Introduction
Poland and Armenia are rarely mentioned in the same breath, but this juxtaposition offers a valuable means of examining the relationship between war, population displacement, territory and state formation in twentieth-century Europe. Both countries experienced widespread social and political upheaval that found expression in forced migration and reinforced the idea of a beleaguered nation. Prior to the First World War ethnic Poles and Armenians alike were dispersed between the great imperial polities: Poles lived under German, Habsburg and Russian rule, and Armenians were subject to Russian and Ottoman authority. At the same time Poles and Armenians took pride in a long tradition of Christian belief and a rich cultural life, sometimes maintained in difficult circumstances. In 1918 both countries achieved independence, but whereas Poland retained full sovereignty until the outbreak of the Second World War, Armenia quickly became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. However, neither Poland nor Armenia obtained the ‘restoration’ of the lands that formed part of the national epic – ‘historic Armenia’ and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth respectively.Footnote 1 By the end of the century, following the collapse of communism, Armenia had regained its independence, while the Soviet sphere into which Poland fell in 1945 had ceased to exist. In both cases political turmoil during the twentieth century had dramatic demographic and social consequences.Footnote 2
The First World War, by displacing Armenians and Poles, brought about national suffering that, in the eyes of patriotic leaders, required popular resilience and collective action lest further calamities befall the ‘nation’. When the old empires collapsed in 1918, the successor states sought to protect the new national borders.Footnote 3 In Armenia, protection from potential territorial claims by Turkey was bought at the price of heavily circumscribed sovereignty. Independent Poland sought protection from threats posed by neighbouring Soviet Ukraine and (after 1933) Nazi Germany, but this goal eventually proved illusory. Nor did these political uncertainties, grossly magnified in the case of Poland during the Second World War, vanish overnight when the war ended. In Poland they helped sustain a programme of redrawing borders and engineering compulsory population transfers, largely as a means of punishing defeated Germany by claiming the right to ‘recovered lands’ in the west in exchange for ceding territory in the east to the Soviet Union.
The displacement of population that accompanied these political upheavals attracted close scrutiny, including by a diaspora seeking to assist displaced persons (DPs) with a common ethnicity. Poles and Armenians alike had established durable ethnic communities in western Europe and North America as a consequence of job opportunities and political oppression – for example, the Polish diaspora swelled as a consequence of the tsarist suppression of the 1863 revolt, while the Armenian community grew rapidly following the massacres in the Ottoman empire in 1894–6. This raises questions as to how far these external ethnic communities engaged with the ‘homeland’ and mobilised around ideas of national affliction.Footnote 4 Dedicated foreign Polonophiles and Armenophiles also helped keep alive a sense of cultural achievement and national vulnerability.
Material deprivation, too, was directly related to population movement. In the short term non-governmental organisations offered practical assistance in order to alleviate immediate distress when the governments of Armenia and Poland threatened to be overwhelmed by the scale of the task. The relief efforts following both world wars also inspired intervention by growing numbers of professional experts and volunteers, including doctors, psychologists, social workers, teachers and others. These manifestations of concern – accompanied by a tendency to depict displaced persons primarily in terms of abjection – became a familiar part of the humanitarian landscape during the twentieth century.Footnote 5 In the medium and long term both states also grappled with the challenge of economic progress as a means of accommodating newcomers or returnees and of cementing political loyalties in peacetime. Thus the relationship between war and population displacement was expressed in material and cultural terms. Political leaders tapped into notions of territory that had been forfeited and might be ‘recovered’; but these projects were also about economic development, expert knowledge and entitlement to membership of the national community.Footnote 6
Armenia
