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Polonization (Template:Lang-pl) is the acquisition or imposition of elements of Polish culture, especially the Polish language, experienced by the non-Polish population of the territories controlled by Poland or with a significant Polish influence, in different historical periods. Polonization is often compared to other assimilationist policies carried out at times by other European powers that aspired to the regional domination (e.g. Germanization, Rumanization or Russification), or to policies carried out by reconstituted countries which wanted to increase the role of their language in their societies (eg. Ukrainization).

Polonization was especially noted in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795) and the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939), although it must be noted that because of strong differences between these two widely separated historical periods, the process of Polonization was quite different in each. In the times of the Commonwealth, the Polish culture, itself influenced by Western culture, drew to itself the upper classes of the Ruthenian (Belarusian and Ukrainian) and Lithuanian communities leading to those classes' lesser or greater alienation from their ethnic roots.

Polonization was sometimes closely related to conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, as in some areas and in some historical periods being Polish culturally and Roman Catholic by religion was almost the same, although the correlation was by no means universal. The promotion of the Roman Catholic Church at the expense of the Orthodox Churches was the aspect of Polonization most resented by Belarusian and Ukrainian masses. In contrast the Lithuanians, who were mostly Catholic, were in danger of losing their cultural identity as a nation, but that didn't become evident for the wide masses of Lithuanians until the Lithuanian national renaissance in the middle of the 19th century.

In the twentieth century the Second Polish Republic's Polonization policies were aimed at achieving an ethnically homogeneous Poland over the entire territory of the Republic while over one third of the Poland's population was non-Polish. These policies mainly relied on emphasizing the Polish language in education and official use, while discriminating against other languages. The proponents of this policy hoped that it would result in the Polish language becoming dominant over the continuum of a few generations. Given the short time span in which they were applied, these policies, applied with varying intensity, fell far short of their aim, but contributed to increased ethnic tensions which led to large scale violence during World War II.

Historic periods of Polonization

Poland of Piasts

Between the 12th and the 14th centuries many Polish towns were accorded the so-called Magdeburg rights that promoted the towns' development and trade. The right were usually granted on the occasion of the arrival of the colonists from Germany. After the years of living amidst the Polish majority of western and central Poland those groups were Polonized. A similar process of Polonization took place in case of merchants that settled in those areas, especially Greeks and Armenians, they adopted most aspects of Polish culture but kept their Orthodox faith. Since the middle ages, Polish culture, influenced by the West, in turn radiated east, beginning the long and uneasy process of cultural assimilation.

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the minorities (especially Ruthenian and Lithuanian) found themselves under strong cultural and religious pressure of Poland. The Polish rule of the territory started from the 1569 Union of Lublin, when many of the territories formerly controlled by largely Ruthenized Grand Duchy of Lithuania were absorbed into Crown of the Polish Kingdom, and formally ended by the 1795 Third Partition of Poland, while in reality it continued well into the 19th century as the enserfed peasantry and huge estates were left in the Russian and Austrian Empires under the control of the Polish magnates, or the Polonized ones, virtually indistinguishable from the former.

In the climate of the colonization of Ruthenian lands by the Polish or Polonized nobility, persecution and even an attempted ban of the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Polish controlled territories following the unsuccessful attempt to convert the Ruthenian peasantry into the Catholicism, pressures of Polonization on Ruthenian nobility and cultural elite resulted in almost complete abandonment of Ruthenian culture, traditions and the Orthodox Church by the Ruthenian higher class.

The Polish king Władysław II Jagiełło (reigned 1386-1434) built many Roman Catholic churches and provided them generously with estates, gave out the lands and positions to the Catholics, settled the cities and villages by the Poles and gave those settlements the Magdeburg Rights privileges that consisted of many allowances. These rights were given only to the settlements dominated by the Poles and the Germans but not to Ruthenian settlements whose residents were fully taxed. The noble Ruthenians were also freed from many payment obligations and their rights were equalized with those of the Polish Szlachta but only when they adopted the Catholicism. Then they were provided with compensation for the military service, while those who remained Orthodox received none. As such, the entire population of Ruthenia was split into the privileged and non-privileged ones, and the latter were the Orthodox people of Ruthenia.

