Ethnic Tourism from Canada and the United States to Ukraine in the Context of the Cold War, 1950s–1980s

Trips by Ukrainian Americans and Canadians to Ukraine during the period after World War II remain in the margins of current historiography of international relations in the Cold War. This applies both to the motivation of tourists and to the role of political and public organizations, particularly the Communist parties of Canada (CPC) and the United States, the League of American Ukrainians (LAU), the Lemko Association, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), and the Workers’ Benevolent Association (RZT in Ukrainian). These organizations maintained ties between the Ukrainian community in North America and its historical homeland and made a significant contribution to arranging ethnic, or nostalgic as they are also called, tours for compatriots who were searching in Ukraine for the roots of their national identity. As is well known, there were a substantial number of potential tourists from the ranks of the Ukrainian diaspora: the population censuses in Canada reported 395,000 (2.8 percent of the population) in 1951; 473,300 (2.6 percent) in 1961; 580,300 (2.7 percent) in 1971; and 529,600 (2.2 percent) in 1981. According to official 1979 statistics, the United States had more than 730,000 citizens of Ukrainian origin. Most of the Ukrainians emigrated to those and a number of other countries from the western regions of Ukraine, the present-day IvanoFrankovsk, Lvov, Ternopol, Rovno, and Chernovtsy oblasts. Before World War I the emigration consisted of workers, whereas in the interwar period it already had not only socioeconomic but also political reasons, and after World War II it was mainly political in nature. The interwar period accounted for about 60,000 emigrants. The second wave of emigrants, in