In 1914 Armenians, like Poles, lacked a titular sovereign state. During the war Ottoman Armenians were targeted by the Young Turks as a ‘disloyal’ element. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were arrested, deported and killed. A minority escaped to safety, either to Mesopotamia or to Russian-controlled Transcaucasus. After the war Armenian survivors of the genocide moved to France, Greece, the United States and the Middle East, as well as the fledgling Armenian state that came into being in 1918. Relatively few remained in the new Turkish Republic.Footnote 7 Diaspora associations and Armenophile commentators in Britain, France and the United States denounced the massacres, as they had done on previous occasions when Ottoman officials persecuted the Armenian minority.Footnote 8 The British Armenia Committee petitioned British ministers on behalf of an enlarged Armenian territory that could protect surviving refugees. It drew attention to Armenian support for the Allied war effort, which was linked to ideas of Armenian resolve in the face of external threat. Aneurin Williams, the committee's chairman, promoted the ‘fighting qualities and virtues of the Armenian race’, whose soldiers had fought throughout history against ‘barbarians’. Armenia stood on the front line of the Christian and ‘civilised’ world.Footnote 9 But this rhetoric ultimately failed to convince the Allies to endorse the ambitious proposals tabled by the Armenian national delegation at the Versailles peace conference. By late 1919 it was clear that Armenian refugees could expect no territorial enlargement at the expense of Turkey.Footnote 10
Broadly speaking, the choice lay between repatriation and resettlement in a third country. Resettlement found no favour among patriots, who thought that it ‘would be a death blow to the claims for an independent national home’ and would play into Turkey's hands.Footnote 11 Foreign Armenophiles also opposed resettlement because it would ‘dilute’ the Armenian population in Anatolia and the Caucasus.Footnote 12 Resettlement encountered other obstacles: some Armenians who fled from Yerevan to western Europe after 1917 were regarded as spies.Footnote 13 The preferred option of most refugees displaced from western Armenia was eventually to return to their homes, but Turkish control ruled this out.Footnote 14 The next best option was to settle in Soviet Armenia. But there was a price to pay. The short-lived Armenian Republic (May 1918–December 1920) and its Soviet successor had to cope with upwards of half a million refugees, which they did with the assistance of the American Near East Relief, which assumed responsibility for orphans, although the Soviet authorities hoped to ‘keep [them] for the Armenian nation’ to develop ‘loyal citizens of Red Armenia’.Footnote 15 Meanwhile several thousand refugees who remained behind in British-administered camps in Mesopotamia complained of feeling like discarded ‘fragments of the nation’.Footnote 16 One priest who hoped to lead a party of a thousand refugees from Tehran to Soviet Armenia commented that the refugees, who spoke no Persian, ‘long to return [sic] and rejoin their families and work in peace as agriculturists’, rather than continue to suffer ‘moral and physical torment’.Footnote 17 Soviet officials acknowledged that to deny them any prospect of entry would give a propaganda boost to their political opponents. But post-revolutionary privation meant that the authorities were in no hurry to take them back.Footnote 18
One major obstacle to repatriation was a shortage of cultivable land, which Fridjtof Nansen's famous irrigation scheme sought to address.Footnote 19 The Armenian national delegation in Paris claimed that it would support 50,000 refugees at a total cost of US$4.7 million, ‘not considerable, especially if compared with the expenses of the Great War’.Footnote 20
Patriotic Armenians emphasised the qualities of potential returnees, whose skills and capacity for hard work would enable them to contribute to the task of reconstruction. Displacement even conferred benefits: ‘the nomadic life of the settlers, full of torments [bedstviia], has made them sturdy and capable workers’.Footnote 21 ‘Repatriation’ raised other issues. Refugees had a habit of returning in what Soviet authorities described as a ‘spontaneous refugee wave’. Concern was expressed that the process needed to be organised, since ‘if they die, our enemies will exploit this’. Political problems also came to the fore. Armenian officials argued that orphans and juveniles were promising targets for radical propaganda disseminated by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutian), making it imperative for Soviet schools and newspapers to counter the influence of Dashnaks, who were described as ‘illiterates’ and ‘bandits’, affected by a ‘zoological nationalism’ and a deep hatred of Soviet power.Footnote 22
