Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.

Polish-Ukrainian Relations: The Burden of History


In the all-too-narrow land between two seas sits the headstrong Ruthenian with his implacable enemy of the past one thousand years -- the Pole, the Liakh. And the rage fed by centuries of delusion has put them both into a bedeviled frenzy. They are like two lions, two lions that once made tremble Christendom's awesome foe on the Bosphorus. Distressed by what has been and passed, and desperate before what surely is to come, the two lions -- the .Ruthenian and the Pole -- tear into each other's breasts to the very heart. Their eyes, shot through with blood and malice, can see, nonetheless, the joy their feuding brings to common enemies. Yet, on this abominable duel they spend the last of their strength, the last of their resources. They are like gladiators in a Roman coliseum as they face each other among the nations. Each prepares the other's destruction, but of this not one of their descendants will be proud.
P. Kulish, Krashanka rusynam i poliakam na Velykden 1882 roku (Lviv 1882).

The first known episode in the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations is the expedition of Prince Volodymyr the Great of Kiev against the "Liakhs," recorded in the Tale of Bygone Years under the year 981. The chronicler's brief entry has given rise to a lively and unabating scholarly controversy with which we need not concern ourselves here.1 We ought, however, to keep in mind the fact that in a few years' time we shall be able to celebrate a millennium of Polish-Ukrainian relations.

It is obviously impossible to epitomize a historical development of a thousand years' duration within the narrow limits of a paper. Thus a narrative approach would be altogether unsuitable for the treatment of our subject. I shall, therefore, concentrate on a few salient problems, referring in particular to the early modern and modern eras, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The legacy of those centuries has also determined the shape of Polish-Ukrainian relations in the twentieth century. I shall make some observations about the present when I come to the conclusion of this paper.

My first contention is that the Polish-Ukrainian relationship has to a large extent set the course for the respective historical destinies of both peoples. My second contention is that -- in spite of the numerous valuable contributions which the two peoples have made to each other, and in spite of the numerous instances of mutually beneficial co-operation -- the Poles and the Ukrainians have failed in the past to establish their political relations on a firm and satisfactory foundation. This failure, and the protracted Polish-Ukrainian conflicts which ensued, have had catastrophic results for both peoples. Polish-Ukrainian conflict was, indeed, a major cause of both Ukraine's and Poland's loss of national independence on two separate occasions, in the seventeenth-eighteenth as well as in the twentieth centuries.

The above two contentions are not likely to meet with much criticism. The issue becomes more controversial should we attempt to assess responsibility for the unfortunate and destructive direction that Polish-Ukrainian relations have taken over the centuries. I am well aware of the difficulty of maintaining objectivity and scholarly detachment in dealing with such an emotionally charged topic. Still, the question cannot be avoided, not only because it is legitimate from the point of view of historical inquiry, but also because of its important practical implications for the present and the future.

My third contention, then, is that the party mainly responsible for the past failures in Polish-Ukrainian relations is the Poles. As a rule, the stronger side always takes the lead in determining the character of a relationship between communities. The stronger side, consequently, bears the larger share of responsibility. The historical record shows unmistakably that Poland, since the late Middle Ages, has generally been stronger and more advanced than Ukraine. Poland's strength vis-a-vis Ukraine was not derived from any inherent inferiority of the Ukrainians or inherent superiority of the Poles, but rather from weighty geopolitical factors, such as Ukraine's exposed position on the steppe frontier, and later its proximity to the rising power of Muscovy-Russia. The Poles, regrettably, have used their relative advantage over their Ukrainian neighbours with slight display of statesmanship or foresight.

In attributing to the Poles the major onus of responsibility for the catastrophic development of Polish-Ukrainian relations, I do not intend altogether to exonerate the Ukrainians. For they, too, committed many blunders and errors of judgment, and missed their share of opportunities. As a matter of fact, when surveying the record of Polish-Ukrainian interaction, one is often struck by the great similarity in attitudes and behaviour of the two communities. Since, however, the Poles were usually stronger, they were in the better position to perpetrate mischief.

Poland and Rus' (the predecessor of modern Ukraine) emerged as independent realms simultaneously, in the tenth century A.D. The medieval development of the two countries ran fairly parallel courses.2 For instance, both Poland and Rus', after an era of initial unity, passed through a stage of fragmentation into a number of appanage principalities. Social conditions in both countries were similar, although it cannot be denied that until the thirteenth century the culture of Kievan Rus' was richer than that of contemporary Poland. In one most important aspect, however, the ways of Poland and Rus'-Ukraine diverged from the outset: Poland accepted Christianity in its Latin, and Rus' in its Byzantine form. The long-range impact on Polish-Ukrainian relations of this difference in religious allegiances, and in the concomitant cultural traditions, cannot be overestimated. This does not mean that we have to postulate, in Toyn-bee's terms, the existence of a "Western Civilization" and an "Eastern Orthodox Civilization" separated in two watertight compartments. Throughout its history, Ukraine has been extremely receptive to Western cultural influences. Nevertheless, it remains true that religion has at all times separated Poles and Ukrainians by an indelible line of demarcation. The question is not one of "Catholicism" and "Orthodoxy" in the technical sense: the Eastern-Rite Catholic (Uniate) Ukrainian shares a common spiritual-cultural tradition with his Orthodox compatriot, and clearly feels distinct from his Polish neighbour, a Catholic of the Latin Rite. (Such a formal demarcation line has been missing in Ukrainian-Russian relations, and this is one reason why Ukrainians have found it more difficult to differentiate themselves nationally from the Russians than from the Poles.)3

The religious differences did not preclude close ties between medieval Poland and Rus'; there were, after all, frequent marriage alliances between members of the Piast and Riurik dynasties. Stefan Kuczynski aptly observes that "during the first centuries of the existence of the Polish state and Kievan Rus', the Polish and the Ruthenian communities -- despite the many bilateral military expeditions, suggesting a state of continual warfare -- did not actually engage in wars in the strict sense, and did not harbour mutual feelings of lasting hostility and hatred."4 These were princely feuds of a local and transient nature. It was quite common for a Ruthenian ruler to ally himself with a Piast against a fellow Riurikid, and vice versa. The boundary between Poland and Rus' hardly changed for some three hundred years, and the relationship between the two countries can be characterized as one of essential parity.

The balance between Poland and Rus'-Ukraine was permanently upset by the great Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth century, which brought disaster to Ukraine, marked by the destruction of cities, including Kiev, the devastation of the countryside, and incalculable losses in wealth and human lives. And this was only the beginning of the calamity. Out of the divisions of the Mongol Empire emerged the Tatar states, first the Golden Horde and later the Crimean Khanate. The latter became, in 1475, a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, and thus the greatest military power of the age stood behind it. The national industry of the Crimean Tatars was slave-hunting, and Ukraine found itself exposed to continual raids. Under pressure from the steppe, the Ukrainian area of settlement shrank drastically. Generally speaking, the late Middle Ages were for Ukraine an era of political and economic regression and of cultural stagnation. During the same period, however, Poland was taking remarkable strides forward in all spheres, especially during and after the reign of Casimir the Great (1333-70).

The simultaneous strengthening of Poland and weakening of Rus' was bound to encourage the former's expansion at the cost of the latter.5 The first major step in this direction was the annexation of the Principality of Halych by King Casimir (1340). Thus Galicia became the first East Slavic, Ukrainian territory to fall under Polish domination. In this connection one should note that the Galician-Volhynian state of the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries occupies an important place in Ukrainian history. The eminent medievalist, Stepan Tomashivsky, has called it "the first Ukrainian state."6 What Tomashivsky meant to say, of course, was not that Galicia-Volhynia was the first state organization in Ukrainian lands; rather, he meant that Galicia-Volhynia had the opportunity to play in the history of the Ukrainian people a role analogous to that of Suzdal-Vladimir, and later Moscow, in the history of Russia, namely the role of the nucleus of a nation-state. (According to this interpretation, Kievan Rus' was a common East Slavic state, comparable to the Carolingian Empire in Western Europe.) The Mongols crippled the Galician-Volhynian state, but it survived for another century. It received its death blow from Poland.

