ABSTRACT
In the years immediately following World War II, the term ‘diaspora’ was not used by Ukrainians living outside of Ukraine. Instead, it was much more common for them to think of themselves either as being ‘in the emigration’ or as ‘an immigration’. The diaspora label tended to be used only when Soviet authorities wanted to discredit Ukrainian émigré nationalists living abroad who were calling for the overthrow of the Soviet regime and the liberation of Ukraine. For the Soviets, diaspora was a pejorative term that referred to groups of people living abroad who had ulterior political motives for their interest in their ancestral homelands in the Soviet Union. As Harvard historian Roman Szporluk (1998) explains: ‘The Soviets needed to characterize immigrants negatively since the immigration fought against the “silent liquidation” that was proceeding against Ukrainians in a complicated historical and political process’. Szporluk suggests, however, that the politicized Ukrainians ‘in the emigration’ were not, in fact, offended by the diaspora label and gradually embraced it as part of their self-definition.
