In Wartime Read online

  According to the historian Timothy Snyder, some 780,000 Poles were sent to Poland from what was now Soviet Ukraine. Including Belarus and Lithuania, the official number sent was 1,517,913, of whom 100,000 were Jews who had survived the Holocaust, but the total number of people who left was larger because “a few hundred thousand left without registering for official transports.” From Lviv many were sent to Breslau, in Silesia, which was German until 1945, when it became Wrocław and was incorporated into Poland. Here too the Jews had been killed, but what had been an overwhelmingly German city now became a completely Polish one as the Germans fled or were expelled. Many artistic, religious and other cultural treasures were taken from Lviv to Wrocław, including a vast circular panoramic painting of a 1794 defeat of the Russians at the hands of the Poles, which came out of hiding to be exhibited again only in 1985.

  Just as the Poles were being sent to Poland, some 483,099 Ukrainians were sent to Ukraine from the regions they inhabited in what was to remain in Poland. In the so-called Operation Vistula another 140,660 Ukrainians were ethnically cleansed from their homes and sent to settle in other parts of Poland. Those who came to Ukraine were not sent to Lviv though because most were peasants and they were needed in the countryside to replace the Polish peasants who had been sent to Poland. Whole villages on either side of the border were uprooted, but their inhabitants were often kept together and transplanted on the other side. While they were sent to villages, as Lviv industrialized they, or their children, or other Ukrainians who had always lived in the countryside, came for work to the city. This process only took off massively in the 1960s though, because Soviet laws did not allow people to move freely from the countryside. Still, by 1950 Lviv was already well on the way to becoming the almost totally Ukrainian and Ukrainian-speaking city that it is today. By then about half of the population were Ukrainian, 27 percent Russian and 6 percent Jewish, though many of the latter had not been natives of Lviv before the war.

  Svetlana Zymovnya is the chief statistician for the Lviv District, and the story of her family is typical. Her father was born in Sanok, which is now in southeastern Poland. Before the Second World War this was a heavily Ukrainian area. “When he was fourteen they were sent here,” she said, “to a village near Lviv where they lived in a house built of clay which only had one room.” There were five children in the family. But in Poland, “they were rich and had a lot of land.” Their new circumstances left them with not enough money and there was little to eat, so her father walked to Lviv to work in a then still Polish-owned furniture factory.

  With the murder of the Jews and with the Poles being sent to Poland, a lot of Lviv must have been empty after the war? No, explained Svetlana, because immediately the war ended, what had been Polish and Jewish apartments and homes were filled with Soviet military men, men from the NKVD, party members and administrators, and these people, who brought their families, were mostly Russians or from the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine. Conflict in the region did not end in 1944 either, as the NKVD especially had to continue fighting the UPA until well into the 1950s.

  While the demographic and ethnic transformation of Lviv was dramatic, it was not at all unique. All the smaller towns of the region were transformed. In the neighboring and historic region of Volhynia, which had been divided between Poland and the Soviet Union before the war, Poles fought Ukrainians during the war and the Jews were again killed. At the end of the conflict those Poles that remained were sent to Poland and ethnic Germans expelled too as the Soviet Union absorbed the rest of the territory. Historically, as you went farther east the Polish factor diminished, but generally a similar pattern prevailed whereby Jews lived in towns and cities, as did Russians, while Ukrainians dominated the countryside. Between Russians and Ukrainians identity was also fluid. In the past, in the areas of Ukraine which had been part of the Russian empire, Ukrainian was considered by many, especially the educated, as a peasant language or dialect of Russian rather than a language in its own right. Many Ukrainians who came to town were educated and, as they began to move up the social ladder, they started to speak Russian and many in this way “became” Russian. However, and this is very important today, others still considered themselves Ukrainian, even though they and their families spoke Russian. Likewise, many but again not all Jews who spoke Russian considered themselves Russian Jews, rather than Ukrainian Jews. In Lviv they spoke Yiddish and German, but increasingly Polish after 1918.

