organization, they acted without delay. In the first days of the
occupation, the Soviet commissars seized the property of the Shevchenko
Scientific Society and prevented all further work by confiscating the
building and its contents and preventing all further publications. On
January 14, 1940, they forced the complete self-liquidation of the
Society. The president, Prof. Rakovsky, at once fled to the west and
during the next uncertain months a large part of the active members
made their way to Krakow in the Polish Government General, where they
endeavored to resume their work. The Society was then turned into a
branch of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR and was placed under the
control of the administration in Kiev, while part of its collections
and its work was placed under the University of Lviv, which was now
ostensibly Ukrainianized and given the name of Ivan Franko, the great
Western Ukrainian scholar and writer. This was not for long, for very
soon here, too, the lecturers to win Soviet approval began to switch
over from Ukrainian to Russian.
All other societies of every kind were abolished and fitted into the
Soviet scheme of things. The cooperative network, especially such
great societies as the Maslosoyuz (Dairy Cooperative Society) and the
People’s Trade were made governmental organs. Various firms were
turned into branches of one commissariat or another. By the spring,
while there had not yet been a full communization of the country, the
process was well advanced and no resident of Western Ukraine could
doubt as to the future of the area.
In Eastern Galicia, where the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite
was the predominant religion, the Metropolitan Archbishop Andry
Sheptytsky was not personally touched. He was placed under more or
less surveillance and found it impossible to exercise his normal
activity. However, all the religious schools and seminaries under his
charge were closed, the church and monastic lands were seized, and
all ecclesiastical printing was suppressed. Finally, the clergy were
compelled to hand over to the representatives of the government all the
baptismal and other records which were incorporated in the work of the
ZATS, the Soviet bureau of vital statistics. The clergy were treated as
a non-working class and were thus deprived of all means of livelihood,
except for the free-will offerings of their impoverished parishioners.
In the eastern sections, where the Orthodox Church predominated, the
same regulations were put into force with the additional proviso that
the clergy had to transfer their allegiance from the Polish Orthodox
Church to the locum tenens of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of
Moscow. This was a first step in improving relations between the locum
tenens and the Soviet government and in making the authorities of the
Russian Orthodox Church a definite instrument of the government in the
spreading of Russian Communism.
On the other hand, there was a considerable patronage of Ukrainian
art. Certain scholars were rather favored. The Ukrainian theatre was
supported on a more liberal scale than it had been under the Polish
rule and there were in some quarters hopes that there might be a happy
future. It was again a short dream, for as 1940 came to a close, there
began again the insistent but unobtrusive attempts at russification.
Russian theatrical companies began to visit Lviv and other cities.
The publications of the publishing firms of Lviv fell off and once
more they found it necessary to produce Russian books. The libraries
were carefully purged of those authors who had fallen under the
displeasure of Moscow during the crushing of the Ukrainian renaissance
and their works were forbidden, just as in Eastern Ukraine. The books
that were sent from Kiev were chiefly in Russian. Furthermore, those
authors, poets, and artists who were still in Western Ukraine now found
themselves regimented. They were given elaborate projects but they
found that their success depended upon their ability not to express
themselves freely but to satisfy the demands of the Soviet authorities.
As a result many of them endeavored to get, in one way or another, to
the west where even if they were under Nazi rule they still had more
possibilities at the time than they did under the highly organized
system sponsored by Moscow.
It was thus abundantly evident that the “liberation” of Western
Ukraine was but the exchange of one master for a still sterner rule.
The realization of this fact came quickly and it very soon evoked a
corresponding reaction which began to unite the entire population,
the more so as even those few Communists in Western Ukraine who had
remained true to their convictions were now seized by the Soviet
authorities and punished on the ground that they were Trotskyists
or were believers in one of the various deviations from the general
line of the party. There were to be no Communists except those who
had passed through the Soviet training school and those people who
had believed that their Communist faith would be of profit to them
found themselves in as wretched a position as had Eastern Ukrainian
Communists like Khvylovy and Skrypnyk who had gained nothing by their
independence, except death and destruction.
Thus, by the spring of 1941 conditions in Western Ukraine were rapidly
assuming the same form that they had taken in the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic. Any hopes that there would be any exception or any
toleration for the area were once and for all annihilated when the
Soviets attacked Finland and, still more, when, in the summer of 1940,
they absorbed and turned into Soviet Republics the three Baltic states
of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Soviets were shown clearly to be
on the march and it was for the people to protect themselves as best
they could.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Western Ukrainian Reaction
To appreciate the next step in the relations between the Western
Ukrainians and the Soviets, it is necessary to go back and look briefly
at the conditions that existed under Polish rule. The two peoples were
distinctly hostile but their relations were very different from those
between the Eastern Ukrainians and the Russians.
