Interview: Ola Hnatiuk on Jerzy Giedroyc's Legacy and Polish-Ukrainian Relations

How has Giedroyc's legacy influenced your work in advancing Polish-Ukrainian relations, and what aspects of his vision do you find most relevant in today's context?

Jerzy Giedroyc, as a political thinker, played a very special role in Polish-Ukrainian relations after the Second World War. It is vital to remember Giedroyc’s legacy for various reasons. His thought was immensely important for the second half of the 20th century, especially since it influenced Polish Eastern policy after 1989. Without his legacy, Polish-Ukrainian relations would have been in an entirely different state after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Giedroyc escaped from occupied Poland in 1939, and during the Second World War, he and his new friends served in the Polish army abroad [Anders’ Army]. Later, they established the independent publishing house Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute). 50 years later, they were still relevant. It was common for emigrants to disappear in France or other Western countries without subsequent influence or impact. In that sense, it was remarkable that Giedroyc established the renowned monthly Kultura in 1946, first in Rome, then in Paris. Kultura significantly influenced politics even after ’89, when most post-Soviet states wanted to establish their independence.

The Giedroyc group weren't your usual émigrés, living in their own thoughts and celebrating the prewar conditions. They were not pro-communist or leftist but rather conservative, albeit not rightist.

The first and primary demand of the Polish government-in-exile, which was based in London [from 1940], was to reestablish pre-war borders, the status quo ante bellum. Asserting their independence from the government, the group around Giedroyc believed that the future of Eastern Europe, especially Poland, would be created in Poland, from within—not in emigration or the West, a thought still relevant today.

What were the political aims Kultura sought to promote?

At the very beginning of Kultura’s activities, as early as 1947, Giedroyc was thinking about Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation after World War II. He thought about a statement or declaration from Polish activists to start the reconciliation process. “We have to talk” was his motto; otherwise, there would be no independent Poland or Ukraine—a stance that was not obvious for other émigré circles at the time. However, the declaration was never written because of the unexpected death of its author, Piotr Dunin-Borkowski.

In 1952, there was a new attempt to extend a hand to Ukrainians from a young seminarian named Józef Z. Majewski, who wrote a letter demanding the recognition of Lviv as Ukrainian and Vilnius as Lithuanian, causing a veritable storm. That same year, the well-known writer, poet, and translator Józef Łobodowski published a long political essay entitled Against the Ghosts of the Past in Kultura. Its main message was “Let's not let the past shape the future,” which constituted an invitation to discuss new forms of dialogue between Ukrainians and Poles.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a prolonged publishing period on Ukrainian issues, including notable publications on political changes inside Ukraine after Stalin’s death. It was uncommon then to direct editorial interest away from Russia and toward individual Socialist republics.

Then, in the late 1950s, the Ukrainian writer Yurii Lavrinenko, who had emigrated to the US from Kharkiv, published an anthology of Ukrainian Soviet writers of the 20s and 30s called Executed Renaissance, which constituted a minor revolution. Renaissance because it was strictly forbidden to publish anything in Ukrainian during the Russian Empire and the First World War; executed because most of these writers were executed during the 1930s, especially during the Great Purge [of 1936-1938 under Stalin]. The anthology sparked intense debates in the Ukrainian émigré press and afforded Kultura a notable surge in subscribers. This period was the first step towards dialogue and mutual trust between Poland and Ukraine.

How would you characterize the change in editorial stance throughout the years, especially as we near 1989?

The anthology constituted dialogue through culture and translation, which intimately resonates with my background as a literary scholar. After 1968, Kultura also increasingly dealt with political issues, especially nationality studies, with notable authors such as Ivan Koshelivets and Borys Lewitzky.

In the mid-1970s, a pivotal moment was the development of the so-called ULB conception, which stands for independent and democratic Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus as a guarantee for a long-lived independence of Poland, elaborated by Juliusz Mieroszewski and Jerzy Giedroyc. Later, this concept was also called the Mieroszewski-Giedroyc doctrine. At the heart of it lay the idea that Polish independence must go hand in hand with a fully independent Ukraine and Belarus.

Bohdan Osadczuk also played an important role. He lived in Berlin, was a professor at the Free University, and worked for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, specializing in East European issues. He also published in Kultura between the 1950s and 1990s. Not only did Osadczuk closely collaborate with Giedroyc until his death, but he was also an influential figure in advancing Polish-Ukrainian relations after 1989, a link between politicians in both countries. At the beginning of the first decade of independence, it was crucial to have such people.

You must remember that at the turn of the '80s and '90s, there was no recognition of Ukrainians' rights to independence, embodied not least by George Bush’s so-called Chicken-Kyiv Speech just one month before the Declaration of Independence by Ukraine. The Polish will to recognize Ukrainian independence based on the ULB doctrine—and the fact that Poland did it as the first country in the world—was a fundamental element of Polish Eastern policy after 1989.

