DEAR READER,

Last week, Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki revoked Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Order of the White Eagle after Kyiv named a special forces unit after the “Heroes of the UPA”, a force Poles associate with the 1943 Volhynia massacre. For our Expert Opinion, we are reaching back 13 years — to Yaroslav Hrytsak's 2013 essay on Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation published by New Eastern Europe, written for the 70th anniversary of the Volhynia massacre. Hrytsak's warning feels overdue for a re-read: reconciliation is a key to Europe's eastern relations, and with the passing of the generation that built it, that key is slowly slipping away. If that slide continues, he wrote, Poland and Ukraine risk facing suicidal nationalisms once again.

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

Originally published in New Eastern Europe Issue 4/2013.

In his letter to Czesław Miłosz dated December 5th 1969, Jerzy Giedroyc wrote: “Politically we are facing the growth of nationalisms of the Nazi type. It takes place in Russia, it also takes place in Ukraine and other republics, and it is the same in Poland … If that outburst occurs, it will be completely blind, with people slaughtering each other, and the problems of Lviv, the Treaty of Riga etc. will be revived, and this time we are prepared to ultimately perish under the debris of that cataclysm.” This letter was written 20 years before the fall of communism. The outburst did occur, but wasn’t accompanied by the growth of nationalisms. To a great extent, the lack of a re-emergence of nationalism is owed to such people as Giedroyc, as well as his Polish and Ukrainian colleagues. They were able to stop the Polish Ukrainian conflict, which historians and publicists from both sides tagged, maybe with some exaggeration: "The longest war of modern Europe,” which lasted for almost 1,000 years. This is not the proper place to write about how and why it happened. Dozens, if not hundreds, of works are devoted to this issue. Here, I want to emphasise one thing: what has happened within the last 20-25 years in Polish-Ukrainian relations can be called a geopolitical revolution. I daresay its importance can be compared to that of French-German relations in the 1950s; while the latter has served as a cornerstone of the European Union, the former can be seen as a chance for the expansion of this community further to the East.

Clearly, a new geopolitical structure cannot be built on a single cornerstone. It requires a solid foundation from a series of other reconciliations: Ukrainian-Russian, Polish-Russian, and even Ukrainian-Ukrainian. Nothing divides neighbours, and Ukrainians themselves, more than the memory of the Second World War [Editor’s note: keep in mind this was written in 2013, before the Russian annexation of Crimea or war in Donbas]. At the heart of this argument is the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and in the particular Polish-Ukrainian context: the 1943 Volhynia massacre. In fact, the massacre remains one of the biggest challenges from the past which threatens to turn Polish-Ukrainian relations from a cornerstone into a stumbling block. And as the last, 70th anniversary of this tragedy demonstrates, this threat remains real. Not only do I study Polish-Ukrainian relations, I also practise them. From the early 1990s, I was a participant and sometimes initiator of several more or less successful joint actions aimed at reconciliation of the two nations. Respectively, my experience, despite its inevitable subjectivity, gives me an understanding of some things and details which otherwise would be unknown or inconceivable to me. First of all, it makes me sceptical in respect of all declarations or estimations that suggest a separate “Polish side” and a separate “Ukrainian side”. In fact, all our actions were joint – of those Poles and those Ukrainians who strive for reconciliation, against those Poles and Ukrainians who do not want this reconciliation. Besides that, there is a third group of Poles and Ukrainians who perhaps want reconciliation, but only on their own terms. Paradoxically, when compared to the previous milestone anniversaries of Volhynia in 1993 and 2003, each of the three groups has increased in 2013. The explanation of this seeming paradox is rather simple: Polish-Ukrainian relations are not a zero-sum game, where the growth of one group would imply a decline or defeat of the other. In fact, each of these groups have tried to increase at the expense of the passive majority, which is ignorant to Volhynia and unwilling to learn anything about it (according to sociologists, it is more or less equal in Poland and Ukraine; approximately 50 per cent of the each states’ citizens do not know anything about the massacre) – to become a majority and thus dominate the public domain. Speaking of the first group (the Poles and Ukrainians who want reconciliation), the biggest change inside of it is a generational turnover. Many of the architects of this reconciliation have already passed away with Jerzy Giedroyc in 2000, Jacek Kuroń in 2004, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański in 2005 and Bohdan Osadchuk in 2011. The death of Pope John Paul II has had its impact, too: even though he was not an architect of Polish-Ukrainian dialogue, he legitimised it with his authority.

Of the still active veterans are those who were the youngest in 1989: Adam Michnik from the Polish side and Myroslav Marynovych from the Ukrainian side. This year we, together with Myroslav Marynovych and several Polish and Ukrainian colleagues, prepared a reconciliation action in Pavlivka – former Poryck, where the UPA murdered several hundreds of Poles – and in Sahryń, where the Polish Home Army (AK – Armia Krajowa) annihilated several hundreds of Ukrainians. We prepared it according to the scheme that was for the first time tried out at the Cemetery of the Eaglets in Lviv on November 1st 2002: a joint prayer with the participation of Church leaders, concluded with the known formula: “We forgive you and beg for your forgiveness.” This scheme worked back in 2002, and we hoped that it would also work now.

