Українознавство (Jul 2020)
Ukrainian Youth Association and Its Journalistic and Publishing Activities in Emigration
Abstract
The article is based on the author’s research of documents and materials of the UYA Board, conducted during his scholarly internship in the UK. The materials belong to the library of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain in London and the archives which exclusively store complete files of such periodicals as Holos Molodi, Avanhard, Ukrainska Dumka, and Vyzvolnyi Shliakh, which were also studied. In the ongoing scientific debate over the assumption whether the Ukrainian Youth Association was a project of the Soviet secret services formed to identify and eliminate the nationally conscious part of the Ukrainian society in the 1920s and early 1930s, or the hypothesis that it was backed up by real organizers and cases, the author belongs to the group of researchers that share the second point of view. Modus operandi of this organization was as follows: it was founded in Kyiv on the basis of the First Shevchenko Kyiv Labor School in late 1925 as an alternative to the Moscow organization of the Communist Komsomol. Mykola Pavlushkov became the founder and first head of UYA. In 1929, UYA was exposed by the punitive Soviet authorities as an “underground counterrevolutionary organization”. In 1946, the organization resumed its activity in Germany, in the camps of American-funded forced refugees from Eastern Europe. The first volume of the organization’s main publication was released in Munich in December 1946. In December 1949, Holos Molodi magazine was founded in London. The active book publishing movement of this organization begins there. The author’s attention is focused on the analysis of printed materials produced by this organization and not fully available today in Ukraine. They include a number of small-print cyclic publications issued in Munich and London, as well as Avanhard and Holos Molodi monthlies, and the thematic page of the UK regional branch of UYA in the London newspaper Ukrainska Dumka. According to the thematic principle, the following main subjects of the publications are analyzed: propaganda of the ideas of belligerent Ukraine in the non-Bolshevik democratic world; protection and continuation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’s deeds and those of fallen heroes of Ukrainian national liberation struggles of all times; assimilation of foreign experience in all spheres of life and state-building for its further use in Ukraine liberated from Bolsheviks.
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