The Ukrainian Response

Because it was basically the Polish government that defined the nature of Polish/Ukrainian relations during the interwar years, Ukrainian activity during this period was essentially either a response or a reaction to Polish initiatives.

Although the “legalists” never abandoned the goal of eventually uniting all Ukrainians in an independent state, they concentrated on preserving the gains that Ukrainians had made under Austrian rule against the discriminatory policies of the Polish state. They participated in the Polish political system by means of legal Ukrainian parties, rebuilt and expanded the cooperative movement, and sought to protect Ukrainian schooling. By developing this “organic sector” of Ukrainian society, the “legalists” hoped that Ukrainians would be better prepared to achieve independence when the next opportunity arose. Such constructive albeit mundane activities attracted mostly the older, more stable elements of Ukrainian society, such as members of the prewar establishment, the clergy, much of the intelligentsia, and the well-to-do peasants. Political parties

An unusually fractious society, Poland had ninety-two registered political parties in 1925 of which thirty-two were represented in parliament. This tendency for political differentiation was also evident among the Ukrainians. Spanning the ideological spectrum from extreme left to extreme right, the Ukrainians had about a dozen political parties, which also reflected the very different political traditions of the “Austrian” Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia as opposed to the “Russian” Ukrainians of Volhynia, Polissia, and Kholm.

There was one party, however, that was larger and more influential than all the others put together – UNDO. It had been formed in 1925 from the merger of the Labor (Trudova) party and several smaller groups. Despite the name change, UNDO was actually the direct descendant of the prewar National Democrats, the leading West Ukrainian party prior to and during the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–19. Essentially a liberal party, it was committed to constitutional democracy and Ukrainian independence. To prepare Ukrainians for statehood, it supported the policy of “organic development” and agrarian reform. Relatively flexible in its tactics, it initiated the attempt at “normalizing” Ukrainian/Polish relations. But, with Polish repression on the one hand, and Ukrainian nationalist extremists on the other, UNDO found it difficult to maintain its middle-of-the-road policies.

Because most Ukrainian activists, including the vast majority of the intelligentsia and clergy, belonged to UNDO, it was the party of the West Ukrainian establishment. Its members controlled many Ukrainian financial, cooperative, and cultural institutions, including the most influential West Ukrainian newspaper, Dilo. During elections, it drew about 600,000 votes and won the vast majority of Ukrainian-held seats to parliament. Some of the party’s most important leaders were Dmytro Levytsky, Vasyl Mudry, Stefan Baran, Ostap Lutsky, Milena Rudnytska, and Ivan Kedryn.

Socialist tendencies among the West Ukrainians were strong but fragmented. Their main representative was the Radical party, the oldest of all Ukrainian parties. Its program called for an equitable distribution of land among the peasants, limits on private ownership, and separation of church and state. But it also emphasized that these goals could not be attained until an independent state that united all Ukrainians was established. Therefore, in the 1920S-1930S, the Radicals, who had been strong supporters of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, strongly opposed Poland and the USSR, the main opponents of Ukrainian independence.

In the 1930s the Radicals had about 20,000 members, most of whom were peasants, agricultural workers, and some intelligentsia. In the elections of 1928, the party received about 280,000 votes. Although based in Galicia, the Radicals made a strong effort to expand their influence into Volhynia, Polissia, and Kholm, uniting in 1926 with the smaller Volhynian-based Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary party to form the Ukrainian Socialist Radical party. Among their best-known leaders were such veterans as Lev Bachynsky and Ivan Makukh. While the Radicals inclined toward nationalism, the other prewar Ukrainian socialist party – the small and weak Social Democrats led by Lev Hankevych – veered toward communism.

During the 1920s, pro-Soviet views spread rapidly in Western Ukraine. To a large extent, this was a reaction to the Western powers’ favoritism of the Poles and to Poland’s oppression of its minorities. Moreover, the Ukrainization policies in Soviet Ukraine as well as the resurgence of the peasantry under the NEP also appealed to West Ukrainians. To encourage these tendencies, the Soviets appointed Ukrainians as their consuls in Lviv and tried to woo West Ukrainian intellectuals and students, boasting of Soviet Ukrainian achievements, and promising them responsible positions and a warm welcome in Ukraine.

