Ukrainians Exploited By Poles Debunked Snyder

Sketches From a Secret War, by Timothy Snyder. 2005

Henryk Jozewski. Ukrainians Had It Bad in Poland Myth: The Many Ways That Poland Benefitted Ukrainians. OUN Separatism, and Planned Genocide, and the Necessary Polish Pacification Response

The life of Henryk Jozewski spanned much of modern Polish history. It included the pre-Independence period, WWI, the Polish-Bolshevik War (1920), Jozewski’s attempts to promote Polish-Ukrainian understanding in the Kresy and to unite both peoples against the Soviet Union and Communism, his WWII and post-WWII hiding from Nazis and Communists for a prolonged period of time, his trial and release, and his eventual death, at age 88, just as the Solidarity Movement was blossoming (1981). Jozewski was not religious, and was a Freemason.

Jozewski had been closely involved with Ukrainians before and during the ill-fated Pilsudski-Petliura (Petlyura) alliance of the 1920 Polish-Soviet War. In fact, this Ukrainian-speaking Pole was to have been part of the independent Ukrainian government. (p. 8). He was close to Pilsudski, and became the postwar governor of Poland’s Ukrainian-majority Volhynia (Wolyn).

“POLISH IMPERIALISM” IN SOVIET COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA: AN IRONY

During the interwar era, Soviet Communist propaganda warned of a Polish invasion of the Soviet Ukraine. Ironic to this, eastern Ukrainians actually longed for such a development–even before the Holomodor! (p. 99). The Soviets strongly promoted Communist agitation among Poland’s Ukrainians.

POLES DID NOT OPPRESS UKRAINIANS: POLES UPLIFTED UKRAINIANS

Snyder unmasks many of the myths and exaggerations that have been advanced relative to the Polish presence in the Kresy. Ukrainian backwardness was not the result of Polish rule: It had preceded Polish rule. At the start of Polish rule, the respective urban and rural illiteracy rates were 31% and 60.5% for Roman Catholics (almost entirely Poles); against 55.6% and 84% for Orthodox (almost entirely Ukrainians). (p. 61).

Far from being oppressive to Ukrainians, the Polish authorities actually played a very beneficial role in Volhynia: “In 1921, no Volhynian town had a regulated street network…In the first decade of Polish rule, Polish authorities built 114 elementary schools and a high school, as well as three hospitals and ten public buildings. All important towns were electrified, and telephone service was introduced.” (p. 61).

Snyder realizes the fact that, although most of the nobility in Volhynia were Polish, most Poles living there were not nobles. (p. 5). The products of land reform, although not distributed among Poles and Ukrainians in proportion to their relative numbers in the Volhynian population, were nevertheless not trivial in scope, and were of benefit to the Ukrainians. Snyder writes: “By 1937, the state had taken 230,883 hectares from Polish landowners in Volhynia, and 174,717 hectares from non-Polish landowners. Of these 404, 270 hectares, 198,195 hectares (48.9%) were granted to Poles (16.7% of the population) and 203,417 hectares (50%) were given to Ukrainians (68.1% of the population).” (p. 285).

As for the much-exaggerated interwar military settlers (OSADNICY), there were only 3,800 of them in Volhynia and a comparable number in other major parts of the Kresy. (p. 11). Compared to the millions of non-Poles living there, this was a drop in the bucket–much too small to noticeably alter the ethnic composition, and therefore hardly a significant attempt at “colonization” or Polonization.

Jozewski’s policies eschewed attempts at Polonization of Ukrainians. Snyder writes: “By 1936, more than two-thirds of Volhynian elementary schools had some Ukrainian component…The inclusion of a Ukrainian component in Polish schools replaced rather than complemented actual Ukrainian schools, of which there were extremely few.” (p. 68). Clearly, then, the lack of Polish support for all-Ukrainian schools had been an anti-separatist tactic, not an anti-Ukrainian one.

After Jozewski’s removal following the death of Pilsudski, his successors planned to Polonize the Kresy through massive investment and modernization, leading to a massive migration of new Polish settlers. (p. 165). There was a revindication of Orthodox churches in Volhynia and (especially) the Lublin area. This was defended as a recovery of non-Orthodox churches that had forcibly been made Orthodox by the Russians during their over-century of post-Partition rule, and not an attempt to take-away Orthodox Churches away from the Ukrainians. (pp. 162-163).

POLAND’S UNENVIABLE GEOPOLITICAL SITUATION IN THE LATE 1930s

By 1930, Soviet military power had grown so much that a renewed Polish invasion of the USSR was militarily impossibility. (p. 104, 117). The Polish-Soviet and Polish-German nonaggression pacts of the early 1930’s reflected this reality. Snyder realizes that Poland wanted truly to be neutral towards the two powers and rejects the claim, advanced by Soviet propaganda at the time [and recently repeated Russian revisionists] that accused Poland of having a secret alliance, with Nazi Germany, against the USSR.(p. 117).

THE ZYDOKOMUNA IN THE USSR AND IN INTERWAR VOLYN

Snyder writes: “It is true that about thirty percent of the Bolshevik Central Committee members were Jewish in 1917, and that Trotsky, a Jew, was the Bolshevik Commissar for war in 1920.” (p. 52). Not mentioned is the fact that 1-2% of the population of the USSR was Jewish. As for interwar Poland, much the same situation existed as per the CP. For example, Snyder comments: “In Luck [Lutsk], for example, every member of the Party was Jewish.” (p. 67). During this same time, Poland’s Ukrainian Communists complained that the local Ukrainian Communist Party leadership, handpicked by the Soviets, was predominantly Jewish. (p. 71).

UKRAINIAN SEPARATISM AND THE VERY NECESSARY POLISH PACIFICATION

The Ukrainian fascist-separatist OUN, active in intewar Poland, did everything to prevent Polish-Ukrainian friendship. After a wave of assassinations and arsons, the Pacification took place: “In September [1930] Pilsudski ordered the pacification of Galicia, sending a thousand policemen to search 450 villages for nationalist agitators. They found weapons (1,287 rifles, 566 revolvers, 31 grenades) and explosive materials (99.8 kilograms), but Galician Ukrainians interpreted intrusive searches in political terms.” (p. 76). Snyder suggests that the OUN assassination of Tadeusz Holowko, a tireless champion of Polish-Ukrainian goodwill, had owed to a mistaken identity, because it was inconsistent with the OUN’s foreign image as the defender of an oppressed people. (pp. 36-37). The OUN-UPA genocide of Poles, beginning in the winter of 1942/1943 in German-occupied Volhynia, had been planned long before WWII. Already in 1936, captured OUN operatives spoke of exterminating the Poles. (p. 158; See also p. 167).