Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on December 9, 2026 to attend this event in-person.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Iaroslav Kovalchuk, Visiting Lecturer in History. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
During World War II, the Soviet Union annexed territories of Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, presenting the move as the “reunification” of Western Ukrainian lands with the rest of the nation. In practice, local residents, and local Communists in particular, were regarded as less advanced than Soviet Ukrainians who had lived through the Stalinist revolution of the 1930s. Moscow responded by sending thousands of Eastern Ukrainian experts and managers west to make the new regions “truly Soviet,” often sidelining the locals themselves. This lecture compares the place of Western Ukrainians in the Communist Party, the Soviet Union’s central institution, in two newly acquired regions: Galicia and Transcarpathia.
Iaroslav Kovalchuk specializes in the political history of the Soviet Union, Communist movements and socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, with a focus on the subnational level. His research examines how Communist ideology and practice were received, adapted, and contested in the multiethnic borderlands, with particular attention to the intersections of national identity and party politics. He is currently working on a book project, Practising Communism in the Borderland: Subcarpathian Communists in the Twentieth Century, which traces the political careers and ideological commitments of Communist activists in Subcarpathian Rus / Transcarpathia across the successive state frameworks that governed the region.
