Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (review)

Timothy Snyder traces the life of Henryk Józewski, a senior Polish intelligence officer who became governor of Volhynia, a borderland region seized by Poland during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 and then occupied by the Soviet Union along with the rest of eastern Poland in September 1939. The title of the book promises a spy story, but Snyder's analysis of Volhynian society and the political struggle among Poland, the Soviet Union, and Ukrainian radicals for influence in the region overshadows the book's biographical aspects and the descriptions of covert operations launched by Polish and Soviet intelligence services.

As is typical of borderlands, Volhynia was inhabited by people of mixed ethnic, religious, and cultural identities. Although Ukrainians were a minority in Poland overall, they were the majority in Volhynia, and they strove for equality with privileged Poles in the region. The authorities in Warsaw regarded the Poles in Volhynia as the mainstay of Poland's power there and rewarded them with choice government positions and the best lands. Volhynia experienced ethnic, agrarian, and religious tensions that periodically escalated to small-scale guerrilla warfare and finally exploded in one of the most horrible incidents of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe.

Snyder draws on Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian primary sources that have only recently been made available. Such a broad source base enables him to analyze the perspective of every major political actor, effectively tackling sensitive issues that have traditionally been the subject of interpretations marred by nationalist agendas, ideological bias, and political correctness. Snyder offers an exceptionally thorough and balanced analysis of the many nettlesome problems tormenting Volhynia. He details the challenges facing the Polish administration as it sought to integrate a large, restive national minority into mainstream society. Snyder demonstrates that this problem had no easy solutions. The government wavered between the options of polonizing Ukrainians by force, which was bound to spark resistance, or adopting multiculturalism that could over time spur the growth of ethnic self-consciousness and separatism. As events unfolded, the Polish regime was not authoritarian and ruthless enough to adopt the first option consistently, nor was it willing to carry out radical social and economic reforms that could have borne fruit within a multicultural framework. Instead, the Polish authorities tried to maintain their grip by relying on election fraud, repression (though without the severity that would have been needed to quell dissent), and the sponsorship of Polish military colonists whose influx aggravated the existing social tensions. The Ukrainians in the region were increasingly frustrated by the impossibility of improving their lot through legal channels, and they began to support national Communist and fascist revolutionaries.

Snyder's path-breaking research highlights Volhynian leftists who discarded conventional Marxist rhetoric and rallied urban Jews and rural Ukrainians under slogans of ethnic equality and agrarian reform. In the late 1930s the leftists began to experience increasing competition from the opposite side of the political spectrum. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) called for the ethnic cleansing of Poles and other non-Ukrainians. OUN began to implement its program during the Nazi occupation, which led to the mutual extermination of Poles and Ukrainians. Snyder examined the roots of this calamity in two previous articles, "The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943," Past and Present, No. 179 (May 2003), pp. 197–234; and "'To Resolve the Ukrainian Question Once and for All': The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947," Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 86–120. In Sketches from a Secret War he traces the earlier, futile attempts of the Polish government to defuse the escalating tensions. Henryk Józewski was one of the civil servants entrusted with this endeavor.

Snyder found excellent sources pertaining to Józewski's career, including memoirs, protocols of Józewski's interrogations in Communist Poland, testimonies of his former colleagues, the reports...