The Road to Exile of Deportees from Western Ukraine: the Second Half of the 1940s – the Beginning of the 1950s
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15407/uhj2022.05.018Keywords:
Western Ukraine, national liberation struggles, Stalin’s regime, terror, repression, deportation, exile, convoys, special settlementsAbstract
The article talks about the features of the difficult journey to exile – one of the first acts of mass deportation of the population of Western Ukraine. Various aspects of the infernal transportation of those who were forcibly removed from their homes only because they provided assistance to members of the national liberation movement, sympathized with them or were not even involved are described. These people were recognized as “socially dangerous because of their connections with the criminal environment” – Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighters, they were called an indefinite element in need of strict isolation.
The purpose of the article is to study the organizational and sanitary and household components of the difficult road to exile, as well as the moral and psychological state of forced migrants. The research tasks determined by the purpose consist in the analysis of the process of delivery to the railway, artificially created long and exhausting conditions for the transportation of the elderly, women and children. In the end – the construction of the Bolshevik concept of the geographical isolation of the «indefinite contingent» and the torture that accompanied them.
The methodology of the research combines critical discourse analysis, biographical method, tools of historical and legal, ethnological research, social anthropology, etc.
The scientific novelty is to expand the general idea of political terror in general and a specific segment of the forcible movement of large masses of people to the remote areas of the USSR. The language of documents and witnesses of that terrible abuse highlights the terrible trials that befell forced migrants.
Conclusions. It has been proven that the Stalinist regime, in an effort to subdue the exiles, made great efforts so that the very transportation to the place of exile became a cruel punishment for an uncommitted crime.
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