Polish-Ukrainian Conflict Research Articles

Kościół katolicki na Kresach południowo-wschodnich wobec odzyskiwania przez Polskę niepodległości

The article by Mieczysław Ryba describes the process of escalation of national conflicts in Eastern Galicia and a deepening religious conflict in this region. The author concludes that during the struggle for Polish independence throughout World War I, the Roman Catholic church had a clearly pro-Polish stance. The Uniate church, in turn, became a foundation for Ukrainian national movement with its explicitly anti-Polish sympathies. The rise of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict increased anti-Polish phobias and disagreements among Galician Uniates. The Armenian church, led by archbishop Józef Teodorowicz, a widely recognized Polish patriot, was one of the eastern churches with an unequivocally pro-Polish attitude.

НАЦІОНАЛ-ДЕМОКРАТИЧНИЙ РУХ ТА НАЦІОНАЛЬНЕ ПИТАННЯ У ІІ РЕЧІ ПОСПОЛИТІЙ

The article analyzes the history of the development of the political movement of the National Democrats, also known as endecs, in Poland during the interwar period. The process of appearance of the movement in the previous stateless period of the history of Poland, the formation of the foundations of their ideology is considered. The peculiarities of the development of the national democratic movement in the conditions of the revival of the independent II Rzeczpospolita, creation of new political organizations by the endecs, their participation in parliamentary life and government are described. Attention is drawn to the development of ideological postulates of the movement in which the evolution of the views of Polish nationalism of the first half of the 20th century was reflected. The National Democrats opposed the ideas of marshal J. Pilsudski and his political camp, who were for creating a federal state of peoples in the territories between the Black and Baltic Seas, and wished to build a mono-ethnic state within the boundaries of the resettlement of the Polish people. The views of the endek people on the solution of the national question in the interwar Polish state, which developed the concept of national assimilation of the foreign ethnic group in the Polish environment, are separately highlighted. Important in the ideology of Polish national democracy were the postulates of building a socially-corporate society with the rule of elites where the nation was seen as the highest value and was viewed as a living organism where each of its members fulfills the role assigned to it. Also endecs were opponents of liberalism, individualism and market economy. Stressed the importance of traditions and the Catholic Church for maintaining the unity of the Polish people. Separately, the article examines the land and educational policy of the ruling camp, headed by the National Democrats. In land policy, endeki contributed to the strengthening of Polish landowners in the eastern lands inhabited by the non-Polish majority of the II Rzeczpospolita and contributed to the Polish resettlement movement on these lands, in particular, the actions of settling Polish military colonists. In education they defended the idea of assimilation of Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Byelorussians through the liquidation of the national education and the introduction of bilingual and exclusively Polish-speaking education. The activities of the Polish national-democratic movement in the interwar period greatly contributed to the aggravation of interethnic relations, the intensification of Polish chauvinism and the oppression of national minorities. This, in turn, led to a deepening of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, which grew into a bloody confrontation during the Second World War and subsequent years.

МИХАЙЛО ГРУШЕВСЬКИЙ ТА ПОЛЬСЬКО-УКРАЇНСЬКИЙ КОНФЛІКТ У ЛЬВІВСЬКОМУ УНІВЕРСИТЕТІ: СПРОБА РЕКОНСТРУКЦІЇ

The article is devoted to the problem of the formation and growth of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in Lviv University. Investigation of M. Hrushevsky's interdependence in the process of growing inter-ethnic confrontation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s has been researched. The reasons of numerous misunderstandings between Ukrainian and Polish scientists, which were primarily based in the desire to deepen – qualitatively and quantitatively – Ukrainian studies at the university, have been found out. The facts of resistance of the Ukrainian youth to the polonizatory actions of the administration of the educational institution have been highlighted as well. It has been proved that the most prominent action was secession in 1901 – 1902, during which more than 500 Ukrainian students left Lviv University and went to study to foreign educational institutions. This youth hoped to attract public attention to the founding of a Ukrainian university in Lviv, demanding decisive behavior in the Ukrainian parliamentary representation. The facts of cooperation of M. Hrushevsky with Polish professors, triggered by the necessity to solve numerous of current problems, for instance: opening of new departments, inviting specialists, appointing of scholarships to students, promotion of students' scholarly degrees, etc. M. Hrushevsky had a business relationship with Polish colleagues, whom he supported in terms of issues discussed on the board of the faculty . He even maintained close contacts with some of his Polish colleagues (e.g. B. Dembinsky). It has been concluded that M. Hrushevsky's relations with Polish scientists should be regarded as typical for intellectual environments of the dominant and conquered nations, when the former want at all costs to preserve the status quo, appealing to the tradition, while the latter in their desire to increase their influence turn to universal values and rights. Hence the practice of confrontation – loud, involving the widest possible audience, mutual accusations – in the destruction of the established order, on the one hand, and the reluctance to comply with the humanitarian requirements of the early twentieth century. – on the other. Along with this, we see quite a solidarity work in the middle of the university department and absolutely collegiate manifestations of behavior in purely life situations. The latter is not surprising, since the conservatism of the scientific community was generally accepted, therefore, a person of science, without distinction of nationality, is compelled to act in the formed field of professorial traditions. All this is intended to actualize the further study of the communicative strategies of Ukrainian and Polish intellectuals in difficult historical periods, which would make it possible to rethink many stereotypes inherited by us from the last century.

