mail: Bill Thayer	Help	Up	Home
previous: Chapter 16 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 18

 p151  XVII

Across the Iron Curtain

With the re‑entrance of the Soviet army into Ukraine, rumors began to trickle out that not all of the partisan fighters who had helped disrupt German communications were devoted to the Communist cause. It was darkly hinted that at least part of these were organized into bands that were equally hostile to both Red and Nazi imperialism. Such rumors were not welcomed during the war — nor in the days when the West was seeking the co‑operation of the Soviet Union in building the United Nations — for they seemed to indicate that all was not well and the public mood insisted upon the need for unity among the foes of Hitler.

The Communists knew how to capitalize on this mood of the moment to cement their power over Eastern and Central Europe. As the Soviet troops swept west in a wide arc, they used it to install their own governments in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania and Hungary and to dominate the regime in Czecho­slovakia. Slowly but surely they made away with all of their opponents. On one excuse or another they virtually eliminated all other Allied representatives on the various control commissions and pursued their own policy of "liberation."

It was assumed by the Soviets and tacitly agreed by the other powers that the Soviets would recover that part of Western  p152 Ukraine which they had occupied under their pact with Hitler in 1939. So they found themselves again in control of Lviv and the old Eastern Galicia and they were free to make such boundary settlements with a subservient Communist government of Poland as they might wish.​1

They fared just as well in Carpatho-Ukraine. When the Soviets recognized Dr. Benes as head of the Czecho­slovak government-in‑exile soon after they entered the war, they promised to respect the old boundaries of the republic.​2 But when the Red army entered upon its territory, they met at once in their usual manner enthusiastic appeals to include Carpatho-Ukraine in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. With their love for democracy, they could not fail to be moved; accordingly, on June 29, 1945, they annexed the area, while Dr. Benes yielded graciously in the name of Slav solidarity.​3

In May, 1945, the Germans surrendered and the Red army formally met the Western troops in the middle of Germany to inaugurate the new era in human civilization. Up to this moment Soviet plans had proceeded without a hitch and the West had accepted the Soviet point of view on almost all disputed questions without protest or criticism.

After the first flush of jubilation over the joint victory and the first extensive contacts between soldiers of the West and those of the Soviet Union, the reservoir of good will began to empty rapidly. Soon the way was open for a new evaluation of all the reports that had been filtering across what was now commonly called the Iron Curtain.

There were three factors mainly responsible for this change. These were the unprecedented looting and plundering by the Red army, the problem of the displaced persons, and the open announcements of "banditry" by the Red command and the governments of the satellite states.

There is little need to dwell here upon the orgy of crime that was committed by the Red army. Even if a certain amount is almost inevitable in military occupation, the raping of the occupied lands reached a new high and was so reminiscent  p153 of the excesses of the Reds in Ukraine in 1918 and in 1939 that it inevitably drew attention to this characteristic of the Soviet regime. The stories about Western Ukraine were so exceeded by the developments in Germany that their truth was easily rendered not only possible but probable. Contact with the Western armies threw a revealing light not only upon the cultural level of the masses of the Red army and their discipline or lack of it but upon the Soviet determination to shield their men from an accurate knowledge of what was going on in the rest of the world.​4

The second factor was the problem of the displaced persons. In an evil hour at the Yalta conference in the spring of 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill accepted Stalin's idea that all displaced persons should be sent back to their own homes, by force if necessary. This seemed a senseless addition. The victims of German deportation from the Western countries were only too happy to receive governmental aid in returning to their homes. They literally swarmed back to pick up the threads of their old lives where they had been broken off by the Nazi invasion.

Not so, however, the persons who had been brought to Germany from the Eastern nations. It was to be expected that the refugees from the Baltic states which had been seized by Stalin in 1940 would refuse to go home. They were joined by millions of persons from states like Poland which had been placed under new Communist-dominated regimes including enormous numbers who had deserted from the Red army and had preferred even to starve with the Nazis under the command of the Russian General Vlasov in their zeal to combat the Communists. Of this group the Ukrainians formed perhaps the largest contingent and they had come not only from Western Ukraine, which had been seized in 1939, but even from the Ukrainian Soviet Republic where they had enjoyed the paradise of Communist rule for a quarter of a century.

