The accession of Western Ukraine to the USSR as a necessity or a mistake of the Stalin period?
From the next news, which came from Ukraine, it became known that the deputies from Galicia propose to the Ukrainian parliament to remove the term “Great Patriotic War” from the regulatory documents and textbooks.
These deputies suggest that the term "Great Patriotic War" be considered inappropriate historical the truth, which, in their opinion, contradicts European approaches to the assessment of World War II, provokes misunderstandings and conflicts in Ukrainian society.
Probably, in this way, the actively-aggressive nationalist minority once again seeks to rewrite history in their favor, and this is understandable why, their fathers and grandfathers were on the other side of the front line, so they really do not want to continue to be descendants of the vanquished.
For some reason, the descendants of the winners recently more and more often began to forget that their country was one of the first among the republics of the Soviet Union to take the perfidious blow of the enemy in June 1941, and was occupied by the Hitlerites the longest, that Soviet Ukraine suffered the greatest losses in the years of the war, and that it lost 40% of its total national wealth. During the war in Ukraine, 214 cities and urban-type settlements became ruins, more than 28 thousand villages, about 10 million people lost their homes.
But the most terrifying was the loss of life. 8,5 million inhabitants of the republic died on the fronts. The total number of civilians killed was 5,3 million (January 1941-May 1945), 2,3 million were forcibly taken to Germany.
For the overwhelming majority of the people of Ukraine, this was a real Patriotic war, a war of national survival, and now it is proposed to replace the opinions of millions with tolerant European approaches.
Now it’s not customary to write about the Great Patriotic War in modern history textbooks of Ukraine, now history is written differently there, probably the descendants of the very defeated, who still live in the same state next to the descendants of the winners, write.
How could it happen that the region that has recently become a part of a country, is meant by historical standards recently, the region is mostly mentally alien for a large part of the population of Ukraine. And suddenly, this very land - the so-called Polish Galicia has now turned out to be the main historical and national legislator for the whole of modern Ukraine?
All of this nationalist leadership of Galicia did not arise "suddenly" and not from scratch. Connoisseurs of history know that all of today's political events taking place in Ukraine are regularities and consequences of the results of the famous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, according to which the famous joining of the autumn of 1939 took place, this is when Western Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union called - Galicia.
Events developed so rapidly that the Soviet leadership, probably then in 39, simply did not have time or could not correctly calculate all the negative consequences associated with the accession of Western Ukraine to the USSR.
Immediately after the defeat of Poland by the Germans, the mechanized columns of the Red Army troops rushed to meet them from the east, the main thing then was to get ahead of the Germans and reach the agreed frontier in time, as a result, our army in a very short time occupied almost all of Galicia and part of Eastern Poland.
At first glance it seemed that historical successor of the Russian Empire also triumphed over historical justice - the USSR regained control of its ancestral lands.
Yes, primordial, but if we keep in mind the territories of the Baltic States, Western Belarus and parts of eastern Poland, and Galicia had never been Russian before, it didn’t really become Ukrainian, although the time since the accession was already decent, more than 73 of the year.
Why has Western Ukraine still not become “its own” for the rest of Ukraine?
Probably, because before joining the Ukrainian SSR, the people of Galicia lived for centuries in other empires and states, for example, the capital of this region, Lviv, was part of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (from 1349 to 1772), then Austro - Hungary (in the period from 1772 to 1914), and only four years, Lviv was Russian, it was in the years of WWI from 1914-1919, then it became Polish again (in the period from 1919 to XXUMX).
Back in the distant 1939, no one could have imagined that by adding Western Ukraine to the USSR, thereby, the then Soviet leaders with their own hands rolled a kind of “Trojan horse” onto the common then for all of us - the territory of the Russian-Ukrainian statehood.
The Soviet leadership, taking a decision to include into the USSR an absolutely alien region, both socially and historically, did not take into account all the complexity and all the features of the military-political situation that had developed at the time of the entry of Soviet troops into Galicia.
Probably, the large-scale military-diplomatic events of the fall of 1939 didn’t notice the then Soviet leaders of their strategic miscalculation, which manifested itself only decades later in the future of the 21 century. However, blaming the same Stalin for the fact that he added new lands to his country is also not true, as there is never any extra land for any state.
But the holding of Sovietization, and even on the eve of the outbreak of world war in a turbulent, border region, was undoubtedly one of the most serious mistakes of the country of the Soviets. Although the Soviet secret services then worked quite effectively and the leadership of the USSR probably was very well informed about what was happening in the cities and villages of pre-war Galicia and, nevertheless, stubbornly continued sovietization until the very beginning of the war.
