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Polak (polonus, polanus, polenus were the commonly used medieval Latin forms) derives from Pole, plain - the land of the Polanie, living in the basin of the middle Warta river, in the western part of modern-day Poland.
What linked the Polanie to their neighbours and to so many peoples of the great Eurasian plain was language - slowo - the word: those who spoke intelligebly to one another were Slowianie, Sclavinii, Slavs.
The "Dump Ones" took so many Slavic tribesmen captive that their chronicles were able to more than hold their own in the insult trade: sclavus replaced servus as the latin word for "slave".
Linguistic community did not mean political solidarity. The Slav tribes of the lands between the Elbe and the Oder were as likely to be in conflict with their Polish/Silesian/Czech neighbours of the east as with incomers from the west.
In 965, the knez, the prince of the Polanie, Mieszko I, thwarted a troublesome alliance between the Christian Czech and his pagan, Slav neighbours to the west by his marriage to Dobrava, daughter of duke Boleslav I of Bohemia.
Most of the early clergy who came to Poland were German; Mieszko and his successors were as willing to conclude marriage alliances with the great families of the Empire as with the ruling dynasties of Scandinavia, Hungary and the Rus' lands.
Valiant (992-1026) extended the Piast realm to the Carpathian mountains.
In 1018, too, Boleslaw intervened in Kyiv, to secure his brother-in-law, Sviatopolk, on its throne.
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Chrobry's protege, Sviatopolk, was driven out of Kyiv by his brother, Yaroslav "the wise", as soon as polish forces withdrew.
Mieszko II's son, Casimir (Kazimierz) "the Restorer" (1039-58), needed at least 15 years to stitchhis lands back together with Imperial and Kyivan help.
Few, if any, of the Slav tribes east of the Elbe accepted Christianity gracefully.
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Boleslaw II emulated Chrobry in his forays into Kyiv, Bohemia and Hungary.
Boleslaw III too, tried to solve the problem of the succession, this time in more civilized fashion, in his testament of 1138, by borrowing fron Kyivan practice: overall political authority would be vested in the princeps, the eldest of his five sons.
This expediment proved no more successful than in the Kyivan state.
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The troubled situation in the south-east, in the lands of Rus'. After reign of Yaroslav I the Wise (1019-54), the one-great principality of Kyiv had undergone its own dynastic fragmentation. The mongol onslaughts of 1237-40 had savaged these lands even more viciously than Poland. The successor-states of Kyivan Rus' were largely reduced to tributaries of the Golden Horde, established in the Eurasian steppes.
In 1338, Boleslaw-Iurii, the childless ruler of the two westernmost principalities of Halych and Volodymir, and a scion of the Masovian Piasts, recognized Casimir as his heir; two years later his chief nobles poisoned him.
The fertile Rus' principalities, straddling the great east-west overland trade route from Germany to the Black Sea.
Invasion of 1340 may have been prompted by the very real fear that the Tatars would impose their direct rule in the "regnum Galiciae et Lodomeriae". the Kingdom of Halych and Volodymir".
Casimir held the south, centred on the town of L'viv (Lwow/Lemberg/Leopolis).
Poland's Rus' lands remained separate from the rest of the Crown.
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The Rus' lands, Wielkopolska and the territories around Krakow and Samdomierz were to pass to Louis of Hungary.
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In 1377 Louis incorporated Polish Rus' into Hungary.
What linguists call "middle belorussian" prevailed in the governments chancelleries, albeit with admixtures of native lithuanian and latin.
Hungary helped Jadwiga to recover the Rus' territories transferred by her father from Poland.
Chronic strains dogged their relationship, not least over the possession of the southern Rus' territories of Podole and Volhynia.
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Vytautas' grandiose hopes of securing mastery of the whole of old Rus' ended in disaster in 1399 when the Mongols of the Golden Horde destroyed his army on the Vorskla river.
