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GALICIA AND VOLHYNIA IN INTERWAR
POLAND (III.1921 – VIII.1939) Paul Robert Magocsi Chapter 44 from the book ”History of Ukraine”, Toronto / 1996 |
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As a result of the settlements reached by
the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Riga, the restored state of
Poland between July 1919 and March 1921 was able to obtain territories
inhabited by as many as four to five million Ukrainians. By 1931, according
to official statistics Ukrainians numbered 4.4 million persons, or 14 percent
of Poland's population. Unofficial estimates placed their number at between
five and six million. As a national minority, Ukrainians were guaranteed
equality before the law, the right to maintain their own schools, and the
right to use Ukrainian in public life and in elementary schools. These rights
were oudined in the treaties of Versailles (28 June
1919) and Riga (18 March 1921) as well as in the Polish constitution (Articles
108 and 109) promulgated on 17 March 1921.
The administrative
status of Ukrainian-inhabited lands Ukrainian territories within Poland
consisted of (1) the eastern half of the old Austrian province of Galicia,
including the Lemko region along the crests of the
Carpathian Mountains in western' Galicia; and (2) the so-called northern
Ukrainian-inhabited regions, of western Volhynia,
southern Podlachia, Polissia,
and the Chelm region, all of which had been part of
the Russian Empire before 1914. Because the eastern half of former Austrian
Galicia became the West Ukrainian National Republic in late 1918, and because
according to international law that territory was not considered part of
Poland until 1923, eastern Galicia continued throughout the interwar period
to undergo a development that was in many ways distinct from that of Poland's
'northern' Ukrainian lands. The reconstituted state of Poland was a
republic governed by a bicameral legislature consisting of the elected House
of Deputies (Sejm) and the Senate, and a president
elected for a term of seven years. Poland was a centralized state,
administratively divided into palatinates (wojewodztwa),
which were subdivided into districts (powiaty) made
up in turn of communes (gminy). The palatinates had
no relationship to any historical units, and none, with the exception of
Silesia, had any autonomous status.
Even before eastern Galicia was
internationally recognized as a part of Poland, its territory was divided
into three provinces: Lwow/L'viv,
Stanislawow/Stanyslaviv,
and Tarnopol/Ternopil'.
Initially, the Polish government considered Ukrainian- inhabited eastern
Galicia a distinct territorial entity, and from March 1920 it was referred to
by the Polish name Malopolska Wschodnia,
or Eastern Little Poland. Eventually, in September 1922, a law was approved
by the Polish Sejm which proposed self-government
for each of the three Ukrainian-inhabited palatinates. This law, however, was
never ratified by the Polish government. The other Ukrainian- inhabited lands
of western Volhynia, Polissia,
southern Podlachia, and Chelm,
were divided among the Polish palatinates of Luck/Luts'k,
Brzesc/Brest, and Lublin. The economic status of
Ukrainian-inhabited lands The socioeconomic development of Ukrainian
lands within interwar Poland evolved in a manner that was in stark contrast
to the situation in neighboring Soviet Ukraine. Eastern Galicia and the other
Ukrainian territories in Poland essentially remained what they had been
before 1914 under Austrian and Russian rule. In other words, they continued to
be treated as territories from which raw materials could be obtained and in
which products from the more industrial western and central parts of Poland
could find a market. In general, however, the entire Polish economy was
agrarian in nature; it remained weak and unstable throughout the interwar
period; and it was especially hard hit by the world economic crisis of the
1930s. In these circumstances, there was little hope that the Polish
government could make any substantial improvement in the economy of the
'peripheral' eastern regions (kresy) inhabited by
Ukrainians. Thus, by 1939 eastern Galicia, with over
five million inhabitants, had a mere 44,000 workers, employed in 534
industrial enterprises. This small industrial sector consisted primarily of
woodworking mills (35.2 percent), food processing plants (20.9 percent),
building-material factories (14 percent), and metalworking shops (12.5
percent). The oil-producing regions in eastern Galicia (around Boryslav and Drohobych), which
had made remarkable progress on the eve of World War I (producing almost four
percent of world production), never again reached their prewar levels. The
highest output under Polish rule (1923 - 737,000 tons [670 thousand metric
tons]) was only one-third the highest prewar level. Then came
the world economic depression and a decline in the traditional foreign
investments, which, together with the gradual exhaustion of the oil deposits,
reduced the output. By 1938, the eastern Galician fields were producing less
than half what they produced in 1923. Even less industrial development took
