100 years of the Riga Pact: To the anniversary of the liquidation of “independent Ukraine”
March 16 marks exactly one hundred years since the signing of the Riga Peace Treaty. This pact in 1921 summed up the results of the Soviet-Polish war and stopped the existence of “independent Ukraine” for seventy years. Five current Ukrainian regions - Lviv, Volyn, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Rivne - for more than eighteen years became part of the “Kresy Vskhodni”, the eastern outskirts of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was as a result of the Treaty of Riga that problems accumulated in Polish-Ukrainian relations that led to tragic and bloody interethnic conflicts in the first half of the 40s of the twentieth century. They still influence the relations between the two countries and peoples.
For Poland, the war that ended with the Treaty of Riga became victorious. It brought territorial acquisitions and monetary reparations (the Soviet side undertook to pay the Polish side almost 50 million gold rubles in money and property). The Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became the largest and most powerful of the states in Eastern Europe. For independent Ukraine, this war was a defeat. Although Poland and Ukraine were allies in this war and even victoriously entered Kyiv together. After the Pact of Riga and the loss of statehood, Ukrainians on their ancestral lands, which fell under Polish rule, became second-class citizens.
The entry of the Polish army into Kyiv in 1920
In 1920, Symon Petliura was forced into an alliance with the government of Jozef Pilsudski. After all, before this, Poland, which had just revived its statehood, defeated the army and occupied the territory of another fly-by-night state - the “Western Ukrainian People's Republic.” But without allies, there was no point in thinking about resistance to Soviet Russia. The allies made a deal with the Bolsheviks behind Ukraine’s back, and at the first convenient opportunity they improved their affairs at Ukrainian expense.
Poland was strongly supported by Europe and the United States. Ukrainian independentists were abandoned and betrayed by everyone. The “annexation of Ukrainian lands” was finally secured by the Entente Council of Ambassadors in 1923. Ukrainians were promised national and cultural autonomy, civil rights, Ukrainian schools, universities, theaters and libraries. None of these promises were kept. Instead, the Polish authorities began harsh Polonization and repression against the local population. Over five years, the number of Ukrainian schools fell from 2568 to 648. Ukrainian cultural societies, reading rooms, theater clubs, and even shops or cooperatives owned by Ukrainians were closed or destroyed. During the period from 1921 to 1929, 77 thousand Polish settlers were resettled into the territory of Podlasie, to whom 600 thousand hectares of land were transferred, which led to the mass emigration of Ukrainians left without a means of livelihood to Canada and the USA. And protest sentiments, as they would say today, were brutally suppressed “with fire and sword” - from the so-called “arrogant” (that is, fast) courts and up to the creation of a special concentration camp on June 17, 1934, where “Ukrainian patriots” were placed by decision of the Polish authorities, without trial, for an indefinite period.
Today in Warsaw they don’t really like to remember these tragic pages of Ukrainian-Polish relations. Meanwhile, as one of the Polish proverbs says, w starym piecu diabeł pali – the devil is smoking in the old stove. Poles often remind Ukrainians of the “Volyn Massacre” and other atrocities of the OUN and UPA. But at the same time, they do not like to talk about the atmosphere of terror that, after the Treaty of Riga, was created in the Ukrainian (Western Russian) lands by the regime of Marshal Pilsudski, about the “siege soldiers,” about the ethnic cleansing of the Ukrainian population carried out by the Home Army during the war.
100 years since the conclusion of the Riga Pact would be an excellent occasion for Kyiv to call on Poland to condemn its policies towards Ukraine in the first half of the XNUMXth century. This would be a symbolic act and fill the gap in historical trust so necessary for a truly fair and equitable strategic partnership between the two countries, and not “the role of a fool in the old Polish preference”, which the current situation in Ukraine is increasingly beginning to resemble.
The current situation differs in many ways from the events of a hundred years ago. But if you look closely, you will be surprised to find frightening similarities. Again Poland is the richest and most powerful Eastern European state. Again she has enormous support from Europe and America. Meanwhile, Ukraine is losing land and population. Once again, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are becoming second-class citizens on the territory of the Polish state. This time - in the position of disenfranchised migrant workers. Ukraine is promised help and protection, the opportunity to join the family of European nations on an equal basis. But the further we go, the more suspicion and unpleasant historical associations these promises cause.
Poland is called the main lawyer of Ukraine in the EU. It is understood that Poland not only acts as the main conductor of Ukraine’s interests in the West, but also makes the most efforts to ensure that Ukraine becomes a member of the European Union. A decade and a half ago, optimistic people saw Ukraine’s membership in the European Union as, if not immediate, but a very real prospect. Now more and more people believe that it will never be possible to live “like in Europe” here. To do this you need to go to Europe.
