Poland

In the interwar period, the Polish Republic possessed the largest territory and population (27,177,000 in 1921; 31,915,800 in 1931) in East Central Europe and contained most of the Ukrainians living outside the USSR.²⁵ Restored and located between a castrated Germany and the new Soviet state, Poland remained one of the most strategically important countries in the region.

Although the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) blessed Poland’s cre­ation, the Allied Council of Ambassadors postponed making a decision on the future status of the Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia. In 1923, the Allied Council allowed Poland to keep this region. The Allies, especially the French, chose to bolster Poland as a cordon sanitaire (a quarantine line) against Germany and the Soviet Union rather than provide national self­determination for the Ukrainians.²⁷ According to the above-mentioned treaties as well as the new Polish constitution (adopted on 17 March 1921), Ukrainians and Poland’s other minorities were guaranteed equality before the law, the right to maintain their own schools, and the right to employ their own languages in the public sphere.²⁸ But Poland’s fragile geopoliti­cal position convinced many of its leaders that national security concerns were more important than compromises with its large non-Polish popula­tions, especially the Ukrainians.

Despite Poland’s possession of several important industrial centres, the new state remained one of Europe’s poorest regions. According to the 1931 census, 60 per cent of the total population remained dependent on agricul- ture.²⁹ Despite the pressing issue of rural overpopulation and extensive land hunger, alleviating poverty and transforming the agriculturally based econ­omy into an industrially based one did not emerge as the new Polish elite’s first priority.³⁰ Instead, the new political establishment hoped to overcome the legacy of the partitions and fuse the Austrian, German, and Russian institutions and political cultures into a coherent whole. Poland’s elites conflated plans for political consolidation with national integration, espe­cially of its large Lithuanian, Belarusan, and Ukrainian populations.

The different political cultures the Polish state inherited and the new proportional representational system it inaugurated produced political gridlock. Between November 1918 and Marshal Joseph Pilsudski’s coup in May 1926, fourteen different governments and political coalitions ruled Poland.³¹ These constant electoral swings highlighted the country’s con­flicting aspirations and popular expectations, long unexpressed under the partitioning powers, and paralysed the new state. Many Polish observers proclaimed that Poland needed someone to maintain its national unity in order to avoid foreign intervention and a new set of partitions.

Joseph Pilsudski, the war hero, fit the bill. Although he never held the presidency or the prime ministership, he established a regime that combined “a personal military dictatorship” with a “centralized authori­tarian oligarchy” and dominated the new republic from 1926 to 1935.³² He centralized power in the executive branch, watered down the parliament’s checks and balances of the government, and arrested the leaders of the leading opposition parties, thereby thwarting the emergence of a centrist movement.

Haunted by Poland’s past and influenced by the radical right-wing National Democratic Party, the new Polish ruling elite rejected for the most part the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s tolerance of its large multinational and multi-religious populations prior to the Counter­Reformation. The National Democrats, Poland’s largest political party in the interwar period, claimed that its non-Polish and non-Catholic popula­tions “stabbed Poland in the back” in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­turies and undermined the commonwealth’s independence. Its spokesmen asserted that the newly restored Polish state would not repeat the com­monwealth’s “mistakes.” Only the Poles would be masters of the new Poland, and the core nation would assimilate most of its minority groups, except for the Germans and Jews. The new rulers believed that the Jews remained unabsorbable and would be expelled or expatriated.³³

Unlike the Ukrainians, Belarusans, and Germans, Polish Jews did not constitute “a compactly settled national group with a territorial claim against the Polish state or with the government of a neighboring state prepared to intervene on its behalf.” Of all of Poland’s national minorities, the Jews “rep­resented the least tangible threat to Polish national security.”³⁴ Nevertheless, the Polish authorities considered the Jews as the minority “whose assimila­tion was least desirable, and whose presence was most destabilizing.”³⁵

Although members of the PPS, the Democratic Party, and the Communist Party of Poland consistently opposed anti-Semitism, most could not accept the idea of Jewish cultural distinctiveness. They fervently believed that “full Polonization of the Jewish masses would eventually occur in a democratic and tolerant Poland.”³⁶ But for most Poles, a democratic and tolerant state would have to wait. Poland’s resurrection in the twentieth century after its partitions in the eighteenth century demanded internal security, political consolidation, and national integration.