Diplomacy and political maneuvering rather than conquest allowed Poland's further expansion into the east. The Union of Krevo (1385) created a dynastic link between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the latter included, in addition to ethnic Lithuania, all Belorussian and most Ukrainian lands. Nearly two centuries later, Poland and Lithuania merged into an organic federation, the so-called Commonwealth of the Two Nations. The memorable Union of Lublin (1569), which accomplished this, was a landmark in the history of four peoples: Poles, Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians. In this paper, I shall deal only with the Polish-Ukrainian dimension of the Union.7

The Lublin settlement offered some undeniable advantages for Ukraine. It reunited the country, previously divided between Lithuania and Poland, thus making possible a more effective defence against Tatar incursions. Joint Polish-Ukrainian military efforts protected the country from foreign enemies, especially Turkey and Muscovy. Incorporation into the Polish Crown opened Ukraine to greater penetration by Western cultural influences. Whiffs of the Renaissance and the Reformation reached Ukraine and stimulated a cultural revival, ending a long era of stagnation. The late sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century witnessed in Ukraine the establishment of printing presses and schools, the development of theological and secular learning, the beginning of a new, "middle-Ukrainian" literature, and noteworthy achievements in the area of architecture and the fine arts. During that era, all-European culture entered Ukraine mostly through Polish channels. An expression of the Ukrainian revival was the Kievan Academy, founded in 1632, the first institution of higher learning in the entire East Slavic and Orthodox world.8 On the political side, Ruthenian noblemen obtained, by the terms of the Union of Lublin, rights equal to those enjoyed by the Polish nobility. In matters of religion, sixteenth-century Poland-Lithuania was one of the most tolerant states in Europe. There was no discrimination against Orthodox and Protestant noblemen, although institutionally the Catholic Church maintained a privileged position.

In the post-Lublin era, Polish influences on Ukraine were accompanied by Ukrainian influences on Poland. The peculiar way of life and the ideology of the Polish gentry, the so-called Sarmatism (sarmatyzm), stemmed largely from changes that Polish society and culture experienced under the impact of association with the Ukrainian (and Lithuanian) east.9 Sarmatism became an organic part of Poland's national tradition, and we can still discern traces of this legacy today.

One can easily understand why Poles take pride in the formation, under their leadership, of a large body politic, the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, which at one time occupied a paramount position in Eastern Europe. Many look upon the Union of Lublin as a high point in Poland's history. Still, it is an undeniable fact that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ultimately failed. And it is questionable whether this failure can be explained exclusively by later mistakes in policy and by the malice of foreign adversaries. One can make a strong argument that the failure was inherent, the consequence of basic structural deficiencies. There exists a consensus among historians that serious symptoms of internal decay, of growing political and social disorganization in the Commonwealth, were already multiplying during the decades immediately following the brilliant success of Lublin. It is hard to doubt that here a cause-and-effect relationship was at work. The comments of a Polish historian, Eugeniusz Starczewski, shed light on this problem:

The union of Poland and Lithuania has often been called a masterly move executed by the Polish oligarchy (moznowiadstwa pol-skiego) on the political chessboard.... Nevertheless, the results of this masterly move proved themselves disastrous for the future of Poland. Having obtained easy access to the huge expanses in the Ruthenian and Lithuanian east, Poland gradually abandoned her ethnic boundaries [in the west]; she left her ancient domain, Silesia, in German hands. Instead, she diverted her population, not overly numerous to begin with, and all her resources, toward the newly acquired territories. Whatever, in the late fourteenth century, the Polish state gained in power, the Polish people lost by diluting themselves in the Ruthenian east, and by losing ground in their ancestral Silesia. In their own homeland, the life of the Polish people assumed an anemic, sickly character.... If the union with Lithuania was to become, in the long run, pernicious to Poland, the negative aspects of this connection were augmented by the manner in which the union was realized and implemented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We are referring to the separation of Volhynia, Podillia, and Ukraine from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania [in 1569], and their incorporation into the Province of Little Poland [Malopolska, Polonia Minor].... Not granting Ukraine autonomy, at least such as Lithuania enjoyed, was conducive to its treatment as a land where nobles, and especially magnates, could get rich quickly.... Then the Cossacks emerged. Also in dealings with them, one mistake was piled upon another. . . .10

For geographical, sociological, and cultural reasons, Ukraine did not fit comfortably into the structure of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations. The unitary nature of the Crown, the Polish half of the Commonwealth, bred endless friction and frustrations, exacerbated by the victory of the Counter-Reformation in Poland and by the growth of religious bigotry during the first half of the seventeenth century. There was only one potential remedy for these ills: the reconstruction of the Commonwealth on tripartite lines by the addition of an autonomous Ruthenia- j Ukraine to Poland proper and Lithuania. However, this necessary reform, which would have established a federal union of the peoples between the Baltic and Black Seas, remained unrealized. I

The responsibility for this mortal sin of omission must be ascribed, in about equal proportions, to the Polish and the Ukrainian leading classes. Ever since the establishment of the original dynastic link between Poland and Lithuania in 1385, the Polish aristocracy and gentry, motivated by the lure of wealth, had striven to detach the Ukrainian provinces from the Grand Duchy, and to annex them to the Crown. After Lublin, the Ukrainian borderlands attracted many Polish fortune hunters, and their greed prevailed over any considerations of statesmanship. The central government under the elective kings was too weak and too short-sighted to prevent the formation of huge latifundia in Ukraine. The prevailing social system, represented by the magnates and their latifundia, was hateful to the masses of the Ukrainian people -- not only to the enserfed peasantry, but to the burghers and segments of the petty gentry as well. The defence of Orthodoxy provided a common ideological platform for the forces of the Ukrainian resistance.

The Ukrainian aristocracy, the descendants of the princes and boyars of medieval Rus', failed to come forward, at the time of the Union of Lublin and after, with a constructive political program. They were satisfied to accommodate themselves to the existing structure of the Commonwealth and to share the benefits of the "golden liberty" of the Polish nobility. The attraction of the Polish aristocratic way of life and Baroque culture was so powerful that, in the course of some two generations following 1569, nearly all Ukrainian aristocratic families and a large portion of the middle gentry converted to Catholicism, thus accepting Polish nationality. This loss of nerve on the part of Ukraine's traditional elite poisoned Polish-Ukrainian relations. The leadership of the Ukrainian national cause in the Commonwealth, deserted by the old representative class, was willy-nilly taken up by a new element, the Cossack military-political organization, the Zaporozhian Army. As Pawel Jasienica correctly emphasized, Polish and Ukrainian aristocrats could deal with each other as social equals, but Polish aristocrats and Ukrainian Cossacks could not; the compounding of national-religious and social factors doomed the prospects for solving the thorny Ukrainian problem within the framework of the Commonwealth."

Modern Ukrainian historians of the populist school have viewed the Polish-Cossack wars of the seventeenth century as a contest between aristocracy and democracy. We cannot accept this simplistic interpretation without considerable reservations. In the first place, petty Ukrainian noblemen had entered Cossack ranks in great numbers; Cossack officers, or "elders," came largely from that background.12 Secondly, the Cossack order as a whole tended to form an estate distinct from the peasants. The Cossack state that emerged from the 1648 Revolution became a society composed of estates, and the Cossack officers eventually, in the eighteenth century, crystallized into a new hereditary landed aristocracy.13

Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in the populist interpretation of Ukrainian history. Under frontier conditions, Ukrainian society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries followed a path of evolution markedly different from that taken by central Poland. Ukrainian peasants, accustomed to defending their lives and possessions against Tatar raiders, would not submit passively to the yoke of serfdom. All the energetic elements of the peasantry wished to become "Cossackized." The Zaporozhian Army had repeatedly rendered signal services to the Commonwealth against foreign enemies. But within the legal framework of the Polish-Lithuanian state there was no place for a self-governing body of plebeian warriors; the interests of the magnates required its destruction. Thus the coming Polish-Ukrainian confrontation was to be at once national-religious and social. This explains the irrepressibility and the ferocity of the conflict.

The great Cossack Revolution of 1648, led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, was a pivotal moment in the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations. All strata of the Ukrainian population, excepting the magnates and their retainers, participated in the uprising, an indication of how deep was resentment against the Polish regime in Ukraine. The revolution amounted to the Ukrainian people's repudiation of the Lublin settlement. Khmelnytsky and his lieutenants did not at first envision secession from the Commonwealth. Their original objectives focused on redress of Cossack and Orthodox grievances, and on winning for Ukraine some form of limited autonomy. But no compromise solution was possible, because the magnates would not acquiesce to the loss of their latifundia, seized by insurgent Cossacks and peasants. From about 1650 on, Khmelnytsky's policy aimed at a complete break with Poland. But neither side was able to achieve a decisive military victory, and the destructive war dragged on. Thus Khmelnytsky was obliged to seek foreign support, first from Turkey and afterwards from Muscovy. By the memorable Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654), Ukraine accepted the protectorate of the Russian tsar.14 Hegemony in Eastern Europe shifted to the Tsardom of Muscovy, soon to be transformed into the Russian Empire, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost forever its stature as a great power.

