Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. Группа авторов

Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society - Группа авторов


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He said:

      The almost blatant violation of the USSR’s official legal norms by Soviet officers likely indicates that this was a common practice. The situation could not have been different—on the one hand, the Soviets were forced to maintain “the Soviet rule of law,” but on the other, they were expected to deliver immediate results in their fight against the guerrilla fighters and the underground movement. This meant that the number of individuals killed and arrested was expected to increase month by month. Reports sent to the headquarters were carefully read and thoroughly analyzed. Any decline in combat activity was immediately noticed and condemned. When faced with the choice whether to be “law-abiding and humanitarian” and expose oneself to the risk of being accused of ineptitude (or in the worst case—of supporting nationalists) or to break the law and expose oneself to the less likely risk of being accused of abuse, most people chose the latter option.

      This behavior was welcomed by the Soviet leadership. On 10 January 1945, in Lviv, during a meeting of party activists and officials responsible for economic affairs in Lviv oblast’, the 1st secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Nikita Khrushchev explained the rationale for the repression in the following way:

      It should be noted that the Soviets were aware that this type of behavior discouraged the local population from supporting the communist rule. Moreover, the local residents likely had the feeling that they were under occupation. This is why, at least from 1945, the Soviets tried to reduce the scale of lawlessness and abuse in order to win over a portion of residents of Volhynia and Galicia and engage them in the fight against the OUN-B and the UPA.

      There is no doubt that the NKVD troops delivered the Ukrainian underground movement and the guerrilla movement a series of heavy and painful blows. Operations carried out by the NKVD Internal Troops contributed to a reduction in the scale of activity of the guerrilla movement, and most importantly they offered some degree of protection to the government apparatus built by the communists. This is why the activity of the NKVD Internal Troops should be viewed as an important factor that facilitated the post-war Sovietization of western Ukraine.

      However, what is shocking is the scale of the acts of repression which accompanied the actions of a purely anti-guerrilla nature. They affected nearly every family in the western oblasts of Ukraine.

      This is why in these regions the memory of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is the idealized memory


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