Soviet Union

The present study offers an examination into how residents of the mixed Slovak-Ukrainian areas of Transcarpathia recall the optation process of 1945–1947. As most respondents did not experience the event directly, any knowledge obtained was derived primarily from intergenerational narratives passed down by parents and grandparents. This paper explores how the optation is remembered today and which interpretations and versions are maintained within the collective memory of the studied communities.

The forced resettlement of the Ukrainians (the so-called Lemkos and Boikos) from south-eastern Poland to the Soviet Ukraine in 1945-1946, often carried out in a violent way, was part of the plan to attain homogeneity of Poland as a one-nation state without ethnic minorities. In autumn 1945, as a result of political pressure exerted on them by the Polish government and its subordinate bodies and under the impact of a growing number of brutal acts of the Polish troops and militia engaged in the transfer of the Lemko and the Boiko people into the U.S.S.R.

Negotiations focused on full diplomatic recognition of the USSR by Czechoslovakia, which was the main task of Alexandr J. Arosev (head of the soviet mission to Prague from 1929-1933), required intense and friendly contacts with local political, economic and cultural elites. On the other hand, these contradicted the expectations of the local Communist community, which was relying on the production of an image of the USSR as the "homeland of all proletarians" and as their protector from alien bourgeois regimes.