Poland and Ukraine have certain obvious things in common...

The Bloody History Between Poland and Ukraine Led to Their Unlikely Solidarity

by Marci Shore 

 

Associate professor of history at Yale University and a visiting fellow

 at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna

On 20 February, the young Ukrainian activist Aleksandra Kovaleva posted an open letter to European politicians on Facebook. "Yanukovych fucks you all this time, he fucks us also, but we at least trying to resist," she wrote. "You’re too old, you’re blind to see what is happening, you are deaf and can not hear the screams." The letter was a cri de coeur, evoking the anger, hurt, and disappointment of thousands on the Maidan. “Sorry for my English,” Kovaleva ended her letter. Then she added, "And yes, thank you, Poland. We hear you and we love you."

Polish-Ukrainian mutual affection is not necessarily self-evident. What is now Western Ukraine, including its cultural capital of Lviv, was once eastern Poland. It was not a friendly territorial exchange between neighbors. In November 1918, as World War I drew to a close, forces belonging to a Polish state that had not yet quite come into being fought a war against the West Ukrainian People's Republic, which had just moments earlier declared itself. As a result of that Polish-Ukrainian war, eastern Galicia and much of Volhynia was incorporated into a new Polish state; after the Bolshevik Civil War, the remainder of what is now Ukraine became a Soviet Republic.

Two decades later, in September 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland from the west, and the Red Army invaded from the east. The Polish state ceased to exist, and eastern Galicia and Volhynia became Soviet Ukraine. In 1943, with the Ukrainian lands now under Nazi occupation, Ukrainian nationalist extremists embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing: They herded Poles into churches and set them on fire. They shot Poles with bullets and beat them to death with farm tools. There were hangings and decapitations. Poles responded, sometimes in kind. After the war, the Polish government, finding concentrations of ethnic Ukrainians inside Polish territory undesirable, "resettled" thousands of Ukrainians in western Poland, murdering some in the process.

And yet despite that bloody history—or perhaps in part because of it—no one in Europe cares more about Ukraine now than the Poles. The Polish press has used the word "powstańcy" to describe the protestors on the Maidan. "Powstańcy"—those who rise up, resistance fighters—is a special word in Polish; it is reserved for the courageous, for those who fight “for our freedom and yours.”

......

Read more: www.newrepublic.com