The Poisonous Fruits of Hatred

A historian is neither a judge nor a prosecutor, just a biased chronicler of the past. Yet professional documented chronicles can and must serve to restore historical memory and help governments and honest politicians pursue a constructive policy. This is precisely what the half a million Ukrainians whom the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and Poland forcibly deported from Poland to Soviet Ukraine in 1944-1951 are demanding today.

The new architects of postwar Europe were very well aware of the Ukrainian national liberation movement or, to use their notorious term, Ukrainian separatism. Oddly enough, the geopolitical situation in Central and Eastern Europe in 1944 was such that deportation of socially active Western Ukrainians was to the benefit of both the London-based Polish government in exile and the USSR, with its communist client-state in Poland. The Mykolajczyk government in exile sought to restore the Second Rzeczpospolita within the borders that had existed between the two World Wars. The pro-Soviet Polish National Liberation Committee, formed in July 1944 in Moscow with Stalin’s approval and ‘educated’ in the Moscow suburb of Barvikha, viewed the deportation of Western Ukrainians as a tool to ensure stability for a new monoethnic state.

Unfortunately, the US and British governments agreed to the “exchange of populations,” including the transfer of Ukrainians and Poles, because they still considered Poland a sphere of their geopolitical interests. The Kremlin in turn tried to suppress, by way of deportations, a powerful bulwark of Ukrainian national liberation movement in the Carpathians, spearheaded by the exhausted but unvanquished Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA. To execute this sinister plan, Stalin attempted to use the obedient Poles. On July 27, 1944, while the Red Army was stationed on the banks of the Sian River, the leader of the Polish National Liberation Committee signed a secret agreement in Moscow about the Soviet-Polish border along the “Curzon line.” The Poles even managed to cajole the dictator into ceding them quite a large territory east of this line, including the erstwhile princely cities of Peremyshl (Przemysl), Yaroslav (Jaroslaw), and Kholm (Chelm). As early as September 9 this same Polish committee signed an agreement in Lublin with Soviet Ukraine’s government on evacuating the Ukrainian population from the territory of Poland, and Polish nationals from Ukraine. Clearly, this accord was signed under the Kremlin’s watchful eye. The contracting parties undertook to evacuate from October 15, 1944, until February 1, 1945, “all ethnic Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and Ruthenians residing in the Chelm, Hrubieszow, Lubaczow, Jaroslaw, Przemysl, Liskow, Zamosc, Krasnystaw, Bilgoraj, Wlodawa districts and other areas of Poland.” This was followed by the cynical statement, “The evacuation being voluntary, no direct or indirect coercion shall be applied. The evacuees are free to express their wish both orally and in writing.” Yet the harsh reality of the so-called evacuation eclipsed the “voluntary nature” of the action and entailed mass-scale compulsory deportations of Ukrainians from such ancient Ukrainian lands as the Sian, Kholm and Lemko regions. Eastern Halychyna and Volyn Poles were also forcibly resettled to German ethnic territories.

Today, researchers single out several stages of the 1944-1951 deportations. During the first stage (October 15-December 31, 1944), the resettlement of a small number of exhausted people bore some semblance of voluntariness. Yet the oncoming winter practically put an end to departure requests from northern Zakerzonnia (“beyond the Curzon line”), while the southern districts ignored the action altogether. Then, in response to Polish underground terror and by force of military circumstances and abuses on the part of the Polish authorities, who would close Ukrainian schools and transfer churches to the Roman Catholics, 28,589 people left for Ukraine. The then leader of Soviet Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, failed to implement the idea of establishing a separate Kholm oblast in Ukraine. As is known, many requests of Ukrainians who were living beyond the Sian to incorporate their lands into Ukraine have been preserved in archives.

The second stage of the deportations (January 1-August 31, 1945) was timed to coincide with the advance of the Red Army, which occupied the Sian and Lemko regions. This time, the people slated to leave were the Ukrainians whose houses and property had been destroyed during the hostilities against the Germans in the Lupkow and Duplian passes and as a result of forays by the Polish underground. Nevertheless, requests for resettlement in Soviet Ukraine practically came to a halt in the summer of 1945. Desperate people fled to the woods and re-formed guerrilla units, while many youths were mobilized into the Red Army. Some families sought help from Roman Catholic churchmen and the administration of the Polish schools that their children were forced to attend. Many people lodged protests at the time, for example, the residents of the village of Glomcza: “...Our homeland is here, and we are not going to leave. We think the Ukrainian border should extend as far as Krynica.” There were also other cries of desperation from Lemko residents: “If the Soviet Union does not want our land, then it does not want us, so leave us alone.”

