The period immediately following the war furthered the development of the Ukrainian movement in the Lemko region. The collapse of the ZUNR (Western Ukrainian National Republic) in June 1919 caused migrations of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, mainly teachers, from Eastern Galicia to the western part of the region, where Polish-Ukrainian relations were not as strained. School authorities were eager to hire Ukrainians in Lemko schools, fearful of political provocations above all from the Moscophile intelligentsia. In these more favorable circumstances, the western Lemko region acquired great numbers of Ukrainian teachers, who were able to regenerate the pedagogical organization which had existed there before 1914.

The ranks of the secular intelligence were reinforced by military men. In autumn of 1918 a group of soldiers and officers from Ukrainian infantry regiments stationed in Nowy Sącz and Zakopane, which had been disarmed by the Polish authorities in the early days of November settled in the Lemko region. Furthermore, the postwar period was also characterized by an inflow of the younger generation of Greek Catholic clergymen, whose national consciousness had matured in confrontation with the Ukrainian struggle for nationhood. The secular and clergy intelligentsia shaped the substance of organizational work, took command of cultural, educational, and economic institutions, and represented the Ukrainian movement in the political life of the Polish nation.

The Prosvita Society and the Lemko Commission

The strongest Ukrainian cultural and educational organization in the Lemko region was the Prosvita Society.

As a result of the displacements of 1944-1946, and in particular Operation Vistula in 1947, the demographic structure of the previously existing Lemko Region was destroyed, and the repressed population found itself in a difficult social and moral situation. Stalinist propaganda disseminated in socialist Poland took away the Ukrainian sense of dignity, conferring an inferior status on them. This culminated in their feeling ashamed of their origins and avoiding national self-definition. The power of family traditions was not always able to overcome this barrier. For a part of the population this gave rise to certain forms of behavior which included a preference for a particular ethnographic designation. In other words, it was easier to be a Lemko than a Ukrainian. On the other hand, there were political traditions from before the war which also ruled against the use of the name “Ukrainian”; for some, there was no need to avoid the term, since they had never used it.

Political changes which took place in Poland during the “Solidarity” era awakened the political engagement of national minorities, long hidden from the realms of culture and education. Gradually this led to the rebuilding in the Lemko community of the two ideologically opposed camps which had put roots down in the Lemko region in the 19th and first half of the 20th century: the Union of Lemkos with headquarters in Gorlice, one of the Ukrainian minority organizations, and the Association of Lemkos, headquartered in Legnica, which declared the Lemkos’ affinity with the modern Rusyn nation (neo-Rusyn/Carpatho-Rusyn).

Based on the research conducted, it should be stated that the political currents analyzed herein originated outside of the Lemko region. Beginning from the early 19th century, they fi rst developed in Eastern Galicia. Th is forces us to link social and political events and phenomena occurring in the Lemko community with the transformations taking place in the Eastern part of the country and leads us to conclude that the Lemko region had close connections to the political development of East Galician centers of thought and action. Th is interconnectedness was sustained in the interwar period.

We face some problems when classifying the political elites. It is diffi cult to narrowly distinguish the elite with Lemko origins and attach to it a definite political orientation. A great many activists, it is true, lived in the Lemko region or surrounding cities, but had origins outside of its ethnographic area. This applies in particular to the intelligentsia, for whom it was easier to change places of residence. The Lemko region attracted national activists, Moscophiles and Old Rusyns; priests (Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic), lawyers and doctors. Migration also flowed in the reverse direction - Lemkos came to reinforce branches of institutions of varying political hues in Lviv and other cities, establishing medical practices and attorneys’ offices. After getting an education it was natural for them to settle in Eastern Galicia, putting aside their Lemko origins.

The nineteenth century was characterized by the development of modern national and political movements in Europe, which grew out of the tradition of the French Revolution. In the first half of the 19th century the national idea was echoed in Central and Eastern Europe. These processes were initiated by socioeconomic changes. The crisis of the feudal economy led to the development of the production of goods, the growth of exchange and the emergence of new money markets. Peasants freed from serfdom settled in cities, and the vernacular increasingly heard in Germanized urban centers deepened the process of urban nationalization. In Austria, a country with multiple nationalities, this caused national conflicts, accelerating the formation of modern consciousness among its Slavic peoples.

In the course of these sociopolitical changes, the ideologies of the Enlightenment and Romanticism played important roles. The Enlightenment, proclaiming the equality of all before the law, spread the concept of the nation to different social classes. Romanticism exposed elements of folk culture and brought to light evidence of a marvelous past belonging to nation-states and also stateless nations. The attempt undertaken in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to take a new look at Slavic cultural heritage found support in the philosophy of the German thinker Johann G. Herder, who showed the historic role that Slavs were to play in the future.

The immediate postwar period

The fall of the Lemko republics put an end to the Lemko postwar searchings for a national identity other than Polish. Despite the fact that changes occurred in the general consciousness of the community and its elites, it was the rebirth of the Polish state, absorbing the Lemko region throughout the northern slope of the Carpathian mountains, which marked out the prospect of Polish citizenship for Lemkos and the necessity that all issues of sociopolitical life be dealt with in terms of Polish statehood.

The immediate afterwar years proved to be a test of Lemkos’ loyalty to the state, which process was highlighted in the context of military matters: registration for conscription and conscription itself. In early 1921, based on the reports of State Police Posts (PPP), districts sent lists to the government in Lviv of persons who were shirking military service. In each case of disloyalty an investigation, intended to force the conscript to be brought before the registration commission, was decreed. This task belonged to the police, but its execution was made difficult by the mountainous and wooded terrain of the municipalities in which draft-dodgers found convenient hiding places. The administrative authorities, following orders from a higher court, conducted searches (not only for Lemkos) and raised the share in operational costs for those municipalities which did not provide conscription registration lists at the appointed time.

The many instances of desertion constituted a separate problem for the military and civil authorities.

Formation of the pro-Russian party

The development of Moscophilism and the Old Rusyn movement in the Lemko region during the interwar period was closely connected with political movements which developed in the Lviv, Stanyslaviv, Sambir, Zolochiv, and Rava Ruska areas, and in other cities scattered around the former Eastern Galicia. Lemkos did not have forms of social or political organization evolving exclusively from their local traditions. The organizations in which they actively participated took form mainly through the inspiration of Lviv activists. This was a natural state of affairs, considering that the centers of all of the more important and influential provincial institutions were located in Lviv. The processes through which the structures of such institutions developed in the Lemko region must therefore be presented in the context of the activity in Lviv's political centers.

The fall of Tsarist Russia and the emergence of the Polish state brought about a revaluation in the political consciousness of many actors – hence pro-Polish, pro-Russian, and pro-communist sympathies equally became visible. The accumulated archival documents do not allow us to precisely separate out the above political tendencies in the immediate postwar period, yet they did find a place in the party called the Halych-Russian National Organization, hereafter HRNO, formed in 1919, whose executive organ was the Russian executive Committee (Russkii Ispolnitelnyi Komitet) in Stanyslaviv. The chaos was aggravated by the fact that – as Ivan Kedryn attests – this Committee recognized the authority of the Western Ukrainian National Republic, which could signify the entry of the Moscophiles on the path of identification with the Ukrainian movement.