place in the northern territories of Volhynia, Podlachia, and Polissia, where
there were at most 8,000 industrial workers with steady employment and
another 11,000 seasonal workers in basalt and granite factories and in the
lumber industry. Since agriculture was the dominant element
in the economy of Poland's Ukrainian lands, the agrarian question was most
pressing. The peasants in Poland, notwithstanding their nationality, all
expected to benefit from the new political situation and to obtain land. In
July 1919, the provisional Polish parliament (Sejm)
called for agrarian reform. Within a year, the parliament considered a law
providing for compulsory partition of the large landed estates, which at the
time accounted for 47 percent of the country's arable land. The proposed law
was blocked by its opponents, however, and it was not until December 1925
that the Polish parliament succeeded in passing a law that indeed called for
the partition of the large estates, but only on a voluntary basis. Despite the voluntary nature of the reform,
the land was partitioned, and by 1938 nearly two million acres (some 800,000
hectares) had been redistributed within Ukrainian-inhabited areas. The
redistribution did not necessarily help the local Ukrainian population,
however. For instance, as early as 1920, 39 percent of the newly allotted
land in Volhynia and Polissia
(771,000 acres [312,000 hectares]) had been awarded as political patronage to
veterans of Poland's 'war for independence,' and in eastern Galicia much land
(494,000 acres [200,000 hectares]) had been given to land-hungry Polish
peasants from the western provinces of the country. This meant that by the
1930s the number of Poles living within contiguous Ukrainian ethnographic
territory had increased by about 300,000. Looked at in another way, ethnic
Poles comprised 40 percent of the urban population and 21 percent of the
rural population in eastern Galicia, and 29 percent of the urban population
and 20 percent of the rural population in the 'northern' Ukrainian lands.
These increases were owing not only to the influx of
Poles into the area, but also to a decrease in the number of Ukrainians due
to emigration abroad. During the interwar period, approximately 150,000
Ukrainians left Poland, the vast majority - in consequence of United States
restrictions after 1924 - going to Canada, Argentina, and France.
The size of individual Ukrainian
landholdings in both eastern Galicia and the northern territories remained
small (see table 44.1). Size, moreover, was crucial to the welfare of the
individual farmer. Contemporary observers concluded that properties less than
twelve acres (five hectares) in size were generally inadequate to sustain a
single family. Not only were such farms incapable of producing a sufficient
amount of food to support the family, but sales in a local market from the
surplus of any one crop would not produce enough cash to buy foodstuffs that
were not produced at home. Nor could animals belonging to the small
landholder make up the shortfall. This meant that farmers who owned less than
twelve acres (five hectares) of land - and they made up 79 percent of
landholders in eastern Galicia - were forced for at least part of the year to
seek supplemental employment elsewhere just to survive. TABLE 44.1 Landholdings in interwar eastern Galicia,
1931
Leaving aside the problem of small landholdings,
Ukrainian farmers in Poland also suffered, at least initially, as a result of
the damage caused during World War I. For instance, 20 percent of the rural
population lost their homes and farm buildings during the war, and 38 percent
of the horses, 36 percent of the cattle, and 77 percent of the hogs were
destroyed. Poland's initial
policies and Ukrainian reactions At the close of World War I, Poland signed
international treaties respecting equality for its national minorities and
entered guarantees for them into its 1921 constitution. Such agreements might
have been acceptable to a group that had developed a perception that they
were a national minority. Ukrainians in eastern Galicia, however, had
virtually reached a stage of equality with Poles under Aus¬trian
rule during the first decades of the twentieth century. Then, when the
Habsburg Empire fell, they had created and fought for an independent western
Ukrainian state (1918-1919). Even the victorious Allied Powers themselves
initially (at least officially, until 1923) held to the possibility of some
kind of self-rule for the Ukrainians in eastern Galicia. In this environment,
the Ukrainians of Poland, most especially those of Galicia, were not about to
accept the status of a national minority in what they considered their own
homeland. That would be tantamount to turning back the historical clock -
which is exactly what Poland tried to do. It is true that some Polish leaders,
including the country's legendary national liberator Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, at times considered the possibility of
re-creating a tripartite federated Polish state on the model of the
eighteenth-century pre-partition Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had
for centuries united under one sceptre Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians.
