Burds Jeffrey. The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948

Pittsburgh: The Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2001. — 69 p. — ISSN: 0889-275XThe transition of U.S. policy in the 1940s from “containment” of Soviet aggression to “liberationism”—rolling back and destabilizing Soviet power from within by actively supporting nationalist, anti-Soviet rebel groups operating on Soviet territory — had a profound effect on the early history of the Cold War. Somewhere between the last days of World War II and 1948, the myth was born of vast, seething unrest percolating in Eastern and Central Europe, a popular dissatisfaction which could, if properly nurtured, cripple Soviet Communism from within. Liberationism preached that “now it is time not merely to contain Communism but to begin rolling Soviet power back.”15 As Senator Robert Taft, then Republican majority leader, observed in the New York Times on 2 June 1952: “There are millions of heroic antiCommunist Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Czechs, Rumanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Latvians, who desire passionately to throw off the Soviet yoke and to achieve once more their independence and freedom.”