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Eastern Galicia, with the ethnic composition of about two thirds Ukrainians and one third Poles, [nb 2] [5] east of the Curzon line, was incorporated into the Second Polish Republic after Austria-Hungary's collapse and the defeat of the short-lived West Ukrainian People's Republic. [1]
In Ukraine, the events are called "Volhynia tragedy". [230] [4] Coverage in textbooks may be brief and/or euphemistic. [231] Some Ukrainian historians accept the genocide classification, but argue that it was a "bilateral genocide" and that the Home Army was responsible for crimes against Ukrainian civilians that were equivalent in nature. [229]
According to mainstream Ukrainian historiography, the western Ukrainian nobility developed out of a mixture of three groups of people: poor Rus' boyars (East Slavic aristocrats from the medieval era), descendants of princely retainers or druzhina (free soldiers in the service of the Rus' princes), and peasants who had been free during the times of the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia. [5]
Today, the territory of Galicia is split between Poland in the west and Ukraine in the east. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, Poles constituted 88.7% of the whole population of Western Galicia, Jews 7.6%, Ukrainians 3.2%, Germans 0.3%, and others 0.2%.
Ukrainians were considered a friendly Soviet nation (a member of the USSR) and any mention of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict would be seen as anti-Soviet. The previously Polish territories of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were incorporated into the Soviet Union; therefore any reference to those lost lands would be treated as anti-Soviet revisionism.
Many nationalities lived in Galicia, but Poles were dominant, next followed by Ukrainians with a significant Jewish minority. Galicia was divided into eastern and western part, Przemyśl itself and the county belonged to Eastern Galicia. The western part was overwhelmingly Polish while the eastern part was ethnically more mixed.
The rising tide in Galicia of anti-Jewish sentiment among Ukrainians during Soviet rule was accompanied by the complete removal from Ukrainian society of moderate or liberal forces within that society when the Soviet authorities abolished all local Ukrainian political parties and arrested and deported most of the moderate politicians it could ...
A secondary movement was the emigration under the auspices of the Austro-Hungarian government of 10,000 Ukrainians from Galicia to Bosnia. Furthermore, due to Russian agitation, 15,000 Ukrainians left Galicia and Bukovina and settled in Russia. Most of these settlers later returned.