Volhynia-43: a tragedy, not a “weapon”

There are enough politicians and intellectuals in Ukraine who do not think it necessary at all to react in any way to the resolutions of Poland’s Senate and Sejm “to honor the victims of genocide [the term “ludobojstwie” is translated as none other than “genocide.” – Author] committed by Ukrainian nationalists against citizens of the Polish Republic during World War Two.” They are saying: it is history, it is the past, it is politicking, it has nothing to do with today, this will cause a quarrel with our main ally in Europe, we should never behave provocatively towards the Polish, and so on.

In my view, those who assume this position do not take into account a number of important objective factors on which not only Polish-Ukrainian relations but also, to a large extent, the overall situation in Central and Eastern Europe depend.

Above all, Polish national identity was and still is deep-seated in history. It is quite clear: when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost its independence in the late 18th century, the Poles needed something to rest upon in their struggle for freedom. They found this support in the past exploits, romanticized and idealized, of course, and in the symbolic figure of Poland as “crucified Christ of Europe.” The former and the latter are closely tied up with history, both old and new. Moreover, the Polish have considered themselves, not without a reason, co-creators of Great History in the past few centuries. By all accounts, if they had not been resting on this powerful tradition, there would have been no strong resistance movement, known as Polish “underground state,” during World War Two.

So, if we look at the abovementioned resolutions in this context, they (like all of the current hysteria in Poland over the “atrocities of Ukrainian nationalists”) are about the present and the future, not the past.

Besides, present-day Poland glorifies in every possible way the Second Polish Republic of 1918-45 which is being hyped in political sermons and mass awareness as an unattainable peak of all virtues. The traditions of Jerzy Giedroyc, Czeslaw Milosz, and Leszek Kolakowski, who took rather a critical view of this historical form of the Polish state and, thanks to their intellectual and moral authority, guided the Polish elite in the 1960s-1990s, have been pushed to the fringes in spite of ostentatious piety for them.

Meanwhile, the Second Polish Republic, i.e. the Polish state restored after a century-long partition between the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, was far from being “goody-goody,” as some are fond of painting it now. The just-mentioned Leszek Kolakowski pointed out “a terrible policy towards ethnic minorities in the period of two interwar decades” pursued by official Warsaw. Let me note, by the way, that those who suffered from this policy throughout or almost throughout their adult life could not help but give an equally terrible response to it. For, as soon as the Second Polish Republic was born in 1918, it launched a purely colonial war against the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR), and against Lithuania and Czechoslovakia in 1919. After occupying a considerable part of Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian lands, the Second Polish Republic pursued a policy of active Polonization of them, which included, among other things, resettlement of “reliable” ethnic Poles, the so-called “osadniky,” to those lands. And what amply proves that those lands were occupied by colonizers is the so-called “Curzon line” drawn in 1919-20 as Poland’s eastern border by the heads of Entente states (without which, incidentally, Poland could not have restored its independence).

And, finally, both resolutions use several times the term “borderlands” (“kresy”) and its derivatives. This means that Volhynia and Galicia are not ethnic Ukrainian lands, which were, incidentally, demarcated by the “Curzon line,” but the eastern frontier of the Polish Republic – be it the second or the current, third, one which positions itself, in the person of its leaders and the majority of the Polish elite, as resurrection of the majestic body politic that existed in the interwar years. Again, it is not history as such but topical politics.

Therefore, for this and a number of other reasons, I agree with Professor Leonid Zashkilniak that we should not pretend that things are OK and, at the same time, we must not fly into hysterics. “Our response to the Polish resolution should be moderate and well-balanced, without accusations or any inadequate actions,” Zashkilniak noted. “Firstly, there should be a Verkhovna Rada resolution which says that the documents the Polish Sejm has adopted are unbalanced and give a one-sided assessment of Ukrainian-Polish relations in the period of World War Two… Secondly, this document should say that the Ukrainian side and the Ukrainian national movement as a whole raised the question of not exterminating the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia but of only removing or resettling it in the conditions of a raging war” . It is also necessary to point out the colonial nature of the Second Polish Republic’s policy not only towards Ukraine, but also towards Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Belarus, as well as the fact that during World War Two Polish military formations not only defended Poles from “Ukrainian cutthroats,” but also applied the same methods, carrying out ethnic cleansing in Kholm region, Berestia and Lviv lands. As for Volhynia, Polish units were trying to wage a true colonial war to hold back this territory (Ukrainians accounted for 80 percent of its population) as part of the Polish Republic restored within the old borders. Under the current circumstances, stating the fact of a colonial expansion and colonial wars of the Second Polish Republic (not only against Ukrainians) will be a political and legal protection device against the attempts to file compensation claims against Ukraine for the acts of genocide, which is sure to begin in the near future. And this fact can be proved by citing prominent European figures, such as Lloyd George and Churchill, as well as certain documents of the Entente and the Polish Republic itself. For the question is whether or not Ukrainian politicians and intellectuals will recognize the Third Polish Republic as sort of a new “big brother” authorized to tell Ukrainians what is and what is not the truth, whether or not Ukraine’s relations with the Polish state and people will be really equal, with no claim to special status and historical “goody-goodiness” from both sides.