In the first heat of enthusiasm for their Soviet allies, the Western nations obediently handed over the vast majority of  p154 these people, who were immediately marched off to arrest and liquidation, for Soviet rules prescribed punishment not only for Red army deserters but for all persons who had fallen into enemy hands. The attempts to turn these people over led to disgraceful scenes and many preferred to commit suicide rather than return behind the Iron Curtain. Life under the most uncertain and trying conditions in the British and American zones of occupation in Germany still seemed better than life in the prison of nations that is the U. S. S. R. It was in vain that Soviet sympathizers in such organizations as the UNRRA tried to put pressure on the unwilling victims. Their minds were made up and gradually the Western Powers became convinced of this and began to try to find ways and means of balking the Soviet slave hunters. It is these implacable foes of the Soviet Union who form the overwhelming portion of the displaced persons and are able from their past experiences to supply hitherto unknown details about conditions of life in the Soviet Union and the opposition which exists against the Stalin regime.

The third factor was the announced outbreak of banditry behind the Soviet lines. This seemed strangely inconsistent with the boasted order and efficiency of the Red army. The Soviets made much of the so‑called deserters and Fascists who were operating in parts of Poland and in Carpatho-Ukraine. The strength of the bands was shown by the fact that in May, 1945, they were even able to kill General Swierczewski, the Polish Communist vice minister of war.​5 A little later these were identified to newspaper reporters as the Banderivtsy, the followers of one Bandera, who seemed to be everywhere preying on small isolated detachments of the Red army.​6

Eventually the constant flow of official announcements combined with the rumors that seeped out made it known that the "bandits" were the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, part of which had been organized out of the branch of the Union of Ukrainian Nationalists headed in Western Ukraine by Stephen Bandera. It was soon evident that these foes of both  p155 the Nazis and the Soviets at periods actually controlled relatively large sections of territory and proved a formidable enemy with which the Red army was not prepared to cope.

By the spring of 1947 the raids of these men had become so annoying that the Soviets actually made an agreement with both Poland and Czecho­slovakia for joint military action against them.​7 It was evident also that they enjoyed the sympathy and support of large sections of the population, especially in Slovakia, and cases were even known where they were aided by the Czechs. The prisoners taken from these bands were publicly tried in Poland and in Czecho­slovakia and were usually sentenced to death.​8

It is now becoming possible to trace out in general lines the later history of this force. After the retreat of the Nazis from Ukraine and the re-occupation by the Soviets, large detachments made their way to the Carpathian Mountains, fighting as they went. They were apparently part of the UPA-West forces and were under strict military discipline. In the fall of 1947 one of the detachments of this group even succeeded in cutting across Czecho­slovakia to the American zone in Bavaria, where its members were disarmed and interned. At first the American authorities were suspicious of them but the soldiers were later given the status of prisoners of war and were added to the large number of displaced persons, despite the demands of the Soviets and their satellite states that they should be returned as deserters or war criminals. Since then, many other detachments have made the dangerous trip success­fully.​9

These detachments have small immediate hope of winning the independence of their country from the armies which the Reds have constructed to maintain the Communist regimes in power. Their primary object seems to be to maintain themselves in existence in expectation of the outbreak of World War III while carrying on propaganda work among the Red forces, especially the non-Russian troops coming from the other Soviet republics. Though they are thus much more of a potential than a present menace to the Soviet Union, they are  p156 an outstanding example of the discontent that lurks at the core of Soviet power.

They are perhaps of even greater significance in keeping alive the ideals of liberty in the newly mastered states to the west of the Soviet Union. With the latent spirit of resistance still unextinguished in states like Czecho­slovakia in which the governmental machinery has been seized by the Communists, these raiding detachments of disciplined and well-equipped men serve as a rallying point for all who prefer to die rather than live in slavery. They are of course pursued by vastly superior forces of both Soviet and satellite armies but they can be sure of support from sympathetic elements of the population.

Again and again the Communist press has issued appeals to the population not to assist them on pain of heavy reprisals but these have largely fallen on deaf ears. The people of these countries, like the Ukrainians, are already learning that they will meet with the same reprisals and persecutions whatever action they take, and it is often safer for them to join these bands then to wait meekly for the inevitable.

The range of the UPA is gradually spreading. From the earliest days when it was chiefly occupied with the war against the Nazis, it has remained in close contact with kindred movements in the Baltic states. In fact it is rapidly becoming the center of armed resistance among all the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe and taking the lead in building up an under­ground coalition of fighters against Communism and the Soviet Union.

This military activity is only one part of the story of modern Ukraine, even though it is perhaps the most spectacular. Discontent, scarcely more passive, reigns throughout the entire region.