Postpamięć i świadkowie zastępczy a współczesne opisy tzw. konfliktu polsko‑ukraińskiego z okresu II wojny światowej

Postmemory and Substitute Witnesses in Contemporary Descriptions of the So-Called Polish-Ukrainian Conflict During the World War II
 This article presents the general problem of the postmemorial character of parts of contemporary historiography. An illustration of this issue is the preliminary analysis of descriptions of Polish‑Ukrainian relations during World War II. The analysis is based on tropes derived from genocide studies. Several research hypotheses were formulated on this basis. They require further verification. This is, among others, the question of introducing the concept of ‘social postmemory’and showing its relation to historical policy. Promising seems to the perception of the connection between post‑memory, discursiveness, and eristic. The issue of intergenerational dialogue on the past and memory has also emerged in thebackground of deliberations. In the article, an ethno‑historical variant of practicing history has also been criticized in an indirect way.

The Polish-Ukrainian Conflict of 1918–1919 in the Context of the Rise of the Versailles System

The article studies the process of peace settlement of the war in Eastern Galicia between 1918 and 1919. The author conducts a comparative analysis of the policy of Poland and the West Ukrainian People’s Republic meant to legitimate power in the disputed region. He also studies the mediation initiative of the Entente and the conflict settlement process during the peace conference in Paris, revealing the motives of the parties’ actions. With reference to a particular example, the article mainly aims to prove that the idea of law and justice was degrading and failing due to the hegemony of western states that assumed the role of world arbiters following the defeat of the German-Austrian alliance. This status let them ignore the principles of international relations and take decisions relying on geopolitical motives and their own imperialist interests. The analysis is made with reference to archival and published sources, i.e. texts of international treaties, minutes of the Supreme War Council’s meetings, diplomatic correspondence, reports of povit commissars of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, appeals on behalf of the Polish population of Galicia, etc. Additionally, the author takes into account the achievements of modern historiography relating to the issue in question in the Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and English languages.

Ćwiczenia z polityki wobec pamięci

This essay contains a description and critical appraisal of the contemporary Ukrainian state’s policy in regard to memory of the Volhynian and Galician massacres of 1943–1945. The author engages in polemics with Tomasz Stryjek, who recently published a book on this and other issues: Ukraina przed końcem Historii. Szkice o polityce państw wobec pamięci [Ukraine Before the End of History: Essays on State Policy in Regard to Memory]. In the author’s opinion, Stryjek one-sidedly, or even naively, places hope in the idea that the EU, in the not-too-distant future, will exert effective pressure on the government in Kiev to make it adapt its narrative about the activities of the OUN and UIA against Poles and Jews to European standards of memory about the Second World War. In the author’s opinion, the Ukrainian narrative about the activities of the OUN and UIA is based on the erroneous conviction—which is comfortable for the Ukrainian side—of equal guilt in the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of 1939–1947. He argues that there should be no cessation of efforts to remind Ukrainian historians and authorities about the responsibility to condemn, unambiguously, the mass crimes committed by national independence groups.

Polacy w Galicji podczas drugiej wojny światowej: doświadczenie i pamięć

Based on biographical interviews coming from different collections of the Oral History Archives of the KARTA Center Foundation and the History Meeting House, the text highlights three main elements of biographical experience which make the narrations of Poles from Galicia different from those of their Ukrainian and Jewish neighbors. 
 These were: the Red Army entering the Eastern Borderlands and Soviet repressions, the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, and departure from the Eastern Borderlands. For most speakers the following topics constitute the base of their identification with a national group understood as the community of remembrance. The text shows the difference between memories of people who stayed in the Ukraine after 1945 and those who left the Eastern Borderlands – “repatriates”. It also analyzes dependencies between individual and social memory and the influence of different cultures of memory on shaping biographical narration.