Khmelnytsky's successor, Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, reacting to Muscovite subversion of Ukrainian autonomy, attempted once again to reach an accommodation with Poland. According to the terms of the Union of Hadiach (1658), Ukraine, under the name of the Grand Duchy of Ruthenia, was to become the third member of a tripartite Polish-Lithuanian- Ukrainian Commonwealth. But after a decade of fierce warfare, mutual enmity and distrust had grown too strong. Moreover, under Cossack auspices a new political and social system had come into existence in Ukraine, a system incompatible with that prevailing in Poland. The tripartite experiment came at least a half century too late, and the Union of Hadiach entered history stillborn.15

It is tempting to consider the hypothetical question of what might have been. Assuming that a solution of the Ukrainian-Cossack problem was impossible within the framework of the Commonwealth, would it not have been more advantageous for both parties if Poland had acquiesced in Ukraine's separation? In the mid-seventeenth century there was a chance for the establishment of an independent Ukrainian Cossack state. This would, obviously, have implied territorial loss for Poland. But such a state, by its very existence, would have shielded Poland from the Ottoman Empire and Russia. From the point of view of Poland's internal development, the amputation of the Ukrainian provinces would have undermined the power of the magnates, whose domains were located mostly in the eastern borderlands. This might have halted the process of the Commonwealth's internal decay and made possible salutary reforms.

But Poland took the contrary course and strove by all available military and diplomatic means to regain the lost Ukrainian lands. Unable to reconquer Ukraine, Poland preferred to partition the country with Russia rather than allow it independent existence. By the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), Russia and Poland divided Ukraine along the Dnieper River.16 This effectively destroyed the chances of Ukrainian independence in the seventeenth century. It is true that an autonomous Cossack body politic, the so-called Hetmanate, survived under Russian suzerainty on the Left Bank, i.e., on Ukrainian territory east of the Dnieper, for another century. But the Left-Bank Hetmanate was too puny to resist in the long run the levelling and centralizing pressures of the Russian Empire. As George Vernadsky has observed, the preservation of Ukraine's territorial integrity, at least within the frontiers achieved under Bohdan Khmel-nytsky, was a precondition for the country's ability to maintain itself against Russia.17 (One should remember that Khmelnytsky's Cossack state did not include all ethnic Ukrainian territory, but only the three former palatinates of Kiev, Chernihiv, and Bratslav. The western Ukrainian regions of Galicia, Volhynia, and Podillia still remained under Polish domination.)

Polish rule did not return to the Right Bank immediately after Andrusovo. A desperate resistance continued for decades. In fact, in the early years of the eighteenth century Hetman Ivan Mazepa succeeded in reuniting temporarily the Left and the Right Bank. Taking advantage of the Great Northern War, Mazepa attempted, in alliance with Sweden, to free Ukraine from Russian overlordship. But Swedish and Ukrainian forces suffered a decisive defeat at Poltava (1709). This sealed the fate not only of the Left-Bank Hetmanate, but also of the disputed territory west of the Dnieper, which Peter I handed back to Poland.18

On the surface, Poland could be pleased with the results of its great confrontation with Cossack Ukraine. The eighteenth-century Commonwealth still stretched eastward as far as the Dnieper, making it one of the largest states in Europe. But Poland had suffered such irreparable loss in population and substance that the country's great territorial sprawl was but a hollow memento of its past grandeur. In denying liberty to Ukraine, Poland found itself, in the aftermath of the Great Northern War, humbled under a virtual Russian protectorate.

Right-Bank Ukraine, regained at such terrible cost, continued to be a source of weakness for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the ast decades of its existence. Throughout the eighteenth century, popular inrest plagued the Right Bank. Ukrainian peasants, although deprived of he former Cossack organization, did not reconcile themselves to serfdom and the hated overlordship of the Polish nobility. A whole series of popular uprisings, the so-called Haidamak revolts, culminated in 1768 in i large-scale peasant rebellion known under the name of Koliivshchyna.19 rhe tragic events of 1768 left a deep imprint on the minds of both com-nunities, and were still to preoccupy the imagination of Ukrainian and Dolish writers in the nineteenth century.20 Continued unrest in Polish Jkraine offered Russia opportunities to intervene in the affairs of the Commonwealth. Russia, on the one hand, assumed the role of protector )f Orthodoxy, persecuted under Polish rule, and, on the other hand, proffered military aid against popular insurgency. Russian troops suppressed he Koliivshchyna.

Another memorable episode connected with Right-Bank Ukraine was he Confederation of Targowica, in 1792. The Confederation took its lame from the Ukrainian town of Torhovytsia (Targowica). The Confed-:ration, composed of selfish and reactionary oligarchs who owned atifundia in Ukraine, defied the new reformist constitution of 3 May 791, placed itself under the protection of Catherine II, and invited Rush's armed intervention in Polish internal affairs. The Confederation of rargowica precipitated the Second Partition and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's demise. The magnates of the borderlands, for whose ake Poland had sacrificed chances of reconciliation with Ukraine, repaid his debt by bringing about the destruction of Polish independence. One s tempted to see in this an act of historical justice.

In surveying the truly tragic course of Polish-Ukrainian relations from he Union of Lublin to the late eighteenth century, when almost simulta-leously the Partitions of Poland and the abolition of the remnants of Jkrainian Cossack autonomy took place, it is possible to make the fol-owing concluding observations. A free Ukraine -- either completely in-lependent, or federated with Poland and Lithuania on a footing of genuine equality -- would have energetically, and perhaps successfully, opposed Russia's westward expansion. There is factual support for this hypothesis. The pre-Lublin Grand Duchy of Lithuania, of which Ukraine was an organic part, had fought a whole series of at least partially victorious wars against Muscovy from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. But the Grand Duchy was a predominantly East Slavic state, in which the Ruthenian (Ukrainian-Belorussian) language and culture were supreme. The Orthodox aristocracy and nobility of the Grand Duchy showed but little sympathy with Moscow.21 Even after the Treaty of Pereiaslav, which placed Cossack Ukraine under the suzerainty of the tsar, the country continued to resist Muscovite encroachments stubbornly. But when the issue was reduced to a brutal alternative -- either Polish or Russian domination -- Ukraine preferred Russia to Poland. A variety of factors account for this choice, including religion, the shared traditions of medieval Kievan Rus', and Russia's greater political flexibility and dexterity, in such contrast to Poland's habitual clumsiness. By denying Ukraine an equal partnership, or, alternatively, complete independence, Poland effectively drove the Ukrainian people into Russia's arms. By this short-sighted policy Poland not only did great injury to Ukraine, but also prepared its own downfall.

During the entire nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, Poland and Ukraine appeared to be in similar situations, inasmuch as both countries lacked national independence, and both were under the domination of the same alien powers, Russia and Austria.22 It may seem that these shared circumstances should have fostered Polish-Ukrainian cooperation. In fact, however, a Polish-Ukrainian entente never materialized, at least not to any politically significant extent. Sporadic attempts at agreement between Polish and Ukrainian groups were completely overshadowed by deep mutual distrust and unrelenting strife.

The similarity in the situations of dependent Poland and Ukraine was close to the surface. More deep-seated, and weighing more in the historical balance, were the great disparities between the two nations -- in social structure, in cultural heritage, and, deriving from these, in their treatment at the hands of the dominating powers. Although nineteenth-century Europe knew no independent Poland, no one ever questioned the existence of a separate Polish nation. European public opinion, and the partitioning powers themselves, took for granted the existence of a distinct Polish nationality. The governments of Russia, Austria, and even Prussia made important political and cultural concessions to the Poles at various times. In contrast, tsarist Russia consistently denied the very existence of a Ukrainian nationality, and treated the "Little Russians" as a tribal branch of the Russian nation. Consequently, the tsarist government suppressed even quite innocuous, non-political expressions of Ukrainian cultural identity, considering them subversive of the unity of Russia. The Austrian government, it is true, recognized, from 1848, the existence of a "Ruthenian" nationality. But Vienna usually paid scant attention to its Ukrainian subjects, and was inclined to sacrifice their rights and claims to those of the more powerful Poles. In the West, only a few scholars knew of the ethnic differences between the Ukrainians and other Slavs. European statesmen and the public at large knew nothing of the Ukrainian problem.