The new Soviet republic issued questionnaires to prospective returnees in order to ascertain their commitment to the revolution. ‘Filtration’ officers screened applicants for entry. Questions were asked about the purpose of the journey, their knowledge of Russian, relatives who lived abroad and their political affiliation.Footnote 23 Further difficulties beset those Armenians who did return. In 1926 the Cheka (Soviet secret police) noted that the local Armenian ‘support committees’, established in 1924 to act on behalf of Armenian ‘colonies’ in Russia and to contribute to the ‘renaissance’ of Armenia, were full of ‘women with counter-revolutionary psychology’ who pursued a ‘patriotic’ rather than a ‘Soviet’ agenda. Throughout the 1920s the Armenian secret police continued to vet the returnees; the reports made for disturbing reading in government. One Armenian wrote to his relatives in Constantinople that ‘the local powers had promised much but they have until now done very little to settle us and we have had to make do as best we can’.Footnote 24
Meanwhile Armenian refugees in the Balkans and the Middle East continued to suffer. In 1927 the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) wrote of the plight of Armenian refugees in Greece:
[W]ho has seen our refugee camps has not hesitated to say that ours is an exceptional situation. Things cannot continue as they are at present without preparing ground for the gradual destruction of tens of thousands. We are not desirous of tracing back to history to seek responsibles [sic] of this unprecedented tragedy. While other national refugees were decently treated and adequately indemnified and housed, the Armenian refugees were abandoned to their bitter fate.Footnote 25
Against this background the situation in Soviet Armenia seemed less oppressive than hostile voices in the diaspora suggested. Besides, living in relative safety overseas posed its own dilemmas: Armenian patriots bemoaned the prospective ‘denationalisation’ (apazgainatsman) of brethren in countries where they were ‘guests of nations on a much higher level’.Footnote 26
During the Second World War the invading German armies did not reach Armenia, but the indirect impact of the war was widely felt. Half a million Armenians served in the Red Army, of whom 170,000 never returned.Footnote 27 Diaspora spokesmen articulated a vision of a ‘reborn’ Armenia while at the same time emphasising that ‘through their long history [Armenians] have stood as a bulwark against the invading hordes from the interiors of Asia’. Furthermore all Armenians owed ‘appreciation to the great Russian people and the other peoples of the USSR for giving our brothers in the land of our origin the opportunity to live again as a free and independent nation and to transform their country once more to a trakhdavayr, that is the land of paradise’.Footnote 28
Well known Armenians in the United States were invited to visit Yerevan during the late 1940s in order to support repatriation and learn about the achievements of Soviet Armenia. But repatriation was ‘dependent on the restoration of traditionally Armenian provinces now held under Turkish rule; the great number desiring repatriation could not be sustained economically or territorially by their homeland without such restoration of expropriated areas’. The AGBU, the Armenian National Council of America and representatives of the Armenian Church referred to the borders of ‘Wilsonian Armenia’ agreed at the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) and to the suffering inflicted on other peoples during the Second World War by Nazi Germany, Turkey's ally. One American Armenophile concluded that ‘were [Turkish Armenia] returned to Armenians, the amazing story of Soviet Armenia of the past twenty-five years would be repeated, and the world and civilisation [sic] would gain from the transfer’. The campaign in support of adjusting Armenia's borders alluded to ‘historic ties’ between the United States, Britain and Armenia, and particularly to the ‘bonds of Christian brotherhood’ that had been established as a rhetorical device ever since the late nineteenth century. But tentative proposals for territorial change again came to naught; by the late 1940s the West needed to placate rather than antagonise Turkey.Footnote 29
Repatriation went ahead all the same. Sympathetic political figures and religious leaders placed supportive appeals in newspapers and on local radio stations.Footnote 30 The repatriation agenda was sustained by pro-Soviet organisations, which distributed propaganda films and disseminated messages to communities in Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus, each of which had its own repatriation committee. Potential repatriates were promised the right to build private houses.Footnote 31 Members of the patriotic intelligentsia and Armenophiles instead claimed the right to speak on their behalf. An Armenian medical officer, reporting on the ‘repatriation’ of 1,600 Armenians from Beirut, commented on their prospects and aspirations:
They were extremely happy to be returning home, their dreams realised, after so many years of wandering and suffering and refugee existence . . . [R]epatriation will be the salvation of these destitute people, morally, physically and spiritually; their own people, country, churches, schools and universities await them in Armenia.
