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An unlikely bulwark of Sovietness: cross-border travel and Soviet patriotism in Western Ukraine, 1956–1985

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Zbigniew Wojnowski
Zbigniew Wojnowski*
Affiliation:
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
*
*Email: zbigniew.wojnowski@nu.edu.kz
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Abstract

Focusing on the development of travel between the borderlands of Ukraine and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, this article explores what it meant to be Soviet outside the Russian core of the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The cautious opening of the Soviet border was part of a larger attempt to find fresh sources of popular support and enthusiasm for the regime's “communist” project. Before the Prague Spring of 1968 in particular, official policies and narratives of travel thus praised local inhabitants who crossed the Soviet border for supposedly overcoming age-old hatreds to build a brighter future in Eastern Europe. By the 1970s, however, smuggling and cultural consumption discredited the idea of “internationalist friendship.” This encouraged residents of Ukraine to speak and write about the continuing importance of the Soviet border. The very idea of Sovietness was defined in national terms, as narratives of travel emphasized that Soviet citizens were inherently different from ethno-national groups in the people's democracies. Eastern Europe thus emerged as an “other” that highlighted the Soviet character of territories incorporated into the USSR after 1939, helping to obscure western Ukraine's troubled past and leading to the emergence of new social hierarchies in the region.

Keywords

Ukrainian historyregional identities in western UkraineUkrainian-Polish relationsSoviet patriotismSovietization of western Ukraine
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 82 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

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1) Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Warsaw Zespół 1354 Google Scholar
2) Derzhavnyi Arkhiv L'vivs'koi Oblasti (DALO), L'viv Fond P3 Google Scholar
3) Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Kyivs'koi Oblasti (DAKO), Kyiv Fond P5 Google Scholar
4) Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), Moscow Fond 9576 Fond 9612 Google Scholar
5) Open Society Archives, Budapest Collection 300-6 Google Scholar
6) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), Moscow Fond 5 Fond 89 Google Scholar
7) Stowarzyszenie Wsp61pracy Polska-Wsch6d (SWPW), Warsaw Uncatalogued files of Soviet-Polish Friendship Society. Google Scholar
8) Tsentral'nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads‘kykh Ob’‘ednan’ (TsDAHO), Kyiv Fond 1 Google Scholar
Bazhan, Oleh. 2008a. ‘“Praz'ka Vesna’ u dokumentakh Galuzevoho derzhavnoho arkivu Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy.” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB 1 (2): 54–137.Google Scholar
Biriukov, Igor'. 1986. Chekhoslovakiia: liudi i gody. Moscow: Politizdat.Google Scholar
Korotich, Vasilii. 1981. Most: Razmyshleniia o puteshestviiakh s piatnadtsat'iu otstupleniiami. Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatei'.Google Scholar
Ravich, Nikolai. 1964. Po dorogam Evropy. Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia.Google Scholar
Amar, Tarik Cyril. 2011. “Okupacyjna codzienność we Lwowie (Lwiw, Lemberg, Lwów) w czasie II wojny światowej: przemoc i jej spowszednienie.” In Przemoc i dzień powszedni w okupowanej Polsce, edited by Chinciński, Tomasz, 506–530. Gdańsk: Oskar.Google Scholar
Applebaum, Rachel. 2013. “A Test of Friendship: Soviet-Czechoslovak Tourism and the Prague Spring.” In The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, edited by Gorsuch, Anne and Koenker, Diane, 213–234. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Bazhan, Oleh. 2008b. “Suspil'ni nastroi v Ukraini u khodi chekhoslovats'koi kryzy 1968 roku za donesenniamy radians'kykh spetssluzhb.” Zarkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB 1 (2): 37–53.Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeffrey. 1994. “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read all about it!” Slavic Review 53 (4): 973–991.Google Scholar
Brown, Kate. 2004. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dvornichenko, Vladimir. 1985. Turizm v SSSR i deiatel'nost’ sovetskikh profsoiuzov po ego razvitiiu (1917–1984 gg.). Moscow: Vysshaia shkola profsoiuznogo dvizheniia VTsSPS.Google Scholar
Field, Deborah. 1998. “Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushchev Era.” Russian Review 57 (4): 599–613.Google Scholar
Gitelman, Zvi. 1976. “The Diffusion of Political Innovation: From East Europe to the Soviet Union.” In The Influence of Eastern Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR, edited by Roman Szporluk, 26–57. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Gorsuch, Anne. 2006. “Time Travellers: Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe.” In Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, edited by Gorsuch, Anne and Koenker, Diane, 205–226. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gorsuch, Anne. 2011. All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hodnett, Grey, and Potichnyj, Peter. 1970. The Ukraine and the Czechoslovak crisis. Canberra: Australian National University.Google Scholar
Kozlov, Denis. 2006. “'I have not Read, But I will Say …’ Soviet Literary Audiences and Changing Ideas of Social Membership, 1958–66.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (3): 557–597.Google Scholar
Risch, William. 2011. The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Snyder, Timothy. 1999. “To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All': The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–47.” Journal of Cold War Studies 1 (2): 86–120.Google Scholar
Snyder, Timothy. 2003. “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943.” Past & Present 179: 197–234.Google Scholar
Sowinski, Pawel. 2005. Wakacje w Polsce Ludowej. Polityka władz i ruch turystyczny (1945–1989). Warsaw: Polska Akademia Nauk.Google Scholar
Statiev, Alexander. 2010. The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Szporluk, Roman. 1991. “The Soviet West – or Far Eastern Europe?” East European Politics & Societies 5 (3): 466–482.Google Scholar
Weiner, Amir. 2006a. “Déjà vu all over Again: Prague Spring, Romanian Summer, and Soviet Autumn on the Soviet Western Frontier.” Contemporary European History 15 (2): 159–194.Google Scholar
Weiner, Amir. 2006b. “The Empires Pay a Visit: Gulag Returnees, East European Rebellions, and Soviet Frontier Politics.” The Journal of Modern History 78 (2): 333–376.Google Scholar
White, Anne. 1990. De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland, and Hungary, 1953–1989. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wojnowski, Zbigniew. 2012. “De-Stalinization and Soviet Patriotism: Ukrainian Reactions to East European Unrest in 1956.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (4): 799–829.Google Scholar