The study Polish-Language Press during the Beginnings of the Sovietisation Process of Ukraine. Selection of Sources, Ewa Dzięgiel (Ed.), is part of the project entitled Polish Language in the Press and Other Written Sources during the Beginnings of the Sovietisation Process of Ukraine (in the 1920s and 1930s), conducted at the Division of the Polish Language of the Eastern Borderlands at the Institute of the Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, between 2012 and 2016.

 

The project has been conducted as a documentary and research work, encompassing the search, collection and study (from bibliographic, journalistic and linguistic perspective) of the unique, so far unknown archival sources, scattered in libraries and archives, mainly in Ukraine and Russia.

 

In the years of 1918–1939, according to estimates by historians, the territory of the USSR was inhabited by 1.2–1.3 million Poles, the majority of whom were located in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet policy towards the Polish population resulted from the general objectives of the national policy at that time, i.e. striving to create the "homo sovieticus", who knows the national language used by the authorities as means of indoctrination. One of the outcomes of the "Polish community experiment" was the publishing activity, including the relatively large scale publishing of the Polish-language periodicals. This policy ended in 1935, then – following 10 years of existence – the Julian Marchlewski Polish Autonomous District in Volhynia, was resolved. 1935 was, in fact, also the end of publishing of Polish-language periodicals. The only Polish-language journal of 1935–39 – "Głos Radziecki" [The Soviet Voice] – generally included the reprints from the Russian-language press.

 

This website serves to popularise the results of the research conducted within the scope of the project, among the academic community and the general public. The presented anthology of archival periodicals includes issue numbers selected out of the 46 titles from 1918–39, alongside with the journalistic description. The anthology is accompanied by the articles discussing the political background and press chronologisation as well as biographies of the editors and authors. 

 

The presented press titles came into existence in specific geopolitical conditions. The multilingual environment of both the authors and the recipients of the texts, makes the coexisting languages (Polish, Ukrainian and Russian) interpenetrate and interact. Additionally, the lexical specification is composed by the political context in Ukraine, during the beginnings of sovietisation. It is the period of a political breakthrough. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the communist regime transformed the political, economic and social life. With reference to the press publishing agencies, the single-party system and censorship have caused thematic and propagandistic unification of all periodicals. The dependency of the press texts on the Russian-language models resulted also from the strict political subordination to the centralised government. The result of this was the organisational reliance, in terms of circulation of information, data collection from the Russian-language sources, i.e. news agencies (ROSTA, TASS) and the Moscow press.