This striking disparity in the status of the two peoples had sociological causes.23 The traditional Polish upper class survived the shipwreck of the old Commonwealth. The Polish aristocracy and landed gentry continued, well into the second half of the nineteenth century, to represent the national cause. Ukraine, on the other hand, owing to unfavourable historical circumstances, had lost its upper classes, whose descendants had become Russified or Polonized; the Ukrainian nationality found itself virtually reduced to the peasantry.24 One has to remember that in the Austrian Empire serfdom persisted until 1848, and in the Russian Empire until 1861. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the present century did the Ukrainian masses begin to emerge, slowly and painfully, from the dismal condition of disenfranchisement, social and economic oppression, illiteracy, and the absence of a modern civic and national consciousness. The cities of Ukraine formed alien, Russian-Jewish or Polish-Jewish, enclaves. The deficiencies of the Ukrainian social structure found some compensation in the richness and vitality of Ukrainian folk culture, which was probably superior to Polish folk culture. The ease with which hundreds of thousands of Polish peasant colonists imperceptibly assimilated to the Ukrainian environment corroborates this notion.25

Thus, as in the seventeenth century, a social factor complicated relations between Poles and Ukrainians. Of course, not all Poles were noble landowners, and not all Ukrainians were peasants. But in those regions where Poles and Ukrainians did come into contact -- in eastern Galicia and the Right Bank -- antagonistic social classes represented the two nationalities. The legacy of the gentry tradition has left a profound imprint on the mores and the mind of the Polish middle class and intelligentsia, which gradually assumed the leadership of the Polish community. The emerging Ukrainian intelligentsia, on the other hand, was predominantly of plebeian origin, and infused with a populist ideology. Educated Poles and Ukrainians, whose actual living standards were often quite similar, differed sharply in life styles and values. The Polish inteligent tended to consider his Ukrainian counterpart boorish, and the Ukrainian inteligent thought his Polish counterpart conceited and arrogant. Thus the traditional hatred between the Polish szlachcic and the Ukrainian Cossack and haidamak continued to colour the relations between the two nations. These emotions intensified, thanks to writers on both sides who liked to evoke, although from contrary viewpoints, the memories of past Polish-Cossack conflicts. It is enough to recall, on the one hand, Shevchenko's poems and Gogol's Taras Bulba and, on the other, the immensely popular historical romance of Henryk Sienkiewicz, With Fire and Sword.

The greatest obstacle to Polish-Ukrainian understanding was the basic incompatibility of the respective national-political programs. Modern Ukrainian political thought rested on the concept of ethnic nationality and of ethnic-linguistic frontiers. This did not necessarily imply political separatism. Most nineteenth-century Ukrainian political thinkers and publicists did not go beyond the postulate of cultural self-expression and limited home rule for the Ukrainian people within the framework of the existing empires, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Once, however, Ukrainian political thought made the transition to the idea of independent statehood, it envisioned the future Ukrainian state as encompassing all lands where the majority of the population spoke the Ukrainian language. Polish political ideologies, by contrast, were predicated on the concept of historical legitimism. Polish patriots were unanimous in considering the partitions, which terminated the old Commonwealth, intolerable acts of violence and rapine. It followed logically, then, that these patriots understood the future rebirth of Poland as a restitutio ad integrum, i.e., as a restoration of the historical Commonwealth in its pre-1772 frontiers. Ukrainian and Polish territorial claims collided too roundly to allow reconciliation through some pragmatic compromise.

Polish patriots of varied political hues shared the same program of restoring Poland's historical frontiers. "Despite their own sincerely held linguistic nationalism, the Polish democrats did not recognize that the cultivation of a separate language might eventually lead Lithuanians, Latvians and Ruthenians to put forward political claims of roughly the same character as their own."26 A polemical article in a conservative Polish emigre journal admonished the spokesmen of the Ukrainian movement in the late 1850s to restrict their efforts to the Left-Bank area: "Ukraine on this side of the Dnieper, conquered and defended by Polish arms, and inhabited by a people that has produced the [Polonized] gentry, is and, God permitting, will never cease to be Polish."27

Polish practice was consistent with this philosophy. The two great uprisings, of 1830-31 and of 1863, stemmed from the determination to assert Polish claims to the "eastern borderlands."28 Russia was at times willing to grant far-reaching autonomy to Poland proper, the Congress Kingdom, but refused to concede to the Poles the disputed Lithuanian-Belorussian-Ukrainian lands. The failure of both uprisings brought about the loss of the autonomous status previously enjoyed by the Congress Kingdom. This signified a radical deterioration of the position of the Polish people in its own homeland. Nevertheless, even after these tragic experiences, the unrealistic concept of "historic frontiers" continued to haunt Polish minds.

Some Polish leaders did understand that Ukrainians were potential allies in a struggle against Russian tyranny. Prince Adam Czartoryski, the head of the conservative wing of the post-1831 Polish emigres, fostered various schemes aimed at enlisting Ukrainian support.29 The 1863 insurgents, who were men of democratic convictions, issued a manifesto, the "Golden Charter" (Zolota hramota), that pledged on behalf of the future independent Poland various benefits to "the village people of Podillia, Volhynia and Ukraine."30 But the Golden Charter and similar appeals met with no positive response. Mykhailo Drahomanov cogently explained the reasons: for Ukrainian peasants, the very name "Poland" was a symbol of serfdom. And Ukrainian intellectuals who thought in political terms were bound to ask: granting that the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were acts of injustice, why should Ukrainian patriots fight for a restoration of the old Russo-Polish boundary, which amounted to a partitioning, a halving, of Ukraine? "If Ukrainians are to shed blood. . . , then only for the autonomy of their whole people."31 In other words, no Polish-Ukrainian alliance was feasible as long as the Poles remained unwilling to abandon the platform of "historical frontiers."

There were some positive aspects to Polish-Ukrainian relations in the nineteenth century. The members of the Polish minority in Right-Bank Ukraine often possessed a sense of territorial patriotism: they loved their Ukrainian homeland and its people. A memoirist, Stanislaw Stempowski, expressed this dual allegiance in his confession that "the Pole and the Ukrainian lived in him in perfect harmony."32 Local Polish writers and scholars readily worked on topics inspired by the Ukrainian landscape, folklore, and history. A "Ukrainian School" flourished in Polish literature, a testimony to the symbiosis of the two peoples.33 Some poets of Polish background went a step further, and began to use the Ukrainian language in their creations.34 It is regrettable that this potential for Polish-Ukrainian co-operation did not come to fruition in the political sphere. Such co-operation would certainly have accelerated the Ukrain-an renascence and would also have conformed to long-range Polish na-ional interests. There is an illuminating parallel case in the Swedes of ^inland. The Swedish minority made a crucial contribution to the development of modern Finland. But imagine if the Finnish Swedes, in the lame of "historical rights," had striven to restore Swedish domination )ver Finland instead of uniting with the native Finnish majority in a com-non defense of their homeland's liberty. There would probably be no independent Finland today, no Swedes left in Finland, and Sweden itself would have become a Russian satellite. But in reality, the Swedes avoided this fundamental political error, just as the Poles perpetrated it.

One understands the Poles' attachment to the traditions of the old Commonwealth: this was, after all, the epoch of their nation's greatness. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that by their rigid adherence to an anachronistic ideology the Poles did harm both to themselves and to the Ukrainians.

Galicia occupies a special place in the history of nineteenth-century Polish-Ukrainian relations.35 Issues whose overt expression was stifled by tsarist autocracy could emerge into the open under Austria-Hungary's constitutional regime. Moreover, the crownland of Galicia at one time played the role of a "Piedmont," a national sanctuary, in the life of both peoples. Thus Polish-Ukrainian relations in Galicia affected the relationship between the majorities of the Poles and Ukrainians who lived within the confines of the Russian Empire.

The first confrontation between Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia occurred during the 1848 Revolution.36 The events of that critical year revealed the incompatibility of the two communities' respective political programs. The majority of the Polish spokesmen refused even to recognize the existence of a Ukrainian (Ruthenian) nationality; they considered the Ukrainians' emergence on the political scene an artificial phenomenon spawned by the anti-Polish machinations of Austria or Russia. The Poles sought to preserve the unity of Galicia, which they considered essentially Polish territory, destined to return in the future to a restored and independent Poland. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, advocated a partition of the province on ethnic lines, the separation of predominantly Ukrainian eastern Galicia from Polish western Galicia.

As a side effect of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, political control over an undivided Galicia passed into Polish hands, and this state of affairs was to continue, with some modifications, until the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy. The two Galician nationalities were about equal in numerical strength, but the aristocratic bias of the Austrian constitution and the policies of Vienna favoured the Polish element. The Poles used their dominant position to deny the Ukrainians parity and to impede their civic, economic, and cultural advancement. For instance, the Polish-controlled Diet (provincial legislature) deliberately neglected Ukrainian elementary education and blocked the expansion of Ukrainian secondary schools; the Poles succeeded in preventing the creation of a Ukrainian university, which was one of the Ukrainians' chief demands and would also have had profound repercussions in Russian Ukraine. It is true that over the decades the Ukrainians were able to improve considerably their position in Galicia: they built up a dense network of voluntary economic, political, and educational associations; they developed a vigorous periodical and non-periodical press, and a burgeoning intellectual life; and they gradually increased their representation in the Vienna parliament and the provincial Diet. But all these were achievements won in a stubborn struggle against Galicia's Polish administration, which attempted to thwart or delay Ukrainian efforts at every step.

