Wiktor Poliszczuk (10 October 1925 in Dubno near Rivne – 17 November 2008 in Toronto) was a Polish-Ukrainian-Canadian (a Canadian citizen of Polish-Ukrainian descent) politologist specialising in the history of political thought, who wrote about the Polish-Ukrainian relations during World War II and issues relating to the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism in the 20th century resulting in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Poliszczuk's work has been praised by several Ukrainian, Polish, Canadian, American, and Ukrainian historians, but also acknowledged for his Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation effort.
Biography
Poliszczuk was born in Dubno (then in the Second Polish Republic), into a family of Ukrainian father and Polish mother. He was raised as an Eastern Orthodox Christian. When he was a child Wiktor, his mother and two sisters were deported to Kazakh SSR by the Soviet authorities (in April 1940). His father (an ethnic Ukrainian who had served as government official in interwar Poland) was executed by the Soviets. After World War II his family resettled in Dnipropetrovsk and in 1946 moved to Poland following Polish-Soviet repatriation agreement, to re-unite with the family of his aunt. In Poland Poliszczuk graduated from the Pedagogical Liceum and worked as a teacher. Later he studied law at the Wrocław University, and political science at the University of Silesia in Katowice, where he obtained a PhD (his doctoral thesis was about the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism). He worked as an attorney in the People's Republic of Poland. In 1981 during the time of martial law in Poland he emigrated to Canada. He lived in Toronto until his death in November 2008.
Work
Poliszczuk's research and his extensive writing were devoted to the anatomy of bolshevism, theory and practice of national rights in the former Soviet Union as well as the theory and practice of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army activities. His on-line biography does not list any affiliations with a Canadian university. His two books, translated into English-language, were self-published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, including: Legal and political assessment of the OUN and UPA, as well as Bitter truth : the criminality of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Wiktor Poliszczuk was the author of over 200 papers, books and scientific publications, scientific articles, polemics, reviews, and press releases written in English, Ukrainian and Polish, including five large volumes bearing the title Integral Ukrainian nationalism as a variant of fascism (Toronto, 2003). His two books were translated into English-language. In his writing, Poliszczuk clearly separates the issues of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Ukrainian nation, stating that the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was based on terror. He explores the sources of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists' actions as based on the theories of Dmytro Dontsov. On April 16, 2009, Wiktor Poliszczuk received posthumously the "Polonia Mater Nostra Est" award.
Analysis
Poliszczuk's main argument in his work on the history of Ukrainian nationalism was that it began only in the period following World War I. Poliszczuk postulated that the earlier political beliefs held by Ukrainian writers such as Mykola Mikhnovsky were oriented toward independence and did not have the same radical character of Dmytro Dontsov's ideology which served as inspiration for the World War II atrocities committed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. According to Poliszczuk – wrote Dr Anna Dziduszko-Rościszewska of the Jagiellonian University – the main difference among the ideas of Mikhnovsky and Dontsov was the actual definition of a nation. For Mikhnovsky, the reform of the existing social order did not preclude the commitment to the ideal of tolerance, wrote Poliszczuk. For Dontsov, on the other hand, violence and intolerance became the necessary ingredients of the new Ukrainian nationalism providing the vocabulary of motive for the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in the following years.