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After 1422, Vytautas had returned to his hopes of subordinating the lands of Rus' to his rule. As the tatars of the Golden Horde squabbled among themselves, the principality of Moscow emerged as the greatest obstacle to his ambitions. The adoption of latin christianity drove a wedge between native lithuanians - who gravitated towards catholicism - and the majority of their Rus' subjects. The gradual percolation of polish-style rights and privileges ought to have had its own attractions for the Rus' nobility. To orthodox nobles, taking service with Moscow often seemed to offer a more promising path of advancement. To the grand princes of Moscow, Catholic rule in Lithuania provided the perfect pretext for seeking to recover the Rus' lands ruled from Vilnius. Casimir IV managed, by and large, to preserve good relations with Muscovy. On his death in 1492, Ivan III unleashed open war.
The comparatively loose military organization of the Grand Duchy, composed of the retinues of great magnates and princes, the pospolite ruszenie and all too few mercenaries, could not cope with the forces the much more centralized Muscovite state could mobilize. Its eastern border in 1492 was less than a hundred miles from Moscow, but some 400 from Vilnius; after the catastrophic loss of Smolensk in july 1514, it was pushed back to around half that distance. Polish troops and funding helped the lithuanians to victory at Orsa in september 1514, but they could not recover Smolensk. The lands around Homel, restored by Moscow in march 1537, were little more than a fleabite in Lithuania's losses. Respite came largely as a result of Ivan IV's internal preoccupations and his distractions against the tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. Though Livonia grew rich on trade and tolls from Lithuania and Muscovy. It was all very tempting for Ivan IV, who regarded Livonia as part of his Rurikid inheritance.
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In 1558, the Moscovians captured Narva and Dorpat, in 1560 the strategically central town of Fehlin.
Lithuanian victory over the Moscovians on the river Ula in 1565.
From july 1566 more lithuanian territory than ever was under Moscovians occupation.
Krakow, Lwow or Poznan were content with their individual privileges.
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The first printing-press had been set up in Krakow in 1476; the very first Cyrillic (ruthenian) printed texts were published there in 1491.
Most Sejmy did vote funds for the obrona potoczna, the general defence force based around the fortress of Kamieniec Podolski on the Crown's south-eastern border. Lawless settlements of Cossacks gave the tatars as good as they received. The sejm of 1508 agreed, for the first time, to financial help for Lithuania against Moscow.
Exponents of Reformation could be found virtually anywhere from the Silesian border to the depths of the Ukraine.
Sigismunds failure to sire an heir and the manifest incapacity of Lithuania alone to withstand Muscovy undermined the rationale for maintaining the separation of the Crown and the Grand Duchy.
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The polish written and spoken word was, by the late 15th century, making rapid progress among Lithuania's elites, to produce a fascinating written and spoken linguistic hybrid of belorussian, lithuanian, latin and polish. Cultural polonization was certainly not opposed by Lithuanian elites; many, not least Rus' orthodox, positively embraced it as a channel to a more sophisticated western European culture.
The constant presence during the Muscovite wars of polish troops, drawn mainly from the szlachta, served to familiarize their lithuanian counterparts with polish ideas and institutions. Sigismund Augustus' privilege of Vilnius of july 1563 aimed to win round orthodox nobles by restoring their access to offices on the hospodar's council.
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When most of the Lithuanian representation walked out on 1 march, Sigismund angrily announced the incorporation of Volhynia and Podlasie, part of Lithuania's Rus' lands, into the Crown.
On 6 june, the royal chancellery announced the incorporation of the sprawling palatinate of Kyiv, with the overwhelming approval of the local nobility.
As enemies of freedom second only to the tsars of Muscovy. The Executionist leaders were content to protect the gains of 1569. Rather than vote extraordinary subsidies for the Russian war, the szlachta settled for a three-year truce with Muscovy in june 1570. Polotsk remained in Ivan IV's hands.