The National Democratic Party consistently advocated such a posi­tion. It attracted support throughout Poland and influenced all Polish governments in the interwar period, including Joseph Pilsudski’s authori­tarian regime.³⁷ During the leadership crisis after his death on 12 May 1935, the Polish public recognized Poland’s vulnerability in regard to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In this environment, the views of Roman Dmowski, the founder of the National Democratic Party, gained even more adherents. Most Poles interpreted all efforts by the non-Polish minorities to differentiate themselves in public from the majority Polish population as treasonable activities which the state had to suppress. Not surprisingly, these ideas and actions promoting a nationally pure Poland provoked a hostile reaction, especially from Ukrainians, who constituted approximately 15 per cent of the total population and whose number grew from 3.8 million in 1921 to approximately 5.3-5.5 million by 1939.³⁸

Poland’s Ukrainian speakers lived in areas far poorer, less industrialized, and more agriculturally backward than western or central Poland. About two-thirds of Poland’s Ukrainian speakers lived in the eastern Galician voivodeships of Lwow, Stanisfawow, and Tarnopol; the remainder resided mainly in the voivodeships of Wolyn and Polesie. Smaller groups lived near Chelm in Lublin voivodeship and in the Lemko region of the Western Carpathians (Cracow voivodeship).³⁹ In these eastern domains, Ukrainians constituted almost 66 per cent of the population, and the Poles 25 per cent. As in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces of the former Russian Empire, Ukrainians inhabited the rural areas and Poles and Jews dominated in the towns and cities. A Polish population, moreover, dominated Lwow, the largest city in Malopolska Wschodnia (Eastern Galicia).⁴⁰

Although not all Ukrainian speakers in Poland hated the Poles, Polish policies often needlessly inflamed them.⁴¹ The highly centralized Polish administration, based on the French political system, provided few op­portunities for self-government to territorially concentrated Ukrainians, Belarusans, and Lithuanians, who remained embittered by the govern­ment’s failure to introduce any land reforms benefiting them.⁴² As the Ukrainian population exploded from 1921 to 1939, they became even more impoverished.

The Polish government reached a short-lived agreement after 1935 with the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), the largest and most moderate Ukrainian political party in Poland in the interwar period.⁴³ Founded in 1925 as a fusion of various Ukrainian political and social groups and led by Greek Catholic clergy and the intelligentsia, UNDO aspired to create an independent state with a democratically elected parliamentary system. But the Polish government’s efforts to col­onize Ukrainian lands and dispossess Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Or­thodox churches destroyed this political cooperation in 1938. Although UNDO declared its loyalty to the Polish state at the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939, many (if not most) Ukrainians hoped that the Germans would completely overturn the status quo and did not mourn Poland’s collapse.⁴⁴

Whether led by Roman Dmowski’s National Democrats on the right or by Pilsudski and the Polish socialists on the left, interwar Polish govern­ments often violated treaties that proclaimed the equality of Ukrainians under the law. Long before the government abrogated the Polish Minority Treaty in September 1934, it sought to blur (if not destroy) the Ukrainians as a group distinct from the Poles by restricting the use of their East Slavic language in public, by limiting Ukrainian organizations, and even by ban­ning the term “Ukrainian.”⁴⁵

Local Polish officials tore down road and street signs written in Ukrainian. They reprimanded and persecuted individuals for publicly expressing them­selves in their native language, for subscribing to Ukrainian newspapers, for sending their children to Ukrainian schools, and for belonging to Ukrainian organizations. Not only did the Polish authorities arbitrarily engage in these indignities and public humiliations against nationally conscious Ukrainians, they also sought to dismantle Ukrainian civil society and to subordinate the Ukrainians in Malopolska Wschodnia and Western Wolyn.