Visions based on past models would, of course, require that Poland's
boundaries reach at least as far as Kiev and take in Belarus and Lithuania as
well. Poland's loss in the war with Soviet Russia in 1920 and the creation of
Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet republics shattered any prospect of a
revival of the old Commonwealth on a tripartite federative basis. With Poland
restricted to smaller frontiers, its leaders decided to transform what
territories they did control into a unitary nation-state and to rule over
peoples along their eastern borderlands (kresy),
including Belarusans, some Lithuanians, and
Ukrainians, as minorities living on 4Polish' territory. Not surprisingly, many Ukrainian leaders,
especially from Galicia, reacted to the new situation as if a state of war
still existed. In fact, the Polish forces which took over the province in
mid-July 1919 interned, during the first months, several thousand Ukrainians
who had fought (or were suspected of having fought) against them. Ukrainian
charges of brutality and executions were countered by Polish accusations of
Ukrainian sabotage and allegations of Ukrainian terror in Galicia. Indeed,
Ukrainians initiated an underground war, especially after the brief return to
eastern Galicia in 1921 of Ievhen Konovalets'. Konovalets' had
been the leader of the Galician-Bukovinian
Battalion of Sich Riflemen, which until its
dissolution in early 1920 had fought with the forces of the Ukrainian
National Republic in Dnieper Ukraine. In 'occupied' eastern Galicia, Konovalets' established the Ukrainian Military
Organization (UVO), which during 1921 and 1922 undertook a campaign that
included the burning of Polish estates; the destruction of Polish
governmental buildings, railroads, and telegraph
lines; and political assassinations. Among these was an unsuccessful attempt
to shoot Marshal Pilsudski during the chief of state's visit to L'viv in September 1921, and the successful assassination
in October 1922 of a Ukrainian political leader (Sydir
Tverdokhlib) who favored cooperation with the Poles
and participation in elections to the new Polish parliament.
Because of the tense situation on the
international front, most Galician-Ukrainian political leaders followed the
instructions of the West Ukrainian government- in-exile, headed by Ievhen Petrushevych in Vienna.
The result was a boycott of the first elections to the Polish parliament,
held in November 1922. In the northern, non-Galician lands, however, Ukrainians
did go to the polls and elected twenty representatives to the House of
Deputies (Sejm) and five to the Senate. Although
these first Ukrainian deputies and senators to the Polish parliament
reaffirmed that their ultimate goal was an independent Ukrainian state, they
declared that in the interim, until such a goal became a reality, they were
willing to cooperate with the Poles in return for Warsaw's non-interference
in their national life. The early years of Polish rule also had a
negative impact on Ukrainian cultural life in Galicia. The Polish
administration closed many of the popular Prosvita
Society reading rooms, an action which, combined with the devastation brought
about during the war years, produced a marked decline in the number of reading
rooms, from 2,879 in 1914 to only 843 in 1923. As for the educational system, the
provincial school administration from the Austrian era, which was based in L'viv and had separate Ukrainian representation, was
abolished in January 1921. All decisions were subsequently to be made in
Warsaw and to be implemented by administrators in local school districts.