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January 1573 financial and military support for Poland-Lithuania in the Muscovite war.
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Signal victories such as Kircholm over the Swedes in 1605 or Cudnow over the Russians in 1660 went to waste troops mutinied over arrears.
The origin myth of a common, "Sarmatian" ancestry, assiduously propagated by humanist writers, allowed very different groups to merge their identities into a wider whole - provided they were nobles. To the disgust of later nationalists, Lithuanians and Ruteni, Rusini (nowadays Belorussians and Ukrainians) could regard themselves as "Poles" because they were also "Sarmatians". Integration had mixed success in the Ukraine. Pride in the traditions of Kyivan Rus' could not always accommodate itself within the framework of the Rzeczpospolita. When, in 1608, Catholic heirs closed Prince Konstantyn Ostrogski's Academy at Ostrog, Orthodoxy lost its only school capable of competing with Jesuit colleges or Protestant gymnasia. The decision, in 1596, by a majority of the Orthodox bishops at Brest, in Lithuania, to unite with Rome, was prompted by more then Catholic pressure or fear of the increasingly hostile patriarchate of Constantinople or the new patriarchate of Moscow. To some, at least, of the "Uniate" bishops, the only means of restoring spirituality and intellectual credibility to the Orthodox religious tradition, even, indeed, of the preservation of a distinct cultural identity, lay in borrowing from the Latin West.
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The Union provoked enormous hostility among the Orthodox laity and clergy. In 1620, the patriarch of Jerusalem surreptitiously consecrated a number of Orthodox bishops.
The campaigns of Stefan Batory between 1578 and 1582 reversed the territorial gains notched up by Ivan IV, securing Livonia and Polotsk.
Intervention in Russia during the later reign of Boris Godunov and the "Time of Troubles" saw a Polish-backed pretender briefly placed on the Muscovite throne in May 1606. In 1610, Russian boyars elected Sigismund's 15-year-old son, Wladyslaw, as tsar. Though the prince never entered Moscow, the city received a Polish garrison in September 1610, which, in the face of a massive uprising, held out in the Kremlin until October 1611. The election of Michael Romanov in March 1613 gave the Russians a ruler around whom to unite, but it was years before Polish troops and "Cossack freebooters" were cleared from Russian soil. In 1618, Russia acknowledged Polish possession of Smolensk. Michael Romanov's attempt to recapture it during the "Smolensk war" of 1632-4 ended in humiliation. The "Perpetual" peace of Polanovo of June 1634 left Smolensk in Polish hands.
The Russian avdenture of 1606 was begun by irresponsible grandees seeking to exploit the disorders of Boris Godunov's reign.
Unofficial, destructive raids by Poland's Cossacks against Turkish possessions on the Black Sea aggravated matters. The 1620 expedition under Crown grand hetman (military commander) Stanislaw Zolkiewski, to keep a friendly hospodar on the Moldavian throne, suffered a crushing defeat at Turkish hands at Cecora.
Stefan Batory did not fight just to repel Muscovite invasion. The reduction of Muscovy to a dependency was a necessary step. The Sejm refused to endorse his plans for resuming the Russian was in 1584.
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A frustated Wladyslaw looked to the Cossacks of the Ukraine. Sigismund Augustus had used these lawless frontiersmen as a counter-force to the perpetual Tatar raids. Batory had made use of their sterling infantry. In their stronghold of Sicz, on the lower Dnipro, they elected their own hetman and army council. They fought the Tatars; they raided the Black Sea littoral. In 1614 they attacked Trebizond and Sinope; in 1615, they burned the suburbs of Constantinople. The Sejm had agreed to "register" and pay those in the Commonwealth's direct military service - but this accounted for only a fraction of those who regarded themselves as Cossacks. The szlachta spurned the aspirations of those on the register to be counted as nobles. The drive to exploit the fertile soils of the Ukraine, "Polands Indies", and the systematic imposition of labourservices provoked a series of uprisings, suppressed with increasing difficulty. After the defeat of the 1637 rising, the Cossacks were formally degraded to "a commonality of peasants", save for a register of 6000.
