Socioeconomic Conditions
Despite the vast political transformations experienced by West Ukrainians as a result of the collapse of the Austrian and Russian empires, the struggle for independent statehood, and their inclusion into Poland, the socioeconomic conditions in which they lived remained essentially unchanged.
The Ukrainian-inhabited lands, which constituted about 25% of Poland’s territory, remained underdeveloped agrarian borderlands or internal colonies that supplied cheap raw resources to the core areas of Poland and bought their high-priced finished products.Even by Polish standards, the Ukrainians were extremely agrarian: about 80% were peasants compared to the Polish average of 50%, and only 8% were industrial workers compared to the Polish average of 20%. In addition to these structural disadvantages, the Ukrainian populace had to deal with such problems as the wartime devastation; the government’s discriminatory economic policies towards them; and the impact of the Great Depression. In short, the socioeconomic plight of the West Ukrainians under Polish rule remained as unsatisfactory as their political status.
As might be expected, the main economic difficulties lay in agriculture, where old problems, such as rural overpopulation and tiny plots, persisted from pre-First World War days. In the Ukrainian-inhabited provinces of Poland, about 1.2 million peasant households owned 60% of the land. The problem was especially acute in Galicia, where the size of over 75% of the peasant plots was less than 10 acres. Meanwhile, about 2000 large estates, owned by Poles and sometimes consisting of 10,000–20,000 acres, controlled close to 25% of the land. In Volhynia, where there were fewer large Polish landowners, the soil was richer and peasant plots were larger, so that conditions in the countryside were somewhat better.
To alleviate the acute shortage of land, the government encouraged the subdivision of large estates in the 1920s.
However, the program was of little benefit to Ukrainians in Galicia because most of the subdivided lands went to Polish peasants and newly arrived colonists. Emigration also proved to be less effective than before in alleviating the rural overpopulation because, during the interwar period, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada reduced the numbers of immigrants they were willing to receive. As a result, only about 170,000 West Ukrainians emigrated during that time.Industry continued to offer few options to a Ukrainian peasant anxious to better his lot. The eastern borderlands had a disproportionately small share of Poland’s weakly developed industry; it grew even smaller in the 1930s when the government supported industrial growth in central Poland while neglecting the largely non-Polish provinces. Only about 135,000 West Ukrainians were employed as workers, mostly in the forestry and oil industries. Lviv, with a population of about 300,000, most of which was Polish and Jewish, remained the largest urban center in Galicia.
As before the First World War, the intelligentsia continued to provide the political, cultural, and even socioeconomic leadership in West Ukrainian society. But unlike in the 19th century when priests constituted much of this class, during the interwar period the overwhelming majority of the intelligentsia was secular. According to Polish scholars, in the 1930s about 1% of the West Ukrainian working population or about 15,000 individuals belonged to the intelligentsia (among Poles the analogous figure was 5%).2 A major reason for the comparatively small number of educated Ukrainians was the Polish government’s policy of hindering access to higher education for non-Poles. Thus, in Lviv University, Ukrainians constituted less than 10% of the student body.
For the most part, the members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia earned their living as teachers or white-collar workers in the rapidly growing cooperative movement.
Some Ukrainians began to enter professions such as law, medicine, pharmacy, and engineering, where Poles and Jews had long held a monopoly. Yet, one of the most common white-collar careers in Eastern Europe – government service – was practically closed to qualified Ukrainians, all such positions being reserved for Poles. A positive aspect of this frustrating situation was that many educated young Ukrainians were forced to abandon their attempts to find employment in the cities and went to work in the countryside, resulting in the impressive cultural and socioeconomic development of the Ukrainian villages. Nonetheless, difficulty in finding appropriate employment, especially during the depression of the 1930s, added greatly to the already precarious material plight of the intelligentsia. It also fueled resentment toward the Polish regime among educated Ukrainians and encouraged in them a conviction that these problems could be solved only if Ukrainians had a state of their own.