The Prison on Lonts’kyi Street: Memory Dialogue or Memory Monologue?

Uilleam Blacker

L’viv’s wartime history is complex, and demands sensitivity and an understanding that victimhood and guilt are not always exclusive categories. The history of the site of the prison on Lonts’kyi Street speaks to this complexity. It speaks of the Polish state that forcefully oppressed Ukrainian political and cultural aspirations, and also of the Poles tortured, killed and deported by the Soviets. It reminds of Ukrainian victims of the Soviets, but also of Ukrainians’ part in the L’viv pogrom of 1941; it speaks of the Jewish victims of that pogrom, and of wider anti-Semitic violence and murder. This site speaks to the history of interwar Lwów, where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews failed to build a strong enough society to withstand the chaos that the war would bring. For these reasons, it is a good thing that there is a museum at Lonts’kyi. Its history of the tragic intertwining of the fates of various groups makes it a perfect location to examine that history and learn from it. Unfortunately, the current museum does not take advantage of this opportunity.

Although its address is telling – 1 Stepan Bandera St – the museum is in fact hidden away on a side street, as though trying to avoid awkward encounters. Its entrance is nondescript, marked only by a modest sign. The building has clearly undergone little in the way of renovation since it ceased to function as a prison in 1991. Visitors walk its grim corridors, where peeling, yellowed signs inform prisoners how to behave. The exhibition, which aims to tell the story both of the prison and of the Ukrainian nationalist activists who suffered there, is threaded through the corridors, incorporating some of the prison’s original cells.

The museum represents the suffering and struggles of Ukrainians. The exhibition barely mentions the word ‘Jew’, while Poles appear, in a historically dubious comparison, only as one side of a triangle of evil ‘occupiers’ alongside the Nazis and the Soviets. The prison was indeed used by different regimes, including the Poles and Austrians. But the nature and legitimacy of these regimes varied drastically. The museum presents all these regimes, except the Austrians, as perpetrators of crimes against Ukrainians. It does not recognize that the victims of the crimes carried out here were also plural, and included Jews, Poles, and others. What’s more, the exhibition ignores other perpetrators linked to the site, skating over the question of Ukrainian participation in the L’viv pogrom of 1941.

Lonts’kyi not only denies the memories of others, however: it simplifies that of Ukrainians too. It ignores the complexity of Ukrainian society of pre-war and wartime L’viv and of Ukrainian nationalism. The tradition of fighting for the right of Ukrainians to political and cultural self-determination is bigger than the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN/UPA), which dominates the museum. That wider story includes those dissidents whose pictures grace the walls of the prison in which they were once held, or whose works are sold at the doorway, and who cannot be simply absorbed into the ‘Liberation Struggles’ understood as a metonym for the OUN/UPA.

One striking feature of the museum is its mnemonic mathematics. Ukraine, we are told, had Europe’s biggest resistance movement during the Second World War, amounting to half a million people. Ukrainians were ‘enemy number one for the occupiers’. The math also shows that Ukrainians suffered most, according to the numbers of victims of various Soviet mass shootings that are displayed on the walls, on top of photographs of victims of those shootings. And yet on the museum’s website we read: ‘Of the population (of L’viv), Jews suffered most of all […] Ukrainians suffered no less.’ This statement perfectly encapsulates the paradoxical and narcissistic logic of Lonts’kyi. The numbers of Jewish victims of pogroms or Nazi executions is not given in such detail.

Sites like Lonts’kyi force us to interrogate the nature of sites of memory. Do they have meaning because of the events they witnessed? Do they retain an ‘aura’ of past events? Or are they invested with meaning only by those who inhabit and use them? Lonts’kyi indicates that the latter can never entirely be the case. Its selective narrative does not sit easily. Something else seems to surface underneath the veneer of nationalist rhetoric. Commentators have noted that the photograph onto which the numbers of Ukrainian victims are projected shows other dead too: Jewish victims of the pogrom. The names on the facsimile execution lists are clearly not all Ukrainian, and neither are those on the ‘wall of memory’ (despite being inscribed in the Ukrainian alphabet, rendering them illegible to those who don’t read Cyrillic). Traces of others stubbornly re-surface.

It is clear that from the point of view of historical accuracy, or of simple human empathy, the Lonts’kyi museum leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, it tells a story that needs to be told. The story of Ukrainian resistance and suffering during the Second World War and beyond is hardly a dominant narrative, even in Ukraine. At home and abroad, this complex past is often reduced to western Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis and co-participation in the Holocaust. In the eyes of many, the current Ukrainian authorities undermine ‘everything that is Ukrainian’, as do voices from both Russia and the West, and Svoboda Party conveniently appears as the defender of this ‘everything’. This is a mnemonic zero-sum game, in which there is no room for admission of collective guilt, which means weakness, and plays into the hands of internal and external ‘enemies’.

It is a shame that the story of Ukrainian suffering and resistance can only be told in this atmosphere of antagonism, with this bunker mentality. The result is that the suffering of the majority of peaceful Ukrainians is always tainted by nationalist or anti-nationalist politics. It also means that Ukrainians fail to recognize the suffering of others: they are too busy protecting their own narrative. It is not Holocaust obfuscation as such that is the primary motivation behind Lonts’kyi’s narrative, as some have suggested; it is rather a paranoid determination not to undermine the purity of Ukrainian victimhood that precludes openness about the role of Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust. Of course, this is a subtle distinction, which many observers will not recognize.

A glance at the Lonts’kyi visitor book shows that a degree of recognition of the Ukrainian story is being achieved by the museum. Not long after Euro 2012, the book was full of entries by visitors from Portugal, Denmark, Germany, and other countries. Many were moved by a story about which they had known nothing. The museum’s story is indeed in many respects moving, but not necessarily for the reasons that the curators intended. For non-Ukrainian speakers, its nationalist bent will largely go unnoticed: the museum’s texts are solely in Ukrainian, with only a short leaflet in English available. True, English language tours are available, but I would venture that the majority of the visitors’ empathy is a response to human suffering, rather than to nationalist rhetoric. The tourist is confronted with mug-shots of frightened people, execution lists, pictures of naïve, young partisan fighters, and victims of mass murder; one can view the interrogation room, torture chamber, and the execution wall. The fact that the building remains close to its original state is in many ways more affecting than the content of the exhibition itself.

If the curators at Lonts’kyi want foreign visitors to understand what Ukrainians went through on this site on more than an impressionistic level (though it is not certain that they do), they need to invest in translation – admittedly, an expensive business. Entering into other languages cannot only be about repeating a monologue, however. Yes, it gives the opportunity to be understood; but it also gives the opportunity to understand. A site like Lonts’kyi, where multiple memories intertwine, needs not only to speak in the languages of others to others, but also about others. By doing so it will encourage others to listen to the Ukrainian story.

The author is a Research Associate, Memory at War Project, University of Cambridge

Myths of National Consolidation, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust: A Response to Roman Serbyn

John-Paul Himka

First off, I would like to thank Roman Serbyn for his critique of my positions as enunciated in my text “Interventions” in its abridged version. I am glad to see the arguments of the other side presented in an articulate fashion. I will not be able to respond to all the points Roman raises in his “Erroneous Methods,” but I will pick those that I understand to be the most important. The text of mine that he critiques, “Interventions,” states my positions on the Holodomor and Holocaust only in condensed form, to provide the audience a context for my discussion of what it is like to challenge widely accepted and sensitive interpretations of national history. A much longer version of that text will appear later, but with the emphasis still on the experience of challenging rather than on the merits of my case. I have been making my case for the actual history and its interpretation in a number of publications1 and in conference papers that I have made available on the internet.2 In these other texts one can find references to primary sources and fuller explanations of my thinking. There are many other important publications on these same issues by other authors.3

Myths of National Consolidation

A major point of difference between Roman and me, one that may be irreconcilable, is our attitude to national myths. He writes that I fail to see the benefit of “positive myths of national consolidation” or “consolidation myths” or “a constructive, foundational national myth.” This is true. I look at myths, especially national myths and victimization myths, with profound distrust.4 I cannot even imagine one that I could endorse. Roman is in error to assume, stereotypically, that I accept Jewish myths and even their instrumentalization while denying Ukrainian myths. I hate to see the Holocaust used as a victimization narrative to build community or support for Israel and especially to justify Israel’s harsh policies toward the Palestinians (and I am no enemy of Israel). In the Israeli-Arab conflict I see the mobilization of competing myths and little room for rational discussion. I am for history – complicated, messy, honest history where, at least in theory, the underlying rationality in the acceptance of facts and in the investigation of causalities creates a space for the possibility if not of a shared narrative, then at least of a shared community of discourse. The problem with myths is that they are transcendent, in Popper’s terms: metaphysical, based on something other than rationality, ultimately irrational. Myths cannot “talk” to one another as histories can. They are closed systems that fall out of dialogic discourse. In Ukrainian nationalism – and I will be using this term to refer to the nationalism of the capital N nationalists, i.e., the ideological postulates of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – myths have priority over history. History should, in its view, serve myths. This makes perfect sense for an ideology that embraces voluntarism and irrationalism.

In Roman’s view, good myths bring about national consolidation. Here I am also distrustful. Every consolidation is also an extrusion. National consolidation extrudes groups that do not fit the consolidated model. In nineteenth-century Galicia, the consolidation of the modern Polish and Ukrainian nations went hand in hand with the extrusion of Jews.5 In mid-twentieth-century Galicia and Volhynia, Ukrainian nationalists attempted to consolidate the nation by eliminating the national minorities (especially Poles and Jews, but also Roma and others), persecuting religious groups they did not approve of (Baptists, Ukrainian Autonomous Orthodox, and Russian Orthdox), and executing fellow Ukrainians who opposed their policies.6 The logic of any particular national consolidation requires examination, since this logic can prove dangerous. At the same time, I cannot deny that deep divisions in a society, such as exist in Ukraine, or in the United States for that matter, also pose a danger. But here again, I would prefer to see the demobilization of the myths – the closed thinking – that impede dialogue or agreement on a set of future-oriented positive goals. I teach an undergraduate course on the History of the World in the Last Ten Years, and I assign readings from both The Weekly Standard and The New York Times. It is my view that an informed citizenry must take into account the arguments of all sides; it should not be constrained by the consolidation of one position, particularly not of a nationalist position.

Myths, Roman argues, should be judged by their usefulness and morality, not by their truthfulness. Why should we not believe that Jews fought for UPA if that myth promotes positive attitudes of Ukrainians toward Jews? The idea, and it has been formulated by some of my other critics as well,7 is that we can take the OUN-UPA myth and render it harmless and useful by only promoting the positive side of the heritage (struggle for Ukrainian independence, resistance to Soviet occupation) and downplaying the harmful side (antisemitism, ethnic cleansing, fascism). As long as we use OUN-UPA to promote Ukrainian patriotism and do not take up, for example, its idea that we should destroy Muscovites, Poles, and Jews, it is okay. To me, this looks exactly like the argument that we should honor Stalin as the man who led the Soviet Union when it defeated Nazi Germany; we do not have to agree with him about the need to deport and kill millions in order to consolidate the state, but it would be counterproductive to the goals of our good myth to harp on his unfortunate crimes. There are other arguments against this idea that I have made many times in the past, in other texts, and here I will only mention them concisely: denial of crimes against humanity inevitably leads to their justification and thus to the continuation of the crimes; admission of atrocities is inadequate to remedy them, but it is the least that is required of those who identify with their perpetrators; and Ukrainian nationalist thinking, even when partially excised of negative elements, has its own baggage which reinforces xenophobia and antisemitism, persecution of those who think differently, and a nostalgia for fascism.8

As to the idea of myths being judged by their morality: How does one reconcile with morality the glorification of organizations and military units that engaged in the mass murder of civilians? This has always been hard for me to understand. Roman expresses disappointment that Yushchenko did not also bring into his national consolidation project “the Waffen SS Division Halychyna and other units of the armed forces of the Axis powers.” What does he mean by these “other units”? Does he think that the Ukrainian Schutzmannchaften, which included a strong nationalist presence, should form part of the basis of our national myth? These units engaged in brutal actions against the civilian population of Belarus during their antipartisan warfare. They, including former members of OUN-M’s Bukovynsk’kyi kurin’, committed horrendous murders at Khatyn, immortalized in Elem Klimov’s film of 1985, Come and See.9 The members of the stationary Schutzmannschaften in Volhynia and elsewhere in the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine (popularly referred to as the Ukrainian police) were not only crucial accessories in the Holocaust, but they murdered the families of pro-Soviet partisans and enslaved hundreds of thousands of their fellow Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Galicia was also a major instrument in the Holocaust. Are these part of the national project? Is there any line to be drawn anywhere?

I also find the idea to include SS Galizien in the national consolidation myth highly problematic. That the Deschênes commission cleared it is not, to me a serious argument, at least for historians. I cannot accept that judicial pronouncements or government authorities have the power to settle matters of scholarship. And judicial opinions in such matters are dependent on circumstances, particularly political circumstances. Nuremberg, of course, declared the Waffen SS a criminal organization. Like the Austrians for a long time10 and like some other East European nations today,11 Ukrainians claim that their Waffen SS unit was an exception. And to a certain extent this is true. Although OUN-M and some Ukrainian leaders with at least personal ties to that organization, such as Volodymyr Kubijovyč and Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, had been lobbying the Germans for a Ukrainian unit since the German-Soviet war broke out, a Ukrainian SS division was only permitted after the Holocaust was essentially over in Galicia. Hence, it did not, as a unit, play much of a role in that bloodbath. True, Dieter Pohl writes of the “high probability” that the division was used to round up Jews in Brody in February 1944.12 More important, however, many former Ukrainian policemen and Schutzmänner who had indeed been Holocaust perpetrators entered the unit, particularly as NCOs and particularly in the later stages of the division‘s existence, when it became the first division of the Ukrainian National Army. Also, all those who entered this unit were very aware of how the Germans had killed the Jews of Galicia, and the question therefore arises: How, after witnessing such a crime, could men voluntarily join forces with such an ally? Finally, we know that after the debacle at Brody, the Ukrainian SS was used primarily to suppress partisans in Slovakia and Slovenia. In Slovakia they worked hand in hand with Dirlewanger’s notorious unit composed of criminals. There are reports that the division liquidated whole villages, which was a typical method the Germans employed in antipartisan warfare. From my perspective, it does not seem that the inclusion of SS Galizien and other Ukrainian units in German service into a consolidation myth scores high on the usefulness or morality tests.

