The Promethean Movement
Jozewski also played a key role in the Polish Promethean movement, an ambitious project Marshal Pilsudski initiated to undermine the integrity of the USSR. Pilsudski, the self-appointed guardian of Polish independence, hoped to re-establish a strong homeland, to “shatter Russia into a series of nation-states,” and to create a federation of these newly liberated lands under Poland’s sphere of influence.85 By including Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine, this Polish-led alliance would replace Russia as the great power in East Central Europe.
Named after the mythical god Prometheus, who brought fire (a symbol of the struggle for freedom) to humankind, this group would serve both Polish and non-Polish long-term interests.The Promethean project possessed a number of closely intertwined invisible and visible threads. The first encompassed covert Polish intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, such as those Jozewski and his colleagues initiated. The second embraced the public sphere, with largescale efforts to organize anti-Soviet propaganda or to engage in concrete actions, such as the unsuccessful campaign to prevent the USSR from taking a seat at the League of Nations.86 Each of these strands remained tightly interwoven and, in the case of the Promethean League of Nations Subjugated by Moscow (better known as the Promethean League), difficult to disentangle. In 1925, Pilsudski’s trusted men formed this anti- Communist international, which brought together representatives of various anti-Soviet governments-in-exile scattered across Europe and Turkey and headquartered the League in Warsaw. Over the next fifteen years, the Polish military, foreign ministry, and their allied intelligence services covertly supported this and other similar organizations diplomatically and financially. This anti-Soviet operation achieved its most notable successes between 1926 and 1932.
The complex relationship between Pilsudski and Petliura, the head of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) during the revolutionary period, profoundly influenced the Promethean project of the 1920s and 1930s. Pilsudski, who had always considered Russia to be Poland’s primary enemy, had dreamed of reducing the empire’s size even before the outbreak of the First World War. The February and October Revolutions and subsequent civil and national wars gave him the opportunity to do so. After many preliminary negotiations, he and Petliura signed the Treaty of Warsaw on 21 April 1920 as a prelude to their joint military operations against the Soviet Ukrainian and Soviet Russian governments. The Polish side recognized the right of Ukraine to an independent political existence and Petliura’s Directory as the “supreme government” of the UNR, which would encompass Central Ukraine, the territory between the Zbruch and Dnieper Rivers (far less than the territory the UNR claimed). Although the new Polish government surrendered all claims to Right-Bank Ukraine, which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth controlled until the First Partition of Poland in 1772, it insisted on keeping Eastern Galicia.87
This Polish-Ukrainian treaty annulled the Act of Unity of 22 January 1919 that had united the UNR with the West Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR). The leadership of the two Ukrainian republics disagreed over which state represented the greatest danger to Ukrainian national interests. For the heads of the ZUNR, Poland remained the foremost enemy; their counterparts in the UNR perceived Russia (whether Bolshevik or White) as the primary threat. Bowing to the reality of its fragile existence and to Polish pressures, the UNR reluctantly recognized that Eastern Galicia and Western Wolyn would remain under Polish control. Without Polish help, Petliura understood that he could not win against the Bolsheviks, who had already occupied most of the territory he claimed. If he could not wrest some area for the UNR and successfully defend it, the Ukrainian nationalist cause would fail.
Petliura recognized that he did not possess any viable alternatives and that he was forced to take the opportunities presented to him and not hold out for political miracles.Everything hinged on the ultimate victory of the combined Polish- Ukrainian forces against the Communist/Bolshevik regime in Ukraine, which commenced several days after the signing of the Warsaw Treaty. The first weeks of the invasion succeeded beyond all expectations, and the joint forces entered Kiev in early May 1920. The Bolsheviks launched a successful counter-offensive in June, which led them to the gates of Warsaw in August. Pilsudski’s counter-thrust expelled the Red Army from Poland, but he permanently lost most of the central Ukrainian territories he and Petliura had captured.
The Treaty of Riga, signed on 18 March 1921, marked the end of formal hostilities between Poland and the Soviet republics. The new Polish government gained only about one-third of the territories that the Polish- Lithuania Commonwealth possessed before the First Partition, while Soviet Russia kept the rest.88 These two newly created countries divided the Ukrainian and Belarusan territories between them and established the western boundaries of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus. Although the treaty weakened Poland’s influence in East Central Europe, Pilsudski did not abandon his dreams of destabilizing the USSR or of creating a federation in this region. In his mind, the Polish-Soviet agreement represented a temporary setback for Poland’s rebirth on the international stage. Aspects of the earlier Polish-Ukrainian agreement, especially its hostility to the USSR, remained intact. Hence, the Promethean League.
