In this article for Dwutygodnik, Ukrainian writer and intellectual Oksana Forostyna examines how the rapid transformations in Ukrainian society over the past 35 years have led people to project their present selves onto the past. She reflects on her upbringing in Lviv and discusses the contrasting perceptions of Poland and Ukraine in that era, emphasizing that Poland, despite its economic poverty, had access to Western aesthetics and culture. The article delves into the complexities of historical memory and identity, questioning the narratives that have shaped Ukrainian society's understanding of its past and its relations with neighboring countries.
In the opening paragraphs of his recently published essay The History of My Privileges, Canadian historian Michael Ignatieff asks a cautious question: "What happens when I stop using 'I' and start using 'we'?" Will the story about oneself, asks Ignatieff, become more detached? He also recounts a joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, characters from an American Western: surrounded by Native Americans, the Lone Ranger asks Tonto, "What are we going to do now?" "What do you mean 'we,' paleface?" Tonto replies.
Ignatieff has touched upon a question that has been bothering me for the past few years. Do I have the right to use "we" when talking about my generation, or at least a part of it? Can I generalize as freely as Ignatieff does when he talks about Western, white, middle-class people born between 1945 and 1960? Especially when I can point to so many experiences that make it impossible for me to belong to any broad “we,” no matter how regrettable that might be. There's one question in particular that I could write a whole essay on: The History of My Loneliness. And that question is Poland.
The pace of change in Ukrainian society over the past thirty-five years—and especially in the last three—has been so rapid, it's almost hard to grasp. It's only when we pause to look at specific shifts, comparing who we are now to who we were then, that the scale of transformation becomes clear. As difficult as it is for me to admit, after each major rupture—whether in 2014 or 2022—Ukrainian society has a tendency to project our current selves onto the past. This probably doesn’t particularly distinguish us; rather, it’s just a human tendency, made more noticeable by the depth and speed of our changes.
Looking back over the past 35 years, I’ve come to believe that, at times, ignorance can be a greater blessing than partial awareness. My childhood in Lviv does not allow me to include myself in any of the large "we"s: unlike most Lviv residents, my family had no experience of the "landed Polish" world, and therefore no stories of oppression and discrimination, nor old Polish books on the shelves, Polish "census records," or everyday habits. Consequently, the "oppression" was perceived more as part of the broader Soviet narrative, without any emotional weight. That’s not to say my perception in 1989 was neutral—any resentment I felt was deeply personal, directed toward the lost Polish branch of the family. Even the "antenna for Poland" somehow refused to work throughout most of my childhood, depriving me of one of the usual Lviv experiences of the 1980s: Polish television.
At the same time, there was a subtle air of condescension toward the "Pszeks" (Poles), who were just then arriving in the USSR to trade in scarce Western goods—trendy clothes, chewing gum, and especially the brightly colored pencil cases that were prized in my school years—while buying up Soviet kettles and household appliances. The Poles were, in material terms, objectively poorer than us, but they had access to the coveted aesthetics of the West: brighter colors, new tastes, unfamiliar smells. Just a few years later, the roles would reverse—Ukrainians began flocking to Polish bazaars, selling cheap vodka and looking for odd jobs in Polish towns. And not long after that, those same Poles with the kettles seemed to rocket away from us at a cosmic pace.
I hope that the relatively small circle of Ukrainian intellectuals who, at that time (or earlier), read the Kultura journal and Camus' works in Polish translation, communicated with Polish dissidents, and closely followed changes in the neighboring country, will agree with me that, in that specific era, 11-year-old me, with no knowledge not only of Jerzy Giedroyć but even of Andrzej Wajda, had more of a right to represent the "we" of our then 52-million-strong country. For a long time, my ignorance remained unshakable: it wasn’t influenced by either Polish ancestors (from Podilia) or Lviv with its cultural heritage. I grew up not only in the city of Stanisław Lem, Zbigniew Herbert, and Adam Zagajewski, but also in a personal childhood and teenage landscape that closely overlaps with the early world of Jacek Kuroń. We shared hills in our childhood, but I did not inherit them from him. I arrived at his hills at a time when he was intensely changing his country. In my childhood, an insurmountable chasm of time separated us, and the few blocks between our homes were reshaped by historical cataclysms. The stitching together of our spaces, Kuroń's and mine, happened quite recently—for both me and the Lviv community.
