THE PROBLEM OF EMPLOYMENT AND SOCIO-PROFESSIONAL ADAPTATION OF UKRAINIAN IMMIGRANTS IN THE INTERWAR CZECHOSLOVAKIA. PRODUCTION (LABOR) EVERYDAY LIFE: BETWEEN THE USUAL AND FORCED (1918-1939)

Abstract

The Ukrainian political emigration of the interwar period was conditioned both by the First World War and the defeat of the Ukrainian Revolution. The governments of the Ukrainian People's Republic and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, which continued to fight for their return to Ukraine by various methods, found themselves outside their state territory. In addition, a many soldiers, mobilized into the armies of Denikin and Wrangel, captives in the First World War, emigrated too. Civilian refugees fleeing the war and Bolshevik terror also became emigrants. Labor emigrants from Galychyna were the same. The exact figure of the large "outflow" of people from Ukraine to the CzSR has not been established. The approximate number of Ukrainians in this country ranges from 20,000. The emigration process radically changed the social status of the Ukrainian emigrant, because the "new" Czechoslovak life and the "new" Czechoslovak society did not take into account his former social roles and place in the social hierarchy of the group, and previous social contacts and relations. Social adaptation is a process of accommodation of an individual to the conditions of the social environment; building an adequate relationship with social objects; integration into social groups, which involves the adoption of norms and values of the new social environment. The consistency of the individual assessments and demands with the values and goals of the society around him are important for social adaptation. Social adaptation has the conditional levels: macro level (adaptation within the whole society); meso level (labor or industrial social adaptation); micro level (internal social adaptation). Adaptation issues proved painful for Ukrainian political refugees in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, because all of them (professors, officers, civil servants, politicians, "newly trained" students, former soldiers of the UPR Army and self-proclaimed atamans) had secondary and higher education. And, therefore, they were psychologically more vulnerable, who found it more difficult to adapt and maintain their previous or newly acquired professional (social) status in comparison with emigrants, who did not have any education. Ukrainian political refugees were forced to engage in activities, which insured them to survive physically in the new socio-economic and cultural conditions. The older generation of emigrants in the fight against unemployment used literary fees, visits of senior officials, pawnshops, loans in shops, and the physical unskilled labor in the end. Inventions, scandals (disputes, betting) and divination were intermediate options. The younger generation of emigrants-campers began theoretical and practical learning new professions, foreign languages, and did physically unskilled work in the least.