Terror and repressions of the NKVD against the youth nationalist underground of the Western Ukrainian region (1944-1953)

Abstract

The liberation of Ukrainian lands from the occupying Nazi troops in 1944-45 fundamentally changed the conditions, forms and methods of the OUN struggle for victory and the construction of an independent state. The establishment of a new Soviet occupation regime in Ukraine prompted nationalist organizations to go deep underground and continue the struggle. The NKVD and MGB bodies, which came after the Red Army, began a brutal terror against the local population, and above all, against OUN activists.
The liberation of Ukrainian lands by the Soviet army from the Nazi invaders led to their gradual transformation into a colony of Russia, which called the union of millions of nations the Soviet Empire or the USSR. Therefore, the history of the nation’s opposition to Russian education and total Russification in the 1940s and 1950s is more relevant than ever today, when the latest racism is rapidly imposing the «Russian world» and pro-Russian schools in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
The relevance of the publication is to analyze the forms of the nation’s opposition to Russian education and the Soviet educational machine, which were developed and successfully tested in the western Ukrainian lands by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the first post-war years. The armed underground’s struggle for Ukrainian youth became a continuation of the nation’s liberation struggle for its natural rights in the pre-war and post-war periods, which forced the NKVD to change its tactics of struggle and direct terror not only to the destruction of the armed underground, but also against Ukrainian society, which, in the opinion of the conquerors, creates conditions for replenishing the OUN underground with young people.
To this end, the NKVD, along with the deportation of thousands of families who, in their opinion, could be involved in the national liberation movement, harsh terror against OUN activists, and arrests of school-age youth, began the «Komsomolization of schoolchildren» of the western region of Ukraine in contrast to underground youth organizations.
The publication emphasizes that, despite the terror and repression against youth, which led to the gradual cessation of the OUN underground activities in the mid-1950s, the nationally conscious youth raised by them has been involved in active resistance to the policies of the CPSU and the CPU since the early 1960s.