At the end of the Second World War, more than 1.5 million people were displaced between Poland and Ukraine, in a climate of abuse and violence. Between multi-scale study and connected history, this book allows us to understand the “untangling of populations” in Eastern Europe.
A specialist in migrations in the Soviet and Eastern European space, Catherine Gousseff (researcher at CNRS) publishes here his habilitation thesis on the Polish-Ukrainian exchange which involved nearly two million people between 1944 and 1947. More than a million Poles left Ukraine, while 650,000 Ukrainians left Poland (p. 20). The transfer caused several tens of thousands of victims. It was the only one of the many population displacements, at the end of the Second World War, to result from transfer agreements between theUSSR and Poland, signed from September 1944 and generally respected despite the inequality of goods to be exchanged between the Poles, richer, and the Ukrainians often poor, and the irregularities in their counting.
From transfer to forced migration
From its inception, the exchange bore the mark of the violence it was intended to prevent. In the summer of 1942, the German occupiers and around 12,000 Ukrainian auxiliaries exterminated the Jewish population of Volhynia (between present-day Ukraine and Belarus), some 200,000 people. Did this set a precedent in a region destined to be Germanized, where the Germans were stirring up tensions between Slavic groups? In any case, in 1943, Ukrainian attacks targeted the small Polish minority, some of whom fled to the West. The Red Army, received as a peacemaker, easily convinced itself that it would be easy to complete this “evacuation” (p. 36) and that it was essential to pacify the now execrable relations between Ukrainians and Poles.
But, in the south in Galicia, inter-ethnic relations had remained better and the Soviets appeared as occupiers even in the eyes of the Ukrainians, so that the transfer, conceived according to a simple and mechanistic scheme by Moscow, was in reality subdivided, according to local contexts, into a multitude of sometimes contradictory operations. In the enthusiasm of the Liberation, 80,000 poor Ukrainians were ready to leave in February 1945 from the region of Chelm (also prey to unrest since 1943), but their departure was hampered by the “criminogenic shortage” of means of transport (p. 101). Families, camping near the tracks for weeks waiting for a train, fell prey to bands of bandits. When the Polish authorities thought of subjecting Ukrainians who were not candidates for departure to the requisitions of theKrajiva weaponthe Resistance Army, the Red Army came to their aid because it felt close to them, before the person in charge in Poland of the NKVDthe political police overseeing the transfer to theUSSRdoes not prevent him from doing so, since it was necessary to follow the plan and make the Ukrainians leave (p. 133-134).
In the summer of 1946, theUSSR made the closure of its borders its first priority. Officially, the transfer was completed in November. But, on the one hand, until the end of the 1950s, Poles tried to leave theUSSR (where, deported at the beginning of the Second World War, they were held against their will to work). On the other hand, the Wisła action took place in the spring of 1947 (p. 275 sq.). This terrible Soviet-Polish campaign against the remnants of the Ukrainian minority, the author argues, should be considered in the continuity of the transfer as an operation aimed at ensuring the border “in the Soviet way”, by making it deserted, the populations likely to maintain cross-border links being deported or reduced to insignificance.
A connected story
This transfer therefore mainly presents the characteristics of a forced migration. Exchange peoples is part of the most recent trend in research on an object that has enjoyed renewed interest over the last twenty years; a trend which, through the effects produced by such displacements (demographic changes, reduction or annihilation of a cultural heritage, massacres), seeks the basis in the security needs of a State, displacement being considered as a “surgical operation” of the social body from which various beneficial effects are expected (for example the development of remote regions by migrants).
Innervated by this historiography, this multi-scalar study of the Polish-Ukrainian exchange constitutes the first exhaustive treatment of it. This is undoubtedly what explains why the facts remain in the foreground – a bias that obliges the reader to follow the author attentively to understand her demonstration. But the result is a balanced narrative, never overbearing, which grants all groups, episodes and spaces the same attention and almost the same importance, while the episode is unevenly documented: by well-classified and recently opened Ukrainian archives, by the State and Party archives in Moscow, but also by the more meager ones of Poland, because of the confusion that reigned in the East.
Testimonies, used with sobriety, allow us to go beyond administrative sources to address the effects of displacement on the people concerned (as well as the migratory experience accumulated at different times by Poles from the East). The author knows how to cross-reference these sources in different languages, despite their heterogeneity, and find examples that condense the deep trends of a situation. The controlled writing, without digression, is adapted to a complex event, still charged today on both sides of the border with “tenacious grudges” (p. 333).
