The Politics of Memory in Poland and Ukraine

From Reconciliation to De-Conciliation

Tomasz Stryjek, Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin, Tomasz Stryjek, Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000462036
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together the work of sociologists, historians, and political scientists, this book explores the increasing importance of the politics of memory in central and eastern European states since the end of communism, with a particular focus on relations between Ukraine and Poland. Through studies of the representation of the past and the creation of memory in education, mass media, and on a local level, it examines the responses of Polish and Ukrainian authorities and public institutions to questions surrounding historical issues between the two nations. At a time of growing renationalization in domestic politics in the region, brought about by challenges connected with migration and fear of Russian military activity, this volume asks whether international cooperation and the stability of democracy are under threat. An exploration of the changes in national historical culture, The Politics of Memory in Poland and Ukraine will appeal to scholars with interests in memory studies, national identity, and the implications of memory-making for contemporary relations between states.

Part I
Past roots and contemporary manifestations of differences in the historical cultures of Poland and Ukraine

1
Polish-Ukrainian historical controversies

An overview

Andrii Portnov

DOI: 10.4324/9781003017349-3

History is (too) often used as a justification, explanation, or even a precursor to ongoing conflicts about memory. And neighbors, especially those with shared experiences and similar features, are particularly inclined to stress the differences.

In my essay, I would like to show the origins, as well as the continuities and disruptions, of some basic historical stereotypes in Polish-Ukrainian relations, but without essentializing them. I will try to describe the most widespread and still living historical myths, keeping in mind the changing, dynamic, and ambivalent nature of the very notions of Polish-ness and Ukraine-ness.

Such an overview is inevitably selective and should openly face the serious risk of being too broad in its generalizations. Being aware of this, I treat my essay as an exercise in synthesis and as an invitation to further reading and reflection.

The Polish-Lithuanian Res Publica: an unusual empire and/or a prototype for the EU?

Polish-Ukrainian historical encounters can be traced back to interactions between the medieval principality of Poland and old Rus’. In the first case (Poland), Christianity came from Rome, and in the second case (Rus’) it came from Byzantine. After the decline of the Rus’ principalities, present-day western Ukraine, with its main city of Lviv/Lwów, was integrated into the Polish state in the late fourteenth century, which makes the story of this region’s association with Poland almost six centuries long.

However, the majority of future Ukrainian lands came under the Polish crown in 1569 as a result of the Union of Lublin between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – a huge state (the second largest in early modern Europe after Muscovy) with a population of 8–11 million people. The Rzeczpospolita’ s domain included the majority of the territories of present-day Poland and Ukraine, as well the entire territories of present-day Belarus and Lithuania, and parts of present-day western Russia. The south eastern borderlands of the Commonwealth created a contact zone with the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire. This exact area of steppe on the lower Dnieper River became the birthplace of Cossackdom: a specific military phenomenon of the frontier that, at first, turned into a significant problem for Polish-Ottoman relations.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a unique power structure with a Sejm (a diet) as the sovereign entity and the representative of all nobility (which constituted up to 7 to 10 percent of the entire population) and an elected king. The country had an unusually large noble stratum and the largest Jewish population in the early modern world.

How did the Rzeczpospolita deal with the diversity of its lands and people? On the one hand, it remained rather tolerant towards the different religions; on the other, it still welcomed the conversion of the elites to Catholicism and the establishment of a Uniate (Greek-Catholic) church subordinated to the Pope in Rome. The Church Union with Rome was proclaimed in Berestia/Brest (a town in present-day Belarus) in 1596. Starting from the early seventeenth century, the aforementioned Cossacks strove to present themselves as defenders of an endangered Orthodox faith in order to add important symbolic legitimacy to their social claims.

Protection of Orthodoxy and social guarantees for Cossacks were the main demands of the biggest Cossack uprising, which was under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. It started in 1648 and rapidly turned into a bloody war. Hetman Khmelnytsky, who was constantly looking for international alliances, finally succeeded in gaining support from Moscow, the only Orthodox state in the region, in 1654. This agreement, broadly known as the Pereyaslav Treaty, opened up an era in which Cossack Ukraine was gradually transferred from Polish rule to Russian sovereignty.

