300 NIEPODLEGLO^C
whole. In specific areas, they constituted a dominant majority. Their cultural
sensitivities were sharpened by marked economic discrepancies. For the histori-
cal reasons far beyond the ken of the new Republic, the Ukrainian community of
the south-east consisted overwhelmingly of poor, illiterate peasants. The Jews,
crowded into their small town ghettos, provided a disproportionate section both
of the pauperized proletariat and of the rich professional and entrepreneurial
classes. The Germans in the western towns constituted a small but relatively
wealthy bourgeoisie. Although the civil equality and cultural autonomy of the
minorities were formally guaranteed by articles 95, 101, and no of the March
Constitution, their separate aspirations were fundamentally incompatible with
the aims of national unity as conceived by government Polish circles. From the
start, the Poles were thrown into competition with the equally uncompromising
nationalisms of their fellow citizens. None the less at the 1922 Elections, the
Block of Nationalities returned 81 out of 444 deputies from about 16 per cent of
the vote, and to the end of the decade strove to work within the system. From
1930, it transferred its support to the official BBWR (Block for Co-operation
with the Government), seeking protection, as its leaders saw it, from the still
greater danger to its freedoms from the rampant National Democrats. By that
time, however, Polish officialdom had lost its initial willingness to meet the spe-
cial demands of the national minorities. For the rest of the life of the Second
Republic, inter-communal tensions steadily intensified.^13 (See Diagram D.)
Close on five million Ukrainians formed the largest single minority, com-
pactly settled along the length of the Carpathian mountains as far west as the
River Poprad, and distributed more unevenly in the south-eastern districts of
Przemysl, Rawa Ruska, Kowel, Luck, Rowne, Krzemieniec, Drohobycz, and
Koiomyja (see Map 14). After the failure of the West Ukrainian Republic and of
Pilsudski's alliance with Petliura, the Ukrainian population was obliged to post-
pone all aspirations towards autonomy. But they retained the social and cultural
organizations founded in Galician days; and a number of national parties, both
radical and liberal, were free to operate. The old Ukrainian Social Democratic
Party (USDP), continued to function intermittently in the Polish Republic, but
its efforts were minimized by the schism that drove half of its members into the
illegal pro-soviet communist underground, and the other half into close co-
operation with the PPS. A similar fate overtook the Sel-Rob (Ukrainian Socialist
Peasant-Workers' Union). The Ukrainian Socialist-Radical Party (USRP) with
its journal Hromadskiy Holos (Communal Voice) recruited significant support
among the peasantry in Volhynia and in the Stanislawow district. In the com-
pany of the liberal Ukrainian National-Democratic Union (UNDO), which had
inherited many of the older social, cultural, and co-operative organizations
together with the newspaper Dilo (The Cause) in Lwow, it participated in Polish
parliamentary life. Yet none of these parties could stem the rising hostility of the
Polish community at large against Ukrainian separatism. Bit by bit, conciliatory
politics gave way to terrorism. The illegal Ukrainian Military Organization
(UOV) and its successor from 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists