The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine lifted the seal of secrecy from archival documents about repressions and deportations of Ukrainians from Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, and Lviv regions in the 1940s and 1950s.
This was reported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs on February 7.
The funds of the Sectoral State Archive currently hold documents related to mass deportations of the population from the territory of Western Ukraine in the 1940s and 1950s, echelon lists of citizens of Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, and Lviv regions.
These archival documents will be available to the public, including they will be published on official websites.
With the beginning of the Second World War, the USSR occupied Western Ukraine. Here, the Soviet regime immediately began mass deportations, only at an accelerated pace. Only from the end of 1939 and during 1940, 10 to 20 percent of the population was taken from Western Ukraine to Siberia, the Volga region, Kazakhstan, and the north of the USSR, according to various estimates.
The most massive wave of deportations occurred between May 22 and June 20, 1941, on the eve of Germanyʼs attack on the USSR. The head of the PCIA [Peopleʼs Commissariat of Internal Affairs] Lavrentiy Beria was personally responsible for its organization. People were evicted in whole families and were not given time to gather. After filtering, the men were mostly imprisoned and sent to camps, where most of them died. And women and children were taken to special settlements in the most remote regions of the Soviet Union. This wave of deportation covered approximately 300 000 people.
In 1944, Soviet power returned to Western Ukraine. From then until the beginning of the 1950s, almost half a million Ukrainians were deported. Operation "West" in 1947 was the most revealing, when approximately 80 000 people were deported in one day. This is how the Soviet authorities fought the liberation movement in Western Ukraine. Whole families were evicted, even those who were only suspected of collaborating with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
The operation began at two oʼclock in the morning on October 21, 1947 in the Lviv, Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Ternopil, and Rivne regions. It involved almost 30 000 soldiers and approximately 16 000 employees of other law enforcement agencies. They surrounded villages, conducted searches and sent people in trucks to railway stations based on lists. And from there — in wagons to Kazakhstan and remote regions of Siberia. They opened fire on those who tried to escape from the encirclement.