The last point I wish to make about national-consolidation mythology is its intolerance toward intellectual pluralism. As I have said, national consolidations necessarily involve extrusions. There are moments in Roman’s text which suggest that my taking a different stance may mean that I stop being a Ukrainian. This has also been suggested by Yurii Shapoval.13 Policing of what it means to be Ukrainian is rather ruder once I leave the company of scholars whom I have known for a long time. Ever since Askold Lozynskyj, a former president of the Ukrainian World Congress, declared that I was in the pay of the Jews, I have received some pretty nasty comments, including an email that hoped I would choke on all the money I’ve earned. On some internet sites you can discover that I am not only a “Ukrainophobe“ but a Russian Jew. A retired physician in Toronto has made a sculpture of a jackal called “John-Paul svoloch,” a photograph of which he has been circulating to various people in the community along with a blank-verse denunciation of my “incessant howling, in promiscuous pursuit of self-promotion” (cf. Roman’ characterization of me as one who “heads for the limelight of the public intellectual”). People coming to hear me speak in Winnipeg and Toronto have been leafletted by Ukrainian student organizations. This is all par for the course when you consolidate a national myth in a community and someone from that community actually begins researching the past to which the myth refers – the community undertakes to extrude him or her. Just a few years back Peter Borisow, a vocal Holodomor activist, took Alexander Motyl to task for an article that appeared in The New York Times, for which Dr. Motyl was a source. Borisov was upset that the article contained “a weak mention of ‘Genocide’”and too many references just to “famine”; moreover, the article suggested that the number of victims was three to six million. Here is what Borisow proposed: “If Prof. Motyl refuses to retract his statement and publicly apologize, he should be drummed out of Ukrainian organizations and be rendered unwelcome in the Ukrainian community.”14

Roman states that my positions strengthen “Russian World” myths. I do not share this binary thinking. In her comments at the 2011 meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Oxana Shevel said that it is more useful to think of three positions in the debate over memory: 1) those who focus on Soviet crimes and downplay the crimes of the national socialists and nationalists; 2) those who focus on the crimes of the national socialists and nationalist and downplay the crimes of the Soviets; and 3) those who attempt to treat all such crimes evenhandedly, using the same criteria and practices of investigation and interpretation. A much-discussed contribution to the third position is Timothy Snyder’s recent Bloodlands.15 From my point of view, the third position is best. Roman feels that to abandon position 1 is automatically to fall into position 2. His attitude is widespread in the Ukrainian community and in the Ukrainian studies community.16

Lemkin and Genocide, Holodomor and Holocaust

A number of passages of Roman’s “Erroneous Methods” take me to task for not sufficiently recognizing the importance of the work of Raphael Lemkin for understanding the Ukrainian genocide. Indeed, he is correct. I really do think that Lemkin’s work in this respect has nothing to offer but antiquarian interest.

To begin with, ever since the time of the scientific revolution, it has been a principle of science and scholarship that arguments, not authorities, are required to settle disputes. The invention of the concept of genocide did not automatically give Lemkin the historical knowledge necessary to determine whether any particular case fit his definition or not. Moreover, Lemkin’s thinking on genocide changed over time. At the time of Lemkin’s greatest influence, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the United Nations took up his definition, he was not yet thinking of Ukraine as an object of genocide; rather the fate of the Armenians during World War I and of the Jews during World War II were uppermost in his mind. His thinking about Ukraine came later in the Cold War, in the mid-1950s, at which time Lemkin was both marginalized and impoverished. He was, in fact, at that time dependent on the Baltic and Ukrainian communities for material support. Moreover, his definition of genocide expanded dramatically. Almost everything the communists did he now dubbed genocide, including the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. His new usage of genocide encompassed so much that it was growing increasingly meaningless.17 It was in this context that the work Roman so admires appeared.

As far as I can ascertain, Lemkin did not himself study the Ukrainian situation independently, but relied on information he obtained directly from émigré nationalists. Hence, it is not surprising that nationalists today resonate to the rediscovered ideas of this Polish-Jewish jurist. To me, Lemkin’s outline of the Ukrainian genocide is nothing striking. Since I was twelve years old I have been aware of the repression of Ukrainian cultural activists by Stalin in the 1930s. I have no doubt that this repression – even without the famine – can be classified as genocide even under the 1948 definition, if one simply matches the history to the words. The famine too can be classified as genocide, especially if linked with the cultural repressions. But I agree totally with Timothy Snyder that classification gets us nowhere and that juridical definitions do not belong in scholarship. My interpretation of the famine is very close, virtually identical, to Snyder’s, as presented in Bloodlands, and so is my reluctance to use the term genocide.18 (In fact, I do occasionally use the term genocide loosely in relation to the Ukrainian famine, something Snyder does not do in his book on principle.)

I think there are immensely more interesting and important questions about the famine of 1932-33 to research than whether or not it can be considered a genocide, even though that has consumed so much of the discourse around the Holodomor in the diaspora and in pronationalist regions and circles in Ukraine. One thing I find interesting and important is the study of memory politics and in this connection particularly the Ukrainian campaign for the recognition of the famine as genocide. I have written about this in the past and plan to write more. Here I will deal only with certain aspects of these memory politics which were mentioned in Roman’s text.

I have never questioned that it is appropriate to empathize with the victims of the famine. I would not use Roman’s formulation, however: “This right [to empathize]…belongs to the victim group of every genocide or mass atrocity.” I think the obligation to empathize is not restricted to the “victim group,” and I think that the term “victim group” is a problematic category. Roman’s stark formulation seems to free Ukrainians from the necessity to empathize with victims of the Holocaust and Jews from the necessity to empathize with victims of the Holodomor. I do not think this is what he means, however, or else he would not be part of the campaign to have non-Ukrainians recognize the Ukrainian genocide. The category “victim group” confuses me. Does anyone else constitute the ”victim group” of the Holocaust other than the Jews who actually suffered during the Nazi occupation? Do their siblings in North America belong? The children of their siblings? North American Jews who arrived in the 1840s? Yemeni Jews? Converted Jews? Anyone who identifies with Jewish suffering? In the case of Ukrainians, the “victim group” is obviously problematized by acute regional differences and the fact that Western Ukraine did not directly experience the famine. In every locality where collectivization and the famine occurred some Ukrainians were on the side of the perpetrators. Are they part of the “victim group”? Are their children and grandchildren? I prefer a more universal formulation about the obligation to empathize.

I believe, however, that what Roman is getting at is one of my problems with the Holodomor genocide campaign. It has been my belief that we should not embark on such a campaign until we deal honestly with accusations of genocidal actions perpetrated by Ukrainians. Probably Roman’s objection hearkens back to an older exchange, from February 2010, in which I debated with Zenon Kohut. Roman wrote at that time:

I did not intend to stray into this discussion until I read John-Paul’s flippant moralizing at the end of his letter:

“And what about the hypocrisy of demanding that the world recognize the famine of 1932-33 as a genocide at the same time as one refuses to give adequate recognition to what OUN and UPA did to Poles and Jews?”

This is a non sequitur. The recognition of one crime is not contingent on the recognition of another. Each crime is judged on its own attributes. Furthermore, these crimes are not related. And then what exactly does “adequate recognition” mean? I have been active for some time in promoting the recognition of the Ukrainian genocide of the 1930s in academic and political circles. Must I preface every communication with an “adequate recognition” of “what OUN and UPA did to Poles and Jews”?19

I did not respond to this at the time, so let me make my position clear now. I am looking for the same standards to be applied in evaluating both what happened to the rural population in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 and what happened to the Jews under the German and Romanian occupation of Galicia, Bukovina, and Volhynia in 1941-44. I want to see the same level of empathy for victims and the same evaluation of perpetrators. I do not think it is right to remember only Ukrainians as victims without remembering those who were the victims of Ukrainians. I do not think it is right to bend all the argumentation to make OUN, UPA, the Ukrainian police, and other Ukrainians look as innocent as possible, while bending the argumentation to make the Soviets (or Russians or communists or whoever we blame) look as guilty as possible. The same kind of striving for objectivity must mark our understanding of both mass killings. We must give the same kinds of credence to the same kinds of evidence, to testimonies by NKVD or komnezam victims as to testimonies by OUN and UPA victims. The same applies to Soviet documentation. We cannot simply accept all Soviet documentation that reveals the criminality of those who condemned millions of Ukrainians to death while simultaneously rejecting any documents found in Soviet archives that incriminate nationalist organizations or leaders. Clearly, different kinds of Soviet documents demand differential evaluation; but similar kinds of documentation require similar evaluation. What I am looking for is a single standard, not a double standard, a more inclusive approach to replace national egoism.

Roman downplays my point about competing victimology, saying that only a fringe element engages in it. Here is an excerpt from a speech made in the provincial parliament of Ottawa by Yuri Shymko on 20 July 1985, the day that Holocaust denier James Keegstra was sentenced by an Alberta court: “Today we are united with the Jewish community in Canada in remembering the six million victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime. We are equally united with the Ukrainian community in remembering the seven million victims of the Soviet genocide by means of the great artificial famine in Ukraine.” I note also that the speech was made with the idea of defending Ukrainians against charges of war crimes.20 Or more recently, while raising money for their film about the Holodomor, Marta Tomkiw and Bobby Leigh put a trailer on the internet that declared the Ukrainian famine “exceeded” other tragedies they named – Darfur, the Armenians, and the Holocaust. In fact, they claimed: “History knows no other crime of such nature and magnitude.” These offensive declarations of competitive victimology were only removed from the internet after my public protest.21 The film was promoted in The Ukrainian Weekly, and Taras Hunczak joined the project as a historical consultant.

Roman also contests my point about Yushchenko suppressing the history of the Holocaust at the same time he was promoting the Holodomor. Let me remind him that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on his watch published both a falsification purporting to exonerate OUN from involvement in the Lviv pogrom22 as well as a totally arbitrary list of Holodomor perpetrators consisting about 40 percent of Jews.23 Yushchenko’s SBU also set up the Lonsky Street Prison Museum, where the NKVD’s murder of Ukrainian nationalists is commemorated but the nationalists’ subsequent violence against Jews at the very same site is passed by in silence. Yushchenko also changed the character of Babyn Yar commemorations. While under previous presidents, this site, so important in Holocaust history, was the venue for the annual commemoration of the tens of thousands of Jews murdered here, Yushchenko shifted the emphasis drastically to commemorate rather the hundreds of Ukrainian nationalists who were also buried here.24

The genocide campaigners do not spout anger at Russians and Jews? Some do not, to be sure, but some definitely do, and not just marginal elements. Some prominent spokesmen have blamed the Holodomor on Jews, including former ambassador to Canada Levko Lukianenko25 and former Ukrainian World Congress president Lozynskyj.26 There is a noticeable antisemitic tinge to the work of the Association of Researchers of the Holodomors in Ukraine, which Lukianenko has headed for a long time.27 I took a photo on Prospekt Svobody in Lviv in 2003 of a sign erected to mark the seventieth anniversary of the famine. The sign reads: “2002-2003. 70th anniversary of the Holodomor of 1932-1933. Russian occupants murdered by artificial famine in occupied Ukraine 10,000,000 peasants-Ukrainians. The land that was depopulated by the Jew-commissars was settled by Muscovites from the Russian Federation.”

The Holocaust and Ukrainian History

In his text, Roman relegates the Holocaust to “Jewish history.” I am going to argue that it is also a part of Ukrainian history. For one thing, the national approach is not the only legitimate approach to Ukrainian history. Some of the most prominent practitioners of the discipline proceeded rather from a territorial approach. I think particularly of Viacheslav Lypynsky and Omeljan Pritsak in the past and Paul Robert Magocsi in the present. When we consider that 1.5 million Jews perished on the territory encompassed by the present boundaries of Ukraine, i.e., a quarter of the Holocaust’s victims, it is hard to imagine that this was something separate from Ukrainian history.

The murder of the European Jews was initiated, sponsored, and largely accomplished by the Germans. But really it was pretty much an all-European project. Vichy France and Nazi-occupied France cooperated in the Holocaust. Slovakia paid Hitler to take its Jews to the death camps. Romania killed Jews partly on its own initiative. Poles, as Jan Gross has been reminding them for over a decade, also took part in the killing of the Jews. In Western Ukraine, the dominant Ukrainian political force, OUN, took an active role in the Holocaust; in numerous rural localities the inhabitants slaughtered their Jews spontaneously in the summer of 1941; and the Germans could rely on a steady stream of denunciation from the local population. Omer Bartov noted in an important recent article, “much of the gentile population in this region both collaborated in and profited from the genocide of the Jews.”28 And throughout Ukraine, not just in the West, Ukrainians were sucked into the destruction process, as Schutzmänner and civil administrators, as cooks for the German shooters or guards of victims slated for execution.29 To quote Bartov again: “Because the Holocaust in Eastern Europe was often experienced as a communal massacre, it left a deep and lasting imprint on all surviving inhabitants of these areas.”30 The Holocaust cannot be cordoned off from Ukrainian history.

The disappearance of the Jews resulted in a transfer of much of their property to Ukrainians. The newspaper Krakivs’ki visti took over the printing press of a Jewish newspaper, for example.31 In cities, Ukrainians took Jewish apartments; in the country, their former homes, their cows, their duvets. Jews gave gold, money, and jewelry as bribes to Ukrainian policemen. They traded valuables and furs to farmers in exchange for potatoes and flour. By all accounts, the Ukrainian cooperative movement flourished under the Nazi occupation. One of the reasons, of course, is the disappearance of Jewish competitors. Some of these economic gains were rolled back by the Soviets, but not all. Ukrainians (and Russians too) moved to the cities and towns where Jews had once constituted a third or more of the population. All this is part of Ukrainian history. It is also Jewish history, of course, but maybe it is not so wise to be apportioning historic processes to some imagined discrete ethnic histories.