In 1924, the Polish government passed laws that prohibited the use of the Ukrainian language in the state bureaucracy and converted the major­ity of Ukrainian-language public schools into bilingual (Polish-Ukrainian) ones, and ultimately into Polish schools.⁴⁶ If 3,600 Ukrainian-language el­ementary schools operated in Poland in 1919, 650 remained during the 1930-1 academic year, and only 139 in 1938-9, even with the large increase of the Ukrainian-speaking population in the interwar period.⁴⁷ At the be­ginning of 1919, thirty Ukrainian-language high schools operated in Galicia and Western Wolym⁴⁸ By 1938-9, only twenty-four remained to serve a Ukrainian population of 5.5 million.⁴⁹

Polish authorities also reconstructed the University of Lemberg, a Polish-Ukrainian institution in the Austrian Empire, into a Polish­language university. They abolished the Ukrainian history and literature chairs, dismissed Ukrainian professors, and denied admission to students who had not served in the Polish army during the Polish-Ukrainian War (which excluded all Ukrainian males of university age). The government also closed a majority of the reading rooms belonging to Prosvita, the mass-based enlightenment society, and harassed the Ukrainian coopera­tive movement, which sought to improve farming methods and the peas­ant’s standard of living. The political elite, moreover, heavily censored the Ukrainian press and banned many publications. In the 1930s the govern­ment dissolved the Ukrainian scouting organization (Plast) and the Union of Ukrainian Women (Soiuz ukrainok), the most influential women’s organization in Poland’s eastern domains.⁵⁰

Between 1920 and 1925, the Polish government provided financial incen­tives for the migration of 300,000 Poles from central Poland to Mafopolska Wschodnia and Wdyn, areas that already possessed a high population den­sity and possessed less productive soil than central Poland’s.⁵¹ This coloni­zation effort as well as Poland’s discriminatory policies angered Ukrainians and undermined the few opportunities left to reconcile the two antagonistic communities after the short, bitter war of 1918-19. The land reform pro­cess administered by the authorities favoured the Polish migrants, not the impoverished local Ukrainian population. Approximately 79 per cent of peasants in the three voivodeships of Lwow, Stanisfawow, and Tarnopol owned on average five hectares (twelve acres) or less, a size generally inca­pable of providing for a family of four to six members.⁵² Despite the emer­gence of a highly successful Ukrainian agricultural cooperative movement in the interwar period, most Ukrainians remained poor, becoming even poorer during the Great Depression.⁵³ Their low incomes, Poland’s slow economic growth, and the collapse of the international agricultural market created not just a permanent state of poverty, but total demoralization, especially among the young.

To most Ukrainians coming of age in the 1920s and 1930s, the social, economic, and political situation in Poland’s eastern domains appeared hopeless. In light of the officially sanctioned discriminatory measures they encountered, Ukrainians recognized that their parents and grandparents had enjoyed more opportunities to better themselves in the Austrian Empire (where imperial officials had considered them equal with the Poles) than they would in independent Poland. Due to the crushing popu­lation pressures in the countryside, most young people wanted to leave for towns and cities, or to migrate to North America. But few, if any, found educational or employment opportunities in the urban areas or could leave for the new world. In the 1920s the United States introduced racist legislation restricting the immigration of Southern and East Central Europeans as well as Asians, but Canada did not. Despite this opportuni­ty, only sixty-five to seventy thousand Ukrainians from Poland migrated to Canada.⁵⁴ As the Polish economy collapsed during the Great Depression, young men and women could find no means of gainful employment. Profoundly angry and frustrated with their situation, many Ukrainian­speaking young people embraced extremist solutions, such as communism and integral nationalism, a form of nationalism less tolerant than the lib­eral nationalism espoused by UNDO and the Greek Catholic Church.

