Snyder T. The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. 384 p

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s found the OUN collaborating with the Abwehr, the intelligence service of

Nazi Germany.

GALICIANS AND VOLHYNIANS, 1921–1939

The ideology of the OUN is one matter, the position of Ukrainians in interwar

Poland quite another. Interwar Poland counted among its citizens about ﬁve

million individuals who spoke what we now call dialects of Ukrainian, and wor-

shiped in Greek Catholic or Orthodox churches. Roughly three million of them

were former Austrian subjects, usually Greek Catholics, in Galicia; roughly two

million were former Russian subjects, usually Orthodox, in Volhynia. Polish

ofﬁcials and Ukrainian activists alike distinguished between Galician and Vol-

hynian Ukrainians: from a Ukrainian nationalist point of view Galicians were

reliable and Volhynians good candidates for national agitation; from a Polish

etatist point of view Galicians were unreliable and Volhynians good candidates

for political assimilation. Polish policy aimed to keep the “bad” Galicians from

inﬂuencing the “good” Volhynians.

In Galicia, Polish policy was harsh enough to make new enemies, but far

from the sort of tyranny which might have stiﬂed Ukrainian civil society or

crushed Ukrainian nationalist conspiracies. The most painful blow to Galician

Ukrainians was the “Lex Grabski” of , which replaced Ukrainian-language

schools with bilingual (functionally Polish-language) schools. This was the

work of the National Democrat Stanislaw Grabski. Having taken on at Riga

what he considered manageable populations of Ukrainians, Grabski intended

that they be assimilated in the next generation. His law brought an explosion of

private schools and alienated Ukrainian youth from Polish authority.

In ,

while his brother Wladyslaw Grabski was prime minister, Stanislaw Grabski as

interior minister blocked efforts to make land reform more equitable. Pilsud-

ski’s coup in  might have marked a turning point. Henceforth “state assim-

ilation” rather than “national assimilation” was Polish policy: citizens were to be

judged by their loyalty to the state, and not by nationality. Sensing this turn of

events as a threat, the OUN undertook a campaign of sabotage designed to force

Pilsudski’s hand. In response, but also to gain support for parties he favored

in parliamentary elections, Pilsudski ordered hundreds of repressive counter-

measures. These very often included public corporal punishment.

Such hu-

miliation aroused lasting enmity.

Volhynia was a challenge of a different sort than Galicia. It was the second

largest region of Poland, its ﬁelds, forests, and marshes scarcely marred by roads

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

144

or rail links, its town innocent of sewers. The largest town was Równe (Rivne),

the majority of whose population of forty two thousand were Jews. Almost 

percent of Volhynia’s inhabitants, which is to say virtually everyone who was

not Jewish, worked the land (or owned it). By comparison with Volhynia, even

proverbially backward Galicia looked quite European, and quite national.

Whereas Galicia had just been mobilized by a great war between Ukrainians

and Poles, national movements were absent in the Volhynia of the early s.

The Polish-Lithuanian uprising of  had little resonance in Volhynia, where

Poles were fewer in number and Polish magnates had found an acceptable com-

promise with tsarist authorities. The Polish question, so fearful to Russian gov-

ernors in Lithuania, was regarded as resolved by Russian governors in Ukraine.

 percent of Polish Volhynia’s population was classiﬁed as Ukrainians in ,

but neither they nor the  percent classiﬁed as Poles betrayed much inclination

to national action. Many if not most local Poles spoke Ukrainian, and some

were former Uniates, now Orthodox. Before  there had been no national

Polish-Ukrainian disputes in Russian Volhynia comparable to those in Aus-

trian Galicia.

On the other hand, the tradition of (Ukrainian) peasant rising

against (Polish) landlords was more than two centuries old. Between  and

Galicia and Volhynia at the Margin

145

Fig. . Ukrainian schoolgirls at the Institute of Basilian Sisters, L’viv,  June .

Ukrainian culture survived outside the Polish state.

 alone, there had been  recorded cases of peasants violently asserting

their claims to land.

Although the First World War and the Polish-West Ukrai-

nian war had exposed young Volhynian men to the wider world of nationalism,

as of  the distribution of land had not yet been accepted by the peasants as

part of a general national liberation. Landlords were not yet seen as an alien na-

tion; the fatherland was still the property inherited from one’s father; land re-

form was not yet connected to the homeland.

