Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine [Hardcover]

Mr. Timothy Snyder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2005

The forgotten protagonist of this true account aspired to be a cubist painter in his native Kyïv. In a Europe remade by the First World War, his talents led him to different roles—intelligence operative, powerful statesman, underground activist, lifelong conspirator. Henryk Józewski directed Polish intelligence in Ukraine, governed the borderland region of Volhynia in the interwar years, worked in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground during the Second World War, and conspired against Poland’s Stalinists until his arrest in 1953. His personal story, important in its own right, sheds new light on the foundations of Soviet power and on the ideals of those who resisted it. By following the arc of Józewski’s life, this book demonstrates that his tolerant policies toward Ukrainians in Volhynia were part of Poland’s plans to roll back the communist threat.

The book mines archival materials, many available only since the fall of communism, to rescue Józewski, his Polish milieu, and his Ukrainian dream from oblivion. An epilogue connects his legacy to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Strikingly new, original, and readable. This book will no doubt force everyone in the field to rethink Ukrainian, Polish, and Soviet history during the interwar period.”—Hiroaki Kuromiya, Indiana University

(Hiroaki Kuromiya )

"Another thrilling and erudite book on the intricate history of East European borderlands by Timothy Snyder, a master of the genre."—Jan Gross, Princeton University



 

(Jan Gross )

"Timothy Snyder draws on his immense knowledge of Europe''s borderlands to describe in fascinating detail the shifting alliances and antagonisms—nationalist, ethnic, religious, cultural, ideological—among their 20th century peoples, as reflected in the extraordinary career of Henryk Jozewski, Polish artist, spy, military and political leader in promoting
cooperation between Poles and Ukrainians."—Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard University

 

 

(Samuel P. Huntington )

“[A] compelling book. . . . It is hard not to see this eminently 20th-century story as a biography for a new century. . . .”—Mark Mazower, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

(Mark Mazower Kritika: Explorations in Russian and European History )

"Timothy Snyder''s Sketches from a Secret War is a rigorous, scrupulous, historical narrative, but a dozen spy novels lurk in these pages. The life lived by the artist Henryk Jozewski was a kind of clandestine masterpiece; Soviet operatives, right-wing assassins, secret police, idealistic Poles. Which makes for an extraordinary story—surprising, compelling, and true."—Alan Furst

(Alan Furst )

About the Author

Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; annotated edition edition (November 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030010670X
• ISBN-13: 978-0300106701
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,424,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars minimal results, June 10, 2007

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Hardcover)

Perhaps it was only the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union that made possible the research that produced this book. Snyder shows the ethnic and political complexity of the Ukraine under communism. With the uneasy and tangled relationships with Poland and Russia.

The efforts by Jozewski were basically minimal. But their account is interesting, in showing that eastern Europe was scarcely a monolithic. There is not much of a sense that Poland invested many resources in Jozewski or others like him. Certainly not to the level of actually realistically prising Ukraine loose from Russia. Though, for intelligence gathering, he seemed to have garnered modest successes.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Details About Henryk Jozewski, a Fascinating Man, With Insights into Kresy Life, March 21, 2011

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Paperback)

The life of Henryk Jozewski spanned much of modern Polish history. It included the pre-Independence period, WWI, the Polish-Bolshevik War (1920), Jozewski's attempts to promote Polish-Ukrainian understanding in the Kresy and to unite both peoples against the Soviet Union and Communism, his WWII and post-WWII hiding from Nazis and Communists for a prolonged period of time, his trial and release, and his eventual death, at age 88, just as the Solidarity Movement was blossoming (1981). Jozewski was not religious, and was a Freemason.

Jozewski had been closely involved with Ukrainians before and during the ill-fated Pilsudski-Petliura (Petlyura) alliance of the 1920 Polish-Soviet War. In fact, this Ukrainian-speaking Pole was to have been part of the independent Ukrainian government. (p. 8). He was close to Pilsudski, and became the postwar governor of Poland's Ukrainian-majority Volhynia (Wolyn).

By 1930, Soviet military power had grown so much that a renewed Polish invasion of the USSR was militarily impossibility. (p. 104, 117). The Polish-Soviet and Polish-German nonaggression pacts of the early 1930's reflected this reality. Snyder realizes that Poland wanted truly to be neutral towards the two powers and rejects the claim, advanced by Soviet propaganda at the time [and recently repeated by Russian revisionists] that accused Poland of having a secret alliance, with Nazi Germany, against the USSR.(p. 117).