Outside the sphere of national politics, Ukrainians and Poles could, on occasion, come together. From the 1870s through the 1890s left-wing Ukrainians and Poles frequently collaborated to oppose the province's conservative establishment.37 Also, some enlightened members of the Polish aristocracy desired a reconciliation with the Ukrainians.38 Around the turn of the century, Polish and Ukrainian modernist writers developed close ties.39 Galicia's two nationalities lived in physical proximity, and largely intermingled; this was conducive to innumerable personal contacts and frequent intermarriage.

Still, the basic political issue dividing the two communities remained unresolved. A contemporary Polish observer noted:

The Ruthenians strive with all strength toward full development as a separate, completely independent nation. They wish to dislodge us from the preponderant position which we have occupied until now. They want to prevent the higher strata of our social structure from being based on the lower, popular strata of their social structure, from using them, and from blocking their progress.... Our prospects in eastern Galicia are unfavourable. The fate of the English nationality in Ireland, of the German nationality in the Czech lands, and the probable, in a more distant future, fate of the German nationality in Upper Silesia are a bad prognosis for us.40

To compensate for their relatively weak political leverage, Ukrainian leaders relied increasingly on mass actions -- electoral campaigns, agrarian strikes, popular rallies, and demonstrations. On the Polish side, the rise to prominence of the chauvinist National Democratic Party (endecja) made the Polish community more intransigent in its attitude toward the Ukrainians. The vehemence and acerbity of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict mounted from year to year, and conditions in Galicia approached latent civil war. The February 1914 compromise concerning the reform of Galicia's provincial statute and the law on elections to the Diet partly satisfied Ukrainian demands, and might have initiated a new era in Polish- Ukrainian relations. But the outbreak of the war prevented implementation of the compromise. Despite the strong anti-Russian sentiments shared by both Poles and Ukrainians, the two nationalities proved unable to harmonize their policies for the coming confrontation with the tsarist II empire.

The revolutionary era that followed in the footsteps of the First World War led to a thorough transformation of Eastern Europe. From the perspective of Polish-Ukrainian relations, three episodes of the years 1917-21 are particularly significant: the national-cultural autonomy of the Polish minority in Ukraine in 1917, the Polish-Ukrainian war for the possession of eastern Galicia in 1918-19, and the 1920 alliance between Pilsudski's Poland and Petliura's Ukraine against Soviet Russia.

In 1917, the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, the Central Rada, undertook to win the national minorities' confidence and support by granting them generous cultural autonomy.41 In July of that year, the Central Rada invited representatives of Ukraine's three largest minorities -- Russians, Poles, and Jews -- to join the Rada. Within the framework of the first Ukrainian government, the Secretariat-General, the Rada created a Secretariat (Ministry) for Nationality Affairs: one of its three divisions was reserved for a Polish Deputy Secretary. After the proclamation, on 20 November 1917, of the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Polish division of the Secretariat-General for Nationality Affairs became a separate Ministry which was to preside over a network of Polish schools and cultural institutions. A Polish eyewitness stated that the Ukrainian government's attitude toward the Polish minority's educational and cultural concerns was such that "a better could not be imagined."42 Members of the Polish minority in general looked favourably on Ukraine's national rebirth and statehood. The social question, however, did cause friction. The radical social policies of the Central Rada evoked apprehension and protests on the part of Polish proprietary elements. The spread of agrarian disorders in the fall of 1917 affected Polish landowners in Right-Bank Ukraine. Only leftist and socialist Poles, therefore, a minority within their own community, actively collaborated with the Central Rada regime. In spite of these difficulties, the policy of the Central Rada toward national minorities constitutes a beautiful page in the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations.

The disintegration of Austria-Hungary precipitated a Polish-Ukrainian war over eastern Galicia.43 This was a direct continuation of the political contest between Galician Poles and Ukrainians which had started seventy years earlier, in 1848. On 1 November 1918, Ukrainians seized power throughout eastern Galicia, now officially named the Western Ukrainian People's Republic. But the Poles refused to accept the fait accompli. In the land's capital, Lviv (Lwow, Lvov, Lemberg, Leopolis), where the Polish element was locally preponderant, the Poles rose in arms against the Ukrainian state. Street battles in Lviv soon escalated into a full-fledged Polish-Ukrainian war. Operations lasted until July 1919, when the Ukrainian Galician Army was forced out of western and into east-central or Dnieper Ukraine, formerly part of Russia.

What was the function of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the general history of the Ukrainian Revolution? A noted Polish publicist of the inter-war era, Adolf Bochehski, proposed the following answer: "The Polish-Ukrainian war was undoubtedly one of the main reasons for the failure of the Ukrainian cause in those years [1918-19]. If even a part of the forces and resources that the Ukrainians wasted in eastern Galicia had been used on the Dnieper, these would have sufficed to create there a fairly solid Ukrainian state."44 Bochehski is right to the extent that a two-front war was beyond the strength of the Ukrainian nation. The circumstance that Ukraine, without any outside support, had to wage war simultaneously against Soviet Russia and Poland (and in addition against the White Army of General Denikin) was the principal reason why the Ukrainian bid for independence failed. Bochehski, however, does not take into account two points. First, the Ukrainians did not themselves choose go to war against Poland. Poland imposed war on the Ukrainians by its aggression, by its determination to incorporate a territory, eastern Galicia, where the Ukrainians, without any doubt, formed a strong majority. Second, if Bochehski implies that the Ukrainians, for political reasons, should have sacrificed Galicia in order to concentrate all their forces against the major adversary, Soviet Russia, then his argument underestimates the crucial importance of Galicia in the life of the Ukrainian nation as a whole.

The history of the Ukrainian Revolution is usually approached, for obvious reasons, from the perspective of Ukrainian-Russian relations. However, the apparently secondary western front was not in fact secondary. Owing to the relatively high level of national consciousness and civic discipline of its population, little Galicia represented at that time the "hard core" of the entire Ukrainian nation. Therefore, the preservation of the Galician base was a conditio sine qua non of Ukrainian independence, especially if Ukraine's confrontation with Russia was to have any prospect of success. The intervention of the Ukrainian Galician Army, which was quite impervious to communist subversion, in east-central Ukraine might, in all probability, have tilted the balance of power in the war between Ukraine and Soviet Russia. The opportune moment for such an intervention was the winter of 1918-19, or the early spring of 1919. The two Ukrainian states, the Ukrainian People's Republic (east-central Ukraine) and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic (eastern Galicia), had proclaimed a union on 22 January 1919. But western Ukrainian forces could not fight on the anti-Russian front, because they were tied down in defence of their Galician homeland against the Polish invasion. When the Ukrainian Galician Army finally appeared in east-central Ukraine, in July 1919, it was still to play an important military role there in the course of the next few months.45 It was, however, already too late for a Ukrainian victory: the Red Army and Denikin's White Army had grown too strong in the meantime. Moreover, Poland had conquered the Galician stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism and, therefore, Galicia could no longer serve as a political and strategic base in Ukraine's struggle against the Russias of Lenin and Denikin.

The gist of the preceding argument is that Polish aggression against and occupation of eastern Galicia signified more to Ukraine than simply the loss of a province. Actually, it amounted to the destruction of the very foundations on which an independent Ukrainian state might have been built in the post-World War I period. This point needs to be stressed because even today many do not appreciate the true historical function of the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918-19.

Let us turn now to the third memorable episode of Polish-Ukrainian relations during the revolutionary era. On 22 April 1920, the Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic, whose respective heads of state were Jozef Pilsudski and Symon Petliura, signed in Warsaw a treaty of alliance directed against Soviet Russia.46 The subsequent course of events is common knowledge. After a dramatic campaign, which first brought Poland's and Petliura's forces to Kiev and soon afterwards the Red Army to the outskirts of Warsaw, and after the "Miracle on the Vistula" had saved Poland, Poland and Soviet Russia reached a compromise settlement: by the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), the two powers divided Ukraine (and Belorussia as well). Poland retained eastern Galicia and Volhynia, the latter province a former possession of the Russian Empire. Most of the remaining Ukrainian lands, constituted as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, reverted to Moscow's domination.

One may draw comfort from the thought that for at least one brief moment in the present century Poles and Ukrainians were allies and comrades-in-arms. But such sentimental considerations do not excuse the necessity of taking a critical view of the Treaty of Warsaw and its political implications.