This would change. In the  elections, Ukrainians in Volhynia voted for

Ukrainians. Once in parliament, Ukrainian deputes were unable to prevent

what they had been elected to stop: colonization by Polish settlers. Land hun-

ger had been the most meaningful social question in Volhynia for three cen-

turies. Poland did carry out land reform, and more or less ended feudal land-

holding practices.

In  Wincenty Witos, the Polish agrarian leader, aligned

his movement with the National Democrats. This ensured that agrarian poli-

tics in Poland was pro-Polish rather than pro-peasant, and that land reform

would be designed to favor Poles. Thus older tensions about the possession of

land began to overlap with newer national politics. The favorable treatment

and special credits granted to Polish colonists made the connection between

state power, language, and land clearer. Polish administrators appeared in Vol-

hynia alongside the colonists. Since local Poles were seen as insufﬁciently edu-

cated to govern Volhynia, Poles from central Poland and Galicia were dis-

patched by the state. This inﬂux of privileged Poles created a new stereotype

that slowly, it seems, attached to Poles in general.

Class and national tensions in Volhynia served Soviet propaganda. In the

s, the Soviet Union exported to Eastern Europe a version of communism

that endorsed peasant ambitions and opposed existing national states. Two tac-

tics of Lenin’s, the alliance with the peasantry and the tactical use of national

self-determination, were very appropriate in Volhynia; and indeed the Com-

munist International’s general exploitation of these questions was more fruit-

ful in eastern Poland than anywhere else. The Polish Communist Party be-

came so dominated by Ukrainians and Belarusians that Moscow had to call for

a correction. Yet, as any true Marxist would have seen, plans for radical and

uncompensated redistribution of land were popular for reasons of class struc-

ture. It was in Volhynia that economic and social conditions best matched

those of Lenin’s homeland: low productivity of the soil, high rates of natural

population increase, a high proportion of the population engaged in agricul-

ture, and extensive cultivation of the land. Soviet attention to the Polish state

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

146

Galicia and Volhynia at the Margin

147

Fig. . An inhabitant of Równo. The town is today Rivne, Ukraine. Towns in interwar

Volhynia were largely Jewish and increasingly Polish, the countryside almost entirely

Ukrainian. Now Volhynia is in Ukraine, and the towns resemble the countryside.

as the source of land hunger drew attention away from actual Soviet practice,

and strengthened the national coloring of the land question in Volhynia. Pro-

paganda was backed by demonstrations of force, as the Soviets organized and

executed hundreds of armed raids on Polish settlers in Polish Volhynia in the

early s.

The Polish state’s positive achievements, in education for instance, proved to

be of uncertain value in the larger political struggle. Polish policy created the

ﬁrst generation of educated Volhynian Ukrainians. But in backward Volhynia,

where jobs were few and Poles ran the administration, there was little digniﬁed

work for Ukrainian elites. As the Great Depression stultiﬁed Poland’s agricul-

ture, there was little chance for a middle class to emerge from the land in Vol-

hynia. The newly minted intellectual proletariat was thus good material for

communists from Kyiv and nationalists from L’viv. Volhynian Ukrainians learned

to read in Polish schools; they learned what to read from central Ukrainian

communists and Galician Ukrainian nationalists. Galician Ukrainian nation-

alists passed easily into Volhynia despite the so-called “Sokalski line” dividing

Galicia from Volhynia; Soviet agitators came and went with almost equal im-

punity across the Soviet-Polish frontier in eastern Volhynia. In this situation,

democracy continued to bring results unnerving to Warsaw. In the provincial

elections of  Volhynian Ukrainians voted for the cryptocommunist Left.

The Left also organized most of the public political demonstrations in Volhy-

nia.

Given the sensitive geopolitical position of Volhynia, just west of Soviet

Ukraine, this called for policy change. In  Józef Pilsudski sent his old com-

rade-in-arms Henryk Józewski to govern Volhynia.

Incidentally, the riddle to be solved in Volhynia was the loyalty of the Ukrai-

nian majority, not that of the Jewish minority. Ukrainian communism and

Ukrainian nationalism were both revanchist: the one favored the expansion of

Soviet Ukraine, the other the establishment of an independent Ukraine. Vol-

hynia was also a hotbed of Zionism: but Zionism was not about destroying

Poland, but about leaving it behind. Although  percent of Volhynian Jewish

adults identiﬁed Yiddish or Hebrew as their mother tongue, and two-thirds of

Jewish children were educated in Zionist private schools, this was seen in neu-

tral or positive terms.

