GalleryPOLAND'S EASTERN COLONIES
Until the Soviet Union was admitted to the League of Nations in 1934 the White Russian and Ukrainian minorities in Poland were practically in the same helpless position as the Jews. The Soviet Union was a political outcast and since it was not a member of the League it was unable to invoke the minority treaty in behalf of its subjugated blood brothers in White Russia and Western Ukraine. There was therefore nothing to prevent Poland from treating Western White Russia and Ukraine as newly occupied colonies with a native population which was to make room for Polish settlers.
Since the land was largely the property of a few great Polish landowners it was easy to expel the White Russian and Ukrainian tenant farmers from their native soil and supplant them with Polish peasants, usually army reservists and their families, thus forming a network of military garrisons in the "occupied regions." By various electoral tricks familiar in our own South the White Russians and Ukrainians were practically disfranchised. The language provision of the minority treaty was largely ignored and in the universities of their own ancient cities Ukrainian students were subjected to the numerus clausus, hitherto reserved for Jews. Buell, in his "Poland," states "Out of a total of 140 students in the Lvov medical school only two Ukrainians were admitted in 1931. As a result of this numerus clausus many Polish Ukrainians studied abroad, for instance at the Ukrainian University at Kharkov in the Soviet Ukraine."
In 1930 the Polish Ukraine broke out into an open revolt against the unbearable Polish yoke. Several Polish divisions were mobilized to crush the revolt and the "pacification" reached such a pitch of brutality that the League of Nations was forced to take notice of it with a gentle reprimand.1
In 1934 when the Soviet Union was admitted to the League of Nations Poland was in a panic lest the Soviet Union initiate a League investigation of her minorities policies. Poland took no chances. In the fall of that year Foreign Minister Beck formally declared: "Poland was compelled to refuse cooperation with the international organization in the matter of supervision of the application by Poland of the system of minority protection under the agreement of June 28, 1919." Thus Poland unilaterally abrogated a treaty which was the diplomatic precondition of its independent existence.2
| 1 | We already mentioned Ukrainian extremists turned their campaign of terror on their own. The League of Nations actually communicated that given the nature of the terrorism, Polish use of force was justified. |
| 2 | This is yet another chronologically challenged account. Poland's renunciation of the minorities treaty until all other members agreed to the same provisions took place prior to the USSR joining the League of Nations. |
