The New Status of the West Ukrainians

Although Poland won the military conflict in Eastern Galicia in 1919, from the points of view of international law and the Entente powers, its right to rule the West Ukrainians remained at issue.

Map 23 Western Ukraine during the interwar period

A phrase that best describes the tense relationship in Eastern Galicia existing between the Ukrainian majority and the new Polish administration during the unsettled period of 1919–23 is “mutual negation.” Until the Council of Ambassadors in Versailles reached its decision, the Ukrainians in Galicia refused to recognize the Polish state as their legitimate government. They boycotted the census of 1921 and the elections to the Polish sejm (parliament) in 1922. More radical elements among them turned to terror tactics and sabotage against Polish officials and government installations. For its part, the Polish goverment acted as if Eastern Galicia were a completely Polish land, imposing Polish control over the political, cultural, and economic life of the region, and totally ignoring Ukrainian concerns.

For the sake of international opinion, however, the Poles repeatedly proclaimed their readiness to respect the national rights of the Ukrainians and other minorities in their new state.

Its discriminatory policies notwithstanding, Poland was a state based on constitutional principles. While elections to its bicameral parliament were manipulated at times, for the most part they were relatively free. Even after 1926, when Marshal Jozef Piłsudski staged a military coup, the rule of law remained in effect (although it was often interpreted in favor of Polish state interests). Consequently, Polish laws provided Ukrainians with the means, albeit limited, of opposing or at least protesting against state policies. This meant that, despite their second-class status, the Ukrainians in Poland were politically better off than their compatriots in the USSR.

The newly formed Polish state contained one of the highest percentages of national minorities in all Europe. In 1921, about one-third of its 27 million inhabitants were Ukrainians, Jews, Belorussians, Germans, and other non-Poles. The Ukrainians were by far the largest national minority, numbering well over 5 million and constituting about 15% of the state’s inhabitants (minority statistics were a highly controversial matter in interwar Poland and Polish sources claimed that there were only about 4.5 million Ukrainians, while Ukrainians insisted that they numbered over 6 million). Thus, the numerical preponderance of the Polish majority was not so vast as to allow them to ignore completely and consistently the aspirations of the non-Poles.

Ukrainians in Poland constituted two distinct communities (and the government did everything in its power to emphasize these distinctions). The majority lived in the former Habsburg land of Eastern Galicia or Eastern Little Poland (Małopolska Wschodnia), as it was now called. In 1920 this region was subdivided into the three wojewodstwa or provinces of Lviv, Ternopil, and Stanyslaviv. Overwhelmingly Greek Catholic, the more than 3 million Galician Ukrainians were nationally conscious and relatively well organized. The rest of the Ukrainians inhabited western Volhynia, Polissia, and Kholm, areas that Poland had acquired from Russia. They numbered approximately 2 million and were mostly Orthodox; they were also politically, socioeconomically, and culturally underdeveloped.