The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  Further developments encouraged Ukrainians, who constituted the absolute majority in the villages, and Jews, who made up more than 70 percent of the population in the small towns of Galicia, to leave the region and the country. Economic stagnation and neglect of the eastern borderlands were largely responsible for increasing emigration. The extraction of oil in Galicia fell 70 percent from its peak on the eve of World War I, but no other industry, short of the small forestry and agricultural sectors, existed to replace it. By the end of the 1930s, the working class of Ukrainian Galicia did not exceed 45,000. The Ukrainian peasants tried to improve their situation by reviving the cooperative movement that had existed under Austrian rule. By far the most successful was the Dairy Union, which not only competed successfully at home but also exported its products to Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and other European countries. Almost every Ukrainian farmer joined the Dairy Union. But the cooperatives could only do so much to improve the plight of the Ukrainian village. With urban jobs almost unavailable, the land-hungry peasants (about half of peasant farms did not exceed five acres) often had no choice but to leave the country.

  During the interwar period, as many as 200,000 Ukrainian peasants emigrated from Poland. Many of them ended up in the United States and, after immigration there was closed in the mid-1920s, in Canada and Argentina. Approximately the same number of Jews left Poland, with most of them (up to 75,000) going to Palestine and the rest to Argentina and the United States. Both worsening economic conditions (most Jews in Galicia and the rest of Poland lived in poverty) and rising anti-Semitism, which resulted in the boycott of Jewish shops initiated by Polish nationalists and attacks on Jewish communities, drove Jewish emigration. In the latter half of the 1930s, after the death of Józef Piłsudski, the head of state, who tried to curb anti-Semitism, dozens of Jews were killed and hundreds injured in riots and skirmishes throughout Poland. The Polish government tried to “solve” the “Jewish question” by asking the Western powers and their Jewish communities to help the impoverished Jews of Poland or to take Jewish refugees. Western governments were not responsive, to say the least.

  The economic and cultural policies implemented by the Polish authorities in the Ukrainian lands in the 1920s ran directly counter to those pursued at the time by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Ukraine. Instead of promoting rapid industrial development, Polish authorities relied on agriculture; instead of integrating Ukrainians into the state apparatus, they encouraged emigration and promoted the influx not only of Polish administrators but also of Polish colonists into the region. But the Polish state had one feature that the Soviet Union never possessed—a political system built on the principles of electoral democracy. Even after Józef Piłsudski’s coup of 1926, the Polish state maintained elements of political pluralism and religious toleration that allowed Ukrainians to establish their own political parties, churches, and cultural organizations.

  After the defeat of Ukrainian statehood in Galicia in 1919, the Greek Catholic Church reclaimed its role there as the main national institution, while its head, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, assumed the status of generally recognized national leader. If the former was not a new phenomenon—the church had performed that function at least since the Revolution of 1848—Sheptytsky’s undertaking the role of national leader was quite a novelty. A descendant of a Ruthenian noble family that had given the church a metropolitan back in the eighteenth century, Sheptytsky was born Roman Catholic to a family that had been culturally Polonized for more than one generation. Many in Ukrainian society regarded his adherence to the Greek Catholic Church, followed by his ascension at the turn of the twentieth century to the highest position in its hierarchy, as a Polish attempt to take over the last Ukrainian “national” institution in the land. But Sheptytsky, who felt himself more a loyal subject of Austria-Hungary than a son of Poland, did his best to protect his church and its members from the Polonizing efforts of the new Polish state. With the spread of the Polish language and the authorities’ refusal to introduce nationality as a census category, religion, in this case Greek Catholicism, became one of the main markers of Ukrainian identity in interwar Galicia.

