Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  Many peasants did not appreciate being talked down to in this manner by the urban intelligentsia, not least because Prosvita officials rarely took the trouble to visit their villages. On one occasion, when Father Melnyk rebuked the reading club in Nagórzanka, on the outskirts of Buczacz, a member of the audience called out, “Nobody from the intelligentsia has visited us!” Indeed when forty members of the urban elite were invited to attend a meeting of the educational council at another village, only eight turned up. One village representative pointed out, “[This disregard] illustrated that the Buczacz intelligentsia is interested in educational matters only in their own city.”

  Meeting of a local Ukrainian peasant society in Buczacz, March 24, 1938. Source: PA.

  At the same time, Prosvita leaders feared that the very core of their mission, getting people to read, was in jeopardy: they had neither the resources to purchase enough books nor the means to persuade villagers to read them. In 1931 only five thousand books were available in Prosvita libraries for a population of seventy-two thousand Ukrainians, that is, one book for every fourteen people. Most reading club members chose not to read any books. Even the Ukrainian library in the city of Buczacz, which contained 628 volumes, had only twenty-five registered readers. Branch chairman Roman Slyuzbar expressed his concern about “the ignorance of our citizenry as compared to other peoples, even the Bolsheviks,” and urged Ukrainians to learn from the Germans, who “despite losing the war catastrophically and thanks to their high culture, consciousness and discipline,” had once more become the arbiters of war and peace in the world. Similarly, Prosvita’s secretary, Volodymyr Koltsio, warned that Ukrainians, as a subjugated people, were undergoing “a moral crisis,” to the extent that “in some villages the reading clubs” had become “nothing more than local taverns” that “spread demoralization.” People had forgotten they could “overcome ignorance, gain consciousness, and become a civilized nation only through books and periodicals.” What was to be done? Perhaps, suggested one board member, they should appeal “to the seminary and gymnasium graduates who are abundant in our villages and are not interested in anything.” But many of these youths soon became attracted to more exciting activities than readings books and joined the ranks of the OUN. Some of them had likely studied with Viktor Petrykevych, a veteran of World War I and the Polish-Ukrainian War, who began teaching at the Buczacz state gymnasium in 1929 and was an activist in Prosvita and a mentor of students associated with the OUN.31

  Viktor Petrykevych as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1916. Courtesy of his son Bohdan Petrykevych.

  It was thanks to the dedication of such men as Petrykevych that, despite all the obstacles, Prosvita played a crucial role in disseminating the message of Ukrainian nationalism in the interwar period. Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 1938, the Buczacz branch estimated a probably exaggerated total of thirty thousand supporters, which “proved just how much popularity and love Prosvita enjoys among our citizenry and how dear our educational appeals have been to them.” With sixty-six thousand Ukrainians in the Buczacz district on the eve of the war, the local branch reported 1,150 registered and dues-paying members, along with an additional 8,000 members in fifty-six reading clubs throughout the district; it had also forged close links with numerous other associations, including forty-eight cooperatives of various kinds. Altogether Prosvita reading club members constituted 10 percent of Galicia’s Ukrainian population—no mean achievement considering the ubiquitous poverty and illiteracy. Ukrainian nationalism had become an established fact, even if many peasants had far more urgent issues to deal with in their daily lives.32

  Beyond widespread sympathy for Prosvita, the vast majority of Ukrainians supported the UNDO. In 1929 it was estimated that the party had secured 70 percent of the Ukrainian vote in the Buczacz district; this reflected the desire of the population for independence from Poland, but it did not necessarily mean agreement with the UNDO’s rejection of violence as a means to attaining that goal. Although it is difficult to gauge how many UNDO voters also eventually supported the illegal OUN, which did advocate violence, the growth of other, increasingly militant associations indicates the progressive radicalization of Galician Ukrainians. These included especially the Ukrainian village sports association Sokil and the gymnastics and firefighting organization Luh, which largely served as a cover for the militant Sich Riflemen society, after it was banned by the Polish authorities in 1924. Active during the Ukrainian arson campaign of 1930, and despite being repeatedly targeted and harassed by the police, these associations only gained strength in the years that followed and clearly played a major role in stirring up popular feelings against Polish rule.33

  Members of the Luh association, 110 boys and 30 girls, in Leszczańce (Ukrainian: Lishchantsi), Buczacz district, in military formation. Source: PA.