She added that ‘many others are in an absolutely hopeless condition, even worse than 1938 [but] now their dreams are being fulfilled . . . this is their last and only hope of survival’.Footnote 32
It would thus be a mistake to regard repatriation as a direct response to Soviet propaganda or to the difficulties that some Armenians faced in the host country. Returnees affirmed the idea of reconstructing the ‘homeland’ and contributing to the ‘in-gathering’ of Armenians (nerkaght). Returnees portrayed themselves as ‘non-political’. One woman expressed her desire to leave Cyprus for Armenia as follows: ‘It was not a question of left or right wing politics . . . Whatever the regime is there, we would still be with Hayastan’ (a reference to the ‘traditional’ term for Armenia). Homeland was infused with a sense of safety. The Armenian Repatriation Committee in Jerusalem spoke of a ‘desire to live as a national group . . . after centuries of persecution and massacres’. Others, too, expressed enthusiasm for repatriation. One young French-born ‘returnee’ portrayed himself as ‘rich in faith, in energy. I know what I want’. He spoke of leaving his ‘foster mother’ and going to a land ‘where everything is fairer’. An American-Armenian spoke of being ‘impelled by . . . the desire to live and work in the land where for countless generations before us our ancestors have lived, struggled and brought forth a matchless civilisation’. They each espoused the idea of a reconstructed national republic in which all Armenians could make a contribution.Footnote 33
Around 100,000 Armenians in the diaspora – 10 per cent of the total – heeded the Soviet call to ‘return’, compared with 42,000 in the interwar period.Footnote 34 Initially they received a warm welcome. A Five-Year Plan for the city of Yerevan provided for loans and building materials as well as ‘the promise of educational and medical facilities far beyond anything the Middle East has to offer’.Footnote 35 However, the vision of national renewal soon faded. In practice the Soviet state did not regard Armenia as a special case; the priority was to invest in war-ravaged republics. Newcomers were accused of failing to work sufficiently hard or ‘patriotically’. For their part, Armenian repatriates expressed disappointment at the slow pace of reconstruction. In 1949 Soviet officialdom turned on the repatriate community, deporting 3,000 of them to Kazakhstan on the spurious grounds that they were Dashnaks (spurious, because the repatriation committees had already denied Dashnak supporters the right to return). Of their disillusionment, whether with the economic prospects in Armenia or the failure to add to Armenian territory, there can be little doubt.Footnote 36
To sum up, many Armenian nationalists and Armenophiles supported territorial changes at Turkey's expense. The repatriation agenda bolstered these claims in so far as repatriants needed somewhere to settle. When territorial adjustment foundered, largely because Turkey was a valuable Western ally against Bolshevism, the remaining option was either to find additional investment to support the increased population or to accept resettlement. The disappointment felt by returnees may have been a factor in the arrests and deportations that occurred in the late 1940s (complaints made during the relatively free conditions of the 1920s did not result in widespread repression). The post-1945 repatriation dream turned sour and was not revived until the 1990s, but ironically many more Armenians then chose to emigrate in search of economic improvement.Footnote 37 At each stage the displaced Armenian population embodied the hopes and fears of national political leaders, the diaspora and sympathetic outsiders. The Soviet state exercised overarching authority, supported controlled repatriation and up to a point provided a security framework that even non-communist Armenians acknowledged.