You are also engaged in a project called Ukraine. Europe 1921–1939, where you aim to publish documents counteracting historical falsifications. How would you see the link between the efforts of Kultura and your work in this regard?

The aim of this project is much broader: to rethink Ukraine's history in the interwar period, to go beyond its usual context of Polish or Soviet history, and to reframe it in the international context. I am sure that this idea is very close to Giedroyc’s view of culture and history. The monthly Kultura and the quarterly Zeszyty Historyczne [Historical Notebooks, established by Giedroyc in the 1960s] aspired to reconsider Polish views of the past, particularly to overcome the burden of the past in Polish-Ukrainian relations.

This was very important for me from the very beginning of my activity as a scholar and activist. During my service at the Polish embassy in Kyiv as the First Counselor responsible for academic and cultural cooperation, I tried to foster Polish-Ukrainian dialogue among historians, which stagnated in the 2000s, primarily due to a crisis of trust. This crisis emerged not only among historians but also among politicians, especially after 2004, when Poland joined the EU, and even more after 2008, when Bulgaria and Romania were accepted. Any prospect or even hope of Ukrainian membership was being dashed by the EU, despite many efforts made by Ukrainian politicians, writers, and intellectuals.

Additionally, the route to NATO membership was closed after the final declaration of the Bucharest summit in 2008. Ukrainians felt betrayed and disappointed. The country was once more pushed toward Russia and its sphere of influence. Prominent US and EU politicians announced a so-called reset with Russia. It was also in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia and first violated international law—not 2014. Viktor Yushchenko, the then-president of Ukraine, believed Ukraine would be next. And he was right.

I am saying this because most European problems with understanding Ukraine's right to independence are rooted in the interwar period, which I am working on in this project. For Ukraine, it wasn't an interwar period.

But a period of continued aggression and war.

Yes, exactly. Ukraine was under Russian occupation from the beginning of 1919. We can trace this type of hybrid warfare back to the establishment of the government of the Ukrainian SSR in Kharkiv in 1919. Joint attempts by Ukrainians from Galicia and the former Russian empire to form a common nation, The Ukrainian People’s Republic, were dismissed entirely. After the First World War and Wilson’s announcement of the right to self-determination for nations, Ukrainians became the largest European nation without a state. Still today, many politicians in Europe believe that Ukrainian independence was accidental and that the Ukrainians became a nation only after Russia’s invasion. This is a widespread belief, especially among Polish right-wing publicists, but also in Western public opinion. It is no coincidence that we, Ukrainians, compare the situation in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of the eastern part of Ukraine by Russia, with the Munich Agreement from 1938 and the politics of appeasement leading up to the Second World War. This is a widely accepted thought in Ukraine but not something EU and US officials want to hear, just like it was in the interwar period in the Czechoslovakia case.

This also links to your research here at the IWM, which investigates publication activities aimed at mobilizing public opinion against the Holodomor.

The project is linked to my broader interest in Ukrainian non-state diplomacy during the interwar period, for example, during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919-1920, the pacification of Ukrainians in Galicia in 1930, or during the Holodomor—the Great Famine of 1932–1933.

I found some materials sent to the Austrian Chancellor by the Austrian embassy in Moscow concerning Soviet protest against activities by the then-archbishop of Vienna, Theodor Kardinal Innitzer, who established the International and Interconfessional Committee for Assistance to the Starving Provinces of the Soviet Union to gather money for publication activities. One publication by Ewald Ammende, the secretary general of the International Congress of National Minorities, Muss Russland hungern?, published in 1935, caused widespread anger among Soviet officials. They started exerting pressure on the Austrian government to curb the publication and stop the spread of anti-Soviet claims. What ensued was a kind of fake news war. The Soviet press accused Innitzer of being involved in malversations, while Ammende was denounced as a Nazi agent.

In any case, the committee's efforts—not only in German-speaking countries but also in France, Great Britain, and the US—were hugely important in disseminating information about the famine internationally and collecting actual money for help.

What are your plans for the time after your IWM fellowship has ended?

I hope to return to Kyiv, and to teaching in person at Kyiv Mohyla Academy. I am still teaching there, but online, and I also continue working on different projects with my colleagues from PEN Ukraine, where I was vice president until 2022. One of them is an international award, the Drahoman Prize, for translations from Ukrainian to other languages—a project close to my heart as a former translator. I would for sure also love to publish a book linking non-state diplomatic attempts in the interwar period to today, where Ukraine is an independent state, but non-government and non-state actors continue to play a decisive role, not least in organizing horizontal networks of support between civil society and soldiers.

The next call for applications for the Jerzy Giedroyc Fellowship is planned to be published in winter 2024. For more information, visit the fellowship page.

Photo: Jerzy Giedroyc at his desk in Kultura's offices in Maisons-Laffitte (© Instytut Literacki)