Національна політика польських комуністів у 1943–1945 рр.

Abstract

Introduction. The Polish state was multi-ethnic prior to its partition among Austria, Prussia and Russia. Its political goals did not require linguistic, religious, or ethnic homogeneity. This historical fact was perceived by part of the Polish political elite as one of the factors that led to the decline of the state. However, the interwar policy of the Second Rzeczpospolita was determined by individuals aimed at supporting ethnic diversity: thirty percent of the citizens of the Second Rzeczpospolita were national minorities - Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Germans, Slovaks, Jews, and others. Only after World War II the communist elites finally embodied the ideal of right-wing radicals, cleansing Poland of national minorities. The article considers the “third model” of the national policy of post-war Poland, which evolved towards forced evictions and violence against non-Poles. Purpose. The authors aim to identify the goals of the national policy of the Polish Communists in the USSR and in Poland, transformed into the purification of the state from nationalities that were considered hostile to their state. Results. The propaganda goals of the national policy of the Polish communists who spent the war years in the Soviet Union are clarified. Having formed the Union of Polish Patriots and founded weekly “Free Poland”, the leader of the Union, Wanda Vasylewska, and her immediate entourage began informational propaganda in order to convince compatriots of the need to get rid of the eastern voivodships and for the noble purposes of the Soviet leadership regarding the population of the annexed lands in 1939 and 1940. For this reason, a campaign was launched to discredit the pre-war governments and accuse them not only of enslaving national minorities but also of the fall of the Polish state in 1939. The Soviet leadership, for its part, implemented three strategic projects: the first persuaded the Poles to recognize the de facto borders of Poland after the Soviet invasion on September 17, 1939; the second imposed the need to form its own armed forces on the territory of the USSR as an opportunity to return to the homeland, and for Stalin as a way to control the armed forces that would liberate Poland from occupation and provide Stalin with control over the entire territory of Poland; the third project prepared public opinion for the perception of the USSR as an ally. Disagreements in the solution of the national question by local communists by 1945 evolved towards the forced eviction of the non-Polish population in the USSR, which indicates the Soviet factor as determining in the national policy of the communist government of post-war Poland. Originality. The text exposes the hidden goals of the national policy of the communist elites of the Polish state, which received power from the hands of the Soviet military command and special services and depended entirely on them. The propaganda slogans of “saving national minorities from the exploitation of bourgeois governments” proclaimed by the Soviet and Polish Communists concealed the irredentist goals of the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the nationalist goals, on the other. Conclusion. For the communist leadership of Poland, whose chances of seizing power were strengthened with the victorious offensive of the Red Army in 1944, resolving the issue of national minorities on the border was of political significance. One of the leading communist leaders, Boleslaw Bierut, considered the creation of a mono-ethnic state to be a happy solution to the problems of national minorities in Poland. The measures taken led to the desired result: within two years after the end of the war, the number of national minorities in Poland decreased by 60 percent. Most remained in the western (German) and south-eastern (Ukrainian) voivodships. The number of Jews decreased in all voivodships. In 2002, during the census, 96.7 percent of the population identified themselves as Poles.