Ukrainian Diaspora in the Struggle with Russian Falsifiers of the History of Ukraine after World War II

Abstract

The article is based on the author’s processing of the archives of Ukrainian emigration during his research internship in Great Britain. His task was to find out and clarify the means and ways used by the Ukrainian diaspora in its struggle against Moscow’s information and propaganda offensive against the Western community’s positive resolution of the “Ukrainian question” after World War II.That was the time when the Russian governmental machine intensified its counter-propaganda work in the Western direction. Under those conditions, the world continued to perceive Ukrainians as part of the “great Soviet people” who unanimously built communism, and Ukraine itself as only a formal state declaratively writing its name in UN documents as a country with a significant contribution to the victory over fascism.Under the conditions of statelessness, Ukrainian public institutions abroad replaced state embassies and official representations and took on the responsible task to constantly plant the Ukrainian information field.The Ukrainian diaspora used the following means in its struggle against Moscow’s information and propaganda offensive against the Western community’s positive solution of the “Ukrainian question”.In particular, it was a matter of checking the presence of materials on Ukrainian studies in the main libraries of the countries where Ukrainian emigrants lived compactly. Foreign authors’ interpretation of mentions was said about Ukraine and Ukrainians in those few texts was analyzed.Representatives of Ukrainian public organizations established personal contacts with directors of libraries in cities with a compact residence of Ukrainians. The goal was to create Ukrainian book and press departments there. In 1948, a centralized network was established in Munich to provide major foreign libraries with Ukrainian publications.The successful breakthrough of the Moscow information blockade on the issue of the Holodomor of 1933 happened due to publication of a series of English-language brochures on this issue at the expense of the Ukrainian Youth Association abroad.