Ukraine

Ukraine (see Maps 104 and 105). Arguably, no other European country suffered as much as Ukraine during the Second World War. The calamities that befell it then added to the agonies of a people whose eastern lands had only a few years earlier been subjected to Stalinist terror, including the politically engineered famine of 1932–3 which caused an estimated 7 million deaths.

Historically, Ukraine's western territories had been partitioned between the Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak states and on 1 September 1939, at the start of the Polish campaign, its eastern part was one of the constituent republics of the USSR. It was therefore a nation, not a sovereign state. But its Slavic people had for long struggled for the unification of their country and their independence from the Russian and Soviet empires—a struggle which partly came to fruition for certain periods between 1917 and 1921 when Ukraine became an independent republic.

Surprisingly, Ukraine's wartime experiences are little understood. Many students of the war overlook Ukraine altogether. They often classify Ukrainians as Russians or over-emphasize the image of Ukrainians welcoming the Germans as liberators. Ukraine is not Russia, as Ukrainians have asserted throughout modern times; and, rather than being overjoyed by the German invasion, most Ukrainians were cautious, welcoming the overthrow of an increasingly oppressive Soviet regime but remaining suspicious of the new overlords. It is ironic then that most non-Ukrainian historians have accepted views similar either to those of Soviet propaganda or to that of the Nazi officials who declared that: ‘Ukraine does not exist…it is merely a geographical concept.’ They have forgotten what the American journalist Edgar Snow wrote on 27 January 1945 in the Saturday Evening Post: ‘This whole titanic struggle, which some are apt to dismiss as “the Russian Glory” has been, in all truth and in many costly ways, first of all a Ukrainian war…No single European country has suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry, its farmlands and its humanity.’

Ukrainian lands were first embroiled in conflict on 15 March 1939, when Hungarian troops, with the approval of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, invaded Ruthenia (Carpatho-Ukraine). They quickly overwhelmed this small country, which had emerged in the wake of Czechoslovakia's dissolution after the Munich agreement of September 1938, although indigenous self-defence units and Ukrainian nationalists from western Ukraine attempted resistance. A policy of Magyarization was imposed on the region for the next five and half years, after which it was absorbed into Soviet Ukraine.

The next Ukrainian territories to be occupied were Galicia and Volhynia, controlled by Poland in the inter-war period and assigned to the Soviets by the Nazi–Soviet Pact. In concert with the Germans, the Red Army moved in on 17 September 1939, ostensibly to protect the Ukrainian and Belorussian populations in Poland. The lands east of the San and Bug rivers were annexed by 1 November 1939 to the Ukrainian SSR, a process continued with the incorporation of the formerly Romanian-dominated areas of northern Bukovina and parts of Bessarabia in June 1940, again with the acquiescence of Germany. The first mass movement of Ukrainian refugees began at this time when some 20,000–30,000 fled from the Soviet-held zone into the General Government which had been set up by the Germans to control what remained of Poland. These refugees joined nearly half a million Ukrainians in the Lemko, southern Podlachia, and Chełm regions, which had passed under German control after the dismemberment of Poland. It was from this population, particularly from the refugees clustered around Cracow, that the Ukrainian Central Committee, headed by Professor Volodymyr Kubijovyć, was formed. The committee, while avoiding collaboration with the Nazis, nevertheless attempted to protect Ukrainian interests by instituting educational, social welfare, co-operative, and cultural programmes, efforts that were modestly successful in easing the burden of occupation.

After western Ukraine's incorporation into the USSR, and a brief period of Ukrainianization, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, began consolidating control through arrests, deportations, and executions. More than a million Polish citizens, including Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, were affected. According to a letter from Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, the influential primate of the Greek Catholic Church in western Ukraine, which was sent to the Vatican on 7 November 1941, some 400,000 Ukrainians fell victim as members of the intelligentsia, clergymen, political figures, and nationalists were killed or dispatched to the GUlag in Siberia and Kazakhstan. During their hurried retreat from these same territories in the summer of 1941, NKVD forces again committed war crimes, massacring more than 19,000 political prisoners in Lwów (L'viv), Sambor (Sambir), Stanisłowów (Stanyslaviv), Równo (Rivne), Łuck (Lutsk), and elsewhere. For example, recent excavations at two Ukrainian cities, now called Drohobych and Ternopil, have uncovered victims' remains and there is no doubt as to who was responsible.