Poland
During the First World War the tsar's Polish subjects found themselves targeted as enemies of the state, much as Armenians incurred the wrath of the Ottoman Turkish authorities. When the Russian army left Warsaw in August 1915 its inhabitants were forced out of the city, on the basis that they were purportedly pro-Austrian. The Russian army not only failed to protect Poland from invasion but also inflicted harm on civilians through its crude use of force. Tsarist policy reflected a deep-rooted belief in Polish ‘perfidy’, as exemplified by the revolts in 1830 and 1863, and suspicion that Poles in the Habsburg empire would stop at nothing to undermine Russian rule. Perhaps as many as 750,000 Polish refugees were scattered throughout Russian towns and cities.Footnote 38
The Polish diaspora had a more difficult course to steer than its Armenian counterpart. Exiled Poles could not draw attention to the harsh policies of the Russian army without risking the charge that such publicity undermined the Allied war effort. Polonophiles in Britain, France and the United States were even more constrained, focusing instead on the harshness of the German occupation. The Polish National Committee, formed in order to aid victims of the war, enjoyed financial support from Britain via the ‘Great Britain to Poland Fund’ and other sources.Footnote 39 Meanwhile, in the Russian interior, Polish ‘national committees’ became the focus of local and national relief efforts. They established schools and orphanages and promoted cultural activity and religious life. Local Polish communities imposed a levy on their members to assist the refugees. Displays of handicrafts demonstrated the distinctive characteristics of Polish art and the refugees’ readiness to work hard. Educating Russian public opinion was almost as important as maintaining Polish culture among the displaced population.Footnote 40
What meaning was attached to the ‘motherland’, and what part did Polish refugeedom play in its articulation? Refugee political leaders proclaimed Poland to be an ‘outpost of Slavdom’ whose inhabitants had made an ‘incalculable sacrifice’ in the interests of the tsarist state, protecting Russia from the German onslaught but at the price of turning Poland into a wasteland. They spoke of the destruction of Polish national wealth and a ‘centuries-old culture’ by German settlers.Footnote 41 Only concerted military retaliation would suffice. A sympathetic journalist wrote that the dream of Polish refugees was ‘to return to their native hearth’.Footnote 42 When they did eventually return, however, ‘home’ looked very different. Poland had gained its independence, but much of the country lay in ruins.Footnote 43 Poland, more than any other state with the exception of Armenia, faced an enormous problem of refugee relief owing to the return from Russia of half a million civilians who had been deported or who fled. Occasional glimpses of refugees’ declared aspirations suggest
a natural wish to go back to our native country, where a new and brighter future awaits us in free Poland . . . we are anxious to re-establish contact with our families who remained behind, and we have a passionate desire to serve our homeland during the difficult time of its foundation.Footnote 44
The bitter war between Poland and its Bolshevik neighbour greatly magnified the size of the displaced population; in its aftermath a further half million left Soviet territory as quickly as they could, leaving behind up to one million.Footnote 45 Quaker correspondents from Britain described the overcrowded and typhus-ridden dugouts on the Polish–Soviet border where refugees waited until their status was resolved: ‘they have grown accustomed all their lives, especially in the last seven years, to being moved from place to place, and enduring in long stolidity while their fate is settled without their voice or vote by the powers above them’.Footnote 46 Polish officials exacerbated the situation by ordering displaced persons who settled close to the frontier with Soviet Russia to leave the region; some were even sent back to Russia. Harsh treatment was reserved for Polish nationals who were not of Polish ethnicity, notably Jews.Footnote 47
