Unique documents from Polish and Ukrainian secret service archives

The second volume of the Polish-Ukrainian series, Poland and Ukraine in the 1930s-1940s: Unknown Documents from Special Service Archives, is a publication of the State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine [SBU] jointly with the Central Archives of the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is dedicated to the deportation of Poles and Ukrainians in 1944-46. The first volume deals with the Polish resistance movement in Halychyna (1939-41), and the introduction is written by the Ukrainian and Polish presidents. The third volume currently in preparation will be called The Polish Underground in 1939-41, from Volyn to Pokuttia.

Such close attention to dramatic pages in the annals of common Ukrainian-Polish history that have not been elucidated in historiography is the project’s underlying principle and the direct result of the democratization in Ukrainian and Polish societies. An important step was taken by disclosing secret documents and launching them into extensive scholarly circulation to foster understanding between the Ukrainian and Polish nations. It has long been proven that the truth about past crimes must be brought out into the open rather than kept secret; it must be discussed and judgment passed jointly, condemning shameful excesses in the past, so as to reinforce the foundations of further neighborly relationships.

Hence the assiduity with which archivists in the Ukrainian and Polish clandestine agencies selected and compiled strikingly revealing documents illustrating the methods used in the deportation of Poles near the end of World War II along with the postwar “exchange of populations” between the USSR and the newly formed Polish People’s Republic. Most characteristically, these documents address an extremely broad range of issues in the diplomatic, administrative, and political domains, but were accumulated and kept in the secret archives of both totalitarian regimes.

Of almost two hundred archival documents, most originate from the SBU State Archives and those of the Polish Internal Affairs Ministry; a few come from the Central State Archives of Ukrainian Social Organizations (former Archive of Party History) and Polish Central Military Archives. They are grouped in two chapters: deportation of Poles to Ukraine in 1944 (7 documents) and deportation of Ukrainians and Poles in 1944-46 (184 documents). Put together, they paint a tragic panorama of the exchange of living souls by both totalitarian Communist regimes under the guise of a noble act, allegedly returning Ukrainian and Poles to their historical Fatherlands and “reuniting” them with their people. The collection is all the more important in that it contains documents composed by the Soviet and Polish secret police and meant for the eyes of the political elite only, while they prompted decisions having major international consequences.

These documents are also a precious reference source not only for studying the deportation, its methods, and consequences. In fact, the range of issues involved is much broader, including the Ukrainian and Polish underground at the time of deportation; there is a considerable amount of information relating to UPA “behind the Curzon Line” and Armia Krajowa in the western territories of Soviet Ukraine; public sentiments, hopes, and ideas of ordinary Poles and Ukrainians during that “population exchange,” finally, what methods the clandestine agencies applied, particularly in the USSR, shipping off several secret agents with every trainload of deportees. This list could be made considerably longer, yet the above suffices to attest the exceptional importance of the collection of documents in studying all aspects of Ukrainian-Polish relations in 1944-46. The publisher’s foreword correctly notes that, despite the sizable amount of available sources pertaining to deportation, “this edition will also help reinforce the scientific base and form an unbiased concept of complicated and dramatic events during that epoch.”

The Deportation of Poles and Ukrainians maintains a high level of scholarly rigor. The compilers, SBU and Polish Internal Affairs Ministry officers and republic administration officials, along with the chief scholarly editors Yury Shapoval and Andrzej Tucholski, skillfully compiled and processed archival documents that are always difficult to prepare for publication. On the whole, this work is an example of effectively solving the problem of a parallel bilingual edition, regrettably a rare occurrence in contemporary Ukrainian and world archaeography (study of old documents —Ed.).

Simultaneously, the compilers failed to solve a number of other problems bound to appear when handling such a documentary compilation. First is agreement between the translations and the placement of documents. This principle is not always observed, resulting in a considerable increase in the collection’s size and impractical usage of its printed area.

The second problem is the need every time to specify the language of the document, so the reader can understand which document, Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish, is the translation. Since the compilers kept this specification in mind only now and then, the reader can only guess the language of the original (e.g., the documents from the Kyiv archives are in the former and those from the Polish archives in the latter). In any case, we believe that the editors should have pointed to this principle, as well as to certain exceptions, in their foreword.

Cases when a given document is not provided in full are accompanied by the compilers’ notation, Excerpts selected, with three dots pointing to omissions. However, under modern requirements of historical documentation it is worth specifying the reasons for such omissions and their size, and stating the underlying principle of such omissions in the foreword. Also, they should have explained the notations used in the collection, because it is somewhat different from what we are used to in Ukraine.

Such shortcomings, however, are practically unavoidable in any complex parallel bilingual publication, and they cannot substantially affect the overall high quality of the collection under study. It constitutes a major contribution to Ukrainian and Polish archaeography as well as an importance reference source in studying dramatic pages in Ukrainian-Polish history of the twentieth century.

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The Editors, with permission from the chief Ukrainian scholarly editor Yury Shapoval, Ph.D. in history, are enclosing herewith several excerpts from the second volume of the series Deportation of Poles and Ukrainians in 1944-46.

From a letter addressed by a Polish woman, Yuliya ROMANOVYCH, to Ivan TREMBETSKY: “When they announced that we were going back home, we were overjoyed, it was our happiest moment in Russia. Describing our trip would be a very long story. Some disease appeared in our railroad car; there were thirty people in one of the cars, dressed in rags, and there were as many lice as there were threads [in their clothes], so it was not surprising that people fell ill because of the dirt, misery, and hunger. In our car six persons got sick: two came down with typhus and four with the flu. After three weeks on the train there was an onslaught of lice, myriad of them as never seen anywhere else in the world. Eventually, we were given an apartment with fifteen persons per room. We do no cooking, there is no food. 99% have no clothes or shoes , so we can’t go to work. So we sit home, hunting lice and mending our rags. If we knew we weren’t going home, we would never go, we would stay and live somehow...”

Excerpts from a letter addressed by Viktor Abakumov to USSR Minister of State Security Lavrenty Beriya, quoting from letters of Ukrainian deportees from Poland:

“Deportee M. H. FILIAK, residing at the Antonivka village council, Ustynivka district, Kirovohrad oblast, noted in a letter to the US: ‘We go to work in the field, because they make us; they don’t believe me when I say I’m sick. We go and work and are paid nothing; I have no home and I don’t want to live at all. They say we’ll buy ourselves homes, but none of our people wants to do so, because no one likes this way of life when one has to work without food, without earning anything, without having anything to wear...’

“Deportee M. KON’, resident of the Red Star Collective Farm, Adzhamka district, Kirovohrad oblast, states in a letter to America: ‘Only two families are left of our people, the rest have fled to Western Ukraine, because they don’t have any collective farms there. I stayed, I couldn’t leave because I have small children. We have no clothes, no shoes; here one can’t earn enough to buy clothes or footwear... I don’t know if we are ever going to live in a normal way or not.”