Postsocialist Nationalism: Rediscovering the Past in Southeast Poland
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Chris Hann
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Postsocialist Nationalism: Rediscovering the Past in Southeast Poland
Chris Hann
Introduction
Since the collapse of socialist regimes in 1989 few subjects in eastern Europe have attracted as much attention as nationalism. Detailed academic studies have been carried out from many disciplinary perspectives, by scholars native to the region as well as many from outside it.1 This is also a field in which governmental and nongovernmental organizations have undertaken numerous policy-oriented initiatives.2 Eastern European developments have figured prominendy in global discussions of "ethnicity" and "identity politics," while a few scholars have used materials from this region to articulate more general frameworks of comparative analysis.3 It is difficult to speak of major conceptual advances, but some progress has been made. For example, few would now argue that national loyalties reemerged in some "natural" form after a generation
This article is based on research financed by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (No. R000236071, "The Politics of Religious Identity: the Greek Catholics of Central Europe"). I am greatly indebted to my main partner in this research, Sta-nislaw Stepien, director of the Southeast Scientific Institute in Przemysl, who in addition to local data collection and extensive interviewing among the Ukrainian minority in the city in 1996-97 has in countless ways helped to inform and educate a puzzled outsider. Needless to say he is not responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation in this text, which is based primarily on my short field trips (maximum of one week) in each year between 1994 and 1998. The same disclaimer applies to others who have provided useful comments on earlier drafts: Klaus Bachmann, Janusz Mucha, George Schopflin, and Kai Struve. I am also grateful for the comments of participants at two conferences in November 1997: "Poland: Social and Cultural Paradigms," in Berlin, organized by Michal Buchowski and Edouard Conte, and "Structuring of Identities in Twentieth-Century Europe," in Warsaw, organized by Marian Kempny. In 1998, seminar members at the Free University of Berlin, at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and at Viadrina University Frankfurt (Oder), as well as the anonymous referees for this journal, also provided useful comments.
1. For a concise comparative survey in the context of debates over "civil society," see Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction (Cambridge, Eng., 1997). For further useful references, see Gerasimos Augustinos, ed., The National Idea in Eastern Europe: The Politics of Ethnic and Civic Community (Lexington, 1996). A good specialist journal in this field is Nationalities Papers.
2. Among the many initiatives of recent years have been the establishment at Central European University of a Centre for the Study of Nationalism, financed by George Soros and led until his death in 1995 by Ernest Gellner, and the Project on Ethnic Relations, based in Princeton, New Jersey and funded primarily by the Carnegie Corporation.
3. See, for example, Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London, 1993); Claus Offe, Varieties of'Transition: The East European and East German Experience (Cambridge, Eng., 1996). Good comparativists, while proposing general analytic tools, insist at the same time on nuanced and differentiated accounts; an excellent example is Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Refrained: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1996).
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in the socialist "deep freeze," metaphors widely employed in the early 1990s.
Anthropologists have made significant contributions to this field, sometimes with case studies quite limited in time and place, sometimes tackling larger regions and complex historical processes.4 Kather-ine Verdery has demonstrated the need to take account, not only of the short-run factors that can precipitate malignant forms of nationalism in the postsocialist conjuncture, but also of how an idea of the nation was used and abused by socialist powerholders, and of the roles played by intellectuals in the formation of national symbols in earlier periods.5 Once this causal complexity is accepted, the formulation of elegant general theories to encompass very different national experiences becomes very difficult. It is not therefore surprising that, in a recent survey, Peter Nie-dermiiller has complained of "a certain theoretical and methodological stagnation" in this research field.6 His own preferred remedy is to distinguish a number of "discourse strategies" that together provide contemporary eastern Europeans with a convincing and satisfying "cultural logic" by which to organize their daily lives. I find Niedermuller's work stimulating and I shall return to it below; I shall argue that his anthropological concern with "cultural ordering" needs to be complemented with more concrete investigations of changing institutions and, above all, of the new political contexts.
Coverage of the region in the recent literature has inevitably been uneven, since scholars, publishers, and philanthropists have naturally invested more resources in those countries where the problems have been most conspicuous. Hence there is a large literature on former Yugoslavia, and especially on Bosnia. By contrast, the literature dealing with the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia is still scant. So too, especially in view of the size of their populations, is the literature on contemporary nationalisms in Ukraine and Poland. My focus in this article is limited to Poland and to one part of the Ukrainian minority there. This group's collective awareness derives to a great extent from its minority situation. I am not concerned with the more complex phenomenon of nationalism in Ukraine itself; I do, however, wish to broach more general aspects of contemporary Polish nationalism.
The Polish case can be instructive precisely because it is not widely perceived to be a problem. Poland has been almost entirely free of the ethnic violence that has occurred elsewhere. Even anti-Roma prejudice has not
4. For recent examples, see Tone Bringa, Being Moslem the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, 1995); Anastasia N. Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990 (Chicago, 1997).
5. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescn's Romania (Berkeley, 1991); Verdery, Wliat Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996).
6. Peter Niedermiiller, "Zeit, Geschichte, Vergangenheit: Zur kulturellen Logik des Nationalismus im Postsozializmus," Historische Anthropologic: Kultui; Gesellschaft, Alltag 5 (1997): 246.
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been a significant problem, no doubt in part at least because the Roma population is relatively small. Postsocialist constitutions have guaranteed the rights of all "national and ethnic minorities," and these documents have been followed up by an active Parliamentary Commission.7 Nonetheless I want to suggest that the potential for nationalism is deeply rooted in contemporary Polish society. Far from withering (or "freezing") under socialism, it continued to grow in this period: overt promotion of political nationalism of the sort which typified the interwar period was precluded, but rigid control of education and culture helped to ensure that the nation, rather than any sub- or si^ra-national entity, became the dominant focus of loyalty and identity. Above all, it suited the Roman Catholic Church to promote the nation as the basic principle of cultural ordering.
I approach the Polish case in terms of the model put forward by Ernest Gellner.8 This model, much more abstract and long-term than is usual in social and cultural anthropology, contrasts the cultural diversity of the polity of the Agrarian Age with the homogeneity of the succeeding Industrial Age. The territory of what is today southeast Poland and western Ukraine was culturally diverse in Gellner's sense for many centuries. Leaving aside smaller groups and specific local identities, three main groups lived alongside each other in roughly equal numbers: Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, and Jews. The generalized identity that had most salience was religion, for until late in the nineteenth century, in both towns and rural areas, national identity in the modern sense was weakly developed.9 In this region most Roman Catholics spoke some dialect of Polish, while most Greek Catholics spoke a dialect of Ukrainian.
7. In Poland, as elsewhere, this terminology creates problems. Most Polish social scientists have assumed that an ethnic group is a "national" group if it possesses its own state. In practice, however, groups such as Roma and Lemkos have often been classified, like Ukrainians, as a national minority. The vocabulary is also confusing because the term nationality is often popularly used to describe another form of belonging, that of legal citizenship. The nationalism that I am concerned with in this article is of the sort commonly labeled "ethnic," but this can also be misleading. The terms ethnic and ethnicity can be employed in more complex ways: for example, some citizens of contemporary Poland declare themselves to be of Lemko ethnicity (etnicznošé) and Ukrainian nationality (namdowošč); see Chris Hann, "Ethnicity in the New Civil Society: Lemko-Ukrainians in Poland," in László Kůrti and Juliet Langman, eds., Beyond Borders: Remaking Cultural Identities in the New East and Central Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 25. I am not competent to pursue these issues in the Ukrainian language: all Ukrainians who are Polish citizens are fluent in Polish, and this was the medium I used in all my visits to Przemysl.
8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); Gellner, Nationalism. (London, 1997). For recent appraisals of Gellner's work in this field, see John A. Hall, ed., The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge, Eng., 1998).
9. Jerzy Tomaszewski cites the case of a peasant in the middle of the nineteenth century who declared his identity and his language to be "Mazovian": see "The National Question in Poland in the Twentieth Century," in Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The National Qiiestion in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 298. Another identity term that remained widespread in the eastern borders of presocialist Poland was the designation tutejszy (of this place). For classic ethnographic documentation, see Józef Obrebski, The Changing Peasantry of Eastern Europe (1936; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Roman Reinfuss, Lemkowie jako grupa etnograficzna (1948; reprint, Sanok, 1998).
