Between 1944 and 1947, 1,300,000 people (about 500,000
Ukrainians and 800,000 Poles) in the Polish-Ukrainian border regions were
displaced. As a result of the Soviet policy of forced resettlement, in the
first postwar years the percentage of the Polish population in Lviv decreased
radically. At the same time, some Poles left even before the Red Army entered
the city: fleeing the bloody Ukrainian-Polish conflict and ethnic cleansing,
they escaped from villages and towns to Lviv and later to the West. The
motivation for leaving was also the fear of possible Soviet repression and
deportation. According to various estimates, by June 1944, about 45,000 Poles
had left Lviv.
Despite the Soviet leaders’ insistence on
Poland's eastern border being established along the Curzon line, the Polish
government in exile hoped for a change in the geopolitical situation, support from
the allied powers and the restoration of the pre-war borders. Unlike 1939, it
was important for the Soviet regime to achieve the legitimization and
international recognition of the newly annexed territories as Soviet. Ethnic
homogenization of the population was seen by the Soviet authorities as a way to
establish a postwar order and peace. The only representatives of the Polish
state were the London government in exile (which broke off diplomatic relations
with the USSR in 1943) and the Polish National Liberation Committee (
), established in Moscow in mid-1944
with the Soviet leaders’ support. As a result of this legal conflict, the first
bilateral evacuation agreements were signed at the national level between the
PKWN and the governments of the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian Soviet
republics, each of which had a large Polish minority. The Polish-Ukrainian,
Polish-Belarusian and Polish-Lithuanian agreements were virtually identical.
All three agreements were based on the principle of reciprocity. They concerned
not only the Polish minorities of the three Soviet republics, but also the
Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian minorities in Poland, who were also
invited to "return to their homeland".
Thus, according to the Lublin Agreement between the
Government of the USSR and the PKWN of September 9, 1944, both sides undertook
to begin the "voluntary evacuation of all citizens of Ukrainian,
Belarusian, Russian and Ruthenian nationalities" living in eastern Poland,
and the "evacuation of all Poles and Jews who had Polish citizenship until
September 17, 1939, lived in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and
wished to move to Poland." The agreement stated that the move was to take
place voluntarily. The displaced persons were given the opportunity to choose
their place of residence and were offered a loan of 5,000 rubles or the
equivalent in zlotys, as well as compensation for abandoned property (land,
real estate) in the form of farms or urban property. It was allowed to take up
to 2 tons of luggage per family: clothes, shoes, food, household items, equipment
and appliances, livestock. Specialists (doctors, artists, scientists) could
take the items needed for work.
This document used the bureaucratic euphemism of
"evacuation" (moving to escape possible danger). As soon as the
administrations in charge of resettlement were established in the Ukrainian SSR
and Poland, this process began to be called "repatriation" in the
documents. The use of this terminology is very controversial. For people who
have lived in these territories for several generations,
"repatriation" meant the loss of their homes and forced departure
from the "small homeland." The main purpose of the new wording was to
"normalize" this process and to prove the active cooperation of the
Soviet and Polish authorities in the implementation of the postwar new order.
In modern Polish and Ukrainian historiography we can also find the terms
"expatriation" and "deportation", used to emphasize the
forced nature of the postwar population movements. According to American
historian Theodore Weeks, these events fit into the concept of "ethnic
cleansing" as a policy of ousting minorities and traces of their presence
from a certain territory.
The resettlement operation was scheduled to end on
February 1, 1945. This date turned out to be unrealistic and was postponed to
June 1946. Initially, the vast majority of the border regions residents did not
support the call for "voluntary evacuation." Thus, as of December 5,
1944, out of 87.7 thousand Poles registered for resettlement from Lviv, only
946 people left. On the one hand, they hoped for a change in the geopolitical
situation; on the other hand, especially among the intelligentsia, the desire
to prevent Russification and ensure the preservation of the Polish character of
the border areas prevailed. The Roman Catholic Church, led by Archbishop
Eugeniusz Baziak, was an important center of passive resistance to eviction.
In January-February 1945, as the Red Army approached
Berlin, the pressure on the Poles gradually escalated into repression. Members
of the Polish administration responsible for the evacuation were accused of
subversive activities and sabotage of the resettlement process. A wave of mass
arrests coincided with the Yalta Conference, which ended on February 10, 1945
with unsuccessful attempts by the Polish diplomacy to preserve Lviv for Poland.