During the interwar era, Soviet Communist propaganda warned of a Polish invasion of the Soviet Ukraine. Ironic to this, eastern Ukrainians actually longed for such a development--even before the Holomodor! (p. 99). Poles continued to spy on the USSR, and the Soviets strongly promoted Communist agitation among Poland's Ukrainians.

Snyder unmasks many of the myths and exaggerations that have been advanced relative to the Polish presence in the Kresy. Ukrainian backwardness was not the result of Polish rule: It had preceded Polish rule. At the start of Polish rule, the respective urban and rural illiteracy rates were 31% and 60.5% for Roman Catholics (almost entirely Poles); against 55.6% and 84% for Orthodox (almost entirely Ukrainians). (p. 61).

Far from being oppressive to Ukrainians, the Polish authorities actually played a very beneficial role in Volhynia: "In 1921, no Volhynian town had a regulated street network...In the first decade of Polish rule, Polish authorities built 114 elementary schools and a high school, as well as three hospitals and ten public buildings. All important towns were electrified, and telephone service was introduced." (p. 61).

Snyder realizes the fact that, although most of the nobility in Volhynia were Polish, most Poles living there were not nobles. (p. 5). The products of land reform, although not distributed among Poles and Ukrainians in proportion to their relative numbers in the Volhynian population, were nevertheless not trivial in scope, and were of benefit to the Ukrainians. Snyder writes: "By 1937, the state had taken 230,883 hectares from Polish landowners in Volhynia, and 174,717 hectares from non-Polish landowners. Of these 404, 270 hectares, 198,195 hectares (48.9%) were granted to Poles (16.7% of the population) and 203,417 hectares (50%) were given to Ukrainians (68.1% of the population)." (p. 285).

As for the much-exaggerated interwar military settlers (OSADNICY), there were only 3,800 of them in Volhynia and a comparable number in other major parts of the Kresy. (p. 11). Compared to the millions of non-Poles living there, this was a drop in the bucket--much too small to noticeably alter the ethnic composition, and therefore hardly a significant attempt at "colonization" or Polonization.

Jozewski's policies eschewed attempts at Polonization of Ukrainians. Snyder writes: "By 1936, more than two-thirds of Volhynian elementary schools had some Ukrainian component...The inclusion of a Ukrainian component in Polish schools replaced rather than complemented actual Ukrainian schools, of which there were extremely few." (p. 68). Clearly, then, the lack of Polish support for all-Ukrainian schools had been an anti-separatist tactic, not an anti-Ukrainian one.

After Jozewski's removal following the death of Pilsudski, his successors planned to Polonize the Kresy through massive investment and modernization, leading to a massive migration of new Polish settlers. (p. 165). There was a revindication of Orthodox churches in Volhynia and (especially) the Lublin area. This was defended as a recovery of non-Orthodox churches that had forcibly been made Orthodox by the Russians during their over-century of post-Partition rule, and not an attempt to take-away Orthodox Churches away from the Ukrainians. (pp. 162-163).

The Ukrainian fascist-separatist OUN, active in intewar Poland, did everything to prevent Polish-Ukrainian friendship. After a wave of assassinations and arsons, the Pacification took place: "In September [1930] Pilsudski ordered the pacification of Galicia, sending a thousand policemen to search 450 villages for nationalist agitators. They found weapons (1,287 rifles, 566 revolvers, 31 grenades) and explosive materials (99.8 kilograms), but Galician Ukrainians interpreted intrusive searches in political terms." (p. 76). Snyder suggests that the OUN assassination of Tadeusz Holowko, a tireless champion of Polish-Ukrainian goodwill, had owed to a mistaken identity, because it was inconsistent with the OUN's foreign image as the defender of an oppressed people. (pp. 36-37). The OUN-UPA genocide of Poles, beginning in the winter of 1942/1943 in German-occupied Volhynia, had been planned long before WWII. Already in 1936, captured OUN operatives spoke of exterminating the Poles. (p. 158; See also p. 167).

As for the Zydokomuna (Bolshevized Judaism), Snyder writes: "It is true that about thirty percent of the Bolshevik Central Committee members were Jewish in 1917, and that Trotsky, a Jew, was the Bolshevik Commissar for war in 1920." (p. 52). Not mentioned is the fact that 1-2% of the population of the USSR was Jewish. As for interwar Poland, much the same situation existed as per the CP. For example, Snyder comments: "In Luck [Lutsk], for example, every member of the Party was Jewish." (p. 67). During this same time, Poland's Ukrainian Communists complained that the local Ukrainian Communist Party leadership, handpicked by the Soviets, was predominantly Jewish. (p. 71).