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Undeterred, Wladyslaw cut a secret deal with the Cossacks. He would double their register to 12000 and grant near-autonomy to the Ukraine if only they would help provoke a conflict with the Turkey's vassals, the Crimean Tatars.
The powder-keg of the Ukraine had already exploded. A private feud between a polish official and Bohdan Khmel'nytskyi, one of those party of the clandestine dealings with the king, escalated beyond all control. Much of the Crown army was wiped out in May 1648; hurriedly reconstituted, bolstered by private militias, placed under the orders of a demoralisingly divided committee of squabbling nobles, if fled in panic before a joint Tatar-Cossack force in September. Khmel'nytskyi, far from provoking the Tatars, looked at their support - though they were not prepared to allow him to become too powerful. His periodic bids to impose control over Moldavia were bound to such in the Turks. Whether he wanted an independent Ukraine, or a looser relationship with his more powerful neighbours, remains uncertain. He could scarcely control the forces he had unleashed. At its height, his rebellion numbered some 150000 armed men, mainly peasants who loathed their polish masters and the jews who dominated much of the Ukrainian commerce as the szlachta's economic agents. The swing of the pendulum in the poles' favour, marked by the victory of Wladyslaw's successor and half-brother, John II Casimir, at Beresteczko, in june 1651, was nullified by the massacre of moset of the polish regular army at Batoh a year later. The hitherto cautious Russians now seized their chance. In january 1654, by the Union of Pereiaslav, the Ukraine placed itself under Tsar Alexei's protection. An irresistible Russian invasion followed. By august 1655, most of Lithuania was overrun. The Russian advance precipitated an invasion by Charles X of Sweden, alarmed by its implications for his Baltic position. With the fall of Warsaw in September to Charles; with mass defections among the polish nobility; and with John Casimir's flight to Silesia, the Commonwealth seemed about to disintegrate. Indeed, at Radnot in Hungary, on 6 december 1656, Sweden and Transylvania agreed to carve up the Commonwealth between themselves, the Ukraine and Brandenburg.
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Poland survived the "Deluge" - Potop - of invasions. The brutality of the over-extended Swedish and Muscovite forces provoked a major national uprising, embracing every level of society.
The struggle with Russia had resumed. Khmel'nytskyi died in august 1657. His de facto successor, Ivan Vykhovskyi, himself of noble birth, judged that "liberty" could have no future under the tsars' rule. The accord of Hadziacz which he signed with Poland on 16 september 1658 would have created an autonomous principality of Rus', the equal of the Crown and Lithuania. Hadziacz, a direct challenge to the Union of Pereiaslav, made renewed was with Russian unavoidable. At the little village of Andrusovo in 1667, the exhausted protagonists concluded an armistice, to run for thirteen years. Smolensk and its hinterland remained in Russian hands. The Ukraine was partitioned: the territories east of the river Dnipro, with the addition of Kyiv - which the Russians promised to restore within two years (they never did) - remained under Russian control; the "right bank" Ukraine remained nominally polish.
The szlachta had borne the brunt of Khmel'nytskyi's fury. So too had their proteges, the jews, who dominated the commerce of Ukrainian settlements, in the wake of the szlachta's colonization drives. Though the figures remain hotly disputed, up to 10000 jews may have perished during the Cossack rebellion; many more would have been massacred without the protection of magnate militias. However, amid the decay of commercial and urban life, the jews, unconstrained by medieval guild regulations, more entrepreneurial, and actively encouraged by their noble patrons, were able to consolidate and to expand their already strong position in polish commercial life, particularly in the smaller townships. Even in the many royal towns which forbade jewish settlement, the christian guilds found themselves frequently on the defensive, as jewish traders settled in suburbs or noble-owned enclaves beyond municipal jurisdiction. Even in the polish Ukraine, the jews were rapidly restored. Nowhere in Europe were there so many jews as in Poland-Lithuania (around a million by the 1770s). But their dominance of much of commercial and economic life, their distinctive faith and culture, also gave rise to resentment, envy and hatreds which have never trully been excised.
