In November 1918, as World War I drew to a close, forces belonging to a Polish state that had not yet quite come into being fought a war against the West Ukrainian Peoples Republic, which had just moments earlier declared itself. As a result of that Polish-Ukrainian war, eastern Galicia and much of Volhynia was incorporated into a new Polish state; after the Bolshevik Civil War, the remainder of what is now Ukraine became a Soviet Republic. Two decades later, in September 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland from the west, and the Red Army invaded from the east. The Polish state ceased to exist, and eastern Galicia and Volhynia became Soviet Ukraine. In 1943, with the Ukrainian lands now under Nazi occupation, Ukrainian nationalist extremists embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing: They herded Poles into churches and set them on fire. They shot Poles with bullets and beat them to death with farm tools. There were hangings and decapitations. Poles responded, sometimes in kind. After the war, the Polish government, finding concentrations of ethnic Ukrainians inside Polish territory undesirable, resettled thousands of Ukrainians in western Poland, murdering some in the process. And yet despite that bloody history—or perhaps in part because of it—no one in Europe cares more about Ukraine now than the Poles. The Polish press has used the word powstańcy to describe the protestors on the Maidan. Powstańcy—those who rise up, resistance fighters—is a special word in Polish; it is reserved for the courageous, for those who fight “for our freedom and yours.” This is bewildering to most Europeans. It is much less bewildering to Poles. They have experience with just this kind of shameless—and absurdist—mendacity. After all, they remember the Stalinist regime promising to protect Jews from the anti-Semitism of the anti-communists, while conducting an anti-Semitic campaign of its own. And they remember March 1968, when the communist regime justified its suppression of demonstrators against censorship by accusing protestors of engaging in a Nazi-Zionist conspiracy against Poland. The dynamism (and riskiness) of such a variegated constellation of forces is not unreminiscent of the Home Army, the Polish underground who fought the Nazis, or of Solidarity, the anti-communist opposition of the 1980s. These two great Polish resistance movements also included a broad spectrum of participants from Right to Left, people who would not otherwise have found themselves on the same side. Poles are in a position to grasp the temporary overcoming of political-ideological divisions in the interest of rising up against what is felt to be a greater evil. They know, too, that if and when victory does come, those divisions will return—perhaps with a vengeance. Yet something magical remains: the coming together of carpenters and physicians, electricians and novelists, construction workers and computer engineers, students and grandmothers, pregnant women and veterans of the war in Afghanistan, Ukrainian nationalists and orthodox Jews, priests and gay rights activists. The moment when the intellectuals and the workers, the fathers and the sons unite is necessarily ephemeral—yet it is extraordinary nonetheless. This was the miracle of Solidarity in Poland. It was this depth of Polish history that allowed Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski to go to Kiev and help negotiate the agreement that put an end to the worst violence so far. This was not a task for those who have little experience with extremity, with what German-speakers call border situations (Grenzerfahrungen): In Sikorskis words, the mood was not conducive to signing an agreement. He tried to persuade them using all possible arguments, including the emotional ones from his own—Polish—history, the history of failed and successful uprisings on behalf of freedom. If you dont support this, you will have martial law, the army, you will all be dead, he finally told the Maidans representatives. In the end, 34 voted to accept the agreement; two were opposed.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 07:56:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015