Ukrainians now found themselves within six different school districts (L'viv, Volhynia, Polissia, Cracow, Lublin, and Bialystok), although at
least initially the Ukrainian school system, especially at the elementary
level, was left undisturbed. At the higher levels, Ukrainian education
fared much worse. Although under Austrian rule the Ukrainians may have expressed
dissatisfaction, their demands for Ukrainian-language university departments
were at least fulfilled. Their constitutional demands for a separate
Ukrainian university were also finally met with a promise by Vienna before
the war that one would be created by 1916. Now, under Polish rule, a
parliamentary recommendation for a Ukrainian university was disregarded, and
in 1919 all the Ukrainian departments at L'viv
University save one were abolished. The one remaining was the old 1848
Department of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) Language and
Literature, but even its chair was left vacant until 1927, when it was filled
by a Pole, the respected linguist Jan Janow. Faced
with this situation, Ukrainians founded an illegal university known as the
Ukrainian Underground University, which, with three faculties and at its
height 1,500 students, functioned from 1921 until 1925, when it was pressured
by Polish authorities to cease operations. Many of its students, as well as
other young Galician Ukrainians who had been denied admission to L'viv's Polish university because they had not fought for
Poland during the Polish-Ukrainian war, went abroad instead. Neighboring
Czechoslovakia was the most popular destination, where they attended either
the Ukrainian Free University or the world-renowned Charles University in
Prague. By 1923, it was clear that the diplomatic
activity of the West Ukrainian government-in-exile and the underground
sabotage work of the Ukrainian Military Organization had failed to dislodge
Polish rule in eastern Galicia. As a result, Ukrainian political leaders were
forced to adapt to the reality of Polish rule. During the fifteen-year period
until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the different responses to their
situation on the part of Ukrainians in Poland found expression in essentially
three approaches: (1) the cooperative movement, which acquiesced in Polish
rule and worked within it to create a solid economic and cultural foundation
for the Ukrainian minority; (2) active participation in Polish society by
political parties, who lobbied through legal means on behalf of Ukrainian
cooperatives, schools, and churches; and (3) armed resistance by paramilitary
groups, who from the outset rejected Polish rule and strove in whatever way
they could to destabilize society. The cooperative
movement The rather dismal state of agriculture in
the Ukrainian lands within Poland was made tolerable only by the remarkable
advances of the cooperatives and credit unions. On the eve of World War I, the
Ukrainians in Galicia had a total of 609 cooperatives. Although the number of
these declined because of World War I (579 in 1921), the following years
witnessed a revival, with the result that by 1939 there were 3,455
cooperatives spread throughout the whole region and united by an umbrella
organization known as the Audit Union of Ukrainian Cooperatives. Initially,
the Audit Union also founded cooperatives in Volhynia
and Polissia, but in 1934 the Polish government
passed a law requiring Ukrainian cooperatives outside eastern Galicia (the Lwow, Stanislawow, and Tarnopol palatinates) to unite with local Polish unions. The cooperatives in eastern Galicia, which
by 1923 had a total of 600,000 mem-bers, promoted
the use of modern techniques and machinery in farming. Most important, they
provided financing and marketing services. The most influential of all
Ukrainian cooperatives was the Dairy Union, or Maslosoiuz,
set up before World War I. The Maslosoiuz expanded
steadily during the interwar years, and by 1938 it included 136 district
dairies supplied by over 200,000 farms producing enough butter to dominate
the Galician market as well as to export to neighbor¬ing
Czechoslovakia and Austria. Also of importance were the Village Farmer Asso-ciation (SilVkyi Hospodar) - with sixty branches, over 2,000 local units,
and 160,000 members (1939) - whose primary concern was to provide farmers
with practical and theoretical training in agriculture; and the Union of
Cooperative Unions, or Tsentrosoiuz, whose goal was
to coordinate the activity of the various cooperatives. By 1938, the Tsentrosoiuz represented 173 central, regional, and
individual cooperatives, to whom it sold consumer goods, agricultural
machinery, and building materials at wholesale prices, and for whom it
marketed Ukrainian agricultural products throughout Poland and abroad. Ukrainian women in eastern Galicia had
their own cooperative, which func-tioned as part of
the Union of Ukrainian Women (Soiuz Ukrainok). Founded in 1921, the women's union grew rapidly
and by 1936 included 45,000 members, in nearly 1,200 urban and village
branches. Aside from courses for women on how to operate cooperatives and
nursery schools, the group established its own cooperative with the express
purpose of popularizing and selling folk art items produced at home. Each of the cooperatives also had its own
Ukrainian-language publications and there is no doubt that the movement as a
