What the past is for. Polish-Ukrainian memory politics and Putin’s war

Flag of Ukraine and Poland tied together during public demonstration to support Ukraine against Russian aggression. Photo: Wiola Wiaderek / Shutterstock

Made just over ten years after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, Kołakowski’s plea to know the past reflected a trend in post-communist politics. The nations, territories and states which inherited the legacies of Nazi and Soviet dual occupation, genocide, destruction and reconstruction were left with uncertain identities after decades of manipulated public life. Collective introspection had been substituted for the party-controlled memorialisation of politically advantageous historical narratives. How young states dealt, and are still dealing, with these legacies largely determined the outcome of their political development into the 21st century.

Integrating the past with the present

Polish Netflix shows often focus on the terror and trauma of Soviet and Nazi occupation and particularly in how they manifest in the present. This summer, the streets of Warsaw’s tourist district displayed an exhibition comparing children’s drawings of the war in Ukraine to those made by Polish children in the Second World War. Construction workers in Lublin recently uncovered a long-forgotten mural bearing the message Solidarność żyje (Solidarity lives). The question is in what form do these legacies live and how are they shaping the future? This is particularly the case in Polish-Ukrainian memory politics.  

Journalist Jeffrey Gettleman has written that the most challenging aspect of understanding the war in Ukraine is the question of “how to integrate the past with the present”. The war has been laden with many historical layers. For instance, this is clear in its continuity with the tradition of Russian imperialism and Putin’s own invocation of “Nazism” in his justification. Polish President Andrzej Duda even said that “history is repeating itself” in Ukraine. One such layer is Poland’s national embrace of Ukrainians and support for the Ukrainian military. In the 1990s public opinion polls found that Poland feared Ukraine more than any other neighbour, reflecting the lingering memory of the ethnic cleansing of 1943 led by Ukrainian nationalists under Stepan Bandera in Volhynia, and of competing Ukrainian and Polish nationalisms reaching back centuries. Yet Poland has contributed more to Ukraine’s sovereignty than any other country besides the United States and the United Kingdom. Its response to the refugee crisis has been so warm as to allow American Ambassador Mark Brzezinski to label Poland a “humanitarian superpower”.

This close relationship is in some ways not a surprise – Poland and Ukraine made great efforts following independence to set aside questions of historical trauma to affirm each other’s sovereignty. This readiness was accompanied by gradual historical reconciliation, as Poland moved towards European integration quickly, using its power in the West to diplomatically support Ukraine’s sovereignty in the East. In 2004 and 2014 Poland led international efforts to stand behind Ukrainian democracy. In 2014 it was a Polish diplomat, Radosław Sikorski, who led mediation efforts amidst the Maidan revolution despite the presence of Ukrainian nationalists celebrating Stepan Bandera on the Maidan. And yet this cultural alliance may be more fragile than it appears, particularly as the far-right Law and Justice party (PiS) has radicalised memory politics since coming to power in 2015. The government has increasingly lost the seemingly permanent social support of Western Europe, as it has flaunted EU norms and requirements. Trouble with national memory has begun to resurface in Polish society.

Yet, Poland’s younger generation has been so ready to support Ukraine in part because the post-communist Polish stance has been one of reconciliation. As this stance has shifted since 2015 towards a revitalisation of a mythical narrative of national martyrdom, suffering and heroic innocence, this reconciliation may prove temporary. While such memory politics will not likely put into question immediate support for Ukraine, it threatens the theoretical limits of Polish humanitarianism. This is due to its connections to nationalist political narratives, such as hatred of Russia or redemption in the face of the West.

Politicisations of the past

For a newly formed Polish Republic in the 1990s, moving beyond the legacies of genocide, Nazi occupation and Soviet-imposed oppression throughout the 20th century made historical identity a priority. Like the fellow post-communist states of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Ukraine, it created the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). Without parallel outside of the post-communist space, these groups are not only charged with establishing archives around national traumas and supporting historical research, but also with shaping public education around history and even prosecuting those found guilty of past crimes against the nation. The Polish institute has gained notoriety since 2015, after which the PiS leadership, led by Jarsoław Kaczyński, took advantage of the institution to radicalise their platform of Polish nationalism by promoting a myth of national innocence and oppression in the 20th century. Its increased activities often led to conflicts within the country, analogues of which are familiar in the West, like battles between state authorities and locals over the removal of statues originally built as Soviet monuments. The removal of Soviet statues is pursued by the IPN as part of its decommunisation campaign in public spaces.