Under Jagiełło's successor Władysław III of Varna (reigned 1434-1444) the Polonization which earlier took place more by force than by other means attained a certain degree of subtlety. Wladyslaw III introduced some more liberal reforms. He expanded the privilleges to all Ruthenian nobles, irrespective of their religion, and in 1443 he signed a bull equalizing the Orthodox church in rights with the Roman Catholicism thus alleviating the relationship with the Orthodox clergy. These policies continued under the next king Casimir IV Jagiellon. Still, the mostly cultural expansion of the Polish influence continued since the Ruthenian nobility were attracted by both the glamour of the Western culture and the Polish political order where the magnates became the unrestricted rulers of the lands and serfs in their vast estates.

Some Ruthenian magnates like Sanguszko, Wiśniowiecki and Kisiel, resisted the cultural Polonization for several generations, with the Ostrogski family being one of the most prominent examples. Remaining generally loyal to the Polish state, the magnates, like Ostrogskis, stood by the religion of their forefathers, and supported the Orthodox Church generously by opening schools, printing books in Ruthenian language (the first four printed Cyrillic books in the world were published in Cracow, in 1491) and giving generously to the Orthodox churches' construction. However, their resistance was gradually waning with each subsequent generation as more and more of the Ruthenian elite turned towards Polish language and Catholicism.

Still, with most of the educational system getting Polonized and the most generously funded institutions being to the west of Ruthenia, the Ruthenian indigenous culture further deteriorated. In the Polish Ruthenia the administrative paperwork language started to gradually shift towards the gradual Polish domination. By the 16th century we find the peculiar official language, a mix of the older Church Slavonic with the Ruthenian language of the commoners with the Polish language with the influence of the latter gradually increasing. It soon became mostly like Polish language superimposed on the Ruthenian phonetics. The total confluence of Ruthenia and Poland was seen coming.

As the Eastern Rite Greek-Catholic Church originally created to accommodate the Ruthenian, initially Orthodox, nobility, ended up unnecessary to them as they converted directly into the Latin Rite Catholicism en masse, the Church largely became an hierarchy without followers. The Greek Catholic Church was then used as a tool aimed to split even the peasantry from their Ruthenian roots, still mostly unsuccessfully. The commoners, deprived of their native protectors, sought protection through the Cossacks, who, being fiercely Orthodox, tended also to easily turn to violence against those they perceived as their enemies, particularly the Polish state and what they saw as its representatives, the Poles and generally the Catholics , as well as the Jews.

After several Cossack uprisings, especially the fateful Khmelnytsky uprising, and foreign invasions (like the Deluge), the Commonwealth, increasingly powerless and falling under the control of its neighbours , started to decline, the process which eventually culminated with elimination of the Polish statehood in the end of the 18th century for the next 123 years.

While the Commonwealth's Warsaw Compact is widely considered an example of an unprecedented religious tolerance for its time, the oppressive policies of Poland towards its Eastern Orthodox subjects is often cited as one of the main reasons that brought the state's demise.

During all time of existing of Commonwealth Polonization in western part of country referred to rather small groups of colonists, like Bambrzy in Greater Poland.

Partitions

Polonization also occurred during times when a Polish state didn't exist, e.g. by mixed marriages between Poles (especially Polish women). This process was most prevalent during the Napoleonic wars when relatively large numbers of French soldiers resided in Polish lands.

Another situation where Polonization took place was in the Prussian partition, where as a reaction to the persecution of Roman Catholicism during the Kulturkampf, German Catholics living in areas with a Polish majority voluntarily integrated themselves within Polish society, affecting approximately 100,000 Germans in the eastern provinces of Prussia. It should be noted that during the same period, the German state was engaged in a state-enforced program of Germanization targeting the Polish minority (and similarly, the Russian state was engaged in forced Russification).

On the former lands of Great Duchy of Lithuania, the Polonization actually intensified under the rule of Alexander I, as the direct control over the education in the "joined provinces" had been given to the local power people. This had marked the beginning of the brief period of the intensive development of the schooling in the Belarusian lands. The Academy of Vilna, after its reorganizing into Emperor’s Vilna University (1803), had become, by the contemporary laws, the main and rules-setting educational institution of the whole Vilna educational district, which included the lands of Belarus and Lithuania (completely), three Ukrainian Gubernias (Governorates) (Podolia, Kiev, Volhynia), Belostok district (since 1807).