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Other combinations were also found: Greek Catholic Poles and "Ruthe-nians" who followed the Latin rite. All-embracing secular designations in the modern sense of ethnicity either did not exist at all or were only weakly internalized and of limited significance in social interaction. People's identities were basically "polytactic," to use the term proposed by the German anthropologist Georg Elwert.10 The more or less lumpy features that we nowadays refer to as "ethnic groups" or "cultures" did exist, but not as sharply bounded units asserting exclusive rights over territory. Identities cross-cut each other, and different ties and allegiances were activated in different contexts. In addition to anthropologists such as Gell-ner and Elwert, historians capable of escaping the mind-set of nationalism have also considered this sort of cultural pluralism to be the more common condition of humanity.11
Gellner liked to illustrate his theories from the Habsburg empire, which in the Polish case provided more fertile soil for the growth of a national movement than either of the other imperial powers that divided the Polish state between them in the late eighteenth century (Russia and Prussia).12 The Poland that was reinvented as a political entity after World War I was still culturally diverse, but it promptly embarked upon the assimilating and excluding strategies of a "nationalizing state."13 About one-sixth of the population was Ukrainian, and Ukrainians outnumbered Poles in many parts of the southeast; another sixth was made up of Jews and other minorities.14 Religious distinctions corresponded ever more closely to ethnic boundaries, but increasingly it was the secular, ethnic identity that was "sacralized." The condition that Gellner associates with modernity was eventually achieved more through political imposition and violence than through the spread of industry. Following wartime genocide, border changes, and accompanying large-scale population movements, voluntary and involuntary, and a final burst of ethnic cleansing in 1947, socialist Poland emerged as one of Europe's more homogeneous states.15 By the 1970s it was reported that only 1.3 percent of the population was not ethnically Polish.16 Within this country the continuing role of the Roman Catholic Church in defining the mainstream of Polish cultural identity has been widely recognized, per-
10. Georg Elwert, "Nationalismus und Ethnizität: Uber die Bildung von Wir-Gruppen," Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 3 (1989): 440-64.
11. William H. McNeill, Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History (Toronto, 1986).
12. The best introduction to the rise of Polish nationalism remains Peter Brock, "Polish Nationalism," in Peter F. Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle, 1969).
13. This concept is elaborated by Rogers Brubaker, who examines the interwar Polish case in some detail in Nationalism Reframed, chap. 4.
14. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Ojczyzna nie tylko Polakow: Mniejszos'ci narodowe w Polsce w latach 1918-1939 (Warsaw, 1985), 52.
15. For a more detailed outline, see Chris Hann, "Ethnic Cleansing in Eastern Europe: Poles and Ukrainians beside the Curzon Line," Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996): 389-406.
16. Jerzy J. Wiatr, "Polish Society," in Poland: A Handbook (Warsaw, 1977), 137.
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haps obscuring the degree to which the principal focus of sacralization became the ethnic community itself, that is, the Polish nation.
Even before the demise of socialism, however, signs were emerging that the cultural homogeneity of modern Poland was less complete than it seemed to be.17 Since the collapse of socialism, ethnic diversity (especially in Poland's borderlands with Germany, Belarus, and Ukraine) has been more openly acknowledged.18 Does this mean that the new democracy is allowing people to rediscover their polytactic identities? While this may be happening for some groups, including Silesian Germans, I shall argue that, as far as the Ukrainian minority in Przemysl is concerned, the strength of Polish nationalism continues to inhibit and preclude polytac-ticity, just as it did throughout the decades of socialism. Ernest Gellner's model of the modern polity, seen as perfectly congruent with just one cultural group, is an ideal type and undoubtedly an oversimplification of the empirical reality in contemporary Poland; but I shall argue that the nationalists' goal of creating and sustaining this congruence continues to structure Polish society and to constrain alternative models that stress plurality and polytacticity.
The Past in the Present: Greek Catholic Ukrainians in Przemysl
Anthropologists are usually more interested in the politics of the past, in how people represent their history, than in history wie es eigentlich ge-wesen ist. In both oral and literate cultures, the past has a social function in the present. It is not only the recent past that functions in this way. At least some Poles and Ukrainians in this region nowadays have a conviction that once upon a time the city of Przemysl and the surrounding territory belonged exclusively to them. Strong claims of primordial propriety are embedded in today's ethnic cultures. But the fuel for the mythologizing of origins and a distant past is obtained from events relatively close to the present.
Today Przemysl is a city which lies in southeast Poland on both sides of the River San, about 10 kilometers from the border with Ukraine. From a total of just under 70,000 inhabitants, the number of people identifying themselves as Ukrainians is almost certainly fewer than 2,000.19
17. For example, there has been a surge of interest in Polish Jewish relations past and present, much of it led by academics at the Research Center for Jewish History and Culture in Poland at Jagiellonian University in Krakow; for a contemporary assessment, see Stanislaw Krajewski, "ChristianJewish Dialogue in Poland: The Difficult Road to Tolerance," in Peter Danchin, ed., The Protection of Religious Minorities in Europe: Law, Theory and Practice (New York, forthcoming). On the Lemko-Ukrainian minority, see Hann, "Ethnicity in the New Civil Society"; see also Ewa Michna, Lemkowie: Grupa Etniczna czy Narod (Krakow, 1995); Jacek Nowak, "Dynamika tozsamosci Lemkow wobec przemiah w Europie Srodkowschodniej" (Ph.D. diss., Jagiellonian University, Krakow, 1996).
18. See Grzegorz Babihski,Janusz Mucha, and Andrzej Sadowski, eds., Pobkie badania nad mniejszosciami kulturowymi: Wybrane zagadnienie (Bialystok, 1997).
19. No official statistics record the size of contemporary Poland's ethnic minorities. The total number of Ukrainians, including Lemkos, is thought to be between 250,000
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Apart from a recently established Orthodox parish with about 100 members, all are Greek Catholic. The Greek Catholic Church, sometimes known as the Uniate Church, and in Poland today officially as the Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite, combines the theology of the western, Roman Catholic Church with the practical religious life of the eastern, Orthodox tradition.20 The Greek Catholic Church came into existence in the era of the Counter-Reformation when the secular and religious authorities of the predominantly Roman Catholic Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania wanted to incorporate their many Orthodox subjects into the Catholic Church (following the principle of cuius regio, eius religio). They did not aspire to change the actual practices of these subjects: such a transformation would have been uncharacteristic of a generally tolerant Commonwealth and unacceptable to the Orthodox bishops. It was sufficient that the bishops should agree formally to recognize the Pope and to amend a few points of theology that have remained to this day obscure and irrelevant to the mass of the faithful. Even so, union proved controversial and in some regions it generated violent resistance. The Union of Brest (1596) was not finally ratified in the diocese of Przemysl until 1692. From its inception until World War II, this Greek Catholic Church operated in political and cultural frameworks dominated by western powers. During these centuries the practical religion of the Greek Catholics moved closer in some details to that of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, in styles of singing and iconography. Despite this long-term Latinization, however, the calendar and the central rituals and liturgy of the Greek Catholics remained virtually identical to those of Orthodoxy and very different from those of the Roman Catholic Church. Religious differences were therefore available as the principal "raw material" in this region for the later emergence of national communities.
In summarizing the complex history of Przemysl and its hinterland we can make a crude division between the more distant past that is available primarily through history books, museum exhibitions, and so on,
and 280,000. Marek Hohiszko, "Mniejszosci narodowe i etniczne w Polsce," Spoleczenstwo Otwarte 4 (April 1993), v. The minority associations, however, claim higher figures, perhaps approaching 400,000. Ukrainians in Przemysl give 2,000 as the upper limit for their community there. The active memberships of the Ukrainian Sociocultural Society and the Greek Catholic parish is nearer to 1,000. People sometimes give a figure of "400 families." They often point out that the city has many more inhabitants of Ukrainian descent who no longer acknowledge this fact.
