In Soviet political discourse, the accession of Western Ukraine to the USSR was seen as an event of great historical importance, for it led to the reunification of the “great Ukrainian people within ...a single Ukrainian state,” the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The official rhetoric stated that with the accession of Western Ukraine, a new, better period in history began for all residents of those regions, a period of inevitable development and unavoidable progress. The prevailing belief was that despite the specific features of the western regions of the country, the general laws of historical development were unchallengeable: the transition from one socio-economic formation to another, a much more progressive one, was bound to lead to the same result for all. The Bolsheviks believed that only the Soviet state could help the workers of Western Ukraine to overcome their economic and cultural backwardness in a rather short period of time. The process of Sovietization required a significant increase in the number of administrators and specialists, which was accomplished by recruiting them from the eastern regions of Ukraine as well as from other regions of the USSR. This article attempts to answer the following questions: How can one describe the Soviet cadres invited to lead western Ukrainians forward on their path to progress? Did the image of the ideal leader correspond to his real appearance and behavior? The main sources used to answer these questions include transcripts of the speeches of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CP(b)U) Nikita Khrushchev at plenums of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, at meetings of secretaries of oblast committees, and at the meetings of party activists in West Ukrainian regions in the period between 1944 and 1949 that is in the period from the expulsion of the Germans from West Ukrainian lands and the restoration of Soviet control over these territories until Khrushchev’s transfer back to Moscow. Those administrators who were sent from the eastern regions of the Ukrainian SSR were usually poorly educated, incompetent and undisciplined; they did not speak Ukrainian, often abused their positions and broke the law. The recruitment of local activists for administrative work was not successful either, as there were few loyal and qualified administrators in Western Ukraine and those that were available were often not trusted. Personnel problems were a constant subject of discussion in the party organs, but it had not possible to rectify the shortcomings before the end of 1949, so the ideal image of a leader often differed greatly from the real image.
Since 1 March 2011 Poland has marked the National Day of Remembrance of the „Cursed Soldiers” (Narodowy Dzień Pamięci “Żołnierzy Wyklętych”) — members of the anti-Communist underground in the 1940s ...and 1950s who tried to prevent Poland’s sovietisation and subordination to the USSR. The idea of establishing such a state memorial day was expressed in 2010 by Lech Kaczyński, the then President of Poland and one of the leaders of the Law and Justice Party (L&J). During the debates on the Bill of the National Day of Remembrance in the Sejm, the deputies of the two main opposing parties voted in favour almost unanimously and the Senate approved it without making any changes. After President Bronisław Komorowski signed it on 1 March 2011, Poland acquired an additional state holiday. In 2015, after the Law and Justice Party won both the presidential and parliamentary elections, the issue of the „cursed soldiers” turned into one of the key questions in historical policy. The „Civic Platform” party, forced to move over to the opposition benches in parliament, sounded the alarm, accusing the L&J party of rewriting history and primitivising the image of the anti-Communist underground. Thus, the memory of the “cursed soldiers” transformed from an issue
that united political opponents to a topic for arguments and political struggle. The
article attempts to show how the L&J party used the preservation of the memory
of the “cursed soldiers” for its own political purposes, including its fight against
the opposition.
Polish-Ukrainian borderland is commonly associated with Austrian Eastern Galicia. The river San marked the western border, and the river Zbruch marked the eastern one. It was multiethnic and ...multicultural land. At the beginning of the twentieth century Eastern Galicia acquired an exceptional symbolic meaning, becoming the place of collision of two state projects - Polish and Ukrainian. The complex relationship between Ukrainians and Poles was escalated by the Second World War. The problem of national minorities was to be solved by resettlement, that took place from 1944 to 1946. So during and after World War II, this region lost their traditional multiethnic character. Poles, Jews, and smaller numbers of Germans were replaced by Ukrainians from those territories that became part of the new Polish state. From this period Eastern Galicia became the part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. This article centers on the question of what were the essential features that delimit the identity of Poles and Ukrainians in the mid-1940s? For answering on this question, I have chosen unpublished memoires of a man who was born in 1913 in Austrian Galicia, lived in Lviv voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic and died in Soviet Ukraine; I also use oral conversations with his children. Methodologically this paper is based on the work of Frederick Barth and Iver Neumann, who concluded that the most effective way of studying identity is to investigate the significant markers of identity that delimit the culture of this group from the culture of the «Other». Thus, it has been noted by many authors, identity is a very complex subject, that is difficult to study. The historical sources used in this article, shows that identity of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland population is ambivalent, blurred. The most significant marker of ethnic identity - language - does not «work» for the population of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland due to the widespread bilingualism. Difficulties arise with another markers - differences in denomination affiliation and the territory.
Ego-documents (such as diaries, private correspondence, postcards, and photos) created by ordinary people attract a high amount of researchers’ attention. Egodocuments, especially those that have ...arisen in linguistic and cultural borderlands, provide information for studying the dialect and contactological features of idiomatic, ethnographic and, more broadly, anthropological phenomena, as well as valuable data on the history of the region. This paper presents the diary of Stepan F. Lagno, a dweller of the Ternopil region of Ukraine, which was written in 1985–1986 in the Ukrainian language, so the text is published with a translation into Russian along with comments. The paper contains a description of the historical source, a brief biographical note about the author, and a linguistic description of the diary's dialect features (dialects in the territory of Galicia). The published diary is a unique example of naïve literature in Slavic studies. The document contains daily records concerning the economic and household activities of a western Ukrainian peasant that will be interesting for ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians.
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