Resettlement
Resettlement. Relocation to a new place of residence either in an organized manner or by individual families. Resettlement means the same thing as migration but is an older term, widely used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to refer to the agrarian mass emigration from Russian-ruled Ukraine to the east, particularly the colonization of Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Far East, and from Western Ukraine under Austria-Hungary to the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.
During collectivization (1929–30) the Soviet regime forcibly deported and resettled hundreds of thousands of so-called kulaks from Ukraine to the northern regions of Russia and the Urals. In the 1940s, following the occupation of Western Ukraine by the Soviet authorities, large-scale deportations of Ukrainians to remote regions of Russia and Siberia also took place. After the Second World War nearly 500,000 Ukrainian inhabitants of the Sian region, the Kholm region, and the Lemko region were forcibly resettled in western and northern Poland or in Soviet Ukraine, and Poles living in Ukraine were resettled in Poland (see Operation Wisła, Poles in Ukraine). In the 1950s, voluntary resettlement to the Asian regions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was encouraged in connection with the opening up of the so-called virgin lands. Settlers received financial assistance for the move. Resettlement for the purpose of working in one or another area of industry or construction was called organized recruitment of workers. In the 1950s and 1960s organized recruitment was responsible for the relocation of a significant portion of the labor force, but from the 1970s its importance decreased. (See also Migrant workers.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buhai, M. ‘Deportatsiï naselennia z Ukraïny v 30–50-ti roky,’ UIZh, 1990, nos 10–11
Trukhan, M. Ukraïntsi v Pol’shchi pislia druhoï svitovoï Viiny, 1944–1984 (New York, Paris, Sydney, and Toronto 1990)
Kabaczij, Roman. Wygnani na stepy: Przesiedlenia ludnosci ukrainskiej z Polski na poludnie Ukrainy w latach 1944–1946 (Warsaw 2012)
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]