Learning to interact as equals
The scholarly conference, Ukrainians and Poles During World War II: Domestic and International Aspects, organized by the Institute of the History of Ukraine (Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences) and the Institute of History (Polish Academy of Sciences) (see the previous issue), ended the Friday before last in Kyiv. For two days, the two neighboring countries’ respected historians and parliament members sought to cut through the Gordian knot of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict in the first half of the twentieth century. Even subconsciously, all the conference participants focused on events sixty years ago, the beginning of tragic developments in Volyn in 1943-1944 that claimed the lives of tens thousands of both Poles and Ukrainians.
Meetings of this kind and exchanges of opinions are undoubtedly necessary, but it is a fact that both sides stuck to their own, basically mutually exclusive, views on the problem. The guests regarded the Volyn events as genocide (with elements of ethnic cleansing) of the Poles perpetrated by the Ukrainians on the territory of a legitimate Polish state known as the Second Rzeczpospolita, and suggested putting an equal sign between the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). It is common knowledge, though, that OUN members were an absolute minority of the UPA units precisely in Volyn.
The Ukrainian historians laid emphasis on the support for UPA and self-defense units by the local population and tried to give a detailed account of the Polish- Ukrainian conflict... Very soon, however, some important and, if you like, conceptual points were left outside the debate. For instance, only Candidate of Sciences in history Mykola Kucherepa from Volyn State University noted, “The sources of the conflict should be sought in the official policies of the Second Rzeczpospolita: in January 1939 Warsaw mapped out and adopted the program of complete Polonization and conversion to Catholicism of the Volyn Ukrainians” (a similar program was put into practice in Eastern Halychyna — Author). Besides, it is not only the experts who know that the root causes of the conflict date back not only to the interbellum period, the time of the terrible Pacification campaigns against the Ukrainian population of Volyn and Halychyna, but also to older periods.
The conflict did not come to a head until September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The situation was further exacerbated by the Soviet troops’ “expedition of liberation” on September 17. War is always an extreme situation. It is extremely difficult to give an exhaustive answer to the bitter questions of who and whom to blame, because Western Ukraine was in 1941-1944 an arena for several antagonistic forces: the German occupation administration, units of the Polish Armia Krajowa loyal to the London government-in-exile, Polish self-defense detachments inclined to collaborate with Soviet guerrillas, units of the UPA, and the Polissia Sich of Taras Bulba-Borovets.
Yet, as Professor of history Yury Shapoval noted, we Ukrainians “must also finally solve the following problem: unless the state makes its final conclusion about OUN and UPA and we go through the painful paces of an internal dialog, it will be difficult to communicate with the Poles on equal terms.”
Moreover, if we want to conduct a dialog, we must reject — without undue soul-searching — any manifestations of anti-Polish hysteria. The latter was especially evident during the conference, when, on the initiative of super- patriots, each participant was given photocopies of some Volyn newspaper articles and Volodymyr Serhiychuk’s book with an overtly provocative cover and, to no lesser extent, content. An equally implacable stand has been taken by Polish historians Wladyslaw and Ewa Siemaszko in their book Genocide of the Polish Population of Volyn by Ukrainian Nationalists in 1939-1945 that came out in 2000 with the active assistance of the Polish presidential administration and a number of ministries. Unfortunately, this kind of approach to the problem of collective memory prevails on the Polish side. Most probably, a balanced Polish attitude will become possible only when the Ukrainian side takes a clear stand of its own. Regrettably, it is too early to expect this.
Ukrainian People’s Deputy Ivan Drach pointed out, “When independent Ukraine was still in its infancy, I put forward the slogan ‘The road to Europe goes through Poland.’ Polish-Ukrainian relations have always been of great value for us. I think when a man and a woman have some problems but still want to save their family, they try to minimize looking for who is to blame because this ‘untangling’ of a situation makes it impossible for them to live together any more. Both Ukrainians and Poles were manipulated by Berlin as well as Moscow. Today, the Poles, as the more organized nation, make more active use of any situation than the Ukrainians. We are doomed to live together. And we can only survive if we respect and heed one another.”
On his part, Verkhovna Rada Deputy Speaker Oleksandr Zinchenko told Polish Sejm Deputy Jan Bira, who took part in the conference, that it was important “not to mix history with current-day politics” because this will have an adverse effect not only on the today’s bilateral relations but also on the future cooperation between the two countries.