20. I use the name Greek Catholics, which took root in the Habsburg period, because this is still the designation preferred by the people themselves, as well as being the name most commonly used to describe them by the Polish Roman Catholic majority. For more definitions and a recent history of the Greek Catholic Church in this region, see Serge Keleher, Passion and Resurrection: The Greek-Catholic Church in Soviet Ukraine, 1939-1989 (L'viv, 1993); for historical background concerning its gestation, see Oskar Halecki, From Florence to Brest, 1439-1596 (Rome, 1958); for a comparative discussion of this Church's role in the Ukrainian and Romanian national movements, see C. M. Hann, "Religion and Nationality in Central Europe: The Case of the Uniates," Ethnic Studies 10 (1993): 201-13.
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and the history of recent generations where, alongside more abundant textual materials, popular memory assumes a greater significance. The first important date for the first sort of history is 981, when a monk in Kiev provided the record of a settlement called Przemyšl, without clearly establishing its nature or the composition of its population.21 In the early centuries of the present millennium, various groups of eastern and western Slavs intermingled here, the bearers of Orthodox and Latin Christianity, respectively. In the town and hinterland of Przemyšl, the former were possibly more numerous in the earliest phases of permanent settlement, but the latter were more successful in consolidating institutions of secular and religious power. In 1340 Casimir the Great succeeded to the title of duke of Galicia (Halicz, Halychyna), and the definitive incorporation of this territory into the Polish state was completed in 1387 by Queen Jadwiga. This state and its successors deservedly enjoyed a reputation for pluralism and tolerance, but the cultural diversity of the Agrarian Age was structured hierarchically. Just as the Greek Catholic Church experienced Latinization, so upwardly mobile East Slavs tended to adopt the language and secular culture of the higher status group. "Ruthenians" could become Poles for social purposes ("Polonization"). Some became Roman Catholics and in time identified fully with a Polish culture that was not yet a national culture in the modern sense of being open to the masses as well as to elites. Others, however, did not change their religion or forget their East Slav origins. Modern Ukrainian history texts present the position of the East Slavs in this Polish state as essentially one of colonial dependency.22 This relationship did not preclude assimilation in the other direction at lower levels of the hierarchy: when Roman Catholic peasants migrated into areas where East Slav dialects and eastern Christianity predominated, they were likely to experience "Ruthenization"; or they might change their religion but hold on to their West Slav language, thereby expanding the possibilities for polytacticity. Very few present inhabitants have any conception of the complexity of these interactions, which also included high rates of intermarriage (in this respect the Jewish group always remained an exception).
In 1772 in the course of the "first partitions" Galicia became part of the Austrian empire (from 1867 the Austro-Hungarian empire). National identities emerged throughout central and eastern Europe in more or less their modern form throughout the 150 years of Habsburg rule. Ro-
21. For detailed outlines of the history of Przemyšl, see August S. Fenczak and Sta-nistaw Stepieň, "Przemyšl jako regionálne centrum administracyne—zaiys dziejów," Studio Przemyskie 1 (1993): 9-48; see also Stefan Zabrowarnyj, ed., Peremyshl iperemyshka zemlapro-tiachom wikhu (Peremyszl, 1996). Early monographs include Leopold Hauser, Monografia miasta Przemyšla (1883: reprint, Przemyšl, 1991); Anatol Lewicki, Obrazki najdaiuniejszych dziejów Przemyšla (1880; reprint, Przemyšl, 1994). For further wide-ranging scholarship, see successive volumes of Polska-Ukraina, 1000 lat sasiedztwa, published in Przemyšl since 1990 by the Poludniowo-Wschodni Instytut Naukowy.
22. Comparable conditions prevailed elsewhere in eastern Europe; for an analysis of the Transylvanian case, see Katherine Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic and Ethnic Change, 1700-1980 (Berkeley, 1983).
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mantic poems, novels, and nationalist historiography all contributed to the dissemination of myths, such as those of Cossack heroes (or villains, depending on your point of view) and of Poland as the "Christ of Nations."23 Churches also played a key role in these processes. Habsburg rulers were generally well disposed toward the Greek Catholic Church, which in a critical period from the middle of the nineteenth century became the leading agent of Ukrainian nationalism.24 It suited the Aus-trians to allow this to develop in eastern Galicia as a counterweight to increasing Polish nationalism. By the end of the Habsburg period even the peasant inhabitants of remote mountain regions were being called upon to profess a national identity, something they had not had to do previously. The tangle of secular and religious identities was also much influenced by developments outside the region, notably the rapidly expanding diaspora communities in North America.25 The main options at this time were either Greek Catholic Ukrainian or Roman Catholic Pole, but East Slavs could also choose a "Ruthenian" (Rusyn) option and the Orthodox Church began to gain ground among Greek Catholic peasants not attracted to the Ukrainian affiliation. They paid a high price when Austria went to war with Russia in 1914.
With World War I we move into the period where social memory assumes greater importance: even if no actual participants remain alive, grandparents can recall the tales told to them. Przemysl was an Austrian military fortress until it fell to the tsar in 1915. Within three years both empires had disappeared. Supporters of a newly proclaimed republic in west Ukraine attempted to include Przemysl, but they were defeated by Polish forces in 1918-19. This period is kept vividly alive in the memories of Poles and Ukrainians. The fighting that took place in Przemysl in the autumn of 1918 was not large scale or in any way glorious, but it did provide the new Polish nation with young heroes: among the dead were a number of schoolboys who gave their lives for the national cause. Designated "Eaglets" in emulation of the heroic "Eagles" who defended L'viv against the Ukrainians, their heroism was celebrated in a special exhibition mounted in PrzemysTs city library in 1997.26 On the Ukrainian
23. The well-known novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz are sometimes singled out by Ukrainians in Przemysl as promoting images of their nation as a land of "butchers and bandits." On this point, see Danuta Sosnowska, "Narodziny rezuna," Gazeta Wyborcza, 6 June 1997, 20-22. For further discussion of the creation of Polish national imagery, see Joan S. Skurnowicz, Romantic Nationalism and Liberalism: Joachim Lelewel and the Polish National Idea (Boulder, Colo., 1981). For stimulating comparative discussion involving a number of east European examples, including Norman Davies on the Polish case, see Geoffrey Hosking and George Schopflin, eds., Myths and Nationhood (London, 1997).
24. John-Paul Himka, "The Greek-Catholic Church and Nation-Building in Galicia, 1772-1918," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8 (1984): 426-52.
25. For a pertinent example, see Paul Robert Magocsi, "Made or Re-Made in America? Nationality and Identity Formation among Carpatho-Rusyn Immigrants and Their Descendants," in Magocsi, ed., The Persistence of Regional Cultures: Rusyns and Ukrainians in Their Carpathian Homeland and Abroad (New York, 1993), 163-78.
26. The city library was formerly a synagogue and remains instantly recognizable as such; but the city's Jewish histoiy is otherwise almost invisible today.
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side, the memory of heroic defeat continued to provoke some groups to violence in the interwar decades. During this period the proportion of Polish, Roman Catholic inhabitants in the city increased, while peasants in the surrounding countryside became increasingly aware of possessing Ukrainian national identity. The state was concerned about the threat posed by Ukrainian nationalism and deeply mistrustful of the Greek Catholic Church. Many in the Roman Catholic Church shared these negative views. The entire interwar period was one of economic hardships and of rising ethnic antagonisms, between Poles and Ukrainians and between each of these groups and Jews.27 The erection in 1937 in Przemysl of a monument to the Eaglets of 1918 was one indication of nationalist sentiment.
These factors were exploited during World War II by the Nazis, who recruited many Ukrainians to assist them in the administration of the Polish territories they occupied. When Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin carved up Poland, they made the River San part of their frontier, thus dividing the city of Przemysl in two (most of the old town lies to the east, that is, in the area occupied by the Soviets in 1939). The monument to the Eaglets was demolished in 1940 by Ukrainians acting on German orders. The following years generated more scores for people to settle after the Nazi defeat. Alongside the struggle between the Nazis and the Red Army there were conflicts between Polish and Ukrainian "partisans." These were particularly fierce in Wolhynia, to the northwest of the Przemysl region and now part of Ukraine. These years yielded a further storehouse of submerged memories that were brought to the surface, especially among Poles, after the collapse of socialism (they were "submerged" only in the sense that it was not possible to discuss them openly in the public sphere; they could of course be discussed and transmitted in private).