The new structure had been headed by prince Adam Czartoryski, helped by such notable personalities as Tadeusz Czacki, rev. Hugo Kołłątaj, Jan Śniadecki. Effectively, this setup had enabled the cultural Polonisation and cultivating of the strictly Polish patriotism in in the territory in scale never before possible. The whole spirit of the schooling and the University had become distinctly Polish. In the words of rev. Dmochowski: "...under the Russian rule the finest perspectives are opening, it’s just the question of choosing right people..." The Polonization trend had been complemented with the (covert) anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox trends.

Such activities had seen some, rather weak and short-lived, opposition, e.g., by the first head of the University rev. Hieronim Strojnowski, and by the Uniate metropolitan Józef Lisowski. However, soon the headship of the University had been transferred to the notable Polish national activist Jan Śniadecki, and so any opposition to the Polonization in the University had ceased.

Summarily, the 1800s – 1810s had seen the unprecedented prosperity of the Polish culture and language in the former Great Duchy of Lithuania lands, had prepared the era of such famous "Belarusians by birth – Poles by choice", as Adam Mickiewicz and Władysław Syrokomla. The era had seen the effective completion of the Polonization of the smallest nobility, with further reduction of the areal of use of the contemporary Belarusian language.

In the following decades, the Polonization trend had been confronted more staunchly by then "anti-Polish" Russification policy, with temporary successes on both sides, like Polonization rises in mid-1850s and in 1880s and Russification strengthenings in 1830s and in 1860s.

Second Polish Republic

By the times of Second Polish Republic (1918-1939) much of the territories controlled by Poland over a century ago (at the Commonwealth's time), that were historically mixed (partly Ruthenian and partly Polish), had the Ukrainian and Belarusian majority. Following the post-World War I rebirth of the Polish statehood, these lands became again disputed but the Poles were more successful than the nascent West Ukrainian People's Republic in the Polish-Ukrainian War. Thus, in the wake of the Poland's elimination of Ukrainian statehood attempt in Galicia (Eastern Europe) and Volhynia followed by the further westward expansion into Belarus which the Soviet Russia succeeded to deter only to a degree, these territories ended up under the Polish control. As such, Poland had to deal with the problems it brought upon itself by expanding into non-Polish populated territories as the approximately one third of new state's population was non-Polish and non-Catholic.

The Ukrainian territories of Galicia and Volhynia had different backgrounds, different late histories and different dominant religions. Until the First World War, Galicia with its largely Greek Catholic Ukrainian population, was controlled by the Austrian Empire whose local policies were relatively pro-Ukrainian (Ruthenian) in an attempt to cement the Austrian control over the territories and prevent the political trends of population's leaning towards the rest of Ukrainians controlled by the Russian Empire. Such policies resulted in much stronger national self-perception among the Galicia Ukrainians. On the other hand, the Ukrainians of Volhynia, formerly of the Russian Empire, were largely Orthodox by religion, and were influenced by the strong Russophile trends. Therefore, while the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), which functions in communion with the Latin Rite Catholicism, could have hoped to receive a better treatment in Poland, where the leadership saw the Catholicism as one of the main tools to unify the nation, the Poles saw the Greek Catholic Galicia Ukrainians as even less reliable than the Orthodox Volhynia Ukrainians seen as good candidates for the political assimilation. As such the Polish policy in Ukraine initially was aimed at keeping "bad" Greek Catholic Galicians from influencing "good" Orthodox Volhynians.

Due to the region's history the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church attained a strong Ukrainian national character, and the Polish authorities sought to weaken it in various ways. In 1924, following a visit with the Ukrainian Catholic believers in North America and western Europe, the head of the UGCC was initially denied reentry to Lviv until after a considerable delay. Polish priests led by their bishops began to undertake missionary work among Eastern Rite faithful, and the administrative restrictions were placed on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church .

