Quoting Jeffrey Veidlinger’s In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, pages 288–289:
In April 1920, Polish and Ukrainian forces advanced toward Kyiv from the north, beginning what came to be known as the Polish–Soviet War. Their goal was to challenge Bolshevik ascendency in the region and reclaim the historic lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Petliura, who was then in exile in Warsaw, had agreed to an alliance with Piłsudski in which Poland would support Ukrainian independence in the provinces of the former Russian Empire in exchange for Petliura’s renunciation of Ukrainian claims to Eastern Galicia.¹ Polish forces had already made gains in Belarusian territory, conquering Mazyr and Kalinkavichy in March.
The Red Army was completely unprepared for the assault. Polish soldiers were amazed at the bedraggled appearance of the Bolsheviks. “Some were barefoot, some had shabby soft shoes, others had rubber galoshes,” wrote Franciszek Krzystyniak, “while on their heads they wore a variety of headgear—some even had women’s hats—and winter caps or kerchiefs, and some were even bareheaded, their hair flying in the wind. They looked like ghouls. Their rifles were either suspended on string, or without any straps—but they did have plenty of ammunition in their pockets and their aim was good.”²
The Bolsheviks’ tenuous hold over Ukraine seemed to be evaporating just as it had in the face of the Whites eight months earlier.
(Emphasis added.)
Maybe I should have known this far sooner than I did, but I was always under the impression that the Red Army had simply invaded Poland unprovoked!
The fascist Polish state also gladly took a slice during the partition of Czechoslovakia with Nazi Germany and Hungary.
They similarly started “Polonization” efforts in the region they controlled… for the 11 months it took before Poland was next on the menu.
Poland took advantage of the weakness and chaos of Russia during the civil war to invade and steal western Ukraine and western Belarus. You should also look into the history of Polish colonization and their often violent ethnic and linguistic repression of the local population in western Ukraine during the interwar period. Anyone who says today (this is a common talking point in some “pro-Russian” circles when discussing the Ukraine conflict) that Russia should “return” western Ukraine to Poland or allow Poland to “take its historic lands back” is completely ignorant of history. Stalin took back what Poland stole from the Soviets in a moment of weakness: territory where Poles had always been a minority compared to Ukrainians, Russians and Belorussians and where Poland attempted to import its own settlers, much like the German fascists later wanted to do in Poland and the SU. The fact that Poland in the interwar period was militarist, expansionist and borderline fascist under the Piłsudski government is often deliberately omitted when people discuss WWI, WWII and what happened in between.
In Warsaw, they never really concealed that they wanted to see the lands of Volyn and Galicia populated by Poles, not Ukrainians. Ukrainians in interwar Poland were treated as “subhumans”. And this attitude not only took place at the household level, but was also strongly supported by the Polish government.
The Polish leadership sought to create truly unbearable living conditions for Ukrainians. The policy of total discrimination combined economic, social, cultural and administrative measures. Thus, taxes were artificially raised and wages to Ukrainian workers were reduced, and Poland used gendarmerie units and even the army to extort taxes from the poor population. The arrival of the bailiff in the Ukrainian villages was feared like fire. First, he did not come alone, but appeared accompanied by guards or gendarmes. […]
The undermining of the economic base of the Ukrainian population was carried out by Poland purposefully, in order to oust the Ukrainians outside of Galicia and Volyn. In parallel, the Polish authorities in the 1920-s began the policy of mass colonization of Western Ukrainian lands by Polish settlers. In December, 1920, the Polish government issued a decree on the colonization of the Polish population of “Eastern Poland”, that is, Western Ukraine. For colonization, it was intended to resettle to the Western Ukrainian lands as many Polish colonists as possible, who mainly had experience in serving in the Polish Army, gendarmerie or police.
Former military personnel had to play the role of military settlers, that is, to be engaged not only in agriculture, but also in border guards and the protection of public order. Only from 1920 to 1928 in the Volyn and Polesye years, the Polish authorities were able to resettle more than 20 thousands of Polish military settlers. They got 260 thousand hectares of land. In addition to military settlers, more than 60 thousands of civilian settlers arrived in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in the same years. They were given 600 thousands of hectares of land. One Polish family received a plot of land in the amount of 18-24 per hectare.
[…]
The social situation of the Ukrainian peasants was simply terrible, but the Polish authorities simply ignored this problem. Moreover, they harshly suppressed any attempts to protest against their policies in Western Ukraine. Thus, Ukrainian activists were arrested, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment or even to death. For example, three peasants were sentenced to death for the uprising in the Lviv province. And such sentences were at the time in the order of things.
The cultural policy of the Polish authorities was also social and economic. In an effort to fully assimilate the Ukrainian population, the Polish authorities have begun to eradicate the Ukrainian language in schools. Rural children were forbidden to speak Ukrainian. If the teachers heard the Ukrainian language, they should have fined the children. In the famine years, these fines became a new unbearable burden for many families. Therefore, it was easier to pick up a child who did not speak Polish from school at all, than to pay fines for him.