The new borders imposed by Stalin saw Ukraine expand dramatically westwards, though not quite as far as the San. Centuries of cultural pluralism came to an abrupt end as large numbers of ethnic Poles moved from towns and villages incorporated into Ukraine to occupy the former German lands that now passed to Poland, while Ukrainians moved in large numbers in the opposite direction. In 1945 it was still possible to pretend that these were voluntary movements. No one could claim this of the further violence that occurred in 1947, which has vividly survived in Ukrainian memories. Ostensibly as a consequence of continued guerilla activities by Ukraihska Powstancza Armia (UPA), the leading Ukrainian partisan organization, most remaining Ukrainian and Lemko-Ukrainian communities within Poland's new borders were destroyed by the Polish army in an operation known as Akcja Wisla. Their inhabitants were resettled in lands to the west and north that had formerly belonged to Germany, where they typically found themselves outnumbered by recently arrived and hostile Poles. In Ukrainian memories Akcja Wisla nowadays
27. Jerzy Tomaszewski, "The National Question"; see also Pawel Korzec, "The Ukrainian Problem in Interwar Poland," in Paul Smith, ed., Ethnic Groups in International Relations (Aldershot, 1991).
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figures as the brutal climax of a longstanding Polish program of ethnic cleansing.28
Many Ukrainians who experienced deportation, like the few who managed to avoid this fate, concealed their national identity in the new conditions.29 In Przemysl, as elsewhere, many children where one or even both parents were Ukrainian learned only the Polish language and lost all contact with Ukrainian culture. Repression of Ukrainians was relaxed in 1956, however, when they became an officially designated minority, entitled to maintain their culture under the auspices of a national So-ciocultural Society that published a newspaper, sponsored a choir, and organized festivals. Branches of the association, including the one established in Przemysl, replicated these activities at the local level. With basic civil rights restored, it became possible for Ukrainians to return to their native region. Many could not return to their former homes and farms, for these had been allocated to Poles, and Przemysl became a popular alternative, a place where Ukrainians of diverse origins could start to build a new community. Many who made this move recall the risks and dangers. Some speak of a "blockade" by ethnic Poles, determined to prevent them from finding work and accommodation.
The Polish socialist authorities, anxious to present themselves as the legitimate representatives of the Polish nation, could not play a nationalist card against Russia directly, but they could and did do so against Ukraine, especially by emphasizing "terrorist" atrocities by UPA on the territory of the new Polish state up to 1947.30 The "cultural ordering" of socialist Poland was nationalist rather than socialist, even though official historiography was restrained in comparison with some other cases.31 Strong diaspora groups helped to sustain this ordering, which was underpinned by the Roman Catholic Church and enormously boosted by the election of Karol Wojtyla to the papacy in 1978 and his regular "pilgrimages" to his native land thereafter. In the last decade of socialism, the symbols and rituals developed by the Solidarity movement confirmed that
28. Although the Polish Senate went some way toward condemning Akcja Wisla in 1990, it has not yet been fully "delegalized" by the postsocialist state. This fact was often noted in 1997, the year of its fiftieth anniversary, when it was widely commemorated by Ukrainians, but not by any public authorities. In Przemysl, plaques were mounted at the Ukrainian club and also at the Orthodox church. Disagreements between Polish and Ukrainian historians on the interpretation of Akcja Wisla and other events central to popular memory are listed in "Komunikat historykow polskich i ukrainskich na temat najnowszych dziejow obu narodow," Biuletyn Informacyjny Poludniowo-Wschodni In-stytut Naukowy w Przemyslu 2 (1996): 75-80. See also Wlodzimierz Mokry, ed., Probkmy Ukraincow w Polsce po wysiedlenczej ahcji "Wisla" 1947 rohu (Krakow, 1997).
29. These and more recent identity changes in the opposite direction have been examined in a number of villages in the vicinity of Przemysl by the sociologist Grzegorz Babinski, who emphasizes the close links between national identity and religious identity. See Babinski, Pogranicze polsko-ukrainskie: Etnicznosc, zroinicowanie religijne, tozsamosc (Krakow, 1997).
30. See various contributions to Peter J. Potichnyj, ed., Poland and Ukraine: Past and Present (Edmonton, 1980).
31. Cf. Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism.
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the vast majority of Polish citizens considered their pays reel, the source of their most powerful sources of identity, to be not the People's Republic but the Polish nation.32
Meanwhile the revival of a Greek Catholic parish in Przemysl (under the protection of the Roman Catholics) in the thaw of 1956 was one of the main attractions to returning Ukrainians. This church continued to serve as a vehicle for the expression of national identity. Its fate exemplified the differences between Polish and Soviet models of socialism. In Ukraine, Stalin had liquidated the Greek Catholics in 1946. History was rewritten and the Union of Brest was reclassified as an act of western imperialist aggression against the Orthodox Church. Greek Catholics were merged into Orthodox congregations, though some persisted in the so-called catacomb churches.33 In Poland most clergy were deported to the USSR in 1946, though a few continued to work "underground" after being dispersed with their parishes in the course of Akcja Wisla. The Greek Catholic bishops of Przemysl both died in Soviet camps. However, although Greek Catholics were denied official recognition in the People's Republic of Poland, they were not explicitly proscribed or actively persecuted. Their history was not so much rewritten as simply ignored. Some of the Church's property, including their cathedral in Przemysl, passed to the Roman Catholic Church (though it was reappropriated between 1952 and 1956, and the adjoining monastic buildings were used for a variety of secular purposes). Other Greek Catholic properties were transferred to the Orthodox Church, which continued the expansion it had begun in this region in the first half of the century. From 1956 most Ukrainians in Przemysl attended Greek Catholic services in a Roman Catholic building, the centrally located former Jesuit church, nowadays known as the garrison church, though a few joined an Orthodox parish when this was formed in 1984 and given use of another former Greek Catholic building on the city boundary.34 Both eastern Churches maintained a low profile; until the very end of the socialist period, only the Orthodox could organize their Jordan ceremonies publicly at the bank of the River San.35
It was not only in Przemysl and not only in the sphere of religion that the Ukrainian minority was constrained to maintain a low profile in the
32. For stimulating anthropological studies of symbols and rituals in socialist Poland, see Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park, Penn., 1994); Zdzislaw Mach, Symbols, Conflict and Identity: Essays in Political Anthropology (Albany, 1993).
33. Keleher, Passion and Resurrection; see also Bohdan Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939-1950 (Edmonton, 1996).
34. The socialist state consistently supported an institution that might take followers away from the dominant Roman Catholic Church. For some people, this made the Orthodox Church highly suspect; they were also repelled by its often marked Russian features. Yet for many Greek Catholics, conversion to Orthodoxy was preferable to attending regular Roman Catholic services, because the form and content of the Orthodox rituals were so much closer to their own.
35. These rituals on 19January correspond to the Latin Epiphany but are celebrated more prominently in the eastern Church. See Chris Hann, "Drama postkomunizmy," Eyudina i Svit 38, no. 4 (1998): 9-14.
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People's Republic: in political and social life they were almost invisible. Apart from the anti-Ukrainian stream that was allowed in popular culture, which focused on UPA terrorism, their past was ignored. In 1988 the Roman Catholic Church joined in the general celebrations of the millennium of the establishment of Christianity in Rus' by Prince Volodymyr. This was an important event in strengthening a sense of national identity among certain Ukrainians, but in some respects it served only as a reminder of divisions within the contemporary eastern Church between Orthodox and Greek Catholics. In short there was neither political nor religious unity in the minority community. The research of Polish social scientists indicated that the socialist state was a more successful "nationalizing state" than its predecessor; assimilation into the dominant Polish Roman Catholic society was the order of the day.36
Postsocialist Conflicts: The "Defense of the Carmelite Church"
Since 1989 a struggle over just one building has taken precedence over all other struggles concerning the politics of the past in Przemysl. I shall focus on this case in order to show how the analysis of nationalist discourse needs to be complemented by an investigation of concrete institutional factors.37
The political events of 1989 were substantially less dramatic in Poland than in neighboring countries: it is often forgotten that, as a result of the "roundtable talks" and compromises that were years in the making, Poland had a noncommunist government in office well before the collapse of walls and iron curtains elsewhere in the region. Like most Polish towns, Przemysl had a very active Citizens' Committee, pro-Solidarity and anticommunist, which triumphed in the local government elections of 1990.38 This quickly secured the replacement of a number of socialist and ex-socialist public officials, for example the county conservation officer, who was replaced on the specific grounds that he held no appropriate professional qualifications.