whole was inspired by national patriotism. In approaching the nationality
question, however, the cooperative movement and its leaders were aware that
political and military action, as undertaken during the immediate post-World
War I period, had been unsuccessful. Accordingly, they argued that a period
of organic growth and a strengthening of the economic base of Ukrainian
society was necessary. There were others in
Galician-Ukrainian society, however, who felt that political or even military
action would more appro¬priately address their
situation under Polish rule. Ukrainian political
parties, schools, and churches By the mid-i920s, several Ukrainian
political parties had come into existence. The most important was the
Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (Ukrains'ke Natsional'ne Demokratychne Ob"iednannia), best known by its Ukrainian acronym,
UNDO. Founded in 1925, UNDO included some of the leading figures in prewar
Galician-Ukrainian life, whose political experience had been formed under the
Habsburg Empire (Kost' Levyts'kyi,
Volodymyr Bachyns'kyi, Volodymyr Zahaikevych), as well
as younger activists who began their political work under Polish rule (Dmytro Levyts'kyi, Ivan Kedryn-Rudnyts'kyi, Vasyl' Mudryi). In a sense, UNDO was a continuation of the
prewar Ukrainian National Democratic party, and, like its ideological
predecessor, it looked forward to a future independent Ukrainian state. In
the interim, however, UNDO hoped to obtain positive changes for Poland's
Ukrainians through legal means. Aside from its own party organ, UNDO was
supported by the influential Galician-Ukrainian daily newspaper Dilo (L'viv, 1880-1939). More to the left in the political spectrum
was the Ukrainian Socialist-Radical party (led by Lev Bachyns'kyi
and Ivan Makukh), a continuation of the prewar
Ukrainian Radical party. The Socialist-Radicals favored the secularization of
Galician-Ukrainian life and the introduction of socialism, although not of
the Marxist variety. On the far left was the Communist party of Western
Ukraine (KPZU). Formed in 1921 as the Communist party of Eastern Galicia, it
was ordered by the Comintern to join the Communist
party of Poland, of which it became an autonomous branch. When, in 1924, the
party was declared illegal by the Polish government, the Communists went
underground. Subsequently, the KPZU was racked by internal controversy over
the direction of events in Soviet Ukraine. One faction, led by Osyp Vasyl'kiv and the
theoretician Roman Rozdol's'kyi, favored the policy
of 'national communism' as carried out by Olek-
sander Shums'kyi in Soviet Ukraine before his
demotion in early 1927. Another faction accepted the idea of internationalist
party loyalty and acceptance of guide¬lines set in
Moscow. The matter came to a head with a purge of the Galician 'Shums'ky-ites' in 1928. Internal dissension nevertheless
continued within the KPZU, largely because of friction with the Polish
Communist party apparatus and displeasure among some members with the
ever-changing Soviet policy regarding Ukrainianization.
Moscow retorted that the Galicians were guilty of 4
bourgeois- nationalist deviation,' until finally, in 1938, the Comintern decided to dissolve the KPZU. The problem of Soviet Ukraine affected many
more Ukrainian leaders in Poland than just the Communists. During the height
of the Ukrainianization policy of the mid-i920s, a
special West Ukrainian Institute was set up in Kharkiv,
and it attracted several left-wing emigres from
Galicia. Even the head of the West Ukrainian government-in-exile, Ievhen Petrushevych, thought
cooperation with the Soviets might help the Galician-Ukrainian cause against
Poland. Several other Galician intellectuals, including Mykhailo
Lozyns'kyi, Antin Khrushel'nyts'kyi, Iuliian Bachyns'kyi, Stepan Rudnyts'kyi, and Oleksander Badan, emigrated to Soviet Ukraine, although subsequently
they were swept up in the purges of the 1930s and perished. The Russophiles, at least in eastern
Galicia, remained a political force during the interwar years, although on
the national-cultural front they were completely outdistanced by the
Ukrainians. Their parties, the Russian Peasant party (Russkaia
Selianskaia Partiia) and
Russian Agrarian party (Russkaia Agrarnaia Partiia), which
merged in 1931, drew their support from the Old Ruthenian
and Russophile cultural institutions like the Stauropegial
Institute and the National Home, as well as from those villages, especially
in the westernmost Lemko region, where the Kachkovs'kyi Society and the Orthodox movement were the
strongest. There was also a group of Galician Russophiles who joined the Volhynian and Chelm-based
Peasant Union (Selsoiuz), which was Communist in
orientation. After splits within this group, some Russophiles (Kyrylo Val'nyts'kyi and Kuz'ma Pelekhatyi) joined the
KPZU, and even though the latter was Ukrainian in orientation they continued
to promote their Russophile views on national identity. These and other non-Communist Ukrainian
political parties participated in some or all of the elections to the Polish
parliament held in 1928, 1930,1935, and 1938. The
strongest Ukrainian party in both the Sejm and the
Senate was UNDO, which opposed the settlement of Poles in traditional
Ukrainian-inhabited territories and made demands concerning the status of
