ANALYSIS: How Poland is commemorating the Volyn events of 1943 the wrong way (05/25/03)

ANALYSIS

How Poland is commemorating the Volyn events of 1943 the wrong way

by Taras Kuzio

Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation has been promoted since 1945. The most influential Polish émigré journal Kultura published in Paris since the late 1940s had always championed reconciliation with Ukrainians.

On the Ukrainian side, the journal Suchasnist did the same. Suchasnist was published until 1991 by the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR) which was created in 1943, the same year as the Volhynia massacres, as the political arm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. When the Bandera faction of the OUN split in 1954 the liberal wing of OUN (Abroad) allied with the UHVR.

After being an exchange student at the University of Poznan, my positive image of Poles and Poland grew in the 1980s when the Solidarity movement mobilized millions of Poles. The election of a Polish pope who has always been pro-Ukrainian was also an important factor. After martial law in December 1981 those like myself were radicalized by the Polish opposition which created an alternative underground civil society. Under martial law Polish civil society began a widespread discussion on attitudes towards Ukraine.

By the late 1980s, when Solidarity and opposition movement emerged from the underground to sit at a roundtable with the Communists their views on Ukrainians were completely at odds with those I had grown up with among émigré Poles in the United Kingdom. Solidarity activists, such as Jacek Kuron, reiterated that "Without a free Ukraine there cannot be a free Poland" and attended the founding congress of Rukh in 1989. With funds from the UHVR, Solidarity groups printed and smuggled literature to Rukh and I helped edit two special Polish-language issues of Suchasnist for the Polish opposition.

The fruits of this reconciliation are evident in the breakthrough in Polish-Ukrainian relations in the 1990s. Poland is, and hopefully will remain, one of Ukraine's main allies in its drive for Euro-Atlantic integration. The crowning success of this reconciliation could be seen in the pope's visit to Ukraine in June 2001.

Placing the massacres in context

Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation is well developed at the elite levels only. Polish opinion polls regularly find that public image of Ukrainians is very low and little better than that of Gypsies. A Ukrainian shuttle trader to Poland recently told Reuters that at the border Ukrainians are treated terribly. "There's one (Polish) shift that's terrible - they call Ukrainians pigs, or say "get out of here, you stink." As Prof. Piotr Wrobel, chair of Polish history at the University of Toronto, confessed to me, its fine for his fellow Polish academics to be "anti-Ukrainian" but not "anti-Semitic."

The Polish negative stereotype of Ukrainians has been nourished for over a century by historians, writers, religious leaders and political parties. This was even the case in Communist Poland, when criticism of Russians was not permitted. The Communist authorities published countless books with mass circulation and released films; they also provided for school instruction which inculcated a stereotype of genocidal anti-Polish Ukrainian peasants. (Such views were also common in Polish diaspora newspapers).

Books and other media articles propagating these stereotypes about Ukrainians did not suddenly cease after the Communists left office. This would be difficult as these stereotypes had grown deep roots in Polish society and former Communists, such as President Aleksander Kwasniewski, were in power. Only Gazeta Wyborcza, edited by Mr. Kuron's Solidarity ally, Adam Michnik, is critical of the plans for the 1943 commemoration. A recent example is Eva Semashko's jointly authored "Genocide of Ukrainian Nationalists Against the Polish Population of Volhynia in 1939-1945." Only a minority of Polish historians, such as Ryszard Torzecky and Radeusz A. Olszansky, have produced objective studies.

The commemoration of the Volhynia massacres takes the entire subject out of context. Ukrainian-Polish relations were poor since 1918, not since 1943. Polish repression of Ukrainians and other minorities in the 1930s led to the rise of extreme right-wing groups. According to the Canadian expert on the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), Petro Potichnyj, professor emiterus, various attempts by the OUN and the UPA to contact the Polish-government-in-exile in London were rebuffed.

Placed within the context of developments in World War II throughout Europe the Volhynia massacres were not large or significant. Compared to the massacres committed by all sides, but especially against the Serbs in World War II, they were small.

The issue of ethnic cleansing is not a purely Ukrainian affair. The Poles and Czechs brutally cleansed millions of former German and German-populated areas with the Soviets, blessing. President Vaclav Klaus opposed the opening of a Sudeten German office in Prague last month and the Czechs refuse to return property confiscated from Germans (unlike that taken from Czechs).

In post-Communist Europe nearly every nation believes it is the victim of its neighbors. History is written as one of martyrdom and national innocence. Poles have a similar mythology of a heroic nation taking on larger enemies to the Serbs. Both have depicted a neighbor, the Croats for the Serbs and the Ukrainians for the Poles, as "genocidal" and historically hostile.

In World War II, therefore, Poles have long claimed that they were the only nation in Nazi-occupied Europe to not collaborate with the Nazis. This myth ignores an important factor in the Volhynian conflict when Ukrainian policemen who fled to the UPA were replaced by the Nazis with local Poles. Some Poles also collaborated with the Soviet forces. Poles accounted for 60 to 80 percent of the employees in the Volhynia state bureaucracy under the Nazis.

Inflated numbers

Volhynia had a large Ukrainian minority of 68 percent; 17 percent of the population were Poles. Some of these Poles were former military officers encouraged to settle in Volhynia in the inter-war period to reinforce the Polish presence. These newcomers were given Ukrainian land and often took over state positions.

A University of Toronto talk delivered in March by University of Alberta doctoral student Krzystof Lada claimed that 390,000 Poles lived in 1,150 settlements in Volhynia. Of the 390,000 Poles in Volhynia, Mr. Lada calculated that 33,000 died in 1943. In other words, 8.5 percent.

