Soviet (Russian) occupation of Western Ukraine (1939 - 1941) [individual assignment]
The Soviet Occupation of Western Ukraine, 1939-41:
An Overview
Excerpts
On September 1939 the Soviet armies entered Western Ukraine. This first Soviet occupation, which lasted twenty-one months, can be divided into two distinct phases. During this initial phase, the Soviets tried to impress Western Ukrainians with their regime's ostensible Ukrainianism. Ukrainian culture, severely pressed by the Poles, was allowed to flower. Ukrainian became the official language of Western Ukraine. Great efforts were made to improve the school system.
Yet simultaneously with these reforms, steps were taken to deprive Western Ukrainians of the means for political self-expression. When the Soviets first arrived, they undertook a systematic campaign of arrests and deportations eastward of the Western Ukrainian political leadership. The largest Ukrainian political parties, which were centrist and relatively liberal, were disbanded.
During 1940 they began to dismantle systematically almost all of the educational, cultural, and economic institutions that Western Ukrainians had laboriously developed over generations and in the face of strong Polish opposition. Thus, the occupation forces set out to destroy the entire infrastructure of Western Ukrainian society.
The Communists forced the peasants to combine their holdings in collective farms. Thus, the same intensely hated collectivization that had cost millions of lives in Soviet Ukraine was imposed on the Western Ukrainian peasantry.
Priests were forced to carry special passports identifying them as clergy and were impeded in their attempts to fulfill their duties. The clergy was also saddled with much higher taxes. Anti-religious propaganda, present from the outset, steadily increased. By late 1940 it was evident that the future boded ill for the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
In the spring of 1940 the Soviets dropped their democratic guise, and repressions against both Ukrainians and Poles began on a massive scale. The most widespread and feared measures were the deportations. Without warning, without trial, even without formal accusations, thousands of supposed enemies of the people were arrested, usually at night, packed into cattle cars, and shipped to Siberia and Kazakhstan to work as slave labourers under horrible conditions. Many of the deportees, whose numbers included entire families, perished.
Who were these "enemies of the people"? The first waves of deportees consisted of leading politicians, industrialists, landowners, merchants, bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, retired officers, and priests. Later, in co-operation with Nazi officials, the Soviet authorities also rounded up the families of Ukrainian political activists and the 20-30,000 Ukrainians who had fled to German-occupied Poland. However, anyone vaguely suspected of sympathizing with Ukrainian nationalism was liable to arrest. In the final stages, the deportations, which grew constantly in scale and brutality, seemed to lose all rhyme or reason. People who had relatives abroad or received letters from abroad (and almost every Western Ukrainian had relatives or friends in Canada or the United States), who were visiting friends when they were arrested, who were denounced for purely personal reasons or who, by accident, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were deported.
The deportations occurred in three waves. In December 1939 they were still selective and encompassed primarily the former leadership and elite. But on 13 and 14 April 1940 a new wave began that included vast numbers of people. "From then on," a survivor wrote, "no one, literally no one, was sure whether his turn would not come the next night." The final and most extensive wave of deportation occurred in June 1941, when the panic-stricken and suspicious Soviets herded thousands of arbitrarily chosen people on trains and shipped them eastward. Estimates of the population losses in Western Ukraine, which must rest on Soviet sources, are obviously difficult to come by.
The deportations, however, were not the worst of what the Soviet occupation inflicted upon Western Ukraine.
Months before the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war, the NKVD began to arrest increasing numbers of people suspected of being potentially politically unreliable. However, the sudden advance of the Germans into Galicia caught the NKVD by surprise, and it did not have time to evacuate prisoners. The solution applied was simple and brutal: during the week of 22-29 June 1941 the NKVD set about slaughtering the inmates of its prisons, regardless of whether they were incarcerated for minor or major offences, or whether they were already convicted or merely awaiting questioning. Major massacres occurred in the following places: in Lviv (about 1,500 victims), in Sambir (about 1,200) in Stanyslaviv (about 2,500), in Zolochiv (about 800), in Chortkiv (about 800), and Dobromyl (about 500). These figures do not include the many small towns and villages where dozens of prisoners died. Thus, an estimated 10,000 prisoners were killed in Galicia. In neighbouring Volhynia, particularly in the towns of Rivne and Lutske, about 5,000 more were executed.
It was not only the numbers of the executed but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had been tortured before death; others were killed en masse. In Sambir on 26 June 1941 the NKVD dynamited two large cells crammed with female prisoners. In Stanyslaviv three huge cells were stacked to the ceiling with corpses that were so badly decomposed that no attempt was made to bury them. The townspeople simply cemented up the cells. In Zolochiv the people found cells full of mutilated bodies next to torture chambers strewn with tongues, ears, eyes, and tufts of hair.11 These and similar findings, coming on the heels of months of growing terror, filled Western Ukrainians with a deep revulsion for the Soviets and reinforced their conviction that the Soviets were, and would always be, their worst enemy. These experiences later encouraged Ukrainians to join the German fight against the Soviets, and these bitter memories of 1939-41 impelled tens of thousands of Western Ukrainians to flee their homeland in 1944 when the Soviets were about to occupy it again.
Questions for experts
1. What are the main points of the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine?
2. What factors influenced the behaviour of Soviets in Western Ukraine?
3. Compared with (to) the Japanese and Nazi occupations what differences did the Soviet one possess?
4. Why did the regimes like Nazi, Soviet and Japanese not behave slighter towards the populations they occupied?
5. Are the authoritarianism and totalitarianism as such predisposed to atrocities? Why do you think so?