Whatever hopes any part of the population may have had of better living conditions at the end of World War II were badly shattered almost at once. Any relaxations of Communist discipline which were tolerated during the war when the  p157 Soviet leaders were in need of all possible support were soon revoked. The hostility of the Communists for the Western Powers which was scarcely veiled during the war flared up openly as soon as the war was over. Attacks on Anglo-American imperialism replaced the diatribes against the Poles and the Nazis of the prewar period. The new Five-Year Plan was openly described as a means of improving the military position of the Soviet Union and not of improving living conditions.

When the Soviet armies returned to Ukraine, Stalin made no bones of asserting that the Soviet victory had been won almost exclusively by the Great Russians. Several of the autonomous republics were liquidated and their populations scattered. The secret police, now renamed the MVD, continued to hound all of those people who had escaped deportation to Germany or the Soviet East. The innocent peasant who had remained on his own collective farm and who perhaps had on more than one occasion taken up arms against the Nazi invader now became a dread rebel or he would have retired with the Red army.

There came a new flood of deportations to Siberia and the Far North as the Soviet government set itself to wipe out the dangerous poison of Ukrainian nationalism and the independence movement. Again many of those Ukrainian authors were condemned and persecuted who had fancied themselves slavish followers of the new regime. They had, willingly or unwillingly, made mistakes in their ideology and in their choice of the settings of their works, which alone could be Ukrainian. Rylsky, a poet who had put himself entirely at the disposal of the Soviet government, was censured for giving way to nationalism and was thrown out of his political posts, even though in the last days of the war he had been sent from one satellite capital to another to praise Stalin's intelligence and kindness and break down anti-Communist feelings in the non-Russian Slav world.

The Communists themselves are today not immune to attack.  p158 Exactly as in the period of the purges after 1928, the slightest sign of sympathy for or understanding of the fundamentals of Ukrainian life is sufficient for the accusation of disloyalty. Khrushchov, for years prime minister of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, has been promoted to service in Moscow, but before he left he had needed assistance and Kaganovich was sent down again as he was in 1928 to institute the reforms so much desired by the Kremlin.​10 The Soviets themselves have announced that over sixty per cent of Ukrainian Communists have been found to be infected with the nationalistic ideas of Professor Hrushevsky and have been purged.

Hardly a week passes without some attack upon the ideas of Hrushevsky, who bids fair to rival in unpopularity in Moscow the hetman Ivan Mazepa who in the eighteenth century led Ukraine in her last great futile rebellion against Muscovite domination by joining Charles XII of Sweden against Peter the Great. The name of Hrushevsky is connected with all of the individuals purged and his teachings are running wild through the country, as the intellectual expression of the conscious and unconscious aspirations of the Ukrainian people. There can be little doubt that his serious studies have received a far more sympathetic hearing among the oppressed Ukrainians of the postwar period than they ever did during his working years.

To counterbalance these manifestations of Ukrainian spirit, the Kremlin has only the answer of force and this force produces a reaction which demands more force for its suppression. Shortly after the ending of hostilities against Germany, Marshal Zhukov, one of the leading Soviet generals, was transferred to the command of the Odessa Military District, apparently to cope with the discontented Ukrainians. There have been rumors of actual outbreaks against the hard conditions of life in both Odessa and Kharkov. It is perhaps fair to say that the entire Ukrainian Soviet Republic is in a state of potential revolt.

If this is true in Eastern Ukraine, which has been under Communist domination for a quarter of a century, it is even more true in Western Ukraine and Carpatho-Ukraine., which  p159 are just undergoing the throes of collectivization. The collective farms being established to take the place of the old system of independent landholding are meeting with the same resistance that they did in the east during the years of the artificial famine created by Moscow.

Everywhere all that was Ukrainian in culture is being stifled. The great writers and leaders of the Ukrainians are being represented by the Russian Communists as the friends and supporters of their cause and their works and history are being shamelessly rewritten in order to vindicate the policies of the new masters. Russian theatrical troupes and musicians are appearing everywhere in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to advertise the duty of the people to have unlimited respect for their elder brothers who have liberated them from the foreign yoke. The Russian language, as the language of Lenin, Stalin and Moscow, is being forced into prominence either directly or by being touted as the Communist model for a Slav language. Old traditions and local customs are being treated as products of American imperialism and Moscow makes no scruples about asserting that Ukraine must have no connections with the West politically, economically or culturally.