Ukrainian schools, the Ukrainian language, the Greek Catholic and Orthodox
churches, and the reaction of the Polish government to Ukrainian terrorist
activity. During the 1920s, the Polish government
increased the total number of schools in Ukrainian areas, especially in the
formerly Russian-ruled northern territories of Volhynia
and Polissia, where the number of elementary schools
rose over threefold, from 1,000 in tsarist times (1912) to 3,100 during the
last full year of Polish rule (1938). In eastern Galicia, the number of
elementary schools rose from 4,030 to 4,998 during the same period. The
Polish administration could also take credit for a decline in illiteracy
among people over ten years of age, from 50 percent in 1921 to 35 percent in
1931. TABLE 44.2 Ukrainian-language and bilingual schools in
interwar Poland, 1922-1938
Polish educational policy, however, had a negative
impact on Ukrainian language use. In 1924, the government of Prime Minister Wladyslaw Grabski passed a law
(known as the lex Grabski),
over the objections of Ukrainian parliamentary representatives, which set up
bilingual Ukrainian and Polish schools. The result was a rapid decline in the
number of unilingual Ukrainian schools together with a sharp increase in
Polish-Ukrainian bilingual schools in Galicia and Polish schools in Volhynia (1,459 in 1938) (see table 44.2). Ukrainians viewed bilingual schools as a
first step toward the national assimila¬tion of
their children. In actual practice, Polish soon became the primary lan¬guage in bilingual schools. The response of the
Ukrainians was to establish private schools, especially at the secondary level.
This effort was undertaken in large measure by the prewar Ukrainian
Pedagogical Society (est. 1881), renamed the Native School Society (Ridna Shkola) in 1926. By the
1937-1938 school year, 59 percent of all Ukrainian
gymnasia, teachers' colleges, and technical schools, with approximately 40
percent of Ukrainian students at those levels, were privately operated. Since Ukrainians in Poland had only limited
control over the formal education of their children, the Plast
scouting movement took up the challenge of inculcating youth with a Ukrainian
national identity. Plast scouts came into being on
the eve of World War I on Ukrainian lands in both the Russian and the
Austro-Hungarian empires, but it was during the interwar years in western
Ukraine (in particular Galicia and Transcarpathia)
that they had their greatest success. By 1930, the organization had over
6,000 male and female members in branches affil¬iated
with secondary schools in Galicia and with Prosvita
societies in western Vol- hynia.
Concerned by Plast's general popularity and the
fact that many of its 'graduates' after age eighteen joined clandestine
Ukrainian nationalist organizations, Poland's authorities increased
restrictions on the movement until banning it entirely after 1930. It
nonetheless continued to operate underground or through other organizations
for the rest of the decade. The status of Ukrainians was also affected
negatively by another law passed in 1924, which excluded Ukrainian language
use in governmental agencies. Moreover, the Polish government never referred
to the Ukrainians and their language by the modern name Ukrainian; instead,
it used the historical name Rusyn (Polish: Rusin), thereby inadvertently contributing to a disliking
on the part of many Ukrainians, especially Galician Ukrainians, for their
original national designation. Finally, in the 1930s the Polish government
adopted a policy of tribalization, which gave
support to the idea that various ethnographic groups (Lemkos,
Boikos, Hutsuls)
as well as the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles were
somehow distinct from the Ukrainian nationality as a whole. This policy was
implemented especially in the westernmost Lemko
region, where state schools offered instruction in the Lemko
dialect and where in 1934 a separate Greek Catholic Lemko
Apostolic Administration was established. The Ukrainian nationality question in
Poland was involved with developments in the church as well as in politics
and education. These developments were com-plicated
by the fact that Ukrainians belonged to two churches. In eastern Galicia,
they were primarily Greek Catholic; in the northern areas formerly part of
the Russian Empire, they were Orthodox. According to an agreement (concordat)
between Poland and the Vatican signed in February 1925, the jurisdiction of
the Greek Catholic Metropolitanate of Halych, with its seat in L'viv,
was reaffirmed, although its activity was restricted to its three eparchies (L'viv, Przemysl, and Stanyslaviv) in eastern Galicia. With regard to internal
developments, the interwar years witnessed a sharpening in the debate within
the Greek Catholic church between those elements (Bishops Hryhorii
Khomyshyn and Iosafat Kotsylovs'kyi, and the Basilian
order), who favored the adoption of a more western religious model, including
celibacy, and those (Metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi,
Bishop Ivan Buchko) who preferred the preservation
of the Eastern rite and spirituality. Quite often in the course of the
debates, the 'Easterners' would present themselves as patriots defending
Ukrainian national traditions in opposition to the western-oriented (critics
would say pro-Polish) 'Latinizers.'
