Between confrontation and attempts to reach an agreement: Ukrainian and Polish socialists in the conditions of the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the proclamation of ZUNR.

Abstract

The article revealed the relationship between Ukrainian and Polish socialists in Eastern Galicia at the beginning of the 20th century, on the eve and during the First World War, which ended with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the proclamation of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (WUPR, ZUNR). In the political life of Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century а prominent place was occupied by the socialists, to which in Galicia, in particular, belonged the Polish Social-Democratic Party of Galicia and Silesia (from 1919 – the Polish Socialist Party) and the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party of Galicia and Bukovina. Both autonomous parties were part of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria and tried to combine the national idea and Marxism. In the conditions of the First World War, Ukrainian and Polish Social Democrats clearly declared the priority of the national over the social-class and international, and their traditional critique and hostility towards the “bourgeois” parties became declarative. The leaders of both parties realized that the world war opened up real prospects for solving the national issue and took an active part in the activities of national representative institutions: the USDP leaders were in the Main Ukrainian Council, later – in the General Ukrainian Council, the PSDP leaders – in the Polish circle in the Austrian Parliament etc.

After the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in the autumn of 1918, the USDP and PSDP became the hostile sides of the armed conflict between the two nations. The Polish Socialists led the first governments of the Second Rzeczpospolita (Polish Republic), while the USDP representatives supported the November 1 uprising of Ukrainians in Lviv and in most of the Galician cities, joined the first Government of the ZUNR (WUPR), headed by K. Levytsky. At the same time, in the composition of both parties, there were few figures calling for a Polish-Ukrainian understanding and an alliance in the struggle against Russian imperialism. Thus, on March 31, 1918, the USDP official M.Hankevych wrote a letter to Polish socialist I.Dashinsky in order to reverse the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, but it did not get the result. After the defeat of the ZUNR (WUPR), the Polish Socialists proposed the projects of the territorial autonomy of the Eastern Galicia in the Second Rzeczpospolita, which, however, did not find support among the leaders of the USDP, which were the supporters of the formation of an independent Ukrainian state, to which Galicia had to enter. The restored USDP since 1928 had a relationship with the Polish Socialist Party but stable cooperation between the two parties was hindered by the contradiction in the national question.