This is how Pavel Sudoplatov, a well-known veteran of the Soviet special services, described the situation in Western Ukraine in 1939 in his memoirs:
“Galicia has always been a stronghold of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, supported by such leaders as Hitler and Canaris in Germany, Benes in Czechoslovakia and Austrian Federal Chancellor Engelbert Dolfus. The capital of Galicia, Lviv, became the center to which refugees from Poland, fleeing from the German occupying forces, flowed. Polish intelligence and counterintelligence sent all of their most important prisoners to Lviv — those who were suspected of playing a double game during the German-Polish 30 confrontation.
About what happened in Galicia, I learned only in October 1939, when the Red Army occupied Lviv. The first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Khrushchev and his people's commissar of internal affairs, Serov, went there to conduct a sovietization campaign in Western Ukraine on the spot. My wife was sent to Lviv with Pavel Zhuravlev, the head of the German direction of our intelligence. I was worried: her unit was occupied by German agents and underground organizations of Ukrainian nationalists, and in Lviv the atmosphere was strikingly different from the state of affairs in the Soviet part of Ukraine.
The Western capitalist way of life flourished in Lviv: wholesale and retail trade was in the hands of private traders who were soon to be liquidated during Sovietization. The Ukrainian Uniate Church enjoyed great influence, the local population supported the organization of Ukrainian nationalists headed by the people of Bandera. According to our data, the OUN acted very actively and had significant forces. In addition, she had a wealth of clandestine experience, which, alas, was not a Serov "team."
The counterintelligence service of the Ukrainian nationalists was able to quite quickly track down some secret apartments of the NKVD in Lviv. Their method of surveillance was extremely simple; they started it near the building of the NKVD city department and accompanied everyone who went out in civilian clothes and boots, which made him a soldier: the Ukrainian security officers, hiding uniforms under their coats, forgot such a trifle as shoes. They, apparently, did not take into account that in Western Ukraine only military men wore boots. However, how did they know about it, when everyone wore boots in the Soviet part of Ukraine, since it was simply impossible to get another shoe. ”
The fact that the OUN was a very serious adversary was spoken by the example of the same bourgeois Poland, where in the 20-30-ies the Ukrainian nationalists quite actively fought against the Polish domination in Galicia and not only by propaganda, but also with the help of terror, they could even reach One of the key ministers of the Polish government was Interior Minister B. Peratsky, who initiated the creation of concentration camps in the country and advocated decisive measures against the Ukrainian nationalists. In 1934, Peratsky was killed during the terrorist attack.
This attempt was organized by Stepan Bandera, who in 1936 was sentenced to death, together with his direct perpetrators, and later commuted to life imprisonment.
We must pay tribute to the Soviet secret services, which, long before entering the territory of Galicia, monitored the activities of the OUN and even conducted short and effective special operations directly against the leaders of the Western Ukrainian nationalists, the NKVD seemed to have a premonition that the struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists would be long and bloody.
So, back in 1938g. NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov destroyed the then head of the OUN Yevgeny Konovalets, the former head of the Sich Riflemen Corps.
Soon after the unification with the USSR, the nationalists realized that Soviet Ukraine was not their ideal of Ukrainian statehood, and that it was not along the way with the Soviets.
As a result, with the beginning of the war, the USSR acquired itself into opponents other than the German Wehrmacht also the whole insurgent army in the person of the OUN and all this in the strategically important southwestern direction, where Galicia together with Transcarpathia was the gateway to the southern regions of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and further to southern Germany.
As is known, with small interruptions, starting from 1941 and 1953, the year in the territories of Galicia was an active fierce armed confrontation between the security forces of the USSR and the NDP on the one hand and the UPA troops on the other.
After the defeat of the UPA about the odious Western Ukrainian nationalism could not be heard for nearly 30-ti years.
However, with the beginning of perestroika, the real dawn of this very nationalism suddenly arrived, its renaissance, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, turned out to be like an opened Pandora's box. It turns out that in the end, the accession of Galicia, to the USSR, as a whole, played an extremely negative role in the fate of the entire former USSR and not only.
History does not tolerate type expressions if it would, but even if the Soviet leadership were in 1939g. removed itself and made it possible for fascist Germany to fully occupy Galicia, then in the 1944 of the Red Army it would still have to win back, while the clashes with the UPA were still unavoidable, as it happened with the Polish AK.
The accession to the USSR in 1939 of Western Ukraine was probably the result of the military-political situation that had developed at that time, the hostage of which in the end was the then leadership of the Soviet Union.
It was impossible not to attach these territories then, and at the same time, to attach this center of Western Ukrainian nationalism to Soviet Ukraine was extremely unprofitable and dangerous, which later was fully confirmed by the entire post-war history of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western Ukrainian nationalism in its most odious forms, like rust, penetrated far to the east of Ukraine.
Who would have thought even 25-30 years ago that such times would come when many citizens of modern Ukraine will have to defend the fact that their fathers, brothers or grandfathers fought and died for their Fatherland precisely in the Great Patriotic War, are the descendants of the defeated condemned this aggressive minority , will achieve their goal and put it next to you, in one line, including all the descendants of the winners?
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