Consequently, a number of leading West Ukrainian intellectuals and scholars, such as Mykhailo Lozynsky, Antin Krushelnytsky, and Stepan Rudnytsky, as well as hundreds of students immigrated to Soviet Ukraine (where almost all of them perished in the purges of the 1930s). Although the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv did not have formal contacts with the Soviet government, it did develop close ties with the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. West Ukrainian cooperatives exchanged expertise and data with their Soviet counterparts. The exiled West Ukrainian government of Ievhen Petrushevych adopted an openly pro-Soviet line after 1923, as did an influential segment of the UNDO leadership.

In its ascendancy, however, pro-Soviet feeling gave rise to a number of legal and illegal political organizations. In 1919 a small group of Galicians, most of whom had been prisoners of war in Russia during the revolution, formed the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia. When the Red Army briefly occupied part of Galicia in 1920, these Galician Communists, who consisted of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, formed an ephemeral “government.” In 1923 the party changed its name to the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU) and, bowing to pressure from the Communist International, became an autonomous part of the Polish Communist party. Even so, the Ukrainian leaders of this multiethnic party, such as Karol Maksymovych and Roman Kuzma, insisted on maintaining its Ukrainian character and exhibited a surprising degree of independence. They vigorously supported Shumsky and the national communist tendencies in Soviet Ukraine, making an issue of it in the international communist movement. This stance led to the removal of the KPZU’s Ukrainian leadership but did not end the fierce factionalism in the party. In 1938 it was dissolved on the orders of Stalin. In the 1930s, the KPZU had over 4000 members, about half of whom were Ukrainians, while the remainder were Poles and Jews who lived in Western Ukraine.

Because it was an illegal, underground party, in 1926 the KPZU encouraged the formation of a legal, broadly based front organization called Ukrainian Workers’-Peasants’ Socialist Union (Sel-Rob) for the purpose of gaining greater access to the masses. At the outset it was led by a leftist Russophile, Kyrylo Valnytsky, and by Pavlo Vasylchuk, a Ukrainian socialist from Volhynia. Internal conflicts, similar to those that had wracked the KPZU, soon split the organization into a right faction, which supported Ukrainian national goals, and a left faction, which sided with Moscow.

The remainder of the Ukrainian parties were small, weak, and inclined to cooperate with the Polish government. One of these was Bishop Hryhorii Khomyshyn’s Ukrainian Catholic party, which attempted, without success, to mobilize support for a clerical conservatism. The rapidly declining Russophiles established the Russian Peasant and the Russian Agrarian parties, which merged in 1931. This did not, however, prevent many of their rank and file from going over to the Ukrainian parties. The cooperative movement

“Rely on your own resources!” was the slogan of the activists in the “organic” sector of West Ukrainian society. It implied that since no one – and certainly not the Polish government – would aid Ukrainians in their endeavors, they had to help themselves. Cooperatives were seen by Ukrainians as one of the best ways of achieving such a goal. Before 1914 the cooperatives’ main function had been economic development. Under Polish rule, this function was greatly expanded: the cooperative movement came to view itself as a school for self-government and an instrument of economic self-defense. Indeed, one of its slogans proclaimed: “In the cooperatives the people learn to be masters of their own land.”

A major factor in the expansion of the cooperatives’ role was the thousands of Ukrainian army veterans who joined them. Patriotic, politicized, and frustrated by their defeat, they saw the cooperatives as a means of continuing the struggle for the Ukrainian cause: “By working in the cooperatives we are once again the nation’s soldiers.” Every cooperative that was organized, every product or service that it provided, and every penny that landed in Ukrainian rather than Polish pockets represented for them a blow against the Polish enemy and a step closer to independence. There was also a practical aspect to involvement in the cooperatives: in many cases the cooperatives provided the only employment opportunities available to the veterans.

