Perspectives from Independent Ukraine
Ukrainian narratives about the Polish conflict in independent Ukraine are understandably defensive in tone, often denying outright OUN-UPA responsibility for the Volhynia massacres.
An early example is an article by Nina Romanyuk and Yurii Mykolayenko, which explores the history of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict during the Second World War. The authors point out that they have made use of materials from the SBU archives in the Volyn region, including the interrogation of Mykhailo Stepanyak, head of the international section of the OUN in 1942-44. Stepanyak took part in several talks with the Polish Government-in-Exile based in London. The first session took place in L'viv in 1942, before UPA units appeared in Volhynia, and was organized by a Greek Catholic priest, Kladochnii. The questions considered included the status of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States vis-a-vis postwar Poland, and the problem of the Ukrainian-Polish alliance. Reportedly, the Polish representatives agreed with many of the Ukrainian demands. However, the two sides were unable to reach an agreement on the future status of Western Ukraine, which the Poles insisted was a “mixed” territory, the future of which had to be resolved through a postwar settlement. They promised to recognize Ukraine and to provide financial assistance to the OUN, but insisted that the nationalists disassociate themselves from the Greek Catholic Church. These negotiations proved unfruitful and shortly afterward the Polish delegates were arrested by the Germans—some suspect that the priest Kladochnii betrayed them. The authors write that on 28 May 1943, Polish armed formations, supported by Polish Partisans, burned down the village Tel'chi in Manevtsi district, destroying 20 houses and killing 27 Ukrainians. They comment that this attack renders the Polish side the primary culprit that forced Ukrainian retaliation. However, it is unlikely that the arson was the first act of violence. Again the two sides entered negotiations, but could reach no consensus on the issues of Galicia. As for the massacres that followed, Stepanyak, who was present during the negotiations, denied that the violence was perpetrated by the OUN and the UPA.9Another author describes a conference organized by right-wing Polish radicals and dedicated to problems of the Ukrainian-Polish relationship. Evidently some participants at the conference had claimed that in Volhynia, Ukrainian nationalists killed 500,000 Poles. The author angrily rejects such figures. Any researcher, well-versed in the events of the period, he writes, will tell you that such figures do not correspond to reality. There were victims on both sides, and no winners and losers. Such a confrontation profited only those who wished to sow seeds of enmity between Ukrainians and Poles. He is also irate with the Polish classification of OUN-UPA as a Fascist organization comparable to the Croatian Ustashi or Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, while considering the Home Army soldiers as heroes. Revealingly, he also notes that “no serious Polish politicians” were in attendance.10 In like fashion, a Polish author criticizes the attack by Polish nationalists on OUN-UPA and accuses the chauvinistic press of ignoring the real causes of the Volhynian tragedy, which he presents as a civil war situation rather than an act of genocide (or ethnic cleansing) carried out by UPA North. Jan Hasten writes that the roots of the Ukrainian insurgency are to be sought in the repressive policies of Pilsudski and his successors, who attempted to colonize Polish Eastern Galicia. He makes reference to the Pacification, the destruction of churches, and the closure of Ukrainian schools. UPA, Hasten maintains, emerged from Ukrainian policemen who left the Germans' service on the orders of the OUN-B. The UPA-Home Army clash is depicted as an act of self-defense by UPA, which was trying to protect Ukrainian villages from Polish raids.
The Home Army,he alleges, killed 1,500 Ukrainians after it crossed the Buh on its retreat from Volhynia. The UPA then sought out the perpetrators and executed them and their sons.11 In other words, there was no independent initiative on the Ukrainian side to carry out ethnic cleansing of Polish villages. All the actions were a result of lack of trust on both sides. The article, however, fails to discuss why most of the victims were not under arms, but innocent civilians.
The more sober analysis of M. V. Koval' points out that one of the main UPA targets was the Armia Krajowa and its partisan formations, which were under the control of the Polish government in London. The OUN wanted a complete and enforced resettlement of Poles from Western Ukraine, starting in Volhynia, then Halychyna, and lastly all the territory west of the Curzon Line, which had become the new western border of Soviet Ukraine in 1939. The situation was also influenced by the anarchy that prevailed in this territory. The OUN took advantage of this chaos in its struggle to “de-polonize” the borderlands and to eliminate any potential basis for Polish identity to be used in a future plebiscite on the status of the region. He writes that more than 40,000 Poles were killed as a result of these mutual acts of terrorism, including women, children, and elderly people, but a similar number of Ukrainians had also fallen victim to this conflict. He cites authors who provide combined figures of 60-80,000 people. The bloodshed benefited only the third party, namely the German Fascists. He quotes Reichskommisar Erich Koch as stating openly that “I would like the Pole to kill the Ukrainian and the Ukrainian the Pole as soon as they meet up. And if they also kill the Jews while they are at it, then that is exactly what we need.”12 Kul'chyts'kyi also observes that the OUN-B and the AK continued to regard each other as adversaries, and that their confrontation was instigated deliberately by the German occupiers; and that it had led to bloody massacres of the Ukrainian population in the Kholm region in 1942-45, and of the Poles in Volhynia in 1943-44.