The Swedish Lutheran and Russian Orthodox invasions were seen as a religious war.
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The Commonwealth's failure to reassert its position over the Ukraine combined with the opposition to the Vasa's supposedly absolutist intentions to break the back of Poland's aspirations to pre-eminence in eastern Europe.
The effects appeared starkly under John Casimir's successors. The mangate families which had backed french or austrian candidates would not forgive Michael Wisniowiecki's elevation, forced on them by szlachta gathered in unprecedented numbers for the election (80000 according to some observers). Disgusted by the improverished scion of a once great family, whose father had distinguished himself (more by brutality than effectiveness) in the wars against Khmel'nytskyi.
When, in 1672, Poland was invaded by the turks, it stood on the verge of civil war. Once Kamieniec Podolski fell and Lwow (Lviv/Lemberg/Leopolis) was besieged, polish negotiators had little choice but to capitulate. Podole and Kamieniec were ceded outright to the Porte; the right-bank Ukraine was placed under its overlordship.
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On 12 September 1683 polish king made only worse by relations with Muscovy. Between 1676 and 1681, Feodors government actually went to war against the turks in an unsuccessful bid to push them from the right-bank Ukraine and impose russian suzerainty.
The treaty of Moscow of 6 may 1686 finally ratified Andrusovo. Kyiv was definitely lost. Moreover, the russians secured the role of the protectors of the position of the Common-wealth's orthodox - in effect, giving the tsars the right to intervene in Poland's domestic affairs.
At least it obviated a russian invasion, but Moscow's ineffectual campaigns against the Crimean Tatars brought Poland no direct benefits.
Their expeditions helped weaken turkish resistance in the Balkans, but it was primarily thanks to imperaalist successes that the poles finally regained Kamieniec, Podole and the right-bank Ukraine at the peace of Carlowitz in January 1699 - after Sobielski's death.
In november 1700, the Sapiehas were resoundingly defeated by their rivals, but the hopes that Augustus had of exploiting their discomfiture were dashed by his own troops' miserable performance against the Swedes and the crushing rout of the russian army at Narva by Charles XII in the same month.
Peter was satisfied with what he extracted from Sweden at Nystad in 1721: Karelia, Ingria, Estonia and, most valuable of all, Livonia - once Poland's own. The Rzeczpospolita counted for so little that it did not even participate in the peace talks.
The so-called 'Silent Sejm' of 1 February 1717 confirmed the deal to Russia.
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The solution was simple: another Partition. Catherine's latest lover, Platon Zubov, and his friends were all too eager to enrich themselves with the polish Ukraine. The empress herself had gone fully native and decided that it was her historic mission to reunify the old Rus' lands, so many of which still lay inside the Rzeczpospolita's borders.
The brutal pantomime of the 1773-5 Sejm was repeated at the parliament summoned to the Lithuanian town of Grodno.
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This suited many landowners, especially in the southern Ukrainian districts, who looked with glee at the attractive prospects of exporting their grain through Odesa, the newly founded russian emporium on the Balck sea.
Most of the Greek Catholic Ukrainian peasants were obliged to return to the orthodox fold. The resulting contrast between the catholicism (both roman and unite) of the Lithuanian-Belorusian north and the orthodoxy of the Ukrainian south, was to contribute markedly to the shaping of very different regional attitudes to the polish national movement in the russian empire in the nineteenth century.
Old Galicia in the 1780s was now extended to New Galicia acquired in 1795.
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Confident that an honourable russo-polish reconciliation, underpinned ideologically by sentiments of Slavonic solidarity, was possible under Alexander.
