Military-professional and cultural-educational activities with the UPR Army interned soldiers in Ukrainian foreign historiography of the Interwar period

Анотація

Abstract. Introduction. In the face of a hybrid war against Ukraine, our county is forced to defend its national-state interests in various ways, including the military ones. Only highly educated, professionally trained patriotic oriented military personnel will be able to manage this. The accomplishing of this task is seemed to be probable in case the leaders of our country use the experience of military construction during the internment period of the UPR Army in the camps of the countries of Central Europe (1921–1924). After all, despite the loss of territory, the extremely difficult conditions of internment, the State Center of the UPR in emigration was able to keep from sputtering an important instrument of state formation – the 40 thousandth Ukrainian Army. It showed the ability to combine the professional training of military personnel with the education of their culturally educated people, patriots of their state. However, a comprehensive synthesis of this experience is impossible without a thorough study of the significant scientific heritage created by previous generations of historians, in particular Ukrainian foreign researchers. This fact causes a deeper analysis of the works of Ukrainian foreign authors on this issue.

Purpose. Taking into account the multifaceted nature of this problem, the author aimed to find out, on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of scientific works, the completeness and reliability of coverage in the interwar Ukrainian historiography of military, cultural and educational activities of the State Center of the UPR with the interned soldiers.        

Results. The author investigated that Ukrainian foreign historians being free from ideological shackles, published some results that focused on various aspects of the problem identified in the article. The epistolary heritage of the Head of the UPR Directory S. Petliura is the most important among these works. It can be viewed as a program for immigrated soldiers aimed to preserve and reorganizing the army in internment.

The first publications on the issue appeared in the time of the “camp” period of the UPR Army. The foreign historians continued to study the problem more actively in the 30’s of the twentieth century. The problem was studies by L. Bachynskyi, M. Bytynskyi, V. Filonovych, A. Marushchenko-Bohdanovskyi, G. Porokhivskyi, and others. They operate with the specific facts that testify to the variety of forms and methods of military, cultural and educational activities of the UPR State Center with Ukrainian soldiers who were interned in Polish and Romanian camps. The military and historical articles of O. Udovychenko, V. Petriv, V. Prokhoda, V. Yevtymovych, Omelianovich-Pavlenko, O. Shpylynskyi, S. Shramchenko, and Y. Naumenko are seemed to be very important for developing the emphasized for military doctrine of the UPR Army.

Originality. The scientific novelty of this historiographic study is believed to be in the investigating the conceptual approaches and techniques used by Ukrainian foreign historians of the interwar period to reconstruct the military, cultural and educational activities of the State Center of the UPR with interns.

Conclusion. The author proved that the creative achievements of Ukrainian foreign historians of the interwar period gave an opportunity to cover the problem under study much more deeply. However, without access to the Soviet archives, foreign researchers wrote much of their work, relying mainly on their own memories. This led to certain factual errors, inaccuracies, subjectivity in assessments and conclusions, which reduced the quality of their work