Conclusion

In the period between the twentieth century’s two world wars, Ukrainians comprised the second-largest national group within the Soviet Union (despite declining from 21 to 16 per cent of its total population) and Poland (15 per cent) and a small minority within Czechoslovakia (4 per cent) and Romania (3 per cent).¹²² Although outside observers often viewed these people as a demographic minority within each of these newly formed and/ or reformed states, Ukrainian speakers (with the exception of those who adhered to the Rusyn orientation in Czechoslovakia) did not think of themselves in this way.

Because Ukrainians remained “compact local majorities in the regions of their settlement,” not “dispersed minorities,” and because they resided on territories their fathers and forefathers had farmed for generations, they did not consider themselves minorities within their own homelands.¹²³ Indeed, in the Ukrainian-speaking territories controlled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania after 1918, those who identified themselves as Ukrainians constituted 63.4 per cent, 61.6 per cent, and 43.4 per cent, respectively, of each region’s total population.¹²⁴ They envisaged them­selves as the majority in their own contiguous areas and sought recogni­tion as such.

In East Central Europe, two of the three states with substantial Ukrainian populations - Poland and Romania - tried to suppress these efforts. Due in large measure to the success of the Ukrainian nation-building efforts in the Austro-Hungarian period, these two post-war governments failed to do so. Although Poland and Romania often employed their state institutions against the Ukrainians and other national groups, neither government won complete power within their own societies or created the political effi­ciency of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Polish and Romanian efforts to crush the Ukrainian national movement in the interwar period failed. Instead of breaking resistance, the Polish au­thorities - more so than the Romanian - raised the level of the Ukrainian national consciousness to a fever pitch. Inadvertently, the Polish and Romanian interwar governments helped mobilize their Ukrainian popula­tions, but could not demobilize them. Just as the Polish and Romanian governments could not destroy the Ukrainian national movements within their own borders, the Ukrainian movement could not destroy the Polish and Romanian states. A seething resentment on both sides produced a vio­lent stalemate.

In the standoff in Poland, Ukrainians began to perceive themselves po­litically as members of a constantly besieged community and psychologi­cally as “orphans of the universe,” not unlike the Kurds, the largest national group in the Middle East not to have gained a state after the Great War.¹²⁵ Isolated and marginalized, Ukrainians generally discounted the USSR’s periodic condemnation of the post-Versailles order and understood that they did not have any external protectors or patrons.

Despite the noble ideals espoused by the League of Nations, the over­whelming majority of Ukrainians in East Central Europe believed that the international community had abandoned them. Democracy and the recon­figuration of European borders in conformity with Woodrow Wilson’s vi­sion of national self-determination did not bring them justice. With the Great Depression, most European states abandoned the democratic order and embraced authoritarian solutions to the complex political and eco­nomic crises they encountered.

In order to attain their own version of national self-determination, most Ukrainians realized that they could not rely on outside forces, not even Nazi Germany, Europe’s most powerful revisionist power, but only on themselves. Born in despair, this interpretation of reality helped prepare them for the Second World War.