Roman complains that I did not write about rescue in my “Interventions” piece. But I have written about it elsewhere,32 and I have a long piece coming out about the efforts of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky on behalf of the Jews.33 In my view, however, there are too few scholarly studies of Ukrainian rescue, and those that do exist must be regarded as preliminary.34 I hope that the new project on rescue undertaken by Orest Zakydalsky moves the scholarship forward. Rescue, it should be recognized, is a complex issue, anything but straightforward. I have a PhD student, Nina Paulovicova, who has nearly completed her thesis on rescue in Slovakia. She paints a picture that is almost entirely composed of different shades of grey. One of the large issues – and it affects also some aspects of Ukrainian rescue – is that perpetrators of various kinds (Hlinka guardists, civil servants with responsibilities vis-à-vis the Jewish population) are usually in the best position to rescue Jews, so they figure rather disproportionately high among categories of rescuers.

I do want to take exception, however, with the implication of Roman’s text – and I have run into it frequently – that somehow rescue balances out perpetration. Only nationalists think that there is some kind of accounting ascribed to nations as a whole – x number of Ukrainians did this, but they are balanced by y number of Ukrainians who did that. It is, of course, precisely this logic that leads to blaming Soviet crimes on Jews in general, whether in the only apparently harmless Lozynskyj form or in the decidedly deadly Stetsko form. Ukrainian nationalists often play the rescue card quite cynically, too, although I do not wish to suggest that this is the case with Roman. But it was the case with the Ukrainian feminist Olena Kysilevska. She contributed a long antisemitic article to Krakivs’ki visti in June 1943, just as the Germans were liquidating the last of Galicia’s Jews. Indeed, she endorsed what was going on, satisfied that there were no more Jews left in the Hutsul region. She published it under a pseudonym and received 187 zlotys for it. Until I found out all the details of this in my late father-in-law’s archive (he was editor of Krakivs’ki visti), no one knew that this leader of the Ukrainian women’s movement in Galicia and later America had written such an appalling piece. Yet she also had the nerve, once in America, to write an article to defend Ukrainians’ reputation during the Holocaust. She wrote that in spite of all that the peasants had suffered from the Jews through economic exploitation, they still helped and fed Jews during the war.35 In short, this collaborator in the Holocaust hid behind the deeds of good people who took risks to help the hunted Jews. To me, this seems little different than when members and champions of the Bandera faction of OUN refer to the rescue activities of Andrei Sheptytsky to whitewash the dirty deeds of pogromists, policemen, and murderers in the forest. Sheptytsky roundly condemned the Banderites, their involvement in the murder of Jews as militiamen and policemen, and their murder of Poles as members of UPA.36

In closing, I would like to put these Ukrainian memory issues into a comparative context. Many countries have gone through a reckoning with the dark past of the Holocaust, and it has always been difficult. In Germany, a real confrontation with Germans’ responsibility for the Shoah came decades after the end of the war, at the earliest in the 1960s, but only properly in the 1980s. It is still very difficult for Germans to accept that members of their own families – beloved grandfathers – took part in such evil.37 The French have been torturing themselves over Vichy for decades now, and the trials of Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon shook French society to its foundations. Everywhere in postcommunist Europe, where the memory of the Holocaust was relatively frozen, it has been difficult to deal with this past. People still remember who took part in the killings in the villages; they still remember where the Jews are buried. And we need to bear in mind that the deeper horror of the Holocaust unfolded not in France and Germany, but in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Romania. Then there is the whole layer of mass killings committed by the communists, which were sometimes also intertwined with the Holocaust. These are not easy things to sort out. In the postwar Ukrainian emigration to North America, Britain, and Australia, the proportion of nationalists and persons associated with German administration or military was very high. These are our fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, grandparents and friends. All these layers and all these personal ties make it difficult for us to work through the dark past. But that is nonetheless what we have to do.

NOTES

1. See especially: “Krakivski visti and the Jews, 1943: A Contribution to the History of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Second World War,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 21, no. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 1996): 81-95. “Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews during the Second World War: Sorting Out the Long-Term and Conjunctural Factors,” in The Fate of the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Studies in Contemporary Jewry 13 (1997): 170-89. Review of Making Sense of Suffering: Holocaust and Holodomor in Ukrainian Historical Culture, by Johan Dietsch, and Holod 1932-1933 rr. v Ukraini iak henotsyd, by Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, 3 (Summer 2007): 683-94. Co-authored with Taras Kurylo, “Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv? Rozdumy nad knyzhkoiu Volodymyra V”iatrovycha,” Ukraina Moderna 13 (2008): 252-65. “Dostovirnist’ svidchennia: reliatsiia Ruzi Vagner pro l’vivs’kyi pohrom vlitku 1941 r.,” Holokost i suchasnist’ no. 2 (4) (2008): 43-73. Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories (Saskatoon: Heritage Press, 2009). “Debates in Ukraine over Nationalist Involvement in the Holocaust, 2004-2008,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 353-70. “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, forthcoming December 2011. “Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder: Krakivs’ki visti, the NKVD Murders of 1941, and the Vinnytsia Exhumation,” in Shatterzone of Empires: Identity and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, ed. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
2. I have posted them, as well as many of the publications, on my site at academia.edu.
3. In addition to those I will be citing below, some important recent works include: Heorhii Kas’ianov, Danse macabre: holod 1932-1933 rokiv u politytsi, masovii svidomosti ta istoriohrafii (1980-ti – pochatok 2000-kh (Kyiv: Nash chas, 2010). Joanna Michlic, “The Soviet Occupation of Poland, 1939-41, and the Stereotype of the Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet Jew,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 13, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2007): 135-76.Vladimir Melamed, “Organized and Unsolicited Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Multifaceted Ukrainian Context,” East European Jewish Affairs 37, no. 2 (August 2007): 217-48. Franziska Bruder, “Den ukrainischen Staat erkämpfen oder sterben!” Die Organisation Ukrainischer Nationalisten (OUN) 1929-1948 (Berlin: Metropol, 2007).Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008). Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “The ‘Ukrainian National Revolution’ of 1941: Discourse and Practice of a Fascist Movement,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 83-114. Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939-1944,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 2 (2011): 336-63.
4. I am not alone. See, e.g., Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1993): 136-52.
5. There is an excellent study of this process: Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2005).
6. Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 123-32. Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussions about Jews, 1929-1947,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 315-52. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 166-201.
7. See especially the article by Volodymyr Kulyk in Krytyka, no. 3-4 (2010).
8. On the latter point, see the torchlight parade in Lviv in 2011 to honor the heroes of Kruty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBo9CUgn2d0.
9. Per Anders Rudling, “The Khatyn’ Massacre: A Historical Controversy Revisited,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, forthcoming November 2011. Per Anders Rudling, “Terror and Local Collaboration in Occupied Belarus: The Case of Schutzmannschaft Battailion 118,” Historical Yearbook, Nicolae Iorga History Institute, Romanian Academy, 8, forthcoming December 2011.
10. Heidemarie Uhl, “Of Heroes and Victims: World War II in Austrian Memory,”
11. See John-Paul Himka and Joanna Michlic, Bringing the Dark Past to Light:The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).
12. Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997), 365.
13. Iurii Shapoval, “Pro vyznannia i znannia,” Krytyka, no. 1-2 (2011): 17-20.
14. Peter Borisow, “A Subversion of Holodomor,” The Ukrainian Weekly, 2 March 2008.
15. New York: Basic Books, 2010. I have reviewed it in Krytyka, no. 3-4 (2011).
16. See for example: Peter Borisow, “The ABCs of Holodomor Denial,” The Ukrainian Weekly, 17 August 2008. (I understand that Borisow’s text is a response to my own, “How Many Perished in the Famine and Why Does It Matter?” BRAMA: News and Community Press, 2 February 2008 http://www.brama.com/news/press/2008/02/080202himka_famine.html). Jars Balan, “Gullible Leftists Play into the Hands of Putin’s Neo-Soviet Apologists,” Ukrainian News, 28 December 2009 – 19 January 2010.
17. Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide,’” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (December 2005), 551-59.
18. Snyder, Bloodlands, 21-58 (presentation of famine), 413 (objections to using the term “genocide”).
19. The Ukraine List (UKL), no. 441 (16 February 2010).
20. Yuri Shymko [MPP High Park-Swansea], “Statement on the Proposed Use of Soviet Evidence by the Deschenes Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes,” 20 July 1985. Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre (Winnipeg), “War Crimes removed from Archives Office G-3-5.”
21. Himka, “How Many Perished.”
22. Dmitrii Rybakov, “Marko Tsarynnyk: Istorychna napivpravda hirsha za odvertu brekhniu,” LB.ua, 5 November 2009, http://lb.ua/news/2009/11/05/13147_marko_tsarinnik_istorichna.html (accessed 6 May 2011). John-Paul Himka, “Be Wary of Faulty Nachtigall Lessons,” Kyiv Post, 27 March 2008. John-Paul Himka, “Falsifying World War II History in Ukraine,” Kyiv Post, 9 May 2011.
23. The list was posted on 23 July 2008. It has since been removed from the website of the Security Service, but I have retained a printout of it. It was widely commented on in the press at the time.
24. Aleksandr Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine: Memorialization of the Jewish Tragedy at Babi Yar,” Nationality Papers 39, no. 33 (May 2011): 371-89.
25. Lukianenko’s position is presented in some detail in Per Anders Rudling, “Organized Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Ukraine: Structure, Influence and Ideology,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 48, nos. 1-2 (March-June 2006):90-92.
26. In the interests of accuracy, I will quote Lozynskyj’s exact words: “Some Ukrainians will perceive this excessive reaction by Jewish media as a self-preserving defense tactic since, statistically, a disproportionate component of the Holodomor’s executioners were Jews and an equally overwhelming amount of Soviet accomplices during the Soviet’s two years in western Ukraine from 1939-41 were Jews.” Askold S. Lozynskyj, “How Insensitive Bigots Continue to Play Ukrainians and Jews against Each Other,” Kyiv Post, 8 November 2010.
27. Lyudmyla Grynevych, “The Present State of Ukrainian Historiography on the Holodomor and Prospects for its Development,” Harriman Review, 16, no. 2 (1 November 2008): 17.
28. Omer Bartov, “Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies: Jewish-Christian Relations in Buczacz, 1939-1944,” East European Politics & Societies 25 (2011): 491.
29. On the varieties of tasks Ukrainians found themselves performing for the German executioners, see Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 97.
30. Bartov, “Wartime Lies,” 491-92.
31. John-Paul Himka, “Krakivs’ki visti: An Overview,” in Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe: Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk, ed. Zvi Gitelman et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by the Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 2000), 251.
32. Himka, Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust.
33. John-Paul Himka, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust,” Polin 26 (forthcoming).
34. Frank Golczewski, “Die Revision eines Klischees. Die Rettung von verfolgten Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg durch Ukrainer, in Solidarität und Hilfe für Juden während der NS-Zeit, vol. 2, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Juliane Wetzel (Berlin: Metropol, 1998), 9-82. Zhanna Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla. (Povedinka mistsevoho naselennia Skhidnoi Halychyny v roky “Ostatochnoho rozv”iazannia ievreis’koho pytannia”) (Kyiv: Biblioteka Instytutu Iudaiky, 1998).
35. Himka, “Krakivs’ki visti and the Jews,” 87-88, 90.
36. I also have a detailed study on this issue forthcoming in New Religious Histories: Rethinking Religion and Secularization in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Catherine Wanner (Woodrow Wilson Press and Oxford University Press).
37. I particularly recommend: Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Opa war kein Nazi,” Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002).

Editor’s note: Roman Serbyn’s article was published on this site, August 7, 2011.

Star of David vs Ukrainian Trident: a fake conflict

Roman Kabachyi

70 years ago, following the Red Army’s retreat from what was then eastern Poland and is now western Ukraine, as they were pushed back by the German invaders, a wave of pogroms swept the cities and townships of the area, which was populated mostly by Jews. They were instigated by the German military command, turning public outrage at the mass executions carried out by the Soviets before they departed, when a total of 22,000 people (some 10% of them Jews) were shot dead, into retribution against the Jewish population.

Exploiting the Ukrainians’ outrage at this horrendous crime at the hands of what Nazi propaganda called the “Jewish” regime, the Germans had apparently hoped the pogroms would have greater impact. However, those whom survivors accused of having instigated and carried out the pogroms also included Ukrainian nationals. While the Lviv pogrom [13] of 1 July 1941 was the biggest, survivors of less significant ones, such as the pogrom in the town of Kremenets, recalled similar scenes: “In Kremenets the Soviets killed 100-150 Ukrainians. After some of the exhumed bodies were found to be skinless, rumours spread that the Ukrainians had been thrown into tubs of boiling water. The Ukrainian population responded by capturing 130 Jews and clubbing them to death…” (Raul Hilberg); “I spotted my classmate Esther among the Jews identifying the bodies in the hole in the ground, and realised she was doomed. There was shouting and moaning in the courtyard, as many people recognised their nearest and dearest.” (Larisa Tomchuk-Medvedchuk). The Germans thoroughly documented the Ukrainian participation in reprisals against the Jews to make sure responsibility would be shared with the local population.
A provocation from Odessa

70 years later Lviv, with its reputation as the most “nationalistic” city in Ukraine, is being reminded of the less illustrious chapters in its history by, of all people, members of the pro-Russian chauvinist Rodina [Motherland] party (link in Russian) [14]. The party’s name is more symbolic of the link with the Russian and Soviet empires than of patriotic sentiments towards Ukraine. Rodina is based in Odessa and its leader is local council deputy Igor Markov. It specialises in spectacular events, such as the expulsion of NATO vessels from Crimea; picketing “Sea Breeze” [15], the joint military exercise with NATO; or supporting Ruthenian separatism [16] in Transcarpathia. And now Jews Against Anti-Semitism, a committee financed by Markov (and filled with his people) has announced its intention to “defend Holocaust victims from fascism and its henchmen”… Until this announcement this organisation was known only for championing the erection of a Stalin statue in Odessa [17] and for demanding that he be declared … the world’s No.1 Righteous Man.