A Polish emigre historian, Kamil Dziewanowski, has recently advanced the following apologia for Pilsudski's policy in 1920:

PiJsudski's plan was to paralyze Bolshevism by splitting its territorial base, the former Tsarist Empire, by means of a strict, literal application of President Wilson's and Lenin's principles of self-determination for all nationalities of the former Tsarist Empire. It aimed at nipping Soviet Russian expansion in the bud by dividing its territorial base, the Communist Empire then in statu nascendi, along vertical or national lines. By this means, Piteudski hoped to create a new balance of power in Eastern Europe.47

The obvious answer to this is that Poland, which strove to annex vast ethnically non-Polish territories, was not credible as an advocate of "a strict, literal application" of the principle of national self-determination. An insuperable internal contradiction vitiated Pilsudski's policy: on the one hand, he wished to maintain an independent Ukraine as a barrier against Russia, while, on the other hand, by his conquest of eastern Galicia he had destroyed the chances of Ukrainian independence. At the root of this contradiction was the circumstance that Pilsudski, himself a Pole from the eastern borderlands, was an epigone of the old Commonwealth. As for Pilsudski's vaunted federalism, its true meaning has been correctly assessed by the well-informed Polish journalist and political commentator, Stanislaw Mackiewicz, himself an ardent Pilsudskiite:

[PiJsudski] believed that the countries neighbouring Poland, and liberated from Russia by Poland, would easily fall under Polish influence, and that the Poles would in due time be able to Polonize them in the same manner as the Polish nobility of the old Commonwealth had Polonized Lithuania and Rus'.... Pilsudski believed that the peoples federated with us would quickly turn into Poles.48

The anachronistic Commonwealth tradition, which implied Poland's great-power position and its dominion over Lithuania, Belorussia, and half of Ukraine, stood in the way of a sincere reconciliation and cooperation between the Poles and their immediate eastern neighbours. The program of Pilsudski's political adversaries, the National Democrats, however unrealistic and even morally repulsive in other respects, had at least the advantage of consistency. The National Democrats advocated an ethnically homogeneous Polish nation-state, to be achieved through assimilation of the Slavic minorities and expulsion of the Jews; in respect to the Ukrainians, to whom they denied the status of a nation, the National Democrats favoured partitioning their country between Poland and Russia.49 In Polish political practice, the program of the National Democrats prevailed over the grandiose, but hazy and self-contradictory, quasi-federalist schemes of Pilsudski.

The Polish-Ukrainian alliance of 1920 came at a time when Ukraine was already exhausted after three years of revolution and civil war. The Treaty of Warsaw was not a partnership between equals; rather, it established a Polish protectorate over Ukraine. By the terms of the treaty, Pet-liura was forced to sign away Ukrainian claims to eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Many Ukrainian patriots apprehended at the time that this arrangement might lead to a tripartite division of their country: Galicia and Volhynia annexed to Poland, Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper still included in the Russian orbit, and a small Ukrainian Republic on the Right Bank surviving precariously under Polish protection.50 Little wonder that these prospects did not elicit an enthusiastic response from the Ukrainian community. Virtually all Galician Ukrainians considered the Treaty of Warsaw a betrayal of their homeland, and leftist eastern Ukrainians -- including such former luminaries of the Central Rada as Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Volodymyr Vynnychenko -- preferred an orientation toward proletarian Moscow to an orientation toward a Warsaw of landowners and capitalists. It is telling that in 1920 Ievhen Konovalets -- a staunch anti-communist, a military commander with a distinguished record during the Ukrainian struggle for independence, and the future founder of the influential Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists -- advised Ukrainian neutrality in the war of two imperialisms, Soviet Russian and Polish, for the possession of Ukraine. Konovalets expected that a victory of Soviet Russia over Poland would result in a consolidation of all Ukrainian lands within one body politic, in a Sovietization of Poland itself, and in an overthrow and revision of the Versailles settlement in Europe -- as a matter of fact, a situation strikingly similar to that which actually emerged out of the Second World War a quarter of a century later.51 In conclusion, the most merciful thing one can say of the Polish-Ukrainian alliance of 1920 is that -- like the Union of Hadiach (1658), with which it has sometimes been compared -- it came too late.

In discussing the unfortunate course of Polish-Ukrainian relations during the revolutionary era of 1917-21, I placed the main onus on the Polish side. But the Ukrainians, too, contributed to the failure to reach a viable settlement. The Ukrainians were essentially "right," as against the Poles, in basing their territorial program on the ethnic principle rather than on dubious historical claims. The entire drift of historical development in Central and Eastern Europe pointed toward a victory of ethnic self-determination over historical legitimism. But even a "correct" principle needs to be applied judiciously and flexibly, taking into account the actual balance of forces. Ukrainian leaders of the revolutionary era sinned by excessive rigidity and a doctrinaire mentality. There were several occasions when Ukrainians spoiled chances for a compromise with Poland.

Thus it was a grave error that, during the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in January-February 1918, Ukrainian delegates pressed for the inclusion of the region of Chelm (Kholm) in the Ukrainian People's Republic. The territory, located west of the Buh river, had a Ukrainian ethnic majority, but Polish influence was paramount there. The possession of the Chetm region was of no vital importance to Ukrainian statehood, while it was obvious that even moderate Poles could not reconcile themselves to the loss of a territory which for the past hundred years had been an organic part of the Congress Kingdom. Polish public opinion unanimously denounced the Brest-Litovsk settlement (in which the Poles had no part), and this issue added fuel to Polish-Ukrainian hostility.52

One year later, on 28 February 1919, an Inter-Allied Mission, headed by the French General Berthelemy, proposed an armistice which would have terminated the war between Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia. Ukrainian forces were to withdraw to an armistice line. In return for this, the Western Ukrainian People's Republic was to be recognized by the Allies, and was to receive aid for the struggle against Soviet Russia. These terms implied a heavy sacrifice for Ukraine: the abandonment of about one-third of ethnically Ukrainian eastern Galicia, including the capital city of Lviv; most of that territory was at the time actually under Ukrainian control. Still, in view of the desperate general situation-Ukraine's diplomatic and strategic isolation, a two-front war against Poland and Soviet Russia, and lack of ammunition and supplies -- it was rash, if not outright suicidal, for the Western Ukrainian government to reject Berthelemy's proposals. A Ukrainian military historian aptly comments:

The Poles were willing to leave a large part of Galicia's territory in Ukrainian hands as a base for the Galician Army's operations in Dnieper Ukraine. Since the prospects of the Galician Army's victory [over Poland] were nil... , the logic of history demanded that the Ukrainian side accept the terms proposed by General Berthelemy's mission. The rejection of these terms and leaving the resolution of the conflict to "blood and iron" proved fatal, for "blood and iron" could not decide the issue otherwise than they actually did.53

The third opportunity for a Polish-Ukrainian compromise occurred in ;arly 1921. Eastern Galicia had been under Polish occupation since the summer of 1919, but it was not yet legally incorporated into the Polish Republic, inasmuch as the Allied Powers had reserved to themselves the Final decision concerning the future status of that land. Poland's interna-ional situation was precarious, owing to the still unfinished Polish-Soviet war and conflicts with Germany over Upper Silesia and Eastern 3russia. Under these circumstances, the Polish government secretly ap-jroached the Western Ukrainian government-in-exile in Vienna, headed )y Ievhen Petrushevych. The Poles proposed to Petrushevych compre-lensive autonomy for eastern Galicia within the framework of the Polish tate provided that the Ukrainian leadership accept this arrangement and lesist from further embarrassing Poland internationally. Petrushevych's ;overnment rejected this offer out of hand, because it expected that the ill-powerful Entente would in the end force Poland to recognize the Jkrainian people's right to full independence.54 Such unrealistic hopes could not fail to be frustrated: on 14 March 1923, the Council of Ambassadors in Paris, acting for the Allied Powers, awarded sovereignty over eastern Galicia to Poland. There is, of course, no telling whether Poland would in fact have honoured the promises made to Petrushevych; in view of the historical record, Ukrainian suspicion of Polish intentions was, perhaps, not altogether unfounded. But it must also be acknowledged that Ukrainian intransigence played into the hands of Polish chauvinist elements, those opposed to any concessions to and understanding with the Ukrainians.

It is time to draw some conclusions. There exists a striking and disturbing parallelism between the course of Polish-Ukrainian relations in the seventeenth-eighteenth and in the twentieth centuries. The Treaty of Riga (1921) resembled the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), inasmuch as both amounted to a partitioning of Ukraine between Russia and Poland. The parallel can be drawn further. We have seen that Right-Bank Ukraine was a millstone around the Commonwealth's neck in the eighteenth century. The same can be said of Galicia-Volhynia in the 1920s and 30s. The final outcome was also similar in both cases: Poland, which had stubbornly denied western Ukrainian lands to a free Ukraine, was in the end forced to hand them over to the Russian Empire, and later to the Soviet Union; Poland itself also fell under Russian domination. Thus the inability of the Poles and the Ukrainians to compose their differences amicably has already twice caused the destruction of Ukraine and Poland, in that order, and has paved the way for Russia's triumph.