However, we experienced something that has not happened before: some of the remaining veterans were not particularly willing to participate in this action. Some pleaded exhaustion. Others sought the slightest reason to avoid going to Pavlivka. Those that came didn’t wish to say the formula: “We forgive you and beg for your forgiveness.” It seemed to stick in their throats. For the Ukrainians, it was a humiliation of their national dignity, while the Poles believed that they have nothing to apologise for to Ukrainians. The former secretary of John Paul II, and now archbishop of Lviv, Mieczysław Mokszycki, was the most radical. He suggested that the apology has to be unilateral, and Ukrainians have to apologise not once, but twice: “We beg for forgiveness and forgive us.” This and other examples show that as the veterans of Polish-Ukrainian dialogue pass away, its scale also changes. It diminishes beneath our eyes, like Honoré de Balzac’s The Magic Skin. A reassuring thing is the emergence of new groups and communities; they are represented mostly – even though not exclusively – by young people, who given their age could be called not the children, but already the grandchildren of the veterans. This generation, according to Polish historian Łukasz Jasina, pursues new tactics: at the moment when “big reconciliation” is not working out, it resorts to “small reconciliation” – joint pragmatic actions, which bring together new and younger people. In Ukraine, which is divided by language, culture and regionalism, it is important that some of these young people come from the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, such as Andriy Portnov from Dnipropetrovsk and Oleksandr Zinchenko from Kharkiv.

Another manifestation of civic engagement was the establishment of the “Reconciliation between Nations” committee headed by the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, at the beginning of April 2013. The first act of the committee was the Declaration on Ukrainian-Polish reconciliation. Apart from secular people, it was also signed by the representatives of all three traditional Ukrainian churches: the Orthodox of Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodox of Kyiv Patriarchate and the Greek Catholic Churches. Not only is the content important, but it is also the very fact: an instance of all three Churches, which are competing with each other for influence, that signed the joint document is hard to imagine in Ukraine. This is another example illustrating that Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation may lead to Ukrainian-Ukrainian understanding.

But each coin has its reverse side. In Ukraine, it is the historian Volodymyr Viatrovych’s participation in the committee. One of Viatrovych’s articles is titled “Truth or Unity”. He doesn’t oppose truth to untruth, and unity to conflict. In his mind, the real dichotomy is “truth/unity”. Viatrovych doesn’t discuss to which extent historical science is in fact able to discover the truth. All these theoretical discussions present no interest to him – moreover, he is probably unaware of them. He writes and behaves as if he has discovered the truth beginning with a capital “T”, and this truth lies in the relativisation of the Volhynia tragedy; such as, nothing special has occurred, there was just “the second Polish-Ukrainian war”. And “war is war”, everything may happen, even the annihilation of civilians. Russian historian Alexei Miller once classified the Viatrovych type. This is a type of a young ambitious historian, recently graduated, not overburdened with an adequate knowledge or moral principles, and for these reasons chosen by the authorities and charged with the task of conducting historical policy – as the older and more qualified historian would either refuse such offer, or accept it, but might diverge from the official position from time to time. The state needs a useful history, and for this purpose it needs a useful historian. Such types exist in Russia and the Czech Republic, and several years ago it appeared in Poland and Ukraine. It is the outcome of the new historical policy, which was launched by Lech Kaczyński and Viktor Yushchenko.

Yet, the logic of “Truth or Unity” is not monopolised by Viatrovych. It is also recently seen in the language of the leaders of Poland’s largest opposition party – the Law and Justice Party (PiS). The transition, from the reconciliation to confrontation, which can be seen in the narrative of this party since the death of the former president Lech Kaczyński in 2010 is probably the biggest change in Polish-Ukrainian relations in the last few years. The rhetoric of conflict, once reserved to the communities of the former Eastern provinces of Poland (Kresy), has now become the central message of the opposition. And this is what can dangerously disrupt the generally positive balance in Polish-Ukrainian relations. Unexpectedly, however, a new set of allies appeared. Namely, the 148 deputies of the Ukrainian Parliament, Ukrainian Communists and the members of the ruling regional party, who addressed the Polish parliament (Sejm) requesting to adopt a resolution which would qualify the Volhynia events of 1943 as genocide, and the UPA as a criminal organisation. The Polish “hawks” welcomed this letter as an appeal of the honest Ukrainians that have the courage to tell the truth about their past. They, however, ignore the fact that both parties are known as the most corrupt and authoritative in Ukraine, far from modern European values, and some of their members serve as a fifth column of the Kremlin in Ukraine.

What is yoking together this strange set of bedfellows is a fear of the new, globalised world. This world is rich with new opportunities, but also new threats. The most endangered is their nation, a firm monolith as they see it, and one which they would like to protect and clear out of “the others” and their “other truths”. This is the logic which is secure and comfortable for Vladimir Putin, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Viktor Yanukovych and recently also Jarosław Kaczyński. And here we come to the point. It is the heritage of 1989-1991. The symbol of the anti-communist revolutions of that time was a round table, not a guillotine; the culture of dialogue, not monologue; and reconciliation, not conflict. Today, in 2013, we are further from this heritage than we were in 2003, let alone 1993. And if the movement “away from 1989” continues, we will again face the fears and phobias of which Giedroyc wrote in his letter cited above in 1969. The only solution that can be used against this threat is according to the Giedroyc recipe, “to do absolutely everything to give people material for thinking, to scratch their brain cortex – maybe it will do some good”. These words were relevant 40 years ago. Sadly enough, they are still true today.

— Yaroslav Hrytsak, member of the New Eastern Europe editorial board