Behind the statement of facts unfolds a connected story that shows the concomitant evolution of the two population displacements where, very often, the first reciprocity was that of abuses. The whole thing can nevertheless be nuanced, showing that the liberal spirit that presided, surprisingly, over the initial agreements sometimes survived; thus the right of option granted to Ukrainians in 1945, who were able to remain in Poland on condition that they assimilated (p. 334).
As far as the sources allow, the room for maneuver of the actors appears: the Lublin committee, communist as it was, granted a primordial role to the “bearers of Polish culture and knowledge”, even bourgeois, avoiding touching the “networks of solidarity, interest, skills in the organization of departures and the planning of destinations” (p. 233), whose disappearance could have compromised the national restoration on the lands taken from the Germans 200 kilometers to the west. The cultural institutions of Lwów (Lviv in Ukrainian) like the Philharmonic and the University, were transplanted almost unchanged to Wrocław (formerly Breslau).
It is difficult to express reservations about this vast undertaking carried out with such intelligence, even if one can regret the smoothing of the historiographical debates of which the reader will sometimes have difficulty in getting a precise idea, as well as, moreover, the absence of presentation of the corpus of interviews. Let us also pass over the fact that this is a difficult subject for a French reader. The author has done everything possible to make it accessible. A few editorial tools would have contributed advantageously. If the maps are well placed to follow the development, no table lists them; similarly, the work would need an index that its partial digitalization on the Internet does not replace.
Contributions and new avenues of research
Nevertheless, the contribution of this book is major in the study of the “untangling of populations” in Eastern Europe after 1945 and its specifically Soviet logic. From the end of the 1930s, theUSSRuntil then a champion of internationalism, evolved towards the assimilation of certain nationalities into “socially alien, politically hostile” groups (p. 16). For this first mass displacement outside the empire, Moscow showed its adaptability. The transfer was also exceptional in its decentralized implementation, delegated to the Polish and Ukrainian leaders – to be more distant, Soviet control did not relax.
In terms of chronology, Catherine Gousseff contributes to documenting the specificity of these “lands of blood” (Timothy Snyder) by proposing an original periodization of the transfer, reflecting the local logic of insertion in the Cold War. Begun in September 1944, it was in no way influenced by May 8/9, 1945, but rather by the San Francisco conference creating theUNand Operation Wisła becomes understandable even in its savage brutality, if we place it in the same chronological sequence as the transfer, while it took place after its official end. In support of this thesis (this “war within the war” was part of the transfer, which was responsible for securing the western border of theUSSR), the author relies on a concomitant deportation, that of Ukrainians who had just arrived from Poland, who were sent far from the border, also to ensure the resumption of collectivization in the rest of Ukraine (p. 323).
His reconstruction of the transfer at several scales finally criticizes an overly simple vision of “ethnic nationality” as the exclusive criterion for action: thus on the San River in Galicia, Ukrainian and Polish guerrillas ended up overcoming national resentments and joining forces to oppose cross-border movements. At the national level, the often poor reception of refugees by their compatriots who considered them as competitors in a dramatic context of shortages also shows the limits of the reactivation of national sentiment just after the war (p. 249). These finely documented examples show that national identity is as much the product of an assignment “from above” as a production (or an absence of production, to take up the current theme of “national indifference” specific to the historiography of empires) “from below.”
Finally, as regards the history of migrations, we will arrive at the conclusion that, during and after the war, Eastern Europeans were considered as a workforce that could be moved at will, and we can better understand the curious impression of deterritorialization that strikes foreign observers when they approach the question of contemporary Polish identity.
The author finally opens an overview of an interesting field that will undoubtedly be the subject of further developments: that of the memory of these displacements, as well as the omissions that accompany it, in particular that of the Jewish genocide, almost always ignored in the sources (p. 28). Very little present in Ukraine, which kept these events quiet until perestroika (p. 335), the memory of the transfer exists in Poland: associations of Polish displaced persons meet Germans expelled from the West, while the Ukrainian minority maintains its Orthodox churches and regional initiatives in South-Eastern Poland, supported by European funds, recall certain almost extinct minorities such as the Lemkos (Ruthenian-speaking and predominantly Greek-Catholic) who lived in sub-Carpathian Poland east of Krakow.
It remains to be seen whether these memories communicate with each other, at what scales they appear (more transnational, more local), and whether they are assumed on a national level. It is not the least merit of this work, which is reminiscent of the artistic unfolding of a complex origami, to encourage further reflection.