The university of Wilno became a beacon of polish academis life and by far the largest university in the russian empire.
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Austrian Galicia continued to be administered by an imperial governor in Lwów/Lemberg and a german-speaking bureaucracy. Austrian law continued to operate, while a strict censorship and a loyalist church hierarchy further reinforced the political status quo. Wealthy landowners dominated the largely ineffectual provincial assembly. The province was both economically underdeveloped and financially exploited by the imperial government. It was only Austria's concern with russian successes against the turks in 1828 and 1829 that prompted Vienna to woo Galicia's nobles with a series of linguistic and cultural concessions. And despite a degree of government protection, the serfs of Galicia, whether Roman Catholic polish-speakers in the west or Unite Ukrainian-speakers in the east, saw no futher improvement in their condition.
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In 1839 the Greek Catholic church with its 2 million adherents was formally adsorbed by the russian orthodox church. In 1840 the Lithuanian legal code, the last functioning institutional link with the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was replaced by russian law, and in the south-western Ukraine governer-general bibikov zealously implemented the policy of reducing the legal status of the petty szlachta to that of one-dwelling peasants.
At the same time it needs to be borne in mind that the polish radicals and democrats saw in the Lithuanian-, Belorusian- and Ukrainian-speaking serfs of the western lands future equal citizens of a democratic polish nation embracing all the lands that had constituted the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772.
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Dembowski wandered through the villages of Galicia preaching his revolutionary gospel.
The continuing rumbles of discontent in the villages of Galicia and the Kingdom were interpreted by the democrats as evidence of an imminent revolutionary outburst that had to be channelled in the national cause.
Memories of the tragedy of 1846 were all too recent in Galicia. In Lwów invited the landed nobility voluntarily to abolish labour dues on Easter Sunday.
This time a 20,000-strong national guard was created; there were even talk of Galicia becoming a kind of Piedmont, an independent polish centre from which would proceed the liberation of the rest fo Poland.
Polish aspirations clashed in the east of Galicia with those of the young Ukrainian national movement, focused around the Uniate Church, which demanded imperial protection against the poles and the devision of Galicia along ethnic lines.
Province after province fell to the imperial forces, which eventually in November restored full control over Galicia. About 4000 polish fighters managed to escape across the Carpathian mountains to join the hungarians, who still dified the Habsburgs.
By the same token, the end of sefdom in Galicia was to begin the lengthy process of integrating the polish-speaking peasants there into a wider polish community. In the eastern part of that province Ukrainian national feeling was to prevail.
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Wielopolski was a conservative patriot who had participated in the anti-russian uprising of 1831 but who, under the impact of the horrors of the Galician jacquerie of 1846, had accepted the necessity of collaboration with russian empire.
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The insurrection engulfed much of Lithuania and western Belorusia but not hte Ukraine, while numerous volunteers crossed the border from Poznania and Galicia.
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Inhibited by still vivid memories of the jacquerie of 1846 and apprehensive about the Ukrainian national revival, the predominantly conservative polish leadership in Galicia contented itself with a limited degree of autonomy within the austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. In return for loyalty to Austria, control of Galicia's internal affairs was gradually transferred to the local polish elite.
A narrow class-based franchise ensured a landed and middle-class domination of the provincial Sejm in Lwów/Lviv/Lemberg, and of the Galician representation to the central austrian parliament.
It was a position easier to adopt under the Habsburgs' tolerant rule in Galicia than under the strict tsarist regime in Warsaw.
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Much less developed was Galicia with its dense patchwork of small and frequently subdivided peasant holdings, its abject rural poverty and its socially conservative elite. Until 1890 the province remained in debt to the central government in Vienna and was burdened by indemnity payments to landowners following the peasant emancipation of 1848. It trailed far behind industrialized Teschen Silesia as well as other western regions of Austria. At the beginning of the 20th century, out of a population of 7.3 million, Galicia had no more than 60,000 industrial workers. Its only significant industrial activity was the extraction of oil (over 5 per cent of world production in 1909) aound Boryslaw and Drohobycz in the south-east. Economic expansion did accelerate respectable size by 1910, with 207,000 and 174,000 inhabitants respectively.