One of the possible solutions to Khmelnytsky demands – the creation of Cossack autonomy, and even the transformation of the Commonwealth into a triad structure: Polish-Lithuanian-Cossack – never materialized. The last attempt was made in 1658 by Khmelnytsky’s successor Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky who agreed to the establishment of the Ruthenian Duchy (Kyiv, Bratslav, and the Chernihiv palatinates) as the third part of the Res Publica. This project, known as the Union of Hadiach, was finally rejected by the Sejm and remained a political fantasy.

How can we summarize the Commonwealth’s experience for Ukraine? Ihor Ševčenko stressed that “the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands are the only Orthodox Slavic territories that widely experienced the Renaissance, and, above all, its aftermath – the baroque and the Counter-Reformation,” and “For a period ranging between one century and four, depending on region, Ukrainians participated in the life of a non-centralized state in which individual freedom and the privileges of the upper class of society were respected” (Ševčenko 1996, 127).

How can we summarize the Commonwealth’s experience for Poland? Ševčenko (1996, 122) mentions a particular type of Polish accent, the formation of a class of Polish or Polonized magnats who owned enormous latifundia, kept private armies, and opposed any centralized executive; and, by doing so, prevented Poland transforming into one of the modern states.

One could also say that in early modern times Poland became a window to the West for Ukraine, and Ukraine became the birthplace of Polish imperial fantasies. The particular mythology of the Polish Borderlands (Kresy) developed later (and will be discussed later), but it inextricably related to the notion of the borders of 1772 (the year of the first Partition of the Rzeczpospolita).

The historiographical rehabilitation of nobility’s Res Publica came much later, in the context of the post-communist transformation of Eastern and Central Europe. Polish historians began to stress the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s achievements in parliamentarism, self-government, civil rights, and religious tolerance; and to criticize its identification only with what is now modern Poland (Sulima Kamiński 2000). The international attention paid to non-nationalistic forms of political organization and to historical alternatives to ethnic nationalism made the Rzeczpospolita an attractive (and provocative) comparison to the European Union (Snyder 2003, 293).

Does such comparison really make sense? And are all the positive visions of the Commonwealth completely free of hidden Polish imperial fantasies and connotations? Some historians strongly rejected the idealization of the szlachta (i.e., nobility) democracy and compared Polish literary perceptions of its Eastern Borderlands to French discourses on Algeria, and openly suggested that Kresy mythology be “put [to] an end” (Beauvois 1994).

The comparison to Algeria inevitably implies both an imperial and colonial perspective to the Commonwealth’s history. Could the Rzeczpospolita be described as an Empire? Maybe, a very peculiar type of Empire then (Nowak 2008)? An Empire whose expansion was not based on the classical relations of metropole-colonies. An Empire that was not a “multinational federation,” but a polity where all political identifications were socially limited and where there were no “Poles,” “Ukrainians,” or “Lithuanians” in the modern sense (Szporluk 2007, 29). Anyway, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist; it was partitioned between the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian Empires.

The end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries could be described as a time of open possibilities, of co-existence and of competition between an estate and history-based concept of nationality, and an ethnic and language-based one. The Polish case is of particular interest in this respect; because here the process of modern nation formation started from the political phase, from the definition of the nation as a sovereign community of citizens, but not of a people with the same ethnicity (Walicki 1994). This community was limited to the noble stratum, and language or religion did not make the Polish peasant socially and culturally closer to the szlachcic (Kizwalter 1999, 42–90). The very idea of winning over the peasants for the nation’s cause came to the political avant scène later. In the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire was an estate-dynastic monarchy with little attention being paid to the ethnic composition of the population in the ex-Polish provinces and an attitude towards members of the szlachta stratum as being, first and foremost, landlords and only after this, Poles.

Dilemmas of Ukrainian and Polish modern national projects

The Ukrainian national project of the nineteenth century adopted an ethnographic principle, and claimed the goal of cultural autonomy for all territories that had a predominantly Ukrainian peasant population. Its cultural claims, at least at first glance, seemed to be rather harmless to a number of imperial officials in both the Habsburg and Romanov Empires, who were much more preoccupied with the stronger and politically mature Polish national movement. At the same time, at least under particular circumstances, both empires sought to use the Ukrainian card against one another.