To persuade the city's residents to leave, a mission was sent to Lviv by Stanisław
Grabski, an influential Polish politician and vice president of the National
People's Council. In 1945, he visited Lviv three times and met with Soviet
officials, Polish academics, and ordinary Lviv residents. More and more Polish
residents of Lviv and Galicia started registering to leave. In addition to
their reluctance to live in the Soviet Union, the incentives to leave were
arrests, deportations, and professional and educational discrimination against
Poles. A popular saying at the time was "if we don't leave for Poland, we
will be made to leave for Siberia."
The dynamics of resettlement was different in urban
and rural areas: while the departure of Polish residents of Vilnius or Lviv was
organized as quickly as possible, the relocation of peasants was delayed for
fear of a sharp reduction in agricultural production. According to
eyewitnesses, even peasants registered for "repatriation" were
allowed to leave only after they sowed their lands.
The Polish Evacuation Commission operated in Lviv from
May 1945 to December 1946 and was located in the former Krakowski Hotel on the
corner of pl. Bernardyński (now pl. Soborna) and ul. Pekarska. Zofia
Lewartowska, a commission employee, recalls its work as follows:
The
bilateral commission in the epicentre of the events: what was it and what were
conditions it worked in?
It
was indeed a very interesting phenomenon. An ephemeral organization, with a
simplest structure, with no fixed assets, no departments, no offices, even no
telephone, that is, with nothing at all. (...) There were 12 persons on the
Polish side and as many on the Soviet side, shoulder to shoulder, in a shared office...
In the lower hierarchy, there were four Polish and Soviet employees responsible
for the evacuation from the city districts. Their task was to write out cards
on the basis of birth certificates (German Kennkarte were declared invalid), to
make descriptions of the property, to check transports and be on duty at night.
These jobs were pretty good, it was quiet upstairs, you could move around
freely, sometimes go out to the people. The ground floor, especially during the
commission sessions, was a real hell. Here, evacuation cards were issued and
departure conditions were set. Here the commission clerks were exposed to the
strongest pressure of a desperate crowd fighting for everything: transport, seats
in the car, convenient dates and destinations...
(Zofia Lewartowska, Polskie
przesiedlenia — historia nieznana)
Zofia Lewartowska left Lviv immediately after the
Commission's work was finished in early December 1946. Like other resettlers,
she recalls very tough conditions of traveling that could last for several
weeks. Often migrants had to wait for their trains at the stations for a long
time, commonly without the possibility of cooking, without shelter from rain or
cold, at risk of robbery. Some people died from illness while moving,
especially in the cold months.
The transition of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus
to the USSR was officially fixed by the Soviet-Polish treaty of August 16,
1945. Poland's new borders included territories formerly owned by Germany, the "Recovered
Territories" (Ziemie Odzyskane), home to several million Germans
who were also subject to forced resettlement. By the end of 1946, about eight
hundred thousand people had left for Poland, the vast majority of whom were
Poles and about thirty thousand Polish Jews. About a quarter of them came from
the Lviv region, including almost 105,000 from Lviv itself. The majority of
migrants from the border areas settled in the ex-German lands: according to the
State Administration for Repatriation (Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny, PUR),
37.9% of migrants from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia ended up in the Silesian Voivodeship
and 35.4% in the Wroclaw Voivodeship. Arriving at the destination did not
necessarily mean the end of the problems. Displaced people often had to wait
for a new apartment or house for weeks. In the spring of 1947, the Soviet
authorities announced the completion of the "evacuation" of the
Poles. In 1948, the only Polish-language communist newspaper, Czerwony
Sztandard, was closed in Lviv. Soviet policy was aimed at expelling Poles from
pre-war Polish territories; however, those who lived in the USSR before the war
avoided it. As a result, in the late 1940s, the Zhytomyr region became the
largest Polish center of the USSR.
Simultaneously with the eviction of Poles, there was a
mass forced relocation of Ukrainians from eastern Poland. Despite initial
Soviet plans to relocate them to the southeastern regions of Ukraine, most of
them — about 323,000 people — moved to the western regions. However, only a few
were allowed to live in large cities. As of October 1946, only 7% of Ukrainians
who had moved from Poland to the Lviv region had been allowed to settle in
Lviv, while others lived mainly in rural areas. After the Soviet-Polish border
was closed in mid-1946, the Polish authorities launched the Operation Vistula,
when 120,000 to 150,000 Ukrainians from the eastern regions were deported and
resettled in the newly annexed western regions to limit support for the
Ukrainian nationalist underground.
Thus, in the postwar years, Lviv was a place where
constant forced displacements continued, blurring the line between peace and
war. Despite significant ideological differences, ethnic homogenization became
a common denominator of the activities of nationalist forces and the Soviet regime.