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previous: Chapter 6 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 8

 p72  VII

Between the Wars

The series of treaties that were drawn up at the Peace Conference in 1919 opened a new period in European history. It was confidently assumed that they had permanently limited the power of Germany as they had certainly wiped out the empire of the Hapsburgs by dismemberment. All of the important peoples of the Dual Monarchy except the Ukrainians received an independent position in the new Europe. Yet these treaties had completely sidestepped the problems offered by the dissolution of the Russian empire. The Treaty of Riga in 1920 had indeed given Poland for the first time an eastern boundary but this had been done at the expense of the Ukrainians at a moment when for the first time in centuries Poland and Ukraine had been fighting as allies. The "peace" that was thus made in Europe was destined to a precarious existence of only some twenty years.

Under the conditions of that peace there was little hope for the Ukrainians to advance far in the direction of their long-desired independence. The new situation presented even more ominous possibilities than they had faced in 1914. Western Ukraine was divided between Poland, Czecho­slovakia and Romania, largely according to the old provincial districts and regimes of Austria-Hungary. Eastern Ukraine, under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was an unwilling victim  p73 of the new forms of Russian imperialism which was substantially the old system coated with the theories of Marx, Lenin and later Stalin.

The situation was a sharp letdown from the high hopes with which the Ukrainians and the whole of Eastern Europe had arisen at the moment of the Russian revolution and the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Then independence, peace and prosperity had seemed so near. Now all of these ideals had been relegated to the distant future.

Yet the years of struggle were not a total loss. the Ukrainians had acquired a certain self-confidence during the hard experiences of those event­ful three years that was to stand them in good stead. They had learned to work together in a common cause. The masses were largely freed from their political apathy, had become conscious of their national identity and were willing to proclaim themselves for what they were. The two parts of Ukraine had learned to know each other better and to feel their kinship more strongly. Personal contacts had been formed in different areas and these were by no means confined to the outstanding scholars and writers; even ordinary citizens who had served in the armies had gotten to know their fellows from other sections of the country.

Some of these contacts were of short duration, for soon the paths of Eastern and Western Ukraine began again to diverge. In the early years there was a more or less brisk interchange of certain ideas between Lviv and Kiev but this soon dried up as the Iron Curtain erected by the Soviets across Europe became ever more impassable.

A large and active émigré group had developed abroad. The leaders of both east and west, after the failure of the political and military movement, made their way to Western Europe and spent the next years in the capitals of the democratic powers, endeavoring, as did Orlyk and his friends after the defeat of Mazepa in 1709, to arouse interest in the fate of the Ukrainian people and enlist public sentiment in their cause. Late in the nineteenth century Professor Michael  p74 Drahomaniv had left Kiev to undertake work of this kind in Switzerland and then in Bulgaria, but that was about all. If Ukraine was known abroad before 1914, it was only through the laborers and peasants who had gone as seasonal workers across Europe or had settled down to build a new life in the lands across the Atlantic.

The struggle for independence had its effect on emigrant Ukrainians. Many had gone to the United States and Canada as simple laborers and had prospered. The World War woke them to a full consciousness of their feelings as Ukrainians. Made the targets of Russian, Polish and German propaganda, they commenced a counteraction. They were not able at the moment to sway American and Canadian public opinion as did some of the other groups but they went to work actively for the cause of a free Ukraine. They organized relief work for their relatives abroad and seriously undertook through their various societies and especially the Ukrainian National Association the difficult task of enlightening American and Canadian public opinion on the Ukrainian problem. They sent representatives to the Peace Conference in Paris and much to the annoyance of their enemies made sure that the voice of free Ukraine would not be silenced.⁠1

Even though the Ukrainian representatives failed, the Peace Conference served to introduce them to Western diplomats and statesmen. It gave them the opportunity to speak of their national cause and laid the foundation, even if only very sketchily, for future relation­ships.⁠2

At the same time the leaders of the Ukrainian missions in Washington, Dr. Julian Bachynsky for the Ukrainian Republic and Dr.  Longin Cehelsky and Dr. Luke Myshuha for the Republic of Western Ukraine worked steadily until 1923 to explain the situation. As the accredited diplomats of their state, they received broad powers and courtesies but not official recognition and their words far too often fell on deaf ears.

When all has been said, the period between the wars was disappointing for the Ukrainians but it was no less disappointing  p75 for all the other peoples of the world. The swing of public sentiment which had begun immediately after the signing of the armistice with Germany continued and resulted in an atmosphere in which all unconsciously the groundwork was laid for a new catastrophe.

The new world order was one of strange contradictions. In a physical sense the world had become united as never before. The discoveries and inventions of material sciences had seemingly annihilated space and time. The airplane and the radio had brought the nations nearer together. The spread of manufactures, the automobile and the motor bus had almost eliminated the self-contained life of the villages and the isolation of certain areas. The motion picture in all provincial centers and towns and in many villages had given even the most secluded individual some concept of the outside world.

