Nationalizing States

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian em­pires, newly independent states, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, Hungary, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, emerged in East Central Europe.

Taking advantage of the chaos generated by the First World War and the post-war revolutionary situation, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Soviet Russia partitioned territories the Central Rada proclaimed as those constituting Ukraine. Poland won control of Eastern Galicia from Austria- Hungary and Western Volhynia and Kholm gubernia from Russia. Romania gained Bukovina from Austria-Hungary and Bessarabia from Russia. Czechoslovakia acquired Austria-Hungary’s Transcarpathia (see map 5). The overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe, those that had belonged to the Russian Empire, were now incorporated into the Soviet Union, the world’s first self­proclaimed “proletarian state.”

The enormous chasm between the ideal of national self-determination propagated during the war and the post-war reality embittered many of the thirty-one million Ukrainians, who remained the largest national group in Europe that failed to create an independent state after the First World War.¹⁴ Despite their substantial numbers, its national movements could not overcome serious handicaps: its reliance on the peasants, the weak Ukrainian presence in the towns and cities, or the hostile interna­tional environment. To add insult to injury, the 3.8 million Ukrainians living under Polish control in 1921 possessed a population larger than that of the newly formed states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland, states which possessed powerful international patrons.¹⁵

In Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, as in the other new East Central European states, the ruling elites sought to integrate different pre­war regions with different political histories and different bureaucracies into a single, coherent, and efficient unit.

Although most of the Ruthenian (also known as the Rusyn) population living in the northeastern counties of Hungary and Eastern Slovakia wel­comed incorporation into Czechoslovakia, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians who lived in the four eastern Polish voivodeships, Bukovina, and Bessarabia did not want to become citizens of Poland or Romania. Ukrainian aspirations for national independence came into conflict with the efforts of post-war states in East Central Europe to transform them­selves into nationalizing states or to expand their territories.

Recognizing the possibility of conflicts between national majorities and national minorities in the newly created states of East Central Europe, the negotiators at Versailles also crafted and imposed special treaties dealing with national minorities on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and other countries in the region.¹⁷ These Allied arbitrators anticipated that the new­ly created League of Nations would guarantee the rights of minorities, but they did not encourage national-personal autonomy (which only Estonia introduced in the 1919-39 period).¹⁸

This noble Allied effort to protect national minorities collided with the anxieties of the ruling elites in Poland and Romania, which constructed their respective new states as nationalizing states, countries that intro­duced policies favouring their respective core nation. In the view of the leading political and cultural elites within each state, independence did not overturn the consequences of nationally discriminatory policies or trends from the past.¹⁹ They, in short, conceived their core nation as the legitimate “owner” of the state, one that should promote the language, culture, de­mographic position, economic development, and political hegemony of the majority population.²⁰

In adopting these policies, Poland and Romania became nationalizing states that alienated their large minorities and aspired to assimilate their Ukrainian minorities.

To better integrate Ukrainian-speaking territories into their new states, both Poland and Romania redrew their internal boundaries. The Polish au­thorities eliminated Galicia as an administrative unit and renamed its eastern region, where the majority of Ukrainians lived, as Eastern Little Poland (Malopolska Wschodnia), dividing it into three voivodeships (Lwow, Stanislawow, and Tarnopol) and packing in as many non- Ukrainians as possible. In the 1920s the Romanian rulers abolished all of their prov­inces, including the province of Bukovina, and redrew their counties, dilut­ing some large Ukrainian areas with Romanians and other national groups.²²

The Polish and Romanian post-Versailles regimes also sought to weaken the Ukrainian national orientation of both the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches on their territories. In the 1930s, Polish authorities sup­ported the forcible conversion of Orthodox churches to Roman Catholicism and physically destroyed hundreds of their churches in Chelm voivode­ship, Western Wofyn, and Polesie (Ukrainian: Polissia).²³

The Soviet Union reacted in a more complex manner. In the 1920s, the USSR favoured its large non-Russian populations and supported a quasi­sovereign Soviet Ukrainian political entity (see chapter 5). By the early 1930s, Stalinists altered its political landscape and remade the first socialist state into a hybrid socialist-Russo-nationalizing state (see chapters 6 and 7).²⁴