With respect to the Orthodox Ukrainian population in eastern Poland, the Polish government initially issued a decree defending the rights of the Orthodox minorities. In practice, this often failed, as the Catholics, also eager to strengthen their position, had official representation in the Sejm and the courts. Any accusation was strong enough for a particular church to be confiscated and handed over to the Roman Catholic church. 190 Orthodox churches were destroyed (some of the destroyed churches were abandoned and 150 more were forcibly transformed into Roman Catholic (not Greek Catholic) churches. Such actions were condemned by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, who claimed that these acts would "destroy in the souls of our non-united Orthodox brothers the very thought of any possibility of reunion."

How to deal with the non-Polish minorities was a subject of intense debate within the Polish leadership. Two ideas of Polish policy clashed at the time - a more tolerant and arguably less assimilationist approach advocated by Józef Piłsudski, whose project of creating a Międzymorze federation with other states failed in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War, clashed with the eventually prevailing strictly nationalist and assimilationist approach advocated by Roman Dmowski, a minister of foreign affairs, and Stanisław Grabski, a minister of religion and education. Dmowski and Grabski saw the solution of the "minorities problem" in imposing "Polish values" (Polish language and the Catholic Church) on the minorities to achieve "national assimilation", i.e. to make them "Polish" within the "next generation". On the other hand, Józef Piłsudski, a Polish chief of State who also controlled the army, supported "state" rather than "national" assimilation as a more practical approach.

As most of the Polish government was initially controlled by Roman Dmowski, leader of endecja and a strong proponent of Polonization, the policies that based on his views were implemented. Dmowski, quoted to have said Wherever we can multiply our forces and our civilizational efforts, absorbing other elements, no law can prohibit us from doing so, as such actions are our duty. engineered the policies of "Endecja", that alienated the minorities in Poland to such an extent that even when Piłsudski gained power in 1926 his attempted modest reforms did not affect the attitude of the minorities to the Polish state formed by endecja policies.

When the territories of Western Belarus, Western Ukraine and the Wilno region were incorporated by Poland after the Treaty of Riga, Poland rejected its international obligations to grant the autonomy to eastern Galicia which Poland never intended to follow anyway. The linguistic assimilation was considered as a major factor of "unifying the state" by National Democrats. For example, Stanisław Grabski, Polish Minister for Religion and Public Education in 1923 and 1925-1926 wrote that "Poland may be preserved only as the state of Polish people. If it were a state of Poles, Jews, Germans, Rusyns, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Russians, it would lose its independence again" and that "it is impossible to make a nation of those who do not have the 'national self-identification', who calls themselves "local" (Tutejszy)". Grabski also said that the aim of Polish policy should be "the transformation of the Commonwealth into Polish ethnic territory". Some other officials rejected the existence of Ukrainian and Belarusian nations altogether.

A law issued in 1924 banned usage of any language but Polish in governmental and municipal paperwork. It the area of public education it was postulated that state schools could be only Polish language schools. Local populations could have private local language schools, but only in territories "loyal to the Polish state". Specifically with respect to the Eastern territories (known as Kresy Wschodnie, or "Eastern Borderlands") it was recognized that "schools can become an instrument of the cultural development in Eastern lands only if Polish teachers will work there". It turned out to be infeasible for implementation and, in particular cases, bilingual ("utraquist") schools were proposed, while in reality those schools were functionally the Polish language ones.

In internal politics, Piłsudski's reign marked the much needed stabilization and improvements in the situation of ethnic minorities, which formed almost a third of the population of the Second Republic. Piłsudski replaced endecja's 'ethnic assimilation' with the 'state assimilation' policy: citizens were judged by their loyalty to the state, not by their nationality. The years 1926-1935 were favourably viewed by many Polish Jews, whose situation improved especially under the cabinet of Piłsudski’s appointee Kazimierz Bartel. However a combination of various reasons, from the Great Depression, through the Pisłudski's need for support from parties for the parliament's election to the vicious spiral of terrorist attacks by Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and government pacifications meant that the situation continued to degenerate, despite Piłsudski's efforts. The attitude of Ukrainians of that time is well shown in the statements by the reputable Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who noted negative influence of Polish policies on the Ukrainian culture: "the four centuries of Polish rule had left particularly destructive effects (...) economic and cultural backwardness in Galicia was the main "legacy of historical Poland, which assiduously skimmed everything that could be considered the cream of the nation, leaving it in a state of oppression and helplessness".

