Ternopil Oblast - History

History

Before World War I, most of the current Ternopil oblast was part of Austro-Hungarian province Galicia. Only the northern-most section was within the borders of Russia. From 1918 until World War II, the area formed the Tarnopol Voivodeship in the newly independent country of Poland. As was common throughout the western Ukraine, the non-Ukrainian population was concentrated in the cities. Before World War II, the population of Ternopil was 40% Polish, 20% Ukrainian, and 40% Jewish. The oblast is sometimes associated with the Ukrainian nationalist movement, as during the Polish-Ukrainian War, Ukrainian nationalist forces launched the Chortkiv offensive to stop Polish attempts to topple the newly established West Ukrainian People's Republic. Later the local ethnically Ukrainian population was loyal to the revolutionary UPA.

During the Second World War, Ternopil was the object of conflict between Soviet and German forces because its importance as a rail transportation hub. After the war, a destroyed residential section of Ternopil, near the river, was turned into an artificial lake rather than being rebuilt. Additionally, upon annexation to the Soviet Union's Ukrainian SSR, most ethnic Poles in the region were forcibly relocated to Poland, whose national borders had shifted far to the west. The area of the former Polish voivoideship was expanded by adding territory in the north, though the western-most parts were transferred to the Lviv oblast. After 1945 Soviet authorities also encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in territories newly annexed to the Soviet Union, including the Ternopil oblast, though western Ukraine remained considerably less Russian than eastern Ukraine. As Ukraine achieved independence in the 1990s, western Ukraine remained the heartland of Ukrainian political and cultural nationalism, and the political affiliations of Ternopil voters reflected that viewpoint. In the first elections after independence, the People's Movement of Ukraine was the leading party in the oblast. A majority of oblast voters supported the Ukrainian nationalist-oriented Electoral Bloc Yuliya Tymoshenko in the Ukrainian parliamentary election, 2002. Over 88% of voters supported Yulia Tymoshenko of the All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" in the Ukrainian presidential election, 2010.

By 2005, the population of the oblast had grown to roughly 225,000, consisting primarily of ethnic Ukrainians with a large Russian or Russian-speaking minority. The religion of the majority is Eastern Rite Catholic (Uniate), though there is a notable Orthodox presence and a small Protestant minority. Many churches which were closed or destroyed under Soviet rule have rebuilt since independence. The local Jewish community, which was very large before 1939, was not reestablished after 1945. There are no active synagogues in the oblast and only a few isolated individuals affiliating with the Jewish faith. The city of Ternopil has important institutions of higher education, including two teacher's colleges, an international medical school with instruction in English, and one of three economics institutes in Ukraine.