The cooperatives quickly established an elaborate organization. Credit unions were united in an association called Tsentrobank; rural consumer and marketing unions formed Tsentrosoiuz; the union of dairy cooperatives was called Maslosoiuz; and Narodna Torhivlia represented the urban retailers. The umbrella organization that united all the cooperatives, audited their accounts, trained their personnel, and provided general guidance was RSUK (Audit Union of Ukrainian Cooperatives). The authority of RSUK was greatly enhanced by the high quality and dedication of some of its leaders, most notably Ostap Lutsky and Iuliian Pavlykovsky.

In the interwar period, rural consumer and marketing cooperatives dominated the movement because they addressed the main problem experienced by the peasants – the low prices they received for their produce and the high prices they had to pay for finished goods – by uniting them into larger, more-effective bargaining units. The dairy cooperatives of Maslosoiuz were most successful in marketing their products and they dominated the West Ukrainian, and even large parts of the Polish, markets.

Statistics testify to the dramatic growth of the cooperatives. In 1921 there were about 580 Ukrainian cooperatives in Eastern Galicia; in 1928 their number jumped to 2500; and by 1939 there were close to 4000. The total membership in the cooperatives on the eve of the Second World War was over 700,000, and they provided employment for over 15,000 Ukrainians. However, close to 90% of the cooperatives were in Eastern Galicia; in Volhynia, Kholm, and Polissia, Ukrainians were forced to join Polish cooperative associations. Nonetheless, Ukrainians had twice as many cooperatives per capita as did Poles, even with the advantage of government support enjoyed by the latter.

But the Ukrainian cooperatives also had serious problems. Alarmed by their growth, Polish government officials made a point of obstructing their further development. Polish tactics included allegations that reports were filled out incorrectly and building or hygienic codes were violated. Although the Ukrainian cooperatives were numerous and well organized, they were far less wealthy than those of the Poles and the lack of capital limited their economic impact. These difficulties notwithstanding, the cooperative movement accelerated social mobilization and national integration among the Ukrainians of Galicia and reflected their desire to take charge of their own affairs. Education

As might be expected, education was an extremely sensitive and important issue in the Ukrainian/Polish confrontation. Besides providing their children with an education, Ukrainians wanted the schools to raise Ukrainian national consciousness and cultural development. The Poles, for their part, expected the educational system to make non-Poles into loyal citizens of the Polish state. The Poles expanded education on the elementary level, especially in underdeveloped areas such as Volhynia, Polissia, and Kholm; by the 1930s illiteracy had dropped to 28% in the Ukrainian-inhabited areas of the Polish state (although it remained considerably higher in Volhynia). At the same time, however, the Ukrainian-language schools that had been established under Austrian rule were systematically eliminated under the guise of transforming them into bilingual schools. Of the more than 2400 Ukrainian elementary schools existing in Eastern Galicia in 1912, only 352 remained in 1937. In Volhynia the decline during this period was from 440 Ukrainian schools to 8. On the secondary level, the situation was also grim for the Ukrainians: in 1931 there was one Polish gymnazium for every 16,000 Poles but only one Ukrainian gymnazium per 230,000 Ukrainians.

Anti-Ukrainian discrimination in education was also obvious at the university level. The government never fulfilled its promise to establish a separate university for the Ukrainians and it systematically obstructed Ukrainians from obtaining a university education. Therefore, in 1920, the Ukrainians established a “secret” university in Lviv. Organized without the permission of the authorities, it offered a broad range of improvised courses that were taught in conspiratorial manner in secluded rooms and basements. At its high point, the university had 54 professors, 3 faculties, 15 departments, and about 1500 students. After the government closed down the courses in 1925, many Ukrainian students left to pursue their studies abroad, especially in Czechoslovakia. The net effect of these discriminatory government policies was that many educated Ukrainians became militantly anti-Polish and politically radicalized.