Between the wars population displacement continued to be viewed in terms of Polishness and Polish state-building. One mechanism was the troubling encounter between Poles and Ukrainians, five million of whom (16 per cent of the total population) lived in Poland, mostly adjacent to the frontier with Soviet Ukraine. By the early 1930s the Ukrainian minority was portrayed as a threat to Poland's future. Ukrainians who lived close to the Soviet border were harassed and threatened with deportation. Ethnic tension was exacerbated by government attempts to populate Volhynia (Wołyń) with Polish colonists; around 77,000 individuals including veterans were settled in this manner. Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, referring to the policy of settling Polish veterans in the eastern borderlands of Poland (kresy), proclaimed that ‘Poles have contributed their blood and their culture to the east and therefore deserve to be seen and treated as the masters of these lands’.Footnote 48 A pro-Ukrainian author affirmed that ‘nothing but the extraordinary staying power of the Ukrainian peasant can support his spirit and save him from despair’, a telling reminder of the way in which cultural attributes could be ascribed to an entire population.Footnote 49 Impoverished Ukrainian farmers were easily radicalised against Polish landlords and officials. In Galicia, where the OUN (Orhanizatsiia Ukrains'kykh Natsionalistiv) became a powerful force, Ukrainian nationalists conducted a violent campaign against any rapprochement between Poles and Ukrainians.Footnote 50
Huge changes took place following the German and Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939. Jewish refugees arrived in large numbers in Galicia, fleeing the German onslaught in the west. In Volhynia Polish military colonists were arrested and their property was seized. Around 40,000 Poles, Jews, Belarussians and Ukrainian nationalists were deported from Volhynia to central Asia and Siberia between February 1940 and May 1941, part of a Soviet plan to decimate the Polish civilian and military elite by means of summary execution or deportation.Footnote 51 No one was spared. A gendered reading of displacement suggests that women had a particular responsibility for the survival of the ‘nation’. Polish women portrayed themselves as ‘helpless’ victims – a rhetorical device that drew attention to the damage inflicted on their bodies and on the Polish nation, without discounting the possibility of discovering a resilience that might yet guarantee its survival.Footnote 52
The resulting encounters, such as that between Poles and Kazakhs in central Asia, gave rise to a variety of meanings. Ryszard Kapuściński memorably spoke of how the deportee became ‘a consignment’ rather than a human being. Surviving accounts speak of mutual hardship rather than persistent social antagonism between deportees and the native population. Frequently the enemy was depicted as impersonal, the arid, remote and ‘terrifying’ territory of Kazakhstan contrasting starkly with the fertile and familiar landscape of Poland. Polish women wrote in poignant terms of having to bury their children or parents in this Asiatic ‘wasteland’ or in Siberia, which ‘we are once again bestowing with Polish graves’.Footnote 53
Closer to home, fresh displacements were in hand. The longstanding conflict with Ukraine was resolved by mutual expulsions. Plans for an organised transfer of population – Ukrainians from Poland, Poles from Ukraine – were agreed in September 1944. ‘Whoever doesn't go to Poland goes to Siberia’: thus went the refrain in Volhynia after the Soviet reconquest of Ukraine. Meanwhile, around 482,000 Ukrainians were deported from Poland to the USSR between 1944 and 1947, more than two-thirds of the total Ukrainian population of pre-war Poland.Footnote 54 The Polish authorities drew up plans for a ‘final and general solution of the Ukrainian problem [sic]’ in May and June 1946.Footnote 55 The dramatic ‘Operation Vistula’ (Akcja Wisła), whereby communist Polish authorities deported 150,000 Ukrainians from south-eastern Poland to former German territory in the north-west, disclosed a direct link between pre- and postwar resettlement plans:
The legal basis for deporting Ukrainians within the existing borders of Poland was originally a pre-war statute – the ‘Executive Order of the President of Poland on the State Borders’, 23 December 1927. Under this law [amended in July 1936], provincial governors and village administrators were authorized to forbid people from living in or entering a border area . . . This provision was cited as the statutory basis for the expulsion of ethnic Ukrainians to Ukraine in 1945 and 1946 . . . This law was also used as the legal basis for resettling the Ukrainians within Poland.Footnote 56
The targeted population was identified by means of the letter ‘U’ that the Nazis had printed on identity papers during their occupation.Footnote 57 Those who resisted were deported to the Polish ‘central work camp’ at Jaworzno. So too were Ukrainians suspected of having collaborated with the OUN-UPA (Ukrainian Partisan Army).Footnote 58