However, much of its activities move beyond the question of symbolic memorial, allowing PiS to bring memory politics into education, diplomacy and the everyday running of the state. In 2020 Poland lifted the statute of limitations regarding communist-era crimes. This increased the prosecutorial powers of the IPN and allowed communist – often synonymous with Russian – oppression to drive contemporary discussions. This came as Duda said PiS aimed to “cleanse Poland of dirt”, particularly in its legal system. The claim of communist collaboration has been central to problems of judicial tampering, which have frustrated the European Union. In response, the PiS government has claimed that it is trying to “eliminate black sheep among judges”. PiS co-founder Kaczyński claims that courts are often staffed by “privileged groups” from “communist times”.

More threatening politicisations of the past by the highest levels of the Polish government have come in the form of public statements and the attempted control of traumatic political symbols. In July 2022, Poland’s education minister publicly suggested that only Polish tour guides should show the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial to visitors, including Israeli visitors, to avoid “distortions of the truth”. The government has also demanded over one trillion US dollars in reparations for damages from Germany with plans to ask the same of Russia. These are not merely cultural problems but geopolitical moves, strengthening the PiS model of authoritarian nationalism both at home and in Europe. As the EU has blocked billions in COVID-19 recovery funds for Poland and Hungary due to problems of judicial independence, Polish leaders have increasingly expanded their retrospective politics to include not only Russia, but Germany. Warsaw has suggested that Berlin’s hesitancy to support Poland and cut energy ties with Putin is in essence support for the war in Ukraine. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said that he will not let Germany “lecture us on democracy” and “spit in our face”, while Kaczyński has gone further, suggesting that if the EU does not fulfil its obligations towards Poland, then it has no reason to act friendly towards the EU.

Controversial policy

No discussion of PiS’s memory politics would be complete without its most internationally notorious move, in passing what became known as the “Holocaust Law” in 2018. This law made it a criminal offense to attribute crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany in Polish territory to the Polish nation, and although it was later modified to make such statements civil offenses punishable by fines rather than jail time, it still remains in place. The passing of the law was met with international outcry. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre labelled it “highly problematic” and suggested that the law “contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge”. Its targets have included scholars like Jan Tomasz Gross, whose work includes the book Neighbours, which revealed the history of Polish pogroms against Jews instigated by, but not committed by, the German occupying forces.

Even if the applications of the law were strictly limited to German crimes, it would still be historically inaccurate. As historian Edna Freiburg has written, the Nazi occupiers “drew upon Polish police forces and railroad personnel for logistical support, notably to guard ghettos where hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children were held before deportation to killing centres”. Even some nationalists fighting in the underground resistance, held to be the pinnacles of Polish martyrdom, helped Germans track down Jews and aided in the claiming of Jewish property by Poles. Indeed, institutional and individual complicity and collaboration were clearly present during the Nazi occupation. Jan Karski, a Pole who willingly entered Auschwitz to build its underground resistance, himself described Polish antisemitism as “ruthless, often without pity. A large part avails itself of the prerogatives that they have in the new situation … To some extent this brings the Poles closer to the Germans”.

To discuss these facts should not be held as unpatriotic. It remains true, as with most realities of genocide, occupation and terror perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin, that patterns of resistance and collaboration cannot fit into neat boxes. To acknowledge that thousands of Poles engaged in the Holocaust, as they also engaged in Soviet collaboration and rule, is not to negate the thousands that resisted, helped Jews and sacrificed themselves. However, approaching such choices as human decisions made by complex subjects is the starting point for understanding. As Kołakowski puts it, “our identity… [as] my own memory builds my personal identity, makes me a human subject.”

Painful reminiscence

While the Polish Home Army, or AK, is honoured as the primary armed resistance group against Nazi Germany, having led the heroic 1944 Warsaw Uprising, its relationship with Ukraine complicates its character. Historian Timothy Snyder has written that “the AK’s plans for a rising, as formulated in 1942, anticipated a war with Ukrainians for the ethnographically Ukrainian territories that fell within Poland’s pre-war boundaries. By 1942, the formation of sizable Polish partisan units in the east could not but remind Ukrainians of Polish territorial claims.”

Preparation for an ethnic war in what is now Western Ukraine was paralleled by Ukrainian nationalists, particularly the infamous Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgency Army, or UPA. The UPA was led by Stepan Bandera, a nationalist who had welcomed the Nazi invasion as an opportunity to create an ethnically homogenous and independent Ukraine. In anticipation of such a struggle, Bandera’s UPA led an ethnic cleansing of Western Ukraine, which claimed the lives of thousands of Poles, 40,000 of whom were killed between the spring and summer of 1943 alone.

