It’s very interesting to analyze the position of the Polish side in discussions with Ukrainians about Volhynia using the terminology of postcolonial studies. Oleksiy Panych, PhD, Senior Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Humanities Publishing House ‘Dukh i Litera,’ writes.
Over the past month, I had incidental discussions on this topic with dozens of Poles, and in many of them (of course, not all) you can notice the same pattern or set of assumptions that they bring into conversation with a Ukrainian who is unfamiliar to them. Among these assumptions, two stand out.
- Epistemic superiority: “We, the Poles, already know the whole truth about those events, and you, Ukrainians, are either uninformed, or misled by manipulators like Vyatrovych, or you deny the truth for ideological reasons.” Here, the presumption of epistemic equality (“each side knows some part of the truth and is ready to respect the other side’s viewpoint”) is completely absent, and the first reaction in a discussion with a Ukrainian interlocutor is to give them “basic information” at the level of facts from the school history curriculum or references to (Polish) Wikipedia.
- Epistemic colonialism: “We are a civilized people who has fully dealt with its past, while you are still savages, so that’s why you glorify your savage UPA; that’s why you should accept our view of the “Volhynian massacre” in order, at last, to become civilized; and if you don’t want to become civilized, then stay away from the EU.”
I’ll repeat: not all Poles adhere to such an assumption in conversation. However, it is adhered to by virtually all who openly take it upon themselves to debate Volhynia. The others instead propose rather to “leave the past in the past” and focus on issues of the present. This creates an interesting asymmetry: in matters of the present, some Poles are ready to consider Ukrainians as equals, whereas in matters of history Ukraine still appears – openly or latently – for the average Pole in a colonial perspective, at least in the epistemic dimension. At least, my experience of these conversations creates exactly that impression.
If, and to the extent, this is true, we can assume that the decolonization of knowledge and perceptions of Ukraine, as well as the critical analysis of these knowledge and perceptions from the standpoint of postcolonial studies, still lies ahead for Polish society.
By the way, some manifestations of such critical analysis already exist in Polish academic discourse: notably, articles by Bogusław Bakuła (“Kolonialne i postkolonialne aspekty polskiego dyskursu kresoznawczego (zarys problematyki)”, 2006) and Ewa M. Thompson (“Postkolonialne refleksje. Na marginesie pracy zbiorowej ‘From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from Postcolonial Perspective’”, 2007).
In both cases, a critical analysis of entrenched Polish views of Ukraine in general, and “kresy” [A historical region of the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic. The term was coined during the interwar period (1918–1939) – UT] in particular, is proposed specifically from a postcolonial-studies perspective. But judging from my recent experience of talking with people, for Polish society as a whole, this is only the beginning of a very long and very difficult path.
