Jaruzelski launches anti-Ukranian campaign
"two minutes of hate" institution of the state that concerns itself with the sessions were one of the techniques of indoctrination question of nationalities. This ministry was the source
Although the of all the documents published in the press.
system of "oligarchic collectivism" imagined by Orwell In one way or another, all the press organs of the does not exist in Poland, the Polich bureaucracy's various factions of the bureaucracy took part in this a device reminiscent campaign from the pseudoliberal
Rzeczywistosc, organ of the Stalinist
POLAND
In George Orwell's novel 1984, utilized by the totalitarian regime.
arsenal includes
Last year, this method was used against the priest Jerzy what incited a group of secret hardliners, including Slowo Powszechne, the magazine of the "socially progressive Catholics "
For months in a clearly co-ordin- regime in all its forms.
Ukrainian people.
Rzeczywistosc found no difficulty in basing itself on ated way, the official press trumpeted what it called the "truth about the criminal character of Ukrainian a statement made in 1943 by the National Party (SN), a formation that represented the most chauvinistic nationalism" and about the actions of the "barbaric currents in the bourgeoisie and among the big landhordes of Ukrainian nationalists" forty years ago.
owners, which was always in the forefront of support
The fighters of the Ukrainian liberation movement, who for eight years (1943-1951) waged an
"Ukrainian society, showing its immatstruggle against German imperialism first of all and urity or its degeneracy by mass criminality, condemns then against Stalinist tyranny were presented as "savage
The weakness and primitivism of Ukrainian executioners"
"fascist cutthroats out of the society are obstructing its own development." (1)
Their activity was described as
In order to understand the present anti-Ukrainian against humanity"
campaign, it is necessary to review the historic events information that has reached us, this campaign was that the bureaucracy are exploiting in this campaign. I directly whipped up by the Ministry of the Interior, that is, by the police, which in Poland is the main will try to do that in the following article.
Following the failure of the Red Army in the war with Poland in 1920, the western part of the Ukraine and also of Byelorussia remained incorporated into the
Polish bourgeoisie state until 1939. The new Polish state continued the traditional policy of the Polish ruling classes in these areas toward the Ukrainian population, which was 90% peasant in composition.
It was a policy of national oppression, cultural discrimination, economic exploitation and forced assimilation.
In 1930, in reprisal for terrorist actions carried out by the Ukrainian nationalists,
Marshall Jozef Pilsudski, the Polish chief of state, ordered the army and police to
"pacify" the Ukrainian villages.
this that gave the fundamental shape to the experience of an entire people of
Poland and Poles," it says in a book recently published underground saw, which deals with the relations between Poland and its neighbours.
a crime, and one that we had to pay for."
(2) It was this repression that set the stage for the revenge of the Ukrainian peasants in 1943, which I will take up
Moreover, the western Ukraine was the traditional center of the Ukrainian national movement, especially Galicia, which was called the "Piedmont of the Ukraine."
For some time, this movement exhibited
20 controlled for repressive Byelorussia.
"synonymous According to the a pro-Soviet attitude, turning toward the Soviet Ukraine, which after the October Revolution exercised a considerable attraction over the peasants, the workers, the petty bourgeoisie and even the Uniat priest of the Polish part of the Ukraine.
However, this situation changed drastically as a result of Stalinism's monstrous crimes against the Ukrainian people at the time of forced collectivization. ensuing famine led to the death of nearly six million peasants in the Soviet Ukraine, and this was accompanied by slaughter of Ukrainian intellectuals and national communist cadres.
Leon Trotsky wrote: "Nowhere did restrictions, purges, repressions and in general, all forms of bureaucratic hooliganism assume such murderous sweep as they did in the Ukraine in the struggle against the powerful, deeply rooted longings of the Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and independence. To the totalitarian bureaucracy, Soviet Ukraine became an administrative division of an economic unit and a military base of the
After the Stalinist crimes, Trotsky explained, the Ukrainian masses did not want to live in the USSR any more or remain attached to it. On the contrary, they aspired to the creation of an independent workers' and peasants' state.
The workers of Russia and the entire world, Trotsky said, "must even now premier Mieczyslaw Polish policies in the Ukraine and understand the causes for Ukrainian separatism, as well as the latent power and historical lawfulness behind it, and they must, without any reservation, declare to the Ukrainian people that they are ready to support, with all their might, the slogan of an independent Soviet Ukraine in a joint struggle against the autocratic bureaucracy and against imperialism." (4) on the USSR, a national liberation strug gle developed in the western Ukraine. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) took the leadership of this fight, and in 1943, in the countryside it founded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, (UPA), which rapidly grew into a force of nearly 40,000 combatants. Previously, the OUN had been a rightist organization. It had conducted terrorist actions directagainst the Polish state and shown a penchant for fascism. Its hope was that Germany would consent to the formation of an independent Ukrainian state.
