Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide or Ukrainian-Polish War in Volhynia?1 Ivan Katchanovski, Ph.D. School of Political Studies & Conflict Studies and Human Rights Program University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada Tel. 613-407-1295
[email protected] Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 10-13, 2020 1 Abstract This paper analyzes the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during the German occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of communism, especially in the last fews years. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers offered different and often divergent theories of this historical event. It is often presented in Ukraine as a Ukrainian-Polish war, in particular, by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory after the “Euromaidan”. The laws and policies adopted by the Maidan governments glorified the far right OUN and the UPA, their leaders and members as national heroes and fighters for the Ukrainian independence. In contrast, the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia is often characterized in Poland as a genocide. The Polish parliament declared in 2016 that the Volhynian massacre constituted a genocide. The research question is whether this mass murder was an ethnic cleansing, genocide, or Ukrainian-Polish war. This study analyzes archival documents from the Branch Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine, the SBU archive in Volyn Region, and the State Archive of Volyn Region, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts in English, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian languages.