Founded in 1919, the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (CPWU), an autonomous part of the Communist Party of Poland, gained some support in the 1920s. In demanding the redistribution of land to Ukrainian peasants without compensation to the landowners and the annexation of Poland’s southeastern region to the Soviet Union, the CPWU represented a major national security threat to Poland. Warsaw feared that Moscow could exploit the social unrest in its eastern borderlands and intervene militarily. (The Soviet Union, in turn, dreaded another Polish invasion of its territories.)⁵⁵ Not surprisingly, many Ukrainians, especially in densely populated Wolyh, enthusiastically supported the CPWU.⁵⁶ During the last reasonably free elec­tions in Poland in 1928, Communist front parties in Wolyri won 48 per cent of the vote; in Malopolska Wschodnia, they won only 13 per cent.⁵⁷

The CPWU remained less popular in Malopolska Wschodnia than in Wolyn for several reasons. Most Ukrainians in Malopolska Wschodnia re­membered the brutal Russian occupations during the war and very few favoured Eastern Galicia’s and Western Volhynia’s incorporation into Soviet Ukraine. When Ukrainians learned of the forced Soviet collectiviza­tion drive and the Holodomor of 1932-3, support for the CPWU and sym­pathy for the Soviet Union completely vanished.⁵⁸ Despite retaining their scepticism towards the Soviet regime, the majority - even staunch anti­communists, nonetheless approved of the Soviet policy of Ukrainization and imagined Soviet Ukraine as a stage in the evolution of an independent Ukrainian state.⁵⁹

As communism’s appeal declined, another ideology, integral national­ism, won the allegiance of most Ukrainians who came of age in the inter­war period. Members of this radical right-wing movement acquired certain ideological principles from the traditional conservatives, but sought to create a mass movement based on new principles.⁶⁰ Its ideology embraced a different tone and view of the world than the liberal Ukrainian national­ism practised in Eastern Galicia before the Great War. Unlike the leaders of the Ukrainian national movement in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, post-war radical nationalists refused to compromise with the political sta­tus quo or recognize the Polish state’s existence. These men and women raised the struggle to create an independent Ukrainian state above all other values, including humanitarian ones. By glorifying action, war, and vio­lence, this small group - organized in a single party and led by a charis­matic leader - unflaggingly engaged in illegal (if not immoral) activities in order to spark a radical political realignment in Europe and to pave the way for an independent Ukraine.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) embodied this pro­active stance.⁶¹ Founded in 1929 as a merger of various nationalist student organizations and groups of Ukrainian war veterans (who encountered of­ficial Polish hostility throughout the interwar period), this organization vowed to form an independent, united, national state in the territories where Ukrainians lived. The group built upon the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), established in 1920 in Prague to continue the armed struggle against the Polish occupation of Eastern Galicia. UVO had pro­vided a haven for many Sich Riflemen and veterans of the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918-19, men who initiated a series of assassinations, bombings, and other acts of terror against the Polish authorities and Ukrainian “col­laborators” in the interwar period.⁶² Even after the Allied Council of Ambassadors finally recognized Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia on 15 March 1923, which “raised doubts among many Ukrainians about the sense of continuing armed resistance,” UVO continued its actions.⁶³

Like UVO, the OUN accepted violence as a political tool against exter­nal and internal enemies. Inspired primarily by Mussolini’s Fascist Party, by the success (not the ideology) of the Nazi Party in Germany, and by the writings of Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973), the OUN sought to overturn the political status quo created at Versailles and establish an independent Ukrainian state in East Central Europe.⁶⁴ Despite widespread sympathy for the fascist and national-socialist movements in Italy and Germany, which promised to overturn the European political order and confront the USSR, the OUN leaders did not identify their organization as a fascist one. They claimed that their group represented the “revolutionary integral nationalism of a stateless nation” aspiring to establish an independent state, not take over an existing one.⁶⁵ In their pronouncements, Ukrainian state creation remained the ultimate goal of their struggle for national libera­tion. Colonel Evhen Konovalets, an officer in the Sich Riflemen during the First World War and the head of UVO, assumed the leadership of OUN and held it until his assassination by a Soviet agent in Rotterdam in 1938.