In June 2011 Jews Against Anti-Semitism announced that 150 of its members would come to Lviv on 22 June, the anniversary of Hitler’s attack on the USSR, and stage on the Mount of Glory an event “against the policy of fascism, anti-Semitism and the holocaust in memory of the Soviet nation and of all mankind, in memory of the Jews who perished in the ghettos and concentration camps at the hands of monsters – Ukrainian nationalists, followers of Shukhevych, Bandera [18] and other fascist scum”. They presented their application for a permission to hold the event in [primarily Ukrainian-speaking] Lviv in Russian, spelling the word Holocaust with a small “h”. With Rodina’s successful 9 May Victory Day provocation [19], aimed at engineering a confrontation between nationalists and Soviet veterans, still fresh in people’s memory, well-known and respected Jewish organisations of various kinds in Ukraine were outraged.

Iosef Zisels: “It is in the interest of Russian authorities to present western Ukraine to the world as aggressive and anti-Semitic, and the Jews as Stalinists.”

Leader of the Congress of Ukrainian National Communities Iosif Zisels said in an interview with Radio Liberty that this was a “planned provocation since it is in the interest of Russian authorities to present western Ukraine to the world as aggressive and anti-Semitic, and the Jews as Stalinists.” Zisels further stressed that Jews Against Anti-Semitism does not belong to the Association of Jewish Organisations and Communities of Ukraine (VAAD) [20]. Aleksandr Feldman [21], President of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee and member of Parliament (elected as a member of the Yulia Tymoshenko’s opposition bloc, but now representing President Yanukovich’s Party of Regions), issued the following statement: “This kind of provocation has nothing to do with the Jewish community, with the fight against anti-Semitism and fascism or with commemorating the victims of war.” Feldman regards this as a “crude attempt to discredit the Jewish community and drag Ukraine into fanning an intra-regional and intra-national conflict”. The politician appealed to legitimate Jewish organisations to publicly condemn dubious ventures of this kind.
Anti-Semitic “Jews”

Aleksandr Mikhelson, a correspondent for the journal Ukrainski tyzhden’ [22] (Ukrainian Week) tried to reach the chairman of Jews Against Anti-Semitism, Rozalia Tsenter, by telephone. Quite predictably, she was “not available” and the call was taken by Aleksandr Eryomenko who introduced himself as the Committee’s secretary. His response made it clear that the Committee was interested not so much in the victims of the Holocaust as in a desire to demonstrate that living conditions in an independent Ukraine are much worse than they were during the war. Vaad’s investigation has shown that Eryomenko is linked to the ZUBR [23] movement (the acronym stands for ‘For Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’) and that he also chairs the organization “The Eye of the Diamond”, notorious for its ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist Orthodox and anti-Semitic attitudes. Both organizations are financed by Igor Markov.

At least partly because of general outrage, Jews Against Anti-Semitism never made it [24] to Lviv. As Viacheslav Likhachev, an expert on intra-national relations and social movements in the post-Soviet space, told me: “This episode was quite significant, showing that a sufficiently strong educational campaign can succeed in facing down this kind of provocation. It even turned against the organizers since everything came to the surface.” There is another explanation that sheds light on the refusal to travel to Lviv not only by the “pseudo-Jews” but also by representatives of the Communist Party, the Odessa mayor’s office and chairman of the Kharkiv region administration Mikhail Dobkin, who had also sought to “defend history”. Mikhelson believes that while Yanukovych is in the midst of difficult renegotiations on gas agreements [25] with Russia, “official Kyiv has no interest in playing into the hands of its northern neighbour by showing support for ‘ritual’ Ukrainophobes.” In all likelihood an order came from above not to stage a provocation.

The bizarre messages of the Odessa-based organisations associated with the pro-Russian Rodina party:
a June 2010 demonstration proclaims Stalin to be the best man in world history – a view not entirely consistent with a campaign against anti-Semitism. (Photo: Viktor Pavlov, reproduced with permission)

On 22 June the commemoration of the victims of war took place peacefully in Lviv. Is this to the credit of the city’s inhabitants, or rather those who had “put in the boot from above”? Tarik Cyril Amar [26], former director of the Lviv Centre for Research in Urban History and currently visiting professor at Columbia University, comments: “Many Lviv inhabitants do not share anti-Semitic and nationalist stereotypes but they have not managed to get organised and make themselves heard, except for a few marginal cases. Unfortunately, the people of Lviv tend to react too emotionally to neo-Soviet provocations, while remaining unaware of more significant political issues of a right-wing nature and nationalist distortions of history. The people of Lviv, as genuine patriots, are capable of doing more to demonstrate what kind of nationalism is not acceptable in their city.”
The need to come to terms with the past

Is Ukraine safe from future provocations of this kind? Viacheslav Likhachev recalls a few rather successful attempts at playing the “Jewish card”: before the Orange Revolution a court shut down [27] the Ukrainian-language opposition paper with the largest circulation, “Silski Visti” (Village News), which had been appearing since Soviet times, for publishing an openly anti-Semitic article. And during the last presidential election in 2010, a potential winner, Arseny Yatseniuk [28], was pushed down to fourth place when rumours were spread [29] that he was Jewish.

Ukrainian society apparently needs to be ready for the challenge of Ukrainian anti-Semitism being presented as a natural phenomenon. That is why Ukraine needs a discussion, similar to the discussion that has taken place in Poland on the events in Jedwabne in 1940 [30] and the postwar pogrom in Kielce [31]. Currently Ukrainian historiography mostly turns a blind eye to certain “negative” historical facts. For instance, the Centre for the Research on the Resistance Movement in Lviv, under its director Vladimir Vyatrovich, is more likely to discuss the role of Jewish doctors in the UPA [32] [the Ukrainian Insurgent Army] than the Lviv pogrom, even though the latter took place well before UPA appeared.

The director of the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies [33], Anatoly Podolskyi, says: “Researchers at Vyatrovich’s centre lack what German historians call the ‘issue of coming to terms with history’. It is necessary to look at the past in perspective and to admit certain things, rather than just saying we are responsible for what was bad about it – we are responsible for the memory of the past.” Podolskyi stresses that he is also against the continuation of the Soviet tradition that indiscriminately branded the entire Ukrainian liberation movement as anti-Semitic: “If only those researching the OUN [34] [Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists] and UPA would say calmly that yes, unfortunately Ukrainians did take part in anti-Jewish actions, it would be fine. We need an honest and balanced discussion.” This, however, raises another question: is anyone in Ukraine interested in discussions of this kind or, on the contrary, is history doomed to be used for political and provocative goals?

Likhachev cites the example of the Russian senator Boris Shpigel [35] who – whenever the Kremlin needs to cast a neighbour (Estonians, Georgians, Ukrainians) in an unfavourable light – immediately starts accusing [36] them of “fascism” and “anti-Semitism”. “There are quite a few people in Ukraine working for Shpigel,” he believes. Ukraine does not understand that an uneducated Ukrainian society benefits the patrons in the Kremlin but not Ukraine. The very subject of the Holocaust continues to be taboo, as it used to be in the Soviet era: “This issue has not yet been internalised,” Anatoly Podolskyi laments. “The Ukrainians have only a superficial knowledge of the fact that the Holocaust happened. They say: “That’s ‘their’ history.” They don’t perceive it as part of their own.”

With such patchy knowledge of Ukraine’s history in relation to the Holocaust, truth and reconciliation is impossible. What will solve this? Tarik Cyril Amar suggests that a major international conference be organised, with the participation of top foreign scholars of Ukrainian nationalism, including strong critics: “At the very least this would demonstrate the wish to openly admit existing problems”.

Republished from our partner organization Open Democracy Russia, where it appeared on 12 September 2011.

Erroneous Methods in J.-P. Himka’s Challenge to “Ukrainian Myths”

Roman Serbyn

For some time now, Professor John-Paul Himka has been campaigning against what he calls “Ukrainian myths about traumatic aspects of the twentieth-century.” On 28 March 2011, he explained his chosen mission in his address at the University of Alberta. An abridged version of his text can be found on the Internet under the title “Interventions: Challenging the Myths of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian History” . Regrettably, what Himka has produced in this article is not a good history of the tragic events, and his analysis of the myths that they engendered is flawed. His paper is not helping to set the historical record straight, nor does it contribute to the formulation of positive myths of national consolidation, crucial for newly independent states like Ukraine. Himka’s approach tends to reinforce anti-Ukrainian mythologies.

Himka feels that, both as an academic and a public intellectual, he has a responsibility and a moral duty to challenge what he regards as myths, and because of his “self-identification as a Ukrainian”, he can do it “from the inside.” The two “core myths,” as Himka sees them, that have become the objects of his indignation are: (a) the claim that the Ukrainian famine of 1933 was genocide, and (b) the denial that OUN and UPA participated in the Holocaust. What bothers the historian is that these myths are instrumentalized and exploited in tandem. Himka complains: “The genocide argument is used to buttress another campaign, to glorify the anticommunist resistance of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.” Since he regards the nationalists, i.e., OUN and UPA, as being implicated in the Holocaust, he considers their glorification unacceptable. Rejecting the nationalist (in his opinion) view of Ukrainian history, Himka concludes that “a revisionist treatment” is “not only appropriate, but obligatory.”

If Himka’s presentation gives the impression of a déjà vu, déjà entendu – there are good reasons for it. Anybody who remembers the Soviet war on the Ukrainian diaspora in the 1980s will recall Douglas Tottle’s Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (Toronto, 1987). Tottle’s pseudo-scholarly treatise left a similar impression. Only his accusations were more blatant and thoroughly mendacious with regard to the Soviet famines of 1921–23 and 1932–33. With Soviet aid, and echoing Soviet propaganda, Tottle accused Ukrainian nationalists of criminally collaborating with the “fascists” and then fleeing to the West where, as refugees, they promoted the myth of a man-made famine in Ukraine in order to deflect attention from their own crimes and to gain sympathy as victims of Communism. Unlike the Soviet propagandists, but like Himka today, Tottle did not deny the famine: the gradual opening of Soviet archives was making that argument untenable. The similarity in Tottle’s and Himka’s positions resides in their rejection of the Ukrainian genocide and their paramount interest in the Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust.

Calling on his training as a historian, Himka writes: “Once I took up the project of clarifying the history of the Holocaust, I submitted the topic [to – RS] the usual disciplinary procedures, which include researching in primary sources and rethinking in relation to existing research.” In line with such sound scholarship, he pledges to “uncover the truth,” because “truth is a value in and of itself”. These are laudable qualities. What is regrettable, however, is that the author, despite linking the two issues in tandem, seems to pursue only one of the two selected “myths”—the wartime activities of the OUN and UPA.

Himka gives no assurance of the same attention to the Ukrainian genocide. He tells us that his interest in the famine flowed out of his work on the Holocaust, and seems to keep it limited to that initial motivation. Thus, while he has conducted “a number of undergraduate and graduate seminars on the Holocaust,” he only led one seminar on the famine of 1932–33. He gives no indication that he has done extensive archival research on the Ukrainian genocide or even read the main published documents and scholarly literature on the subject. His claim, therefore, that he exposed his students to different perspectives and “tried to find the best presentations of the varying points of view” rings somewhat hollow, especially after one learns from his course outline that the first seminar meeting was devoted to Tottle’s fraudulent book. Lemkin’s seminal article on the Ukrainian genocide did not even figure in the course bibliography. Himka’s accusation that his opponents have avoided “serious and honest confrontation” with his arguments or “with the sources on which they rest” seem to be a mirror image of his own attitude in the Ukrainian genocide debate.

Himka’s essay deals with facts and ideas (interpretation, definitions, and conceptualizations) about “holocaust,” “Holodomor,” “genocide,” and “myth.” All of these subjects demand a rigorous methodological approach and precise formulation. Unfortunately Himka often treats his facts and ideas loosely, evasively, and irresponsibly. It may be, as he admits, that writing short texts results in oversimplification and that they tend to be sloppier. Since it is only 3,500 words maybe one should indeed be more indulgent when criticizing Himka’s essay. But it seems to me that the author must honor his claim of rigorous truth-seeking scholarship and profound inside knowledge of Ukrainian realities. I do not think that these qualities are reflected in such statements as the following two examples: “While Yushchenko pursued his campaign to have every country recognize the famine of 1932-33 as a genocide, he [was – RS] simultaneously suppressing the history of the other genocide, the Holocaust.” The accusation against Yushchenko’s suppression of the history or the commemoration of the Holocaust is serious: it reflects badly not only on the president of Ukraine, but also on that country’s national policy. Unless Himka can show that such state policy actually existed, he is contributing to the creation of an anti-Ukrainian myth.

In another passage, Himka leaves it to the reader to guess whether or not there were Jewish doctors in the UPA: “The myth maintains that Jews served as doctors in UPA, and therefore UPA rescued, rather than killed, Jews.” A logical interpretation of this sentence leads to the conclusion that since the UPA killed Jews, there could not have been any Jews in its ranks. Other historians, however, claim otherwise. Was it to dissimulate these and other ambiguities and apparent falsities in his text that Himka offers this confusing explanation: “In speaking of the views I oppose as mythologies, I do not always mean to make truth claims”?

The Holodomor—History or Myth?

Before answering the question whether the Holodomor should be considered a genocide in fact or a myth, it is necessary to clarify the terms we are using—“the Holodomor” “genocide,” and “myth.”

Himka fails to elaborate on the meaning of “Holodomor” and “genocide,” and he only makes a cursory comment about his use of the term “myth.” Since he does not define genocide, we are left unaware whether Himka accepts Lemkin’s comprehensive definition of the Ukrainian genocide as a four-pronged attack by the Communist regime against the Ukrainian nation. He defines myths as “unexamined components of an ideologized version of history.” In other words, he does not distinguish myths from history, but considers myths to be bad history, which are used for an unworthy purpose. By contrast, the Oxford online dictionary gives other usages of myth: “an exaggerated or idealized conception of a person or thing,” and makes no connection with history. Similarly, in the Merriam-Webster dictionary we read: “a popular belief or tradition […] embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society.” It follows that myths are not history, and that all myths are not bad or necessarily used in a harmful way. There is an interesting online literature on the positive characteristics and beneficial uses of myths. Genocides, including the Holocaust and the Holodomor, have been written up in good and bad historical narratives and also have become overgrown with a lot of mythology. Some of the myths are noxious and some benign. The mythical elements accompanying the Holocaust and the Holodomor do not impinge on their characterization as genocides. That qualification depends on other criteria.