As these Ukrainian acts of protest were foiling the evacuation plans, the 3rd, 8th, and 9th Infantry Divisions of the Polish Army marched into the Liskow, Przemysl, Lubaczow and Jaroslaw districts to help the local authorities clear the frontier of so- called “Ukrainian nationalists.” Thus, the use of Polish troops signaled the third stage of deportations (81,806 people) which lasted, by and large, from September 1 to March 1946. The Polish troops in conjunction with some NKVD units deported most of the Ukrainians from Nadsiannia. The slow pace of deportations in the Liskow, Lubaczow and Sianoc districts triggered reprisals by UPA-West. The Ukrainian insurgents destroyed communications, fomented protests against the resettlement, and hampered the work of the evacuation commissions. To prevent Polish repatriates from settling in the depopulated Ukrainian villages, the UPA often burned these villages down. Among those who courageously defended the frontier from the terror of the authorities and troops were the companies of Burlaka, Hromenko, Krylach and Lastivka, mostly manned by local residents. Attempts were also made, without apparent success, to make peace with the Armia Krajowa command. At the fourth and final stage, the deportation of Ukrainians to Soviet Ukraine assumed the nature of ethnic cleansing, a fact that Polish officials still do not always accept. In the second half of 1945 and also in 1946, the Communist government of Poland had no scruples about organizing a new “pacification,” burning dozens of Ukrainian villages and terrorizing peaceful residents on the principle of collective responsibility. This forced desperate peasants to leave behind their property and cross the Polish-Soviet border en masse — illegally, without documents. Many fled to Slovakia and then to Germany or into Poland’s hinterland.

The fourth stage saw 154,000 people deported to the east. On the whole, the Polish totalitarian government deported about 482,000 Ukrainians in 1944-1946. Apart from ordinary citizens, about 300 priests were also forcibly deported to Soviet Ukraine. The Polish government interpreted the arrest and deportation to the USSR of Przemysl bishop Josaphat Kotsylovsky as the abolition of the Przemysl Diocese. By 1947 there was not a single Greek Catholic church left in Przemysl. In 1947-1949 the state nationalized the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s property, with many premises being leased out to the Roman Catholic Church. The overwhelming majority of deportees settled in the western regions, and a third of them were moved to the eastern and southern parts of Soviet Ukraine. However, secret documents of the Soviet security forces say that the flight of “those from behind the Curzon line” from the east to the west of Poland, where individual farming prevailed, was of a hasty and mass- scale nature. This is why the Council of People’s Commissars of Soviet Ukraine resolved on October 16, 1945, to ban resettlement in Ukraine’s western regions. Yet the deportees continued to be settled without permission in Ternopil, Drohobych, Lviv and Volyn oblasts.

Finally, the Polish government’s Operation Vistula (Akcja Wisla) in 1947, when at least 150,000 Ukrainians were deported to northern Poland, concluded ethnic cleansing in the eastern frontier. In the course of pre- planned ethnic cleansing of the frontier, the two totalitarian regimes repeatedly revised the interstate border. For instance, during the new demarcations of the Polish-Ukrainian border in 1945-1948, Soviet Ukraine and Poland obtained 18.9 sq. km. and 20.5 sq. km., respectively. Under the Soviet-Polish treaty of February 15, 1951, Poland received another 480 sq. km. of Drohobych oblast and Ukraine, a same-sized area of Lublin voivodship. Clearly, the repressions against and the deportations of the Ukrainians exposed the anti-people nature of the totalitarian regimes of Communist Poland and the USSR. The Soviet government failed to fulfill its commitments to provide the deportees with logistical support. Only 56% of resettled households were compensated for the property they left behind in Poland. Sadly, the plans of Warsaw and Moscow reflected the interests of the government, not the people.

For decades the deported Ukrainians remained a socially unprotected and psychologically vulnerable part of postwar Soviet society. Today the settlers hope that the government of the new Ukraine, and in the long run of post-Communist Poland, will fully share the pain and tragedy of the hundreds of Ukrainians who were born in the western-most Ukrainian lands and are now advocating the current cause of Ukraine by word and deed. Victims of the totalitarian regime are demanding a political appraisal of these past shameful misdeeds as well as material compensation for the damage done to their families.