An attempt to meet Ukrainian needs at the secondary-school level was made by Ridna Shkola, an educational society, which by 1938 established about 40 gymnazia, lycees, and vocational schools. Dues from its membership, which jumped from 5000 in 1914 to over 100,000 in 1938, and contributions from immigrants in the United States and Canada provided much of the funding for its efforts. General cultural needs remained the domain of the venerable Prosvita society, the “mother” of all West Ukrainian organizations; in 1939 it had over 360,000 members. It supported a vast network of reading rooms, published educational materials, established day-care centers, and conducted a variety of courses.

The Galician penchant for organization carried over into other spheres as well. A variety of prewar youth organizations, such as the village-based Sokil and Luh (the old Sich), continued their activities while new ones, such as Plast, the scouting movement founded in 1911, attracted the children of the urban intelligentsia and groomed them for leadership positions in society. Convinced that the scouting movement was a hotbed of nationalism, the government banned it in 1930. An important organizational development in the interwar period was the growth of the women’s movement. Committed to creating a new, nationally conscious, culturally developed, and socioeconomically progressive woman, the Soiuz Ukrainok, founded in 1920, had over 45,000 members a decade later. Under the able leadership of Milena Rudnytska, a member of parliament, it carried on extensive charitable, educational, and cultural activities. It also had well-developed contacts with international feminist organizations. The churches

The largest, wealthiest, and most influential West Ukrainian organization was, of course, the Greek Catholic church. But striking changes occurred in the relative importance of this institution in Galician society. Unlike in the 19th century, when the church had been the only institution that the Ukrainians of Galicia had, in the interwar period it was only one, albeit the largest, of many and, therefore, could no longer count on the unquestioning loyalty of all Galician Ukrainians.

In the late 1930s, the church had over 4 million faithful in about 3000 parishes. The church also possessed a network of youth organizations and women’s societies, periodicals, and even its own political organization, the Ukrainian Catholic National party. An indication of its ability to mobilize the youth, particularly from the villages, was the massive Youth for Christ rally in 1933, which drew over 50,000 participants. The church also made progress on the educational level. In 1928 it established the only Ukrainian institution of higher learning in Poland, the Theological Academy in Lviv, the rector of which was Josyf Slipy. Three new seminaries were also founded.

The greatest asset of the Greek Catholic church during the interwar period was undoubtedly its leader, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. Universally respected for his strength of character, breadth of vision, and humanity, the metropolitan was the single-most influential figure in West Ukrainian society. His conviction that the Greek Catholic church was a distinctly Ukrainian institution that should preserve its Eastern ecclesiastical traditions and support the national aspirations of its people added to his popularity. This attitude brought him into conflict with a part of the church hierarchy, led by Bishop Khomyshyn and the Basilian Order, that preferred to stress ties to Roman Catholicism rather than the church’s distinctiveness.

The metropolitan also exerted considerable influence on political affairs. In 1930 he energetically protested the “pacification” campaign and five years later he supported the policy of “normalization.” While maintaining close relations with the moderates of UNDO, he chastised both nationalist extremists and Communists, constantly appealing for the need for higher values and broader vision.

In Volhynia, Polissia, and Kholm, the Orthodox church included about 2 million Ukrainians. Unlike the Greek Catholic church, it did not have the protection of Rome and was, therefore, more exposed to repressive Polish policies. In 1924, on the insistence of the government, the Orthodox church in Poland broke its ties with the Moscow patriarchate and declared autocephaly (ecclesiastical independence). Although old Russophile sympathies still survived at the upper levels of the church hierarchy, Ukrainian influences increased markedly at the grass-roots level as Ukrainian came to be used in the liturgy, religious publications, and the seminaries. Alarmed by these developments, the Polish government insisted on the use of Polish in church services and began a campaign, accompanied by the widespread destruction of Orthodox churches, to convert the Orthodox to Catholicism. Although Polonization did make some inroads, notably in the liturgy, conversions to Catholicism were rare.