League of Nations
League of Nations. An international organization incorporated in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles with the aim of preserving world peace and collective security and fostering international co-operation. From 1920 the seat of the League was in Geneva, Switzerland. Among the League’s members were states that occupied parts of Ukraine—Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1934–9). In 1920 the government of the Ukrainian National Republic failed to gain admission to the League. In 1920–3 the Government-in-exile of the Ukrainian National Republic and the Government-in-exile of the Western Ukrainian National Republic repeatedly submitted protests to the League regarding the occupation of Ukrainian lands by Poland and the USSR. Only once—on 23 February 1921—did the League take into consideration the protests of President Yevhen Petrushevych and acknowledge that eastern Galicia was militarily occupied by Poland.
Because the League was responsible for ensuring that the rights of national minorities guaranteed in a treaty signed by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were observed, Ukrainians (including Magyarophile and Russophile circles in Transcarpathia) submitted memoranda to the League when such rights were violated. The largest number of such memoranda were submitted by the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation and its individual members in the Polish Sejm. In them they protested Poland’s discriminatory educational policies, the officially sanctioned colonization of Western Ukrainian lands by Polish army veterans, the persecution of the Ukrainian co-operative movement, the abuse and torture of Ukrainian political prisoners, and the 1930 Pacification of Galicia by the Józef Piłsudski regime. Because of the unsympathetic attitudes of members of the League’s Secretariat and the League’s complex procedural norms, only the memorandum regarding the Pacification was passed on by the Secretariat to the League’s Council.
The only occasion on which the League took note of Soviet Ukrainian affairs was at the September 1933 secret Council meeting on the Holodomor famine in Ukraine. The League had the legal authority to care for refugees from the former territories of the Russian Empire, including Ukraine, but it did not formally grant Ukrainian émigrés separate recognition (see Emigration). Ukrainian interests were defended in the League’s various agencies primarily by Ukrainian parliamentarians in interwar Poland and by Oleksander Shulhyn, the unofficial representative of the Government-in-exile of the Ukrainian National Republic.
An International Federation of League of Nations Societies promoted co-operation with the League and propagated its ideas. The émigré Ukrainian League of Nations Society and the Western Ukrainian League of Nations Society (Vienna, 1921–4) were admitted to Federation at its Prague Congress in June 1922. The first was headed by Mykola Zalizniak, the latter—by Roman Perfetsky. In 1925 the Ukrainian Group of the International University Federation for the League of Nations was founded at the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady, Bohemia. Although the League was a political instrument of the victorious European powers in the First World War and did not, by and large, recognize Ukrainian national demands, Ukrainian petitions to the League and the participation of Ukrainians in the International Federation facilitated the dissemination of information about Ukrainian affairs in international circles. In 1946 the League was dissolved by its 21st Assembly and was replaced by the Organization of United Nations.
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]