The old Austro-Hungarian Empire, unlike the Russian, had not denied the
existence of a Ukrainian people, even though it had not favored their
development save as a counterbalance to the Poles in Eastern Galicia.
Yet there was a considerable number of Western Ukrainians who had been
trained to fill the lower offices in the old Hapsburg system. They had
the right of voting for the provincial diets and when the Hapsburg
Empire disintegrated, they immediately voted for the establishment of
a Western Ukrainian Republic. When this failed to establish itself and
to win recognition by the Western powers and the League of Nations, the
vast majority of the Western Ukrainians under the leadership of the
UNDO voted for representatives to the Polish Parliament and continued
the struggle in a legal and parliamentary manner to win rights for
themselves.
A minority which was finally organized into the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists under Col. Evhen Konovalets continued the
illegal and revolutionary struggle through sabotage and terroristic
attacks on outstanding anti-Ukrainian Poles. It was in vain that the
Polish government endeavored to suppress this group by the forced
pacification of Eastern Galicia and by other violent tactics and, after
the murder of Colonel Konovalets, his place was taken by Colonel Melnyk.
In 1932, in connection with the suppression of the Ukrainians in the
UkSSR, the claim was advanced that the OUN had commenced work in
eastern Ukrainian territory. However that might be, the small group
continued to operate in Poland. It trained young men in secret military
organizations, in operating without detection, and in undercover
political education. In this work it was opposed and imitated by some
of the legal political bodies, usually of a more leftist but still
anti-Communist type, which likewise prepared their own cadres of
semi-trained men who would be ready to act, if need arose.
The events of 1939, with the rise and fall of the independent
Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, won many adherents to these groups and
organizations, and after the outbreak of the war and the occupation
of Western Ukraine by the Communists, the latter advertised their
existence by their talk of an active Ukrainian underground.
With the first months of the occupation the network of these groups
spread throughout the country but even under these conditions there
was little or no cooperation between them and similar Polish groups
which persisted in maintaining the Polish supremacy and waited only
for the Soviet defeat to reassert their hegemony in the area. Some of
the leaders went abroad and there was considerable confusion aroused
in their ranks but, by the spring of 1940, when the full weight of the
Soviet changes was beginning to be felt by the population, the attitude
changed toward these groups and they began to be looked upon as the
leaders of the Ukrainians who objected to the introduction of the
Communist regime.
The general turmoil that existed with anti-Nazis fleeing to the east,
the outstanding Ukrainians trying to get to the west, the sending of
members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to the villages as teachers and
the general disorganization, gave them relatively good conditions for
developing and making their principles and knowledge available to the
villagers. These were made aware of the fact that any opposition to the
new regime would be instantly punished and as their normal pre-war life
was now converted into a criminal existence, they showed themselves
more ready to cooperate.
Unfortunately, during this preliminary period discord broke out in the
OUN. One faction under Stepan Bandera objected to the leadership of
Colonel Melnyk and demanded the change of several prominent leaders.
When this was refused, a split came in the organization with Melnyk at
the head of one faction and Bandera in control of the other. It is very
possible that this split was the result of German intrigue to prevent
the formation of a strong Ukrainian movement but it had the result of
weakening it, even though both Bandera and Melnyk fell into German
hands and were imprisoned during the rest of the war. Their followers
continued and intensified the feud and even came to armed clashes.
Both factions of the OUN and similar groups strengthened themselves
first along the borders and commenced to smuggle arms and ammunition
from the west, so as to be prepared to act in case there came an armed
clash between Germany and the USSR. Then, as the months passed, the
network extended further into the country and the OUN became organized
on a territorial basis under a Country Executive and the Country
Leader, who were assisted by expert advisers on military affairs and
propaganda.
While the two imperialistic powers were still friends, there was
little possibility for open sabotage. The chief work of the Ukrainian
patriotic underground was the spreading of the national spirit,
the encouraging of the spirits of the oppressed, and the secret
education of the masses in the hope of later action. They sought to
counter-balance the Soviet propaganda and their efforts to enlist the
young people in the Komsomols and train them as Communists. They worked
upon some of the eastern Ukrainians who were moved by the Soviet regime
to the west and they brought it about that some of these remained
behind and joined their ranks when the break finally came in 1941.
Despite the efforts of the leaders to hold their followers in check,
they were not always successful for some of the younger members were
so enraged by the Bolshevik tactics that they could not be restrained
from attempting individual acts of reprisal. These usually failed and
involved not only the punishment of numbers of the innocent but also
called the attention of the Communist leaders to the existence of the
organizations and made them more vigilant in tracking down suspects.
Some of the members, to secure more adequate military training, even
enlisted in the Red Army, sometimes with the approval of the heads of
the underground but this proved an expensive process, for the alerted
Communists usually moved these candidates for training well to the east
where they would be harmless in case of a general conflict. Numbers of
them were sent to the Bashkir ASSR and to the central Russian areas.