In addition to Citizens' Committees and political parties, new possibilities for participation in the public sphere were offered by special-purpose associations. Prominent among these were nationalist groupings
36. Ewa Nowicka, "Przyczynek do teorii etnicznich mniejszosci," in Hieronim Kubiak and Andrzej K. Paluch, eds., Zalozenia teorii asymilacji, (Wroclaw 1981); Andrzej Kwilecki, Lemkowie: Zagadnienie migracji i asymilacji (Warsaw, 1974).
37. The account that follows is based on later oral accounts and a considerable volume of local and national journalism. The most detailed narrative of events is that published by Stanislaw Zolkiewicz, one of the leading protagonists, in the regional newspaper Pogranicze between 22 October and 10 December 1991.
38. The Citizens' Committee list included a Ukrainian, a widely respected doctor. National identity issues seem to have played no role in the 1990 elections. This Ukrainian councillor was not reelected when he sought a second term in 1994, however, and since that time there has been no Ukrainian member. Right-wing parties (mainly Porozumienie Centrum and Konfederacja Polski Niepodleglej) have been the strongest forces in both local and national elections in Przemysl since 1993.
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and veterans' associations, which took advantage of virtually unrestricted media freedom to publicize all those issues it had not been possible to discuss publicly under socialism, notably the history of problematic relationships with eastern neighbors. Much was now published for the first time about atrocities committed by UPA and by Ukrainian sections of the Wehrmacht against innocent Polish civilians in wartime Wolhynia. Prominent in this work were the books of Wiktor Poliszczuk, whose accounts of Ukrainian nationalist violence were considered all the more authentic as they came from the pen of a Ukrainian author.39 The nationalism of the new Polish discourses fits well into the model outlined by Peter Niedermuller: the interwar period was presented as a period of positive development in the life of the nation, rudely interrupted by the war and then by socialism, following which the "purity" of the nation had to be newly asserted in all areas of social life.40
But expectations concerning the redress of old grievances were also raised among the Ukrainian minority. They focused on the injustices of Akcja Wisla in 1947, which could at last be openly discussed, and on religious freedoms. The latter issues were dominated by intractable property issues. The few Greek Catholic clergy were able to step out from the shadow of the Roman Catholic Church to voice their demands for autonomy and restitution. The Polish Pope had consistently upheld the right of the Greek Catholics to full equality with the Church of the Latin rite. Early in 1991 he appointed Iwan Martyniak to be the new Greek Catholic bishop of the ancient see of Przemysl. From this point on, the aspirations of the Greek Catholic community centered on regaining possession of their former cathedral, which had been transferred to the Roman Catholic Carmelites by the communists in 1946. Restitution had already been formally requested by the Greek Catholic cardinal in Rome.
As soon as Greek Catholic demands were articulated, however, a group of lay Roman Catholics formed an Association for the Defense of the Carmelite Church, which opposed any transfer of ownership to the Greek Catholics.41 This group could not deny that the building had been used by the Greek Catholics before the communists intervened in 1946, but it argued that, in this case, the simple course of erasing the evils of communism could not be followed. Their reason was that this church had formed part of a Roman Catholic Carmelite foundation between its foundation in 1630 and its suppression by Emperor Joseph II at the beginning of the Habsburg period. It was allocated to the Greek Catholics only in 1784, after they had refused the offer of the city's Jesuit
39. Poliszczuk's best-known work is Gorzka Prawda: Zbrodniczosc OUN-UPA (Warsaw, 1993). This and other books by Poliszczuk and by Polish authors holding similar views were widely available in Przemysl bookshops, which do not stock any materials in Ukrainian. Poliszczuk himself apparently lives in Canada, yet publishes principally in Polish.
40. Niedermuller, "Zeit, Geschichte, Vergangenheit."
41. The association had a total of thirty-three members, including four city councillors and six Solidarity activists. Fourteen members held a degree, most in the fields of engineering and economics.
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church, located on a less imposing site lower down the same central hill. Members of the Defense Association argued that this act of violent appropriation was contrary to natural justice, and to specific laws enacted by the Polish Republic in 1928. They insisted it had never received any legal sanction. Thus the Carmelites had been fully entitled to regain their former property in 1946—all the more so as this religious order had itself once again been the victim of illegal appropriation by the Soviet authorities in L'viv. The association even traced descendants of the founder's family, who issued public statements asserting that it would be disrespectful to them if the Carmelite church in Przemysl were to pass again into foreign hands.
The Greek Catholics offered a quite different interpretation of the past, emphasizing the elements that suited their case. The building was said to incorporate materials from an even older Orthodox church. They claimed that they had only abandoned construction of a new cathedral on another site because of a clear understanding, shared with Roman Catholics in the late eighteenth century, that the transfer of the former Carmelite church was irrevocable. Some Greek Catholics claimed in addition that the building had been legitimately purchased from the Austri-ans. They persuaded certain members of the founder's family to endorse their view that it should now belong to the eastern rite church. They also claimed that their ownership had been confirmed in a 1925 Vatican Concordat and was consistent with many other cases all over the world where a church founded by one rite of the Catholic Church had passed into the hands of another. Finally, in perhaps their most telling point, Greek Catholic Ukrainians emphasized that Roman Catholic Poles had not disputed this church's ownership when they had ample opportunity to do so, in the generation preceding its confiscation in 1946; therefore, despite all protestations to the contrary, the Defense Association was in effect seeking to profit from socialist immorality.
Each side was able to make a case in the realms of historical discourse, offering a blend of fact and interpretation. Practical outcomes, however, are determined elsewhere. At first it seemed that a compromise would prevail: the Papal Nuncio in Warsaw Jozef Kowalczyk, Polish Primate Jozef Glemp, and Archbishop of Przemysl Ignacy Tokarczuk agreed at a meeting with the newly appointed Greek Catholic bishop that the building should be returned to the Greek Catholics for a five-year period only; within this period the Greek Catholics were to set about building a new cathedral church, with Roman Catholic support. As soon as this compromise was made public the group of lay activists began to organize protest campaigns in the local media, which they later took to the streets. An elderly lady went on a hunger strike. Senior Roman Catholic clergy were accused of being KGB intelligence agents, others were condemned for refusing to hear the confessions of members of the Defense Association. Some junior clergy sympathized with the activists and helped to frustrate attempts to mediate in the dispute.
The protesters argued in the same "us" versus "them" terms that Solidarity had deployed successfully over the years against the socialist au-
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thorities, the difference being that "us" no longer referred to an all-inclusive "people" but to members of the Polish ethnic community. They argued not only that Poles had a legally clear-cut right to retain the Carmelite church, but that the city's Polish heritage was coming under a more general threat from Ukrainians. This issue of church property was central in fomenting a climate of mistrust in Przemyšl at the very time when the Pope himself was due to visit the city in June 1991. Eventually John Paul II had little choice but to back down when the activist group refused to end their occupation of the building. He left the former Greek Catholic cathedral in the hands of the Carmelites, but during his visit gave the minority the garrison church they had been using unofficially for many years, the former Jesuit Church (which they had rejected in 1781, in favor of the Carmelite building).
