Galicie

The Galicie is a historical area of the Union of Poland-Lithuania, located at the south of the area now Ukrainian of Volhynie. It was a long time an area plug, a zone of passages and a crossroads of cultures, between the empire of the Habsbourg and the Russian Empire. It is currently divided between the Poland and the Ukraine.

It should not be confused with the Galicia, which is an autonomous region of Spain. Their two names come from the root Latin E gallus for Gaulois, the two areas having been occupied by Celtes.

Before the First World War, this province of a surface of approximately 78.000 km, belonged to the empire of Austria-Hungary (empire of the Habsbourg). Its capital Lvov (in Polish: Lwów, in German: Lemberg, in Russian: Lvov, in Ukrainian: Lviv, regional official name current), was created at the 13th century by the sovereign of the Rus' de Halych-Volodymyr. The city is from now on on the Ukrainian territory.

Key dates

Area especially populated of Slavic, it is attached in 1340 to the Poland by the king Casimir III Large the ( Kazimierz Wielki ), that the duke Georges II of Galicie-Volhynie, ( Georg II Trojden ), had founded like his successor in exchange of a help against his enemies.

In 1772, at the time of the first division of Poland, Galicie becomes Austrian and until in 1914 will remain it.

In 1914, it is conquered by the Russian imperial army at the time of the first military operations of the First World War.

In 1915, it is taken again by the army austro-allemande.

In 1918, it is conquered by the Poles who encounter nationalist formations Ukrainian.

In 1921, by the Treated of Rīga, it is declared ground Polish and until in 1939 will remain it.

In 1939, after the crushing of the Poland, it is annexed by the Soviet Union under the terms of the pact germano-Soviet. In 1941, it is invaded and occupied by the German troops. With the assistance of Ukrainian nationalist militia, commandos Nazis (the S Einsatzgruppen) proceed to a systematic liquidation, without precedent in the History, of the many Jewish population by off-setting it in concentration camps and death camps.

In 1943, Reichsführer S Heinrich Himmler orders to create a Division of Waffen S made up Ukrainian volunteers of Galicie (Division S Galizien).

In 1944, Galicie is conquered by the Red Army , which takes again Lvov on July 28th.

In 1945, it is cut out by the Ligne Curzon (proposed by Lord Curzon during the conference of peace of Paris on December 8th 1919) and is adopted at the time of the Accords of Yalta, which leaves Lithuania and passes to the east of Przemysl to Poland and the west of Lviv (Lvov) in Galicie. The part in the east of the Curzon line is attached to the Ukraine, then one of the republics composing the Soviet Union.

A made history of traumatisms

Of moved back province and without history of the Austrian Crown, Galicie was the theater of confrontations tearing during and after the First World War, opposing the communities Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish.

With the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is formed, in October 1918, a short National Republic of the Ukraine of the West. The very new Ukrainian army, resulting from the collapse of the Russian empire following the Revolution of 1917, faces the Polish troops which seize the capital, then of the whole of the area in July 1919. During the battle of Lvov, the Polish soldiers devote themselves during three days to a pogrom. Galicie was then integrated in the Eastern territories of the Poland coldly reconstituted into the favor of the Russian Revolution, forming one of the regions of the kresy, frontier zone or plug of the Second Republic, populated variegated minorities. The province loses its Austrian name and disappears, with Galicie Western, under the name of Malopolska (" Petite Pologne").

Starting from the middle of the Thirties, the ideal of large a multiethnic Poland of Pilsudski is exceeded by a policy of aggressive polonisation, openly anti-semite, imposing by violence the “pacification” of the Ukrainian villages. In 1939, under the terms of the secret agreement Molotov-Ribbentrop, while Germany invades the Western half of Poland, the Soviet Union puts the hand on its oriental party. This territory is incorporated, following a faked referendum, in the Soviet republic of Ukraine. The Soviet Union follows to it a policy of ukrainisation, but also of forced collectivization and setting to the ideological step, supplied with a violent repression (deportations, imprisonments, executions) which touches in the chronological order the former political elites, economic and intellectual Polish, then Ukrainian nationalists. At the end of June 1941, the area is conquered by the Wehrmacht.

The Ukrainian nationalists accommodate the German troops like liberators. However, far from conferring independence on the Ukraine, the Nazis develop to with it very quickly a policy of radical elimination of the Communists, but also of ethnic and racial cleaning, assisted by volunteers of the OUN (Organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists), transforming this territory into test area very specific of setting to died on the ground and of toughening (“brutalisation”) of the violence of war, with an important and voluntary participation of the local population. As of the arrival of the Germans, the Ukrainian local population “is avenged” for persecutions of the NKVD by a series of wild pogroms, perpetrated against the Jewish civil population (24.000 dead). The Nazis integrate Galicie into the “General Government” of the Poland and gradually set up the “final solution”: 500.000 Jews of Galicie (12 % of the population of approximately 4 million), initially gathered in ghettos and camps of work, for the majority shot at the edge of common graves or are destroyed to Bełżec. In addition, 350.000 Poles and Ukrainians are off-set in Germany as workers forced or moved to create an economic area vital and germanisable, within the framework of a military and economic strategy which deliberately considered death by the hunger of tens of million human beings in Soviet Union.

