The German attack in June 1941 interrupted the Stalinisation of the western republics, but the Nazis had by then abandoned their earlier plans to create a system of puppet states in the Soviet west. In any case, their racial ideology dictated different treatment of the peoples living in the occupied territories. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, local self-government in the form of ministries was set up and universities were allowed to function. In Ukraine and Belorus- sia, the natives could at best serve in municipal administration, and schooling above Grade Four was abolished. However, all these territories were exploited economically and earmarked for future incorporation into the Reich. Looking for immediate economic benefits, the German administration never really kept its promise to dissolve the collective farms in Ukraine and Belorussia or to allow the restitution of nationalised businesses in the Baltics. In all these regions and usually with the help of local collaborators, the Nazis carried out the extermination of the Jews. Late in the war, in a desperate effort to use the non-Russians' manpower, the Nazis established national SS units composed of Estonians, Latvians and Galician Ukrainians. (This effort failed in Lithuania and was not attempted in Belorussia and eastern Ukraine, but throughout the western republics the locals were actively recruited into auxiliary troops and police.) The Germans suppressed or ignored several attempts by the nationalists to proclaim state independence and, until desperate times came in i943, were generally wary of working with them. Especially after 1943, Soviet partisans were active in Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. So were the nationalist guerrilla detachments, which originally attacked the Soviet troops but, in view of Nazi mistreatment, soon turned against the Germans as well.
The Soviet army recovered the western regions one by one between the autumn of i943 (eastern Ukraine) and the spring of i945 (parts of Latvia). Its advance resulted in the mass westward exodus of the population especially from the regions that had been incorporated before the war. Intellectuals and nationalist activists were over-represented among the so-called 'displaced persons', who, during the late 1940s, resettled primarily in North America, Australia and Britain. Particularly in the Baltics and Western Ukraine, the Soviet army encountered fierce resistance from the nationalist guerrillas, who congregated in the region's forests, but, by the end of the decade, the brutal Soviet counter-measures had succeeded in establishing control over the countryside. This achievement was accompanied by a new wave of mass deportations. Still, the armed resistance in the west profoundly traumatised Soviet ideologues, who subsequently always treated the region as nationalism-prone.
Between Eastern Europe and the Russian core
Territorial changes at the end of the Second World War favoured the western republics (see Map 8.1). In addition to the 1939 reunion of eastern and Western Ukraine, the Ukrainian SSR acquired Transcarpathia from Czechoslovakia. Lithuania recovered Vilnius from Poland and Klaipeda from Germany. But the population losses and destruction brought by the war made for a long recovery. While Stalinist authorities in the old Soviet regions busied themselves with reconstruction, in the newly acquired western territories their task was Sovietisation. The collectivisation of agriculture was put on hold until the late 1940s, when the authorities established their control over the countryside, but when it finally came, the collectivisation was as violent and disruptive as its all-Union model had been two decades previously.
The post-war international situation also complicated the authorities' choices. New Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe preserved their independent statehood, and Soviet ideology was at a loss to explain why, for instance, Estonia had to be a part of the USSR, while Poland had not. The very existence of the Soviet republic of Moldavia east of socialist Romania might appear superfluous. As Roman Szporluk has long argued, the emergence of socialist states in Eastern Europe in a fundamental way undermined the legitimacy of Soviet nationality policy.[313] Stalin's new subjects might not feel this theoretical tension. But the Soviet west also became the region most exposed to contacts with East European versions of socialism and served as the USSR's shop window turned to Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.
Either because ofthis window-dressing function or because oftheir general ideological vision of the USSR as a highly developed industrial state, the central authorities in Moscow invested heavily in the industrial development of the western republics. The post-war period saw a quick industrial expansion, particularly in the Baltics and eastern Ukraine. Such previously agricultural areas as Lithuania, Belorussia, Western Ukraine, and Moldavia also, acquired some modern industries. Although not in the short run, industrial growth presented the western nationalities with two problems. First, their specialised production units were included in (and dependent on) the large network of the Soviet command economy. Second, much of the required skilled labour force was - whether intentionally or inevitably - recruited in Russia, thus increasing the share of the Russian population in the western republics. In one extreme case, the Latvian population ofthe Latvian SSR's capital, Riga, decreased from 63.0 per cent in 1939 to 44.6 per cent in 1959 and to 36.5 per cent in 1989.[314] In Moldavia, Bessarabia remained agrarian, while new industrial development (and new Russian migrants) were concentrated in Transnistria, the former Moldavian autonomy within the Ukrainian republic.
Politically and culturally, life in the western republics stabilised following de-Stalinisation. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Baltic republics demonstrated standards of living higher than elsewhere in the USSR, while the rest of the region (except Moldavia) was on a par with the European part of Russia. Especially in urban areas, consumerism set in with the wider availability of cars, furniture, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and cassette recorders. Except for a brief period during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the central authorities did not openly encourage assimilation to Russian culture, although they were clearly pleased when social processes pushed in this direction. During the 1970s, especially in Belorussia and eastern Ukraine, local party leaders sometimes assisted the Russification of education, the media and urban environment. Needless to say, the Soviet authorities and the KGB remained ever watchful for manifestations of 'bourgeois nationalism' in the western borderlands, suppressing every potential source of resentment.
But the perpetual threat of 'nationalism' was built into the Soviet system, which had itself institutionalised ethnic difference. There were local administrators who, like the deputy premier Eduards Berklavs in Latvia during the late 1950s or First Secretary Petro Shelest' in Ukraine during the 1960s, developed too strong an identification with their countries and cultures. More important, the functioning of full-fledged national cultures, even Soviet-style, required the existence of national cultural producers, groups of intellectuals who often deviated from the required intricate balance of Sovietness and national pride. There were, too, 'national religions' in some regions of the Soviet west.
Persecutions ofthe Roman Catholic Church in Lithuania, for instance, elicited strong popular protest. Although the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had been forcibly dissolved in 1946, it retained a considerable following in Western Ukraine as a 'catacomb Church'.