Jedrzej Seret, "Tragedia Kresow" ["The Tragedy of the Eastern Borderlands"]. Rzeczywistosc, No 32, 1984.
Kazimierz Podlaski, Bialorusini, Litwini, Ukrainey: nasi wrogowie czy bracia? [" Are the Lithuanians. Ukrainians and Belorussians Our Enemies or Our Brothers and Sisters"], Slowo, Warsaw, 1984, p 75. Excerpts of this interesting book were published in the Paris magazine L'Alternative, No 31, 1985.
Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1984, pp 302-303
Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-40, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1977, p 53.
International Viewpoint 8 April 1985
hynia and Polesia, a bloody national con- matter of indifference to us who are its
The bloody repression of every expression of Ukrainian nationalism, and the policy of brutal exploitation of the Ukrainian masses followed by the Nazis quickly dispelled the OUN's reactionary illusions. At the same time, the OUN was led by other factors to make a deepgoing ideological shift. Beginning in 1941, its "expeditionary groups" started to penetrate into the Nazi-occupied Soviet Ukraine and establish contacts with the local population.
As a result of discussions with the population in the Soviet Ukraine, whose consciousness was shaped by the gains of the October Revolution and the structure of post-capitalist society, and in particular under the pressure of the working class in the Donbass, the leading coal and steel center of both the Ukraine and the USSR as a whole, the OUN and the UPA adopted a program not just for a national revolution but for a social one as well. Left turn
The independent Ukraine that was to come out of the struggle "against both Hitler and Stalin" was to be a democratic state without capitalists or landlords, without "the parasitic class of Bolshevik grandees," without oppression of one nation by another, without the exploitation of human beings by human beings, a state based on social ownership of the means of production and which would build a classless society.
The adoption by the Ukrainian nationalists of a program for social revolution confirmed Trotsky's thesis that the social revolution in the USSR, which had been betrayed by the bureaucracy and its party, lived on in the property relations and in the consciousness of the workers. This was pointed out by Pierre Frank at the time of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International in 1951.
"What we have learned from Ukrainian independence movement on this question is also quite significant. As a result of the division of the Ukraine before the Second World War, the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Poland contributed to the development of proindependence tendencies in the Soviet
But on the other hand, the difference in the social system between the two parts of the Ukraine led to the Ukrainian nationalists in Poland evolving toward support for the forms of social ownership in the Soviet Ukraine. a phenomenon that must not be forgot-
The new revolutionary nationalism that was evolving toward democratic socialism won the support of the masses in the western Ukraine, which had been part of Poland before 1939. When the Soviet army entered this army in 1944, the Kremlin found itself facing the first mass movement for political revolution in its state.
In 1943, when the UPA was set up, in the western Ukrainian provinces of VolInternational Viewpoint 8 April 1985 flict raged between the Ukrainian peasants and Polish settlers. Massacres of civilians were perpetrated by both sides.The
Polish and Ukrainian resistance organisations became involved in the conflict in the two opposing camps. The German authorities, who had every interest in seeing the sharpest possible antagonism between the Poles and Ukrainians, poured oil on the flames. The same was done by the Soviet partisan groups, which had an interest in provoking pogroms among the Ukrainian masses that supported the movement for national and social liberation.
In taking up a war of liberation against German imperialism, the Ukrainian masses at the same time took their revenge for the national oppression they suffered at thehands of the Polish population. Indeed, the Polish resistance movement and the authorities of the Polish "underground were hostile to the Ukrainian national movement. (6) They thought that in the future the western Ukraine should belong to Poland, wanting to maintain the territorial gains the Polish bourgeois state had made in the east.
The Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa - AK) had rejected the UPA's proposals for putting an end to the conflict and collaborating against the common enemies of both movements, Hitler and Stalin, based on a recognition of the right of the Ukrainian nation to form an independent state.
It is the episode of this conflict prithe Polish bureaucratic government is exploiting today. regime not only obscures the historic background to the 1943 massacres and the historic responsibility of the Polish forces involved in them as oppressor, but it also passes over in silence the followed by political and military institutions of the Polish "underground state" in the Nazioccupied western Ukraine as regards the
The historian Jerzy Tomaszewski has even been pillioned by the regime's press for having dared say that massacres of civilians were carried out by both sides. and that the actions of the Polish resistance against the Ukrainian peasants cannot in any case be considered self-defense.
The official press talks about *propaganda materials fabricated by the Ukrainian nationalists saying the same thing as this Polish historian" (7) It has also referred to other material that, it claims, "are pure Zionist inventions, like what
Jerzy Tomaszewski offers Polish readers."
