Roman Dmowski o kwestii ukraińskiej
Roman Dmowski on the Ukrainian question

Summary/Abstract: The Ukrainian issue did not occupy an exposed place in Dmowski's politics, but it is significant that if it appeared, it was associated with conflict situations. Dmowski encountered it at the turn of the century, observing peasants strikes in Eastern Galicia, which were often violent in their course. Before 1914, he thought that the conflicts were local in nature, blown up artificially by Vienna's policies, while in the Russian partition, in the absence of political freedoms, the Ukrainian and Polish national movements had similar problems. Even if this was the case, the situation changed after the fall of the tsarism, and especially after the outbreak of the Agrarian Revolution (1917), destroying the Polish holdings in Kyiv Ukraine. Dmowski's nationalism obviously weighed on the perception of the issue of mutual neighbourliness, regardless of the fact that, contrary to popular notions, he accepted multiculturalism. However, he did not accept a situation in which the emancipating peoples of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth turned against a common tradition and against the Polish population. As a result, he tried to fight them, and when the possibility of defining a territorial program (1917) arose, he designed the borders of the future Poland to limit the size of the problem, dividing the areas covered by the Ukrainian question between Poland and Russia. In the interwar period, Dmowski accepted the term "Ukrainian" (he had previously written about "Rus" and "Ruthenians") in reference to the Ukrainian national movement, which did not mean a softening of his position. He saw it as an adversary, linked to states hostile to Poland, primarily Germany. He was skeptical about the chances of establishing a Ukrainian state, given international realities, but also the weakness of the Ukrainian elite. However, if it were to be created, it would not enhance Poland's security, being an unpredictable and thus dangerous neighbor. Dmowski's pessimistic forecasts are worth juxtaposing with others (Mieroszewski, Giedroyć, Brzeziński) - in the context of recently fashionable geostrategic speculation, this can be inspiring.

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