No happier a fate awaited those Ukrainians who found themselves at the end of the war under the various satellite governments. The boundaries of these states were drawn in Moscow and the people were given the choice of moving to the countries to which they belonged racially or remaining where they were. Naturally very few in the districts formerly in Slovakia or in Poland preferred to move to the Soviet Union. The satellite governments immediately found excuses for uprooting the population. In the case of Poland the Ukrainians who remained under the control of the puppet regime were gathered up and forced to go to the western boundaries of the country, from which the native German population had been expelled. Here they were carefully scattered among the villages in the hope that they might be completely absorbed by the Polish population.

 p160  The immediate result was a widening of the area of Ukrainian resistance for the UPA now had increased opportunities to come into contact with the fighters for freedom among the oppressed peoples of the Baltic. This gave the satellite states further excuse for attacks on the luckless population and this again swelled the ranks of the UPA and its sympathizers.

While this persecution of the Ukrainian population continued, the Soviets were devoting a certain amount of energy to the restoration of the factories, mines and hydro-electric plants which they or the Nazis had destroyed during the war. The celebrated Dnieprostroy, the great electric plant on the Dnieper River, the building of which had been highly publicized in earlier years, received early attention.​a It became clear that the primary object of Soviet restoration was to bind the economy of Ukraine still closer to that of Moscow, and the main efforts of the authorities were expended on the areas of Moscow, the Urals and Central Asia. Machinery which had been moved to the East was not returned.​11 So far as work was done in Ukraine, it became a pretext to bring in non-Ukrainians to populate the restored cities. Ukrainians going into industry were filtered off into other republics, while their places were taken by outsiders. The unparalleled destruction in the country left the Kremlin free to work even more openly and unhesitatingly in carrying out its plans but results were not always according to its desires. Again and again it found that its methods tended to infect Soviet citizens of non-Russian origin with the nationalistic heresy rather than persuade the local population of the advantages of the Soviet regime. But its decrees and policy are inexorable.

Flattery of Stalin must go on, even in the grimmest circumstances. In the very first days, before any reconstruction was even possible, the world was astonished to read of the most liberal donations by Ukrainian villages to their benefactor Stalin for the help of the Great Russians who had been injured by the Nazi advance. Villages which faced starvation could still find the grain to give thousands of tons to their elder brothers  p161 and to the great Joseph Stalin as a small expression of their gratitude.​12º

Thus the ending of World War II has not eased the predicament of the Ukrainians. On the contrary the old processes that were applied during the preceding decade to break the spirit of the people have been intensified. The same men who came from Moscow to break Ukrainian resistance in 1928 are back at their work. The uprooting of Ukrainian ideas and ideals is being pushed more vigorously, the population is being decimated and dispersed ever more widely, and in their desperation the people are resorting to violence which is met with countermeasures. Amid all this the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is doing what it can and waiting for the hour when the world will awaken to the full significance of both the internal and external policies of the Soviet Union and come to their assistance.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed.

2 See Seton-Watson, op. cit., p387. Jan Papanek, Czecho­slovakia, New York, 1945, p103 f. "Now Carpatho-Russia and the other liberated parts of Czecho­slovakia, outside the immediate military zone, are under the civil administration of the Czecho­slovak Government, whose delegate from London took it over on October 28, 1944, from the Soviet military authorities, according to the Soviet-Czechoslovak administrative agreement of May 8, 1944."

3 New York Times, June 30, 1945. See P. Tychyna "Bud' zdorova, Zakarpatska Ukraina," Vybrani Tvory, Kiev, 1947, p281 f.

4 W. H. Chamberlin, "Stirrings of Ukrainian Unrest," The Ukrainian Quarterly, III, 113.

5 Nicholas D. Chubatyj, "The UPA Fights the Kremlin," The Ukrainian Quarterly, III, 359.

6 New York Times, May 4, 1946.

7 Chubatyj, op. cit., p359.

8 New York Times, May 6, 1946, etc.

9 New York Times, September 19, 1947.

10 See Chamberlin, "Stirrings of Ukrainian Unrest," The Ukrainian Quarterly, III, 109.

11 Stephen Protsiuk, "The Evacuation of Industry in 1941 and the Postwar Economy of Ukraine," The Ukrainian Quarterly, V, 215 ff.

12 [The footnote number in the text here was printed as 17, but should be 12. Either way, the question is moot: the endnotes as printed only go thru 11.]

---

Thayer's Note:

a In 2024 as part of its war on Ukraine (2014‑present), Russia destroyed the main Dnipro River dam supplying power to the plant, knocking the plant immediately out of commission.

◂ previous						next ▸
Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:		Twentieth-Century Ukraine	History of Ukraine	European History	Home
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two *asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility