Of all the odd, forgotten corners of eastern Europe, the province of Volhynia must be among the oddest and most forgotten. A land of marshes and forests, memorable for its impassable roads and its lonely villages, Volhynia now lies in the north-west corner of Ukraine, along the Polish border. But before the second world war Volhynia was one of the easternmost provinces of Poland — as well as one of the poorest. In 1921, when the Polish state incorporated the province, having fought over it (and often in it) during the Polish–Bolshevik war, no Volhynian town had a regulated street network, only one had a sewage system and only three had electricity.
But where some saw a dull backwater, Henryk Jozewski, Cubist painter, theatrical scenographer, a man acquainted with the theories of Stanislavsky and the writings of Freud, saw the future. Polish by ethnicity, Jozewski had been born in pre-Revolutionary Kiev, then a part of the Russian empire. As a young man, he conceived simultaneous passions for modern art, national liberation and the ideals of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, an empire that had ceased to exist in 1795.
Bizarre though that combination may sound, it made a certain amount of sense in interwar Volhynia, at least during the years when Jozewski ran the province as its governor. As Jozewski saw it, if modernity, artistic or otherwise, was ever to come to Volhynia, it would have to be brought there by the new Polish state, with the full co-operation and agreement of the majority Jewish and Ukrainian populations. To put it differently, reforms could only succeed if undertaken in the spirit of ethnic tolerance which had, Jozewski believed, been embodied by the old Commonwealth, a multinational, multilingual, pre-modern empire.
Given what happened afterwards — Volhynia, invaded alternately by Soviet Communists and German Nazis, became ground zero of the Holocaust before dissolving into a vicious, three-way civil war — Jozewski has to be counted as one of the 20th century’s greatest dreamers. That alone would make him a worthy subject for a book. But in this extraordinary volume, Tim Snyder (an American historian with his own simultaneous passions for border regions and confusing bits of history) has found out a few other stories worth telling as well. It turned out, when Snyder started reading Polish secret files from before the war, that not only was Jozewski a Cubist painter and a governor of Volhynia, he was also one of inter-war Poland’s great spies. At one point, he placed dozens of agents across Ukraine in a failed attempt to provoke a Ukrainian patriotic uprising against Soviet communism. Later, he fought the Nazis as a member of the anti-Nazi underground. Later still, he fought the Communists as a member of the anti-Communist underground. In the latter role, he remained at large until 1953, working as a ‘gardener’, filing reports to the Polish government in London, until a distant relative turned him in.
There are, as might be expected, moments of deep obscurity in this story. Although Jozewski is the main protagonist, readers should also be prepared to learn about everything from Ukrainian church politics to the structure of interwar Polish government bureaucracies. But there is a pay-off, in the form of extraordinary tales, such as that of the intelligence coup carried out by Jozewski’s operative M-13, a spy who came into contact with the wife of a Soviet Ukrainian dignitary in Kiev. Counselled by Warsaw to sleep with the woman ‘early and often, since this is the ordinary behaviour of men’, he managed to obtain inside information on the Ukrainian Communist party purges and pass it back home. In an era in which Soviet secret police were busily arresting people for all kinds of invented conspiracies, it seems extraordinary that they missed the real plots taking place right under their noses.
Ultimately, though, this is a story of a profound failure. Not only did Jozewski fail to prevent ethnic conflict between the Poles, Ukrainians and Jews of Volhynia, and not only did he fail to achieve the liberation of Soviet Ukraine, he was also forced to witness the destruction of his own country, first by the Nazis, then by the Communists. Thanks to the redrawn postwar borders, Volhynia itself was, after the war, permanently incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. Jozewski ended his days as a painter, mostly of still lifes. Snyder suspects, though, that his final preoccupation, the painting of windows, may not have been accidental. A ‘window’, in the jargon of Polish espionage, was a ‘time and place when a hostile state border could be crossed’. Once, the eastern border of Volhynia had contained many such windows. By the end of Jozewski’s life, they all seemed to have been closed for ever.
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