In these early postsocialist years in Przemyšl numerous other past events over which a veil had been drawn under communism were manipulated and contested. The Polish nationalists operated mainly through the instrument of their newly formed associations which, they claimed, represented the long suppressed voices of civil society. They had heavily overlapping memberships, were often far from civil in their operation, and drew their raison d'etre from the violence of the past. Claims to be representative of local society were rendered dubious by the fact that prominent leaders of these associations were not natives of Przemyšl but repatrianci, Poles "repatriated" from lands incorporated into Ukraine in 1945.42 The violence most commonly evoked as evidence of Ukrainian brutality was the violence that took place in Wolhynia, not violence in Przemyšl or any other region of contemporary Poland. The most aggressive of the new associations, however, was that formed to reerect the monument to the Przemyšl Eaglets of 1918. Its president, Stanislaw Zólkiewicz, was perhaps the most influential individual in Przemyšl in the early 1990s, though he never held any elected office. Too young to have participated in the events of the 1940s, his motivation apparently derived from childhood memories of Ukrainian terrorism, and from being a witness in 1950 in L'viv to Ukrainian desecration of the graves of the Poles who had defended the city in 1918-19.43
The Ukrainian minority was never in a position to compete in the local media or with the barricades and candlelit vigils organized by the defenders of the Carmelite church. Having lost that battle, however, they too looked continuously to the past and pursued claims for other items of property appropriated by socialists. They enjoyed some successes, though their principal claim, for the former bishop's palace which has served since the 1960s as the main state museum, has so far made no progress
42. Some say that many of these activists were members of the Communist Party before 1990, but I have not been able to verify this.
43. The expression of national memory in this cemetery has remained a source of concern on both sides; Ukrainians have recently reacted strongly to a Polish attempt to commemorate the Polish heroes who gave their lives "in defense of the Fatherland." For the interview with Zólkiewicz, see Zycie Przemyskie, 1 May 1996.
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in the courts.44 They also sought to commemorate those who had fallen in the struggle for an independent Ukraine, including those killed on Polish soil in the first years of the socialist period. Attempts to erect public monuments led to several conflicts with the authorities and, in one case, to the imposition of a heavy fine on a Greek Catholic priest. These initiatives were viewed as treasonable by the Polish activists, who opposed Ukrainian moves to have their men reburied in consecrated ground; in some cases graves had to be dug up secretly in the dead of night.
After the church controversy in 1991 the heady enthusiasms that had followed the end of socialism gave way to a climate of mistrust and intolerance. The city government came increasingly under the influence of Polish extremists who were determined to oppose initiatives from the capital to improve relations with Ukraine. The clearest example of friction between capital and periphery was the initiative taken by Warsaw in 1995 to move the biennial Ukrainian Cultural Festival to Przemysl from its usual location at Sopot on the Baltic coast. As with the decision of the religious hierarchy in the case of the Carmelite church, the officials failed to reckon with the strength of Polish nationalist opinion in the city. After a campaign that included the defacing of public posters advertising the festival and an arson attack on the Ukrainian Sociocultural Society, the festival eventually went ahead in an atmosphere of considerable tension, with a high security presence. The activists objected to public money being spent on such festivals. They tried to prevent its organization in Przemysl again in 1997, but were again overruled by Warsaw. They also attempted to prevent the organization of a Polish Cultural festival in L'viv in 1996, recognizing that such an event in the city which is often paired in the imagination with Przemysl would strengthen the claims of the Ukrainian minority in their own city.45
At the height of the festival controversy in 1995, Stanislaw Stepien, an ethnic Pole who has served since 1990 as director of the Southeast Scientific Institute, an independent and mostly western funded research institution that works to promote better interethnic relations, was stung by nationalist criticism to publish the following diagnosis of the local political climate under the title "We Should Not Stay Silent Any Longer":
Since the time of the infamous "Defense of the Carmelite Church" against Catholics of the Eastern rite, when . . . before the visit of the Holy Father in 1991 Przemysl walls were daubed with slogans like "Kowalczyk,
44. Some Poles argue that a church known as the Ukrainian Catholic Church can have no valid claim to property built and held by a Church with a quite different name when the region was under Austrian rule. The Association for the Defense of Polish Property specializes in property issues and is opposed to any form of foreign ownership. Its deputy head is a lawyer who also serves as a vice president of the city.
45. Another issue on which central and local governments have clashed concerns the Carpathian Euroregion, membership in which was strongly encouraged by the authorities in Warsaw. Nevertheless, the city council in Przemysl decided in 1995 that it was not in their interests to seek closer cultural or economic links with neighboring states. See C. M. Hann, "Nationalism and Civil Society in Central Europe," in Hall, ed., The State of the Nation.
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Glemp, and Tokarczuk have sold Poland to the Ukrainians," no one apart from Archbishop Tokarczuk has publicly condemned those who carried out and inspired those events. They therefore felt that they had avoided all sanction, indeed the present city authorities even began to reward them for their endeavors, while most people unfortunately acquiesced through their silence. Especially politicians in various offices were afraid of that small but noisy group, of being accused by them of a lack of patriotism, of not being real Poles [prawdziwymi Polakami], or, heaven forbid, of having some Ukrainian ancestors.
This wrong, which went publicly uncorrected, has led to a situation in which that group, which styles itself "patriotic," has effectively terrorized a city of 70,000 people. Usurping for itself the right to speak in the name of the whole of society, it has imposed its own representatives on various public bodies. It denigrates parliamentarians, state officials, clergy, and scholars. It accuses scientific research institutes of "falsifying the history of Poland."46
Contestation of the past was carried out in a rapidly changing present, in which mundane changes in the economic sphere were of great importance. For the first time in half a century Ukrainians became visible and audible in Przemysl as a result of the liberalization of cross-border travel and, in particular, of regulations governing petty trade. People traveled from all over Ukraine and even further afield to sell and buy at a bazaar said at its peak in the early 1990s to be second in size only to that of the capital. Small-scale commerce fitted in well with the new precepts of freedom and market economy. It certainly offered a badly needed economic lifeline to a city in which many socialist enterprises were being closed; for this reason the petty commerce was condoned as a somewhat disagreeable necessity, even by the more nationalist Poles who did not like to see so many foreigners in their city. The authorities in Warsaw and their western advisers expected new trading partnerships to produce positive social benefits. No doubt some such benefits have accrued, but petty trade of the sort unleashed throughout the regions bordering on the former Soviet Union also carries dangers. The conditions of the markets and the traders often left much to be desired (few could afford to stay in hotels, and in any case Przemysl at this time had no hotels to offer them), as did the quality of the goods they sold. The influx of Ukrainian traders and wild rumors about "mafias" tended to confirm the negative images long harbored by many Poles. Since the numbers of Poles who took advantage of opportunities to travel eastward was much smaller, it is doubtful whether the new economic circumstances did much to improve intercultural understanding. On the other hand, the new phenomenon of mass unemployment created a reservoir of discontented people, especially among the young, who were susceptible to the rhetoric of extremists.47
46. "Dhizej milczec nie wolno," ZyciePrzemyskie, 17June 1995 (emphasis in original).
47. Przemysl Ukrainians believe that anti-Ukrainian graffiti writing and the more serious outbursts of violence in recent years, such as arson attacks at their Ukrainian
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Although some controversy has also surrounded other buildings, the Carmelite church has remained the principal symbolic focus for the minority issue. Having won the main battle in 1991, the nationalists made various alterations to the interior to highlight its Polish affiliation. One wall was covered with a large map of Poland with its pre-1939 boundaries and a plaque that features the Polish national eagle with a swastika in one claw and Ukraine's national symbol in the other. The text underneath reads: "To the innocent Polish population barbarously murdered by UPA bands in the southeast borderlands of the Republic in the years 1942-48," followed by the signature of Stanislaw Zolkiewicz.
In 1992 the Carmelite clergy, supported by the nationalists, began an attempt to transform the exterior of the church by removing the tower and dome that were added in the nineteenth century by the Greek Catholics. At first the county conservation officer gave his permission and demolition commenced. He then changed his mind, only to be accused of pro-Ukrainian bias and in effect hounded out of office after the 1993 elections by a coalition of nationalists and ex-socialists. The issue simmered while a successor was appointed. Eventually the job went to the previous, ex-communist incumbent, who to no one's great surprise acceded to nationalist demands. Permission was denied by the Ministry in Warsaw, however, and for several years the remnants of the great dome provided a conspicuous reminder on the skyline of the tradition that the Polish activists wished to obliterate, a symbol of Ukrainian culture in the city, even if the building would never again be theirs.
The dome was finally demolished in 1996, the 400th anniversary of the creation of the Greek Catholic Church in this region, in circumstances that again highlighted the tension between the city government and the authorities in the capital. To the earlier historical justifications a new one was now added in public discourse on the Polish side: the claim that the canon law of the Carmelites prevented any building belonging to them from being adorned with any form of tower or dome. Hence the dome would have to come down, irrespective of what the secular authorities might have to say. Against this, the national conservation officer insisted that state conservation law had priority over any such canon law. Various Polish "experts" declared that the dome was structurally unsound (no one took this argument very seriously—even if true, this could have been remedied) and that it did not harmonize architecturally with the rest of the building. No one asked the Ukrainians for their opinion.