  A party with deep prewar roots, the National Democratic Alliance, dominated Ukrainian politics in interwar Galicia; its leaders came from the ranks of the Ukrainian National Democratic Party of Austrian times. Galician politics entered a new era in 1929 when the Ukrainian Military Organization, a clandestine network led by Colonel Yevhen Konovalets, who had been active in the struggle for independence in eastern Ukraine in 1918 and 1919, turned into a political party called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The new organization inherited from its predecessor the goal of Ukrainian independence and irredentism, as well as the conspiratorial structure and terrorist tactics employed to achieve its goals. New was the ideology of radical nationalism, which the veterans of the wars for independence from 1918 to 1921 had simply lacked. The new ideology condemned the liberal nationalism of the leaders of the prewar Ukrainian movement, whom the OUN accused of limiting themselves to issues of language and fostering a culture of defeatism. It proclaimed the nation as its supreme value and aimed at the creation of a “new man.” Dmytro Dontsov, a native of eastern Ukraine and a former social democrat, formulated this ideology. Dontsov never joined the OUN but shaped the new generation of its leaders and activists through his writings.

  Almost immediately, the OUN, at best a marginal force on the Ukrainian political scene, proved its ability to influence that scene far beyond its actual political weight. The OUN scored big in June 1934, when its members assassinated the Polish minister of the interior, Bronisław Pieracki, claiming that he had played a critical role in the Pacification—a series of repressive measures taken against Ukrainian activists in the fall of 1930. The killing of Pieracki followed the assassination of a Soviet diplomat in Lviv in the fall of 1933 in retaliation for the 1932–1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine. The same man organized both assassinations: a twenty-five-year-old student at the Lviv Polytechnical Institute, Stepan Bandera, who became head of the OUN network in Galicia in June 1933. The public learned more about Bandera and OUN ideology after his arrest and prosecution by the Polish police. Bandera’s trial for the assassination of Pieracki took place in Warsaw; a second trial followed in 1936 in Lviv for the killing in July 1934 (after Bandera’s arrest) of a respected Ukrainian director of a Lviv gymnasium whom the OUN had accused of cooperating with the Polish police.

  In his closing statement at the Lviv trial, Bandera explained why he and his comrades not only took the lives of others but also risked their own: “The OUN values the lives of its members very highly, but as we understand our idea, it is so grand that when it comes to its realization, not only individual sacrifices but hundreds and thousands must be offered in order to realize it.” Bandera was talking about the goal of an independent Ukraine. For his role in the assassination of Pieracki, Bandera received the death sentence, later commuted to seven life terms. He would go free in September 1939, when the German and Soviet invasion of Poland created chaos in Polish jails, allowing many prisoners, Bandera among them, simply to walk through their gates.

  The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had distinct Galician roots, but in the 1930s it made inroads into Ukrainian territories beyond Galicia, especially in the former Russian province of Volhynia. Ethnic relations there were quite different from those in Galicia. According to the 1931 census, 68 percent of Volhynians claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue, while 17 percent gave Polish and 10 percent Yiddish. Before World War I, Volhynia was a hotbed of Russian nationalism, with local Ukrainian peasants lacking a distinct national identity and sending to the Russian Duma members of the Union of the Russian People and its sister organizations. After its incorporation into the Polish state, the province had become an object of intensive Polish colonization as well as a sphere of competition between two Ukrainian nation-building projects. Both were Ukrainian, but one, modeled on Galicia, was strongly
anti-Polish, while the other was culturally and linguistically Ukrainian but politically loyal to the Polish regime.

  The Polish government did its best to seal off Volhynia from the “harmful” influence of Galician nationalism. It introduced the so-called Sokal border, named after a town on the boundary between Galicia and Volhynia, to limit the territorial extent of the activities of Galician Ukrainian institutions. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was allowed no representation in Volhynia, Polisia, Podlachia, or the Kholm region, as Greek Catholics there were subordinate to the Polish Roman Catholic Church. In areas north of the Sokal border, the government prohibited the activities of the Prosvita (Enlightenment) Society and limited the distribution of literature from Galicia. It made special efforts to prevent the OUN from establishing its network in Volhynia.