I will not attempt to discuss the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations during the inter-war era. So far no scholarly studies have appeared on the policies of the Second Polish Republic toward its involuntary Ukrainian citizens or on developments within the Ukrainian community in Poland between 1919 and 1939.55 The subject is too important and too painful to deal with in a casual manner; rather, it must be left to the labours of future historians and political scientists. I cannot, however, refrain from quoting Talleyrand's well-known bon mot: "This is worse than a crime, it is a stupidity." These words could well serve, I believe, as a motto to a history, still to be written, of Polish-Ukrainian relations between the Treaty of Riga and the end of World War II.

As we have seen, the first step in Poland's eastward expansion was the occupation of the Principality of Halych in 1340. Three centuries later, the Khmelnytsky Revolution signalled the beginning of the Polish retreat from Ukraine. This withdrawal was completed, after another three hundred years, in 1939-45. Thus an epoch in Polish-Ukrainian relations, which lasted six hundred years, has clearly come to a close, and we stand now at the beginning of a new epoch. What is it going to bring to both nations? Will Poles and Ukrainians be able to draw lessons from the tragic experience of the past?

Objective circumstances seem propitious to a Polish-Ukrainian entente in our time. The present frontier between the Polish People's Republic and the Ukrainian SSR coincides with the ethnic frontier. The remaining minuscule minorities on both sides no longer constitute a serious political problem. It is noteworthy that the post-1945 frontier approximates, with some changes in Poland's favour, the one that existed in the Middle Ages, prior to 1340. Poland's recent geopolitical reorientation to the west, the regaining of territories lost centuries ago to Germany, has ended, let us hope permanently, the traditional Polish drive to the east. Thus the main cause of former conflicts between the Polish and Ukrainian nations has disappeared.

Sociological and cultural changes also point in the direction of a better mutual Polish-Ukrainian understanding. The growth of secularism, on the one hand, and the spread of an ecumenical spirit, on the other, have diminished the importance of the religious barrier between Poles and Ukrainians. At the same time, both communities have grown more alike in their social structures. The Ukrainians have become largely industrialized and urbanized, and can no longer be considered a peasant nation. The Poles, for their part, have shed many traits derived from the gentry tradition. Thus class conflicts and resentments should no longer complicate the relationship between the two nations. The removal of these impediments will facilitate a more generous appreciation of the shared elements in the cultural heritage of the two nations, and will contribute to more intensive future cultural exchanges.

Most important of all, Poland and Ukraine have today, and will probably have for a long time to come, obvious and urgent common political interests. Systematic, long-range co-operation between Poles and Ukrainians offers hope for a change in the present power structure in Eastern Europe. This is not the place to discuss practical details. I refer in this connection to the program so brilliantly formulated by the late Juliusz Mieroszewski.56

One final cautionary word. As so often in the past, Poland is today again in a relatively (although only relatively) more advantageous position than Ukraine. Both Poland and Ukraine are captives of Soviet Russia's imperial system, but the status of the Polish People's Republic is clearly superior to that of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. As at the time of the great Mongol invasion, the very survival of the Ukrainian people is in jeopardy in the USSR, while Poland, although controlled by and subordinated to Moscow, still enjoys the outward attributes of sovereignty and a near-fullness of national life. There exists a potential danger that, as in the past, Poland might be tempted to abuse its superior strength by reviving territorial claims against Ukraine at the very moment when all the energies of the Ukrainian people will be needed for a decisive reckoning with Russia. Let us hope and pray that there will never be a repetition of the old mistakes, mistakes that have already cost so dearly both the Ukrainian and the Polish nations.

Notes

1. The controversy is over the original status of "Peremyshl (Przemysl), Cherven, and other towns" annexed by Volodymyr the Great. For a brief summary of the diverse views of Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian historians, see F. Sielicki's introductory essay to his translation of Powiesc minionych lat (Wroclaw, Warsaw and Cracow 1968), 92-6. A recent treatment of this problem is by la. D. Isaievych, "Terytoriia i naselennia 'Chervenskykh hradiv' (X-XIII st.)," Ukrainskyi istoryko-heohrafichnyi zbirnyk 1 (1971 ):71-83.

2. On Polish-Ukrainian relations during the medieval era, see: B. Wlodarski, Polska i Rus' 1194-1340 (Warsaw 1966); B. A. Rybakov, ed., Polsha i Rus': Cherty ob-shchnosti i svoeobraziia v istoricheskom razvitii Rusi i PolshiXH -- XlV vv. (Moscow 1974).

3. The notion expressed by Adam Bromke in his essay, "Ukraine and Poland in an Interdependent Europe," in Poland and Ukraine: Past and Present, ed. P. J. Potich-nyj (Edmonton 1980), that there was a chance in history for the Poles and Ukrainians to merge into one nation must be rejected. Professor Bromke refers to the era when the Poles and the Ukrainians were politically united within the framework of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Such political coexistence, however, could not expunge profound ethnic-linguistic and religious-cultural features that permanently differentiated the two peoples. Individuals and even entire social groups could cross over this barrier and assimilate to the other side, but this did not obliterate the barrier itself. The question of the viability of a federated political arrangement is an altogether different issue.

4. S. M. Kuczynski, "Stosunki polsko-ruskie do schylku wieku XII," in his Studia z dziejow Europy wschodniej X-XVH w. (Warsaw 1965), 30.

5. G. Rhode, Die Ostgrenze Polens (Koln and Graz 1955). Unfortunately, only the first volume of this erudite work has appeared, covering developments up to the year 1401.

6. S. Tomashivsky, Ukrainska istoriia. 1: Starynni i seredni viky (Lviv 1919), 85-110.

7. J. Peleriski, "Inkorporacja ukrairiskich ziem dawnej Rusi do Korony w 1569 roku," Przeglqd Historyczny 65, no. 2 (1974):243-60.

8. A recent monograph on this subject is by A. Sydorenko, The Kievan Academy in the Seventeenth Century (Ottawa 1977). Polish intellectual influences on the Kievan Academy have been investigated by R. Luzny, Pisarze kregu Akademii Kijowsko-Mohylanskiej a literatura polska (Cracow 1966). On the subject of the Ukrainian cultural revival in the late sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, see: M. Hrushevsky, Kulturno-natsionalnyi rukh na Ukraini v XVI-XVH vitsi, 2d ed. (n.p. 1919); W. K. Medlin and C. G. Patrinelis, Renaissance Influences and Religious Reforms in Russia (Geneva 1971). 9. S. Cynarski, "Sarmatyzm -- ideologia i styl zycia," in Polska XVII wieku. Pan-stwo -- spoleczenstwo -- kultura, ed. J. Tazbir (Warsaw 1974), 269-95.

10. E. Starczewski, Widma przeszlosci (Warsaw and Cracow 1929), 14- 16. It is to be noted that Starczewski applies the term "Ukraine," according to the old Polish usage, to the Kievan region only. The same usage is also to be found, further below, in the quotation from the ' 'Golden Charter'' issued by the Polish insurgents in 1863.

11. P. Jasienica, Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow (Warsaw 1967), 1:211-21, and passim.

12. A collection of essays concerning gentry contributions to the building of Cossack Ukraine is: W. Lipiriski, ed., Z dziejow Ukrainy (Cracow and Kiev 1912).

13. Probably the best discussion of the political and social structure of Cossack Ukraine is found in L. Okinshevych, Lektsii z istorii ukrainskoho prava. Pravo derzhavne: Doba stanovoho suspilstva (Munich 1947).

14. The Treaty of Pereiaslav is a highly controversial topic in historical literature. John Basarab has analyzed this historiographical controversy in his Pereiaslav 1654: A Historiographical Study (Edmonton 1982).

15. The tragic fate of Iurii Nemyrych, the advisor of Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky and the architect of the Union of Hadiach, is discussed by S. Kot, Georges Niemirycz et la lutte contre I'intolerance au 17e siecle (The Hague 1960).

16. Z. Wojcik, Traktat Andruszowski 1667 roku i jego geneza (Warsaw 1959).

17. G. Vernadsky, Bohdan, Hetman of Ukraine (New Haven 1941), 122.

18. J. Perdenia, Stanowisko Rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej wobec sprawy Ukrainy na przetomie XVII-XVIII w. (Wroclaw, Warsaw and Cracow 1963).

19. W. A. Serczyk, Koliszczyzna (Cracow 1968).

20. Taras Shevchenko devoted to this subject his narrative poem, Haidamaky (1841). The bloody popular revolt of 1768 also inspired Polish writers of the Romantic school, notably the poets Juliusz Slowacki and Seweryn Goszczyhski and the novelist Michal Czajkowski.

21. H. Jablonowski, Westrussland zwischen Wilna und Moskau: Die politische Stellung und die politischen Tendenzen der russischen Bevolkerung des Grossfitrstentums Litauen im 15. Jh. (Leiden 1961).

22. For a general discussion of Polish-Ukrainian relations in the nineteenth century, see: M. Demkovych-Dobriansky, Ukrainsko-polski stosunky u XIX storichchi (Munich 1969); and the appropriate sections in P. S. Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918 (Seattle and London 1974).