  By the mid-1930s, then, increasingly militant nationalism, cutting across age groups and social classes, had become the norm among urban Galician Ukrainians in such settings as Buczacz and other towns in its district. A tight-knit group of middle-aged professionals, businessmen, spiritual leaders, teachers, and other members of the local intelligentsia formed the core of a network of associations, cooperatives, societies, and clubs dedicated to promoting the cause of Ukrainian nationalism. Around them were wider circles of activists of all ages and social classes, supporters of the UNDO party, members of Prosvita, and potential operatives of the OUN who could be activated when the time came to realize their dreams of independence. In Buczacz they included a poorly educated farmer and cooperative inspector, a shoemaker and rally organizer, an attorney with a PhD, and a mining engineer and veteran Ukrainian Army officer. Younger activist men and women, mostly in their twenties, similarly ranged from laborers and unemployed gymnasium graduates to students of philosophy and law school graduates. And there was a group of teenage OUN activists in the state gymnasium.34

  Certainly not everyone, likely not even a majority, supported the terrorist tactics of the OUN, but that was largely a question of the means rather than of the common goal of creating an independent Ukrainian state. However indifferent to nationalism many of the peasants may have remained, the efforts to nationalize the rural population were, it appears, bearing fruit, most especially among the young. Villagers surely disliked being patronized by bourgeois urbanites and were often too preoccupied with sheer material survival to contemplate a future Ukrainian state. But they were far more resentful of Polish rule and its local representatives, as well as of their marginally better-off Jewish neighbors. On these matters there was not much indifference, but rather plenty of sullen accommodation and increasingly impatient anticipation of a radical, and possibly violent change.35

  Members of the Orhanizatsiya Ukrainskykh Natsionalistiv (OUN, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) in Soroki, Buczacz district. Source: PA.

  It should therefore come as no surprise that Polish fears and anxieties about ethnic minorities spanned the entire interwar period. Under the rubric of minorities, Jews were featured as an alien, inassimilable, and potentially subversive element, whereas Ukrainians were possibly susceptible to integration as fellow Slavs and Christians. And yet, both because of their numerical preponderance in the eastern territories and across the Soviet border and because of their long history of conflict with Polish rule, Ukrainians were simultaneously seen as presenting a direct threat to the integrity of the Polish state.

  This history of conflict was intimately linked with the idea and memory of the kresy, Poland’s historic eastern borderlands, which had once stretched far beyond the Dnieper and symbolized a moment of Polish greatness followed by a humiliating demise. A constitutive element in the collective national memory of many Poles, especially the educated elite, the nostalgia for the lost lands of the East was not necessarily confrontational; the underlying urge to return to those lands—or at least to hold on to the ethnically diverse regions of Galicia and Volhynia that had come under Polish rule in 1919—could be presented as par
t of Poland’s traditional paternalistic role and civilizing mission, especially vis-à-vis the Ukrainians. But it obviously also contained a violent edge, because it reflected a genuine patriotic sentiment and conviction of historical and cultural rights beyond the exigencies of politics. Hence those who opposed Polish hegemony were by definition in the wrong and could not, indeed must not be argued with; they had to willingly consent to Poland’s rule or be subdued into acceptance.36