Andriy Sheptyts’kyi In more general terms, the intellectual life
of the Greek Catholic church was allowed to flourish in interwar Poland. A
wide variety of theological and scholarly journals were published, and the
Greek Catholic Theological Academy was established in L'viv
in 1928. The Academy, headed by the Reverend Iosyf Slipyi, was the only Ukrainian institution of higher
learning in Poland. Finally, the Greek Catholic church's status was upheld
throughout the interwar years because it remained under the leadership of
Metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi, the 'patriarch' of the Ukrain¬ian movement who was respected by the highest
Polish ruling and social circles. In contrast, the Orthodox church, with over
two million Ukrainian adherents in the northern territories (Volhynia, Polissia, and Chelm), was in a less favorable position than the Greek
Catholic church in Galicia. Although historically associated with the tsarist
government and its policy of russification, the
Orthodox church in Poland attempted to break with the past, obtaining
independence (autocephaly) in 1924 and its own metropolitan see (headed by
Metropolitan Dionizy) in Warsaw. The russophile character of the church also changed as the
Orthodox seminary at Kremenets', in Volhynia, and the Orthodox theological department at
Warsaw University (after 1924) began to teach in Ukrainian, and liturgical
materials were published in Ukrainian. Nonetheless, Polish authorities
especially at the local level remained ill disposed to what was considered a
'schis¬matic' church with roots in Russia. Such
attitudes resulted in the so-called revin¬dication
campaigns in 1929-1930 and again in 1938, whose goal was to deprive the
Orthodox of those churches that had once been Greek Catholic (that is, before
Orthodoxy was imposed by the prewar tsarist Russian government). This policy was
particularly detrimental to Orthodoxy in the Chelm
and Podlachia regions, where in 1929 and 1930
alone, 111 Orthodox churches were closed, 59 were destroyed, and 150 were
converted into Roman (not Greek) Catholic churches. Physical destruction was
particularly rampant in 1938, when within a few months almost 150 churches
were destroyed in the Chelm and Podlachia
regions, prompting protests in the Polish parliament against what was
described as wanton cultural discrimination. Armed resistance and pacification Given the generally unfavorable attitude of
the Polish government toward its Ukrainian minority, especially evident in
educational policy, in the restrictions on the official use of Ukrainian, and
in anti-Orthodox discrimination, and given what seemed an inability on the
part of the Ukrainian cooperative movement and legal political parties to
counteract Polish policy, it is not surprising that for some people armed
resistance presented itself as the only viable course of action. Throughout the
1920s, the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) continued its policy of
political assassination, bomb attacks on governmental buildings, and sabotage
against railroad and telegraph installations. Such activity on the part of the UVO was
sporadic, and in any case it was increasingly unpopular among the
Galician-Ukrainian public after 1923. To improve the reputation and
effectiveness of the underground, a more strictly disciplined and
ideologically determined organization seemed necessary. Such a movement arose
among Ukrainian emigre youth and student groups in
east- central and western Europe, where the UVO leader Konovalets'
had been func¬tioning in exile since 1922. At a
meeting held in Vienna in 1929, representatives of several emigre groups founded the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN). The UVO leader Konovalets' was
made head of the new organization, which before long had branches throughout
Ukrainian emigre centers as well as in the western
Ukrainian lands of Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia.