As with the earlier conflicts in 1991, these various strands of discourse were rendered brusquely irrelevant by direct action.48 In scenes that read
Sociocultural Society and at the Southeast Scientific Institute, are the work of "hooligan youth" but that these eruptions are encouraged and funded by their elders. Anti-Ukrainian prejudice among Przemysl schoolchildren has been noted by the Rzeszow sociologist Jerzyjestal, "Stereotyp Ukrainca w swiadomosci mtodziezy Polski poludniowo-wschodniej," Fraza 4 (1995): 89-97.
48. Comparisons can be drawn with long-running conflicts over the Transfiguration Church in Cluj, Transylvania, where a different constellation of forces led to a differ-
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in media accounts like high farce, the county conservation officer, after ordering that demolition proceed, hid himself away from his office so as not to be able to take the countermanding call that he knew would be made from the Ministry in Warsaw. The Carmelite clergy and demolition workers sealed themselves off from the world, as had the occupiers of the church in 1991, in order to be able to ignore last-minute instructions to desist. A year later, apparently in disregard of their own canon law, the Carmelites erected an elegant new tower in place of the demolished dome. Thwarted, the national conservation officer in Warsaw had to content himself with the observation that the dome, far from being Eastern Orthodox in character, had in fact been modeled on St. Peter's in Rome. To a foreigner the new tower might even be thought to have a more distinctive oriental character than the dome it has replaced. But that is not how these matters are perceived by either the Polish or the Ukrainian community in Przemysl.49
Some Ukrainians wept when the dome was dismantled, but they felt powerless to influence the course of events at any stage. Questioned about responsibility, some agreed that only a tiny minority of the Polish population were responsible. Others gave more thoughtful answers, arguing that this active minority were giving expression to prejudices that were deep and widespread throughout the Polish population. Although their bishop has decided not to question the Pope's gift establishing the former Jesuit church as their cathedral on a permanent basis, and major redecoration of this building was completed in 1997, some Greek Catholics still do not feel at home in this church. Confrontation is continuing in 1998 over plans to erect a new bell tower and to remove the Jesuit symbol and Latin inscription from the facade of the building.50
ent solution. After lengthy legal processes, this church was finally returned to the Greek Catholics in March 1998, but here too direct action played a role in finally forcing the Orthodox to concede the building. Religious buildings have of course been recognized as vital cultural property elsewhere in postsocialist eastern Europe, notably in the targeting of mosques during the fighting in Bosnia. See Robert Donia and John V. A. Fine, Jr., Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (London, 1994).
49. This account of the last phase in the recent transformation of the Carmelite church is based largely on the article by Jagienka Wilczak, "Spor w rozbiorce," Polityka, 7 December 1996, 30-32.
50. For details, see the somewhat one-sided presentation by Agnieszka Niemiec, "Akt adaptacji czy wyrok zniszczenia? Spory o przebudowe przemyskiej katedry," Architektura, 1998, no. 2:68-69. The journalist cites three Polish "experts" who all agree that Ukrainian proposals to alter the exterior of the former Jesuit church are contrary to conservation codes. One adds that such alteration would be contrary to ecumenical aspirations. Whereas some Poles justify the demolition at the Carmelite church on the grounds that the addition of the dome in the nineteenth century was an alteration of the original building, Greek Catholics point out that the Latin inscription they now wish to remove from the Jesuit church was added at the time of major renovation in 1900. The Polish reply to this, as reported by Niemiec, is that this inscription is not merely a name on the church but a religious invocation to God that bears witness both to the Roman Catholic origin of the building and to the sacrifices made by the people of Przemysl in renovating it at the turn of the century. She adds an unsupported assertion: "Among the inhabitants of Przemysl the memory of that social action is still living" (69).
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Although the church was given to the Ukrainians by the Pope himself, they know that many Poles still consider it a Polish church (kosciol). Some therefore favor a return to the plan of erecting a new cathedral, a cerkiew with an explicitly eastern design and acoustics better adapted to eastern hymns, which would be undeniably "ours."51
Conclusions: Prospects for Polytacticity
Peter Niedermuller refers several times to Poland in his review of the role of history in postsocialist discourse strategies.52 The strategies that he labels "renovation" and "reconstruction" imply that the postsocialist national community can resume an earlier trajectory, can rebuild on basically unproblematic presocialist foundations. However, Niedermuller pays litde attention to the concrete institutional contexts which become crucial when one moral principle, the provision of restitution or compensation to all those who suffered unjustly at the hands of socialist power-holders, comes into conflict with an even stronger principle, that which attaches the highest moral worth to the Polish nation and the Roman Catholic Church. This is what has happened since 1989 in Przemysl. The usual strategy of "renovation" was trumped in this case by the evocation of an earlier wrong done to the Polish side. The motivation for evoking an unjustifiable appropriation in 1784 lay in memories and media evocations of acts of violence committed this century between Poles and Ukrainians.
Many Poles in Przemysl concede that the Ukrainian, Greek Catholic minority also suffered wrongs under communism. According to their rationalization, however, compensating this group materially is not warranted, because this would involve returning more real estate than the present minority population could possibly use (similar arguments are sometimes advanced in the Jewish case). To provide full compensation would now threaten the "Polish character of the city" and make it an attractive place for Ukrainian migration. Such views compete with other views, such as the pluralist multiculturalist view according to which, although the city now lies unambiguously within the Polish state and has a predominantly Roman Catholic Polish population, the rights of linguistic and religious minorities should be respected and actively cultivated. Almost all Poles agree, at least publicly, that the Ukrainian minority that exists in the city has a right to be there and to cultivate its traditions. But at the same time there are many Polish inhabitants who doggedly insist that this minority is very small and that "it should have no right to dictate to the majority."53
51. For further details of minority viewpoints in Przemysl, see Stanistaw Stepieh and Christopher Hann, eds., Tradycja i Toisamosc: Wywiady wsrod ukrainskiej mniejszosci etnicznej id Przemyslu (Przemysl, 1998).
52. Niedermuller, "Zeit, Geschichte, Vergangenheit."
53. For an example of this viewpoint, see the interview with Andrzej Matusiewicz, president of the city, in Zycie Przemyskie, 18 November 1992. He spoke as follows: "We
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There is a strong conviction among members of the Ukrainian minority that historically, primordially, all territory east of the San River and large districts west of it belonged to them. Following the deportations of the 1940s, most of the Ukrainians who were indigenous to what is now southeast Poland have been more or less integrated into other regions of Poland and Ukraine. The latter have no right of return and there is no evidence that the former will ever move back in large numbers to the Przemysl region, whatever compensation policies are adopted.54 Nonetheless, the Polish nationalists in the city profess concern. Both their discourses and their practices illustrate in extreme forms how the past can become a focus for controversy in the conditions of postsocialist democracy.
I have tried in this article to situate this Polish nationalism in a number of time frames, including the long-term and the postsocialist conjuncture. Long-term issues include the status of Ukraine as a sovereign nation and of the Greek Catholics as a hybrid of east and west. The basic story is a simple one: after many centuries of cultural pluralism, the dominant trend of this century in this part of central Europe has been to create culturally homogenous "nation states." In this region the most drastic steps to this end were taken in the 1940s. In the wider context the political culmination of this trend was the breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in the 1990s. But no matter how drastic the measures taken and how painful these separations, the goal of perfect congruence between political and cultural boundaries is always illusory. All over the region, and especially in "borderland" territories, there are minorities in analogous situations to the Greek Catholic Ukrainians of Przemysl. Many have managed to retain more complex identities than are now to be found in this region, where, as we have seen, pressures to make national identity coincide with religious affiliation long ago modified an earlier polytacticity. The very existence of such minorities serves as a reminder that national identity itself is a contingent phenomenon, which has developed in this part of the world relatively recently.
