The Intellectual Baggage of Three Waves of Ukrainian Immigrants to Montreal

The author describes the historical conditions which pushed three intellectually distinct fragments of Ukrainian immigrants to establish a visible community in Quebec. The first fragment arrived before 1914; the second after the First World War and the Russian Revolution; and the third after the Second World War. The author contends that the first group was on the left of the political spectrum, the second in the centre, and the third on the right. He argues that the mentality of each fragment led to different initiatives in the community and to the emergence of separate, competing Ukrainian institutional frameworks in Quebec. The First World War and the internment of Ukrainians as enemy aliens created a Ukrainian socialist-Communist movement in Quebec during the inter-war years. The second-fragment immigrants who came after 1920 bolstered the anti-socialist group, which split into Catholic and Orthodox factions in 1925 and created a network of competing secular and religious institutions in Quebec before 1939. The Second World War led to some unity when Ukrainian institutions (except Communist ones) federated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), formed in 1941. After 1945, a third fragment of nationalists arrived with a new mentality, adding to the division and complexity of the Ukrainian community in Quebec. Although the third-fragment refugees were mostly anti-Communist nationalists, the rift in the OUN in 1941 divided them into Melnykites and Banderites. The author points out that the preponderant majority of those who came to Quebec had sided with Stepan Bandera and were "men of the right." He argues that by the time Quebec was on the eve of its "Quiet Revolution" in the early 1960s -- a revolution aimed at modernizing the province by making it over into a progressive welfare state -- the three successive fragments of Ukrainian immigrants to the province were being guided in the opposite direction.

New Soil, Old Roots : The Ukrainian Experience in Canada

Winnipeg, MB

Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada

1983

71-84

en