The Nature of the Polish-Ukrainian Conflict

The Polish-Ukrainian relationship was the major internal problem of Galicia. The struggle between the two communities, which broke out overtly in 1848, went on relentlessly with an ever-increasing intensity and bitterness, from year to year and decade to decade.

The distribution of nationalities in the province of Galicia, according to the 1910 census, was 47 per cent Roman Catholics (Poles), 42 per cent Greek Catholics (Ukrainians), and 11 per cent Jews. A distinction, how­ever, should be made between western and eastern Galicia, divided ap­proximately by the San River. The former was overwhelmingly, 89 per cent, Polish. The latter was a land of mixed populations: the Ukrainian majority of 62 per cent was faced by Polish and Jewish minorities of 25 and 12 per cent respectively.³² A distinguished Polish social historian made the observation: “The distribution of Poles in eastern Galicia is un­favourable, because they are spread out over the entire area, but with the exception of the city and district of Lviv, they are nowhere in a major­ity.... The Polish population of eastern Galicia is concentrated mostly in the cities and manorial estates.’’³³

Whatever one may say about the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, “race’’ played no role in it. Ethnic intermingling between the two communities had been going on for centuries. The Polish nobility was largely of Rus’ ancestry. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Polish peasant settlers had imperceptibly blended with the surrounding Ukrainians. Even in times of sharpening nationalist disputes, intermarriage remained very frequent. There was a saying in Galicia that “the Polish-Ukrainian frontier runs across the marriage bed.”

The identification of the Poles with Roman Catholics, and the Ukrain­ians with Greek Catholics, requires some qualification.

The dominant position of the Polish nationality was bolstered by the social privileges of the landed nobility and upper middle class. Con­versely, for the Ukrainians, the struggle for national and social eman­cipation was one. A Polish student could state: “The fact that ‘peasant’ and 'Ruthenian,⁷ on the one hand, and ‘Pole’ and ‘squire,’ on the other, have become synonymous, is fatal to us.... The social element of the national question tremendously facilitates the Ruthenians⁷ work of na­tional education of their people, and makes it difficult for us to defend our position.”³⁴

Beyond the clash of actual social interests, there was an invidious con­flict on the psychological plane. The outlook of the Polish intelligentsia and middle class was largely derived from the tradition of the gentry. The origins of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were plebeian; every educated Ukrainian was only one or two generations removed from either a par­sonage or a peasant hut.

Lastly, the two nations were separated by incompatible political ideol­ogies. Polish political thought took as its point of departure the pre­Partition Commonwealth, in which the corporate unity of the noble class was identical with the unity of the nation. Such an attitude made it ex­tremely difficult for the Poles to reconcile themselves to the idea of a sep­arate Ukrainian nation. The claim that the Ruthenians constituted a na­tion, in principle endowed with equal rights with the Poles, seemed to the latter preposterous. Hence the inveterate Polish tendency to explain the Ukrainian movement as a foreign “intrigue”: Austrian (Stadion!), Rus­sian or, later, Prussian.

As early as 1833, Waclaw Zaleski, the distinguished collector of folk­lore, directed a barb against the Ruthenian Triad: “The Slovaks, the Silesians and the Moravians have united with the Czechs; with whom should the Ruthenians unite? Or should we perhaps wish for the Ruth- enians to have their own literature? What would happen to German litera­ture if various Germanic tribes attempted to have their own litera­tures?”³⁵ The Polish democratic leader, Florian Ziemialkowski, proclaimed in January 1849 in the Constitutional Committee of the Austrian Reichstag: “As for Galicia, it belongs to the Polish national­ity.... Before March 1848 a Ruthenian was a person of Greek, and a Pole a person of Catholic religion. There were Ruthenians and Poles in the same family. It is unnecessary to say who has created the split, but this is a difference of religion, and not of nationality....

Large segments of Polish public opinion never retreated from this basic position. Others, more flexible and realistic, did so, although grudgingly and slowly. Some Poles considered the possibility of a future Polish-Ukrainian alliance against Russia, of course under Poland’s leadership. This was, for instance, the opinion of the Cracow conserva­tive, Count Stanislaw Tamowski, in 1866: “We must not oppress, but should rather nurture, the Ruthenian nationality here in Galicia, and it will grow strong also on the Dnieper.... It will remain Rus’, but a Rus’ fraternally united with Poland, and dedicated to one common cause. ”³⁹

Left-wing Poles and Ukrainians were temporarily, in the 1870s and 80s, brought together by their common opposition to the ruling conserva­tive regime in Galicia. The outstanding Ukrainian writer and scholar of the period, Ivan Franko (1856-1916), had an important part in the for­mation of the Polish Peasant Party.⁴⁰ But co-operation tended to break down once the former fringe groups assumed political responsibility.

The Polish position is well summarized by the statement made shortly before the fall of the Austrian Empire not by an extreme nationalist, but by a perceptive scholar of moderate views and a self-proclaimed partisan of Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation: “Polish public opinion looks upon this province as a trust whose splitting up in whatever form is inadmis­sible; its unity must remain a noli me tangere.... The Poles are bound by a sacred obligation to regard Galicia as a ‘historical area’ where they are called to fulfill the duties of the master of the house.... [The demand of equal status for the two languages, Polish and Ukrainian] means the wish to create a pretended justice, which would consist in putting on a footing of equality two totally unequal things.”⁴¹ What the Poles were willing to concede to the Ukrainians was, at most, the position of a tolerated minority; but Ukrainian hands had to be permanently kept off the levers of political control, and the educational and economic opportu­nities of the Ukrainian community were to be carefully restricted in order not to inconvenience the “masters of the house.”

The Ukrainian point of view was formulated by Ivan Franko: “We wish the Poles complete national and political liberty. But there is one necessary condition: they must, once and for all, desist from lording it over us; they must, once and for all, give up any thought of building a ‘historical’ Poland in non-Polish lands, and they must accept, as we do, the idea of a purely ethnic Poland.”⁴²

The divergence of national ideologies was too wide to be bridged by compromise. This basic incompatibility often frustrated or delayed the solution of practical issues, which were treated not in a pragmatic way but as pawns in a power struggle. A thick cloud of pent-up emotions and mounting hostility settled over the land.