The OUN and the UPA (the Army of Ukrainian insurrection), which passes meanwhile from collaboration to resistance against the Germans while continuing his fight against the Soviets and the Russians, benefit from chaos in which is plunged the area to get rid of the Polish population (50.000 initially dead in Volhynie, then in Galicie Eastern), where the terror imposed by the guerilla of the Ukrainian “banderists” (partisans of Bandera, chief of the OUN) independence will be controlled by the Soviet Union only with the beginning of the year 1950. On its side, Stalin sets up as of the end of the war a policy of deportation of the populations: between 1945 and 1956,800.000 Poles “are repatriated”, including 560.000 of Galicie, while approximately 600.000 Ukrainians on other side of the border (Lemkos) are off-set towards the Ukraine (majority towards Galicie) or are dispersed during the “Vistula Action” (Akcja Wisła) in the territories that the Poland recovered on the Germany.

Galicie, ground of emigration and cradle of celebrities

Galicie was since the middle of the 19th century a ground of emigration. A considerable proportion of the “Galicians” are today out of Galicie. Nearly a million Ukrainian Galicians, known as “Ruthènes”, emigrated at the beginning of the century with the United States, Canada and in Western Europe, just like of many Polish Galicians. Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York became great centers of Galician emigration. Of the 800.000 Galician Jews of before the First World War, 200 to 300.000 fled Pogrom S and wars towards the Western capitals and the United States between 1880 and 1914.

Because of the possibilities of education and social advancement offered by Austrian monarchy to the unit of its minorities, the fame of Galicie was also based on the fact that it was the fertile compost of the constitution of a national intelligentsia (Austrian, Polish, Russo-Ukrainian or Jewish) of foreground. Galicie was the laboratory of national movements modern, Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish. Taking into consideration later persecution, the period of the Austro-Hungarian empire makes figure retrospectively era of freedom.

Galicie also profited from the notoriety of its figureheads, which besides often left it in their social rise and cultural, or became symbols headlights in their respective national cultures: German-speaking the Joseph Roth and Martin Buber, the polonophones Gerda Taro, Joseph Wittlin and Bruno Schulz, the ukrainophones Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanik and Martovitch, for which it is necessary to add the writers of Hebraic language Shmuel Yosef Agnon or Aharon Appelfeld, and the writers Yiddish Moyshe Leyb Halpern, Melekh Ravitsh and Uri Tsi Grinberg, without speaking about the pleiad of the Galician school Yiddish of the beginning of the century.

One also counts more exotic figures like politicians (Karl Radek, Isaac Deutscher, or Maximilien Rubel), or many authors which was the subject of a more recent “Re-discovery”, like the German-speaking cantors of multiethnic Galicie (certainly germanocentrée) Karl Emil Franzos and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and for the post-war period, the memorialist S Soma Morgenstern and Manès Sperber, just like Polish novelists Andrzej Kusniewicz and Julian Stryjkowski.

These Galicians bore throughout the world the name of their “small fatherland”, while singing some the multiculturalism before the letter, the religious, cultural and ethnic pluralism, seen through the prism of the disappeared community. Thus, the Jewish shtetl, the great Polish aristocratic land and buildings, the colony or the German-speaking linguistic small island or polonophone in the Ukrainian “sea”, or the last splendor of the regional metropolises that were Cracow or Lvov incarnate Arcadie lost of childhood or Atlantis submerged by the surge of the evil (war, Communism, occupation hitlérienne).

Although not having undergone, like the Jews, an attempt at total annihilation, the organizations of Ukrainian emigrants in the United States and Canada perpetuate a memory centered around the persecution of the Ukrainians by the Poles, the Russians, then the Soviets and glorifient the UPA, even SS-Galizien division, like anti-Soviet pole of resistance.

In Soviet Union, Galicie Eastern, divided into three oblast (Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk), will form with Transcarpathie the “Western Ukraine”. Relegated in a excentré corner of the national territory which extends, with the cultural capitals of the Soviet world, from now on towards the East, it undergoes sovietization.

Sources

Cultures of Central Europe No 4 - CIRCE - 2003. " The myth of Galicie, disappearance to resurrection (virtual) " Delphine Bechtel. (University Paris IV - Sorbonne, CIRCE)

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