Political developments, 1923-1939
A comprehensive and balanced history of Ukrainian Galicia between 1923 and 1939 remains to be written. For the most part, the published material that does exist consists of descriptions of a memoiristic and documentary nature, dealing with the negative aspects of Polish-Ukrainian relations and the reaction of both sides to an increasingly tense situation.
The best documentary source materials for this period are the stenographic records containing the debates and publications of the Polish Parliament. While Ukrainians from parts of Volhynia, Podlachia, Polisia, and the Chelm area participated in elections to the Polish Parliament in 1922, it was not until 1928 that the first Ukrainians from Galicia entered both the house of deputies (Sejm) and Senate (Senat). The interpellations of Ukrainian parliamentarians and the responses of their Polish counterparts provide a good picture of the kinds of problems that wracked eastern Galicia.[538] Some of the parliamentary debates from this period have been published separately,[539] and there are several studies of Galician Ukrainians in the Polish Parliament and of individual Ukrainian political parties.[540] Much valuable factual data from this period are also available in the systematic chronicle of events on Ukrainians and Old Ruthenians that appeared six times a year between 1927 and 1939 in a Warsaw journal on minority affairs,[541] as well as in the memoirs of the Ukrainian Radical leader Ivan Makukh, Social Democrat Antin Chernets’kyi, and the journalist and UNDO supporter Ivan Kedryn-Rudnyts ’ ky i.[542]
Perhaps the most informative surveys on the interwar years are found in a balanced account by the Canadian-Ukrainian historian Bohdan Budurowycz and in several chapters dealing with eastern Galicia in monographs by the Polish scholars Miroslawa Papierzynska-Turek (on Ukrainians in Poland between 1922 and 1926) and Ryszard Torzecki (on the Ukrainian question and the Third Reich after 1933).[543] The Polish view of eastern Galicia during the interwar period is also found in chapters on Ukrainians in three works dealing with all minorities in Poland.
Two of these works were published in the 1930s, and they argue that indeed the Polish government was trying to live in peace with Ukrainians and to protect their rights; the third is a recent monograph by Andrzej Chojnowski, who is much more critical of Poland’s interwar minority policy.[544] The inevitable failure of Polish efforts at compromise was hastened by the formation of the fascist-oriented uniparty Bloc of National Unity (Oboz Zjednoczenia Naro- dowego), whose establishment in 1937 is described by E. Wynot.[545]The largest amount of literature on political developments after 1923 deals on the one hand with the revolutionary and military approach to the Galician- Ukrainian problem adopted by the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) and its successor, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and on the other hand with the Polish reaction to such activity that took the form of periodic arrests and trials followed in the early 1930s by half hearted attempts at repression-a policy known as pacification. As for Ukrainian nationalism, the best work on its ideological background and subsequent practice as carried out by Galician leaders both at home and in the emigration (Vienna, Prague, Berlin) is a recent monograph by Alexander J. Motyl.55 For greater details on the UVO and other revolutionary activity during the 1920s, one has to rely on the historical memoirs of two of its members, Volodymyr Martynets’ and in particular Zynovii Knysh.56 The more radically nationalist and revolutionary OUN, which came into being in 1929, is covered in a collection of documents and in several sympathetic histories of the movement, the most comprehensive by Petro Mirchuk.57 There are also several memoirs by former OUN members on the organization’s activity during the 1930s,58 and a study by a postwar Polish emigre on the OUN’s most publicized act-the assassination of Minister of Interior Bronislaw Pieracki (1895-1934) in 1934.59 The OUN leader, levhen Konovalets’, has been the object of praise in a
55 Alexander J. Motyl, The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919-1929, East European Monograph Series, vol.