The OUN’s founding represented a declaration of war on Poland. During this internal war, the OUN engaged in terror, which T.P Thornton defined as “a symbolic act designed to influence political behavior by ex­tranormal means, entailing the use or threat of violence.”⁶⁶ This group em­ployed this rationally calculated violent tool to terrify the agents of the Polish state to end their occupation of Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia. Members of this group organized boycotts of Polish tobacco and liquor monopolies, torched the estates of Polish landlords, led armed attacks on police stations, post offices and governmental buildings (physi­cal symbols of the hated Polish state), and assassinated nearly sixty Pol­ish officials and uncounted numbers of Ukrainian “traitors” in the eastern voivodeships. An “epidemic” of sabotage and terror swept Galicia in 1930-1, the first great wave since 1922-3, when the Allied Council of Ambassadors acknowledged Poland’s right to incorporate Eastern Galicia.⁶⁷

As a prelude to the November 1930 parliamentary elections, the Polish authorities introduced repressive countermeasures, such as the “Pacifica­tion” campaign from September to November 1930, which sought not only to stop “terrorists,” but also punish the Ukrainian population as a whole. In the course of this brutal implementation of the principle of col­lective guilt to the OUN’s terror campaign, the authorities arrested, im­prisoned, and tortured hundreds of leading Ukrainian activists, including women. These large-scale anti-Ukrainian campaigns did not pacify the Ukrainians.⁶⁸ Just the opposite. The OUN responded with a more intense level of violence, which culminated in the organization’s 15 June 1934 as­sassination of Bronislaw Pieracki, the minister of the interior and the ar­chitect of the Pacification campaign. The Polish government cancelled its minority treaty three months later.

Although the OUN may have attracted somewhere between eight thousand and twenty thousand members by 1939, its influence far out­weighed its small numbers.⁶⁹ The spirit of selfless, even fanatical, dedica­tion to the Ukrainian cause appealed to young people, especially those who had no place in interwar Polish society and who were attracted to extreme black-white ideologies and “to holistic black-and-white solu­tions.”⁷⁰ They imagined that their parents’ generation failed to create an independent Ukraine. One OUN courier, recruited at the age of fourteen in 1940, shortly after the Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia, recounted her ideological training in her memoirs:

My contemporaries and I searched for an answer to the baffling and painful question: “Why was Ukraine not an independent nation?” It was difficult to understand why, after so many revolutions and uprisings, Ukrainians had been unable to establish a sovereign state. Where did the fault lie? What was missing? We discussed these questions over and over again at our weekly meetings. This self-evaluation coupled with our patriotism made us painfully aware of our second-class status, which we had inherited from our fathers, our grandfathers, and our great-grandfathers. We talked about the unsuccess­ful attempts to create an independent Ukraine during World War One, and we could not forgive our parents for letting that opportunity slip through their hands. We learned in the OUN’s Youth Section that it was our duty to fight for our land, our customs, and our proud heritage.⁷¹

This young woman eloquently expressed her own frustrations and that of her generation growing up in interwar Poland. Who was at fault for Ukraine’s defeat? For them, individuals, groups, nations, even those within one’s own nation - not structural factors, not the First World War’s alliance system and its collapse - prevented the emergence of an independent Ukraine. Like many in her generation, she absorbed the OUN’s “maximalist” orientation, especially the organization’s emphasis on single-party rule and uncompromising hostility towards its enemies and wayward allies.⁷² Although a majority of Ukrainians did not em­brace the OUN’s ideology, most agreed that they should respond to each Polish indignity and provocation with “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

In comparison to the mass arrests of traitors, “wreckers,” and “sabo­teurs” a few years later in Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s USSR, the number of arrests, trials, and convictions in Poland were very small.⁷³ But the overall brutality of the Pacification campaign in the context of the past Austrian environment alienated the Ukrainian population from the Polish regime and, for many, justified the actions of the OUN. Each act of brutal force provoked a violent reaction. The cycle of violence and counter­violence became self-perpetuating and more intense, undermining moder­ates among both Poles and Ukrainians.

