and the physical intrusion of new Polish colonists (osadnicy) into their territory. In 1931, 37 percent of the arable land in the Belorussian areas of Poland was owned by Poles, and the region’s extensive timber resources were also exploited in a predatory manner. Many Belorussians now became enamoured of the supposedly better political and economic lot of their conationals in the Soviet Union’s Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Their fascination with the neighboring Communist model, in turn, alarmed the Polish authorities, who attempted to repress politically this Belorussian nationalist movement that now appeared even more concerned about differentiating itself from Poland than from Russia. Yet even this Polish repression of the late 1920s was still intermittent and inconsistent; though severe against explicit political expressions of Belorussian “subversiveness” and brutal in the villages, it left the central Belorussian cultural institutions in Wilno unmolested. In the 1930s, finally, the repression was extended to cultural expressions as well; Belorussian schools were polonized or closed, and the youth given the unhappy choice of studying in Polish or remaining illiterate. As is generally the case in such circumstances, Belorussian nationalism was only strengthened and rendered yet more subversive by the efforts to destroy it. By the time of Poland’s destruction in September, 1939, the loyalties of its Belorussian citizens were divided between aspirations for independence and hopes for unification with their Soviet Belorussian brethren.
The Ukrainians were the largest national group in interwar Europe to whom the doctrines of political self-determination and unification had not yet been applied. They were then divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, not as dispersed minorities, but as compact local majorities in the regions of their settlement. The fraction of the Ukrainian nation that was assigned to interwar Poland was overwhelmingly agricultural. But even in the midst of a solidly Ukrainian rural countryside, the populations of the southeastern towns consisted of Polish officials and garrisons, and of Polish and Jewish professionals and merchants. The land-hungry Ukrainian peasants craved the estates owned by Polish landlords. Thus, the Ukrainian problem in interwar Poland was social, economic, and cultural as well as political—a complex which the Polish Right, preferring to dismiss Ukrainian nationalism as either immature or a German machination, declined to acknowledge.
The Ukrainians were aggrieved and alienated by linguistic pressure and cultural polonization, economic exploitation and Polish colonization, as well as by restrictions on their access to higher education and public careers, and their gerrymandered underrepresentation in the legislature. In the 1930s, Polish-Ukrainian relations sporadically degenerated into quasi-guerrilla warfare, characterized on the one side by assassinations of Polish politicians, officials, and colonists, and on the other by dragonnade-like military brutalization and “pacification” of Ukrainian villages. But as interwar Poland was not a police-state, the conscience of the Polish intelligentsia restrained the political authorities from stripping the minorities of their rights altogether. Thus, through all the vicious cycle of provocation and revenge, the Ukrainians managed to develop an active intelligentsia and a lively cooperative movement, which functioned as a school of politico-administrative self-education as well as a bulwark of economic self-defense. They also succeeded in easing pressure to transform their ecclesiastical institutions into funnels of polonization. Though Poland’s Eastern Orthodox (i.e., Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian) dioceses did assert their autocephalous organization with respect to the Moscow Patriarchate in the early 1920s at the urging of the Polish authorities, they resisted heavy pressure in the late 1930s to polonize their sermons, prayerbooks, and calendars. The Uniate Church functioned even more emphatically as an explicit expression of Ukrainian national consciousness in interwar Poland.
In the mid-1930s, as Stalin moved to destroy Ukrainian national culture and imposed the hated kolkhozi on the Ukrainian peasantry in the Soviet Union, and as Warsaw achieved diplomatic détentes with both Berlin and Moscow, the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Poland was for the time being deprived of the patronage of any major state. This would appear to have been a likely moment to reconcile the isolated Ukrainians to the Polish state. The Poles, however, failed to seize it. Instead of viewing the situation as an opportunity to bid for their Ukrainians’—and, analogously, their Belorussians’—allegiance, they myopically interpreted it as a license to ignore and repudiate their minorities’ aspirations.
Statistics may also help to explain, though not to excuse, why so many Poles, especially on the political Right, succumbed to the temptation to dismiss the two Slavic, eastern minorities as too immature and primitive to merit serious consideration as authentic nations. The census tabulations for illiteracy indicate considerably higher rates in the provinces where these two minorities were concentrated than in Poland as a whole (see table 6). Similarly, the economic structure of their Orthodox and Uniate denominations show higher absorption in agriculture and lower representation in more “advanced” economic sectors than the general average (see table 7).
TABLE 6
ILLITERACY ABOVE THE AGE OF TEN (IN PERCENTAGES)
| Region | 1921 | 1931 |
| Provinces of Ukrainian concentration: | ||
| Wołyń | 68.6 | 47.8 |
| Stanisławów | 46.0 | 36.6 |
| Tarnopol | 39.2 | 29.8 |
| Lwów | 29.2 | 23.1 |
| Provinces of Belorussian concentration: | ||
| Wilno | 58.3 | 29.1 |
| Nowogródek | 54.6 | 34.9 |
| Polesie | 71.0 | 48.4 |
| Poland | 33.1 | 23.1 |
TABLE 7
RELIGIONS BY ECONOMIC SECTORS (INCLUDING DEPENDENTS). 1931 CENSUS*
*Tabulations for Jews were presented in table 4.
Of course, except for the Jews, who have been analyzed earlier, religion does not quite correspond with ethnicity. Here, for example, the Roman Catholic Belorussians and Germans cannot be separately identified as such. Also, about a third of the Protestants were Poles, though almost all the rest were Germans. On the other hand, the Uniates and Orthodox were entirely composed of Poland’s eastern Slavic minorities and hence table 7, even when interpreted conservatively, does demonstrate that these were overwhelmingly relegated to the relatively poor and backward agricultural sector. This was the result of long historical neglect far more than of interwar Poland’s policies. Indeed, illiteracy rates of these peoples declined dramatically under Polish rule (table 6).
It must be acknowledged that even a rich and long-established state—and
