Territorial increase of Ukraine at the beginning of World War ІІ in the journal of the USSR (1939—1941)

Abstract

The presented article was prepared within the framework of the implementation of the annual plan of scientific work of the State Printing Archive of the Book Chamber of Ukraine: in the current year 2024, we are researching domestic prints of 1940, that is, the period of the Second World War and the post-war reconstruction of the Ukrainian SSR. Establishing the thematic and substantive priorities of the periodicals of the time, the author focused attention on such a defining aspect of national state-building as the territorial expansion of Soviet Ukraine at the initial stage of the Second World War. The article examines the problem of Western Ukrainian lands becoming part of the Ukrainian SSR, in particular, Eastern Galicia and Northern Bukovyna. The premise of the event was a bilateral conspiracy between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union regarding the division of Europe into spheres of influence. The Soviet-German treaty of September 28, 1939 became a documentary post-factum confirmation of the event. A feature of the territorial changes of the Ukrainian SSR at that time was the inclusion of lands that, according to the Soviet-Polish treaty of August 16, 1945, Soviet Ukraine lost. We are talking about Nadsiany, Kholm region, Podlasie and Lemkiv region, which in 1939 entered the Ukrainian SSR, and in 1945 became part of the Polish People's Republic. The source base of the presented intelligence was made up of domestic periodicals, namely: the republican magazine "Red cross" for 1939 and the regional literary and artistic almanac "Vilna Bukovyna" for 1940—1941, which tell about the crossing by the Red Army of the Polish-Soviet and the Romanian-Soviet state borders and the events that resulted from it. The purpose of this investigation was to process the mentioned press releases by the method of content analysis.