Ukrainians and Poles are to make one more step to reconcile with the past
On February 13, at a meeting between presidents Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine and Aleksander Kwasniewsky of Poland, an agreement was signed, On Preparing Measures to Appropriately Commemorate the Victims of the Tragic Events [a fratricidal conflict between the Ukrainians and Poles 60 years ago in Volyn]. A severe war between the Armia Krajowa regiments (subordinate to the Polish Government in emigration) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) took the lives of tens of thousands of our compatriots, Poles as well as Ukrainians.
Historically, the roots of the conflict are to be found long before the Liublin (1569) and Beresteysk (1596) unions were signed. However, those were mostly local conflicts. After creating Rzeczpospolita and subordinating the Orthodox church in Ukraine to Rome, a wave of Polish colonization covered Volyn, Halychyna, and Naddniprianshchyna. The essence of the conflict was not only the ethnic hostility towards and religious oppression of Ukrainians, but also over social inequality. Later, there were harsh suppressions of the Cossack and peasant uprisings in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries by the Polish authorities, and, as a response, the Liberation War, guided by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in mid- seventeenth century and the bloodshed of Koliyivshchyna in 1768. As soon as in the 1790s, the Rzeczpospolita ceased to exist as a state, being divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. For as long as 125 years, Volyn has been a part of the Russian Empire. After World War I, this mostly Ukrainian-speaking and orthodox land appeared under the dominion of the newborn Rzeczpospolita, in accordance with the decisions taken in Versailles in 1919. Jozef Pilsudski’s police of “sanitation”, fierce “pacification” of Ukrainian country became a true time bomb. On the other hand, Volyn and Halychyna became a Vandea, which to a considerable extent undermined the Second Rzeczpospolita, where the ruling nation didn’t even conceal its disgust towards the “natives,” be they Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Lithuanians.
After the defeat of Poland in 1939 in the war against Nazi Germany and in accordance with the secret protocols to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, Volyn and Halychyna were included into the Soviet Union. The conflict between the neighboring nations, suppressed due to the permanent repressive measures the Bolsheviks took against both Ukrainians and Poles, emerged as soon as a few months after the war began between Germany and the USSR. As a result, in March of 1943, the fight between the AK and UPA, inspired by both Berlin and Moscow, escalated to bloodshed where there were no rights or wrongs.
How is it possible to break common stereotypes in which Poles see Ukrainians only as dangerous nationalists? This approach was encouraged by both Moscow and pro-Communist Warsaw. Ukrainians, in their turn, should not keep silent about the Volyn events, which were nothing but an ethnic purge. According to various Polish sources, almost 50,000 Poles were killed, mostly peaceful inhabitants. For the sake of the future generations we are to put an end to this conflict and, to quote from Polish writer Jan Jozef Lipski, “to break this vicious circle of mutual grudges.”
THE DAY’S COMMENT
Yury SHAPOVAL, Professor, Ph.D. in History, Head of the Center for Historical Political Science at the Institute for Political and Ethnic Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine:
“Undoubtedly, we are to discuss the conflict of 1943-1944 with the Poles, whatever people say. However, one should avoid simplification here. Some Ukrainians base their conclusions only upon OUN-UPA documents, others on NKVD ones, while Polish researchers — upon AK materials and the ones from the representatives of the Polish emigration government in the occupied Poland [Delegatura]. This is where the nationalist passions come from. I think this way is ineffective and none of these documents, taken separately, is able to give an objective picture. All of them require critical attitude. Only studying and comparing the whole complex of archive sources will make it possible to avoid vulgarization and, in part, will demonstrate how fruitless the attempts are to find out who was the first to start the “reap of death” in Volyn.
“Not all motives for the Volyn events have been considered so far. Take, for instance, the social factors. Suffice it to recall the proportions of land property: since pre-war period, most of the land lots in Ukraine belonged to Polish colonists. Thus, when on August 15, 1943, the UPA issued a decree on delivering lands belonging to former Polish landlords and colonists to Ukrainians, the latter received it approvingly, and Poles vise versa, which escalated the long-term hostilities.
“There is no doubt that the Germans used Poles in their fight against Ukrainian nationalists, as well as the Stalin regime (which was also admitted by People’s Commissars for Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, Serhiy Savchenko). This has been broadly discussed. Simultaneously, in my view, the non-interference by Germans and Russians into the Polish-Ukrainian conflict has played a key role. These hostilities were determined by Polish and Ukrainian mutual extremism, which depreciated people’s lives under patriotic slogans. There is no excuse for any side. Poland and Ukraine are to denounce the violence, so that the Volyn Leviathan would never raise its head again in our independent countries.”
