History of the Ukrainian minority in Poland
Following the extinction of the Rurikid dynasty in 1323, the Polish Kingdom extended further east in 1340 to include the lands of Przemyśl and in 1366, Kamianets-Podilskyi (Kamieniec Podolski).
After the Union of Lublin (1569), principalities of Galicia and Western Volhynia became, what is known as, the Ruthenian Voivodeship of the Polish Crown, while the rest of Red Ruthenia together with Kyiv came under Lithuanian control.
Kopystensky—the re-discoverer of the ancient Hypatian Codex of southern Rus – regarded the eastern Slavs as "one nation in the medieval sense of the term, descended from a common ancestor."
Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky and representative of populist movement in Ukraine, attacked Poland, claiming: "the four centuries of Polish rule had left particularly destructive effects (...) economic and cultural backwardness in Galicia was the main "legacy of historical Poland, which assiduously skimmed everything that could be considered the cream of the nation, leaving it in a state of oppression and helplessness".
A formal treaty, the Peace of Riga, was signed on 18 March 1921, establishing Polish borders for the period between the World Wars.
[13] Of the 44 administrative divisions of Austrian eastern Galicia, Lviv (Polish: Lwów, German: Lemberg), the biggest and capital city of the province, was the only one in which Poles made up a majority of the population.
The assimilationist approach advocated by Roman Dmowski (minister of foreign affairs) and Stanisław Grabski (minister of religion and education) clashed with the more tolerant approach advocated by the Polish chief of State Józef Piłsudski,[22] whose project of creating the Międzymorze federation with other states failed in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War.
The ultranationalist Roman Dmowski and his National Democrats, with its consistent militantly anti-Ukrainian policies, was supported by the Polish minority in Eastern Galicia.
Ukrainian and Belarusian deputies created a powerful "Ukrainian-Belarusian Club" (Klub Ukrainsko-Bialoruski), whose members were very active in those years.
[31] In response to this terrorism, the Polish government implemented its so-called pacification in Galician villages suspected of support for UVO.
[35] A Polish report about the popular mood in Volhynia recorded a comment of a young Ukrainian from October 1938: "we will decorate our pillars with you and our trees with your wives.
"[36] Ukrainian organizations continued to grow in spite of Polish interference that included destroying reading rooms during pacification in 1930 and banning them in certain regions.
[37] There was the Luh sobriety association, and the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, several newspapers (including Dilo) and the sports organizations.
During the 1920s, electrification and telephone service were introduced to all major towns, and the share of children receiving school education rose from 15% to 70% in Volhynia alone.
[42] The Polish Ministry of Education increased the number of schools in the Ukrainian areas more than three-fold, to 3,100 by 1938, thus reducing the illiteracy rate among people ten-years-and-older from 50% down to 35% by 1931.
[49] The Polish authorities established the Institute for the Study of Nationality Affairs and educational society for the Orthodox (named after Petro Mohyla, it expanded to 870 chapters in Volhynia).
"[56] The Polish army Generals believed that filling all state offices in Volhynia with ethnic Poles would ensure fast mobilization and prevent sabotage in case of a Russian attack on Poland.
[45] A decree defending the rights of the Orthodox minorities was issued but often failed in practice, as the Roman Catholic Church, which had been persecuted under Tsarist rule[63][64][65] and was eager to strengthen its position as well as to reclaim Catholic properties that had been confiscated and converted into Orthodox churches,[66] had official representation in the Sejm (Polish parliament) and the courts.
[59] In the regions of Chelm and Polisia, armed groups of Polish colonists known as Krakus terrorized Ukrainian civilians into converting to Catholicism.
The last official government act of the Polish state in Volhynia was to, in August 1939, convert the last remaining Orthodox church in the Volhynian capital of Lutsk into a Roman Catholic one.
[69] The Orthodox clergy in Volhynia used the persecution of their church to build up already strong feelings of resentment among the local Ukrainian people against the Poles.
Military parades and commemorations of battles at particular streets within the city, all celebrating the Polish forces who fought against the Ukrainians in 1918, became frequent.
"[73] After the OUN's assassination of Poland's minister of the interior in 1934 attempts were made at normalization between the government and the UNDO representatives led by Sheptytsky.
[74] Polish youths were organized into armed, local paramilitary Strzelcy groups and terrorized the Ukrainian population under the pretext of maintaining law and order, wrote Subtelny.
[87][88] By the outbreak of World War II, it became the largest among all émigré and Western Ukrainian academic publishers,[88] and achieved the status of the main center of Taras Shevchenko studies in Europe.
[95] German-Jewish writer Alfred Döblin, travelling in eastern Galicia in 1924, expressed more sympathy for the Ukrainians under Polish rule than towards the Poles who dominated them.
The OUN carried out hundreds of acts of sabotage in Galicia and Volhynia, including a campaign of arson against Polish landowners (which helped provoke the 1930 Pacification), boycotts of state schools and Polish tobacco and liquor monopolies, dozens of expropriation attacks on government institutions to obtain funds for its activities, and approximately sixty assassinations.
[102] The results of the 1931 census (questions about mother tongue and about religion) in voivodeships with significant Ukrainian populations: Ukrainian/Ruthenian and Greek Catholic/Orthodox majority minority counties are highlighted with yellow.
The committee's interventions led to the release of 85,000 ethnic Ukrainian prisoners-of-war (presumably, from the Polish military) who were captured during the German-Polish conflict.
When the Germans began to kill Ukrainian peasants in the Zamość region for alleged resistance, Kubiyovych's protest to Hans Frank was able to halt that slaughter.
