Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, by Kate Brown. 2005

Poles Equal Landowners Half-Truth. The Fate of Soviet Poles East of the Riga Line. Polokaust and GENERALPLAN OST

Although Kresy often is used by Poles in reference to the eastern half of Poland confiscated by the USSR in 1939 (during the Nazi-Communist war against Poland) and again in 1944 (following the Teheran betrayal of Poland), the author refers primarily to the areas just east of the Riga line.

WHO FALSIFIED THE CENSUS?

Throughout the interwar period, Ukrainians had been accusing Poles of skewing the census to minimize the Ukrainian population in the Kresy. Ironic to this, Poles living in the Soviet Union, the 1922, accused Ukrainian officials of deliberately undercounting the Polish population of the then western parts of the Soviet Ukraine. (p. 41).

POLISH NOBILITY: FACTS AND MYTHS ABOUT POLISH LANDOWNERS

Brown comments: “At the turn of the century, Poles counted as 3-5% of the population but retained 40-50% of the manorial land in the Volynia, Podolia, and Kiev provinces.” (p. 242). Although Poles were strongly overrepresented among large landowners, the Soviet Communist and Ukrainian nationalist propaganda that characterized the local Poles as wealthy landowners was manifestly incorrect. Most large landowners were not Poles and, of course, the vast majority of local Poles were not nobles or large landowners! Still, the Polish presence and influence in much of the Ukraine was considerable despite over fifty years of tsarist efforts to de-Polonize the area. (p. 4).

THE SOVIET UNION: NO SHARP BOUNDARIES BETWEEN POLES AND NON-POLES

The author elaborates on the Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Ukraine. Founded in 1925, it was located 60 miles ESE of Rivno (Rowne) and 40 miles east of the Riga line. (See map, unmarked page ix). It shows the complexity of nationality, and the ambiguity of any line dividing Poles from Ukrainians. About 70% of the population of Marchlevsk was nominally Polish (p. 21), although there were cities such as Proskuriv, Novograd-Volynsk, and Zhytomyr (30% Polish: p. 28), all of which had sizeable Polish populations but not Polish majorities. (p. 27). However, of the 70% Polish population of Marchlevsk, less than half spoke Polish, and less than half of that spoke it well. These people were Catholics who spoke a mixed Polish-Ukrainian dialect. When asked what language they spoke, these people said “in Catholic”, “in peasant”, “in the simple way” or “the language of here”. (p. 39). Ukrainian officials claimed that these people were long Polonized Ukrainians, while Polish officials suggested that they were Poles who had recently acquired Ukrainian ways because of tsarist repression of Polishness. (p. 42).

THE GREAT TERROR AND THE 1937-1938 GENOCIDE OF SOVIET POLES

The Communist authorities turned against the Soviet Poles in 1935-1938, especially during 1937-1938. Of the 1.3 million people who were sentenced in the Great Purges, one-third were arrested in “national operations”, of which nearly half were arrested in the “Polish line”. (p. 155). Of 335,000 people sent to the Gulags, nearly half were Poles. (p. 160). Local Polish institutions in Marchlevsk, such as schools, were closed. (p. 274). Later, the Soviet Poles were joined, as victims, by the Polish deportees of 1940-1941.

POLES IN THE USSR AFTER ITS FALL

In the mid-1990’s, nearly 8,000 Poles still lived in the Akmola and Kokchetau Regions of Kazakhstan (p. 282) out of a total of about 60,000 Poles in all of Kazakhstan. (p. 284). The author herself visited Kazakhstan (p. 173-on), and bore witness to the failed agricultural and other experiments of Communism. Most Kazakhstan Poles had assimilated, become Russian speakers, and more than half had married non-Poles. (p. 191). Very few Poles spoke the Kazakh language, and 12% claimed to know the Polish language. Still, some of them moved to Poland (p. 284), although there was much Polish-government resistance to this. (pp. 232-233).

POLES SLATED FOR EVENTUAL EXTERMINATION: THE POLOKAUST AND GENERALPLAN OST

The Nazi German conquest of the Kresy in 1941 led to a racial hierarchy: “Russians and Poles ranked lower [than Germans and Ukrainians], projected for eventual extinction or deportation to Siberia.” (p. 206). Despite the customary attention to the Holocaust, the following fact is telling: “Of all Nazi victims, nearly two thirds were Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles.” (p. 213).

NOT ONLY JEWS FACED PLUNDER ON A GRAND SCALE

Despite all the one-sided attention to Jews losing their properties, no less than 18.3 million Europeans lost their ancestral homes after WWII! (p. 225).

OUN-UPA MOSTLY IN WESTERN UKRAINE

Interestingly, a number of cited sources state that the OUN was disappointed in the fact that Ukrainian villagers in Right Bank Ukraine generally did not hate Poles and Russians, and generally did not think in terms of an independent Ukraine. (pp. 221-222). This tends to support the Polish contention that Ukrainian separatism was a position held by only a modest fraction of mostly-western Ukrainians.