On the issue of the Ukrainian genocide, Himka writes: “In the mythicized version, Stalin unleashed the famine deliberately in order to kill Ukrainians in mass and thus to prevent them from achieving their aspirations to establish a national state. I, however, point out that the precondition for the famine was the reckless collectivization drive, which almost destroyed Soviet agriculture as a whole. […] My somewhat more nuanced view is a problem for the mythologists, who want the world to recognize that the famine, or as they call it – the Holodomor, was a genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948” (emphasis added – R.S.) Contrary to Lemkin’s definition, Himka erroneously limits the notion of genocide to the starvation of Ukrainian peasants, and so he has a conceptual problem with the Holodomor.

The “more nuanced view” that Himka offers for explaining the famine is the specious argument that “the precondition for the famine was the reckless collectivization drive, which almost destroyed Soviet agriculture as a whole.” In other words, the starvation was caused by collectivization, which was the same throughout the Soviet Union.

There are two problems with his argument. First, as Himka himself admits, there were local and specific conditions in Ukraine: “particularly severe measures applied in those regions.” The famine there “was connected with a major offensive against perceived nationalism in the [C]ommunist [P]arty of Ukraine”; as a result “the famine in Soviet Ukraine and in the Ukrainian-inhabited Kuban region of Soviet Russia was more intense than elsewhere in the Soviet Union.” Himka even quotes a clause from the UN Convention on Genocide to show that “what happened in Ukraine in 1932-33 could fit” the description in the document.

Second, Soviet documents show that collectivization and the opposition to it did not reduce the quantity of cereals and other food products in the USSR to below famine levels. Students of Soviet economic history agree that in 1932 and 1933 the USSR had enough foodstuffs to feed the whole population. It was only necessary to stop confiscating all grain and other foodstuffs, open the stockpiled reserves, stop exporting, and accept offers of aid from abroad. Soviet documents—the law of 7 August 1932 that condemned peasants to death for “stealing” from the fields the grain they sowed, and Stalin’s letter to Kaganovich, written four days later, in which he anticipates the famine (“the moment things get worse”) warns of the possibility of a revolt and the loss of Ukraine. Detailed, comprehensive reports from Ukraine by Bolshevik leaders and GPU functionaries before and after the “five ears of corn law” clearly show that it was Stalin and the Communist regime that unleashed the famine with a conscious intent and precise motives.

Himka has a problem with the term Holodomor (“as they call it”). He could have gotten a better idea of the word and the concept if he had tried to understand it by analogy with the Holocaust, of which he is an expert. When the term “holocaust,” whose basic meaning is sacrificial offering by immolation, is capitalized and preceded by the definite article, it refers to the genocide against the Jews. In a similar way, the Holodomor has evolved beyond its original sense of forced starvation and now embraces the notion of a Soviet-led genocide against the Ukrainians. Himka’s shortcoming here is his insistence on treating the Holodomor according to the old peasantist interpretation (intentional starvation of the peasantry). He fails to see what Raphael Lemkin saw 68 years ago— namely, that the famine was only one component of the genocidal acts that the Soviet regime perpetrated against the Ukrainian nation.

Himka is right to affirm that “whether the famine constituted a genocide is a matter of interpretation.” But he fails to explain the criteria on which the interpretation must be based. The only generally accepted definition of genocide, which provides such criteria, is the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide. Article II declares that genocide means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Himka does not like the document because it only recognizes four groups and “excludes victims of social and political murder.” That may be a valid criticism, but it is irrelevant to the question of the Ukrainian genocide. The (partial) destruction indicated in the document applies to ethnic Ukrainians as a national group in general, of which the peasants form an integral part not according to their socio-economic function but to their national-ethnic characteristics.

Raphael Lemkin, who in 1943 coined the term “genocide” and conceptualized the crime it connoted, and later was instrumental in getting it adopted by the UN General Assembly, had no difficulty in applying the UN definition to what happened in Ukraine. In 1953, five years after the declaration of the UN Convention on Genocide, and on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Great Famine, Lemkin addressed a 3,000-strong audience at the Manhattan Center in New York with an allocution entitled “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine.” This Polish legal expert of Jewish origin elaborated his analysis within the parameters of the UN Convention. He described it as a four-pronged attack by the Communist regime against the Ukrainian nation, with the intent to destroy (1) the intelligentsia (“the national brain”), (2) the national churches (“the soul of Ukraine”), (3) the independent peasants (“the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit of Ukraine”), and (4) the cohesion of the Ukrainian people by forced in- and out-migration with the aim of changing the republic’s ethnic composition by reducing the number of ethnic Ukrainians and increasing the number of non-Ukrainians, particularly Russians. It cannot be stressed enough that in his conceptualization of the Ukrainian genocide Lemkin avoided the “peasantist interpretation” still prevalent among both genocide deniers (Terry Martin) and genocide promoters (Norman Naimark). Instead, he treated the peasants as part of the ethnic and national group, not as a social category.

If Himka had taken Lemkin’s outline and filled it with data provided by newly released Soviet documentation, he would have realized that the destruction of the Ukrainian national intelligentsia and elites of all sorts began in 1929 and 1930, with the arrests and show trial of the so-called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU). It continued with the purges of real and imaginary “nationalists” within various state administrations, which culminated in the “great purges” of the second half of the 1930s. A similar analysis of documentary sources shows the destruction of much of Ukrainian cultural and spiritual life (the church, literature, scholarship, theater, language, and so on). The ethnic mixing of the population, reported by foreign observers who visited Ukraine towards the end of the famine, is corroborated by official and other Soviet documents. If Himka had more than a tangential interest in the Holodomor, he would also be interested in the fate of the eight million ethnic Ukrainians in the RSFSR (according to the Soviet census of 1926) who were subjected to the state policy of physical and cultural destruction. This genocidal act should be added to the Lemkin list as a fifth prong of Stalin’s destructive policy towards the Ukrainian nation.

Perhaps the most bizarre and morally objectionable part of Himka’s article is the reasoning behind his opposition to the Ukrainian community’s effort to secure recognition for the Ukrainian genocide. Himka does not see it as a legitimate campaign for historical justice for the victims, but rather as a political and ideological gimmick to glorify the struggle of the OUN and the UPA and blame the Jews for the famine. To bolster his argument he invokes irrelevant and misleading affirmations, such as the claim that the campaign “finds its greatest resonance in the area of Ukraine where there was no famine, and in the overseas diaspora deriving from that region.” First, the argument is irrelevant: the recognition of a crime as genocide is contingent on objective criteria and not on the geographical distribution of its popular support. Second, the history of the Ukrainian genocide’s affirmation is quite different from what Himka insinuates.

While taboo in Soviet Ukraine, the first promoters and pioneers of famine studies in the diaspora in the immediate postwar decade originated from the regions where the famine took place in central and eastern Ukraine. They were: Semen Pidhainy, Dmytro Solovei, Fedir Pigido, S. Stariv, Yar Slavutych, Vsevolod Holubnychy, Ivan Maistrenko, and others; and it was the younger generation of “easterners” – Oleh Pidhainy, Marco Carynnyk, and others who were most active in researching and writing in English about the famine. In Soviet Ukraine in the late 1980s, during the glasnost period, it was the “eastern” survivors and their descendants who first raised the question of the Ukrainian famine in the USSR. Since then, most of the publications on the subject in independent Ukraine have been produced by scholars and journalists whose roots are in the Holodomor-affected regions.

As for the present, stronger, support in western Ukraine and the diaspora, Himka knows the historical and political reasons why and how popular memory on the famine was dulled in the more Russified and Sovietized eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, and why it survived better in the western parts of Ukraine and the North American diaspora (which came mostly from western Ukraine).

Most of the people who have been actively promoting the recognition of the Holodomor as genocide and have embraced the heritage of Ukrainian struggle for independence against Communist Russia and Nazi Germany would probably be offended if they read Professor Himka’s insinuation against Ukrainian attitudes towards the victims of the Holodomor and the Holocaust. There are various fringe elements in the North American Ukrainian community to whom some of Himka’s reproaches should be legitimately addressed. Every community has these people, but serious scholars don’t take marginal elements for the main body of the community or minority views as representative of the community. Most Ukrainians do not behave the way Himka insinuates that they do. They do not engage in “competing victimology” and are not “galled” by the fact that the widely accepted numbers for the victims of the Holodomor are lower than those of the Holocaust. They do not spout “anger at Russians and Jews” in their “genocide campaign.”

Contrary to Himka’s claim, the Ukrainian community has every right to “be calling on the world to empathize with the victims of the famine.” This right is unconditional, and it belongs to the victim group of every genocide or mass atrocity. To suggest, as Himka does, that it is subject to some sort of reciprocal expression of feeling towards the victims of other criminal activity is casuistic. This is not to overlook the fact that thousands of Ukrainians helped Jews during the war (Yad Vashem attests to that). The help that Jews received from the Ukrainian population during the war is praiseworthy. Many Ukrainians risked their lives saving or trying to save Jews. Those who hid Anne Frank in Holland were not even arrested, while Ukrainians lost their lives when caught hiding Jews. Contrary to Himka’s insinuation, many if not most of the Ukrainians who “embraced the heritage of the wartime nationalists” empathize with the victims of the Holocaust.

I find Himka’s opposition to “the campaign for recognition as genocide [my emphasis – R.S.]” of the Holodomor, on the pretence that it is being used to “glorify the anticommunist resistance of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II,” a casuistic argument against recognizing the Ukrainian genocide itself. The instrumentalization of a historical event does not change the nature of the event. The Nazis exposed Soviet crimes (the starvation of Ukrainians and the Katyn massacres of Poles) in a propaganda war against the Soviets, yet no one will now say that these crimes cannot be recognized because the Nazis used them for ideological and political purposes.

The OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust in the Modern Ukrainian National Myth

A fundamental methodological flaw in Himka’s discussion of the OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust is his failure to distinguish between history and myth, and then to see their respective roles in the Ukrainian heritage of World War II. Had he done so, he might have come up with a more nuanced and more truthful rendering of the events and of the safeguarding of their memory by the Ukrainian community. As a Holocaust scholar, Himka must be well versed in the literature on the role of heritage in the Jewish tradition. “History tells […] how things came to be as they are. Heritage passes on exclusive myths of origin and continuance, endowing a select group with prestige and common purpose” (Beth S. Wenger, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage, p. 19, quoting David Lowenthal). History has a duty to discover and explain the past in a truthful way; the goal of myths is to fashion desired attitudes about the past for the future. We evaluate history by its adherence to veracity; myths are judged by their usefulness and their morality – by the righteousness of the cause they advocate. History sins by commission and omission; myths cannot be blamed for what they do not say.

It is in the nature of national heritage, composed of history and myths, to elevate and idealize the past. There is nothing wrong, Himka’s claim notwithstanding, with “glorifying the anticommunist resistance of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.” It is right to praise people who sacrificed their lives for national independence and freedom from foreign tyranny. It would be wrong only if the glorification discourse contained malevolent messages. Himka complains: “Defenders of the mythical history often circulate fabricated memoirs of a non-existent Jewish woman who served in UPA.” Yet, there is nothing wrong with the idea of a Jewish woman serving in the UPA; as part of Ukrainian mythology it promotes positive Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Verification of veracity belongs to the discipline of history not the domain of mythology. The point is that rather than calling the story “mythical history,” one should distinguish whether it is presented as a mythical or historical discourse, and then evaluate it accordingly. If the story is presented as history and is then proven to be a fabrication, it should be rejected as historical falsification.

Himka criticizes President Yushchenko for embracing the “OUN-UPA-Holodomor” identity and pushing it on the Ukrainian public. What Himka fails to see is that the Ukrainian politician was attempting positive heritage making. We are dealing here with what can be called consolidation myths. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union two basic myths have been operating in Ukraine, seeking to consolidate post-Soviet formations according to opposing principles. One is centred in Russia but enjoys strong support among pro-Russian segments of Ukrainian society. This myth promotes the idea of a common “Russian World” (russkii mir), of which the Ukrainians are supposed to be an integral part even if, for the time being, Ukraine and Russia are separated by what the myth holds as “artificial” state boundaries. The most aggressive promoters of the “Russian World” idea are the Russian state authorities (see the speeches at the recent Vladimir conference on the upcoming celebrations of the 1,150th anniversary of the foundation of Russian statehood at ). Its most vocal and outspoken advocate is the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (see the recent visit of Patriarch Kirill to Kyiv to celebrate the 1,023d anniversary of the baptism of “Russia” at ). Among the ideological underpinnings of this myth are: the idea of a common historical experience, stretching from Kyivan Rus’ to the “Great Fatherland War” of 1941-45, the Russian language that everyone understands in Ukraine, and the Orthodox Church, which necessarily must be under the Moscow patriarch.

At the beginning of his term in office, President Yushchenko tried to counter this imperialist myth encroachment on Ukrainian sovereignty by promoting Ukraine-unifying myths founded on specifically Ukrainian traditions and historical experiences. One was to be the Holodomor, or the man-made famine of the 1930s that decimated Ukraine and whose memory has survived in all parts of Ukraine. The other component of the projected integrating myth was the movement for national liberation, embodied by the OUN and the UPA, whose members and supporters fought against both totalitarian empires—Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. What is often overlooked is the fact that Yushchenko’s recognition of the UPA was not in opposition or to the detriment of the veterans of the Red Army. His ambition was to reconcile the veterans of the Red Army and the UPA. This fostering of a shared Ukrainian heritage was a noble one. What Yushchenko can be reproached with is not having brought into the project the Ukrainian veterans of the Waffen SS Division Halychyna and other units of the armed forces of the Axis powers. Even this limited project did not succeed because of insufficient understanding and support within Ukrainian society, especially among its ruling elites.

