Jump to navigation Jump to search This article presents the historiography of the Wolyn tragedy as presented by historians in Polish-ukrainian relations the tragic massacre in volyn remembered and Ukraine after World War II. In the early People’s Republic of Poland, the question of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict was never a subject of independent studies. Ukrainian historian Roman Hrytskiv believes that Polish Communists avoided this subject as it could raise questions regarding the Polish population in Western Ukraine.
Polish-Ukrainian conflict would be seen as anti-Soviet. New studies were initiated in the early 1970s based on factual information. Under the influence of the Soviet historiography, Polish historians continued to expound the mistaken Soviet concept of Ukrainian bourgeoise nationalists, viewed in their own specific manner. 1989 marked the end of the Polish totalitarian state and a new era in Polish historiography. In the light of Polish independence the subject of Ukrainian-Polish relations became a growing concern. The first study to be published was Tadeusz Olszański’s 1989 article which shattered previous understandings of the OUN. Olszański suggests that the OUN expected a return to the situation as it was from 1918, when Poles and Ukrainians fought over disputed territories, and that the Ukrainian leadership wanted an absence of Polish population and Polish military activity.
De-polonization action started in March 1943. Polish-Ukrainian confrontations gradually become more military in nature. Olszański underlines the influence of numerous provocations by the NKVD and Soviet partisans in the occupied zones in directing conflict against the UPA. The UPA was unable to conduct the action alone. It mobilized Ukrainian peasants on a large scale, who were later given Polish properties. Vast numbers of peasants participating in anti-Polish attacks, together with UPA units or individually, were also motivated by numerous Banderist agitators and by communist agents from the north of Volhynia. Olszański sees the role of Soviets in the events as insufficiently explained.
Olszański expressed view that the goal of the action was to expel Poles and not to exterminate them. Soviet Polish diversionist-partisan groups provoked the Ukrainians to use force. These actions were not just those of the OUN and UPA, but also Soviet partisans, auxiliary police and other independent groups. The destruction of the totalitarian system in Poland allowed another direction in Polish historical studies fuelled by the previous studies published under the Communist regime. One of the first such studies was undertaken by J. The first group has focused on the reasons for the inter-ethnic conflict in Western Ukraine. The Polish emigre centre in London at this time began to actively support a nationalist view on the Volyn tragedy.
In 1992, a magazine called Na rubieży began publishing studies by W. The liberal-democratic movement is represented by the works of Ryszard Torzecki which reviewed the thesis put forward during the communist administration and developed a framework for further scholarship. Torzecki argues that the territorial integrity of Volyn lay in the Polish population. Although Torzecki states that in 1943-44 the attempts to curtail the conflict between Ukrainian and Polish nationalism were doomed to failure, in his opinion it was OUN-UPA that could have stopped the conflict and did not. In his 1997 study, Filar came to the conclusion that the sole result of the actions of OUN and UPA were to destroy the Polish population.