Rzeczywistose suggests that "Western tourists of a swarthy type" are trying to buy off some Polish scholars to get them to put forward ideas similar to Tomaszewski's. It accuses him of "spitting in the face of Poles", and goes on to say that public presentation of Tomaszewski's studies of the relations between Poland and the Ukraine in the past "will do more harm than good to Polish scholarship, and also to our fatherland, which cannot be a citizens!" (8
The official press portrays Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism and the liberation struggle of the Ukrainian masses as a fascist movement allied to Hitler. Using the method of the amalgam, it talks about the UPA and the two formations set up by the Nazis - the Ukrainian auxiliary police and the SS-Galicia division -as if they were various wings of the same movement. Finally, to top it all off, the official press bases itself on the "political thought" of the most chauvinist and imperialist currents in the Polish right, as indicated by Rzeczywistosc quoting the National Party's shameful statement from
Such an ideological orientation is not new in the history of the bureaucratic dictatorship in Poland. From the outset of its rule, Polish Stalinism has followed a chauvinist policy with regard to the national question. In 1945, the "people's" government proclaimed that the Polish state should be nationally homogeneous.
More or less openly, the successive ruling teams have remained faithful to
"tradition," from which Solidarnose to break in 1981 by proclaiming the democratic principle of a "republic
The Ukrainian population living within the new Polish frontiers established after the Second World War were the victims of
"ideal" of a "nationally homogeneous state." In the wake of the war, in accordnace with a deal made with the Kremlin, the great majority of this population (several hundred persons) were forcibly deported to the Soviet Ukraine. This included even villages that had traditionally been Stalinist, and was done over the energetic protests of old Ukrainian Communists.
The UPA detachments mounted armed deportations and defended the Ukrainian population ag. ainst pillage, pogroms and murder carried out by the security apparatus, the militia [i.e., the regular police], and the army of "people's" Poland, as well as by armed detachments of chauvinist Polish settlers.
It was in this period that armed groups that came out of the old AK that oppos ed the Stalinist regime began to collaborate on the ground with the UPA. They helped to protect the Ukrainian population from the persecutions, agitated within the militia and army against the antiUkrainian repression, and organized aid for the Ukrainian peasants in the Polish
Breaking in this way from the old policy of the AK, they took a democratic position on the Ukrainian question, and some leaders of these guerilla detach-
Pierre Frank, "Evolution of Eastern Europe, European Revolution, Education for Socialists series, SWP, New York, 1969, p 51.
"underground state" in Poland during the war and the Home Army (AK), see the article by Arthur Wilkins and Cyril Smuga "Les Veritables origines de la Republique Pop-
Viewpoint's Frenchlanguage sister publication.
"Nawroty do zle przeszlosci" ("Returning to an unhappy Past"*). Przeglad Tygodniowy, No 26, 1984
J. Seret, Op cit.
21
accepted the aspirations of the Ukrainian people for national indepen-
The Ukrainian question in "people's" Poland was finally "solved" in 1947. At that time only a single Ukrainian ethnic group remained on Polish territory, oin the Carpathian mountains, the Lemkos. The Polish army mounted an operation, called "Action Vistula," for which tens of thousands of soldiers were mobilized. Its objective was to deport the entire Lemko community and destroy the UPA.
The Lemkos defended tooth and nail their right to live on lands they had inhabited for centuries. It was the guerilla company made up of Lemko peasants and led by Stepan Khrin, one of the UPA's best military commanders, that waged the fiercest battles, successfully utilizing the tactic of offensive raids army deported 150,000 Lemkos to the north and west of Poland, where they were dispersed and consigned to "achieving a higher degree of Polishness," that is, to assimilation.
It is worth remembering that it was in this criminal pogrom against the Lemko people that the present chief of the Polish regime, General Jaruzelski, won his officer's stars. To this day, it is forbidden to talk about the fate to which Polish Stalinism condemned the Lemkos.
It has only been during the processes of political revolution that the legal press has been able to discuss this question. The democratic press recalled the tragedy of the Lemkos on two occasions. 1957, it was the weekly Po Prostu the organ of the "October Left," that did this. In 1981, it was Tygodnik Solidarnosc, the weekly of the free trade union
The lands of the Lemkos were entirely cleared of any population. So, the UPA detachments had to retreat to the Soviet Ukraine, where they joined the local units of the UPA. For some years more, they continued to wage a heroic struggle, but they were finally mercilessly exterminated by NKVD detachments.
In March 1950, Taras Chuprynka (Roman Shukhevych), the commander in chief of the UPA, was killed near Lvov.
after that, the last groups of Ukrainian guerillas who fought to the end in the Carpathian forets to eliminate this "prisonhouse of nations" - as they called the Stalinist USSR - were defeated.