After just one term in office, Yushchenko lost the presidential elections. This was a serious blow to the historical heritage that his administration was promoting. Himka suggests that the defeat had something to do with a divided historical memory and Yushchenko’s handling of it. He is right. President Yanukovych, Yushchenko’s successor, and his supporters have “pushed the opposite perspective,” and the current official promotion of this “historical-identity” is very harmful for Ukraine.

I agree with Himka’s analysis of the malady but not with the cure, when he proposes “the deconstruction of the historical mythologies of both camps.” There are four problems with his suggestion. First, the war of the myths is not an internal Ukrainian war: on the one side are the pro-Ukrainian citizens of Ukraine and the pro-Ukrainian part of the Ukrainian diaspora; on the other side are the pro-Russian citizens of Ukraine, pro-Russian emigrants from Ukraine (of various ethnic backgrounds), and, most importantly, the Russian state and church authorities. Second, even if the two sides in Ukraine heeded Himka’s advice and gave up their struggle, it is most certain that Russia (the state and the Russian Orthodox Church) would not abandon its policy of promoting the imperialist “Russian World.” Deconstruction of the two mythologies in Ukraine would thus open the floodgates to myths coming from Russia. Third, the two camps are not struggling for the same space. Ukrainocentric myths focus on a distinct Ukrainian entity, while the Russocentric idea is predicated on the old imperial model of Russia, of which Ukraine would be an integral part. Fourth, myths can play a highly constructive role in the life of communities and help with nation and state building. Ukraine needs the leaven of good and healthy historical myths.

At present, pro-Ukrainian myths are being attacked from many quarters, and the efforts to discredit them seem to be gaining in strength. In Ukraine itself, not to speak of Russia, state and church structures seem overly favorable to some form of the “Russian world” myth. With the weakening of Ukrainocentric myths, citizens of Ukraine will be drawn into the orbit of the myth-rich “Russian World.” As György Schöpflin notes, “’Through myth the assimilation of ethnically different groups is accelerated, as the myth-poor community accepts that upward social mobility demands the abandonment of its culture, language and myth-world in exchange for something superior, for a better world” (George Schöpflin in Hosking and Schöpflin, Myths and Nationhood, 22). Himka’s participation in the discussion of Ukrainian myths is a contribution to the impoverishment of pro-Ukrainian myths and the strengthening of the “Russian World” myths.

Now let us turn from myths to history. Professor Himka quotes his university motto: “Quaecumque vera—whatsoever things are true.” He is welcome to apply that principle in his historical analysis of the OUN and the UPA, their struggle for the independence of Ukraine, and their participation in criminal activities. The only proviso is that the truth be obtained from adequate documents that provide sufficient information for a complete and comprehensive interpretation. In this regard, a few remarks should be made about Himka’s text. He affirms that the “UPA launched a massive cleansing action against the Polish population of Volhynia and later Galicia, in which perhaps a hundred thousand Poles perished.” Unfortunately, the author does not give the context in which these killings took place, nor any account of the atrocities committed by the Polish side. This is not to relativize the two sides of the conflict, but there were two sides and an objective historical rendering of the events must take both of them into account. Himka’s one-sided presentation of the event is more in the style of myth-making than historical analysis.

I also have a problem with Himka’s story line on the OUN involvement in the Holocaust. It is not a nuanced version of what happened. He attributes the 1941 pogrom of Jews in Lviv solely to the OUN; he does not mention the involvement of common criminals and the action of ordinary citizens of Polish and Ukrainian background provoked by the revelation of massacred victims in Soviet prisons. Himka claims that the Jew-hunting militias were connected to the OUN, that these militiamen formed the nucleus of the UPA in 1943, and that until the end of the war they lured surviving Jews out of hiding in order to execute them. Thus, he states, the “UPA killed at least thousands of Jews” and the “OUN was implicated in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews.” The only side of Ukrainian-Jewish relations that Himka presents is that of the extermination of Jews by Ukrainians. A fundamental question arises: can all the cases of killings of Jews be classified as part of a genocide (the Holocaust), as defined by the UN Convention? Another question: what about the Ukrainians who saved Jews? Himka does not mention them or the humanitarian work of the Ukrainian clergy. This is not what one would call a “quaecumque vera” account, a complete and balanced rendering of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the war.

In his section on the “strategies” for the dissemination of his ideas, Himka declares his happiness at discovering “the power of short pieces” because they are more widely read, especially when they are posted on the Internet. He states that traditional academic publications take long to write, sometimes even longer to be published, and have limited audiences. We have seen that Himka acknowledged the fact that “short pieces” tend to be sloppier and are prone to error and oversimplification. The text under discussion here would seem to belong to the category of a short work by a public intellectual. As the adage goes, “The problem with being a public intellectual is you get more and more public and less and less intellectual.” Academic rigor and integrity, proper to scholars, tend to be more relaxed in public intellectuals writing goal-oriented short pieces. Historical writing can easily take on mythical coloring. This is what, I’m afraid, has been happening with some of Himka’s writing as he discards his professorial toga and heads for the limelight of the public intellectual. I was sorry to see his name under the infamous 2011 Open Letter, even though he was only a contributor to its redaction and not its author. I have commented on that piece elsewhere and will not do so here. I mention it only because the line of argument is similar and the results are equally harmful to the legitimate right of Ukraine to have a constructive, foundational national myth.

As a scholar of Jewish history, Himka is well aware that there are positive Jewish historical myths about the Jewish struggle for a national homeland and on the Jewish genocide, which are honored by Jews around the world. He also knows about anti-Jewish myths on both these subjects, developed to undermine the very existence of the Israeli state and denigrate the memory of the Holocaust. It seems to me that Himka does not object to the first and does not condone the second. I fail to understand why he cannot take a similar attitude towards the myths surrounding the Soviet Ukrainian genocide and the Ukrainian struggle for independence (in particular during World War II). If he is serious about “clarifying the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine,” he must know that it cannot be done in isolation from its general context and that his partisan treatment of the subject only contributes to strengthening anti-Ukrainian myths about Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

Ending on a personal note

My longest and fondest memories of John-Paul Himka are from the 1983 McMaster University Conference on “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective.” At that time we both knew much less about Ukrainian-Jewish relations than we know today, and that was probably one reason why our impressions of them, as I recall, were much closer. Since then we have both challenged, in our respective ways, what we thought was not right in the writings on Ukrainian history, both by Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians. We have also disagreed and argued, usually orally and privately, when meeting at conferences. This is my first public comment about his ideas. I trust he will appreciate my frankness and sincerity. The choice to respond to my observations or not is his. He insists that he has a Ukrainian identity, and is an academic and a public intellectual who enjoys challenges. I think his biggest challenge at this point is to determine how to combine and distinguish his two vocations and fulfill them faithfully in accordance with his enunciated principles.

Interventions: Challenging the Myths of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian History

John-Paul Himka
Department of History and Classics
Winner of the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Research Excellence University of Alberta
Text based on an address delivered at the 2nd annual Celebration of Research and Creative Work Faculty of Arts, 28 March 2011

Recently I was asked by the historian Alexei Miller to reflect on my experiences in the capacity of public intellectual as well as academic, namely as a challenger of nationalist historical myths. He was putting together a volume on Geschichtspolitik and thought that a first-hand account of resistance to dominant national narratives would be an interesting piece to include in the book. I have abridged this account and thought it would make a good talk for an occasion like this, for a talk about research and its implications.

What I have been challenging is Ukrainian myths about traumatic aspects of the twentieth-century.1 By myths here I mean unexamined components of an ideologized version of history, articles of faith more than of reason. In this talk, I will first try to explain my motivations for challenging such myths, even though I realized it would cause considerable discomfort both to my targeted audience and to me personally. Then I will describe and evaluate the strategies I chose for my interventions. But before proceeding to the body of this talk, it is necessary to explain what myths I have been challenging.

One of the areas of contention is the interpretation of the great famine that racked Ukraine in 1932-33. In the mythicized version, Stalin unleashed the famine deliberately in order to kill Ukrainians in mass and thus to prevent them from achieving their aspirations to establish a national state. I, however, point out that the precondition for the famine was the reckless collectivization drive, which almost destroyed Soviet agriculture as a whole. I do not deny that the famine in Soviet Ukraine and in the Ukrainian-inhabited Kuban region of Soviet Russia was more intense than elsewhere in the Soviet Union, that its intensity resulted from particularly severe measures applied to Ukraine and the Kuban, and that the severity was connected with a major offensive against perceived nationalism in the communist party of Ukraine. My somewhat more nuanced view is a problem for the mythologists, who want the world to recognize that the famine, or as they call it–the Holodomor–was a genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948. This campaign became Ukrainian state policy during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko (2005-10). Although I do think that what happened in Ukraine in 1932-33 could fit under the capacious UN definition (“…deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…”), I oppose the campaign for recognition as genocide for a number of reasons. The genocide argument is used to buttress another campaign, to glorify the anticommunist resistance of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II. I do not think that Ukrainians who embrace the heritage of the wartime nationalists should be calling on the world to empathize with the victims of the famine if they are not able to empathize with the victims of the nationalists. I think, further, that there is something wrong with a campaign that finds its greatest resonance in the area of Ukraine where there was no famine, and in the overseas diaspora deriving from that region. I have problems with all the anger at Russians and Jews that gets wrapped up in the genocide campaign. And I also have problems with the UN definition itself, which excludes victims of social and political mass murder and has become a category for political manipulation.

I also have been critical of the use of inflated numbers for the tally of the famine’s victims: president Yushchenko and his Ukrainian Institute of National Memory insisted it was ten million, while overseas diaspora organizations have been using seven to ten million. None of these figures can be justified by demographic data, which indicates an excess mortality in Ukraine in 1932-33 somewhere between 2.6 and 3.9 million. What galls the mythologists is that these numbers are less than the number usually used for the Jewish Holocaust, and having a number bigger than six million is important to them. I have also been active in exposing how this kind of competing victimology is used to justify the violence of radical Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.

My interest in the famine flowed out of my work on another moment in Ukraine’s traumatic history, the second large theme of my interventions and challenges–the Holocaust. The fundamental point of contention between the adherents of the national myth and me is whether or not the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (hereafter OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (hereafter UPA, from its Ukrainian initials) participated in the Holocaust. They deny this entirely. My research indicates, however, as does the research of scholars around the world, that the participation was significant.

In the summer of 1941, as the Germans invaded Ukraine, militias connected with OUN organized several massive pogroms against the Jewish population, notably in Lviv. The militias arrested and beat Jews, abused Jewish women, and rounded up Jews for the Germans to shoot. In many other localities in the regions of Galicia and Volhynia, the militias did not organize pogrom-like public spectacles, but arrested Jews and either shot them themselves or handed them over to the German or Romanian authorities to shoot. Altogether in this phase, OUN was implicated in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews.

After this wave of mass violence subsided, and the Germans began a more systematic liquidation of the Jewish population, OUN sent many of its members into police units in German service. OUN did not do this in order to kill Jews–it had other reasons, but these Ukrainian police served as important implements of the Final Solution in Ukraine and Belarus, particularly in rounding up Jews for execution. In this way OUN members became involved in hundreds of thousands of murders.

Then in spring 1943 thousands of these Ukrainian policemen deserted their posts with their weapons and formed the nucleus of the OUN-led UPA. The preparation of such an action was among the reasons why OUN had sent its men into the police in the first place. UPA launched a massive ethnic cleansing action against the Polish population of Volhynia and later Galicia, in which perhaps a hundred thousand Poles perished. (The slaughter of the Poles is well documented, but the national mythologizers downplay it.) While killing Poles, the soldiers of UPA also routinely killed any Jewish survivors that they encountered. As the Red Army approached in the winter of 1944, UPA and separate OUN security forces lured Jews out of hiding in the woods, then enrolled them in labor camps, and later killed them systematically. Overall, UPA killed at least thousands of Jews. The myth maintains that Jews served as doctors in UPA, and therefore UPA rescued, rather than killed, Jews. Defenders of the mythical history often circulate fabricated memoirs of a non-existent Jewish woman who served in UPA.

In speaking of the views I oppose as mythologies, I do not always mean to make truth claims. Whether OUN organized pogroms and how many people perished in the famine are indeed about questions of fact, and my contentions can be verified without much difficulty; but whether the famine constituted a genocide is a matter of interpretation; and whether one should campaign for its recognition as a genocide is rather a political and moral issue.

Motivations of Intervention

My decision to intervene on these issues is partly just a result of my training as a historian. Once I took up the project of clarifying the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine, I submitted the topic the usual disciplinary procedures, which include researching in primary sources and rethinking in relation to existing research. The tremendous gulf between what the sources told me and the common wisdom in Ukrainian discourse was something I had never encountered before in my professional career. I was also struck by the complete absence of literature on the topic written from within the field of Ukrainian studies. As I worked, I more and more came to the conclusion that here was a moment where a revisionist treatment was not only appropriate, but obligatory.

Throughout this project I have kept returning in my mind to the same basic idea: that the truth is a value in and of itself. No matter what we would like to believe about something, we are obliged to uncover the truth. It has never ceased to astound me in the course of all the debates in which I have engaged, that so few people seem to be interested in that. My arguments have repeatedly been rejected out of hand, without a serious and honest confrontation with them or with the sources on which they rest. My opponents in debate seem to be interested in defending a certain position, not in figuring out what happened, as historians are supposed to do. When I originally took up this project, I had no idea about the OUN militias in summer 1941 and I doubted that UPA killed Jews or thought that it might have done so only exceptionally. I made my discoveries with very mixed feelings. I did not like what I was finding out, but I also experienced that satisfaction that a professional historian obtains when solving a difficult problem.

Heightening my interest in the topic, because of the intellectual challenge it posed, was the extreme polarization of memory between Ukrainians and Jews. How could their views on what happened be so strikingly different? Protestations of total innocence on one side were contradicted by deep resentments for complicity on the other. Indeed, some Jews felt that the Ukrainians were simply “the worst.” It was a puzzle for me, one that I feel I eventually worked out in its essentials; it whetted my curiosity and drove my quest to find out what actually happened and thus make sense of the disparities.