Meanwhile, more than 540,000 ethnic Poles who had been drafted into the Nazi war effort or who had been taken prisoner found themselves on German territory at the end of the war. Others had fled into exile. For both groups the issue was whether or not to go back to Poland (‘wracać czy nie wracać’). The situation was a great deal more complicated than at the end of the First World War. Many Polish DPs had strong reservations about returning, now that the Communist Party appeared likely to become the dominant political force. Their views were governed by the deportation experience and by knowledge of the Katyń massacre and Stalin's behaviour during the Warsaw Rising. At an elite level, General Władysław Anders adopted a restorationist platform, according to which Poles in exile (including surviving combatants from the army created on Soviet territory in July 1941) had to bide their time until communist power in Poland came to an end. But his project foundered on the absence of Western support for a crusade against Soviet rule in eastern Europe.Footnote 59
The reluctance of many DPs to return caused a deep rift between Polish and Soviet authorities on the one hand and the camp authorities and the Western Allies on the other. Polish officials insisted that family members in Poland should persuade DPs to rejoin them. Between November 1945 and January 1950 the Office for Repatriation of Poles from the West issued an illustrated newspaper, Repatriant, and supplied Polish liaison officers with publicity material. Returnees were promised housing and land seized from Germans in the newly acquired western provinces of Silesia and Pomerania. Communist propaganda also spoke positively of the role of the Catholic Church in the ‘recovered lands’, concealing the fact that priests were persecuted.Footnote 60
These efforts were not confined to Polish officials. In 1945 the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) supplied 550,000 copies of the Polish weekly, Tygednik Polski, and 50,000 copies of the children's paper Maly Polak to Polish DPs in order to maintain morale. More directly connected with the repatriation agenda, UNRRA's director-general, Fiorello La Guardia, approved the distribution of a film entitled ‘Return to Homeland’.Footnote 61 UNRRA staff persuaded DPs that it was in their interests to return to Poland, where they would ‘find familiar patterns and a way of life more in keeping with their national culture than if they were to seek resettlement in strange lands’. An Information Bulletin invited Polish DPs to help ‘build a new home in which everyone will feel happy’, an ‘enormous task’ to be undertaken by ‘a nation whose spirit was never broken’. The threat to cut rations was another bargaining counter.Footnote 62 These measures worked in some cases but failed to dissuade some 120,000 Polish DPs, the quality of whose lives in the camps was alleviated by a mixture of self-help and external assistance.Footnote 63
As in Armenia, the repatriation agenda amounted to more than propaganda. The war gave rise to a ‘new Poland’, albeit one in which Communist Party officials now wielded power and suppressed political opposition. Territorial reconfiguration, economic reconstruction and the expropriation of German farmers’ land created opportunities in the ‘recovered lands’ (ziemie odzyskane). Around 265,000 Polish families moved hurriedly from the overpopulated centre and south of the country to the north and west.Footnote 64 But the speed of their movement wrecked expectations of an orderly transfer. In Wrocław (former Breslau), newly arriving immigrants found jobs easier to come by than adequate shelter and food. Many workers who initially expressed optimism about their prospects in Lower Silesia became disillusioned, as did their Armenian counterparts. Some returnees ventured back to their former homes in the east. Other settlers who found the prospect of farming in the ‘recovered lands’ more alluring nevertheless kept their family farm in ‘crowded southern Poland’ as an insurance policy. Poles who had been forced to leave their homes in Soviet-occupied Lithuania and Belorussia suffered hardship when they settled in the western territories. Finally, several thousand Poles returned from France and Belgium.Footnote 65
Organised recruitment schemes brought some Polish DPs to the United Kingdom in the late 1940s as European Voluntary Workers.Footnote 66 Others were forced to remain behind. In 1950 the International Refugee Organisation issued an ‘SOS’ for individuals in the UK to sponsor DPs who had been categorised as ‘hard core’ on the grounds of their physical or mental disability. The abbreviated life histories emphasised individual worth. For example, ‘Mychajlo Z’ figured as a decent tailor, who could make suits notwithstanding the loss of an eye; the accompanying photograph showed him in front of a sewing machine and the text spoke of a person who resisted Nazi tyranny. At the same time he symbolised the inflexible immigration restrictions imposed by the victorious powers. Nothing was made of his Polishness per se. He found himself ‘alone in the world’, testimony to the fact that being embraced by the Polish community in exile was not a foregone conclusion.Footnote 67 This illustrates how the individual could also embody assumptions about displacement as a cause of loss and despair.Footnote 68