To claim that this was a "planned genocide," as Lada and Polish officials are doing, is therefore a gross exaggeration. A total of 357,000 Poles, or 91.5 percent of the Polish inhabitants of Volhynia, were not physically harmed. Mr. Lada said that 142,000 of the Poles (or about half) still lived in Volhynia in 1944. Of the 390,000 Poles in Volhynia, 215,000 were subjects of ethnic cleansing.

Mr. Lada's figure of 33,000 Polish deaths is just over half that claimed by the Polish government (60,000). A major problem is that neither side has undertaken the necessary research to ascertain the correct figure. Mr. Lada's figure of 33,000 should be placed alongside the 15,000 Ukrainians who died at the same time in Volhynia.

Dr. Potichnyj, who has long edited UPA documents, concluded that, "There is no document that I know of showing that the Ukrainian underground ordered wholesale slaughter." In areas of western Ukraine where there was no Polish military activity against Ukrainians, no actions by the UPA were undertaken against Poles.

Another aspect of the commemorations which has been ignored is the forcible expulsion of half a million Ukrainians to Poland in 1944-1946. President Kwasniewski (but not his prime minister or the lower house of Parliament) has only atoned for the 1947 ethnic cleansing of a quarter of a million Ukrainians, not earlier far larger expulsions of Ukrainians. The murder of Ukrainians by Polish units other than the government-in-exile's Armja Krajowa (such as the extreme right NSZ) and the destruction of Ukrainian Orthodox Churches in Kholm and Pidlashia have also been ignored.

The involvement of Nazi and Soviet forces in encouraging the Volhynia conflict likewise is ignored. The Volhynian city of Rivne was the headquarters of Reichskommissar Erich Koch and therefore included a large concentration of German units. The destruction of Polish settlements and killing of Poles by the Soviets a year later is ignored in this year's commemoration. The words "Gestapo" and "NKVD" were removed from a monument erected in Wroclaw in 1997 while the term "OUN-UPA" was maintained.

The Volhynia conflict was not only purely ethnic as Volhynia is an Orthodox region which added a religious element. Social problems also played a role. The forcible taking of land by poor Ukrainian peasants drew on a long tradition of Kozak revolts going back hundreds of years. In the inter-war period the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU) was very active in Volhynia.

What comes through in Polish accounts is not only the question of the numbers of those who died. But, as in Mr. Lada's study, anger at the total removal of the Polish cultural and religious presence in Volhynia to this day.

Ukrainian reactions

The language used in the long list of Polish demands presented by the Polish National Security Bureau (BBN) to the Ukrainian presidential administration in February is reminiscent of the Soviet era, when Polish and Soviet Communist publications dealt with "Ukrainian nationalist bands." The language is in the form of a "diktat" (decree) by a stronger country, perhaps taking advantage of President Leonid Kuchma's weakness at home and abroad.

The BBN's demands elicited a sharp response by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs Minister Anatoliy Zlenko's stated hope that the commemoration would "not hinder development of Ukrainian-Polish partnership" has been shattered.

The head of the BBN, Marek Siwiec is insisting that Ukraine recognize the Volhynia massacres as genocide. The monument to be erected in July in Warsaw will claim the far higher figure of 60,000 Poles murdered by "OUN-UPA" as "genocide" and a "Polish holocaust."

Although the monument is meant to not be anti-Ukrainian, the result will be precisely to reinforce the images long cultivated in Poland of genocidal, anti-Ukrainian Poles. The BBN also wants to take this further by exhuming graves in Ukraine, renovating Polish military graves and conducting research in archives with a view toward launching future prosecutions for "war crimes."

The attempt by the Polish side to isolate this event out of context and place total blame on "Ukrainian nationalists" (OUN and UPA) is rejected out of hand by most shades of Ukrainian political opinion. The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and academic Volodymyr Lytvyn rejected calls for the Ukrainian state to apologize for the 1943 Volhynia massacres. In 1943 there was no Ukrainian state, only the Ukrainian SSR, which ceased to exist in 1992. The Social Democratic Party (United), led by Mr. Lytvyn's successor as head of the presidential administration, Viktor Medvedchuk, issued a statement which called for a mutual denunciation of the killing of Poles and Ukrainians in World War II.

Another factor is the speed with which Poland is demanding an apology. The BBN suggested that President Kuchma make the same gesture as Chancellor Helmut Kohl in kneeling before President François Mitterand in 1984, 39 years after World War II ended. Mr. Kohl, though, is not morally discredited (unlike Kuchma) and he represented a country (Germany) which was the successor state to Nazi Germany. In addition, the German government has never sought reconciliation with its neighbors by listening to the radical demands of Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia or Poland - unlike Poland where veterans and former inhabitants of western Ukraine are influencing official policy.

The Ukrainian state cannot be seen as the successor to the actions of Ukrainian nationalists in World War II, especially as Germany did not permit Ukrainians to create a puppet state. Meanwhile, the UPA itself has not been officially recognized by the Ukrainian state.

The tragic events of 1943 in Volhynia should be commemorated. But, the manner in which the Polish authorities are undertaking the commemoration reflects the traditional stereotypes of Ukrainians which will serve to undo the tremendous progress in the reconciliation of both nations since 1945.

From the viewpoint of the Ukrainian diaspora, perhaps the most important question is recognition (or what has wrongly been defined as "rehabilitation") of the UPA. If the commemoration goes ahead in the manner envisaged with the UPA defined as in the Communist era as "war criminals," what chance will there be of the recognition of UPA in the future?

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto. This commentary is an updated and longer version of an op-ed article that originally appeared in the Kyiv Post on April 10.

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