“RUSSIANS CAME”: MEMORY OF SOVIET AUTHORITIES 1939‒1941 YEARS IN BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES OF THE OLDEST GENERATION OF THE RESIDENTS OF WESTERN UKRAINE
Authors: Bodnar Halyna 
Published: November 2022

The oral history of Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s is an important independent body of sources for the study of this period. An encumbered story about one’s life or specific historical events best conveys experience, the world of ideas and perceptions, and the individual vision of direct eyewitnesses of past events. Pre-planned methods of the interview process, experienced interviewers, a selection of narrators, a sufficient number of recordings with the “saturation effect” are the keys to the success of the oral history project. The article analyzes the oral biographical narratives of the oldest generation of Western Ukraine residents about the Soviet government in 1939‒1941, highlights the main content lines of stories and dominant images of the first Soviet occupation, the transformation of moods. The empirical basis of the research are interviews recorded as part of the project “Social Anthropology of Filling the Void: Poland and Ukraine after World War II” and processed by the author for their publication by the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv. The interviews were recorded by an interdisciplinary group of Polish-Ukrainian female researchers in 2017‒2019 with residents of villages and towns of Ternopil, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts born in the 1920s‒1930s. The stories are biographical and pertain to the whole life interviewees, with a special focus made on the 1930s‒1940s and World War II. The oldest participants were born in 1923 and the youngest were born in the late 1930s. Their stories are biographies of average native Halychyna residents, who shared their life experience for the first time and, consequently, shared what in their opinion was important to remember, as no recorded memory will be left when they pass away. The narration of the “big” story is made of a palette of “small” reactions to events, it is the inner world of a person – their worries and experiences, successes, hopes, and expectations. The images of Soviet authorities and the Soviet people in the memories of children are not holistic and meaningful, but are connected with the outer world – home and parents, close family and friends, the street and acquaintancies, neighbors, school, religious traditions and the church. Children’s memories recorded not so much everyday routine, but crucial and traumatic, strong emotional experience, which was filled with the years of the first Soviet regime in the region; their stories are replete with numerous unique case stories that may not have reached or come into view of adults. After having met the Red Army in September 1939, the hopes placed on the Soviet government by the adult population vanished almost immediately. People, then children, explained the first disappointments with the brutality of the Red Army: accidental or deliberate executions of innocent people, repressions in autumn 1939. For Galician peasants and small-town residents the image of the Soviets in 1939‒1941 is a radically changed world of their childhood with a fairy-tale palace and a local landowner with his family; depending on the social status of the family, the allotted land and the joy of harvesting their own field; inhuman deportations of Polish neighbors in the frosty winter of 1940. The primary “own” grief was the emotional culmination of life stories from the period of the first Soviet occupation: mostly in June 1941 they lost their loved ones due to the last, fourth, wave of deportations or executions in prisons during the retreat of the Soviets. In the memoirs of Galician villagers, unlike to the memoirs of the inhabitants of the cities, there are almost no mentions of the reaction of Poles and Jews to the arrival of the Red Army in September 1939.