The Victimization of Catholic Poles in the Western Ukraine: Factors, Forms and Consequences (1939 — the End of 1950)

Abstract

The research considers the problems of Catholic Poles victimization in the Western Ukraine in the context of social disasters from the 1930s to the 1950s (World War II and Great Patriotic War, occupation, radical socio-economic transformations of Soviet society, Stalin’s and Nazi repressions, forced deportations, interethnic conflicts in the Eastern European region and etc.). The methodological basis of interdisciplinary research are concepts of cultural trauma and collective memory, which actualizes the practice of fighting for collective identity, legitimization and identification functions of collective memory, and generation of mutually exclusive collectivistic narratives and myths. As a heuristic research tool, the work uses the concept of victimization, which allows to actualize the role of the ethno-confessional marker of self-identification in the construction of the conflictogenic interaction of various ethnic groups and the political regime in totalitarian sense. In this case, Catholicism is seen as the institutional and sociocultural basis for preservation and development of the ethnocultural specifics of the Poles in the USSR, which contradicts the idea of unifying national relations in a socialist society and the practice of forming the Soviet people. As a base of empirical sources of the Polish Catholic community life in the Western Ukraine in the USSR in the 1930s — 1950s, the “Polacy na Wschodzie” project was used, which contains non-standardized interviews with residents of the Eastern European lands that were part of the Polish Republic during the interwar period. The application of this project is due to the necessity to introduce into the scientific circulation sources representing the unique individual experience of everyday life in the context of large-scale social cataclysm. The subject of the study is the victimization of residents of the Western Ukrainian lands of Polish origin, as a dynamic process of constructing the status of a collective victim in relation to representatives of this ethnic group, due to political, ideological and social factors. In the context of institutional discourse, articulated in the memoirs of former Soviet citizens of Polish descent, certain aspects of victimization of Roman Catholic Catholics are reconstructed in this paper, and the social consequences of this process on interethnic and interfaith relations in the region are determined (including in the context of political instrumentalization of collective memory).