The land reform designed to favour the Poles in mostly Ukrainian populated Volhynia, the agricultural territory where the land question was especially severe, brought the alienation from the Polish state of even the Orthodox Volhynian population who tended to be much less radical than the Greek Catholic Calicians.

After the Polish legislative election, 1930, Belarusian representation in the Polish parliament was reduced and since the early 1930's the Polish government started to introduce policies intended to Polonize the minorities. In 1938 about 100 abandonedOrthodox churches were destroyed or converted to Roman Catholic in the eastern parts of Poland. The use of Belarusian language was discouraged. There wasn't a Belarusian school in the spring of 1939, and only 44 schools teaching Belarusian language existed in Poland at the beginning of World War II.

Post World War II

Ethnic Germans still living in the western territories gained by Poland (determined by Tehran Conference by Stalin in the aftermath of World War II - e.g. Silesia) were denied the use of their language in public by the Communist regime and they had to adopt the Polish language and citizenship to evade discrimination, expropriation and insult. Some 180,000 were sent to forced work camps like camp Tost, camp Potulice or camp Lambsdorf. Their situation improved in 1950 with the Treaty of Zgorzelec between Poland and the GDR. Western Germany however did not recognize this agreement. Until 1953 there were 55 German basic schools and 2 higher German schools in Poland. Unlike the Poles in Germany, the Germans enjoy a formally recognized status of an ethnic minority in modern Poland.

During Operation Wisła in 1947, the Ukrainian and Rusyn populations were forcibly resettled from their historic territories in the south-east of Poland to northern areas of the territories awarded by the Allies to Poland in the post-war settlement. According to the order of the Ministry of Recovered Territories "the main goal of the relocation of settlers "W" is their assimilation in a new Polish environment, all efforts should be exerted to achieve those goals. Do not apply the term "Ukrainians" towards the settlers. In cases when the intelligentsia element reaches the recovered territories, they should by all means be settled separately and away from the communities of the "W" settlers."

Ethnicity of notable figures

As a consequence of the process of cultural Polonization, disputes occur as to the ethnicity of some notable persons such as Tadeusz Kościuszko, Adam Mickiewicz and Ignacy Domeyko, who are claimed as national celebrities by Poles, Belarusians and Lithuanians alike.

