2026 is the Year of Jerzy Giedroyć. Americans may be forgiven for not recognizing one of Central Europe’s leading 20th-century democratic intellectuals, but Poles have no excuse.
The Polish Senate decided to honor him last year. Most of the country’s elite, including President Karol Nawrocki, a professional historian and former director of the Institute of National Remembrance, are aware of the man and his works.
Giedroyć (1906-2000) was the founder and editor of the influential Paris-based, anti-communist journal Kultura, which featured the writings of prominent Polish intellectuals and writers and served as a platform for the radically revisionist ideas about post-World War II Poland promoted by Giedroyć and his colleague, Juliusz Mieroszewski.
Their “doctrine” made two big claims. First, establishing good relations with Poland’s eastern neighbors and formerly Polish-occupied territories — Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania — was key to maintaining Polish independence in the face of Russian imperialism.
Second, good relations with these three neighbors necessitated that Poland accept its post-war boundaries (which entailed losing large parts of former Polish lands in exchange for former German territories to the west), abandon its historically-grounded ideological and political pretensions to these countries, and recognize that their independence was in Poland’s vital interest.
Given the emotional attachment many Poles felt for these former lands in Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, one can well imagine how controversial the Giedroyć-Mieroszewski position was in Poland and the hyper-patriotic Polish diaspora.
As history has shown, however, the two exiled intellectuals were right. The three independent countries to Poland’s east have served since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, as a strategic buffer between Poland and its main threat from the east, Russia. For Poland, the absence of Russia on its borders (beyond the Kaliningrad exclave) is a priceless gift from history, even if Stalin did not intend it as such.
But the Giedroyć-Mieroszewski doctrine can work only if the Ukrainians, as the largest and geopolitically most important of Poland’s eastern neighbors, agree; and if Poles are willing to prioritize security and survival over ideology and history, especially with respect to Ukraine.
This year, the year of Giedroyć, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Polish counterpart, President Nawrocki, have been stress-testing his ideas.
In late May, Zelenskyy agreed to name an elite Special Operations Forces unit after the “Heroes” of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist guerrilla force that existed from 1942 to the mid-1950s.
It was a curious decision since Poland’s president, like many of his compatriots, argues the UPA committed an anti-Polish genocide in mid-1943 in the northwestern Ukrainian region of Volhynia.
Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of Poland’s highest state honor, the Order of the White Eagle. In turn, Zelenskyy returned the medal, with a tart reminder that Mussolini had also been its recipient. Adding fuel to the fire, several highly-ranked Ukrainians and Poles declared they would return their medals or pins. Finally, Nawrocki said that Poland wouldn’t support Ukraine’s European membership unless the dispute was resolved in Poland’s favor.
Ukrainians, meanwhile, argued that they weren’t honoring the UPA units involved in the wartime anti-Polish violence, but the UPA in general, which resisted both Soviet and Nazi imperialism during and after World War II.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry spokesman put the Ukrainian case: “Today, Ukrainian military personnel defend not only Ukraine, but also all of Europe. By initiating the awarding of an honorary title to their unit, our soldiers certainly did not intend to offend the friendly Polish people. For them, the UPA struggle symbolizes exclusively the opposition to Moscow’s imperial policy — and is in no way directed against the Poles.”
So, who’s right, and what does all of this have to do with Giedroyć and Mieroszewski?
Scholars disagree on the number of Polish and Ukrainian casualties and, more importantly, on who fired the first shot. The former range from 30,000 to 200,000, while the Ukrainian number is usually placed at one third or one fourth of the Polish total. Poles generally focus only on the Volhynian massacres in the summer of 1943. Ukrainians generally broaden the scope, sometimes going as far back as the 16th century, when Polish magnates ruthlessly exploited Ukrainian serfs, and always pointing to inter-war Poland’s anti-Ukrainian (as well as antisemitic) policies.
Poles and Ukrainians also disagree on who should be memorialized by whom. If the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, whom many Ukrainians admire for his uncompromising pursuit of national liberation, is unacceptable to Poles, then shouldn’t Józef Piłsudski, who founded the modern Polish state while abandoning his Ukrainian ally at the 1921 Treaty of Riga, be unacceptable to Ukrainians? That’s not said to indicate equivalence between the two men, merely that finger-pointing is a two-way game.
The claim of genocide is equally controversial, mostly because Polish armed units engaged in anti-Ukrainian violence before, during, and after Volhynia, inflicting sizable casualties on the Ukrainians. In 1942 alone, Polish militants destroyed over 100 Ukrainian Orthodox churches just west of Volhynia.
In addition, the UPA units that committed the violence not only drew their cadres from the local Ukrainian Orthodox peasantry, but they were also riding a wave of spontaneous peasant violence directed at the thousands of Polish “colonists” who had been settled in Volhynia in the interwar period. Finally, both Poles and Ukrainians laid claim to Volhynia politically: the former regarded it as a historic part of Poland, the latter as an integral component of an independent Ukrainian state. In sum, the Volhynian conflict had ethnic, class, religious, and political dimensions and wasn’t just about crazed Ukrainians killing innocent Poles (or vice versa).
That said, it’s unquestionably true that Ukrainians killed tens of thousands of Poles and that Poles killed thousands of Ukrainians. As there were more Ukrainians than Poles in Volhynia, the former succeeded in driving out the latter in what Ukrainian historians recognize was an act of ethnic cleansing involving war crimes and crimes against humanity. But most Ukrainian historians also insist the conflict was not genocidal, if only because genocide is, by definition, one-sided — with the Nazi extermination of Jews and Roma being the classic case.
Were units of the UPA guilty of crimes? Yes. Was the UPA in its entirety guilty? No. May heroes of the UPA exist? Yes. Were the units involved in the ethnic cleansing heroes? No. Last but not least, are Poles blameless? No. Is more research needed to establish the truth about what happened in Volhynia? Absolutely.
Zelenskyy committed a tactical error by naming the unit. He should have known that Poles would be angered. But Nawrocki’s response was a strategic blunder, one that could undermine the Polish-Ukrainian alliance and weaken Ukraine’s ability to resist Russia.
Giedroyć and Mieroszewski would have been outraged. They would surely have advised Nawrocki and his Law and Justice party to stop instrumentalizing painful historical events and to remember that, notwithstanding the nostalgia with which many Poles still view their “civilizing mission” among Ukrainian peasants, such sentiments only detract from an appreciation of the reality that Poland cannot survive if Ukraine falls.
Both Giedroyć and Mieroszewski would surely agree that the first step to resolving the immediate conflict is for the politicians to shut up (at least for the duration of the war) and let the historians fight it out. Meanwhile, all sides would do well to be guided by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s advice: “We may discuss history and our mutual relations, but in no case should we jeopardize our cooperation with Ukraine in defending it against Russia’s attack.”
Fortunately, Nawrocki and Zelenskyy appear to have engaged in a rational dialogue at the July 8 NATO summit in Ankara. That bodes well. Unfortunately, the issue of contention — Volhynia — remains unresolved, and the populist temptation to play it up still remains, especially as next year’s Polish parliamentary elections approach.
That bodes less well. Giedroyć and Mieroszewski will remain relevant for a long time after 2026, the year commemorating the former, ends.
Alexander Motyl is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