Kuroń's case is all the more striking because the echoes of the changes he was directly involved in reached me in the form of a plastic "Solidarność" badge, which one of my Polish acquaintances gave to my father. I knew that Solidarność was a Polish democratic movement fighting for changes like those I read about in Moscow magazines such as Ogonek and Novy Mir. I remember that my grandmother advised me not to wear it to school, but I didn't quite understand what could be wrong with the word "solidarity," which was even understandable to me. So, I pinned the badge on my sleeveless jacket, which I wore over my brown school uniform. The fact that I also wore a Pioneer tie back then feels almost organic—symbolic, even—of Ukraine at the time, building its democratic future using whatever and whoever it had: drawn from Soviet society and Soviet elites. This comical eclecticism of Soviet and anti-Soviet was already being played with by artists, whom I would meet later in my university years.
What did the Solidarność badge mean to me, someone entirely disconnected from the Polish context? To me, it was just the word "solidarity" in Polish, printed on a small piece of white plastic—simple, almost abstract. Looking back, I guess I read the deeply non-Soviet essence of the movement just from the font and the bright shade of red, which I couldn’t have gotten from Soviet markers. In this font, there was lightness, playfulness, and freedom, the contrast of which with our then context can only be understood by those who wore the brown Soviet uniform. Those who grew up in a free, global world no longer have that fine-tuned, bat-like sense capable of detecting difference literally from the air.
Even until recently, when the internet and budget airlines made what was once insurmountable more accessible, one of the recurring themes in our Ukrainian discussions has been the rhetorical question: "Why did we and Poland emerge from behind the Soviet veil on such different paths? Why, despite being wealthier at the start of the 1990s—with our missile design bureaus, factories, brilliant mathematical and technical education, and industry—were we so poor? Why weren’t we in NATO? Why weren’t we in the EU? And why did the Poles, those poor people with kettles, so easily become part of the West?" These discussions often begin with the mistaken assumption that our chances back then were shaped solely by economic potential, and that it’s correct to compare our situations as if we were two new republics emerging from the socialist camp, with Poland simply breaking free a little earlier.
Poland occupied, and still occupies, a peculiar position in mainstream Ukrainian discussions. In the Soviet worldview, it was both demonized and despised as the "Other"—neither a true enemy, like Napoleon or American imperialists, nor a true friend, due to its association with "landlord oppression." After 1991, the "landlord oppression" did not disappear, although the degree of officially sanctioned resentment gradually decreased. However, the affinity of political cultures, the influence of the Polish anti-imperialist movement, particularly the Polish uprisings, on Ukrainian thinkers (and on Russian revolutionaries, by the way), which is immediately apparent from the first lines of the national anthem, was so carefully suppressed that it is sometimes surprising how this load did not provoke complaints from the “guard,” whether from the Soviet or post-Soviet official Ukrainian narratives. In other words, we (here I use "we" to refer to the editorial group of 1989 and later years) were so diligently, so loudly silent about Polish influences that we lost an adequate perception of how different our starting positions were.
It was well known, of course, that Poland had almost no collective farms. What was more interesting, however, were the things that set it apart: television and magazines, "night cinema," jeans, milk bars, cosmetics, detective novels—essentially, a lifestyle far more appealing than the poverty seen in the Soviet Union. These differences were recognized, often on an intuitive level at least. In certain intellectual circles, people knew that banned works were available in Polish, and in order to read them, they learned the Polish language. Among even smaller circles, there was an understanding of the stark contrast between Poland's relative openness to the world—such as the opportunity for scholars to travel abroad—and the Soviet Union's isolation. In 1972, Leszek Balcerowicz went to the United States on a scholarship, the same year when a wave of political arrests swept through the Ukrainian SSR, including for the underground publications of texts, many of which could have been legally published in Poland. Ukrainian dissidents—often punished with labor camps for even moderate criticism of the regime—did not end up in places like Berkeley, as Leszek Kołakowski did. In 1981, at the height of Brezhnevism, anyone bold enough to participate in something like a student strike would have found themselves in a hospital with ruptured kidneys, not studying in the United Kingdom like Radosław Sikorski.
This factual difference is commonly acknowledged in discussions. However, what’s often missing is a deeper understanding of why this disparity existed and how profound it really was. At times, it feels as though Poland simply got lucky.
Much more striking than these contrasts, I was recently struck by just one sentence in an old Polish literature textbook for the first year of high school. This book was printed in 1985, but written in 1981. As the "copyright" indicates, it’s written in English—something unimaginable for a Soviet textbook! However, from the outside, it looks very similar to my textbooks printed around the same time: the same rough yellowish paper, cardboard cover, the same library card with students' names and school years. I think, in one of my textbooks, there was a similar combination of yellow and black fonts. However, both the content and tone couldn’t have been more different. And on page 13, I came across this sentence: "Część więc krajów europejskich, w tym Polska, przynależy do kultury zachodniej, a reszta do wschodniej." ("Thus, some European countries, including Poland, belong to Western culture, and the rest to Eastern culture.")