Although a number of prominent Ukrainians participated in the Promethean League, most of its Ukrainian members came from Central and Eastern Ukraine, not Malopolska Wschodnia.89 They took advantage of the many think tanks (such as the Oriental Institute, the Polish Institute of Nationalities Research, and the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Warsaw) and publications (Wschod/L’Orient, Biuletyn Polsko-Ukrainski, and Promethee) sponsored by the Polish government. Although the Pilsudski regime subsidized the UNR government-in-exile after the debacle of 1920, the Polish leader’s authoritarianism increasingly intensified in the late 1920s and early 1930s and he became identified with Polonization, the Pacification campaign, and the administration’s anti-Ukrainian policies in the Lwow, Stanislawow, Tarnopol, and Wolyn voivodeships.
Although many of Pilsudski’s followers outwardly showed respect to Poland’s Belarusan and Ukrainian minorities, many also adhered to a sense of Polish cultural superiority, persuaded that they could raise the level of the “less developed” Eastern Slavs and eventually transform them into Poles. They differed, for the most part, from Dmowski’s supporters in terms of tactics, not necessarily in the overall strategy of creating a homogeneous Polish nation-state.
In response to these hostile policies and views, the Ukrainians in Poland’s eastern regions rejected Prometheism. Inasmuch as the Promethean movement engaged in a semi-covert set of activities promoting the creation of an independent Ukrainian state, it operated on a state-to-state level. A large number of Prometheans, like Jozewski, may have sincerely defended Ukrainian culture, but the Polish government and its agents - following the National Democratic vision of the world - actively oppressed and harassed Ukrainians as a people. Most Ukrainians viewed their antagonistic relationship with the hostile bureaucracy as official Polish policy and did not whole-heartedly condemn the OUN’s assassination of Tadeusz Holowko (1889-1931), the overall coordinator of the Promethean movement. Although Holowko promoted the Polish government’s close cooperation with the UNR and the Promethean movement, the OUN accused him of “spiritually disarming” Ukrainian society.90
Many (if not the majority of) Ukrainians in these Polish borderlands, moreover, did not possess a high opinion of Petliura’s exiled UNR, which - in their assessment - had abandoned them. After Petliura’s 1926 murder in Paris, the exiled UNR ceased to play a significant role in their lives.
As Ukrainians reassessed their position in interwar Poland, the Polish political leadership also reappraised its relationship with the USSR and with its own Ukrainian population. Stalinist repressions in Ukraine, such as the public trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in early 1930, the forced collectivization drive, and subsequent Holodomor, killed millions and dispirited survivors, inducing mass social despair.
The Soviet state’s success in implementing large-scale, brutal measures convinced Pilsudski’s inner circle that the possibility of mass anti-Soviet rebellions in Ukraine had passed.91 Many now started to argue that Poland’s international projects, such as the Promethean movement, should not take priority over Poland’s own internal concerns. Aggravated by its restive national minorities, the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party and the possibility of a German invasion, widespread communist activities in Wolyn, and the Great Depression, Poland’s ruling elite embraced the issue of strengthening its internal security over efforts to destabilize the USSR. The government expanded its repressive measures against Poland’s largest national minority and then signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on 25 July 1932.For Ukrainians in the Polish voivodeships, a cruel reality emerged after the First World War. The end of the brutal conflict destroyed all promise of union with their brothers and sisters across the Zbruch River (the international border dividing Poland from the USSR), or of political autonomy or independence. By mobilizing large numbers of Polish and Ukrainian speakers along national lines, the First World War and the Polish- Ukrainian War of 1918-19 seriously undermined the possibility of a political reconciliation or compromise with the Poles. The actions of the Polish military, police, and bureaucracy in the majority Ukrainian-speaking territories generated painful reminders of “hopes deferred and fears fulfilled” on a regular, almost daily, basis.92 The OUN responded in kind, which only infuriated the Poles and accelerated the cycle of violence.
Two non-negotiable views of the world set the stage for the conflict between Ukrainians and Poles. Ukrainians did not want to recognize Polish control of the borderlands or to integrate into Poland. They understood that integration meant assimilation and national marginalization, if not extinction.
Ukrainians considered the areas where they resided as the majority population as their homeland. They wanted the Polish state’s public acknowledgment of their national dignity.The majority of Poles, in turn, wanted to dominate these regions, which they regarded as their historical homeland. Despite Polish conquest of these areas, the potentially explosive anti-Polish hostility remained a threat. Active and passive Ukrainian resistance to Polish rule raised national security concerns to a feverish pitch for the Polish elite and for Poles living in Malopolska Wschodnia and Wolyn. By the end of the 1930s, these Poles considered Ukrainians disloyal citizens of Poland and active fifth columnists. With the exception of Jozewski (and to some extent Pilsudski), the majority of the Polish ruling elite did not want to validate the Ukrainians as a group with equal national rights or provide them with full citizenship rights. These conflicting perspectives led to an unending spiral of violence and inter-communal hatred, preparing the ground for the horrid Polish and Ukrainian ethnic cleansing campaigns during the Second World War.