LXV (Boulder, Colo, and New York: Columbia University Press for East European Monographs 1980).56 V. Martynets’, Ukra'ins’ke pidpillia vid U.V.O. do O.U.N. (n.p. 1949); Zynovii Knysh, ed., Spohady i materiialy do diiannia UVO (Toronto: Sribna Surma 1963); idem, ed., Sribna Surma: pochatky UVO v Halychyni (Toronto: Sribna Surma 1963); idem, Pry dzherelakh ukratns’koho orhanizovanoho natsionalizmu (Tornoto: Sribna Surma 1970); idem, Dva protsesy iak naslidok diial’nosty UVO v 1924 rotsi (Toronto: Sribna Surma, 1968); idem, Na povni vitryla: Ukratns’ka Viis’kova Orhanizatsiia v 1924-1926 rokakh (Toronto: Sribna Surma 1970); idem, Dalekyi prytsil: UVO v 1927-1929 rokakh (Toronto: Sribna Surma 1970).
See also the detailed account of the 1926 trial held in L’viv in 12 ukrdintsiv pered I’vivs'kym sudom (protses Paslavs'koho i tov.J, Biblioteka ‘Novoho Chasu’, no. 11 (L’viv 1926); and the report found in the German Foreign Ministry Archives on UVO activity between 1921 and 1926 by a former officer in the Sich Riflemen, Osip Dumin, “Die Wahrheit über die ukrainische Organisation,” report dated Berlin, May 1926, translated into Polish as “Prawda o Ukrainskiej Organizacji Wojskowej,” Zeszyty Historyczne, XXX (Paris 1974), pp. 103-137.
57 OUN v svitli postanov velykykh zboriv, konferentsii ta inshykh dokumentiv z borot'by 19291955 r.: zbirka dokumentiv (n.p.: Zakordonni chastyny OUN 1955); Petro Mirchuk, Narys istorii Orhanizatsii Ukratns’kykh Natsionalistiv, vol. I: 1920-1939 (Munich, London, and New York: Ukrains’ke vyd-vo 1968).
See also Orhanizatsiia Ukratns’kykh Natsionalistiv 1929-1954 (Paris: OUN 1955) and R. Lisovyi, Rozlam v OUN (n.p. 1949).
58 Zynovii Knysh, Dryzhyt’ pidzemnyi huk: spohady z 1930 i 1931 rokiv u Halychyni (Winnipeg 1953); lurii Mozil’, Zapysky politv"iaznia: spomyny z poT s’ koi tiurmy (Toronto: Dobra knyzhka 1958); Lev Rebet, Svitla i tint (JUN (Munich: ‘Ukrains’kyi samostiinyk’ 1961); Mykola Klymyshyn, V pokhodi do voli: spomyny, vol.
I (Toronto: Liga Vyzvolennia Ukrainy and Doslidnyi Instytut Studii' 1975).59 Wladyslaw Zelenski, Zabojstwo ministra Pierackiego (Paris: Instytut Literacki 1973). recently published large collection of essays about his life and times,[546] although he had been criticized by some in his lifetime for not being able to fulfill the role of a strong and charismatic leader that national idealists hoped to have during the 1930s.[547]
The ideological framework for interwar Galician-Ukrainian nationalism was provided by Dmytro Dontsov, a native of the Dnieper Ukraine, who emigrated to L’viv before World War I. Between 1922 and 1939 he worked in L’viv as editor of the leading literary and publicist journal Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (L’viv 1922-32), later Vistnyk (1933-39), and was the author of several works that had a great impact on the disillusioned interwar Galician-Ukrainian youth. Dontsov espoused the ideal of integral nationalism and the necessity to act, which was translated into illegal or terrorist activity by the Galician OUN in its efforts to achieve the goals of Ukrainian independence from Poles and later from the Russians. Dontsov’s works and several biographies about him are available.[548]
The brief pacification campaign carried out against Ukrainians in 1930 became a cause cèlebre not only for aggrieved Ukrainian writers but for liberals in the West as well. Almost immediately, Ukrainians compiled several documentary “black books” that outlined in graphic detail and with photographs the wounds, physical and psychological, inflicted on the Ukrainian population.[549] Similar publications sponsored by Ukrainians in the United States appeared at the same time,[550] and the issue also became a subject of debate in the British House of Commons.[551] Always anxious about its image in western, and especially British, political circles, the Polish government issued explanations defending the pacification and even found support among some British parliamentarians as well.[552]