Henryk Józewski (–), a son of Kijów and a sincere federalist, had been

Pilsudski’s agent within the Ukrainian government during the Polish-Ukrain-

ian alliance of –. Józewski supported Pilsudski’s policy of “state assimila-

tion,” and maintained that the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Common-

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

148

wealth provided a foundation for Polish-Ukrainian cooperation. Józewski had

a geopolitical vision; Volhynia would become an attractive Polish version of

Ukraine, and thereby stem the ﬂow of Bolshevism and nationalism. His failure

reveals the contradictions of Polish statehood in Volhynia within the Riga fron-

tiers. Józewski lacked support both from Polish society and from Ukrainian ac-

tivists. The ﬁrst did not understand why the Polish state was supporting Ukrai-

nian society; the second wanted to support Ukrainian society without the

interference of the Polish state. Although Józewski wished to create a Ukrainian

civil society, he had no choice but to eliminate its instantiations. Correctly per-

ceiving that Ukrainian cooperatives and educational societies provided cover

for communists and nationalists, he eliminated such organizations and re-

placed them with surrogates supported by the state. This had little effect, since

even the ofﬁcial organizations were often staffed by the same people. During

the Great Depression, the limited resources of the Polish state did not allow for

anything but local organizations, and local organizations had to be staffed by

local people. Over the longer term Józewski’s greatest hope was education, and

it was he who was responsible for the introduction of Ukrainian language

courses in all Volhynian state schools. Yet the proportion of teachers brought in

from central Poland increased under this administration, and such people had

no patience for his project and no knowledge of Ukrainian. Józewski worked to

Ukrainize the Orthodox Church, one of the main goals of Ukrainian national-

ists, but received no credit from them for doing so. In the end, Józewski suc-

ceeded where most Poles wished him to fail, and failed where most Poles

wished him to succeed. He succeeded in fostering a Ukrainian patriotism in

Volhynia, but failed to connect this new trend to Polish statehood.

One person who thought that Józewski’s labors could bear fruit was Stalin,

who apparently feared that he would build a Ukrainian Piedmont that would

draw Soviet Ukraine away from the USSR. These paranoid fears, not far from

Józewski’s and Pilsudski’s intentions but far from the reality of Volhynia, may

have provided part of Stalin’s motivation to crush Soviet Ukraine by Famine in

–. As usual, Polish federalists were seen as enemies by both communists

in Moscow and National Democrats in Warsaw. The National Democrats de-

spised Józewski, and after his patron Pilsudski’s death in  he lost control

over Volhynia policy. The army took over, destroying Orthodox churches and

conﬁscating property in an effort to strengthen the Polish presence. This antag-

onized Ukrainian society in Volhynia at what was, as we shall see, the worst pos-

sible moment.

Galicia and Volhynia at the Margin

149

THE POLISH STATE AND UKRAINIAN POLITICS,

1921–1939

A comparison between interwar Ukrainian and Lithuanian civil society is in-

structive. We have seen that in  the Ukrainian movement in Austria was

more impressive than the Lithuanian movement in Russia. After , the es-

tablishment of a Lithuanian state changed this balance by creating a Lithuanian

national society. In the s a new generation of educated Lithuanians was ab-

sorbed by a Lithuanian state apparatus and educational system; at the same

moment Galician Ukrainians were left with social organizations from the nine-

teenth century, fewer educational opportunities than their grandparents had

enjoyed under Austrian rule, and illegal or ineffectual political parties. For

Galicians and Volhynians alike, careers in legal politics had limited appeal, ca-

reers in the backward local economy held little promise, and by the s even

careers in the Church were insecure. Although the OUN was not a mass move-

ment while the Polish state lasted, the Polish state created conditions under

which its attractiveness as an outlet for the frustration of young and educated

Ukrainians grew and grew. Participation in OUN terrorism was a satisfying

way for young Ukrainians to take part in what appeared to them to be national,

revolutionary politics.

