The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943 Author(S): Timothy Snyder Source: Past & Present, No
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Past and Present Society The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943 Author(s): Timothy Snyder Source: Past & Present, No. 179 (May, 2003), pp. 197-234 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600827 . Accessed: 05/01/2014 17:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press and The Past and Present Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Past &Present. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 137.110.33.183 on Sun, 5 Jan 2014 17:29:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE CAUSES OF UKRAINIAN-POLISH ETHNIC CLEANSING 1943* Ethniccleansing hides in the shadow of the Holocaust. Even as horrorof Hitler'sFinal Solution motivates the study of other massatrocities, the totality of its exterminatory intention limits thevalue of the comparisons it elicits.Other policies of mass nationalviolence - the Turkish'massacre' of Armenians beginningin 1915, the Greco-Turkish'exchanges' of 1923, Stalin'sdeportation of nine Soviet nations beginning in 1935, Hitler'sexpulsion of Poles and Jewsfrom his enlargedReich after1939, and the forcedflight of Germans fromeastern Europein 1945 - havebeen retrievedfrom the margins of mili- tary and diplomatichistory. When compared to the Final Solution,each fallsbelow the horrible threshold of intention to exterminate.Yet, whentaken together, they constitute one of thecentral trends of the social and politicalhistory of the Euro- pean twentiethcentury: the violentremoval of populationsin thepursuit of nationally pure space. The lexiconof the Final Solutionhas itsproper limits. 'Holo- caust' and 'Shoah' are specificterms of lament,and 'genocide' refersto the legallyascertainable intention to destroya group. Anotherterm is needed for violentpolicies aimingto clear territoriesof nationalenemies, though not to kill everyman, woman and child. This is the meaningof 'ethniccleansing', which reached English fromSerbian throughtelevision and newspapersin 1992. Serbian practices in Bosnia, at first deemed shockinglyexotic, quickly inspired fruitful compari- sons withother events of the European twentieth century. The perpetrator'sperspective, so compactlycontained, stimulated painfulattempts at understanding.'Ethnic cleansing' became a termof art not onlyof the cleansersbut of theirchroniclers, and thusprovided the basis forfresh investigations of central * For commentson earlierversions of the manuscript,the authorthanks Karel Berkhoff,Sarah Bilston,Ray Brandon,Jeffrey Burds, Mark Mazower and partici- pants of the Russian and East European HistoryWorkshop at Harvard University and the Russian and East European HistoryReading Group at Yale University. Certainarguments were originallypresented at the Remarque InstituteSeminar at New York University.Responsibility for content rests with the author. 0 The Past and PresentSociety, Oxford, 2003 This content downloaded from 137.110.33.183 on Sun, 5 Jan 2014 17:29:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 198 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER179 events of twentieth-centuryEuropean history.'It has also broughtinto focus national atrocities that had hithertoescaped scholarlyattention. One such episode is the removalof Poles fromVolhynia by Ukrainiannationalists in 1943. It is a storyof multiple occupa- tions,and ofcleansing within cleansings. Volhynia, like the rest of the easternhalf of interwarPoland, was subjectto triple occupationduring the Second World War. These territories, fromVilnius to L'viv,home to aboutthirteen million people in 1939, wereoccupied first by Stalin'sSoviet Union (1939-41), thenby Hitler'sGermany (1941-4), and thenagain by Stalin's SovietUnion (from1944).2 In thethree years before Ukrainian nationalistsbegan to cleanse Poles, Volhyniawas the site of a stunningdisplay of politicallymotivated population move- ments.During the firstSoviet occupation, the Nazis imported ethnicGermans from newly Soviet Volhynia. (This was partof Hitler'sfearfully ambitious project to build a nationallypure GreaterGermany, which entailed the deportationof Poles and Jewsfrom the enlargedReich.) The Soviets,having enlarged SovietUkraine to the west,deported tens of thousandsof the 'Important examples are ChristopherBrowning, Nazi Policy,Jewish Workers, GermanKillers (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1, entitled'From "EthnicCleansing" to Geno- cide to the "Final Solution":The Evolutionof Nazi JewishPolicy, 1939-1941'; Terry Martin,The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalismin theSoviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca,2000), ch. 8 on 'EthnicCleansing and EnemyNations'; Norman Naimark,Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-CenturyEurope (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); PhillipTher and Ana Siljak (eds.), RedrawingNations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-CentralEurope, 1944-1948 (Lanham, 2001); see also Mark Mazower, 'Vio- lence and the Statein theTwentieth Century', Amer. Hist. Rev., cvii(2002). 