Mass death and destruction were unleashed on Soviet Ukraine when the German invasion began on 22 June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA). By 19 September 1941 the capital, Kiev, was taken and Ukraine's second city, Kharkov, fell on 24 October. In the south, Germany's ally Romania occupied Ukrainian lands between the Bug and Dniester rivers and renamed them Transnistria. By the time the furthest eastward advance of the German armies was attained, in the summer of 1942, when the front stretched along the River Don to Stalingrad on the Volga, and Kuban region, the whole of Soviet Ukraine had been encompassed. By way of comparison, only a small fraction of Russian territory was occupied.

In what has been described as one of the largest evacuations in history, the retreating Soviets moved about 1,500 factories and more than 10 million people to the Urals and Central Asia, more than a third of these from Ukraine. Ufa, the capital of the Bashkir republic, became the wartime seat of the Soviet Ukrainian government. A scorched earth policy destroyed what could not be moved. In this period Kiev suffered more damage from the retreating Soviets than from the advancing Germans. In the Donets basin most mines were flooded, the huge Dnieper hydroelectric power works were blown up and all of Ukraine's 54 blast furnaces were destroyed. When the tide turned against Germany in the winter of 1943 the retreating German troops obeyed a similar order from Hitler and created a ‘zone of destruction’ east of the River Dnieper.

German-occupied Ukraine was divided into three sectors. The land closest to the front came under direct military rule. Galicia and Volhynia in contrast were added to other occupied Polish territory as the fifth district of the General Government, ruled from Cracow by Hans Frank ( August 1941). His attitude towards the peoples in his domain was reflected in a speech delivered on 14 January 1944: ‘Once we have won the war, then for all I care, mincemeat can be made of the Poles and the Ukrainians and all the others who run around here.’ Most Ukrainian lands, however, were included in the Reichskomissariat Ukraine, presided over by Gauleiter Erich Koch, whose administrative centre became the Volhynian city of Równo (Rivne). The treatment of civilians differed in each of these territories, with probably the worst befalling those in Koch's jurisdiction. A fanatical Nazi who described himself as ‘a brutal dog’ mandated ‘to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of, without consideration for the feelings or the property of the Ukrainians’, Koch declared that ‘if I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.’

Germany's brutal and irrational policies in Ukraine were one of the great wartime blunders. The Nazi leadership held a racist conception of eastern Europe in which Ukraine was nothing more than a colonial Lebensraum (living-space) fated to be ruled over by an Aryan Herrenvolk (master race) whose duties included the eradication or enslavement of the native population, referred to as Untermenschen (subhumans). Instead of exploiting the national aspirations of Ukrainians and other peoples subjugated by the Soviet empire, the Nazis attempted to set up an empire of their own.

Through overseers such as Koch, the Nazis hoped to terrorize the population of Ukraine into submission. A mass destruction of the intelligentsia was orchestrated; thousands of hostages, including women and children, were executed, and millions were sent to the Third Reich as forced labour. Others were incarcerated in concentration camps or simply massacred, including 600,000 Jews (see Final Solution). But instead of cowing the Ukrainians the Nazis' behaviour provoked large-scale resistance and a new Ukrainian patriotism. Although a communist partisan movement emerged, enjoying Soviet military and political support, the core of the national Ukrainian resistance was formed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a revolutionary movement in existence from 1929. A significant political force in Polish-controlled Ukraine in the inter-war period, the OUN was weakened after February 1940 when it fractured into two competing movements. Members of the younger generation, more militant and uncompromising than their elders, broke with Colonel Andrii Melnyk (OUN-M) to form a new revolutionary leadership headed by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B). Attempting to take advantage of the Soviet retreat and resulting chaos, the OUN-B proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in Lwów on 30 June 1941.

The Germans had no intention of recognizing an independent Ukraine. Within days of its formation the government was disbanded and most of its leaders were imprisoned, both Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko, the prime minister, being sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they remained until the autumn of 1944. Many members of OUN-B expeditionary groups, who had moved into eastern Ukraine in the wake of the advancing Germans to press for Ukrainian independence, fell prey to the mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen or were imprisoned. The OUN-M, which founded a Ukrainian National Council in Kiev on 5 October 1941, was also suppressed. Melnyk was placed under house arrest in 1941 and, in January 1944, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen for several months. In Ukraine itself thousands of members and supporters of the nationalist movement perished while others were executed for hiding Jews. The first determined campaign against the Ukrainian national movement, begun on 31 August 1941, had by the end of September spread throughout occupied Ukraine. By January 1942 most advocates of Ukrainian independence had been caught in the Nazi net. Under these conditions, not surprisingly, many Ukrainians concerned themselves less with resistance and more with simple survival.