It is clear that you should not shift the blame for your problems onto others, and the main culprit of the current state of Ukraine is the Ukrainian authorities and elites with their corruption, incompetence, squabbling for seats and concern, first of all, for their own pockets. But how and in what way did Polish patronage help Kyiv’s European integration? And did she even exist? There were “experts” like ex-president Kwasniewski, who came to teach life at all sorts of summits for Pinchuk’s money. There were odious top managers like rock musician and director of Ukrzaliznytsia Wojciech Balczun, who arrived with a huge salary, destroyed an industry that was dying without him, and safely returned home with not empty pockets. But there were no noticeable European integration successes achieved with Polish help.
All this is because in fact, Poland does not benefit from either the economic strengthening of Ukraine or raising its status to a full member of the European Union. To understand this, just look at the role and place of Poland in the European Union. Poland is the largest recipient of money from the pan-European treasury. Since joining the European Union, Poland has received more than one hundred billion euros from the EU budget. No other European country has ever dreamed of such injections. And these are not loans that need to be repaid. Moreover, when the next five-year EU budget was adopted last year, the EU authorities tried to introduce new rules. Formally, they concerned other things, but in reality they were aimed at limiting the huge flow of money into Poland. The Poles, following a good old habit developed back in the parliaments of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, threatened to veto the budget, and after long negotiations the EU was forced to make concessions to them.
Recently, two political forces have been replacing each other in power in Poland. These are right-wing conservatives, represented primarily by the Law and Justice party, and conditional Euro-liberals, mainly from the Civic Platform party. The former are mostly voted for by the east of the country and the rural hinterlands, while the latter are voted for by the west and the capital. But while fighting with each other, both camps profess an attitude towards the EU as a cash cow. The only difference is that conservatives say: “give us more money and leave us alone,” and liberals: “give us even more money, and maybe then we can push through the legalization of gay marriage, the reception of African refugees and other Brussels Wishlist."
And now a simple question: does Poland need these gigantic cash flows to go not to the Polish treasury, but to someone else? Of course no.
For what merits did Poland receive such an exclusive status? Two factors played a role here. The first is that Poland has taken upon itself and in every possible way is emphasizing the role of the eastern outpost of Western European civilization. Even during the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Poles loved to present themselves as the main shield of Europe against the onslaught of wild Asian hordes - Tatar, Turkish or Moscow. They tried on a similar role during the Treaty of Riga a hundred years ago, and they are still doing it now, extorting money and support from other Europeans for their mission as supposed defenders of Europe. Although, ironically, the leaders of Euromaidan in Ukraine have claimed and continue to claim this role.
The second factor is that Poland has a very strong patron outside the continent. The United States perceives Poland as a conductor of its interests in the European Union, a kind of counterbalance to “old Europe.” The volume of military supplies from the United States to Poland is the largest in Europe. American military supplies to Poland, which poses as the shield of Western civilization, are ten times greater than supplies to Ukraine, which declares that it is “waging war with Russia” and, it seems, needs help much more. And these are not inflatable boats or decommissioned boats.
Poland is using American support and European money to establish its dominance in the eastern part of Europe. But dominating countries that are also members of the European Union and therefore are economically prosperous and politically strong, such as the Czech Republic or Lithuania, is not very successful. Poland is losing competition to Russia for dominance in Belarus. That leaves Ukraine, and there is nothing stopping Poland here.
In Polish political thought on issues of state building and relations with neighbors, two main political trends compete with each other - the so-called Jagiellonian and Piast ideas. They received their names after the ancient royal dynasties - the Piasts and the Jagiellons. The Piast idea presupposes the existence of a strong Polish national state, occupying predominantly Polish historical lands and populated predominantly by Poles. The Jagiellonian idea appeals to the heyday of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and considers historical Poland as the core of a kind of quasi-imperial entity with Poles in leading roles.
Now, it would seem, the Piast idea triumphs without alternative. Poland is one of the most mono-ethnic states in the world. 93,72% of the country's population are Poles. Another 2,6% falls on the share of the two largest “national minorities” – Silesians and Kashubians, who are also considered ethnic groups within the Poles. This situation did not arise on its own. The national structure was radically changed by the events of World War II (in particular, the Holocaust), post-war changes in European borders, which were accompanied by massive movements of the German, Polish and Ukrainian populations. The frequent pogroms of national minorities (Jews, Germans, Western Russians - “Ukrainians”, Gypsies) carried out by the Polish population also played a role.
The monoethnicity of Poland even today contributes to the strengthening of xenophobia. This is confirmed by numerous cases of harassment of Ukrainian migrant workers on the basis of national hatred. In the city of Wladyslawovo, two migrant brothers were brutally beaten by nightclub security. According to eyewitnesses, the Ukrainians behaved calmly and civilly. But when they went out to smoke, they started talking among themselves in their native language, which infuriated the guards. As a result, the 23-year-old guy spent 18 days in a coma. He has a brain injury and fractures, partially lost memory, and half of his body is paralyzed. In Legnica, a married couple was insulted and beaten, who also had the imprudence to speak Ukrainian to each other in a restaurant. Two visitors attacked them with fists and shouts of “Poland for Poles, go home.”