Yet man had not risen to the level of these new inventions. The passport and the carte d'identité, regarded before 1914 as the sign of a backward government, now became almost universal. The free movement of populations was stopped. New political barriers were erected as a result of new political philosophies, while at the same time man was proclaiming as never before his belief in universality.

The treaties of 1919 had been amply provided with guarantees for the protection of minorities. They had visualized the application of the standards of civilized life to all communities. Suddenly it was discovered that these clauses either did not mean what they said or could be twisted to produce results entirely foreign to their intentions.

The statements of the Communists which had seemed alluring even to many people who did not fully sympathize with them were now revealed as little better than the brutal actions perpetrated in the height of the civil wars. The naked reality was even less palatable than the theoretical picture. The Ukrainians in the days of the conflict had realized this but they had done so unconsciously and often dimly. Now it was to be brought home to them at every moment.

 p76  The result was again a curious contradiction. During the twenty years from 1918 to 1919 not a single country on the borders of the Soviet paradise ever joined it by its own wish. It required intrigue and the intervention of the Red army. Yet abroad there were still well-meaning believers in human dignity and human rights who could somehow salve and deaden their consciences and in a kind of spiritual hypochondria place the minor mistakes of their own lands on a par with the terrors of the new system. Others were able to look upon the Soviet Union as a noble experiment and refused to condemn it. Still others believed or affected to believe that the government had been chosen democratically by its own people and insisted that the constant appeals of both the nationalities and the White Russians were mere propaganda of an undemocratic stripe. Finally some were so infatuated with the greatness and charm of Russia that they were willing to accept as perfect any government that was set up in Moscow.

War weariness became the dominant note of the new pacifism and the ideals of internationalism and the love of peace had a stronger influence on the minds and hearts of men than did justice and a secure social order. The intellectuals in their visions of a higher humanity forgot the dictates of common decency and their duty to protect their own countries, homes and firesides. In a word, it was a period when World War II was in the making and ambitious dictators could freely plot the downfall of disarmed and peaceful democratic powers.

It was a period when the old ideas of government were discarded, the old concert of European powers, the old codes under which mankind had advanced for centuries. New theories were spawned, concerned on paper with means of reforming democracy but in reality with the exaltation of the state over the individual. Idealism without a basis ran riot, and Communism, Fascism and Nazism were able to appeal to both the highest and the lowest instincts of man.

It was under such circumstances that the various Ukrainian émigrés abroad were compelled to live and carry on their work.  p77 As they wandered from land to land, from capital to capital, they found different modes of thought, different ideas, different ideals, and different receptions. Now the more liberal went to one capital, the more conservative to another. They found it easy to build up groups of similar thinkers and to promote themselves to various offices in a multitude of parties and societies but there were few to follow and new divisions and new organizations sprang up like mushrooms, only to disintegrate or be dissolved in their turn.

For a while Czecho­slovakia offered a safe refuge. Here the government helped to establish a free Ukrainian university, an agricultural school, a library. It was done largely because of the hostility between Czecho­slovakia and Poland and had little or no connection with the development of the situation in Carpatho-Ukraine under Czecho­slovak rule. Later, as Czech policy became more pro-Russian, this support for the Ukrainians tended to disappear.

Berlin and Vienna for a while after the defeat of Bolshevism in both lands welcomed the conservative émigrés. After his withdrawal from Kiev, Hetman Skoropadsky made his way to Berlin. The survivors of the Western Ukrainian government met regularly in Vienna. In both cases their presence in these cities was used to give color to the charges that the Ukrainian movement was a mere Austro-German phenomenon without any basis at home.

Later Paris became more hospitable and many who were disgusted with the rule of Hitler made their way to the French capital. They were only to move again when the French government turned to the left and sought the friendship of the Soviet Union.

Most of these émigrés remained aliens but there were others who went to the United States and Canada and the temperate countries of South America to settle down. They retained their Ukrainian feelings but many of them were swallowed up in the task of building their new homes in developing regions. They found themselves again as parts of a non-Ukrainian life  p78 but one that welcomed them as individuals and gave them abundant opportunities to live and prosper.

It was a strange time between the wars. The world seemed to have forgotten all for which it had fought so stubbornly up to 1918. Yet those ideals did not die and by 1938 they were beginning to make themselves heard again. About that time, on the eve of World War II, all the old accusations against the Ukrainians were refurbished and recirculated, whether true or false. No one paid any attention to the strange and complicated developments in Europe which heralded the next stage of Ukrainian struggle. This had a different form in each country which had seized part of Ukraine but there was a tacit agreement everywhere that at all costs the essence of Ukrainian democracy must be wiped out in one way or another, by conversion or by extermination. It is to this situation that we must now turn.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Ukrainian-American Political Action in the Years 1914‑1920, Golden Jubilee Almanac of the Ukrainian National Association 1894‑1944. Jersey City, N. J. 1944, pp112 ff.

2 Margolin, From a Political Diary, Russia, the Ukraine and America. New York, 1946.

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