  One of the strongest supporters and enforcers of the Sokal border was Henryk Józewski, onetime Polish interior minister and governor of Volhynia from 1928 to 1938. An ethnic Pole born and educated in Kyiv, Józewski had served as deputy minister of interior in the Ukrainian government of Symon Petliura. He became a promoter of the Petliura-Piłsudski alliance in 1921 and, as head of Piłsudski’s chancellery and interior minister, championed the cause of Polish-Ukrainian accommodation. He considered such a prospect realistic if Volhynia were shielded from the destructive influences of Galicia. Józewski worked closely with “good Ukrainians,” representatives of the Petliura emigration in Poland—his former comrades in arms from Dnieper Ukraine—to foster a version of Ukrainian nationalism in Volhynia loyal to Poland. He supported an Orthodox Church independent of Moscow under the jurisdiction of the metropolitan of Warsaw and the patriarch of Constantinople. He also supported moderate Ukrainian politicians in parliamentary elections. Among them was Petliura’s nephew Stepan Skrypnyk, a member of the Polish parliament and future Orthodox bishop, who would win election as patriarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991.

  Nationalist and anti-Polish ideas came to Volhynia not only from Galicia with members of the OUN but also from Soviet Ukraine with adherents of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (CPWU). The latter were significantly more numerous than the former. In the mid-1930s, the CPWU had approximately 1,600 members and the OUN about 800. Both groups offered Ukrainian peasants an ideological product that combined social and national revolution. In the late 1930s, the authorities stepped up repression against communists and nationalists alike, again with many more arrests among the communists: the police detained close to 3,000 supporters of communist organizations and about 700 nationalists. Despite political persecution unleashed by the Stalin regime in the 1930s, on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Volhynian youth continued to listen to Soviet radio and look up to Soviet Ukraine.

  Józewski counteracted Soviet influence by attempting to close the Polish-Soviet border to Bolshevik incursions and clamp down on pro-Soviet peasant insurrections in Volhynia, but he also found inspiration in the Soviet Ukrainization policy and sought to turn Volhynia into a Ukrainian Piedmont. In a major departure from the educational policies adopted by the Polish government in Galicia, Józewski supported the establishment of Ukrainian schools in Volhynia. He also helped make Ukrainian an obligatory subject in bilingual Polish-Ukrainian schools. The Volhynian experiment came to an end in 1938 with Józewski’s resignation as governor and a general hardening of the Polish attitude toward national minorities after Piłsudski’s death in 1935. Despite all his efforts, Józewski failed to stop the spread of nationalist ideas in Volhynia. His toleration of the Ukrainian language and identity helped turn the province, strongly influenced by Russian imperialist currents before 1914, into a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism with powerful anti-Polish overtones.

  Nationalists and communists managed to cross both internal barriers (like the Sokal border in Poland) and international ones, represented by the boundaries of interwar states. The case of Ukrainians in interwar Romania attests to the ability of both groups to do just that—ignore international boundaries. Under a million ethnic Ukrainians lived in interwar Romania, settled in northern Bukovyna, southern Bessarabia, and Maramureş. Like Poland in that period, Romania varied its policies toward different groups of Ukrainians.

  The Romanian government welcomed former veterans of the Petliura army and gave formerly Russian-ruled territories of Ukraine, southern Bessarabia in particular, Ukrainian schools. Official policy was quite different vis-à-vis the formerly Austrian-ruled territories, with their much higher level of ethnic mobilization. In the former Austrian region of northern Bukovyna, the increasingly dictatorial Romanian regime imposed restrictions on Ukrainian cultural and political activities that exceeded those introduced by the Polish regime in Galicia. Besides introducing an agricultural reform that favored Romanian settlement in the region at the expense of Ukrainian peasants, the government undertook a major Romanization of Ukrainians, treating them as Romanians who had somehow forgotten their native language. Romanian became the sole language of administration and education in northern Bukovyna, and even the Orthodox liturgy (the region was predominantly Orthodox) was supposed to be served in Romanian instead of Church Slavonic.