My research and thinking also awakened a moral sense about this topic, something that was not so prominent in my earlier studies. I wrote a piece in 2003 that raised the issue of how Ukrainian-diaspora discourse could be so complacent and reticent about UPA’s murder of the Poles and the Ukrainian police’s well documented tole in the Holocaust. To me, this nonchalance seemed wrong. Moreover, I was disturbed by what was going on both in Ukraine and in the diaspora: on the one hand, OUN and UPA were being glorified, and on the other, the history of Ukrainian Jews in the Holocaust was being suppressed. This too, seemed to me very wrong. My position is that the horrible crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists against Jews and Poles during the Second World War cannot be undone, and all that later Ukrainians can do about them is to admit that they happened and to regret them. It is not enough, but it is all that is possible. Certainly they cannot glorify the people who committed them.

Another major spur to my activities as a gadfly was the Geschichtspolitik of President Yushchenko in Ukraine. In June 2007 he officially celebrated the centenary of the birth of UPA commander Roman Shukhevych. Shortly thereafter the Ukrainian post office issued a stamp in Shukhevych’s honor that bore the emblems of both OUN and UPA. Not much later Yushchenko named Shukhevych a posthumous Hero of Ukraine. Shortly before leaving office in early 2010, Yushchenko also made a posthumous Hero of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the wing of OUN that was the chief Ukrainian perpetrator during the Holocaust and later ethnic cleansing actions. A few days later, Yushchenko called on municipalities to name schools, streets, and squares after the heroes of OUN- UPA. Almost immediately afterwards, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress appealed to the government of Canada to recognize veterans of OUN-UPA as members of the resistance during World War II and to pay them veteran’s benefits. While Yushchenko pursued his campaign to have every country recognize the famine of 1932-33 as a genocide, he simultaneously suppressed the history of the other genocide, the Holocaust. He used the Security Service of Ukraine to pursue his historico-political agenda. It produced two deceptions, one that whitewashed the history of OUN vis-à-vis the pogroms and another that blamed Jews disproportionately for the famine. Someone had to say something about this, and I felt well positioned to do so.

The last motivation that I will mention is also connected to Yushchenko and his historical policies. Ukraine has a divided memory about both the famine and OUN-UPA. Simply put, the West of Ukraine puts OUN-UPA at the center of its heroic narrative of World War II, while the East and South put the Red Army at the center. Western Ukraine is also more convinced that the famine was a genocide than the rest of Ukraine, even though Western Ukraine was not part of the Soviet Union when the famine occurred. Ukraine’s first president deftly avoided alienating either regional perspective, while his successor sometimes played one identity project off against the other. President Yushchenko, however, embraced entirely what one of my colleagues nicknamed the “OUN-UPA-Holodomor” identity and pushed it vigorously on the Ukrainian public. He was massively defeated in the 2010 presidential election and replaced by a man who pushes the opposite perspective. In my view, this historical-identity war has been very harmful to Ukraine. Politicians find it all too attractive to mobilize the population with historical symbols, but they thereby drive the wedge in deeper between regions and between perspectives. It is always easier to deliver symbols than decent health care or affordable homes. I consider the deconstruction of the historical mythologies of both camps to be the prescribed medicine for Ukrainian political discourse.

Strategies

I have made my interventions in forms appropriate to both a scholar (a monograph in progress, articles in scholarly journals, book reviews, conference presentations) and to
a public intellectual (opinion pieces, letters to the editor, open letters). Here I will assess some of the pluses and minuses of these genres. There are several problems with the scholarly forms. One is that they are very slow. It takes a long time to research and write a monograph, at least in my case. I started serious research on my first book in 1974, and my last book was published in 2009, so it took me thirty-five years to write four monographs. The pace of scholarly publication, not just production, is slow. A major article on the Holocaust I wrote in 2004 has still not been published, although it has been accepted for a long time. The other major problem with scholarly forms is that they have a small readership. It is hard to make a dent on public opinion when one writes in the antiquated form of a twenty-five page, footnoted article in a professional journal that is purchased primarily by major research libraries. The third problem is that scholarly forms take effort and time to read. Today’s reader prefers shorter, simpler pieces; op-eds are the perfect size and at the perfect level for addressing the public.

I discovered the power of short pieces delivered via internet in 2004, on the eve of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. I reacted to what I thought was hysterical and sometimes xenophobic rhetoric on the part of the partisans of Yushchenko, then a presidential candidate, and sent around to various lists and colleagues an eleven-hundred- word text dissenting from the prevailing view. Soon everyone I knew had read it, and many more whom I did not know, in Ukraine as well as in the overseas diaspora. An open letter distributed by email and the internet proved to be an extraordinarily effective way to communicate with a large audience in a timely fashion. No normal scholarly venue could have accomplished what a short text on the internet could. After this lesson, I was able to intervene in a similar fashion when a diaspora filmmaker was making an offensive movie about the Holodomor, when Yushchenko’s Security Service was deceiving the public about OUN and the pogroms, and particularly when Yushchenko and the Ukrainian Canadian congress were making OUN and UPA into heroes.

But there are disadvantages to short, instant response. One is that instant is sloppier. I carried on a polemic with a former president of the Ukrainian World Congress, and each of our rapid responses contained errors. I contrast such quick repartee, with its recurring errors, to the slow interchange in scholarship. That article that I have not published since 2004 has been rewritten three or four times, and a number of sets of careful eyes have gone over it. My last monograph took three years to go from my finished draft to publication. In that time, I had to respond twice to the comments of careful reviewers. I did not like it that the appearance of my book was being delayed, but I must admit that it is a much better book as a result.

Short, like instant, is also problematic, because history is complex and a short text often has to oversimplify. Short texts are best at throwing monkey wrenches into the spokes of larger narratives or myths, but they are not good for articulating a sustained argument of any complexity. Something always has to give. Another problem with short and instant pieces is that they sharpen the debate too much, which can constitute an impediment to thoughtful work.

One could argue that scholars should stick to scholarship and leave the formation of public opinion to journalists. But I disagree with that in principle. Scholarship is not a luxury–it has its responsibilities. In my case, not intervening would have left the mythmaking unchallenged; and then the nationalist viewpoint, already hegemonic in the overseas diaspora, in the Ukrainian studies community, and in Western Ukraine, would
have become even stronger and even harder to dislodge. No evidence, I am sure, will convince the nationalist true believers. But it seems to me absolutely necessary to express a different viewpoint, to create a space for and possibility of intellectual dissent; hence the recourse to the short pieces on the internet.

Although one of my courses became the subject of rather intense controversy, I do not consider the classroom to be the place for promoting one idea or another. I have given a number of undergraduate and graduate seminars on the Holocaust and one on the famine of 1932-33. I use these occasions to explore things for myself through collective reading and discussion. When an issue is controversial, I have tried to find the best presentations of the varying points of view. Students should be exposed to different perspectives and then sort out the issues for themselves. Our university motto is Quaecumque vera–whatsoever things are true. I subscribe fully. The university classroom is for exploration and intellectual growth, not for indoctrination.

In the course of these interventions, a few questions emerged concerning what might be called my location. At the beginning, I felt strongly that I should not try to intervene in Ukraine itself, that it was not my place; I thought I should restrict my commentary to the diaspora, since that is where I am located. I realized later, however, that this stance was impossible to maintain. Much of what I wrote in the diaspora was read in Ukraine, and things I published in Ukraine and even in Ukrainian were being read in the diaspora. I had failed to understand that we live in a highly transnational era. Another, related location question was my self-identification as a Ukrainian. Identity location makes some difference in the kind of demythologizing in which I have been engaging: challenging core myths from the inside. By example I demonstrate that one need not identify with OUN-UPA to identify, and be identified, as a Ukrainian. And I actually do have a Ukrainian identity. I have worked on Ukrainian history for over forty years; before that I studied to become a Ukrainian priest; my wife and I raised our children to speak Ukrainian; I attend a Ukrainian Orthodox church; I visit Ukraine and have close friends and relatives there; I like to eat Ukrainian food and drink horilka; I like to listen to various kinds of Ukrainian music, along with other music; I pursue a deep interest in Ukrainian sacral art. How am I not Ukrainian? (And I can hear the chorus of my critics: “Because you are a traitor!”

Conclusions

The debates are by no means over. At the moment, I feel that the biggest accomplishment has been to have forced debate on important issues. It is no longer quite as comfortable to hold on to the illusions as it had been.

It has not been easy to make these interventions, and I do not recommend that others seek out such opportunities. It is very easy to make mistakes. Still, intellectuals every once in a while are forced into an ich-kann-nicht-anders position. I hope that this report on my experiences will resonate with others in this situation and be taken as an expression of solidarity. And I hope that those with less encumbered intellectual lives have at least found this account to be of interest.

[Footnotes have been omitted from the original--DRM]

VIRTUAL EURO-INTEGRATION

Mykola Riabchuk

On May 20, after four weeks of hesitation, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signed into the law the parliamentary decision on the official use of red flags. A few days later, the opposition appealed to the Constitutional Court against the controversial decision. By June 17, with unusual speed, the judges examined the case and deemed the law unconstitutional.

Very few people believe today that any Ukrainian court, including the Constitutional (refilled last year with presidential loyalists), is able to pass any independent decision to contradict whatever may be the president’s whim. In this recent case, neither the court’s ruling nor its timing were incidental. The ruling has clearly met Yanukovych’s need to correct the mistake of his associates, who had badly underestimated the destructive power of the parliamentary motion and allowed the pro-Kremlin lobbyists to pass it through.

The timing was also not incidental. It clearly met two urgent political needs: first, to avoid new violent clashes in L’viv and elsewhere on June 22 (the day when the so called “Great Patriotic War” began 70 years ago) similar to those that happened back on May 9 when Russian nationalists did their best to provoke Ukrainian counterparts in their major stronghold. And secondly, the deadline for the ruling was June 21, the date of Yanukovych’s visit to Strasbourg and his official presentation at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The European MPs who had accumulated many unpleasant questions for the Ukrainian president regarding his authoritarian rule, selective application of justice and persecution of political opponents, had to be countered by the appearance of a moderate politician strongly committed to the rule of law and with no wish to influence the independent judiciary in his country.

The first goal was largely achieved and the earlier status quo reestablished, meaning that Soviet symbols are neither forbidden nor mandatory. The pro-Russian radicals, without official support and encouragement, failed to make any significant disturbances in L’viv and elsewhere, to the noticeable disappointment of numerous Russian TV crews who came to L’viv to gather new evidence of rabid Ukrainian “nationalism” and “neo-Nazism.”

The second goal appeared more difficult to achieve since all the policies and practical steps of the Ukrainian authorities are the antithesis of the officially professed rule of law and independent justice. Whatever soothing words Viktor Yanukovych may have delivered at Strasbourg, a single call of his delegate from the embassy to a French MP Francois Rochebloine, with a strange request to clarify beforehand what question he was going to put to the Ukrainian president during the meeting, tells much more about the real style of Ukrainian politics and its neo-Soviet practices http://gazeta.ua/articles/387449. If a European MP can be dogged this way, one can easily imagine even more unscrupulous pressure of the same acolytes against Ukrainian politicians, journalists, media owners, and businessmen.

Of much higher importance than the empty words of the president was a minor clash between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations at the PACE concerning the Russia-sponsored draft resolution “On ways of opposing the manifestations of neo-Nazism and right-wing radicalism” that targeted specifically Ukraine (and four other European countries) as arguably not persecuting sufficiently neo-Nazis and xenophobes and referring inter alia to the May 9 events in L’viv http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c154/167142.html. The significance of the Strasbourg event is that not only members of Ukrainian opposition but also MPs from the ruling Party of Regions, including Yulia Liovochkina (a sister of Serhiy Liovochkin, the head of Yanukovych’s administration), spoke unanimously against the Russian document http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2011/06/22/6321051/. Yet they hardly felt any sympathy for the Ukrainian nationalists condemned in the Russian draft. Nor did they seem to care much about any idealistic stuff like “the truth” or the fair image of the country. Rather this is simply not the way in which the “pragmatists” from the Party of Regions tend to feel or behave.

The reason for their sudden “patriotic” move is likely the same as that behind Yanukovych’s burial of Moscow-sponsored red flags by the whimsical decision of the Constitutional Court. They have probably come to understand gradually that they have acquired too negative an international image to afford its further deterioration by either red-flag clashes or a neo-Nazi witch-hunt. This may signify an important shift in the previous, largely confrontational policy of the Party of Regions. The “pragmatists” within this heterogeneous group may come to recognize that both Russia and the pro-Russian lobby in Ukraine are pushing them toward international isolation, which means effectively full dependence on Moscow. Transforming Ukraine into another Belarus seems to be the ultimate goal of Russian and pro-Russian “technologists.” Domestically, this requires escalation of conflicts and an increase of governmental coercion. Internationally, it means endowing Ukraine with the image of a failed state, either with neo-Soviet or neo-fascist tendencies, or both.

Such a development clearly tends to spoil the favorite game of Ukrainian oligarchs, carried out under the aegis of “European integration.” It is a virtual game that does not require any action, reforms, transparency, rule of law, or fair political and economic competition. Ukrainian oligarchs, especially those from Donbas that run the country, have never loved honest competition, striving instead to establish monopolies wherever possible by whatever means. They have learned how to play by rules but they despise such methods. They love the virtual “European integration” because it requires no deeds, just words. And it brings them certainty and much-needed security – for their property, bank accounts, and personal dolce vita in the West.

It is like a safety belt, a password that conveys a key message to the EU officials: “We might be bad boys but we are YOUR bad boys. We are not as ugly as that last European dictator Lukashenko, so, whatever we do in our country, please, do not ban us and our families from entering the EU.”

The Kuchma-style “multi-vector” policy seems to be the best option for Ukrainian oligarchs. Back in mid-May, the secretary of the National Defense and Security Council of Ukraine Rayisa Bohatyryova declared something that would have been impossible to imagine one year earlier, during Yanukovych’s imaginary honeymoon with Putin: “We cannot change our foreign policy objective after each election. Consistency of foreign policy is the basis for a country’s predictability.”

