ZINOVIY PELENSKY’S PARTICIPATION IN THE WORK OF CONGRESSES OF NATIONAL MINORITIES IN THE 1930S

Abstract

The article analyzes the effectiveness of the participation of a well-known public and political figure, member of the Ukrainian National Democratic Union (UNDO), Ambassador of the Polish Sejm Zinovy Pelensky in the Congress of National Minorities – an international organization that tried to solve many problems of national minorities. It is noted that in 1928 the politician joined the Central Committee of the UNDO, but preferred to work in the Audit Union of Ukrainian Cooperatives (UNDO) over party work, which made it impossible for him to participate in the work of an international organization. Only after his election as ambassador to the Sejm of the Second Rzeczpospolita in 1930 did work on building this political force become dominant for him. A separate area of his activity at that time was participation in the work of the Congresses of National Minorities, where Zinoviy Pelensky promoted the idea of the unity of the Ukrainian lands and defended the concept of “the nation’s right to self-determination”. At congresses of national minorities, the politician spoke not only on behalf of the UNDO, but also represented the interests of Ukrainians in Galicia and Volyn, who after 1923 were oppressed and discriminated against in the national and cultural sphere by the Polish administration. During the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine, his speeches in the international arena took aggressive forms and were aimed at criticizing the Soviet government, which hid the scale of the famine in the Dnieper region, blocked international aid and generally denied the mass deaths of Ukrainians. His demands for territorial autonomy, speeches with conciliar slogans had a great influence on the solution of the Ukrainian question in the interwar period of the twentieth century, contributed to the rise of the authority of both Zinovy Pelensky and UNDO.