  The 1911 Baedeker’s to Austria-Hungary (“with excursions to Cetinje, Belgrade and Bucharest”) is a guidebook to a world that was about to vanish. For us, most notably, all those areas of modern Ukraine which were then part of the empire—that is to say the eastern part of the region of Galicia, what is now called Transcarpathia and northern Bukovina—are in the same book as Vienna, Prague and Trieste. Secondly, while we are often given the ethnic makeup of places, the word “Ukrainian” does not exist, because here Ukrainians were still known as Ruthenes, a description which broadly speaking encompassed them and some smaller ethnic minorities who still exist, including Lemkos and Rusyns. The name “Ruthene,” which gradually began to be replaced by the word “Ukrainian” at the end of the nineteenth century, comes from the same root as Rus or Russia. On the other side of the border, in the Russian empire, the Russian authorities pursued a policy of Russification and the suppression of anything which smacked of a separate Ukrainian identity, actual or potential. In 1876, as a Ukrainian elite began to emerge, publishing in Ukrainian or “Little Russian” was banned, as were theater performances and lectures.

  The policy in Austria-Hungary, especially in Galicia, was different as Ruthene-cum-Ukrainian identity was to a certain extent encouraged by the authorities keen to divide and rule and to balance Polish identity and aspirations. Today, when we see voting patterns in Ukraine, when we hear that oft repeated description of the west, by which is meant eastern Galicia above all, being more nationalistic and proud of its Ukrainianness, this is the historical root of the reason why. Students could study in Ukrainian, though there were constant struggles with the Poles over this, and a self-consciously Ukrainian elite began to flourish. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century a Ukrainian nationalism began to develop which envisaged eventual union with Ukrainians on the other side of the border inside the Russian empire. Some of the Ukrainian leaders were nationalists who saw themselves as Ukrainians above all but others were Russophiles who looked to Russia for their future and believed themselves a branch of the wider Russian people, not a separate nationality.

  Polish military graves in the Lychakiv cemetery. Lviv, November 2014.

  The collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires left everything to fight for. The Ukrainians also had an embryonic army in the west of what is now Ukraine, that is to say soldiers who had served as members of the Sich Riflemen, an Austro-Hungarian unit. Ukrainians in Lviv proclaimed an independent West Ukrainian People’s Republic on November 1, 1918. In Kiev an independent state was also declared amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution and civil war. Lviv was plunged into conflict. The Poles fought the Ukrainians for the city and the region, and the Poles won. In the Lychakiv cemetery they built a triumphant war memorial to commemorate their dead, including the so-called Lwów Eaglets, or young fighters, who had died there. The Jews, uncertain what to do, had decided to stay neutral. Once the Poles had won, pogroms broke out to punish the Jews for what was seen as their pro-Ukrainian position.

  Interwar Poland was an authoritarian state. As the years wore on it was also increasingly anti-Semitic, as were many of its people, but Ukrainian nationalism was repressed too and activists jailed. The most extreme of them resorted to terrorism and assassinated Polish officials. It was this nationalism that, in the 1930s unsurprisingly and given Galicia’s historical links to Vienna, turned to the German-speaking world for inspiration. Likewise, as Hitler began to look east it meant that, despite his disdain for the Slavs in general and in this case in particular the Poles, he had some r
eady allies. They included Ukrainian former military men who also hated the Poles, grafted his anti-Semitism onto their own, and could also see what communism had done for their compatriots in Soviet Ukraine. While in the 1920s many exiles and Ukrainian nationalists had gone (or returned) to Soviet Ukraine, lured by the promise of building a new Ukrainian state of sorts, in which, at the time Ukrainianization as opposed to Russification was the order of the day, all had changed by the 1930s. These were the years of clampdowns on anything perceived as Ukrainian nationalism, the great purges and of course the Holodomor. And for many Ukrainian nationalists, fusing anti-Semitism and anti-communism, the Jews could be singled out as especially guilty as “Judeo-Bolsheviks.” This was the backdrop for the catastrophe about to befall Lviv and the wider region, and one which, now that Ukraine is at war again, reverberates anew.

