The Reconstruction of Nations by Timothy Snyder

Author:Timothy Snyder [Snyder, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-12841-3
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2003-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

THE UPA IN POLAND IN 1945

The UPA’s policy of ethnic cleansing, inaugurated in Volhynia in 1943, had become general practice by 1945. How did the UPA fare in these conditions, which it had helped to create? After the informal border shift of 1944, the main body of the UPA fought Soviet power in Soviet West Ukraine, its commanders regarding Poland as a peripheral field of operations. In early 1945, Iaroslav Starukh organized a new UPA command for Poland within its new westerly frontiers. Reorganization was complete by August 1945, when the new Soviet-Polish border was publicized. In 1945 in Poland, UPA units probably never numbered more than twenty-four hundred troops.47 These troops were not, with a few exceptions, the same people who had cleansed Volhynia and Galicia in 1943-44. The vast majority of UPA soldiers in what was becoming postwar Poland joined in 1944, 1945, or 1946, and fought in the regions where they lived.48 The further south and west they were in Poland, the longer it took Ukrainian nationalists to activate the UPA. The UPA fought in the Lublin region in 1943. In the Bieszczady mountains, the UPA arose in 1944. As late as fall 1945, after the German surrender and the end of the Second World War, Beskid Niski had no UPA presence, and its Lemkos were scornful of the very idea.

Khrushchev was correct in writing to Stalin that Polish partisan attacks on Ukrainian civilians helped UPA recruitment.49 The main factor, however, was the desire to avoid deportation to the Soviet Union.50 The link between the homeland and Ukrainian nationalism, never before made in many of these territories, finally became salient when Ukrainian nationalists promised to prevent deportation. This was a passage to a new universe of ideology. The OUN-Bandera was still the dominant force within Ukrainian nationalism, but after the German surrender differences between the OUN-Mel’nyk and the OUN-Bandera became less important. Veterans of SS-Galizien, supported by the OUN-Mel’nyk but opposed by the OUN-Bandera, now played a crucial role in the local UPA.51 This can be ascertained on the basis of UPA records. Mykola Kopdo deserted the SS-Galizien for the UPA in 1944, and died commanding a UPA brigade in Poland. Dmytro Karvans’kyi, a prominent OUN-Mel’nyk activist, deserted the SS-Galizien for the UPA in February 1944. He died commanding a UPA company in Poland. Mykhailo Hal’o, commander of one of the four UPA battalions in southeastern Poland, also left the SS-Galizien in 1944. Marian Lukashevich, commander of one of three UPA tactical regions in Poland, was also a veteran of SS-Galizien.52 Whatever the motives of the local Ukrainians who joined the UPA, they received their training from such officers.53 In other words, the ethnic cleansing policies of communist Poland drove its Ukrainian citizens into the arms of former Waffen-SS troops.

That said, the UPA was pursuing interests in Poland in 1945 that we can ascertain and describe. Most of its actions were designed to halt deportations, and its recruiting propaganda presented it as an organization that would defend Ukrainian homes.

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