In Ukraine west of the river Dnipro, substantial polish landed fortunes managed to survive; their owners, such as the Potockis or the Branickis, had the scope and resources to modernize their estates and to develop ancillary food industries, especially the highly profitable refining of beet-sugar. Until 1917 Kyiv was home to a large and thriving polish intelligentsia.
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Conservative clerical leaders among the Galician Ukrainians was successfully challenged by a younger radical group inspired by the writer Ivan Franko, which espoused the cause of an all-Ukrainian national identity, clearly distinct from russians and poles alike. Many polish and Ukrainian communities existed peacefully side by side under Habsburg rule, but the polish domination of Galicia's public life and the prevalence of polish-speaking landlords in eastern Galicia accentuated inter-ethnic and class resentments and eventually contributed to bitter mutual antagonism. A Ukrainian literary and cultural movement also emerged in the russian empire in the 1840s; its chief ideologist was Mykola Kostomarov and its leading bard Taras Shevchenko. A single Ukrainian literary language, based on the dialects of the Poltava and Kyiv regions, was eventually adopted by Ukrainian writers and publicists on both sides of the austro-russian border.
The Ukrainian language, for instance, was banned from russian schools in 1863, and from printing and publishing in 1876.
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The most outstanding among the Ukrainian socialists it was Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk.
Set in 17th century during poland's difficult wars against rebellious Cossacks and invading Swedes.
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Berlin recognized Ukrainian statehood, while austrians also agreed to create out of eastern Galicia a separate imperial Ukrainian crownland within the Dual Monarchy.
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In the south-east the poles destroyed the West Ukrainian Republic and occupied eastern Galicia.
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While retaining the contested east Galicia, Poland recognized the independence of Ukraine, and formed a military alliance with the Ukrainian government of Symon Petliura which was battling against the red army.
The poles and their Ukrainian ally launched their offensive on 25 April 1920; on 7 May they entered Kyiv. But the euphoria proved short-lived. The poles had underestimated bolshevik strength and overestimated popular support in Ukraine for Petliura.
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A law of 1924 promoting bilingual schools led to a drastic reduction of single-language Ukrainian schools in eastern Galicia; another law in the same year banned the use of the Ukrainian language in governmental agencies.
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The Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church under the outstanding leadership of Metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi, the extensive Ukrainian co-operative movement, and moderate Ukrainian political parties strove through legal means to protect Ukrainian cultural and economic interests. The horrors of Stalin's Henocide/Holodomor and collectivization in the Soviet Ukraine had also dissolved any attraction the USSR might have exerted on Poland's Ukrainians. However, despite some conciliatory gestures made by the polish government in the mid-1930s, instances of official anti-Ukrainian discrimination only hardened the bitterness of the increasingly assertive Ukrainians. Nationalist paramilitary groups turned to fight to undermine polish rule.
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At first the Soviets made strenuous efforts to win over the local non-polish populations by promoting the belorusian and Ukrainian languages, and by distributing confiscated landed estates among the peasants. Once effective control had been established, the Soviets launched an attack on all regions, dissolved Ukrainian co-operative movement, and arrested all local Ukrainian and Zionist leaders. In April 1940 Soviet-style collectivization was imposed. The entire population was now terrorized into obedience.
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After 1942 terrible atrocities occured in Volhynia, where local Ukrainian nationalists set out to cleanse the area of its remaining polish population, which brought about violent polish retaliation.
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And in the extreme south-east of the country the forcible eviction of the local Ukrainian population resulted in a brutal counter-insurgency campaign against nationalist Ukrainian partisans, who waged a forlorn struggle against communist-led polish and soviet forces.
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