  The Romanian regime was anything but popular among the Ukrainians, who looked for alternative ideologies and political parties to represent their interests. If southern Bessarabia was more open to communist propaganda, northern Bukovyna became fertile ground for the spread of nationalist ideas. The largest Ukrainian political party in northern Bukovyna, the national democrats, did their best to develop cultural organizations and defend the interests of the Ukrainian population in parliament. They had some success in the late 1920s but were generally unable to change government policies. This opened the door to more radical groups, including members of the OUN, who formed their first cell in Bukovyna in 1934. The nationalists, most of whom were students, soon became active in Bessarabia and Maramureş and published the popular newspaper Svoboda (Liberty), which had 7,000 subscribers before the Romanian authorities banned it in 1937. Repressive measures against the nationalists that year forced them underground, where the organization survived the outbreak of World War II.

  In the 1920s and early 1930s, the communists turned out to be more effective than nationalists in crossing one more European border, that of Czechoslovakia. The breakup of the former Habsburg Monarchy caught approximately half a million Ukrainians in Transcarpathia, part of the Hungarian realm of Austria-Hungary, before they had managed to decide who they really were—Russians, Ukrainians, or a separate ethnic group called Ruthenians. They faced the same choices as the Galician Ruthenians in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the process here took much more time and effort. In 1919, the region voluntarily joined the newly created pan-Slavic state of Czechoslovakia, where it adopted the name Subcarpathian Rus’. The Czechoslovak government, while originally neutral with regard to the identity issue, eventually backed the development of a politically neutral Ruthenian identity. This was an improvement over Austro-Hungarian times, when Budapest had attempted to Magyarize the local population. Prague also supported economic development of the region, which was an agricultural backwater, accounting for only 2 percent of national manufacturing output. As in Poland and Romania, however, the Czechoslovak government gave most administrative positions not to Ukrainians but to ethnic Czechs and Slovaks and supported a program of resettlement to the region, reserving much of its land for colonists.

  Czechoslovakia was the only eastern European country that not only declared but acted according to democratic values in the interwar period. In the case of Transcarpathia, that meant free and fair elections. Given the difficult economic situation in the region, the land hunger among the peasants, and the corresponding rise of social tensions, the major beneficiaries of the democratic freedoms granted by Prague were the communist and radical leftist parties: in 1924, the communists got 40 percent of the vote. The nation builders in
Transcarpathia were hopelessly split. Proponents of the three strands of Ukrainian national identity—Russophile, Ukrainophile, and Ruthenian—competed with one another. The strongest were the Russophile and Ukrainophile factions. The pro-Ukrainian Prosvita (Enlightenment) Society had 96 reading rooms in the region versus 192 established by the Russophile Dukhnovich Society. The Orthodox Church was in the hands of the Russophiles, while the Ukrainophiles made inroads into the Greek Catholic Church, traditionally controlled by pro-Hungarian elements. Modern Ukrainian identity was a latecomer to Transcarpathia, but in the 1920s it became the most dynamic political force in the region, linking it with other Ukrainian territories in a diverse but cohesive project to build a modern Ukrainian nation.

  Of all the regimes that controlled parts of Ukrainian territory during the interwar period, only the communist authorities in Moscow allowed the Ukrainian national project some form of statehood and offered support for the development of Ukrainian culture. The communist project of Ukrainian nation building had broad appeal both in Soviet Ukraine and in the neighboring eastern European countries with large Ukrainian communities. But national communism as a means of resolving the Ukrainian question encountered serious obstacles to its implementation. In eastern Europe, proponents of a communist Ukraine encountered a variety of hurdles: anticommunist as well as anti-Ukrainian policies implemented by national governments; opposition from mainstream Ukrainian parties seeking a modus vivendi with existing regimes; and rising competition from the radical Ukrainian nationalist ideology. But the main reason for the failure of national communism lay in the dramatic changes in Soviet policy that occurred in the 1930s. They turned Soviet Ukraine, once imagined as a communist Piedmont, into a communist Pompeii: the eruption of the Stalinist volcano reduced to ashes the high hopes that Ukrainian nation builders had once cherished with regard to the revolutionary regime in Moscow.