Initially there was conflict over the respective roles to be played by the
OUN and the older UVO, but by 1932 the latter had been merged with the
Galician branch of the OUN and thus had ceased to exist as an independent
organization. The OUN was a highly disciplined
underground revolutionary movement dedicated to the overthrow of Polish,
Romanian, and, eventually, Soviet rule on Ukrainian territories. The movement
drew its ideological inspiration from Dmytro Dontsov, a native of Dnieper Ukraine who in 1908 had fled
to Galicia and then gone to Vienna to study. After the war, he settled in L/viv, where he edited the leading Galician-Ukrainian
journal of public affairs, the Literaturno-naukovyi
vistnyk (L/viv, 1922-32),
and its successor, Vistnyk (L'viv,
1933-39). Despite his influence among many OUN members, Dontsov
never became a member of the organization and, in fact, remained openly
critical of some of its policies. Dontsov espoused integral
nationalism, the theory that the nation, as embod¬ied
in an independent state, was the supreme ideal. To achieve this ideal, an
aggressive will and the ability to take action, preferably under the
direction of a strong leader; were necessary. Such views were common at the
time in many parts of Europe, in particular in Italy, Germany, and Spain. By
the 1930s, if not before, those countries were being led by all-powerful
leaders (Mussolini, Hitler, Franco) who supposedly epitomized the will of the
nations they represented. The OUN translated Dontsov*s
version of integral nationalism into terroristic activity aimed at
overthrowing Polish and Soviet rule and eventually creating an independent
Ukraine. By the 1930s, especially after news of the 1933 famine reached
eastern Galicia, Soviet Ukraine had lost most of its sympathizers among
Poland's Ukrainians. This news, combined with Polish repression and the
increasingly worsening economic situation caused by the world depression, made the OUN an attractive alternative for a
large number of Ukrainian students and peasant youth whose futures did not
look promising.
The OUN's purpose was simple: to
destabilize the situation in Poland until the government finally collapsed. Not
surprisingly, the OUN opposed UNDO and other political parties which worked
through legal channels, and it had little sympathy with the constructive work
of the cooperative movement, which, according to OUN leaders, implicitly if
not explicitly accepted Polish rule. Throughout the 1930s, the OUN in Galicia
(led by figures like Bohdan Kravtsiv,
Bohdan Hnatevych, Bohdan Kordiuk, Stepan Bandera, Lev Rebet) engaged repeatedly in acts of sabotage. These
included the well-publicized assassination of a Soviet consular official in L'viv (1933) in protest against the famine in Soviet
Ukraine and the assassination of the Polish minister of internal affairs Bronislaw Pieracki in June
1934- Despite its popularity among certain segments of the population, most
legal Ukrainian political parties and other groups, as well as the
still-prestigious Greek Catholic metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts'kyi,
publicly denounced the terrorist activities of the OUN.
Bronislaw Pieracki The Polish government tried to curb the
OUN's activity. Its first extensive effort in this direction was the
so-called pacification program carried out between 16 September and 30
November 1930. Imagining potential terrorists at every corner, detachments of
Polish soldiers and police went through Ukrainian villages interning known
activists and indiscriminately beating men and women in the process. While
the pacification program did not result in much loss of life - and therefore
is in no way comparable to collectivization in Soviet Ukraine, which began in
earnest at the same time - it deepened the hatred between Ukrainians and
Poles. It also became a cause celebre for many liberals in the West,
especially in Great Britain, where Poles were depicted by some members of the
House of Commons as brutal oppressors. The Polish policy of pacification in
1930 and the subsequent arrests of Ukrainian activists (a detention camp was
set up at Bereza Kartuzka
in 1934) only helped to increase sympathy for the OUN and further to alienate
Polish and Ukrainian societies. There were some Poles, however, both inside
and outside the government, who favored some kind of compromise with the
Ukrainians. Polish socialist deputies, for instance, tried in March 1931 to
have the issue of autonomy for Ukrainians discussed in the parliament More
serious was the government's attempt at compromise with UNDO, in an agreement
reached in July 1935. Known popularly as 'normalization,' this agreement
assured Ukrainians of a total of nineteen seats in both houses of parliament,
the election of UNDO activist Vasyl' Mudryi as vice- marshal of the parliament, an amnesty for
imprisoned nationalists, and credits to Ukrainian economic organizations. One
result of normalization was a split in UNDO between those who favored and
those who opposed cooperation with the government Owing to the split, UNDO was never to regain the influence it once had
among Poland's Ukrainians. Moreover, the whole policy of normalization failed
within a few years. The failure was the result of continued dissatisfaction
among most Ukrainians with Polish rule that included ongoing efforts to
create an internally strong Polish nation-state and increasing intolerance of
the demands of all national minorities. Thus, political compromise between the
Poles and the Ukrainians was doomed. And this was exactly what OUN leaders
wanted: to discredit the Polish government and especially those Ukrainians
who favored an evolutionary political or an economic (cooperative) solution
to the problem of their existence in Poland. In the end, the OUN got what it
wanted - not only destabilization, but the destruction of Poland. This
destruction came about, however, not as a result of the OUN's efforts, but
because of the outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939. |
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