PROPAGANDA COMPONENT OF THE PROCESS OF SOVIETIZATION AND FORMS OF ITS IMPLEMENTATION IN THE WESTERN REGIONS OF UKRAINE IN 1944 – 1950

The article deals with the peculiarities of the process of Sovietization of the western regions of Ukraine during the period of the late Stalinism. Given the totalitarian nature of the Stalinist regime, it is emphasized that the informational space was one of the most important spheres of life, control over which by the ruling Communist Party was complete and inseparable. The scientific novelty is that the author defines the organization and holding of meetings of various categories of the population as one of the active forms of Stalin’s propaganda. They were an instrument of forcing the local population to trust the Soviet government, to legitimize it. It is noted that such events systematically repeated, gradually became part of Soviet everyday life. The task of Stalin’s propaganda was to construct a new type of man – „homo Sovieticus“, for whom communist ideology is not just a set of slogans, but an inner conviction.