By the spring of 1941 there were many members of these underground
associations hiding in the forests of Eastern Galicia and Volynia and
the Soviets sent out armed detachments to pursue them and to locate the
caches of arms which they had not only smuggled in but had taken from
the Poles during the last days of the Polish opposition and which they
had seized from small and often unsuspecting Soviet detachments. These
searches often resulted in armed clashes in which the Red forces often
emerged victorious, thanks to the ever greater numbers of soldiers who
were assigned to them.
The work of the courriers between the different units and sections
became more arduous and dangerous as the Soviets tightened their
control over the population and strengthened the border guards on
one pretext or another. What had once been a relatively open border,
the area between Sokal and Turka, was now guarded by barbed wire and
the Ukrainian population, which was suspected of complicity with the
underground, was removed.
In the same way, the Soviets prepared one device after another to
attack the Executive of this underground movement. They succeeded three
times in capturing and trying many of the leading members and in the
spring of 1941 they were starting a fourth trial in which they hoped
to assert their power and to crush the movement finally. Yet, their
plans for this were finally upset by the opening of hostilities between
Germany and the USSR.
It was no easy task to organize this movement under the very eyes
of a ruthless invader. Many of the agents who were engaged in it
fell into the enemy hands and were executed ruthlessly. It was still
harder to bring together the groups that were working for the various
Ukrainian parties and to arouse them to a realization that, in the
face of the threat from the east, those differences which had seemed
so important during the parliamentary struggle against the Poles
were to be forgotten in the face of the common danger to all those
things which the various parties had in common. Yet they persevered
despite heavy losses and by the spring of 1941, while their position
still seemed hopeless, they had succeeded in creating a nucleus of
organized opposition to Soviet rule which was really widespread and
had some repercussions in the ranks of the Red Army, especially among
the eastern Ukrainians and some of the other non-Russians who had been
mobilized and sent for service in the area.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania
The agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union had stated that
the former was not interested in the fate of Bukovyna and Bessarabia,
both of which contained a large Ukrainian population. It was therefore
obvious that once the Soviet hands were freed from the Soviet-Finnish
war, they would endeavor to acquire these additional territories.
In both Bukovyna and Bessarabia the Ukrainian cause had been less
developed, although there had been far more work in Bukovyna than in
Bessarabia, which had been under Russian rule. The Ukrainian uprising
in Chernivtsy had not been successful in 1918 and when the territory
was added to Rumania, that country put a stop to all Ukrainian work,
including education although a Ukrainian theatre had developed and
there was considerable secret work being done.
As a result, there was a sense of stagnation which was very different
from the situation in the lands under Poland. There was less sense of
coordination and when in June, 1940, the Soviets requested Rumania
to hand over the new provinces, Rumania had only to submit. Most of
Bukovyna and the part of Bessarabia inhabited by Ukrainians were
annexed to the UkSSR. The rest of Bessarabia was added to the Moldavian
ASSR, which was later raised to the dignity of a Union Republic and
intended for propaganda use against Rumania.
The Soviet policy was then much the same as it had been in the area
taken over from Poland. There was the same amount of propaganda
declaring the “liberation” of the country from the Rumanian nobles
and from international capitalism. There was the same voting for
annexation to the USSR, the same enthusiastic reception in Moscow,
and the same process of nationalization, of the arrest of outstanding
figures, and the same destruction of the established forms of life in
both areas.
The Soviets were, however, less advanced in these provinces for the
application of their system required time and their stay in the area
was eight months less than it was in the territory taken from Poland.
The anti-Communist leaders fled either into Rumania proper or Germany
or made their way to the Polish Government General in Krakow. On the
other hand, despite the attempts to seal off the country, the OUN found
ways of extending its influence into Bukovyna and appealed to the more
alert classes of the population.
In general the Ukrainians in these two areas formed rather a secluded
enclave in the general mass of Ukrainian history and they did not play
a role in proportion to their numbers. They thus scarcely enter into
the account, although for a while, in 1941, there was organized a force
of some 2,000 who sought to impede the Rumanian return to the country.
Yet, their opposition was fruitless and when they endeavored to cut
their way out, they were either destroyed by the Germans or dispersed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The German Attack on the Soviets
During the period from 1939 to 1941, the German policy toward those
Ukrainians who had escaped from the Soviet occupation into the Polish
Government General was not too severe. It was possible for the
Ukrainians in Krakow and elsewhere to carry on a considerable amount of
educational work, to form themselves into relief organizations and, in
general, to work for the establishment of normal relations.
When the breach between the two totalitarian states came on June 22,
1941, the Germans pushed ahead rapidly not only in the Baltic area but
also in Ukraine. By June 30, they had occupied Lviv with the aid of
some Ukrainian units, both from Carpatho-Ukraine and from Galicia.
