War Veterans and Social Welfare in the New Soviet Borderlands (Lviv oblast, Ukrainian SSR, 1944–48)

The existing research on the social provision of Soviet war veterans and their status in late Stalinist society rarely focuses on the newly conquered western borderlands which were central for the post-war Soviet project. The accelerated Sovietization, which often faced resistance from the local population, was reinforced by the geopolitical imperative to secure the new Soviet border. As the radical reshaping of the class structure went hand in hand with a politics of ethnic unmixing, the Soviet welfare state came with state violence, forcing veterans to choose sides. This article brings border studies, research on the welfare state and scholarship on Soviet war veterans into dialogue to offer a novel perspective on post-war transformations in the Ukrainian–Polish borderlands (more specifically, Lviv and the region). The notion of the border – both as the ‘b/ordering’ of previously ethnically mixed spaces and as a moving ‘frontier’ of Soviet civilization – is central to this analysis. As the article demonstrates, the very category of the ‘Soviet war veteran’ was itself a product of the Ukrainian–Polish (re-)bordering as well as of Sovietization policies. The mass mobilization in the Red Army and in the Polish People's Army in Western Ukraine/eastern Poland in 1944–45, and later the demobilization of the respective war veterans, was a complicated process of disentangling two armies, two ethnopolitical communities and two welfare states in the making. At the same time, Soviet war veterans in Western Ukraine were not a homogeneous group, as they were divided into ‘newcomers’ and ‘locals’. The former were a new local elite in the making; the latter, as newly minted Soviet citizens, had first to prove their loyalty by taking an active role in the transformation of the Western Ukrainian countryside as political educators of peasants, local Soviet activists and fighters against Ukrainian nationalism.