Ukraine & Poland: moving borders & people

A personal view of history repeating itself

Guest author, historian Vincent Ochs

There is a long history of trouble at Ukraine’s borders. The very name Ukraine means ‘border, frontier’ derived from the Old Russian oukraina. It was called that because

…it was the borderland or frontier zone of medieval Russia at the time of the Tartar invasion in the 13th century

This according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Ukraine

The current conflict with Russia is very much of a piece with a history of ethnic border conflicts with deep roots in European history.

My family roots are in Eastern Europe

As an historian who specializes in World War II whose ancestors came from East Prussia, I take a keen interest in the current political situation in Ukraine. I remember when my dad, a refugee whose family fled East Prussia ahead of the Red Army in 1944, came back from his only postwar visit to his homeland in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had visited Koenigsberg (now called Kaliningrad), where he had gone to school and tried in vain to find any trace of his grandfather’s estate at Metgethen, razed to the ground by the Russians. I will never forget his reply when I asked him how his trip went.

 ‘Vince, die Russen haben alles zur Sau gemacht’, which roughly translates as ‘the Russians have turned the entire place into a craphole’.

 He described how a once thriving agricultural region had disintegrated into a dysfunctional backwater with stinking sewers, bad hotels and inedible food.  I commented that in light of the then recent reconstitution of the Baltic republics, there was the potential for massive internal problems due to Stalin’s strategic moving of populations post-1945, a fact which he agreed would lead to future trouble.

 For instance, a large percentage of the population of Lithuania, on whose border my father was born, was ethnically Russian, and that this fact represented a serious potential problem for the new republic. Thirty years later a similar scenario is being played out in Ukraine. But it is another series of events during the summer of 1939 which have me shaking my head, as the glaring similarities with the current crisis in eastern Europe couldn’t be more troubling.

A bit of European history

A brief summary of the political situation that brought this about is in order. The overarching goal of the victorious powers in 1919 at Versailles was to shift the balance of power back to England and France at the expense of Germany. Job one was the creation of a buffer zone in the east in the shape of a reinvented Poland, with access to the sea via the port of Danzig. That this entailed cutting eastern Germany in half and leaving large German populations stranded under a hostile regime didn’t seem to faze the allied leaders, except perhaps for Marshal Foch. President Wilson also recognized the inherent danger of such a drastic redrawing of the map of Europe. In Peacemakers, the award winning Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan says that Poland at the end of the Second World War was a ‘strangely altered and shrunken Poland, emptied of its Jews by the Nazis and of its Germans by the Soviets, and moved 200 miles to the west’. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The same short-sighted thinking had also left huge ethnic German populations stranded in places like Czechoslovakia, the long-term implications of which weren’t taken seriously. Joseph Stalin may have been many things, most of them abhorrent, but he was certainly no idiot when it came to the strategic moving of populations to suit his ends. Hence the vast numbers of ethnic Russians who wound up in places like the Baltic Republics, where they could form a useful ethnic bulwark, and the enormous eastward deportations of anyone who represented a threat to the state or didn’t belong to an ethnicity that could be exploited for political gain.

 It’s always fraught to bring up Hitler in the conversation, but recent events in Ukraine compel me to do so. The events which led up to the invasion of Poland in September 1939 sound eerily familiar, particularly when comparing the narratives of the strong neighbor defending the rights of the persecuted ethnic minority. In Hitler’s case the German minority in Poland was under threat, although this isn’t a popular sentiment amongst historians, and in Putin’s case, it is the persecuted ethnic Russians of the Donbass region. If you believe the ‘western narrative’ as it was spun in 1938-39 or again during the current war, the two situations appear even more similar.

Spinning the facts to suit the western agenda

 Another glaring similarity is the western media spin which had sought to portray Poland in 1939 as a ‘democracy’, a particularly ridiculous notion when you consider that that regime was noted for its extreme antisemitism, a subject notably broached by the 1982 American film Sophie’s Choice. Today we are supposed to believe the shameless narrative that the west needs to defend ‘democracy’ in the least democratic of European states, Ukraine.  Hitler in his day and Putin today have been portrayed by western media and leaders as raving psychopaths with no mandate to wage their ‘unprovoked’ wars. This is typical war propaganda, which we seem to be swallowing as we always have. The reality is that western media have systematically ignored years of artillery shelling of Russian Ukrainian civilians by the Ukrainian army, the breaking of treaty obligations towards the ‘separatist’ regions, not to mention the overt and egregious meddling of the west and NATO in the region.

Volodymyr Zelensky, height 5’7”, 1 inch more than Napoleon

In a similar vein, there was widespread persecution of ethnic Germans by the governments of Poland, and Czechoslovakia, amongst others, a direct consequence of the reckless redrawing of the European map after 1919. There is a striking similarity to the situation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. To reduce a complex situation to a family metaphor, when a schoolyard bully picks on someone with a big brother, nobody should be surprised if he comes to the defense of his sibling.

A cornerstone of the current western justification for getting involved in this conflict, aside from the spurious ‘democracy’ claims, is the notion that the borders of Ukraine are somehow immovable, and the very thought of ceding territory to Russia is touted as treason. But this overheated discourse flies in the face of historical reality, namely that the boundaries of eastern European countries have been redrawn, for various reasons, time and again over the centuries. Take for example the confusing territorial history of Poland, a country which has run the gamut from powerful empire to non-existence to reconstitution on several occasions. Again the cynicism of the west is on full display. In 1938 it was deemed politically expedient to move the borders of Czechoslovakia, to incorporate the Sudetenland into Germany proper. One can endlessly argue about the failures of appeasement, the point is that when the ‘great powers’ deem it in their interest, they’re more than happy to move lines on a map.

Forgetting history is a dangerous business

It seems to me that the west is repeating the same cardinal mistake by giving military and financial carte-blanche to Ukraine as it did in the summer of 1939 by throwing its support behind Poland. This gave that country’s officials, notably foreign minister Beck, a false sense of their own strength at the negotiating table. Remember that in the ensuing global conflict the nation which was most comprehensively destroyed was Poland.

It looks like this scenario is playing itself out again in Ukraine, with the increasingly emboldened Zelensky, ridiculously described as the ‘new Churchill’, making all sorts of irrational and downright dangerous demands. It’s clear that without the billions in aid from the west, especially the US, there would have been an end to this

conflict by now. But that is not an option because it is regarded as appeasement of Putin and the fear is that he would not stop at Ukraine. That is pure speculation.

What is not speculation is that if this conflict is allowed to grow, and with time that risk escalates, the country and the people that will most grievously suffer is Ukraine. Poland in 1939 became the pawn of a great-power game of brinkmanship, and suffered accordingly, just as I believe Ukraine is being used in a similar, cynical fashion by NATO to further its agenda of destabilizing Russia. A very dangerous game, that could have catastrophic global consequences. What do they say about people who do not remember their history? Exactly.