  Such views of the kresy as the heart and soul of historic Poland were held especially strongly by those whose own lives and worldviews were formed there. Bishop Piotr Mańkowski came to Buczacz as a refugee in 1920, having fled his bishopric of Kamieniec Podolski (Ukrainian: Kamyanets-Podilskyi), east of the Zbrucz River, from the advancing Bolshevik forces. Born and raised on his family’s estate in Podolia, Mańkowski lamented that in agreeing on a new border with Soviet Russia, Poland had “renounced huge territories of the land that had once been within the Polish Republic,” thereby “violating the history of several centuries.” As he saw it, “We, the inhabitants of the eastern borderlands [kresowcy wschodni], were removed and rejected as unnecessary ballast in newly-constituted Poland.” And because he feared that by losing those vast territories east of the Zbrucz, the Second Republic would be bereft of its very soul and sense of purpose, Mańkowski considered the remaining lands of the kresy, Galicia and Volhynia, as crucial components of the nation’s patrimony.

  To Mańkowski this was not merely a political position but at least as much a deep spiritual and cultural attachment. Coming to Galicia, he was struck by what he perceived as the quintessentially Polish character of his surroundings, as he and his retinue “enjoyed the fresh air, walked in woods full of wild strawberries, raspberries and mushrooms, and swam in the Koropiec River.” Visiting the nearby town of Trembowla (Ukrainian: Terebovlya), they admired the ruins of the old castle but were repelled by “the Jewish houses” below; the debris of past Polish glory was more appealing to them than the detritus of a Jewish presence.

  Jews generally made “a nasty impression” on Mańkowski; their inherently alien presence spoiled these authentic Polish lands. This was all the more disturbing when the bishop settled down in Buczacz, which looked “simply perfect from above and at a certain distance,” but “from close range” appeared “just like any ordinary jerkwater Jewish town.” He appreciated all the edifices built by the town’s Polish owners and benefactors, such as “the ruins of the old castle” and “the beautiful eighteenth century baroque town hall,” as well as “the large and grandiose parish church” and “the Basilian monastery with its school for boys.” But like many other Polish observers, he seems to have never noticed the Great Synagogue.

  Again like much of the rest of the Polish elite in Galicia, Mańkowski believed that the best path “for our eastern borderlanders” was reconciliation between Roman and Greek Catholicism and reintegration of Ukrainians into a Polish-ruled kresy. The refusal of Ukrainians to be co-opted into this Polish scheme made them appear intransigent and bellicose in the face of Polish acceptance and tolerance.

  Mańkowski left Buczacz in 1925 and settled down in Włodzimierz, near Łódź, where he died in 1933. During those years this self-described “eastern borderlander” was tormented by “the neighboring Jewish houses” and the general “noise of the town” and pined for the “rural settlements,” the “gently sloping spaces,” and the “fresh air” of his beloved kresy.37

  Throughout the interwar period Polish politicians, administrators, patriotic associations, and social scientists were obsessed with population statistics, largely in order to demonstrate the progressive growth of Poland’s hegemony in the eastern borderlands; they thereby also revealed a persistent demographic anxiety. This in turn led to increasing manipulation of figures and significant gerrymandering.

  Statistics are notoriously malleable. In 1921, for instance, the town of Buczacz numbered 7,517 inhabitants, of whom just over 50 percent were Jews, 30 percent were Poles, and 20 percent were Greek Catholics. But when categorized according to self-declared nationality, Jews and Poles each constituted 40 percent of the population, indicating that a fair number of Jews chose to register their nationality as Polish. The countryside remained predominantly Ukrainian.38

  The implications of the kresy’s demographic realities for national politics had already been demonstrated in the parliamentary elections of 1922, considered “the only complete and free elections held in Poland until 1991.” The country’s political map was divided into three main electoral blocs: the center-left parties supporting Piłsudski; the coalition of right-wing parties around the nationalist and anti-Semitic Endecja party (National Democracy); and the National Minorities Bloc, combining most Jewish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and German parties. The elections produced a draw between the left and the right, with the Minorities Bloc gaining a fifth of the seats in Parliament. Fearing an alliance between the left and the minorities over the choice of a president, who was elected by Parliament, the Endecja-led coalition unleashed a vicious anti-Semitic campaign against the Minorities Bloc, describing it as a Jewish party and an alien organization about to take over Poland. The atmosphere of incitement and riots led to the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz, depicted as a “Jewish” candidate, just four days after he was sworn into office.39

  The National Minorities Bloc would have had greater impact on the elections had the nationalist Ukrainian parties not boycotted the polls in protest against what they saw as Poland’s illegal occupation of their land. In Eastern Galicia this meant that fewer than half of eligible Ukrainian voters participated in the elections, thereby skewing the vote in favor of the Jewish electorate. As the prefect of the Buczacz district reported, “With few exceptions, the Ruthenian population and a certain part of the Polish population did not take part in the voting.” Consequently, although the East Galician Zionists, the largest Jewish political party in the region, won only 200,000 votes, they gained fifteen seats in the Sejm (the lower house) and became the largest faction of the “Jewish Club” in the national Parliament.40

  In 1926 Piłsudski carried out a coup d’état, whose goal was to diminish the power of the anti-Semitic Endecja. But the elections of 1928 did not produce sufficient votes for Piłsudski’s new Government Bloc to dominate Parliament. Ironically, this caused the regime to veer increasingly to the right, a trend that accelerated appreciably after Piłsudski’s death in 1935. Thanks to its majority Jewish population, in the city of Buczacz the Galician Zionists won an overwhelming two-thirds of the vote in 1928. But Polish population statistics strove to obscure Jewish urban preponderance. The census of 1931 suggested that over the previous decade the total population of Buczacz had grown by almost 30 percent, to ten thousand people, but the share of Jews in the population had declined to 40 percent. A closer analysis reveals that these figures were reached by lumping together major Jewish centers such as Buczacz with smaller towns that had much larger relative Polish populations and by redistricting the town of Buczacz itself so as to include its predominantly Polish rural outskirts.41

  Such voter manipulation was even more pronounced in the heavily rigged elections of 1930, in which the government in Warsaw resorted to undemocratic measures, disbanding Parliament and arresting the leaders of the opposition center-left coalition, as well as those of the national minorities parties. Yet although the Government Bloc managed to gain the majority of seats, its opponents on the extreme right, now grouped under the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe), also gained votes; this signaled where the winds of Polish popular opinion were blowing. With the end of parliamentary democracy in Poland, interethnic strife and violence would only intensify over the next decade.42

  The ongoing ethnic violence increasingly divided citizens at the local level. When eight thousand “people of all nationalities” convened in Buczacz in 1930 to celebrate May 3, Polish Constitution Day, this national holiday was in fact organized as a purely Polish and Roman Catholic event, complete wit
h an open-air mass and a sermon by an army brigade chaplain; a military parade of cavalry, police, members of the paramilitary Riflemen’s Association, as well as fire brigade and Polish Youth Association units; and delegations of war invalids. Although services were also held in the Great Synagogue and the St. Nicholas Greek Catholic Church, the event included no representation of Ukrainian or Jewish associations. It was, in essence, a display of Polish hegemony.

  Threats to that hegemony were confronted head-on. Jan Płachta, prefect of the Buczacz district, was particularly energetic in clamping down on local Ukrainian political activism; in this he was supported by the governor of the Tarnopol province, who dismissed complaints about Płachta’s conduct as “baseless and unjust” and insisted on the need for the “security apparatus” to “put a stop” to the “unusual political activity” and separatist tendencies of the Ukrainians. The prefect was not engaged in “an attack on the Ruthenian national movement,” asserted the governor, but rather was acting in conformity with “a policy of harmonious coexistence between all nationalities in the district.” The problem was, of course, that Polish hegemony could not be democratically maintained in a region where Ukrainians were the majority, and in 1930 Poles made up only a third of the seventy thousand eligible voters in the Buczacz district. The declaration by the governor that the elections had “brought the defeat of the national minorities” therefore merely confirmed the success of state intimidation and manipulation.43