"If you add up the numbers of people who died in the 1917-1920 revolution, the forced collectivism and in the great purges in the 1930s, and in the Second World War, the total comes out to half the male population and a quarter of the female population of the Ukraine. With human beings, the traditions, the ideas, the gains and the hopes of entire generations were destroyed. such a holocaust, Ukrainian society still had the strength to manifest its national aspirations after the
Still more remarkable is the rise in the 1960s of the Ukraine dissident movement, a new testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit." (9)
Why did the Polish political police, which does not normally concern itself with history, suddenly take an interest in the Ukraine nationalist movement of forty years ago? Why has the regime's press, instigated by the Ministry of the Interior, all of a sudden started pounding away on the theme of "Ukrainian fascists and bandits," a stereotype unfortunately strikes a chord with a section of the Polish people?
It should be noted here that in the past, it was the Jewish minority, which was accused of taking part in against the Polish nation and socialism, that was the target of the Polish bureaucracy's chauvinist campaigns. Today, for the first time, similar aceusations are being directed at "certain elements" of the Ukrainian minority.
regime's representatives that veterans of the UPA and the OUN, "who in forty years of peace in Europe have learned nothing raised their heads again in Poland in a time of chaos and relaxed vigilance." (10) They are talking about a time when a process of political revolution was underway, 1980The reason for the campaign
Why is the Ukrainian minority in Poland being attacked? It is systematicdiscriminated against, denied the right to develop its national culture freely and to preserve its language. It is left with no organization of its own but a feeble social and cultural organization under the direct administrative control of the Ministry of the Interior.
The answer to these questions has to be looked for on the other side of the Polish frontier. In the Soviet Ukraine, particularly in the western part, the struggle of Solidarnose made a significant impact among the workers and the intelligentsia.
A number of Ukrainian dissidents saw the social movement of the Polish workers as an example to follow and as a positive alternative for overcoming the problems of the human-rights defense movement in the USSR, which has been isolated from the working class.
In February and March 1983, leaflets appeared calling for a strike and supporting Solidarnose in factories in the western Ukraine. In March 1984, leaflets from the Polish organization Fighting Solidarity (Solidarnosc Walczaca) were distributed in Russian and Ukrainian. They called for the formation of groups modelled on those existing in Poland, under the banner of self-management, solidarity and independence.
Indicating the reasons for the Polish bureaucracy's anti-Ukrainian campaign, a CPSU bigwig in the western Ukraine, Petro Sardachuk, wrote in Issue No 12, of Kommunist (the theoretical organ of the CPSU): "In carrying on its ideological diversion, the class enemy is trying to take advantage of the history and the special geopolitical situation of the Sub-Carpathian region". He wrote that the border areas of the Ukraine "are the front lines of the ideological confrontation," proclaiming that "here constantly smell the smoke of the anti-Soviet fires."
It is thus clear that Sardachuk referring to the the dangers represented by the Polish social movement. time before this article was published, in the fall of 1983, the Soviet press raised the alarm about subversive activity aimed against the Soviet Ukraine being conducted in Poland, and about the Western imperialist spy centers inciting Ukrainian dissidents to learn from Solidarnose and to "adapt to Soviet conditions the methods of creeping counterrevolution" worked out in Poland.
For decades, the Kremlin has feared the liberation movement of the Ukrainian people, the largest oppressed nation in Europe, which inhabits the continent's largest country. territory, population and economic strength, the Ukraine represents one fifth of
The Kremlin is quite well aware of the fact that it was the Ukrainian masses who unleashed the first political revolution against its regime. Stalinist regime displayed for Ukrainian nationalism in the 1940s is no less fierce today.
Soviet citizens are still being sentenced and executed on accusations of having belonged to the UPA. General Roman Shukhevych's son is still in prison, after 35 years, because he refuses to renounce his father. Moreover, the UPA veteran Danylo Shumuk, who was a Communist activist before the war, has recently been recognised by Amnesty International as the longest held political prisoner in the
The national aspirations in the Ukraine are a powderkeg. They have grown apace with the Ukrainian working class, which now represents 75% of the total Ukrain-
The Ukrainian workers are one of the best educated sections of the working class of the USSR and they have acquired considerable experience in fighting to defend their rights.
In 1962, the Donbass workers waged strikes on a large scale that had a semiinsurrectional character. question is becoming more and more closely linked with the problems work-
"Finding myself as a worker at the bottom of the Soviet social scale, I have felt very directly the weight of economic, social and political and national oppression," Mykola Pohyba wrote in a prison camp in 1980. (11)
Bohdan Krawchenko, "The Great Ukrainian Famine", L'Alternative, No 24, 1983, p 50. 10. J. -Seret. Pogrobowcy Stepana Bandery, [The Heirs of Stepan Bandera], Rzeczywistosc, No 50, 1984. 11. "The Open Letter from worker Mykola Pohyba", Cahiers du Samizdat, No 78. 1981, p 14.
International Viewpoint 8 April 1985