References

1. ^ Michael J. Mikoś, Polish Literature from the Middle Ages to the End of the Eighteenth Century. A Bilingual Anthology, Warsaw: Constans, 1999. First chapters online Cite error: The named reference "Mikos" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
2. "Due to his marriage converted into the Catholicism and became an ardent proponent of the newly accepted religion and, gratifying the Poles, patronized both the spread of the Catholic religion through the Ruthenian lands and the implementation of the Polonization of Ruthenia. At this time, the embryo was put that for the following centuries defined the relationship between Ruthenia and Poland. The notion of religion became indistinguishable from the notion of the ethnicity. Who was the Catholic, was the Pole already. Who considered himself a Ruthenian, was an Orthodox and Belonging to the Orthodox Church was the defining sign of the belonging to the Ruthenian people."
   Template:Ru icon Nikolay Kostomarov, Russian History in Biographies of its main figures, section Knyaz Kostantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky (Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski)
3. "Within the grand duchy, the Ruthenian lands initially retained considerable autonomy. The pagan Lithuanians themselves were increasingly converting to Orthodoxy and assimilating into Ruthenian culture. The grand duchy's administrative practices and legal system drew heavily on Slavic customs, and Ruthenian became the official state language. Direct Polish rule in Ukraine since the 1340s and for two centuries thereafter was limited to Galicia. There, changes in such areas as administration, law, and land tenure proceeded more rapidly than in Ukrainian territories under Lithuania. However, Lithuania itself was soon drawn into the orbit of Poland."
   from Ukraine. (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved June 3, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service:
4. "The son of Gediminas, the Grand Prince Olgerd expanded the Ruthenian lands he inherited from his father: he attached the Polish lands to his state expelling the Tatars out. The Ruthenian lands under his sovereignty were divided between princes. However, Algirdas, the person of a strong character, controlled them. In Kiev, he installed his son, Vladimir, which started the new line of Kiev princes that reigned there for over a century and called commonly the Olelkoviches, from Olelko, Aleksandr Vladimirovich, the grand-son of Algirdas. Algirdas himself, married twice with Ruthenian princesses, allowed his sons to baptise into Ruthenian religion and, as the Ruthenian Chronicles speak, had himself baptised and died as a monk. As such, the princes that replaced the St. Vladimir's line in Ruthenia, became as Ruthenian by religion and by the ethnicity they adopted, as the princes of the line that preceded them. The Lithuanian state was called Lithuania, but of course it was purely Ruthenian and would have remained Ruthenian if only the successor of Algirdas in the Great Princehood, the Jagiello wouldn't have married in 1386 to the Polish queen Jadwiga"
   Kostomarov, "Ostrozhski".
5. "Transferred as a result of the Union of Lublin from the grand duchy of Lithuania to the more ethnically homogeneous Crown, Ukraine was “colonized” by both Polish and Ukrainian great nobles. Most of the latter gradually abandoned Orthodoxy to become Roman Catholic and Polish. These “little kings” of Ukraine controlled hundreds of thousands of “subjects”"
   from Wladyslaw IV Vasa in "Poland, history of". (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved June 3, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service:
6. "Ukraine had flourished under Lithuanian rule, and its language became that of the state; but after the organic union of Poland and Lithuania in 1569, Ukraine came under Polish rule, enserfment of the Ukrainian peasants proceeded apace, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church suffered persecution."
   from "Ukraine". The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05.
7. "The Uniate church was unsuccessful in gaining the legal equality with the Latin church foreseen by the agreement. Nor was it able to stem the process of Polonization and Latinization of the nobility. At the same time, the Union of Brest caused a deep split in the Ruthenian church and society. This was reflected in a sizeable polemical literature, struggles over the control of bishoprics and church properties that intensified after the restoration of an Orthodox hierarchy in 1620, and numerous acts of violence. Efforts to heal the breach in the 1620s and '30s were ultimately fruitless."
   from Ukraine. (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved June 3, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service:
8. ^ In 1596 the Union of Brest-Litovsk subordinated the Eastern Orthodox church of the Commonwealth to the papacy by creating the Eastern-rite (Uniate) church. Politically, this was intended to cement the cohesion of the state vis-à-vis Moscow; instead it led to internal divisions among the Orthodox. The new Eastern-rite church became a hierarchy without followers while the forbidden Eastern Orthodox church was driven underground. Wladyslaw's recognition of the latter's existence in 1632 May have come too late. The Orthodox masses—deprived of their native protectors, who had become Polonized and Catholic—turned to the Cossacks.
