Volyn' i Kholmshchyna 1938-1947 rr.: Pols'ko-ukrains'ke protystoyannya ta ioho vidlunnya: Doslidzhennya, dokumenty, spohady (review)

From 1943 to 1947, ethnic cleansing by groups and states acting in the name of Ukrainians and Poles killed roughly 100,000 people and forced some 1.4 million more from their homes. This volume, edited by a leading Ukrainian historian, is the latest attempt to document the mass killing and forced population exchanges of the 1940s in the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands. It includes fourteen chapters as well as a selection of state documents, personal recollections, and reviews of books (one of these books is my own). It concludes with official statements released in connection with the sixtieth anniversary of the expulsion of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) from German-occupied Volhynia in 1943. The substantive chapters are the subject of review here.

During the Communist period and since, writers who wish to prevent Poles from sustaining good relations with Ukrainians have presented a one-sided nationalist account of the events of 1943. The Polish Communist regime succeeded in creating the (false) belief that the Polish state cleansed its own Ukrainians in 1947 in justified revenge for the ethnic cleansings of Poles from Volhynia in 1943. In the post-Soviet era, writers who oppose Ukraine's European orientation have argued that Polish memories of 1943 are a provocation of the Ukrainian nation. Despite such pressures, in the 1990s several valuable studies were published in Polish and Ukrainian under the title of Poland-Ukraine: Difficult Questions. These volumes feature articles by Ukrainian and Polish authors on the same subjects, printed one after the other. Along with monographs by Grzegorz Motyka and Ihor Ilyushyn, these volumes are the starting point for readers who know Polish or Ukrainian and are interested in this question.

Because debates about ethnic cleansing often become disputes about who started the killing, periodization is extremely important. To begin in 1938, as the volume under review does, is to include the "revindication" campaigns in Poland's Chełm (Kholm) and Volhynia regions in 1938 and 1939, part of a Polish strategy to polonize and modernize much of the eastern part of the country. In Volhynia and especially in the Chełm area, Orthodox Ukrainian peasants were induced by promise of material gain or threats of violence to convert to Roman Catholicism. These events, discussed in useful essays here and in a monograph by Robert Potocki, are of great interest to the study of the interwar Polish state and its treatment of national minorities. But to begin in 1938 and not earlier is to exclude the policy pursued by Poland in Volhynia until the spring of that year. In the hopes of gaining loyal Ukrainian citizens, the Polish governor arranged for cultural concessions to the local Ukrainian minority. To be sure, as Cornelia Schenke demonstrates in her Nationalstaat und nationale Frage: Polen und die Ukrainer 1921–1939 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2004), which was published after Isaevych's book appeared (though a précis is included in Volyn' i Kholmshchyna), Poland's acceptance of limited Ukrainization was mostly for external consumption. Nonetheless, it probably deserves more substantial treatment than it is given here.

To begin in 1938 is also to suggest that the Chełm revindications initiated the cycle of ethnic cleansing that ended in 1947, a thesis that is true only in a very attenuated sense, if at all. The revindications undermined the conservative authority of the Orthodox clergy and provided one more propaganda resource for Ukrainian Communists and nationalists. Because Communists were far stronger than nationalists in the Volhynia of the day, the revindications may have helped the former more than the latter. Of much greater importance to future relations between Ukrainians and Poles, however, was the outbreak of war in September 1939, the destruction of the Polish state, Soviet deportations of elites, and German genocide of Jews and exploitation of Ukrainians. All these events intervened between the...