Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944

Abstract

The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml´ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.

Postsocialist and Postcapitalist Questions? Far-Right Historical Narratives and the Making of a New Europe

“…In recalling national sufferings, the Italian far right emphasizes first and foremost the so-called foibe, the ethnic cleansing of Istria which occurred between 1943 and 1945. 19 The Polish far-right narrative focuses on the ethnic cleansing and repressions of ethnic Poles inhabiting the eastern borderlands in the course of and after the Second World War, especially the bloody conflict in Volhynia, 20 and the persecution of Poles by the Soviet authorities and their collaborators, who also tend to be presented in the nationalist key: as Jewish, Belarusian, Russian communists. In both cases, the political and/or national identification is strongly marked by Orientalizing language: Yugoslavian communists and Ukrainians murdering Polish villagers are presented as barbarian, primitive, and brutal, which at the same time foregrounds the civilizational hierarchies that characterized Italian and Polish borderlands and the nobility of the Italian/Polish "people."…”

“Poles of the World Unite”: The Transnational History of the 1929 World Congress of Poles Abroad in the Context of Interwar Soviet–Polish Rivalries

“…Instead, this article will explore Polish-Soviet and Ukrainian relations through the prism of minority experiences, thus contributing to existing scholarship on the respective governments' views on minorities, migration and diasporas abroad. While most scholarly enquiries emphasise how respective governments' minority policies contributed to an atmosphere of ethnic intolerance and resulted in ethnic-based violence across the region (especially in Volhynia: Piotrowski, 2000;Filar, 2003;Motyka, 2006;McBride, 2016;and Eastern Galicia: Motyl, 1985;Snyder, 1999;2003), this article takes a step back to investigate what motivated those governments to promote such forms of identification in the first place; and how they utilised the national factor of mass mobilisation to achieve their far-reaching strategic goals (on Poland's migration policies, see : Wrzesiński, 1975: Wrzesiński, , 1979Lusinski, 1998;Kołodziej, 1999;Patek, 2000;Kraszewski, 2001. On the Soviet minorities policies towards Poles, see : Iwanow, 1991;Stroński, 1992;Kupczak, 1994;Brown, 2004).…”

On German Orders. The Volhynian Massacre in Soviet Partisans’ Memoirs

“…Some Polish authors suggest considering these events as a genocide of civilian Poles by Ukrainians (W. Siemaszko and E. Siemaszko 2008). Western scholars prefer to talk about ethnic cleansing and stress the central role of Ukrainian nationalists as its initiators (McBride 2016;Snyder 2003). Estimates of the number of victims Denys SHATALOV -On German Orders.…”