Both conflicts took place roughly on the same territory: The lands that are now part of western Ukraine and eastern Poland, which were claimed by Ukrainians, the ethnic majority, and the Poles who pointed to their investments into the development of these lands.
The war took place within the framework of the global conflict, World War II. The Third Reich and the USSR played a significant role in fueling the confrontation between the Ukrainians and the Poles. In the end, the border issue was solved after World War II without the participation of either, after which the Communists in the USSR and Poland changed the ethic configuration of these territories by force.
The main participants of the war were not states but underground military formations – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Polish Home Army (AK). During this war, both the militants of the UPA and AK committed war crimes, which, undoubtedly, have to be condemned. They cannot be justified as retaliations or preventive strikes.
However, neither of these armies can be considered an evil formation, no matter how hard some political forces are trying to brand them as such.
Military crimes were an inherent part of World War II. There are plenty of reasons to accuse all participating armies of them. Both Ukrainian and the Polish insurgents set themselves the goal to protect their population and restore the independence of their state – a goal that deserves the highest respect in any society.
In some places and times such goals led different societies to collide, thus causing wars. In the Polish-Ukrainian war neither side could win, and the only one who benefited was the USSR, which strengthened its rule in Ukraine and spread it to Poland.
At this point, I will stop the talk about the past, even though it’s the focus of my professional interest, because I am no less aggrieved by modern events linked to political use of this history.
The information campaign in Poland, dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Volyn tragedy (which peaked with the massacre of Poles), has reached its crescendo. It will clearly go on until the end of 2013, but is unlikely to produce any new quality of arguments.
The scale of this campaign is no smaller than that of 2003, and one of its results is better knowledge about his tragedy among Poles. At the same time, its assessment is increasingly one-sided: sociologists note that, more and more, it is the Poles that are considered the sole victims of the tragedy, while Ukrainians are blamed for starting it. Thus, more than half of those polled say the past is something that divides our people.
Polish historians can take full credit for this result, since they should be the main speakers for the past. Any interested party can find plenty of fresh commentary and political declarations. But you will be hard-pressed to find new research. The voice of truly professional historians in this heated discussion is barely audible.
The most unpleasant trend of 2013 is an absence of dialogue between Ukrainian and Polish specialists. These parallel monologues started off with a conference organized by the Institute of National Memory in Lublin in February, to which Ukrainian academics were not invited. The organizers said they did not “want to see their Ukrainian colleagues to avoid arguments.” Similar events in Ukraine followed, leaving out the Poles.
In June, the central conference in Warsaw invited some Ukrainians, but only those who share the sentiment of their Polish colleagues.
Also, Polish academia ignored the opening in Ukraine of the former KGB archives that has taken place in recent years, allowing access to over half a thousand documents on the subject.
They challenged the key thesis of Polish historiography that backs the genocide concept: there was no political decision to conduct a planned military operation; it remains unclear who destroyed the village of Parasolya (but it wasn’t by the UPA unit of Hryhoriy Perehyniak as Polish historians insist, as they try to present it as the first anti-Polish rebellion of the insurgents); there is no Polish, Soviet or German documentary proof of mass destruction of Polish villages on July 11, 1943; there are no sources to reasonably back the number of 100,000 massacred Poles.
Instead, there are new additional sources about the Polish terror in Chelm against the Ukrainian population, the destruction of Ukrainian villages in Nadsyannya, and the role of the Soviet factor in the conflict.
There has been no professional discussion, and the desire of the Polish colleagues to stick to their opinion has served politicians well, as some of those unproven theses made it to the Polish Senate resolution.
The historians who should have condemned the current level of discussion and move it to closer understanding of the past, have failed to complete their mission. Some even got trapped by the political wave and started changing their views.
The political interest has a negative impact on the understanding between countries. There were many steps made for reconciliation in 2003: Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Alexander Kwasniewski made statements, the two parliaments approved a joint statement.
On the background of this significant progress, a new resolution by the Polish Senate containing false references that contradict international law (such as “ethnic cleansing with elements of genocide”), is a definite rollback on the path to reconciliation between the two peoples. It may not be the last if the model gets adopted by Ukraine’s politicians.
The tough memory of conflict and war can only be dealt with as a dialogue, overcoming the one-sided desire to only talk about one’s own grief.
Volodymyr Viatrovych is a Ukrainian historian and former head of the Security Service archives.