The marginalization of Ukrainians from legal politics was striking. Al-

though one-third of Poland’s citizens were classiﬁed as national minorities, no

minority representative was ever a minister in any Polish government (nor a re-

gional or local governor, for that matter). Few leading politicians took the na-

tional aspirations of Ukrainians or other minorities seriously, and rare were at-

tempts to co-opt Ukrainian elites by offering them attractive alternatives to

nationalism and communism. The Communist Party of West Ukraine was il-

legal from its origins in , and the cryptocommunist Ukrainian Peasant-

Worker Union (Sel-Rob) was banned in the early s. These parties were

criminalized because they opposed Polish statehood: but their illegality did not

solve the problem of the loyalties of their adherents. The main current of Ukrai-

nian political life was the UNDO (Ukrains’ke Natsional’ne Demokratychne

Ob’iednannia, Ukrainian National-Democratic Alliance). Although UNDO

activists generally regarded Soviet Ukraine as a stage in the creation of a

Ukrainian state, their fascination with the Soviet Union was reduced by news

of the purges and famine in Soviet Ukraine. From about  the UNDO sup-

ported Polish statehood. Its new policy of engagement with legal authorities

was always at risk of being undermined by Polish repression, and the OUN in-

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

150

tentionally provoked such repression by killing Polish ofﬁcials. In the late

s, after Pilsudski’s death, the Polish state returned with far greater aggres-

sion to a policy of “national assimilation.” Army raids, public beatings, and

burning churches helped the OUN spread the word of a coming war of nation

upon nation.

Galicia and Volhynia at the Margin

151

Fig. . Jews and Christians buy and sell at the Lwów market.

Even in , this was a political message, not a description of social reality.

Ukrainian terrorism and Polish reprisals touched only part of the population,

leaving vast regions unaffected. OUN activists assumed that all Ukrainian-

speaking citizens of the Polish Republic were endowed with, or were becom-

ing endowed with, exclusionary national identities. Later events incline both

friends and foes of Ukrainian nationalism to imagine that Galicia and Volhynia

were in the s and s home to a society of Ukrainians with clear nation-

alist views. As we have seen, far more Ukrainians were attracted to socialism,

agrarianism, and national communism than to the integral nationalism of the

OUN. There was no natural ﬁt between the ideology of expatriate war veter-

ans and frustrated intellectuals and the concerns of the  percent of Ukrain-

ian-speakers in Poland who worked the land; there was no end in sight to tra-

ditions of Russophilia when even the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine did not

dim the hope of many local Ukrainian activists that Russia would one day

bring social liberation. Lwów remained a center of Ukrainian nationalism, but

Polish and Yiddish were the city’s main languages. Even in the cities and

towns, many of interwar Poland’s Ukrainians were neither interested in na-

tional politics, nor possessed of a clear sense of national identity. Many others

with a clear and sense of themselves as Ukrainians did not draw the conclusion

that identiﬁcation with a Ukrainian community must coincide with loyalty to

a Ukrainian state. In the s and s a series of negative connections had

been made: land hunger and religious persecution were newly linked to Polish

rule. Yet the OUN’s nationalist prescription, a Ukrainian state for ethnic

Ukrainians alone, was far from popular. Its acceptance required a total war

that destroyed the Polish state, warped the idea of law, wrecked local commu-

nities, and provided the worst sort of examples. This is the subject of chapters

to come.

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152

Fig. . Christians and Jews buy and

sell at the Lwów market.

Here let us emphasize a simple fact: interwar Poland included hundreds of

communities, barely touched by the state, whose residents knew who was Pol-

ish and who was Ukrainian, yet regarded their village or county as more impor-

tant than some larger nation. A colorful example, to which we shall return, was

the Galician village of Dobra Shl’iakhets’ka/Dobra Szlachecka. Here Ukrain-

ian-speaking gentry owned the land and set the tone. Three Orthodox brothers

ennobled by the king of Poland in the early ﬁfteenth century established tradi-

tions in which loyalty to Polish authorities was combined with resistance to

every attempt to restrict local autonomy. Their heirs were included in every

Polish census of the nobility, and maintained their position in Austrian Galicia

in the nineteenth century. In interwar Poland, the Ukrainophone gentry in

Dobra still enjoyed wealth and status, protecting the forests they collectively

owned, and offering their daughters as attractive prizes to Poles from beyond

the village. Poles in the village attended Greek Catholic services and spoke

Ukrainian in public. Jewish families were Dobra’s innkeepers and traders. In

, Dobra was neither Ukrainian, nor Polish, nor Ukrainian-Polish. It was a

local reality unto itself, Galician if you like, hovering perhaps on the edge of the

national modernity the next chapters will describe: but bearing the traces of

earlier ideas of nationality, ancient conceptions of political order that time

alone did not efface.

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153