2Although the literatureon the Second World War is almostimponderably vast, the particularpredicament of tripleoccupation escapes notice. The relativeweak- ness of the historiographywas underscoredby two recentcontroversies: the British and NorthAmerican reaction to the Englishtranslation of Jan T. Gross's valuable studyof the mass murderof Jews at Jedwabne,Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jew- ishCommunity in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001), and the disputesover Julian Hendy's 'documentary' on the Waffen-SS division 'Galizien'. The murder of Jews at Jedwabnetook place at the juncturebetween the firstand second occupations;the formationof the Waffen-SS'Galizien' was a resultof the weakeningof the second occupation and the anticipationof the third.On the firstoccupation, the starting pointis an earlierwork: Jan T. Gross: Revolutionfrom Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's WesternUkraine and WesternBelorussia (Princeton, 1988). On the second, the literatureis larger,though oriented towards German sources: consult Dieter Pohl, NationalsozialistischeJudenverfolgung in Ostgalizien (Munich, 1996). On the third,recent work based on Soviet sources includes two articlesby JeffreyBurds, 'Agentura:Soviet Informants' Networks and the UkrainianUnderground in Galicia, 1944-1948', East EuropeanPolitics and Societies,xi, 1 (1997), and 'Gender and Policingin SovietWest Ukraine',Cahiers du monderusse, xlii (2001). This content downloaded from 137.110.33.183 on Sun, 5 Jan 2014 17:29:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CAUSES OF UKRAINIAN-POLISH ETHNIC CLEANSING 199 MAP 1 INTERWAR EASTERN EUROPE, C. 1938 Tallinn ESTONIA SSWEDEN 3() miles N ("3() miles N - V A Ia? Ri V4(X)kilonvmtres BALTIC LATVIA SEA * Moscow LITHUANIA ' KaunasKa eWilno SOVIET UNION GERMANY *M" Berlin BELORUSSIAN-"s * S.S.R.I , GERMANY POAND - Prague * *Volh * Kyiv Cracow.-1" Vienna - " AUSTRIA HUNGARYudapest ROMANIA U AI Belgrade SBeaBucharest YUGOSLAVIA , BLACKSEA Volhynian elites, mostly Poles, to Siberia and Kazakhstan. These actions ceased only when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. In 1941 and 1942, the Germans organized a brutallyintimate genocide of the Volhynian Jews, which trained many of the perpetratorsof the 1943 cleansings of Poles. The 1943 decision of Ukrainian nationaliststo cleanse was, among other things, a strategic calculation based upon news of the Soviet victoryat Stalingrad in February 1943, and the judgement that German occupation was both unbearable and temporary.As Eastern Europe was balanced between two totalitarianregimes, and west Ukraine between a second and thirdwartime occupation, an organizationthat wished to build a Ukrainian state took mattersinto its own hands. In Germany, the ethnic cleansing of Jews was followed by their extermination. Yet ethnic cleansers may take Hitler This content downloaded from 137.110.33.183 on Sun, 5 Jan 2014 17:29:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 200 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 179 seriouslywithout sharing his commitment to total elimination. Ethniccleansing is fareasier than the murderof an entire group,and servesmost nationalist programmes just as well. Nationalistswho wish to builda nationallyhomogenous state need not killall membersof a minoritypopulation: killing manyto removemost is sufficient.Of course,in Volhynia as in otherlands that had beeneastern Poland, Hitler was notthe onlymodel. By 1943,Poles and Ukrainiansalike understood thatStalin and Hitler forcibly removed and destroyed groups in thename of national politics. They not only saw ethnic cleans- ing,they were also subjectto it and complicitin it. By 1943 somethinglike one-quarter of theVolhynian population had experiencednational violence in one form or another, as victim, accompliceor both.For manysurvivors, personal experience took on politicalsignificance. Triple occupationnot only exposedthese lands to bothNazi and Sovietoccupation pol- icies,it made them the site of intense competition between the twosystems. Because alien rule could be seenas bothintoler- ableand transitory, the triple occupation also gave rise to des- peratelystrong hopes for