Polish scholars collected evidence of 34,647 killings, with 12,491 victims identified, but the actual casualties appear to have been much greater. The Germans used provocative tactics to incite clashes between the OUN and AK such as deploying punitive forces against the Ukrainian population that were dressed in Polish uniforms. Similar tactics, Kul'chyts'kyi writes, were later adopted by the AK, the Soviet security forces, and the OUN-B.13A defense of the Ukrainian position on the Volhynia massacres was offered by the prominent L'viv-based historian Yaroslav Isayevich. He starts from the premise that in July 2003 (he is writing in February 2003), Ukraine and Poland were to honor the memory of those who died in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict in Volhynia. Politicians and historians of the two states were making every effort that the relations between the two people remain friendly and harmonious, attempting to comprehend not only their own arguments, but also the motives of those who held opposing views. One should begin, he continues, by stating that Ukrainians and Poles belong to those peoples who suffered most from the Hitlerites and “Bolshevik” terror in the Second World War. Ukraine remained, as before, neither the subject nor object of history. Various powers were competing for control of its lands: Bolshevik Russia (masked under the guise of the pseudo-internationalist USSR), Nazi Germany and its allies (Hungary and Romania are cited), and Poland. During the war, armed formations arose that allotted themselves the task of fighting with the enemies of an independent Ukraine. Although at this time and during the next decade that concept lacked the support of the majority of Ukrainians, the notion of independence arose as a final result of the future evolution of Ukraine. Under these circumstances there were good reasons for Poles and Ukrainians to unite, writes Isayevich, but there was no authentic cooperation between the two sides, and a bloody conflict between them erupted on the territory of Western Ukraine, which included not only confrontations between Polish and Ukrainian armed formations, but also treacherous and extremist actions against peaceful civilians.14
Among the causes of the tension between Ukrainians and Poles were social and national friction based on land ownership and the prewar policies of the Polish state, as well as the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.
The Poles were ruling areas in which they made up only a minority of the population. Ukrainians, writes Isayevich, were not opposed to Poles per se; only insofar as Polish policies were hostile to the idea of an independent Ukraine. The majority of Ukrainian leaders did not know that the future perspective of Bolshevik Russian hegemony (Isayevich appears wedded to the phrase “Bolshevik Russia”) denoted a necessity to treat Poland as a strategic partner. In Polish and Ukrainian publications there are diverse views as to where, when, and how the deaths began of the peaceful population living on the Polish-Ukrainian border. Ukrainian writings, Isayevich observes, disseminate the opinion that the conflict originated with the killing of Ukrainian underground troops and public activists that were considered to be German collaborators in Zamoishyn by the Polish underground forces. In Polish publications, on the contrary, one finds the view that the main events occurred later. The initial stages in any case were a time of sporadic deaths, and an important document revealing the escalation of the conflict is the report from a representative of the Polish emigre government in Volhynia. He declares that these isolated murders were directed against Poles who were employed in the German service as administrators of property, forests, and road services. This document, Isayevich maintains, is important in view of the increasing belief in Polish society, that almost exclusively, the main collaborators with the occupiers were the Ukrainians, who often joined with the Germans in fighting the Poles. In reality there were unprincipled collaborators on both sides.15Isayevich then arrives at the heart of his main argument. The characteristic direction of Polish publications commemorating the Second World War, he says, is to exaggerate the number of deaths on the Polish side, and to release versions that are based entirely on fantasy about exceptionally sadistic acts on the part of Ukrainians.