Armed resistance to Nazi rule emerged first in the backwoods of Volhynia, where the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia, or UPA) was established in 1942, based on self-defence units that had formed the year before under Taras Bulba-Borovets. After the UPA came under the control of the OUN-B, in the autumn of 1942, operations were extended throughout Polissia and into Galicia. By 1944 the UPA consisted of some 40,000 insurgents, aided by an even larger covert network of OUN members and supporters that may have reached a peak strength of 100,000, geographically concentrated in western Ukraine. Under the command of General Roman Shukhevych (nom de guerre, Taras Chuprynka), the UPA carried on a two-front war, first against the Nazis and then, after their defeat, against the Soviet reoccupation of Ukraine. As a result of their contact with eastern Ukrainians and wartime experience, both the OUN-B and UPA issued manifestos condemning Nazi and Soviet imperialism and affirming their commitment to political pluralism and democratic freedoms of the sort commonly associated with western liberalism. This commitment was confirmed in July 1944 after a meeting of OUN-B delegates and representatives from eastern Ukraine near Sambor, in Galicia, when the formation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrainska Holovna Vyzvolna Rada, or UHVR) was proclaimed.

Tragically, in areas of mixed ethnic settlement, such as Volhynia, Polissia, and Chełm, where Polish and Ukrainian partisans both fought to assert control over areas that they claimed, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered.

After the surrender of German forces at Stalingrad the Ukrainian Central Committee supported the formation of the 14th Volunteer Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS, 1st Galician Division (renamed towards the end of the war as the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army). The hope that this division would constitute a nucleus around which an army could be formed for the purpose of reasserting Ukrainian independence proved false. Most of its soldiers perished in battle against the Red Army near the Galician town of Brody in mid- June 1944.

The return of Soviet forces to western Ukraine in 1944 did not quell Ukrainian resistance. The independence movement was suppressed only through the mass deportation of Ukrainians from the Lemko and Chełm regions, the forced collectivization of agriculture in 1948–51, a massive influx of Russians and the incarceration of the hierarchy of the Greek Catholic Church in the GUlag, including Sheptytsky's successor, Metropolitan Iosyf Slipy. The formal liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church, an ally of the independence movement, was accomplished through its forcible union with the Russian Orthodox Church in March 1946 (see also religion).

Militarily, it took the combined action of Polish, Czechoslovak, and Soviet forces to liquidate the Ukrainian partisans, largely in the spring of 1948, in a search- and-destroy plan known as Operation VISTULA. By that time the nationalists were acting in concert with the anti-Communist Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa, or AK) and had despatched small units to western Europe to solicit aid from the Anglo-American powers for what they described as their anti-imperialist war of liberation against the Soviets. Their faith in the West, which never wanted a free Ukraine, proved unfounded, and the nationalist leaders concluded that independence, if it were ever to come, would have to be won by Ukrainians for themselves. Still, even without foreign aid, dispersed OUN and UPA forces continued to fight for liberation until the 1950s, General Shukhevych himself not being killed until March 1950 when his entourage was surrounded by Soviet security troops near Lwów. Thousands of those not killed in battle or executed after capture were banished to the GUlag, where they formed self-defence groups that, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has attested, protected political prisoners from criminal elements in the camps and their gaolers.

The groundwork for a nationalist movement in eastern Ukraine was laid down by those OUN expeditionary groups that had eluded the Nazis and were able to promote the goals of Ukrainian unity and independence. Their anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet resistance consisted mostly of propaganda and agitation. Their political impact should not be underrated. The nationalists became important in industrial cities such as Dnepropetrovsk and Krivoi Rog, and in the Donets basin, eastern Ukraine's industrial heartland—a region that had been under Soviet rule for over two decades. Marked for destruction by the Nazis, confronted by an antagonistic Communist underground and, later, by a Soviet administration equally determined to eradicate them, the nationalists nevertheless managed to spread their views.

Ukrainians fought in a variety of military formations during the war. Thousands, for example, could be found in the ranks of various Polish armies, with the Czech formations of General Svoboda and even in two Ukrainian battalions fighting alongside the French resistance. Other Ukrainians soldiered in the armies of Romania and Hungary, with the Serbian monarchist Mihailović or against him in the ranks of Tito's Yugoslav partisans. Uncounted numbers were organized by the Germans into guard (see OPERATION REINHARD), construction, auxiliary police, and fire brigade units. Some were attached to General Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army (see Soviet exiles). Nearly 60% of the 250,000 Soviet partisans in Ukraine were Ukrainians, but the largest number, some 4.5 million, served in the ranks of the Red Army. According to Soviet statistics, these Ukrainians made a major contribution to Soviet victory in the German–Soviet war. Nearly half a million were awarded medals for bravery, and 961 became Heroes of the Soviet Union (see decorations). Many thousands of others took part in armed resistance against both the Nazis and the Soviets.

