COVERAGE OF THE UKRAINIAN LIBERATION MOVEMENT OF THE 1940S AND 1950S IN THE UGS NEWSPAPER «VOICE OF REVIVAL»

Abstract

The article examines the peculiarities of liquidation of the information vacuum regarding the events of national history in Ukrainian society, caused by Soviet censorship and propaganda. Therefore, attention is drawn to the important work carried out in this direction by the members of the first Ukrainian public and political organization of the second half of the 1980s – the Ukrainian Helsinki Union. Activists of the UGS created a number of press publications to promote their ideas and raise national consciousness and social activity. One such publication was the newspaper «Voice of Revival» created in 1989 in Kyiv. It has been established that the newspaper’s editorial office focused its activities on providing its readers with up-to-date information that was not published by the official mass media. In the conditions of sending propagandistic ideologues of the Soviet totalitarian regime and the monopoly dominance of its press editions with their multi-million circulations, «Voice of Revival» with its limited circulation nevertheless became an expression of the new Ukrainian free press, which has changed in the information space of Ukraine. This article analyzes the materials published in the newspaper «Voice of Revival» devoted to the activities of the Ukrainian liberation movement in the 1940s and 1950s . It is noted that the newspaper’s columns provided readers with information about one of the most mythologized and demonized periods of the Ukrainian national liberation struggle. Given the totalitarian control of the Soviet regime over the official media, Ukrainian society was deprived of the opportunity to obtain objective information about the resistance movement itself and its leaders and activists. Instead, public opinion was «warmed up» by prepared Soviet false ideological stamps. The conclusion states that the activities of the «Voice of Revival» editorial office in covering the struggle of the Ukrainian armed resistance in the 1940s and 1950s were important for the revival of Ukrainian national memory, the spread of national narratives in society, and the mobilization of Ukrainian citizens to oppose the Soviet totalitarian regime in the new period of the Ukrainian liberation struggle in the late 1980s – early 1990s . Keywords «Voice of Revival» newspaper, armed struggle, resistance, OUN, UPA,UGS.