Warsaw is one of the most determined supporters of Kyiv in the war. However, attitudes in some segments of Polish society are highly critical, especially where memories of ethnic violence run deep and collective identities remain contested. Impressions from south-east Poland.
The intermingling of western and eastern Slavs over many centuries is poorly understood, not only by outsiders but by the inhabitants of East-Central Europe themselves. Ordinary citizens make sense of this history by drawing on the stereotypes of national memory cultures, supplemented by their personal experiences. In both Polish and Ukrainian populations, memories of ethnic violence in the 1940s run deep. During my recent visit to Poland, a retired university professor (born in 1941) asked me how he could be expected to support a government in Kyiv that refused to come to terms with the troubled history of the Kresy. Ukrainian ministers, he told me, took pride in barbaric acts of terror that had taken the lives of several members of his immediate family when he was an infant. While the West scoffs at Putin’s allegations of Nazi tendencies in the government of Ukraine, many Poles are still conscious of the fact that Ukrainians collaborated in large numbers with the Wehrmacht for the sake of their national cause. Statues commemorating the leaders of these groupings, their flags and other symbols, are commonplace in the contemporary Ukrainian public sphere, especially in the west, the former Galicia. Poles with an interest in these matters also point to continued repression of minorities by successive Ukrainian governments, notably the denial of language rights.
Critical Voices in the South East
These critical voices are heard most frequently in the Supcarpathian voivodeship (województwo podkarpackie), in the south-eastern corner of the country, where violence culminated in the last years of the Second World War and continued for two years after its conclusion. Armed groups known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) perpetrated numerous atrocities against Polish villagers. The most notorious took place on the 6th August 1944 in the village of Baligród in the Bieszczady mountains, where a monument was erected forty years later to the 42 Poles shot in cold blood. Such acts of commemoration proliferated following the end of the People’s Republic, keeping memories of Ukrainian terror alive. Children’s literature and television films of the socialist era conveyed vivid accounts of bestial violence. These books are still read and connections made with the violence of today. Was I aware, a Polish villager with no education beyond vocational school (b. 1964) asked me, of the policy implemented by Ukraine’s attack drones? It was never enough to shoot and leave the enemy for dead; the body had to be further pulverized in order to make recognition and burial impossible.
A new chapter in Polish-Ukrainian relations began in April 1947 when the authorities of the People’s Republic implemented a mass deportation of the indigenous eastern Slav population of the Carpathians. Though very few locals had participated in the terrorism of the UPA, passive support was presumed and it was imperative to end the violence. Eastern Slav villagers were deported to remote parts of the country to resettle lands formerly occupied by Germans. Some were eventually able to return to the mountains, but most stayed in the diaspora, where their economic prospects were better. Returnees found themselves in a minority because their former home was allocated to a Polish colonist and their wooden church (cerkiew) was converted from the Greek Catholic to the Roman Catholic denomination. The People’s Republic classified these eastern Slavs as Ukrainians. Surely, one might suppose, these victims of the ethnic cleansing of 1947 and their descendants would be unanimous in their support for Ukraine in the 2020s?
Not so. The majority of eastern Slavs in the Polish Carpathians never embraced a Ukrainian identity. During the First World War they sympathized with the Russian Tsar (for which they paid a high price in Austrian internment camps). After 1918, the independent Polish state treated them quite differently from the large Ukrainian minority and sought to assimilate them. Some eastern Slav parishes abandoned the Greek Catholic Church for Orthodoxy. In 1945, large numbers were deported to Ukraine. Those who remained were dispersed across Poland in 1947 and in no position to organize themselves as a group. Following the collapse of socialism, however, a separate Lemko ethnicity was recognized by the new Polish republic. This name originated as an artificial imposition by Polish ethnographers. While some Lemkos have learned to see themselves as a sub-ethnicity or regional group of a sovereign Ukrainian nation-state, others continue to contest such classifications. These Lemko patriots object to the fact that their major cultural festival has been taken over by the pro-Ukrainian faction and react by organizing their own events, both in the mountain homelands and in the diaspora. Lemko dialects have been standardized by academics at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, whose work has contributed to international scholarly recognition of Rusyn as a fourth eastern Slav literary language, distinct from Ukrainian as well as from Russian and Belarusian. The Rusyn language is spoken not only in Poland by Lemkos but also by closely related communities in neighbouring sections of the Carpathians (including the Transcarpathian province of Ukraine, where speakers are not recognized as a distinct group) and further afield by communities originating in this region.
The Blood of the Past
The violence of the 2020s poses dilemmas for Lemkos, a minority within Poland’s eastern Slav minority. There is no question of public support for Vladimir Putin; but they may remind visitors to their homeland that hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers sacrificed their lives to free Poland (and Czechoslovakia as it then was) from the Nazis. The evidence is there in the soil: military cemeteries have been restored and opened to visitors throughout the region. The campaigns of both the Red Army and the Polish underground army are well documented in the palace museum at Dukla, a medieval town on the main trade route to historic Hungary (today Slovakia), the population of which has been entirely Polish and Roman Catholic since the 1940s.
Ten miles south of Dukla in the direction of the pass, in the village of Zyndranowa, the country’s only Lemko museum combines old wooden houses and artefacts of the preindustrial peasant economy with military memorabilia. This mini-skanzen originated as the private initiative of a 1960s returnee, who managed to save his family’s property from destruction. Today it is headed by his son, who receives modest support from the state to employ a guide to offer tourists glimpses of the multicultural history of this valley. Near the Lemko museum, the restoration of a cottage formerly occupied by a Jewish family is a reminder that, prior to the 1940s, in addition to western and eastern Slavs, Jews formed a key component of this borderland. Dukla itself had a large Jewish population and the ruins of the synagogue van still be viewed. Other nearby towns were celebrated for their Hasidic traditions. The museum complex in Zyndranowa also pays homage to the Roma: they too were eliminated by the Nazis.
In the understanding of at least some self-identifying Lemkos, as for those ethnic Poles who like to recall a glorious bygone era when Poland was a great power in the east, Ukrainian peoplehood is a problematic, rather artificial construction. In their eyes, the Ukrainian state does not have the same standing and recognition that, say, British and German states enjoy alongside the Polish and the Russian. Ukraine, especially under its current nationalist leadership, is viewed differently. However disconcerting for liberal politicians and international lawyers, these perceptions cannot be wished away. Numerous interlocutors in Autumn 2024 suggested to me that it was a mistake to see the present violence in eastern Ukraine as a war between two sovereign states. Rather, eastern Slavs on both sides were paying a high price for western manipulation. The Ukrainian state – so I was informed by both Poles and Lemkos – was a puppet in the hands of greater powers. Its fate would depend on the forthcoming US elections.
Also by the Author: Why many Poles are not as supportive of Ukraine’s war effort as their leaders in Warsaw (The Conversation, October 17, 2024)
Featured image: Henryk Bielamowicz, Lesko, pomnik (HB1), cropped, CC BY-SA 4.0
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