Over 7 million inhabitants of Ukraine, more than one-sixth of the pre-war population, were killed during the Second World War. Of a total population in January 1941 of 41.9 million, of whom 14 million lived in the cities, only 27.4 million remained in 1945, 7.6 million of them in the cities, a loss of 14.5 million people through deaths, deportations, and evacuations. Among these losses must be counted the 1.4 million Ukrainian prisoners-of-war who were among the 5.8 million Red Army soldiers who were captured by the Wehrmacht and of whose number 3.3 million died of ill-treatment, disease, and starvation. In sheer numbers, no nation lost so many civilians as Ukraine. Further, more than 700 Ukrainian towns and cities and 28,000 villages were destroyed, 42% of the urban centres devastated by the war in the USSR, leaving 19 million people homeless. The capital of Kiev suffered a 60% reduction in population. Kharkov's pre-war population of 700,000 was reduced to under 500,000 as 120,000 citizens were transported to Germany, another 80,000 starved, and 30,000 were executed. For every village that was obliterated in occupied France or Czechoslovakia, such as Oradour and Lidiče, some 250 villages and their inhabitants were destroyed in Ukraine. The destruction of more than 16,000 industrial enterprises and 28,000 collective farms meant the loss of much of the industrial and agricultural infrastructure that the country had gained at such great sacrifice in the 1930s. Direct material damage amounted to 285 milliard roubles (at 1941 prices) or over 40% of the USSR's wartime losses. Soviet authors have estimated the costs of the war to Ukraine at an astronomical one trillion two hundred milliard roubles, approximately 30% of its national wealth.

In addition, nearly 3 million Ukrainians were press-ganged into the service of the Third Reich as Ostarbeiter (east workers). In the wake of this cataclysm, several million Ukrainian displaced persons (DPs) were marooned in western Europe (see also refugees). Most were repatriated against their wishes to the Soviets by British, American, and French troops acting according to a now questioned interpretation of the Yalta agreement (see ARGONAUT). Large numbers of those handed over were summarily executed or interned in concentration camps. A minority of the Ukrainian refugees escaped repatriation by hiding, declaring that they were citizens of Poland, or claiming to be stateless. Most of these ended up in DP camps run by UNRRA or, after 1947, by the International Refugee Organization. Most remained in that limbo for several years before resettling in the USA, Canada, UK, South America, Australia, and elsewhere.

Although the war devastated Ukraine, it also resulted in the unification of almost all ethnic Ukrainian territories into one state which achieved some international prominence by becoming a founding member of the United Nations (see San Francisco conference). The new Polish–Soviet frontier, agreed at Yalta in February 1945, gave most of eastern Galicia as far as the River San, Volhynia, and Polissia as far west as the River Bug and northern Bukovina, Transnistria, Bessarabia, and Ruthenia to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This acquisition added 11 million people and some 163,200 sq. km. (63,000 sq. mi.) that is, over one quarter the size of the whole country, to Ukraine. Ethnic problems that had plagued Ukrainian lands earlier were much reduced with the elimination, through deaths and deportations, of the country's Polish and Jewish communities, and through a series of population exchanges between Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR between 1945 and 1948.

The democratic popular front Rukh (‘Movement’) and related organizations, such as the Memorial Society, have begun the laborious process of collecting evidence about Soviet and Nazi crimes against humanity in Ukraine. An independent Ukrainian Catholic Church has emerged from the catacombs, as has an autocephalic Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Through public subscription, a monument to Bandera, the OUN leader assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich in 1959, was erected in his birthplace, Staryi Uhryniv, in 1990, but it was blown up soon afterwards. Similar monuments to the founder of the OUN, Colonel Yevhen Konovalets, and to the soldiers of the Galician Division, were also bombed in the summer of 1991. Nevertheless, an all-Ukrainian brotherhood of OUN and UPA veterans has formally been established in Ukraine and seems likely to eventually secure official recognition.

Controversy still continues to surround what happened in Ukraine before, during, and immediately after the war, and this cannot be resolved without full access to archival material in émigré Ukrainian repositories and inside the former USSR. Given Ukraine's proclamation of independence of 24 August 1991 it is to be hoped that an unfettered history of the country during the Second World War will finally be written.

L. Y. Luciuk

Bibliography

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Luciuk, L. , Searching For Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory (Toronto, 2000).