During these days the Ukrainians had high hopes that the Germans would
seriously liberate them from Bolshevik tyranny and wherever they had
the slightest possibility, they endeavored to seize the cities so as
to put a stop to the massacres which the Communists were perpetrating
before they fell back. In some places they were successful but in Lviv,
the Communists killed over 10,000 prisoners, before their bloody regime
could be brought to an end.
In the first days of the war, although there were no clear promises
made to the Ukrainians, the impression grew that there would be
established some form of a Ukrainian administration. The political
leaders set up a Ukrainian government and appointed Yaroslav Stetsko as
the first head of the state on June 30, 1941. A short time later this
was broadened by the appointment of a Committee of Seniors under the
leadership of Dr. Kost Levytsky, who had been the Prime Minister of
the Republic of Western Ukraine in 1918. These developments had the
support of Metropolitan Sheptytsky, although he knew that they did not
yet rest on organized public sentiment.
It was well recognized by the influential Ukrainians that the situation
was very different from what it had been at the end of the Hapsburg
monarchy, but they went through the motions of setting up a government
on the possibility that the Germans would allow them some real
concessions and that it would be mutually advantageous to be already
prepared for all eventualities.
It is perhaps possible that a part of the German armed forces looked
with a certain toleration at these developments, for at least a part
of the officer class realized that the task of the German government
would be greatly facilitated, if they were able to normalize the
situation and win some support from the population, as they had in
the Polish Government General. This did not suit the Nazi element who
believed that the advance of the German forces was only to secure more
_Lebensraum_ for Germany. This faction struck and struck hard at the
new regime and secured the arrest of Stetsko, Levytsky, Bandera and
Melnyk, all of whom were taken to prison in Germany where they were
kept for nearly four years.
The arrest of the leaders, while it was a crushing blow, still was not
completely fatal. The advance of the German troops was so rapid on the
way to Kiev that the Ukrainian leaders continued for some months to
inspire the population not to resist the Germans, the more so as the
western regiments of the Red Army surrendered in large masses. Thus
when Kiev fell, some 675,000 of the Red Army surrendered with scarcely
a blow.
On the other hand, the Soviets attempted to devastate the country
before they withdrew, shooting the Ukrainian intelligentsia
indiscriminately and trying to seize as many as they could for
evacuation beyond the Urals. They demolished factories, tried to remove
finished articles and mined the cities before they abandoned them.
Then, when they exploded the mines, they spread the story that the
total work of demolition had been carried on by the Germans.
On August 1, the Germans made a new division of the country and
assigned the whole of Galicia to the Polish Government General. At the
same time they returned Bukovyna and Bessarabia to Rumania and then set
up a new section around Odesa under the name of Transdnistria which
they likewise placed under Rumania. It was in vain that the Ukrainians
who tried to organize their own national rada in Kiev protested against
such actions, for their protests were not received and the Nazis went
on with their policy of ignoring all the wishes of the population.
Later in the month, the Germans established the Reichskommissariat of
Ukraine and placed it under the control of a fanatical Nazi, Erich
Koch, who set himself during the next years to crush anything and
everything that was done to aid the Ukrainians and to win for himself
the detested title of the butcher of Ukraine.
In the early months of the German occupation and especially during the
period of rapid military movements, much was done for the rebuilding of
the country after the ravages of the Bolsheviks. Nearly 115 Ukrainian
newspapers were established, plans were made for the opening of schools
and during the transition from the military rule to the rule of Koch,
the Ukrainian agents were in the front ranks of the German army,
spreading their propaganda and trying to rouse the population against
the Bolsheviks.
Yet this work did not please the Germans. Everywhere in eastern Europe
the old governments that had been suppressed by the Bolsheviks tried
to recreate themselves but everywhere there came the arrests of these
leaders and their deportation, so that it was not many months before
the sober thought of the liberated peoples turned against the new
occupants and the people realized that their hopes were going to be in
vain. By the end of 1941, it had been made clear to them that there
would be no relaxation of the pressure exerted upon them.
In the Reichskommissariat which, in fact, represented little more
than the right bank of the Dnieper area, for the army retained the
control over the regions to the east of the river, it speedily became
impossible for the Ukrainians to improve their own condition. The
Germans were guided by a strictly logical program. Inasmuch as all the
land was organized in collective farms and the title to these rested in
the Soviet government, they as conquerors merely took over the land of
their defeated rivals. They continued the same kind of collectivized
agriculture, since it brought them the greatest advantages and they
had no intention of doing anything for the Ukrainian population. Koch
made it clear that the Ukrainians had no rights that the Germans were
bound to respect. Their property was not theirs but it was reserved
for Germans and once the system was in the saddle, as shown by Koch’s
Twelve Commandments for the regulation of the relations of the two
peoples, he did everything to destroy completely the Ukrainian
intellectual life.