Conclusion
Poland and Armenia became sites of widespread population displacement during both world wars. In 1915 the tsarist army targeted ‘enemies within’, including Poles, who were forced to move to the Russian interior; simultaneously the Ottoman army launched a terrible campaign against the Armenian minority. Both episodes generated political reactions further afield that sustained a vision of state sovereignty as a means of protecting ethnic Poles and Armenians from further onslaught. Although independence proved short-lived in Armenia's case, nevertheless the Soviet state provided Armenia with its own titular republic. From the outset Armenia confronted a serious refugee crisis. Between the wars Armenians in the diaspora envisaged territorial expansion as a means of resolving questions of population settlement, but this project failed.Footnote 69 Other alternatives included investment in industry to absorb the ‘surplus’ population, but funds were hard to secure. Emigration did not commend itself because it would weaken Armenian claims to territory. In Poland, where ethnic relations were more complex than in Armenia, underdevelopment and exposure to the international economic depression intensified hostility between Poles, Ukrainians and Jews; the situation was complicated by the adjacent revolutionary behemoth. In the Caucasus a combination of ‘nation-building’ under the slogan of ‘nativisation’ (korenizatsiia) and ethnic homogeneity helped assuage any misgivings on the part of Armenians about Soviet hegemony.
During the 1940s, too, the relative stability of Armenia contrasted markedly with the situation in Poland, where three million Jews were exterminated and ethnic Poles faced a dual hazard from the German and Soviet occupation regimes. At the end of the war the map of Poland was redrawn. Although Poland (unlike Armenia) secured what it termed the ‘recovered lands’, it paid a heavy price. Millions of Poles, Ukrainians and Germans were displaced against their will and postwar Poland fell into the Soviet orbit. The authorities in postwar Armenia encouraged ‘repatriation’ from Armenians who had fled the genocide thirty years earlier. In economic terms the reconstruction of Armenia after 1945 was less painful than after 1918, but the repatriates’ hopes of a better life quickly evaporated. This draws attention to the fact that new states, forged out of displacement, became directly embroiled in the process of displacing populations: the Soviet authorities deported ‘dissident’ Armenians, and the Polish government forcibly resettled Ukrainians and Germans as a means of creating an ethnically homogeneous state.
Ethnic homogeneity did not of course imply uniformity of political belief. Many Armenians in North America and western Europe regarded sovietisation with distaste and preferred to sustain Armenian culture in the diaspora. Similarly, many Poles who found themselves in Germany or the United Kingdom in 1945 resisted attempts to recall them to the homeland. When hopes of short-lived communist rule were dashed, they invested instead in Polish cultural, educational and religious activities in the West, enriching the existing diaspora.Footnote 70 Indeed wartime population displacement subsequently helped to give the Polish and Armenian diaspora a fresh lease of life. But whereas Poles in the diaspora, conscious of Poland's history as an independent state between the wars, maintained an uncompromising hostility towards political and economic change in the homeland, the Armenian diaspora had a more ambivalent attitude towards sovietised Hayastan.Footnote 71
There are also cultural dimensions to population displacement. Armenian refugees were portrayed not only as victims of Ottoman oppression but also as resilient and hardworking participants in the task of reconstruction. Their potential contribution would be realised only if they could be ‘collected together’ and not ‘sown broadcast over the world’.Footnote 72 The Armenian diaspora and foreign Armenophiles embraced this discourse of ‘seeds’, ‘roots’ and ‘fragments’, but it proved insufficient to bring about a revision of the frontiers of Soviet Armenia. In Poland the redefinition of state borders was decided at Potsdam, where the Allied leaders agreed to punish Germans and reward Stalin. Beyond the immediate confines of Potsdam, however, images of Polish suffering before and during the Second World War played an important role in determining the fate of the Ukrainian and German minorities who had no place in ‘new Poland’. In both cases, therefore, the population–territory nexus was resolved by a combination of geopolitical considerations, historical interpretation and cultural constructions of ‘homeland’.