Polish antagonism towards Ukraine has remained present in memory since these years, and led to the 1947 Operation Vistula, a state-led campaign to ethnically cleanse concentrated areas of Ukrainians, as well as other minority populations, across Poland in order to weaken their community identities. The operation, which forcibly moved about 140,000 Ukrainians, was not led by a Russified communist collaborator or traitor to the Polish nation but rather by General Stefan Mossor, who had fought with national hero Józef Piłsudski for Polish independence from Bolshevik forces two decades earlier, and who had only joined the communist party in 1945 in an attempt to support the Polish state.

The massacres of Poles by the UPA and Operation Vistula have been central to Polish memory politics before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The authors of the 2018 memory bill also accused Ukraine of honouring “criminal formations and a criminal ideology of integral Ukrainian nationalism” and of trying to distort the history of the 20th century. In this sense, we can understand how public opinion polls in the 1990s found that Ukrainians were the most feared neighbour among Poles.

How can we reconcile this emotionally charged relationship with the outpouring of humanitarian support since February for Ukrainian refugees and the country’s armed forces? How can Poland, which only four years ago was engaging in antagonistic ethnic memory politics with Ukraine, have come to a position in which the American ambassador in Warsaw has labelled it as a “humanitarian superpower?” We can begin to answer this by examining the generational divides among Polish memory visible in Polish art and political landscapes, to find a crossover between young Polish humanitarianism and far-right nationalism which has allowed such a united response to Ukraine. This response allows for both a promising future for less antagonistic memory politics, and a strengthening of the PiS narrative.

Two threads to the response

As mentioned, despite these contentious differences in memory, Polish-Ukrainian relations have remained close and notably strong in important national moments like 1991, 2004, 2014 and now in 2022. As is well known, since the outbreak of the war close to four million Ukrainian refugees have been allowed to enter Poland. Some have moved further into the EU, eventually returned to Ukraine, or remained indefinitely in the country, as is the case for 1.5 million of them. Many of these people have been given temporary homes by Polish civil society. As of July 2022, 600,000 refugees were receiving government monetary support. This reflects two aspects of Polish society: a generation of youth acclimated to supporting Ukrainian sovereignty with Polish compassion, and a national memory politics which allows humanitarianism, but only when it fits into a politically suitable narrative. In this case, it is hatred of Russia – the symbol of communist oppression – the fear of Eastern insecurity and the ability to reclaim itself in the eyes of the West.

The first of these strains is the more optimistic one. Plenty of young people in Poland care about supporting Ukraine solely because they see atrocities happening to people they care about and wish to help. Indeed, Brzezinski did not merely suggest that Polish people should be awarded the Time Person of the Year, in addition to Zelenskyy, but specifically young Poles. While the government has undertaken a large response, the true leaders of the humanitarian response are the civil society and NGOs. A young Polish political science student I have spoken with suggested that Polish support for Ukraine was not surprising, but that it had begun as soon as they gained independence in the 1990s, after which Poles acknowledged the need to affirm Ukraine and vice versa. While he acknowledged – with a grimace – that Bandera remained a national figure in Ukraine, he suggested that such nationalism was fairly empty for most Ukrainians, that they use the symbol without knowing its origins, to which they feel no connection. He predicted that these nationalist symbols have and will continue to become less central to discourse.

This reflects the diplomatic success of memory politics between Ukraine and Poland after independence, the ability to set aside contentious questions and move towards reconciliation. Young people in Poland only remember the Volhynia massacre through stories from their grandparents or great grandparents, just as those in Ukraine have only a mediated memory of Operation Vistula. This correlates with generational changes across Polish society. In 2021, 30 per cent of Poles between 18 and 34 years of age considered themselves to be “left-wing”, which was the first time that percentage was greater than “right-wing” or “centrist”, and the largest percentage since communist times. Only nine per cent viewed the Catholic church, central to PiS politics and Poland’s position as one of the most anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion states in Europe, favourably. This is indeed a generational change as the majority of the country remains right-wing and Catholic.

In this optimistic thread of analysing the Polish response to the war, 2022 is perhaps the greatest achievement in historical reconciliation following those of the 1990s, 2004 and 2014. It is also one which may help ingrain a political memory based on compassion rather than fear or hatred. As Jeffrey Gettleman wrote, “countries are living things that grow and change. They are shaped by their past but not chained to it, just like us.”