The situation in other regions of present-day Western Ukraine, which were part of Czechoslovakia and Romania in the interwar period, was no easier. So, the Czechoslovak authorities, taking the example of Poland, started to resettle about 50 thousands of Czech colonists in Transcarpathia, mostly also former military men. The same émigré Ukrainian newspaper noted that in the highlands of Transcarpathia, due to the economic policy of the Czechoslovak authorities, children are forced to be content with a small amount of oatmeal bread and a few potatoes a day. The population has no money, the property is sold out literally for nothing, just to buy at least some amount of food
[…]
In Romania, which included Bukovina (the modern Chernivtsi region of Ukraine), the situation was even worse than in Czechoslovakia. Stronger national oppression added to the terrible famine. Romanians, who are not Slavs at all, treated the local Ukrainian population even worse than the Polish and Czech authorities. But hunger swept not only the land of Bucovina, but also the same Bessarabia. The price of bread by the fall of 1932 had risen in price by 100%. The Romanian authorities were even forced to stop the railway communication with the starving regions of the country, and any attempts at protest actions were harshly suppressed by the police and troops
[…]
Information about the famine in the Ukrainian regions of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania was published in the American and German press. And it was they who formed the basis of the myth of the famine in the Ukrainian SSR, which from the middle - the end of the 1930-s began to swell the United States of America on the one hand, and Nazi Germany - on the other.
It was beneficial for the USA and Germany to show the USSR as horrible as possible, to demonstrate to the rest of humanity the supposedly perniciousness of the socialist model for the economy. And the economic problems that really took place were bloated by the Western press to unbelievable proportions. At the same time, many narratives of the Holodomor were borrowed from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
[…]
But modern anti-Russian propaganda continues to claim that the Holodomor took place in the Ukrainian SSR. Although if you compare how the Soviet Ukraine developed, which became one of the most prosperous and economically developed union republics, and how the absolutely impoverished Western Ukraine lived in 1920-1930-ies, it was Polish, Czechoslovak and Romanian territories, all Western propaganda myths immediately fall apart like a house of cards.
Where are industrial facilities, universities and institutes, hospitals, sanatoriums for children and workers, opened by the Polish, Czech or Romanian authorities in western Ukraine in 1920-1930-s? Why did so many people leave Galicia and Transcarpathia, Bukovina and Bessarabia in those years, because they did not belong to the “terrible Soviets”, there was no collectivization there and there was nothing to be afraid of? The answers to these questions are obvious and they are not at all in favor of modern Ukrainian propaganda and its western customers.
Where was the true “Holodomor” and who organized it?
Additional reading:
Poland in the Interwar Years: 1918 - 1939
Colonialism in the Polish Eastern Borderlands 1919–1939
Western Ukraine under Polish yoke : Polonization, colonization, pacification
Polish Lebensraum: the colonial ambition to expand on racial terms
While all this was happening in Polish occupied Western Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s, let’s also take a look at what was going on in the Soviet Union’s Ukrainian SSR:
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Lenin gifted some of the most developed and economically valuable (but predominantly Russian) regions such as the Donbass, Odessa, Novorossiya and Kharkov to Ukraine
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In the Ukrainian SSR, the use of Ukrainian language was promoted via the policy of “Korenizatsiya” (also implemented throughout the Caucasus and other national republics)
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Ukrainian identity was promoted throughout the SSR, Ukrainian language was taught in schools and its use in art and printed media was encouraged by the Soviet state to create a national culture
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The number of books and newspapers in Ukrainian increased exponentially
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Universal literacy was achieved
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The participation of ethnic Ukrainians in administration and governance greatly increased, with a large number of Ukrainians at top levels of the local Communist Party of Ukraine as well as the CPSU
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Ukraine was heavily prioritized for industrial development and would later become one of the Soviet Union’s most developed republics, building power plants, dams, canals, railways, mines, factories, universities, advanced technological research institutes, and more.
Meanwhile, under Poland, Western Ukraine remained a largely underdeveloped and backward producer of agricultural exports and raw materials.
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: socialist construction 1921-1941
From Brezhnev to Khrushchev: Ukraine had a huge influence on the Soviet Union
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Indeed, it’s rare that liberals look at a map of Poland in the '30s and ask in what fucking universe Lvov or Baranovichi are rightful polish territory. That in turn means it’s one of those things every communist has to learn by themselves. Maybe this post will inform other comrades as well.
At any rate, we’re reminded that the western narrative on the USSR (and all AES) is a house of cards standing on a foundation of a warped reality. Prodding at a few details shows easily it all comes down. If Poland were a fascist, expansionist power, the Soviets weren’t empire-building, they were reuniting their people. Then they wouldn’t be partners in crime with the Nazis, at worst they’d be people making best use of a bad situation, meaning they aren’t “allies with” or “as bad as” the Nazis and suddenly you’re left with the realisation that the man who said “we fought the wrong enemy” should’ve been shot before he could finish the sentence. There are far too many details of this sort in the period leading to WW2 in Europe, which is exactly why in the global north the history of WW2 isn’t a history of people or even nations, it’s of cool tanks and battles.