There are grounds for supposing that polytacticity may be making a comeback in some parts of eastern Europe, including Poland. Euro-regions and the relaxation of some customs controls are intended to contribute to greater movement across borders. More enlightened minor-
must answer the question: is Przemysl to be a town of both nations, that means of the Poles and the Ukrainians who live here, or is Przemysl to be a Polish town that observes minority rights. ... I am an advocate of the Polish character of this town—of course not in a nationalistic sense. There is in Przemysl a Ukrainian minority, it was here in the past, and it has a right to be here. Above all else, however, it must respect the law of the state in which it is living. It cannot be privileged just because it is a minority." Matusiewicz is a lawyer who acted on behalf of the Carmelites in the church controversy described above; he explains in this interview that his professional involvement in this case had no bearing on his position as president of the city.
54. This view is confirmed by the Przemysl Ukrainians themselves, almost all of whom have relatives settled in other places, including some who now speak only Polish and have been assimilated into the mainstream of Polish society.
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ity legislation, especially when supplemented by the financial resources necessary for educational and other cultural provision, may prove conducive to the reassertion of regional and local identities. The case of the Lemko-Ukrainians, at least some of whom seem able to reconcile the two strands of this identity, is but one of many illustrations of how this phenomenon is unfolding in Poland. On the other hand, policies enunciated by the new liberal elites in Warsaw may not be constructively implemented in the peripheral areas where most citizens of non-Polish ethnicity live; these policies cannot in themselves bring about greater tolerance toward minorities by the dominant group.
Janusz Mucha, one of the leading scholarly investigators of majority-minority relations in contemporary Poland, has recently sought to expand the terms of the discussion.55 By questioning the value of a distinction between ethnic or national minorities and other kinds of cultural minorities—the disabled, atheists, youth subcultures, even women—he in effect introduces a new, broader approach to polytacticity. It is an attractive approach with much to recommend it: for example, in terms of their impact on local public opinion, youth groups known as Skins and Punks have probably been as conspicuous in Przemysl in the 1990s as any public activities undertaken by the Ukrainian minority. This sort of differentiation into pressure groups and subcultures assumes that Polish society can be approached sociologically in basically the same way as, say, Britain or the United States. Moreover there is litde doubt that in some situations the Ukrainians of Przemysl will not identify themselves with the Ukrainian traders conspicuous in their marketplaces, but will feel instead that they have more in common with their Polish neighbors and workmates. In short, everyone, even the most committed members of ethnic and national groups, is to some extent polytactic in everyday life. Have I not exaggerated the importance of one strand in contemporary identities, implying that this is the only strand which matters?
Even supposing that I have not exaggerated the extent of ethnic polarization in Przemysl, there remains the issue of what general conclusions to draw from this case study.56 The Przemysl region is poorly understood in the rest of Poland, and this is at least partly due to the fact that its problems are remote from most Poles' daily experience. I do not pretend that the city is representative in this way. It may also be worth repeating that postsocialist powerholders in Warsaw have made numerous positive gestures toward ethnic minorities, and that in Przemysl itself the great majority of citizens have played no active part in fomenting eth-
55. Janusz Mucha, "Cultural Minorities and the Dominant Group in Poland: A General Overview," in Marek S. Szczepanski, ed., Ethnic Minorities and Ethnic Majority (Katowice, 1997); Mucha, "Mniejszosci kulturowe a grupa dominujaca w Polsce: Badania kul-turowe z perspektywy zbiorowosci mniejszosciowych," in Marek Dziewierski and Tomasz Nawrocki, eds., Grupa etniczna, region, tozsamosc kulturoioa (Katowice, 1997).
56. When I presented an earlier version of this article at a conference in Poland, some participants were politely dismissive. In the context of the present Polish state, they asserted, the problems affecting Greek Catholic Ukrainians in Przemysl were quite exceptional, a marginal phenomenon in the wider society.
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nic hatred. We might adopt a different perspective and suggest that, in comparison with the Yugoslav situation, Polish-Ukrainian relations have evolved very positively. Considering that, here as in the Balkans, direct and indirect memories of ethnic violence remain so widespread, one might marvel at the relative tranquility of this area. To take an optimistic view, the controversies that have arisen in the 1990s may be seen as the last efforts of an older generation to stir up trouble in changed political circumstances; as Poland's democracy is further stabilized, these problems can be expected to recede and the prospects for better relations with Ukrainians should improve.
Yes, maybe, but at the end of the first postsocialist decade Greek Catholic Ukrainians in Przemyšl still have good reasons to conclude that Polish nationalism is a dominant structuring force, not only in their city but more generally in Polish society, and that Ukrainians serve as this nationalism's most significant enemy or "other."57 Why else would hundreds, probably thousands of "mixed" families in Przemyšl continue to foreclose some of their polytactic options by denying that they have any Ukrainian ancestry?
The dominance of national identity among members of the minority community is shown in the fact that, though differentiated in terms of place of origin, occupation, and even religion, they all agree on the importance of marriage within the group, in order to be able to pass on what they see as their Ukrainian heritage. Since most of these people have previously lived and worked in other parts of Poland, their opinions, and the many negative experiences with Poles that they report, cannot be attributed entirely to the unique local environment in Przemyšl (though the recent conflicts here have undoubtedly strengthened their Ukrainian self-identification). In short, the events in Przemyšl have been unique, but they cannot be dismissed as the peculiarities of one city. They confirm patterns long evident in nationwide sociological surveys, which have not changed very much in the new political climate of the 1990s. Secure in the possession of their own national culture, Poles are almost entirely ignorant of the equivalent Ukrainian culture, and the popular images remain overwhelmingly unsympathetic.58 The cognitive map of most Poles has not accommodated Ukraine which, if it does not fall apart altogether, is at best expected to remain a backward eastern neighbor long after Poland has assumed her rightful place in the European Union. Poles are used to conceptualizing themselves as sandwiched between two powerful
57. Formerly this role was played more conspicuously by Jews. Although, as has often been noted, it is perfectly possible for anti-Semitism to linger and even to flourish without any significant presence of Jews, the virtually complete disappearance of Jews from cities such as Przemyšl has perhaps been a further factor in the canalization of hatred toward Ukrainians.
58. See the data analyzed by Aleksandra Jasmska-Kania, "Zmiany postaw Polaków wobec rôznych narodów i paňstw," in Jasiňska-Kania, ed., Bliscy i dakcy: Studia nad postawami wobec innych ras i group etnicznych, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1992), 219-46. It is true, however, that in recent years unwelcome immigration from the Balkans has caused Romanians and Gypsies to be viewed even more negatively than Ukrainians, while attitudes
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neighbors, and they have varying mixtures of hatred and respect for both Germans and Russians. For complex historical reasons, Ukraine simply does not fit. The problem facing Poland is not just how to deal with a minority numbering a few hundred thousand, but how to classify the 52 million citizens of a newly sovereign country, much of which they, Poles, once dominated.59 Until Poles come to terms with this history, a major constraint on postsocialist polytacticity in Przemysl will remain in place.
toward Jews/Israelis have somewhat softened. See "Stosunek naszego spoleczenstwa do innych nacji: Kommunikat z badan," Centrum Badania Opinii Spolecznej (November 1997). Many Poles excuse negative views toward Ukrainians with the claim that Ukrainians categorize Poles in precisely the same way. With the exception of a small group of extreme nationalists in western Ukraine, this is not the case: see Klaus Bachmann, "Na czym polega problem polsko-ukrainski," Rzeczpospolita, 27-28 September 1997, and further correspondence in the issue of 8-9 November.
One positive way to address the negative images held by Poles would be to follow the model set by the Polish-German Schoolbook Commission, which has, since the 1970s, helped both sides come to terms with a history of mutual mistrust and prejudice. See various contributions to Zwanzigjahre gemeinsame deutsch-folnische Schulbuchkomission: lieden aus Anlass der Festveranstaltung in Braunschweig am 10 Juni 1992 (Braunschweig, 1993). The recent "Komunikat historykow polskich i ukrainskich" issued jointly by Polish and Ukrainian historians seems to represent a useful beginning in this direction.
59. The history of Poland's domination of western Ukraine is too intricate to enter into here (for a recent balanced assessment, see Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine [Toronto, 1996]). In very general terms, this can be viewed as a problem of post-colonial recognition analogous to the problems faced by France in Algeria or by England in Ireland.