While the country has been politically unified in its support for Ukraine, this does not mean that generational divides have disappeared. Rather, Ukrainian compassion fits into the template of nationalism shaped by PiS memory politics, meaning that while it remains fruitful now, it is not the basis for an ongoing foreign policy of compassion. Many in the West have suspected that, after years of fighting with Brussels over its capacity to follow EU regulations, particularly judicial independence, Poland’s leading role in European efforts to aid Ukraine and move away from energy dependence on Russia has simply been an “opportunity to score some points in Brussels”. Some also hope that it reflects an inflection point of a move “for Poland back toward the liberal West”. However, others perhaps more insightfully, see that nationalism remains a component part of the government’s policy. Poland was recently found to be at the top of a list of countries with negative sentiment towards Russia – 94 per cent of Poles consider it to be a danger. This correlates with a country whose government has founded its support on revisiting communist trauma, and with a country in which 74 per cent of its inhabitants believe it has suffered more than any other nation. A recent New York Times article read that “the more significant factor in Poland’s welcoming attitude toward refugees, experts say, is that helping them feels like helping Ukraine’s struggle against Putin. And for many in Poland, that feels like self-defence.”

The difficulty of moving beyond the past

The above illustration reflects how these two interpretations of humanitarian help converge: as younger Poles increasingly shift away from nationalist politics, many of whom seem to hold few grudges against Ukraine, their support has overlapped with that of PiS and its supporters. While as recently as 2018 it described the Ukrainian state as possessing a “criminal ideology of integral Ukrainian nationalism”, Warsaw nonetheless gives the central role of national oppression to Russia, allowing support for Ukraine to become not a means of genuine reconciliation, but of building more upon a narrative of national endangerment.

The fact that this drives PiS’s response to the war is made clear by the disparity of its response to Middle Eastern refugees as opposed to those from Ukraine. In 2021, Poland allowed a migrant crisis to occur on its border with Belarus by refusing entry to several tens of thousands of refugees from conflicts in Central and Western Asia. Of course, these are groups removed from memory politics built on a hatred of Russia. Months later, it welcomed four million Ukrainian refugees even as it built a “border wall” in the north to exclude certain immigrants. Whilst this situation is supported by PiS and Poland at large, clearly these policies diverge strongly from each other.

In this sense, the unification of young Poles, increasingly moving away from support for the authoritarian and nationalist PiS, with the government on the issue of Ukraine becomes more dangerous, particularly when we ask more about the “redemption” which some say Poland seeks in the eyes of the EU. As far as PiS is concerned, this is not the redemption of a past conflict with Ukraine, nor a form of redemption for deviating from EU norms (which would suggest an acknowledgement of political wrongdoing). Duda, and particularly Kaczyński, have seen themselves rather as the vanguard of a different form of politics, along with Central European partner Hungary. Kaczyński flaunts EU regulation not because he sees no value in European integration at large, but rather because he sees the authoritarian-trending, illiberal nationalism of Poland and Hungary as a model of European government which will ultimately prove more resilient than liberal democracy. By leading the response to this humanitarian crisis, PiS’s redemption in this case therefore refers to something which readily supports Islamophobia, homophobia and right-wing politics.

In the long term, the war in Ukraine may reveal the fragility of the Polish values of historical reconciliation. In late July 2022, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany caused controversy over his claim that Stepan Bandera was “not a mass murderer of Poles and Jews”, leading to a frustrated Polish response and revealing the difficulty of moving beyond the past.

This year will be one of the most significant for developments in the millennium-long chain of Polish-Ukrainian relations. How will these years, in the words of Kołakowski, come to be viewed in future Polish subjectivities? There is good reason to hope that they will prove to signal a long-term enforcement of compassion and democratic support, not only towards European neighbours, but of these values themselves. However, there remains the possibility that some Poles remember it not as a moment when their country showed Europe how to care for fellow human beings, but as another stage in a national history of resisting Russian evil. This will only further justify nationalistic campaigns to “cleanse Poland of dirt”, to fight “the dictatorship of left-liberal views”, and to ask all Poles to “devote themselves entirely to their homeland”.

Daniel Edison studies Polish and Eastern European history at Yale University with a focus on intellectual, artistic and philosophical developments in the 20th century. His research specifically concentrates on the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas and the intellectual history of Polish democratic opposition under communism.

historical trauma, history, memory, Poland, Polish-Ukrainian relations, Ukraine