Subtelny, Orest, ‘The Soviet Occupation of Western Ukraine, 1939-41,’ in Ukraine during World War II: History and Its Aftermath, ed. Yury Boshyk (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 5-14.

When the North American media deal with the topic of occupied Europe during World War II, they usually present a predictable, if substantially correct, image of countries overrun by Nazi armies, populations terrorized by the Gestapo, summary executions, and concentration camps. The behaviour of the occupied peoples is also depicted in standard fashion: the ‘good’ people invariably resisted the Nazis while the ‘bad’ collaborated. The essence of this version of the war is that the Nazis were the universal and exclusive enemy and that the only acceptable behaviour during World War II was to fight against them.

This position is valid in certain respects but misleading in others. Although the Nazi regime was generally despised, its oppressiveness varied from country to country. Some countries were brutalized more than others. And while a small minority in the occupied lands joined the anti-Nazi resistance or chose to collaborate with the Germans, the vast majority engaged neither in heroics nor in evil deeds. Most people in the occupied lands simply tried to survive. But perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the popular North American view of occupied Europe is the implication that only the Nazis brutalized the lands which they occupied.

Many peoples of Eastern Europe, among them the Estonians, Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Western Ukrainians, were persecuted not only by the Nazis but also by the Soviets. Tens of thousands were murdered by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, as well as by the Gestapo, and hundreds of thousands more were dispatched to Nazi concentration camps and to the Soviet Gulag. In 1939-41, it was the Soviets who first inflicted the horrors of occupation on much of Eastern Europe. After the Nazi regime was defeated in 1944, the Soviets returned once again to these Eastern European lands with their own brand of inhumanity.

For the Balts, Belorussians, and Ukrainians, foreign occupation during World War II presented a more complex problem than for the other occupied nations of Europe. Some tried to resist both the Nazis and the Soviets.