   from Wladyslaw IV Vasa in "Poland, history of". (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved June 3, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service:
9. ^ "The higher class in Poland was omnipotent and, of course, if the Ruthenia nobility was firm in their religion and firmly stood by the religion of their forefathers, no intrigues of the king and the Jesuits would have been able to subvert it. But this was the very misfortune that the Ruthenian nobility, this very Ruthenian higher class who was benefiting from being under the power of Poland, was not able to hold to its own from the moral oppression, that was burdening the Orthodox religion and the Ruthenian ethnicity. Entering into the relations with the Polish Szlachta, adopting the Polish language and Polish habits, the Ruthenian people were not powerful enough to hold on to their forefathers' religion. Catholicism was supported by the eye catching shine of the Western enlightenment. In Poland, the Ruthenian religion and the Ruthenian ethnicity were looked down at: everything resembling Ruthenian seemed to the eye of the Polish society as rustic, vulgar, savage, ignorant, something an educated and upstanding citizen should be ashamed of. Catholics had much better means for education and, therefore, the children of the Orthodox nobility were taught by the Catholics. Stirred up by their teachers, who indoctrinated them with the reverence to Catholicism, entering the court, where they in the prevailing propaganda spirit only heard about the same reverence, the Ruthenian youths inevitably adopted the same attitude towards the religion and the ethnicity of their forefathers, as usually common for those who draw on the alienation under the full conviction that the alien is the sign of education and gives the honour and respect in the everyday life which they are to be part of. The converted to the Catholicism descendants of the noble families, looking back at the morality of their forefathers found themselves in the same mood, as their ancestors who abandoned the Paganism and adopted the Christianity many centuries prior to that. One after the other they adopted the new religion and felt ashamed of the previous one. True, as it always is in the transitional periods, so was in the period of Catholicization of the Ruthenian nobility, for as long as half-a-century, or sometimes even longer, there were remaining adherents of the old tradition and they made themselves heard, but those were becoming very few and far between, and finally there were none. In the Polish Ruthenia the person that belonged by blood and by position to the high society became unthinkable other than with the Roman-Catholic religion, with Polish language and with Polish views and perceptions. From the times of Unia there appeared a new aspiration to raise the Ruthenian Church and the Ruthenian ethnicity, to form Ruthenian education, at least the religious one for a start. But this aspiration came too late for the upper class of the Ruthenian lands connected with Poland. This upper class didn't need anything Ruthenian anymore and viewed it with disgust and aversion. It appeared the Unia, thought to be a bait for the Ruthenian upper class, was for it as unnecessary. The nobles became pure Catholics without it. The Unia remained only as a means of destruction among the commoners of the signs of the Orthodox religion and the Ruthenian ethnicity. To accept the Unia meant for a Ruthenian to become a Pole, or at least, semi-Pole. This direction revealed itself from the start and persisted without deviation for times to come until the end of Unia. Despite in the beginning the Pope, in agreement with the 15th century Council of Florence affirmed the sanctity of the Eastern Rite, already in early-17th century the Uniate clerics started to alter the church service and introduced different customs, peculiar for the Western church and non-existing in the Eastern one, or even the repudiated by the latter Becoming close and closer to the Catholicism, Unia seized being an Eastern Church and started something intermediate but remaining the feature of the commoners: in the country were the commoners reached the total degree of enslavement, the religion, the existed for those people could not have enjoyed the equal honor with the religion preached by the superiors; therefore the Unia in Poland became the inferior religion, that of the common people, not worthy of the higher class. As for the Orthodoxy, in the eyes of the society it became the Religion rejected, the lowest one Worthy of the utmost contempt. It was not just the religion of the low-lives in general, like Unia, but the religion of the outcast low-lives, the different ones and unable in their barbarity and obduracy to raise on a somewhat a higher stage of the religious and societal development. It was no more than a pity affiliation of the despicable half-believers, which will not get any salvation even in the next life.
   Template:Ru icon Kostomarov "Knyaz Kostantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky"
10. ^ Kostomarov, "Ostrozhski"
11. "The new Polish king, the son of Jagello, Vladislav named in history "of Varna" due to his death in the battle with Turks at Varna in 1444) curbed significantly the aspirations of Svidrigello by his attitude to the Ruthenian people and the Ruthenian religion. Until that day the Poles captured power in Ruthenia by force . Jagiello's successor, Wladyslaw (reigned from 1434), acted differently than his father, although with the same goals in mind. He expanded the privileges and liberties formerly available only to the Ruthenian nobles of the Latin religion to all Ruthenian nobles without exception. This marked the beginning of the reconciliation between Ruthenia and Poland...
