A Soviet West: nationhood, regionalism, and empire in the annexed western borderlands

Abstract

This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.

Keywords:

• Soviet Union
• Ukraine
• Baltic Republics
• nationalism
• culture

Notes

1. Interview with “Oresta,” 22 June 2007.

2. See Zbigniew Wojnowski's article in this collection, as well as Halyna Bodnar (2010).

3. For scholarship on this earlier period of the region's history, see, for example, Gross (2002), Mertelsmann (2003), Reichelt (2011), Swain (2009), and Zubkova (2008).

4. See, for instance, a collection of sources on the Ukrainian National Front (1964–1967) in Zaitsev and Dubas (2000).

5. For one example of these Latvian Red Riflemen, Artūrs Vanags, see Aleksandrs Grīns (1990).

6. An example of this would be historians like Ivan Kryp'iakevych who publicly renounced their “bourgeois nationalist” views on Ukrainian history in the late 1940s (Dashkevych 1995). As late as 1959, Kryp'iakevych (1959, 153) reminded readers of Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal’ that one book he had published in Lviv in 1937 “was written not from Marxist positions and I now condemn as incorrect the views expressed in it.”

7. In the case of Estonian Elmar-Ramund Ruben, born 1918, joining the Party was nothing special. “Besides paying my dues, life went on as usual,” he said (Ruben 2009, 89).

8. Interview with Bohdan Zalizniak, 24 July 2004.

9. Interview with Teodoziy Starak, 26 February 1999. Starak was referring to his friend and classmate, poet Ihor Kalynets.

10. Interview with Stefaniia Hnatenko, 13 March 1998.

11. Derzhavnyi arkhiv l'vivs'koi oblasti (hereafter DALO), f. P-3567, op. 1, spr. 36, ark. 133.

12. For oral interviews on this, see interviews with Andriy Bokotei, 17 February 2000; Oleh Minko, 17 February 2000; Roman Petruk, 21 June 1999.

13. DALO, f. P-3, op. 19, spr. 22, ark. 78–80.

14. Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob'iednan’ Ukrainy (herafter TsDAHOU), f. 1, op. 25, spr. 878, ark. 16–22.

15. Pribalt was sometimes used as a pejorative term for people from the Baltic republics. See Ergma (2009, 485).