Interwar Ukrainian and Belarusian national question
전간기 우크라이나·벨로루시 민족 문제
The term refers to the problem created when Ukrainian and Belarusian projects of statehood, autonomy, and cultural self-government were excluded or partitioned within the post-World War I borders and minority regimes of several states. In interwar Poland, territorial incorporation, Polonization, language and education policies, and restrictions on political organizations collided with demands for representation and self-government. It was therefore not merely a border dispute, but an international problem in which national self-determination intersected with the reorganization of class and state power in Eastern Europe.
In depth
Formation
After 1918, new borders divided regions with Ukrainian and Belarusian majorities among Poland, the Soviet republics, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and other states. The Treaty of Riga assigned much of western Ukraine and western Belarus to Poland, fixing their political future differently from local projects for independent national states.
The contradiction in Poland
The Polish state recognized some minority guarantees and parliamentary representation, while also pursuing Polonization in administration and education, settlement policies, and restrictions on organizations. Ukrainian parties and underground nationalist movements responded in different ways, while the Belarusian Peasants’ and Workers’ Union Hromada was banned in 1927 despite operating nonviolently within the legal framework.
Historical significance
The national question was thus not simply a matter of interethnic sentiment, but a question of whose territory, language, and political representation postwar state-building would recognize as legitimate. Soviet Ukrainization and Belarusianization likewise did not abolish the problem, but reconstructed it within a different state form and class power.
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) (supports the 1918–1939 period, the presence of large Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities, and their political representation and discrimination)
- blogs.ucl.ac.uk (supports Ukrainian territorial, institutional, linguistic, and political conflicts within interwar Poland)
- cambridge.org (supports the diversity of Belarusian political organizations and the 1927 banning of Hromada)