12. Template:Ru icon "Little Russian Hetman Zinoviy-Bogdan Khmelnytsky" (Bohdan Khmelnytsky) in "Nikolay Kostomarov's, "Russian History in Biographies of its main figures",
13. William Bullitt, The Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs, Transaction Publishers, 2005, ISBN 1-4128-0490-6, Google Print, p.42-43
14. John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams, Regnery Gateway, 2001, ISBN 0-89526-292-4, Google Print, p.242
15. The Confederation of Warsaw of 28th of January 1573: Religious tolerance guaranteed, part of the Memory of the World project at UNESCO.
16. Aleksandr Bushkov, Andrey Burovsky. Russia that was not - 2. The Russian Atlantis", ISBN 5-7867-0060-7, 5-224-01318-6
17. ^ The Prussian-Polish Situation: An experiment in Assimilation by W.I. Thomas.
18. Довнар-Запольский М. В. (Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky) История Белоруссии. — 2-е изд. — Мн.: Беларусь, 2005. — 680 с. ISBN 985-01-0550-X, LCCN 20-0 – 03 pp.290—291.
19. Dovnar-Zapolsky, pp.293—296.
20. Dovnar-Zapolsky, pp.296—298.
21. Dovnar-Zapolsky, p.298.
22. Dovnar-Zapolsky, pp.303—315,319—320,328—331.
23. THE REBIRTH OF POLAND. University of Kansas, lecture notes by professor Anna M. Cienciala, 2004. Last accessed on 2 June 2006. Quote:"there were large Polish minorities in what is today western Belarus, western Ukraine and central Ukraine. According to the Polish Census of 1931, Poles made up 5,600,000 of the total population of eastern Poland which stood at 13,021,000.* In Lithuania, Poles had majorities in the Vilnius and Suwałki areas, as well as significant numbers in and around Kaunas ."
24. ^ "Poland one third of population consisted of non-Poles, many of whom felt bitterly alienated from a state that had forcibly incorporated them into itself... he Polish government felt it had little reason to negotiate terms of autonomy with minorities upon which it had already imposed its rule."
    Roshwald, Aviel (2001). Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, the Middle East and Russia, 1914-1923. Routledge (UK). ISBN 0-415-24229-0. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
25. ^ Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-10586-XGoogle Books, p.144
26. ^ Magosci, P. (1989). Morality and Reality: the Life and Times of Andrei Sheptytsky. Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
27. ^ The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic Societie, Manus I. Midlarsky in Dissolving Boundaries, Blackwell Publishers, 2003, ISBN 1-4051-2134-3, Google Print, p.15
28. Subtelny, Orest (1988). Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-5808-6.
29. Zbigniew Brzezinski in his introduction to Wacław Jędrzejewicz’s “Pilsudski A Life For Poland” wrote: Pilsudski’s vision of Poland, paradoxically, was never attained. He contributed immensely to the creation of a modern Polish state, to the preservation of Poland from the Soviet invasion, yet he failed to create the kind of multinational commonwealth, based on principles of social justice and ethnic tolerance, to which he aspired in his youth. One may wonder how relevant was his image of such a Poland in the age of nationalism.... Quoted from this website.
30. Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. Messiah and Central European Federalist. Polonica.net article by Patryk Dole
31. Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, Elisabeth Glaser, The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years, Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-521-62132-1, Google Print, p.314
32. Tomaszewski J. Kresy Wschodnie w polskiej myśli politycznej XIX i XX w.//Między Polską etniczną a historyczną. Polska myśl polityczna XIX i XX wieku.—T.6.—Warszawa, 1988.—S.101. (Cited through: Oleksandr Derhachov (editor), "Ukrainian Statehood in the Twentieth Century: Historical and Political Analysis", 1996, Kiev ISBN 966-543-040-8)).
33. Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, Westview Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8133-3792-5, Google Print, p.106
34. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-521-57649-0, Google Print, p.100
35. Feigue Cieplinski, Poles and Jews: The Quest For Self-Determination 1919-1934, Binghamton Journal of History, Fall 2002, Last accessed on 2 June, 2006.
36. Davies, God's Playground, op.cit.,
37. C. M. Hann, Paul Robert Magocsi. Galicia: A Multicultured Land. University of Toronto, 2005. ISBN 0-8020-3781-X. Google Print, Page 85.
38. Snyder, op cit, Google Print, p.146
39. Eugeniusz Mironowicz, "Białoruś", Trio, Warszawa, 1999, ISBN 83-85660-82-8, p. 109
40. Włodzimierz Borodziej, Hans Lemberg, Unsere Heimat ist uns ein fremdes Land geworden... Die Deutschen östlich von Oder und Neiße. Dokumente aus polnischen Archiven, Herder Institut, Marburg 2000, ISBN 3-87969-283-1, Based on this review Template:De icon
41. Роман Дрозд Явожно– трагічний символ акції «Вісла»

External links

• The Polonization of the Ukrainian Nobility
• Template:Pl icon Założenia programowe głównych obozów politycznych wobec szkolnictwa dla ludności białoruskiej w II Rzeczypospolitej

Further reading

• Subtelny, Orest (1988). Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-5808-6.

• Polish culture
• History of Lithuania
• History of Lithuanian language
• History of Ukraine
• History of Belarus
• East Slavic history
• Cultural assimilation