Ukraine

The last years of Stalin’s rule

Postwar reconstruction, the reimposition of totalitarian controls and terror, and the Sovietization of western Ukraine were the hallmarks of the last years of Stalin’s rule. Economic reconstruction was undertaken immediately as Soviet authorities reestablished control over the recovered territories. The fourth five-year plan, as in the prewar years, stressed heavy industry to the detriment of consumer needs. By 1950, Ukraine’s industrial output exceeded the prewar level. In agriculture, recovery proceeded much more slowly, and prewar levels of production were not reached until the 1960s. A famine in 1946–47 resulting from postwar dislocations and drought claimed nearly one million casualties.

The prewar system of totalitarian control exercised through the Communist Party and the secret police was quickly reimposed. Khrushchev continued to head the CP(B)U as first secretary—except briefly from March to December 1947—until his promotion to secretary of the Central Committee in Moscow in December 1949; he was succeeded by Leonid Melnikov. Purges in party ranks were relatively mild. However, real and alleged Nazi collaborators, former German prisoners of war and repatriated slave workers, Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalists,” and others suspected of disloyalty—essentially hundreds of thousands of people—were sent to concentration camps in the far north and Siberia. A hard-line ideological campaign to stamp out Western influences went hand in hand with a renewed Russification drive. Ukrainian writers, artists, and scholars, who in the wartime years had been permitted to develop patriotic themes and sentiments in a mobilization effort against the Germans, were now accused of Ukrainian nationalism and subjected to persecution and repression. An “anticosmopolitan” campaign destroyed the remaining vestiges of cultural institutions of a Jewish community decimated by the Holocaust.

The Sovietization of western Ukraine was a prolonged and violent process. The UPA, under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych (killed 1950), continued effective military operations against Soviet troops until the early 1950s. The armed resistance received covert support from the local rural population, embittered by the concurrent forced collectivization drive, reminiscent of the 1930s in eastern Ukraine. Also accused of abetting the partisans, and Ukrainian nationalism in general, was the Greek Catholic church. In April 1945 Metropolitan Yosyf Slipy and the entire hierarchy in Galicia were arrested and later sentenced to long imprisonment (only Slipy survived, to be released in 1963 and sent into exile in Rome). After arrests and intimidation of the clergy, a synod held in Lviv in March 1946—in fact, on Stalin’s orders—proclaimed the “reunification” of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics with the Russian Orthodox Church. By analogous means, the Greek Catholic church in Transcarpathia was abolished in 1949. Officially declared “self-liquidated,” the Greek Catholic church maintained a clandestine existence through subsequent decades of Soviet rule. Overall, approximately half a million people were deported from western Ukraine in connection with the suppression of the insurgency and nationalist activity, religious persecution, and collectivization.