Deported Lemkos in the Nets of Soviet Post-war Propaganda

Abstract

The article reveals the complex pages of the notoriously planned Soviet propaganda among the deportees in the post-war period. It shows its detrimental effect on the preservation of the ethnic foundations of the Lemko group. Considering that Lemkivshchyna today had lost its integrity as a historical and ethnographic region, and the Lemkos were settled around the world - these only actualize the task to a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the socio-political and national-cultural processes in the region and Lemkos in their context in the new era; to ascertain the role of Lemkivshchyna and Lemkos in the ethnopolitics of the states and, accordingly, their contribution to the development of various Ukrainian public, political, cultural and state organizations, institutions and entities, and generally assess their role and significance in the history of Ukraine of XX - early XXI century. It is claimed that the whole catastrophe of modern times for the Lemkos was their deportation from their native ethnic areas, first to the USSR in 1944 - 1946, where they found themselves among their people, but not on their land, and later - in 1947 those who remained were settled in Poland. New powerful political-administrative and ideological factors against the local population during the Soviet-Polish negotiations were used. The most brutal action against local Ukrainians was Operation Vistula in April-July 1947, which unjustifiably had the task of erasing traces of their national image in peacetime. The difficult stages of life in the Lemko region in the conditions of deportation actions of the 1940s, carried out as a result of the Soviet-Polish conspiracy of 1944 are traced, and pointed out their territorial, social, cultural and mental consequences.А reflection of Russian and later Soviet propaganda, at first, in the Lemkos region, and later among the deported Lemkos, is carried out. The deportation of the local population has led to irreversible territorial, demographic, cultural and mental losses. The analysis of the sources allows us to suggest that the policies of both Poland and the USSR aimed at eradicating Lemko natives from their ethnic areas. And this was done by various methods, starting with propaganda, in the initial stages, to using force at later stages. Having been deported to the Ukrainian SSR from their ethnic territories in Poland, autochthonous Lemkos fell into the nets of total Soviet propaganda. Soviet ideologues tried to involve the most diverse methods, which even in the interwar period manifested in different ways (from public influences, populist calls for a better future, active agitation for leaving the USSR), were well supported materially. At the beginning of the Second World War, we observed a transition to more pragmatic measures through the organization of a special centre and the activities of special agitator instructors. In the post-war period, meetings and conversations with the population took place in almost every village, in which Soviet agitators contrasted poverty in Lemkivshchyna with prosperous life in the USSR. Such oral propaganda, moreover, in all regions of the Ukrainian SSR where the Lemkos arrived, the Bolsheviks reinforced with various slogans, brochures and appeals.