All this created a productive and challenging context for the development of the Ukrainian movement. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the leaders of the Ukrainian movement in Russia eagerly expressed their anti-Polish sentiments, simultaneously stressing the political inevitability of the joint development of Ukraine and Russia. Following the point Mykola Kostomarov made in 1861, they portrayed Ukrainian people as “profoundly democratic,” and Poles as “profoundly aristocratic” (Kostomarov 1991, 69). The issue concerning the elites was of special importance here. One of the founders of Ukrainian historiography, a professor at Kyiv University and a Polish nobleman by birth, Volodymyr Antonovych insisted that the Polish nobles in Ukraine should either “return to the nationality abandoned by their ancestors, or, to resettle to the Polish lands inhabited by Polish people” (Antonovych 1995, 88).

A very different view on the elites’ issue was presented by another Pole by birth who made a conscious choice in favor of Ukrainian identity: his name was Viacheslav Lypynsky. Unlike Antonovych, Lypynsky was proud of his noble origin and praised szlachta for its “statehood value” (Gancarz 2007). Still, he was no less convinced of the fundamental importance of “separating Ukraine from Poland, but in such a way that would mean not drowning in a Russian sea” (Lypynsky 1926, XXV).

The main challenge for the modern Polish national project was a bit different. Due to the fact that the area in which the Polish szlachta had settled was significantly larger than the area containing predominantly Polish peasants, the acceptance of the ethnic concept of the nation would, in the Polish case, automatically mean the dramatic “reduction of the Motherland” (Walicki 2000, 121, 141).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the majority of Polish writers and political thinkers believed in the possibility of preserving the 1772 borders for the future Poland. They also insisted that there were cultural differences between the Ukrainians (often called Ruthenians) and the Russians. At the same time, they would barely question the “cultural inferiority” of Ukrainian peasants and their “natural longing” for Polish culture. The leader of the conservative political camp narodowa demokracja (National Democrats), Roman Dmowski, expressed in 1897 his deep conviction that “Ruthenian culture could only become the foundation for a movement with an exclusively cultural character” (Porter 2000, 225).

If the national democrats believed in the political (if not cultural) assimilation of the Ruthenians, their main opponents, the Polish socialists headed by Józef Piłsudski, developed the utopia of a federation of Eastern European nationalities under Polish leadership, united against Russia. One of the most prominent supporters of the socialist federative plans, Leon Wasilewski (1911), called for the acceptance of the Ukrainians’ national character and support for their independence aspirations against Russia. At the same time, he rightly predicted the Ukrainian-Polish conflict over Lviv/Lwów because “such a conflict is inevitable if two nationalities – one socially and politically privileged, and the other, humiliated – populate a certain area together” (Wasilewski 1911, 218). Wasilewski (1911) appealed to the democrats of both nations to do everything to minimize the scale of future violence. His plea proved to be more than relevant within ten years of his pronouncement.

Inter-war Poland: the Second Republic and its Ukrainians

Independent Poland appeared on the political map of Europe after the First World War and the collapse of the Russian and Austrian Empires. It proudly called itself the Second Republic of Poland (Druga Rzeczpospolita) even though, unlike the early modern Commonwealth, it considered itself to be the national state of the Poles. Independent Ukraine failed to survive the turmoil of revolutions and wars during 1917–21. Still, the Soviet Ukrainian republic became one of the founding members of the semi-federative Soviet Union.

In inter-war Europe, the territories inhabited predominantly by Ukrainian populations were divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Volhynia (which previously belonged to the Romanov Empire) and East Galicia (which previously belonged to the Habsburg Empire) became part of a new Polish state. And this happened after the Ukrainian-Polish war over Lviv/Lwów and Galicia. On 1 November 1918, Lviv was taken by Ukrainian military units of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (Zakhidnoukrayins’ka narodna respublika, ZUNR) who justified their actions with the argument that East Galicia had been Ukrainian until 1387 and “from an ethn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables and graphs
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: how historical cultures change and how we can study this
• Part I Past roots and contemporary manifestations of differences in the historical cultures of Poland and Ukraine
• Part II State historical education: goals, values, content, performers, and mechanisms
• Part III Media as a creator and a transmitter of representations of the past
• Part IV History, collective memory, and social actors in the local communities
• Afterword
• Index