Monographs and Articles on Ukrainian Subjects

Abstract

Pamphlets dealing with Polish-Ukrainian relations through the centuries usually presented the subject within the following context: “From the East came invasions, murder, and conflagration, while law and order and constructive work came here [Western Ukraine] only from Poland, that is, from the West.”1 One of the surveys of Polish-Ukrainian relations in Galicia was by Zakrzewski and Pawlowski, who argued that the region was originally Polish and that the Rus princes, not Poles, were the invaders in the fourteenth century. Casimir IV, as legal heir, had planned to secure Galicia to enable Poland to fight for Gdansk and its western provinces. His campaigns in the east did not stem from a resignation of western ambitions.2 From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries there was no Polish-Rus problem, as proven by the absence of Ukrainian revolts against the Polish state. Poles initially tolerated the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national movement, which the authors characterized as a “special Rus ideology: containing elements of bandit cossack, haidamak mentality, combined with use of terrorist methods in cultural struggle, and backing by Austrians and Russians.” A similar view was propounded in a short history of Eastern Galicia written for the Polish army. The pamphlet explained that the region was Polish because of the economic, military, and political effort Poles had put in through the ages. “Red Rus [Galicia] was indebted to Polish settlers for its agricultural development” and exposure to Western culture.3