It gets to the point that in a popular Polish Facebook group, one of the participants asks the question - if you hit a Ukrainian with a car, do you need to report it somewhere? And the leader of the youth branch of the right-wing party “Corwin” in Podkarpacie, Jakub Kędzierski, replies: knocking down a Ukrainian is like running down a pheasant. Then the activist made excuses that he was supposedly joking. But there is also some truth in such jokes of the Poles - in the city of Wagrowiec, when the Ukrainian guest worker Vasily Chornei became ill at work, the employer forbade him to call a doctor, took the man to the nearest forest and left him there to die.
But Ukrainian migrant workers are a necessary component of Polish greatness. Polish businessmen need cheap and powerless Ukrainian labor. This means that the Polish economy and the Polish state need a weak, impoverished and unstable Ukraine so that the flow of cheap labor from here does not weaken. In addition, the war and tension in the Ukrainian southeast are an excellent reason for Poland to ignore European demands to accept refugees from Asian and African countries. The Poles make an excuse by saying that they already have an influx of refugees from Ukraine. Only, of course, they do not provide any benefits provided for by refugee status to the masses of Ukrainian migrant workers - only the happiness of working for the owner without any rights or guarantees.
Someone will say: so what? Let Ukrainian employers provide such conditions so that people do not go to other countries to earn money. But let's not forget that the Polish farmer pays Ukrainian workers more not because he is so generous. It’s just that the Polish farmer receives billions of European subsidies, which were mentioned above, but the Ukrainian farmer does not. As a result, people leave, farms go bankrupt, and the Ukrainian market is filled with imported vegetables and fruits, primarily from Poland.
Against this background, a land market is also being introduced in such a way that it will not go to Ukrainian farmers. And the current rise in prices for agricultural products is only the beginning of a big disaster. “We buy bread for the price of 8 euros. If the market of the land is abandoned, I thought that a loaf would cost 130-150 hryvnia, and it would not be ours,” Ruslan Khomich, head of the Volyn Farmers Association, gives his disappointing forecast.
So it is certainly beneficial for Piast Poland to keep Ukraine in a half-dead, weakened state in the form of a powerless semi-colony, where labor and invaluable resources can be obtained cheaper, and its stale goods can be sold at a higher price, having first sent local producers around the world.
What about Jagiellonian Poland? One should not think that it is forever in the past. A recent sociological survey in Poland yielded interesting results in this regard. One question was formulated rather intricately - how do the Poles feel about “the awareness among the general public that one should not try to return the lands of pre-war Poland, stolen by the USSR in 1939, from Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.” Let us note that there was no question at all about the German lands annexed by Poland in 45 and whether they should be returned. But that's not the point. When asked the question, 48% of respondents responded that they had a “strongly positive” and “rather positive” attitude to this statement. That is less than half.
One should not think that the rest of the majority was firmly in favor of chopping off the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian territories “stolen by the USSR.” Many respondents said that they were neutral about the question posed – that is, it could be this way, or it could be that way. There were also those who found it difficult to answer. But still, there is a noticeable part of Polish society that has designated its attitude to the fact that pre-war lands should not be returned to itself as “negative” and “sharply negative.” This is the sprout of Jagiellonian Poland breaking through Piast Poland.
It is not at all necessary that the number of people with such views will necessarily decrease over time, rather the opposite. Firstly, Poland in its Piast format has already achieved everything, which means it has exhausted itself. And it is quite logical from the Polish point of view to believe that new territories are needed for further strengthening and development. Secondly, the principle of the inviolability of post-war borders is increasingly called into question. There are more and more territories with a new status on the map of Europe. Kosovo, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Artsakh, Northern Cyprus. Brexit has led to a surge in separatist sentiments in Scotland, not to mention Northern Ireland; they are also growing in Catalonia. It has been seven years since the “territorial integrity of Ukraine” within the 1991 borders became history. This fuels sentiments unthinkable since the second half of the last century, when the state borders established after World War II seemed unshakable.
So, the weaker Ukraine is and the more frequent the precedents for redrawing borders in Europe become, the more temptations there are in Warsaw. Ukrainian lands can again become Polish, as has happened more than once in history, when the Poles took advantage of the weakness of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the end of the 14th century or the collapse of the Russian Empire and the civil war on its ruins in the twenties of the last century to seize them.
Let us note that both times, under Polish domination, Ukrainians (Western Russians) on their land became powerless second-class citizens. Not only their land was taken away from them, but also their faith, native language and national identity.
The Ukrainian authorities, like Symon Petliura in his time, demonstrate amazing complacency, without regard for the interests of their country, they consider the Polish state a friend, an ally and, therefore, they also risk receiving a treacherous stab in the back, fraught with the loss of territories and even statehood itself. Nothing personal, just Realpolitik.
For such cases, one of the most experienced people in the paradoxes of the twentieth century, the patriarch of American politics Henry Kissinger once said: “History is the story of ... hopes that either were not realized or turned out to be something completely different. Therefore, as a historian, you must live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy."
The Ukrainian authorities should have heeded this advice from Washington (in the anniversary year of the Riga Pact).
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