The radicalization of the Polish and Ukrainian communities also spawned divisions within the Ukrainian community. In this hostile envi­ronment, the leadership of UNDO, an older generation educated in the nuanced pre-war cosmopolitan culture of Vienna that sought to represent Ukrainian interests by legal means, could not reach an accommodation with the Poles or compete with the radicalized OUN members. These young radicals presented themselves as harbingers of the future and would not subordinate themselves to their elders or to the wisdom of elected Ukrainian parliamentary officials. This generational conflict intensified in the 1930s as many rank-and-file OUN members embraced fascist prac­tices, although not necessarily the entire ideology’s mindset.⁷⁴ Despite the radicalization of many young people, UNDO (with the Ukrainian Socialist- Radical Party, a member of the Labour and Socialist International, as its junior ally) remained the dominant political coalition among Galician Ukrainians throughout the 1920s and 1930s.⁷⁵

In addition to UNDO, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops, espe­cially Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, publicly opposed the activities of the OUN.⁷⁶ As an individual who enjoyed the highest respect in the Ukrainian community, he hoped to restrain OUN’s violence. He asserted that OUN’s actions catalysed new repressions against its compatriots and would not destroy the power of the Polish state. His call for an end to the violence did not persuade either the Poles or the OUN.⁷⁷

Although the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians despised Polish rule, they came to different conclusions about what they could accomplish within this adverse environment. UNDO’s leaders aspired to work within the Polish system in a non-violent manner, but often found themselves thwarted by Polish rulers and colonists, who increasingly embraced intol­erant political positions and blocked intercommunal reconciliation. The Polish power elite needlessly marginalized UNDO and undermined its authority among Ukrainians.

By engaging in terrorist activities against the Polish state and its repre­sentatives, the OUN sought to publicize its cause and deliberately provoke government reactions that would alienate the Ukrainian population, in­crease support for its agenda, and create an opening for expanded subver­sive activities.⁷⁸ By waging a violent struggle against the Poles, the OUN hoped to win over the “uncommitted fence-sitters” among Ukrainians.⁷⁹ But, in effect, these actions only helped the authorities cripple UNDO’s already limited political influence within the Polish political system.

Extremism also emerged in Wolyn, which differed from Malopolska Wschodnia. In Wolyn, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians belonged to the Orthodox Church, not to the Greek Catholic Church. Before 1914, when the Russian Empire had controlled the area, the Ukrainian-speaking population did not possess a national consciousness as intense as that of their compatriots in Austria’s Galicia.⁸⁰

After Wolyn became a part of Poland, the situation changed. The new Polish government started to favour the small Polish population. According to a local 1937 census, it recorded 348,079 who identified them­selves as Poles (16.7 per cent of the total population), 205,615 as Jews (9.9 per cent), and 1,420,094 as Ukrainians (68.1 per cent).⁸¹ The authori­ties introduced land reforms that benefited only the Poles, supported and subsidized the arrival of several hundred thousand Polish colonists (often demobilized soldiers and their families), and transferred a large number of Polish administrators and bureaucrats from central Poland.

The Polish state also introduced other measures that further aggravated the Ukrainian population. In the 1920s, for example, authorities inaugu­rated compulsory Polish-language education in the province, but this skill did not lead to employment during the Great Depression. Instead, the educated became an under- or unemployed intellectual vanguard that in­cited the disaffected Ukrainian majority against the Polish state.

Henryk Jozewski (1892-1981), the new governor of Wolyn (1928-38), hoped to create an attractive environment for Ukrainians and blunt the at­traction of Soviet Ukraine (located next door) and the Ukrainian national­ists’ vision of an independent Ukraine. A Pole born in Kiev, he had served for a short period as the deputy minister of the interior in the Ukrainian National Republic in 1920 and as Poland’s minister of the interior from December 1929 to June 1930. As Wolyn’s governor, he introduced extensive cultural concessions to the Ukrainians, including Ukrainian- language courses in all state schools, while establishing a base for espionage operations against the Soviet Union. He even supported the Ukrainizing efforts of the Polish Orthodox Autocephalous Church, established in 1924, in his province.⁸² But he could do little about land reform or about the 300,000 Polish colonists Warsaw sent.⁸³ Jozewski succeeded “in fostering a Ukrainian patriotism in Wolyn, but failed to connect this new trend to Polish statehood.”⁸⁴ After 1935, the governor lost the confidence of the Ukrainian majority and control over his own province. The Polish army intervened, destroying Orthodox churches and expropriating Ukrainian properties, which embittered the local population even more.