Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide or Ukrainian-Polish War in Volhynia?

• In Event: Ethnic and Religious Mobilization and Conflict; Evidence from Ukraine and Russia

Abstract

This paper analyzes the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during the German occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of communism, especially in the last fews years. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers offered different and often divergent theories of this historical event. It is often presented in Ukraine as a Ukrainian-Polish war, in particular, by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory after the “Euromaidan”. The laws and policies adopted by the Maidan governments glorified the far right OUN and the UPA, their leaders and members as national heroes and fighters for the Ukrainian independence. In contrast, the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia is often characterized in Poland as a genocide. The Polish parliament declared in 2016 that the Volhynian massacre constituted a genocide.

The research question is whether this mass murder was an ethnic cleansing, genocide, or Ukrainian-Polish war. This study analyzes archival documents from the Branch Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine, the SBU archive in Volyn Region, and the State Archive of Volyn Region, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts in English, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian languages. It offers an estimate of Polish casualties derived from analysis of Polish, Soviet, and Ukrainian sources and demographic data. This study shows that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) did not constitute a Ukrainian-Polish war or a genocide of Poles but that it was a part of an ethnic cleansing.

Author

• Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottawa