Prague, May 1945, “Liberation”: Arrests of Ukrainian Emigrants

Abstract

The goal is to categorize and arrange facts regarding the SMERSH counterintelligence agency’s “Prague Operation” within the larger historical framework of geopolitical shifts in post-war Central and Eastern Europe, as well as to examine the features of the “operational and investigative work” and the “material evidence” base. Using both individual and collective “cases,” analyse the rehabilitation process for victims of totalitarian terror. Methodology. Historical prosopography, comparative analysis, and historical reconstruction methods were applied. Scientific novelty. The “liberation” of Prague in May 1945 has been shown to be nothing more than Moscow’s regime of control taking the place of Nazi rule. The process for carrying out pre-trial investigations and “operational-investigative measures” in “cases” involving Ukrainian emigrants has been rebuilt. It has been demonstrated that the actions of the Kremlin’s special services and their agents in Kyiv damaged the human and intellectual potential of “Ukrainian Prague” and resulted in the confiscation of the local Ukrainian community’s archives, which were largely lost but kept off-limits to the scientific community for many years. Conclusions. Another test for the Ukrainian intellectual elite in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in such a centre of Ukrainian cultural life as Czech Prague, at the end of World War II, was the end of the Nazi occupation and the beginning of the Soviet occupation. It is not the first time that part of the Ukrainian community in Prague has chosen to emigrate, but the majority has remained, hoping that “the Bolsheviks have changed.” Hopes were in vain. The “Prague Operation” of the “SMERSH” counterintelligence agency dealt a devastating blow to the local Ukrainian elite: mass arrests and deportations, absurd accusations and unjust sentences, and years of camps. The repressive bodies of the USSR tried to give the “cases” of the Ukrainian émigré professorship of the second half of the 1940s a seeming character of proof and validity, using the capabilities of the state archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR to find information about the participation of a certain person in the Ukrainian liberation struggle, as well as the historical and memoir literature of the Ukrainian emigration. Only those who survived and had Czechoslovak citizenship were able to return to Czechoslovakia. The rehabilitation of those repressed during the “Prague Operation” of 1945 continued until the 1990s. The Kremlin’s special services not only bled “Ukrainian Prague” but also committed “archivicide” by seizing the “Prague archives” of the Ukrainian emigration.