In the Whirlpool of Conflicts: the Ukrainian Diaspora in France (1925-1930)

Abstract

After the end of the First World War, the process of formation of the Ukrainiandiaspora in France, which took leading geopolitical positions in the world, began. Ukrainian emigrants tried to take advantage of political freedoms, the norms of the constitution, the tolerance of French laws, and the lack of labor resources in this country.

The Ukrainian diaspora in France was not the only one, but the vast majority of it consisted of labor emigrants from Western Ukraine, among the political emigrants there was a predominance of veterans of the Ukrainian liberation movement, who fought against the Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine in 1917-1921. Emigrants from Galicia and Bukovyna (in the 1920s these territories were occupied by Poland and Romania) numbered approx. 30 thousand people, another approx. 7,000 emigrants consisted of officials of the Central Council and Directorate of the Ukrainian People Republic, soldiers from the armies of the Ukrainian People Republic and the Hetmanate. They were united by a common desire to achieve their rights and to resist hostile propaganda and the actions of Russian emigration, Soviet spy diplomats, and Polish-Romanian propaganda, which portrayed Ukrainians in France as ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘Germanophiles’.

Ukrainian government officials of the UNR in exile managed to create a Ukrainian’s center of political life in France, but the murder of S. Petliura and the acquittal of his killer by the French Themis caused significant damage to the Ukrainian Diaspora. The second half of the 1920s was a time of constant conflicts among Ukrainian emigrants in France. These internal quarrels, which had both ideological, socio-cultural and financial foundations, were strengthened with the help of Soviet residents in the emigrant environment, the influence of Russian emigration, which was hostile to Ukrainians in France. All this led to the fragmentation of the Ukrainian emigration and its stay in a social ‘ghetto’, to the fact that the State Center of the Ukrainian People Republic was unable to achieve its goals in France and was forced to leave this country.