Even in 1940, a book called “Lwow” was issued by Jerzy Janicki, in which one could read that Metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi blessed the wooden saw that Ukrainians used to cut up living Poles. However, such accounts do not correspond with reality. Propaganda directed toward fueling Polish-Ukrainian hostility was opposed resolutely by Polish intellectuals grouped around the Paris monthly journal, Kultura. Polish and Ukrainian oppositionists often banded together, particularly the members of the Solidar- nosc movement and members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union. After the restoration of an independent Ukraine, Isayevich notes, both neighboring states simultaneously tried to improve relations. If contemporary Poland is interested in an independent Ukraine, then it responds to Polish interests as well as to the approval in Ukraine of the traditional independence movement. But regrettably, in Isayevich's view, there are well-organized and active groups that try by all means to destroy this movement. In Ukraine, happily, there are no Ukrainian organizations and press organs that specialize in anti-Polish propaganda. However, information about the positive aspects of Polish-Ukrainian relations is still insufficient. Ukrainians still know very little about those Polish political and cultural activists who work fruitfully to create a climate of trust and cooperation in both societies.16 Writing in this way Isayevich focuses on sentiment rather than historical facts, and the discussion of Volhynia takes second place to his analysis of benevolent or malevolent attitudes in contemporary Ukraine and Poland. As such it is a disappointing way to end an article that began in promising fashion, and ultimately he does not really address the main issues of the Volhynia tragedy.In 2000, the Polish scholars Wladyslaw and Ewa Siemaszko published a major study on the Volhynia massacres that purported to provide the most convincing proof to date of OUN-UPA responsibility.17 The book attracted a lot of attention in Ukraine, and in 2003 a leading Ukrainian historian, I. I. Il'yushyn, offered a critique. Il'yushyn set himself three tasks: first, to investigate the source base of this work and to establish if the facts cited therein really occurred; second, to question a conception of history based exclusively on Polish testimonies; and third, to introduce this book to a Ukrainian audience. He notes that the Siemaszkos wrote their monograph on the basis of some 1,500 personal testimonies and memoirs of witnesses dispersed throughout private collections and state archives in Poland. He questions how such testimonies could be impartial, adding that while Polish historians in general have praised the book, there is still a debate in that country whether it is appropriate to include, in an objective scholarly analysis of OUN-UPA, the testimonies of those Polish citizens who witnessed the events but could also find themselves among the victims of the Ukrainian insurgents. Similar reservations are advanced regarding memoirs written after the war. However, Il'yushyn does not reject personal testimonies completely. What is important, in his view, is how to check the information for accuracy, as well as to establish the circumstances in which a particular crime was committed. He considers that in order to carry out such an assignment, historians need to use supplementary sources and “be impartial.” The Siemaszkos, in his view, were guilty in this regard. W. Siemaszko was a member of the Polish Home Army in Volhynia at the height of the conflict and therefore not a credible witness. The study also deploys only three OUN-UPA documents and makes no use at all of Soviet and German materials. Il'yushyn tries to demonstrate how dangerous it is to synthesize historical narrative based only on one sort of testimony with an illustration of a typical case when there were two completely different versions of the same event. The case in question is the Siemaszkos' example of the murder of nine Poles by Ukrainian nationalists on 15 September 1939 in Kovel' district, cited in the AK archives. The same event is found in the Ukrainian NKVD archives, where it is described as being carried out by members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine.18
Il'yushyn posits, without delving into details, that Polish historians probably inflate the number of Polish victims. He continues his review by focusing on the Siemaszko's interpretation of Polish-Ukrainian relations prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, stating that the ethnic antagonism was a characteristic feature of the prewar years, and was not something that became accentuated immediately before the military conflict. He assigns responsibility to the Polish government's policies of assimilation, which were directed toward Ukrainians. Il'yushyn does concur that the campaign of ethnic cleansing began on the initiative of OUN-UPA and—implicitly at least—he rejects the claim of some Ukrainian writers that the attacks began in response to AK terror. The Home Army formations, according to both the Siemaszkos and Il'yushyn, appeared in Volhynia only after the OUN campaign had already claimed two-thirds of its victims. So what drove the Ukrainian insurgents to carry out atrocities against the Poles? He argues that the reason was the infiltration of the local administration by the Poles and comes close to endorsing some of the murders as being based on political motives. Certainly it is difficult to discern how Il'yushyn defines guilt and innocence in such a situation. He goes on to write that the tragedy of the situation as it developed in Vol- hynia, lay in the fact that what was ostensibly a “well-motivated” operation from the perspective of Ukrainian national interests, quickly escalated and took on an extraordinarily gruesome character. As it was conducted in a very cruel manner by armed peasants, and encompassed “apparently innocent people,” including women, children, and the elderly, then the actions constitute a crime. Ultimately, the Poles of Volhynia were paying the price for the prewar policies of the Polish government as well as for their own attitudes to such policies. However, Il'yushyn then introduces a new argument: the UPA also decided to eliminate the Polish population because of the collaboration of Polish civilians with Soviet Partisans. He also disputes the Siemaszkos' contention that the massacres took place in collusion with the German occupiers as the latter would hardly have approved of the deaths of Polish officials. The two Polish authors, in his view, downplay the fact that the Germans used the UPA campaigns to recruit more policemen for operations against the Ukrainian insurgents.19 Il'yushyn's article can be construed as a valiant attempt to use a book review to come up with a synthesis of the main problems of analyzing the Volhynia massacres and to try to reach a reasonable conclusion. It falls short of this goal, ultimately, because of its failure to distinguish between actions against officials (which, to some extent, he condones) and actions against innocent civilians.