Even considering the context—where the East–West divide was often framed in religious terms, and the Polish Roman Catholic Church enjoyed far greater autonomy than the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine (not to mention the outright ban on Ukrainian churches)—this sentence still presents, as a matter of common knowledge, that Poland is: a) a European country, and b) part of Western culture.
It is hard to overestimate the importance of textbooks as a tool for establishing norms and, for better or worse, indoctrination. Textbooks shape how people understand the world—even for those who never think much about it after leaving school. They reflect what is considered normal, acceptable, and appropriate—whether by society in democracies, or by the regime in less fortunate countries. The fact that, in 1981, a Polish high school textbook could officially define Poland as a European country and part of Western culture highlights just how wide the gap was between our starting points in 1989. Moreover, I suspect that if any Soviet schoolchildren in 1981—or even in 1985—had dared to suggest that Poland was a European country, it might not have ended well for them. And making a similar claim about Ukraine would have been even riskier. What’s more: even during my student years, in the late 1990s, we studied Polish literature in a separate course called "Slavic Literatures," while classical literature, as well as English, Spanish, French, German, Italian—roughly the Western canon—was taught in the "History of Foreign Literature" course. The first decade of Ukrainian independence was coming to an end, and my professors still wouldn’t let go of Polish literature, with its undeniably European context, from the firm embrace of pan-Slavism.
In Soviet education, knowledge about the history and culture of the "peoples of the USSR"—including Ukraine—and that of Europe was carefully kept separate, as if they existed on entirely different planets, intersecting only occasionally in the context of wars (which, of course, were portrayed as acts of aggression solely by Western countries, including Poland). And in a way, this separation made sense. The comparison of developmental dynamics was openly unflattering. Unfortunately, this division was inherited by Ukraine and transferred onto its knowledge of Poland. I realize that this statement may be accused of exaggeration, but I do not know how else to explain the careful silencing of the influence of Mickiewicz when discussing the Book of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, the influence of communication with Poles when discussing Taras Shevchenko, or the preconditions for the establishment of St. Volodymyr’s University in Kyiv. Of course, these are well-known facts for more or less educated Ukrainians, but they still do not come together into a coherent and honest intellectual history of our 19th century that is available beyond narrow academic circles. Therefore, the history of our 1989, as well as 1990, 2004, and 2014, remains incomplete.
I also recognize that this couldn't have been the case until recently, simply because many uncomfortable questions were never openly asked. Okay, here’s where the time has come to abandon the "we": I did not voice them. Of course, it’s not about fear, but rather about disgust, because such discussions could have been interpreted to the benefit of the extremely unpleasant company of Ukrainianophobes, and the chance of finding oneself on the same side with them was undesirable, at least for hygienic reasons. With the start of the full-scale invasion, they, let's say, lost their influence. The overall context has changed so much that, in my opinion, it is now possible to ask uncomfortable questions without looking over one’s shoulder.
Such discussions could have been interpreted to the benefit of the extremely unpleasant company of Ukrainianophobes.
I must admit that in my conviction, I do not feel much support and understand that I have no right to expect it. Yes, I also speak on behalf of my privileges: when it comes to the Poles, I cannot offer stories of hatred; instead, I can only tell many stories of love and friendship. This perspective of mine may not be the only or definitive one, but I believe it doesn't have to be considered heretical.
The time gap between Jacek Kuroń's childhood and mine will soon reach the same distance as between my childhood and the present time. The year 1989 hangs almost midway between his then and my now. I regret that I did not feel his shadow in our shared space. But over time, I have gained friends who were also close to him. My loneliness is not so hopeless.
Text of Oksana Forostyna; Translated by Kate Tsurkan; Photo by Vil Furgalo.
The article was first published in Ukrainian and Polish and is the result of the collaboration between the IWM and the Polish online magazine Dwutygodnik.
Oksana Forostyna
Fellow of the Marcin Król Foundation and a contributor to Visegrad Insight. Co-founder of Yakaboo Publishing, editor, translator, and writer, she collaborates with the journal Krytyka and The European Review of Books. Oksana is the compiler of Ukraine! Unmuted, a collection of essays on Ukrainian culture. In 2022-2023, she was a Europe's Futures Fellow at the IWM.