The Anti-Semitic Riots on the Territories of the Kingdom of Poland at the Beginning of Independence

The last year of the Great War brought the enhancement of the activities of the political parties, both the Polish and the Jewish ones, as well as deterioration of Polish-Jewish rela-tions. The attitudes reluctant to cooperate with the Poles took hold among the Jews or rather a belief that there were no actual chances for the agreeable fixing of its principles. Another reason for the mutual grievances became forcing the national and cultural autonomy by some of the Jewish parties and the attempts to search for the adherents of such demands in the West. The events in Lvov (Lviv, Lemberg) and the growing Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the Eastern Galicia became yet another inflammatory point in the Polish-Jewish relations. The rumours, which reached the Kingdom of Poland saying that the Jews sympathised with the Ukrainians in Galicia and ‘shoot the Polish soldiers at the back’ added to the traditional accusations addressed at Jews (cooperation with the Germans and Austrians, sympathising with the communists), one more element, the consequences of which are hard to ignore. At the same time, the anti-Semitic propaganda has collected all the oppositional declarations of the Jews and their critical remarks about the Polish rules and then, distorting them consciously, presented the Jewish population as an element hostile to the Polish state, which in general was not true. In autumn 1918, the Jewish population greeted the liberation of the Polish lands with fear. Those were not groundless fears: one could notice, as early as in spring that year that the hostility towards the Jews undertook the increasingly severe forms. The serious anti Semitic riots took place in the Kingdom of Poland in November 1918, and some of them, like the one in Kielce and probably in a few other towns of the Kielce Province, were in fact pogroms. The next year brought a new wave of anti-Jewish pogroms and violence.

Konflikt polsko-ukraiński 1943–1947 w polskiej historiografii i debacie politycznej

The article aims at presenting the differences in the reception of Polish-Ukrainian conflict of 1943–1947 by Polish historians and politicians, as well as diffusion of the knowledge about the past with contemporary political activity. Firstly, different ideas of the relation between history and politics are described. Secondly, a presentation of three groups of Polish researchers, who study Polish-Ukrainian conflict of 1943–1947, is made. Finally, the analysis of a 2003 parliamentary debate is drawn. The topic of this debate was to commemorate victims of anti-Polish OUN-UPA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists – Ukrainian Insurgent Army) action. These are the main conclusions of the article: historical disputes are reflected in politics; the knowledge about Polish victims of OUN-UPA has been disseminated in the Ukraine thanks to the actions of Polish politicians.

War, Diplomacy, and “Family Affairs” in Seventeenth-Century Eastern Europe: Moldavia in the Danubian Policy of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1648–1653)

Marital diplomacy and marriages have been known in history as effective political tools. While many events occurred under the impact of political, social, and religious factors, “family affairs,” through intrigues and dynastic contacts, also played an important role. Such is the case of the marriage of Ruxandra, the youngest daughter of the Moldavian hospodar Vasile Lupu, and Tymish, the oldest son of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Their marriage in 1652 was the result of the hetman’s Danubian foreign policy during the most dramatic episode of seventeenth-century Ukrainian history—the Zaporozhian Cossack uprising against the Poles. In addition to the ethno-political and cultural-religious backgrounds, the internationalized Polish-Ukrainian conflict was infected by a “personal feature,” that is the “Moldavian affair” of the Khmelnytsky clan. This article examines the circumstances that led to the political alliance of Bohdan Khmelnytsky with Vasile Lupu and explores how the hetman’s dynastic project shaped political alliances during the conflict between the Poles and the Ukrainian Cossacks. Particular attention is paid to Romanian-language studies frequently omitted in Western scholarship.

Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939-44

Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian memories of the war contradict each other. In Polish and Ukrainian collective memory the glorification of the heroic struggle of national resistance fighters against the oppressors makes it difficult to engage with the question of Polish and Ukrainian collaboration and participation in Nazi crimes. The essay traces these conflicting memories back to contradicting experiences. This is done using the example of the multiethnic Eastern Polish, now Western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Polish and Ukrainian eyewitnesses refer again and again to the collaboration of Jews with the Soviet occupiers, while Jewish accounts accuse Poles and Ukrainians of antisemitism, of having profited from Jewish suffering and of active participation in the murder of the Jewish population. Poles and Ukrainians accuse each other of having started the ethnic cleansing of the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands. This article uses wartime documents by eyewitnesses and focuses on key events which have a firm place in Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian collective memory: the reciprocal perceptions during the Soviet occupation, the pogroms which occurred during the transition from Soviet to German occupation, and the violent resolution of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the second half of the war.

Juliusz Słowackis Drama „Mazepa“ im ukrainischen und russischen Kontext

Abstract Juliusz Słowacki’s play “Mazepa” (1840) does not have much in common with the famous Mazepa-texts of World literature, such as G. Byron’s “Mazeppa” (1819), V. Hugo’s poem of the same title (1829) and A. Pushkin’s “Poltava” (1829); and it does not show any greater affinities to the author’s earlier plays, like “Balladyna” and “Lilla Weneda”, or to his later plays like “Ksiądz Marek” and “Sen srebrny Salomei”. Ne­vertheless, for a better understanding of his “Mazepa”, this play should to be read in a larger context, including as well Słowacki’s own works, as well the texts of World literature on Mazepa. A crucial question for that kind of contextualization is a new understanding of the central problem of that play. If we read “Mazepa” as a tragedy of delusion, defraud and betrayal, we can very well compare this play with Słowacki’s later works “Ksiądz Marek” and “Sen srebrny Salomei”, which are – still more than “Mazepa” – located in the historical context of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. But this kind of interpretation leads to a wider range of comparison: Pushkin’s “Poltava” does not only have a similar constellation of acting persons like Słowacki’s plays (a double love triangle), but is based on delusion and betrayal in various forms, too. There is, however one great difference when comparing it with Słowacki’s “Mazepa”: in this play the main hero is not at trickster at all, while in Pushkin’s poem he is the one who betrays in private as well as in political life an therefore has to fail. Słowacki’s Mazepa survives, because he is an honest man, Pushkin’s Mazepa perishes, because he is a traitor. It turns out that both of the authors, Słowacki and Pushkin, in connection with the historical person of Mazepa, seem to condemn betrayal as a means of political agitation. Setting Słowacki’s play in the larger context of Eastern Slavonic Mazepa-tradition, it is to be seen as a polemic with as well as an affirmation of Pushkin’s point of view, without any regard to the fact if Słowacki had known “Poltava” or not.

An Analysis of Polish and Ukrainian Historical Discourse over the Polish-Ukrainian Conflict of 1943-1947

In 1990 Polish and Ukrainian historians started an intensive historical discourse about the Polish- Ukrainian conflict of 1943-1947. Until 1990 there was a need for Polish and Ukrainian historians to discuss their historical disagreements but it was not possible because of the soviet censorship in both countries. After the soviet censorship had disappeared 1989-1991 Polish-Ukrainian historical conferences about this controversial part of their history started to take place and several Polish and Ukrainian historians published monographs or essays on the subject. It turned out quickly that Polish and Ukrainian historians did not agree about what happened in the Polish-Ukrainian borderland 1943-1947 and how the history of this Polish-Ukrainian conflict should be written. Furthermore the historical discourse got very positivistic and objectivistic because some historians tried to persuade other historians that their version of the history was right. In this article I analyse the discourse of the Polish and Ukrainian historians. To do that I subdivide Polish historians into “warriors” (“Krieger”), “aggressors” (“Angreifer”) and “forgivers” (“Versöhner”) and the Ukrainian historians into “legitimisers” (“Legitimisten”), “defenders” (“Verteidiger”) and “forgivers” (“Versöhner”). I analyse the historiographies of these six groups of historians and compare them, asking, which facts do the historians construct? What meaning do the facts get in the historical narratives? What kind of symbols and metaphors do the historians use? Where do the historians see the causes of the conflict? What plots do the historians invent to make sense from the very eventful history?

Polish-Ukrainian conflict and the UGCC during the German occupation

During the German occupation, the fratricidal Polish-Ukrainian conflict became particularly acute. In 1941 Archbishop Boleslav Tvardovsky and Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky discussed the question of their pastoral duty to prevent the rise of crimes caused by this conflict. At the same time, both hierarchs expressed some despair that they did not have sufficient (or no) influence on the perpetrators of these crimes.