23. For an analysis of the social structure of nineteenth-century Poland, see: T. Lepkowski, Polska: Narodziny nowoczesnego narodu (Warsaw 1967); and of nineteenth-century Ukraine: V. O. Holobutsky, Ekonomichna istoriia Ukrainskoi RSR (Kiev 1970), chaps. 7-10.

24. This statement requires some qualification. In the Left-Bank provinces of Chernihiv and Poltava, and in that of Kharkiv (Slobodian Ukraine), the local landed nobility consisted of descendants of the former Cossack officers. In spite of their adjustment to the Russian imperial system, members of that class retained a sense of their Ukrainian identity; many of them played an important role in the early stages of the Ukrainian national revival.

25. Peasants of Polish origin who adopted Ukrainian language and customs usually retained their allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. For this reason, they were referred to as latynnyky ("people of Latin Rite"). The number of latynnyky who inhabited Ukrainian ethnic territory within the frontiers of Poland in 1939 has been estimated at about 700,000. See Entsyklopediia ukainoznavstva (Paris and New York 1955 ff.), v. 2, pt. 4:1259; pt. 6:2226.

26. Peter Brock, "The Political Programme of the Polish Democratic Society," in his Nationalism and Populism in Partitioned Poland (London 1973), 63.

27. Wiadomosci Polskie (Paris), 1858, no. 30, cited in Ivan Franko, "Shevchenko heroiem polskoi revoliutsiinoi legendy," Zhytie i slovo (Lviv 1894), 1:381.

28. On the 1830-31 uprising in Ukraine: F. Wrotnowski, Powstanie na Wofyniu, Podolu i Ukrainie w roku 1831 (Leipzig 1875); on the 1863 uprising in Ukraine: Fr. Rawita-Gawronski, Rok 1863 na Rusi, 2 vols. (Lviv 1902-3); G. I. Marakhov, Polskoe vosstanie 1863 g. na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine (Kiev 1967).

29. M. Handelsman, Ukrainska polityka ks. Adama Czartoryskiego przed wojnt{Krymskci (Warsaw 1937).

30. The text of the Zolota hramota is reprinted in Pamietnik Kijowski (London 1963), 2:32.

31. "Istoricheskaia Polsha i velikorusskaia demokratiia," in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii M. P. Dragomanova, ed. B. A. Kistiakovsky, 2 vols. (Paris 1905-6), 1:58.

32. S. Stempowski,Pamietniki (1870-1914) (Wroclaw 1953), 342.

33. Some recent studies on Polish-Ukrainian literary relations and the "Ukrainian School" in Polish literature are: O. Horbach, "Ukrainsko-polski vzaiemyny v lite-raturi," Ukrainskyi samostiinyk (Munich), 1959, nos. 19, 20; H.-G. Herrmann, "Studien iiber das Kosakenthema in polnischer Literatur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zu Vertretern der 'Ukrainischen Schule'" (Ph.D. diss., Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt am Main, 1969); S. Kozak, "Dzherela 'Ukrainskoi shkoly' v polskii literaturi," Nasha kultura (a supplement to Nashe slovo, Warsaw), 1970, nos. 4, 5 and his "Tvorchist polskykh pysmennykiv 'Ukrainskoi shkoly'," Nasha kultura, 1970, nos. 6, 7; R. F. Kyrchiv, Ukrainskyi folklor u polskii literaturi (Kiev 1971 >.

34. An anthology of Ukrainian-language poems by nineteenth-century Polish writers is: R. F. Kyrchiv and M. P. Hnatiuk,ed., Ukrainskoiumuzoiunatkhnenni (Kiev 1971).

35. On Polish-Ukrainian relations in Galicia, see: P. S. Wandycz, "The Poles in the Habsburg Monarchy" in Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism, ed. A. S. Markovits and F. E. Sysyn (Cambridge, Mass. 1982), 68-93; H. Wereszycki, "The Poles as Integrating and Disintegrating Factor," Austrian History Yearbook 3, pt. 2 (1967):287-313; I. L. Rudnytsky, "The Ukrainians in Galicia under Austrian Rule," in the present volume, 315-52.

36. J. Kozik, Miedzy reakcjci a rewoluckt. Studia z dziejow ukrainskiego ruchu narodowego w Galicji w latach 1848-1849 (Warsaw and Cracow 1975).

37. E. Hornowa, Ukrainski obbz,postepowy ijego wspotpraca zpolskii lewicq^ spoteczna^ w Galicji 1876-1895 (Wroclaw, Warsaw and Cracow 1968).

38. The anonymous pamphlet, Kwestya ruska (Lviv 1871), eloquently expressed this point of view. See also S. Kieniewicz, Adam Sapieha (1828-1903) (Lviv 1939), chap. 9.

39. See H. Werwes, Tarn, gdzie Ikwy srebrnefale plynq_. Z dziejow stosunkow literackich polsko-ukrainskich w XIX i XX wieku (Warsaw 1972), chap. 5; E. Wisniewska, "Wasyl Stefanyk w srodowisku literackim Krakowa w latach 1892-1900," in Z dziejow stosunkow literackich polsko-ukrainskich, ed. S. Kozak and M. Jakobiec (Wroclaw, Warsaw, Cracow and Gdansk 1974).

40. Fr. Bujak, Galicya (Lviv 1908), 1:93-4.

41. H. Jablonski.PoMaautomonia narodowa na Ukrainie 1917-1918 (Warsaw 1948).

42. Cited ibid., 58.

43. M. Lozynsky, Halychyna v rr. 1918-1920 (Vienna 1922; reprint, New York 1970); W. Kutschabsky, Die Westukraine im Kampfe mit Polen und dem Bolschewismus in den Jahren 1918 -- 1923 (Berlin 1934); A. Deruga, Polityka wschodnia Polski wobec ziem Litwy, Biaiorusi i Ukrainy (1918-1919) (Warsaw 1969).

44. A. Bochehski, Miedzy Niemcami a Rosjq_ (Warsaw 1937), 83.

45. L. Shankovsky, Ukrainska Halytska Armiia (Winnipeg 1974).

46. For a discussion of the 1920 Polish-Ukrainian alliance, see: M. K. Dziewanowski, Joseph Pifsudski: A European Federalist, 1918-1922 (Stanford 1969), chaps. 12- 15; and the memoirs of I. Mazepa, Ukraina v ohni i buri revoliutsii, 1917-1921 (n.p. 1950), v. 3. Mazepa was premier of the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic in the early months of 1920.

47. Dziewanowski, 351.

48. S. Mackiewicz (Cat), Historja Polski od 11 listopada 1918 do 17 wrzesnia 1939 r. (London 1941), 106.

49. On the territorial program of the Polish National Democrats in 1918-20, see: W. Pobog-Malinowski, Najnowsza historia poliryczna Polski, 1864-1945 (London 1956), 2, pt. 1:50-56.

50. See the contemporary comments of A. Margolin, Ukraina i politika Antanty (Berlin 1921), 151-2.

51. Ie. Konovalets, Prychynky do istorii ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 2d ed. (n.p. 1948), 42-3.

52. Documents from Austrian State Archives pertaining to the Chetm (Kholm) problem at the Brest-Litovsk peace conference and during the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation of Ukraine in 1918 have been published in T. Hornykiewicz, ed., Ereig-nisse in der Ukraine 1914-1922 (Philadelphia 1967), 2:229-311. See also D. Doroshenko, Istoriia Ukrainy 1917-1923 rr. (Uzhhorod 1932), 1, chap. 12.

53. Shankovsky, 65.

54. This little-known episode is described in the memoirs of T. Voinarovsky: (T. Voinarovsky and I. Sokhotsky), Istorychni postati Halychyny XIX-XX st. (New York and Paris 1961), 66-9. Fr. Foinarovsky, an eminent Ukrainian clergyman and civic leader, was the intermediary who transmitted the Polish offer to Petrushevych.

55. For a short treatment of the subject, see the chapter "Western Ukraine under Poland," by S. Vytvytsky and S. Baran, in Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, 2 vols. (Toronto 1963-71), 1:833-50. The memoirs of I. Kedryn, Zhyttia -- podii -- liudy. Spomyny i komentari (New York 1976), are rich in pertinent information. Two recent Polish works which deal respectively with the social and political structure of inter-war Poland and devote special sections to national minorities, especially the Ukrainians, are: M. M. Drozdowski, Spofeczenstwo, pahstwo, politycy 11 Rze-czypospolitej (Cracow 1972) and J. Holzer, Mozaika polityczna Drugiej Rze-czypospolitej (Warsaw 1974).

56. J. Mieroszewski, Materiafy do refleksji i zadumy (Paris 1976), especially the article "Rosyjski 'kompleks polski' i ULB."