  When it comes to remembering the past a few things immediately jump out at you. The first is that in reality there are three very different memories of Lviv. What Ukrainians, Jews and Poles remember isn’t the same. The city means different things to them. Poles remember a great city lost to them, a cultured and important Polish city, which they had fought the Ukrainians for in 1918 and managed to keep for Poland. Ukrainians recall Polish repression and the way they declared an independent Ukrainian state here twice, in 1918 and 1941. For Jews it is a city with an ancient Jewish history, swept away by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators. Although in recent years there have been conferences bringing historians together, the fact is that whatever good work they might jointly do takes a long time to percolate through to the consciousness of ordinary people.

  You can see one of the first acts of the drama of the destruction of the old Lviv on YouTube. It is in Liberation, a 1940 film made by the Ukrainian Soviet filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko. It gives the Soviet account of the taking of Lviv and western Ukraine, a “colony of Polish imperialism” in 1939. The war begins, we are told, at the behest of the “English imperialists,” and then the “artificial Polish state” ceases to exist. To patriotic music the Red Army, pursuing its “sacred duty” to liberate the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples, pours over the border on September 17, 1939. We see crowds in Lviv cheering their liberators. Then we see happy people voting in October to elect assemblies (some dance in the streets, they are so happy about this) and stirring speeches are made when they convene. In Lviv the assembly meets in the opera house. On the right of a box close by the stage we can see Nikita Khrushchev, the Ukrainian party boss and future Soviet leader, who was sent by Stalin to oversee this operation. After that the action moves to Moscow where western Ukraine and Belarus are graciously accepted into the USSR on November 1, 1939. Stalin acknowledges the standing ovation of the assembled delegates. Finally the show moves to Parliament in Kiev, the same building as the one which houses today’s Verkhovna Rada, and after that, under the watchful gaze of Khrushchev, tens of thousands parade through Kiev carrying pictures of Stalin and other communist luminaries.

  Nikita Khrushchev in Lviv opera house, standing at right and clapping. From the film Liberation, 1940.

  As well as for performances, nowadays you can visit the opera house on a Thursday afternoon, and surprising numbers of people do. Outside, it is an exuberant neo-Renaissance affair and inside, a traditional meeting of deep red velvet and gold. On the ceiling of the auditorium is a roundel featuring ten naked dancing girls, swirling long diaphanous scarves around themselves. The girls and their opera house, which opened in 1900, are a poignant reminder of those final optimistic years before the First World War when no one in Europe had any conception that they were living in an era on which the final curtain was about to fall.

  A middle-aged lady stands at the front to answer questions. Curious as to whether what took place here in 1939 is remembered, I asked her if Khrushchev sat “there” and point at a box. No, she replied immediately, he sat “in the royal box. You can see there is a crown above it.” If you look at Dovzhenko’s film, though, you can see that is not true, as he sat in the box below the royal one. Still, it is a good story, unless she was referring to another event. I asked if Stalin ever attended the opera and she said that, not only did he not, but he never even visited Lviv, bar once passing through the railway station and even then few people knew about that.

  To a Westerner the episode here in the opera house, with strident speeches being made while Khrushchev the puppet master looked on, might seem like a minor historical detail. But in the wake of what has happened in Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk it is necessary to remind ourselves of this. On March 16, 2014, in Crimea, under the watchful eye of Russian soldiers, a referendum was organized on joining Russia. Patriotic speeches followed, and Putin then graciously accepted Crimea into the fold. A similar referendum was held on May 11 in those parts of Donetsk and Lugansk controlled by pro-Russian rebels. In other words, obscure to us in the West, but in the Kremlin simply standard operating procedure, there in the textbooks to be looked at again, dusted off and tweaked for modern times.

