The 1947—48 famine forced tens of thousands of peasants in the eastern Ukraine to flee to the western part, where they became a reserve force for the insurgent movement.
All means were used against the insurgents—military operations, mass deportations to Siberia, relocation of entire villages from areas controlled by the insurgents to eastern regions of the Ukraine, and collectivization of the land. Ukrainian educators were sent from the eastern Ukraine to "reeducate" the population in the western part, and the Uniate church was banned.
The technique used to accomplish this last measure should be examined more closely. After the death of Metropolitan Shcheptitsky, head of the Uniate church in the western Ukraine, in November 1944, this church was invited to fuse with the Orthodox church. An intensive press campaign against the Uniates ensued. A resolute man, the new Metropolitan Slipoy was arrested along with his bishops and sentenced for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis during the war. Slowly, using various methods, including the murder of Bishop Romsha of Transcarpathia in 1951,16 the Uniate church was virtually destroyed, and its legal existence came to an end.
This was a major blow to the Ukrainian nationalists, but not a fatal one. The tenacity of the western Ukrainian movement can be judged by a document of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Order No. 312, dated December 30, 1949, which again announced an amnesty for all those who voluntarily laid down their arms. This order also gives us an idea of the
social composition of the insurrection movement because it includes among the other categories of "bandits" youths who had fled the factories, the Donets mines, and vocational schools.17 The armed struggle, on a smaller scale than before, continued during the first half of the 1950s.
From 1946 to 1950, some 300,000 people were deported, exiled, or arrested in the western Ukraine. Included in this figure are former collaborators with the German SS, former members of the Galichina SS division, among them criminals who had committed many murders and taken part in the mass execution of Jews in the Ukraine. But most of the deported were innocent peasants. The western Ukraine underwent collectivization and forced industrialization, which required the massive shipment into the area of specialists from the eastern Ukraine and Russia. The composition of the population changed and the rebellion withered away. Some nationalist leaders like Shukhevich died in the struggle; others like Okhrimovich were captured and executed. The final blows to the OUN came with the assassination by Soviet agents of Lev Rebet in 1957 and Stepan Bandera in 1959. Both were then living in West Germany.
Thus the period of armed struggle by Ukrainian nationalists came to an end. A new stage would unfold in the post-Stalin era—the peaceful struggle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia for their right to a national culture.
THE COLD WAR AT HOME AND ABROAD
After the war the international position of the Soviet Union changed radically. Soviet troops were in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, in the northeast of China, on the Kurile islands, and on the island of Sakhalin.
The allies of the Soviet Union from the days of the anti-Hitler coalition silently accepted these changes because they were powerless to impede them. Ill-prepared for peace, they suffered an unprecedented, major defeat on the international arena. At that point, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary entered the Soviet sphere of interest. The Soviet Union also had great influence in the Balkans, in Yugoslavia and Albania. It had troops in Vienna and Berlin. Communism was making great strides everywhere in Europe. Greece was plunged into civil war. The local Communist parties were growing in France and Italy.
In Asia powerful independence movements were developing in Indochina, Korea, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India. In China a civil war was underway in which the Communists had the clear ad-
vantage. The Soviet Union had never before been so popular in the East.
Everything seemed to favor the USSR. Of the six major Western powers before the war, only two maintained their positions: Great Britain, albeit badly shaken, having witnessed the collapse of its colonial empire and entered a period of cardinal change in world status; and the United States, which had emerged from the war powerful as never before.
During World War II the United States became aware of the full extent of its interdependence with Europe. Seeking to help the European states overcome their financial straits as quickly as possible, so that they could oppose the advance of communism, the Americans offered economic assistance for reconstruction—the Marshall Plan.18 American leaders also announced their intention to oppose the further spread of communism (the Truman Doctrine).19 The U.S. government proposed that the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states participate in the reconstruction plans, but the former and, under its pressure the latter, too, rejected the offer.20
The Soviet government had no desire whatsoever to join with those nations in efforts toward a speedy recovery of the world economy. It wanted to create its own political and economic sphere, independent of the West, whose center would be the Soviet Union, surrounded by satellite states. In fact, during the first years after the war, the economies of these countries became increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union, tending to become only auxiliary.
It was expected that another means for reviving and strengthening the Soviet economy would be the reparations to be paid by the defeated nations and the industrial machinery transferred from those countries to the USSR as "spoils of war." However, because of inefficiency and mismanagement Soviet industry was unable to use a major part of this equipment, which simply sat and rusted.
In 1947 peace treaties were signed with Germany's former European allies, Italy in particular.21 The Soviet Union attempted to obtain a trusteeship over Libya, a former Italian colony, thereby causing great commotion in the West.22 Seeking to gain a foothold in Africa and the Middle East, it recognized the state of Israel, founded in 1948.23 But the USSR's first attempt to establish itself in the Middle East was thwarted by the Western powers, and the Soviet Union focused all its attention on Eastern Europe.
Soviet policy sought to make satellites of the Eastern European countries, recently liberated from the Germans. It was a simple, even primitive policy, but it was effective. Relying on the Soviet divisions that controlled the territories of those states, the Communist parties, which initially had taken part in coalitions of democratic antifascist parties, led military coups and came to power in each one of these countries. The technique was always the same, with only slight variations. During the first three or four years after the war, the bloc of Communist states of Eastern and Southeastern Europe took shape. These regimes called themselves people's democracies. A world socialist system was born.
In October 1949 the German Democratic Republic was proclaimed.24 That same year, the Chinese Communists came to power after many years of civil war, establishing the People's Republic of China. The Communist victory in China was not a source of great joy for Stalin, as was erroneously assumed in the West. Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared, for example, that China had become a "Slavic Manchukuo," a Soviet colony.25 Such superficial statements, the result of appraising the policies of these states on the basis of their common ideology, were typical of both sides in that era.
In place of a divided China, torn by civil war, the USSR witnessed the birth on its borders of an enormous, centralized Chinese state, with a population greater than three times its own. To stress its position as the "older brother" and Stalin's position as Mao's senior in the international Communist movement, Stalin made Mao wait several days before receiving him during his visit to Moscow in 1950. On the other hand, the victory of communism in China confirmed to Stalin the value of one of Lenin's postulates—that the capitalist world would steadily shrink.