4 - “A Textual Implementation of the Law . . . Was Not Carried Out”: The Reassembled Masses
Summary
In May 1945, the family of a Red Army major, the Ostromogil’skiis, faced a court-ordered eviction from the apartment they had inhabited since Kyiv's liberation. Soon thereafter, an instructor, Dirin, from the Kyiv Obkom's Organization- Instruction Department arranged to meet with the new Kyiv City procurator, Langunovskii, about his decision to allow a man by the name of Vaisberg to inhabit the Ostromogil’skiis’ apartment. Their encounter led Dirin to write to the Ukrainian TsK:
I arrived at the Kyiv City Procurator Office… . However, Langunovskii declared his day to receive people would be on Sunday, June 2, and that, therefore, he would not converse with me. I presented Langunovskii with my documents … but he declared his actions could only be controlled by the Ukrainian Procurator and thus he was not going to show me anything and that I should leave his office. Then he became rude and brusque with me… . To my point that we were not talking about someone who knows someone better in the Ukrainian TsK than someone else, but about the fate of a serviceman's family with small children, Langunovskii answered, “Why are you agitating me?” and emphatically turned away not wanting to talk with me anymore about anything. It was only after the Ukrainian Procurator's office called him that Langunovskii agreed to issue the order of June 5, 1945, stopping the execution of this decision.
Such an episode suggests that, as returnees like Vaisberg inundated the Ukrainian capital to take advantage of the privileges they had earned during the war, they battled the formerly occupied over scarce resources. While the Ostromogil’skiis managed to stay in their apartment, the local Communists had been unable to prevent this battle from taking place. Dealing with stalled reconstruction and an increasing city population, local Communists spent much of their time trying to meet demands for better living conditions from an ever-growing number of people.
This chapter examines Kyiv's reassembling masses by looking at four groups: the formerly occupied, returnees, mobilized laborers (ranging from youth mobilized through orgnabor to German POWs), and demobilized servicemen.
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- Information
- Kyiv as Regime CityThe Return of Soviet Power after Nazi Occupation, pp. 102 - 128Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016