  When the Soviets marched into Lviv in 1939, an act that Soviet history commemorated as the “Golden September,” some Jews welcomed them, as did some Ukrainians, especially the poorer among them. For the Jews, Poland had been anti-Semitic and the Soviets were clearly better than the Nazis. Ukrainians thought they were now to be united with their brothers on the other side of the border. Over the ensuing period tens of thousands more Jews began to flood into the city and region fleeing from German-occupied Poland. The next twenty-two months were to be a bitter experience for all. Polish officers were sent to prison camps. Jews dominated commerce, so as the new regime confiscated businesses and closed down private enterprises, many Jews numbered among the biggest losers. Peasants in the countryside soon found themselves being forced into hated collective farms. But, with the Polish administration gone, some Jews and Ukrainians benefited as they got new jobs which had been mostly the preserve of Poles until then. With regard to Ukrainians, says Mihailo Romaniuk, a Lviv historian, within a year they were sorely disappointed by Soviet rule. Soviet propaganda had had an effect, which was why some welcomed the Red Army, despite the fact that something was known about the Holodomor and the purges, but “when they raised blue and yellow [Ukrainian] flags, the Red Army soldiers tore them off them and stamped on them.” Many western Ukrainians believed that, even though it was Soviet, there was a Ukrainian state, which they were now joining, “but they lacked information.” Anyone remotely politically suspect was arrested and sent east and that applied to Ukrainians, Jews and Poles. Romaniuk says that if Ukrainians greeted the Red Army in 1939 with flowers, in 1944 when they came back they “greeted them with weapons.”

  What historians say is one thing, but luckily to this day there remain people here who well remember the war. It is their memory, what they remember and what they do not, that has helped shape the way people in the west of Ukraine (as anywhere else of course) see their past and interpret their present.

  One is Mihailo Gasyuk, aged ninety-one. He is a bit hard of hearing but otherwise as bright as a button. He lives in the little town of Horodok, which is forty minutes’ drive due west of Lviv, on the road leading to the Polish border. The roads are poor here, and many villages have replaced or supplemented their Soviet war memorials with ones to the UPA, the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army that carried on fighting the Soviets when they returned until the mid-1950s. Mihailo was a member and loves to talk about it. A spread of sandwiches and drinks has been laid on for visitors.

  Mihailo Gasyuk. Horodok, November 2014.

  When he was a boy Mihailo lived in a village very close to Horodok. Here, he recalled, there were “Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Jews…everyone.” At school he studied in Ukrainian but he never went to secondary school, which was taught in Polish, because that was “only for rich people.” Polish boys threw stones at the Ukrainian boys and they fought. Between Jews, Poles and Ukrainians in Horodok it seems there was not much love lost.

  When the Soviets arrived
in 1939 people were not “glad” because they were Soviets, he said, but because they “got rid of the Poles.” They were suspicious and Mihailo remembers an incident when Communist Party officials came to lecture the locals on collectivization and on how well people would live. “One villager stood up and said that he had a tractor that had got stuck in the mud and it had been impossible to get it out, so he tied a goat to it and the goat pulled it out. Then the communist officials began to shout that he was lying and he said: ‘You have been lying for two hours.’ ”

  After collectivization, when people were forced to give up their land, horses and cows, they were even gladder when the Germans arrived, but no one knew much about them or what to expect from them. The Germans quickly started appointing Ukrainians to positions of power and everywhere “Ukrainians were in charge.” They began recruiting a police force too. Mihailo tried this but did not like it and anyway he wanted to see the world so he volunteered to go and work in Germany. Later on Ukrainians were sent as slave laborers to Germany, rather than going there as volunteers. In 1943, when he returned he “met guys from the UPA,” which was the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), its political party. It was split, however, and its two wings were in conflict, but the one led by Stepan Bandera was to win. Bandera’s men had proclaimed independence in 1941 when the Nazis entered Lviv, but they were quickly rounded up and imprisoned by the Germans, for whom an independent Ukraine was not part of their plans. In his first actions Mihailo fought not the Germans but Soviet Partisans. In 1945 he was wounded fighting NKVD troops, was arrested and sentenced to death but survived as his sentence was commuted to twenty years in prison. Stalin died in 1953, and after Khrushchev’s denunciation of him three years later, Mihailo was released. It was hard to find a job at home though, so he worked in Crimea and then Debaltseve, in the east, as a miner. All he had wanted was “a free Ukraine and to fight all its enemies.” When he came home after being in prison, he remarked matter-of-factly that everything had changed. There were no more Jews and the Poles had gone too. It was good that the Poles had left, he said, because now there was no more animosity and they were neighbors, that is to say in Poland rather than literally next door.