“On the one hand,” she argued, “the Russian Federation wants to pull us into the Russian World as soon as possible, and Russia is swiftly moving towards strengthening its international position. On the other hand, we hear that countries like the USA and our other strategic partners are gradually losing interest in Ukraine. The European Union is losing interest, too.” Thus, she concluded, Ukraine is an independent state that should defend its own national interests in the international arena after working out its singular position. Moreover, she stressed that such a position should be elaborated in cooperation with the opposition. (Interfax-Ukraine, May 18, 2011).

Whether the “pragmatists” within the Party of Regions are able to maneuver the country towards more flexible “multi-vectored” politics is not yet clear. On one hand, they face a very strong Russian political, economic and intelligence lobby within their own ranks. And on the other hand, they have already given too many trump cards to Moscow, lost too many possible allies, and made too many enemies both within the country and abroad. And even if they manage to shift their politics towards a “multi-vectored” foreign policy, it would not signify any authentic European integration. As under Kuchma, so today, under Yanukovych, it is simply not on the agenda for one obvious reason. All the practices, habits, and thoughts of the so-called “Ukrainian elite” are worlds apart from those associated today with “Europeans.”

The V-Day Spectacle and Beyond

Mykola Riabchuk

“Show,” “spectacle,” “theater,” and “performance” seem to be the most popular metaphors employed by Ukrainian observers to describe the May 9 clashes in L’viv between local nationalists and Russian barnstormers who came with red flags from Odesa and the Crimea to celebrate Victory Day in a city that has a substantially different view of the “victory” and a radically different view of red flags.

The “theatrical” metaphors should not undermine the seriousness of the conflict and its consequences for Ukraine’s future. Rather, they signal the staged, prefabricated character of the event, pointing to its Kyiv directors and, arguably, Moscow architects.

The stage for the conflict was set on April 21 when the Ukrainian parliament amended the 2000 law on commemoration of victory in the so-called “Great Patriotic War” of 1941-1945. A politically crucial request was added to raise the red Soviet flag (euphemistically defined as the “Flag of the Victory”) on all official buildings and sites, and to use it at all official ceremonies on V-Day and at relevant events, alongside the national yellow-and-blue flag.

Neither Ukrainian MPs nor the president needed to have been great statesmen to understand the provocative and subversive character of this suggestion. Even if they watched only Russian TV and used no other sources of information, they would certainly have known that the Soviet flag is absolutely unacceptable for a significant portion of the Ukrainian population, primarily in the western but also in the central part of the country. They should certainly have known that for millions of Ukrainians the red flag is first and foremost the symbol of occupation, of terror and genocide, Gulag and Holodomor, Russification, and national humiliation.

For many Ukrainians, like for Poles and the Balts, the Second World War on their territory was a clash of two equally dreadful predators, the Nazis and Bolsheviks. Which of the two was more oppressive might be an interesting question for academic debates, but it is of little relevance for people who feel today that the Nazi regime is dead and buried, while the Soviet regime, in its Putinist neo-imperial reincarnation, is alive and well and still threatens their shaky stability and sovereignty by various means.

This is why a significant portion of Ukrainians does not buy the Stalinist notion of the “Great Patriotic War” and rejects defiantly Russian attempts to capitalize politically on the historical victory by promoting particular nationalistic and imperialistic agenda.

So, the main question is not whether president Yanukovych and his Party of Regions (in fact, the party of one region, mostly comprised of the Donbas) share the Russian nationalistic view of the Second World War as a great victory of the Soviet (read Russian) people and the proof of their superiority over their neighbors, thus legitimizing their current “privileged interests” in the region. This might well be true taking into account the provincial character of the ruling Donbas “elite,” their extremely low cultural and educational level, poor knowledge of both national and global history and the outside world in general, the profound entrenchment of Soviet values and stereotypes in their minds, and, of course, their sheer opportunism driven by multiple business (political-cum-economic) interests. Thus, the real question is not about their views and commitments, whatever they are, but about their complete ignorance of the beliefs of the other part of society that makes up, by various surveys, between one quarter and one half of the national population.

Why have the “Regionals” reintroduced the red flag that is a clear irritant for so many co-citizens? Is it just an attempt to appease and to mobilize their Sovietophile electorate at the cost of the perceived anti-Soviet minority? Is it a symbolical gesture to indulge Russia in exchange for some personal/corporate benefits? Is it merely a maneuver to divert public attention from the dramatic failures of their social and economic policies, from the rampant corruption within their own ranks and growing international criticism of their heavy-handed dealing with opposition? Or, maybe, as Alexander Motyl suggests, it is a part of a wider strategy: to undermine the Ukrainian, i.e. largely pro-European and anti-Soviet identity, and thereby to weaken the social base of the Orange opponents?

All these assumptions may hold some truth but they hardly justify the costs to be inevitably paid for the presumed benefits. In long run, the Sovietophile policies would definitely subvert Ukraine’s European integration, preclude any chances to become a part of the first world, and deadlock it perhaps forever in the Russia-dominated “Eurasian” space of backwardness and despotism. This actually might not be a problem for the ruling “elite” since they personally joined the EU long ago, keeping their accounts, families, and real estate rather in the hostile West rather than in friendly Russia. But the real cost of contentious, divisive policies stubbornly pursued by the Donbas “elite” might be the division of the country at best or its “Ulsterization” at worst.

One may find some disturbing analogies between Russian supremacists waving red flags in Western Ukrainian cities and Ulster unionists marching with their flags through the Catholic quarters to celebrate the 1688 historical victory and symbolic dominance of the colonizers over the aborigines. Aborigines apparently dislike it and react emotionally, as happened in Lviv, to the great joy of Moscow propagandists who represent Ukrainians’ outrage at imperial symbols as a crypto-fascist denial of the “Great Victory” and another proof of solidarity with the defeated Nazis arguably inherent in Western Ukraine. “Perception of past Nazi collaborators divides Ukraine” ran the headline of Russia Today, the leading Kremlin mouthpiece, clearly outlining how the clashes in Lviv should be interpreted for both the domestic and international market.

Both the Russians and foreigners buy the news at face value. Even the respectable BBC informed its readers about the “clashes between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Russian activists,” as if “pro-Russianness” was the main feature of rabidly chauvinistic and Ukrainophobic provocateurs purposely brought to L’viv from southeastern Ukraine. The pre-war Sudetenland Nazis might have been labeled “pro-German activists” by the same logic and with the same precision.

The Russian intent to deepen the Ukrainian divide has become an obsession, as well as efforts to discredit any strong anti-Soviet, pro-European Ukrainian identity as rabidly anti-Russian, xenophobic, and crypto-fascist. These intents may perfectly resonate with the Party of Regions’ desire to marginalize the political opposition by a complex two-fold strategy. One aspect was mentioned already: re-Sovietization and Russification of Ukraine as a way to weaken Ukrainian identity and undermine the power-base of the Orange opponents. The other aspect is aimed at promotion and covert support of radical nationalists in Western Ukraine in order to undermine Ukrainian moderates as real political rivals with potentially a much broader electoral base all over the country.

But the price for this perfidious game might be too high. And there are some signs that the Party of Regions, despite appearances to the contrary, is not homogenous and monolithic in this regard. First, Viktor Yanukovych opted not to sign the controversial decree on the red flag’s official usage and relied on so-called legal expertise. He condemned the violence in Lviv and promised a “determined response to those who want to bask in a bloody fire” but did not specify the culprits. In fact, his reference to “some “activists” [that] are trying again to split the Ukrainian people,” and to the “attempts to exploit politically the tragedies of the twentieth century” can be applied to both sides http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/20032.html . Hanna Herman, his top adviser, expressed this idea unequivocally by saying that the both sides of the conflict deserve each other: “Яке їхало таке здибало” (“Like guests, like hosts”).

Oleksandr Yefremov, the head of the parliamentary faction of the Party of Regions, seemed to backtrack when he stated that ”probably we have to stipulate this [the red flag official status] not by law but by parliamentary decree and to think more deeply about this matter” http://gazeta.ua/articles/politics/382050. And the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to its Russian counterpart with a sharp—albeit wrapped in diplomatic wording—call to tone down anti-Ukrainian hysteria in the Russian mass media and pay more attention to nationalistic and xenophobic excesses in Russia itself. The statement implies that Russia, unlike Ukraine, has not yet got rid of “politicians who earn political dividends through provoking tensions in bilateral relations.” Still worse, some Russian politicians try to “divide peoples into more or less worthy heirs of the victory over fascism” http://www.mfa.gov.ua/mfa/en/publication/content/53249.htm.

Ukrainian TV, even though largely state-controlled, covered the May 9 events in L’viv in a much more balanced and moderate way than Russian TV networks, engaged in overtly propagandistic Galicia-bashing and anti-nationalistic witch-hunts, in which “anti-nationalism” was as subtle a substitute for anti-Ukrainian angst as Soviet “anti-Zionism” for anti-Semitism.

It is not clear yet whether we are witnessing some splits within the ruling team between the pro-Moscow hawks and more pragmatic doves, or this reflects some backtracking from too rough and assertive anti-Ukrainian policies of today’s mostly Russian and Russophone “elite,” or perhaps some hesitation evoked by the obvious fact that re-Sovietization in Ukraine, despite initial expectations, has not proceeded as smoothly as in Russia and Belarus. One thing is clear, however: the Genie of Russian/Russophone nationalism in Ukraine has been released from the Soviet bottle and is very unlikely to be put back. What looked like mere Sovietophile nostalgia throughout the 1990s has been institutionalized recently as a vociferous political movement, with very strong Russian and probably FSB connections and even stronger Ukrainophobic zeal. This might be a greater challenge for any Ukrainian government than the antithetical and ideological Frankenstein from the Ukrainian far right cherished covertly by the Party of Regions.

Whatever Viktor Yanukovych does with the as yet unsigned law, he will encounter a problem. The red flag has been used already without his signature and is likely to be re-deployed in the future. The regional authorities in Luhansk have already declared they are not going to remove the red flags at least until June 22 – the day when the “Great Patriotic War” began. They may well extend, in good faith, the presence of these flags indefinitely, or even substitute them for the national flags.

In the longer term, they may have no need for a national president in remote Kyiv.

Does Ukraine Have a Future?

David Marples

Ukraine is currently undergoing a crisis, according to several of its leading intellectuals. It is not an economic quandary, but rather one of self-perception and future path. Six years after the Orange Revolution had appeared to put an end to a neo-Soviet leadership, the country has yet to establish a national identity and a clear direction. One of its leading writers comments that although Ukraine is celebrating its 20th year of independence, it will cease to exist in 20 years’ time.

Are such statements credible? Why is there such a crisis of identity today?

In terms of politics, there is no question that the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych has reversed some of the gains made in 2004-05. Both Western analyst Alexander Motyl and Ukrainian writer Mykola Riabchuk have highlighted the cronyism and corruption of the Yanukovych team.

But it was author and poet Yuri Andrukhovych who expressed the “doomsday scenario” in an interview on the website http://www.polit.ua (Ukrainian Politics) on April 5. Noting that Ukraine is divided today between “Soviet Russians and Ukrainians,” he maintained that opponents of the country’s independence are as numerous as its supporters. In this situation normal development is impossible. Instead Ukraine is being dragged into what Andrukhovych calls “the Russian world” under the leadership of its East Ukrainian clan.

Writing on March 18 on the website “Current Politics in Ukraine” (http://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com/), Riabchuk observes that the leading Ukrainian oligarchs are afraid of a pro-Western policy, open competition, and the rule of law and thus abandoned the more moderate and centrist position they had held under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004) and opted instead to back the Russophile group that is currently in power, which relies on tight control and brutal crackdowns against opponents in the best of Soviet traditions.

Regarding the pro-Ukraine policies heralded by the Orange Revolution, Kyrylo Halushko, a sociologist from the Drahomaniv National University in Kyiv, speaking at the University of Alberta on April 7, commented that they were identified closely with the personal fortunes of President Viktor Yushchenko and thus disappeared from view once the latter”s popularity began to drop sharply. Thus national symbols such as Ivan Mazepa, Symon Petlyura, and the Famine-Holodomor of 1933 are barely recognized in contemporary school textbooks.

An additional problem has been the figure responsible for those textbooks, Dmytro Tabachnyk, Ukraine’s Minister of Education and Science, Youth and Sports. In fact Tabachnyk, who has even been chided by Ukraine’s Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov for antagonizing teachers, symbolizes what critics perceive as the fundamentally anti-Ukrainian nature of the Yanukovych Cabinet.

How can Ukraine attain a national identity if its national leaders deny that one exists?

A study conducted several years ago by scholar Yaroslav Hrytsak contrasted popular opinion in two antithetical cities, namely Hrytsak’s native L’viv and Donetsk; one Ukrainian-speaking, Europe-oriented and pressing hard for recognition of nationalist heroes; the other Russian-speaking, Sovietized, and supportive of the Red Army heroes of the “Great Patriotic War.”

The point, however, is not that both identities exist—they surely do—but that they represent the extremities. Most Ukrainians are not interested in going back to the Soviet Union and the younger generation cannot even remember it.

Moreover, even the Yanukovych government wishes to join the Free Trade Area of the European Union. It is not yet confined within what Andrukhovych calls “the Russian space.” It has not even joined the Common Economic Space with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin arrivesvisited in Kyiv in April 2011, with a mission to coax Yanukovych to integrate the Ukrainian economy more closely with Moscow. Economic pressure is today’s substitute for the more forcible methods of the Soviet era. Already there is talk that the agreement on gas prices might be waived, and Ukraine could pay $US 350 per 1,000 cubic meters rather than its current $260.

Ukraine’s situation admittedly is troubling, but even the Donetsk group currently in control has its own priorities, and these are national by default. They have no wish to be subsumed to the interests of their larger neighbor.

Ultimately then, Ukraine may be defined not for what it is, but what it is not. And the key goal for Ukrainian intellectuals should be to find issues of common consent to identify what is Ukraine without alienating a large portion of the population. The recent past remains too divisive to be used as a basis.

The first task is to build up a strong opposition force that embraces democracy and the centrism of the Kuchma era without the corruption. The removal of Tabachnyk should be the first task. And focus should be on the parliamentary election set for October 28, 2012. Given the growing unpopularity of the government, there is a real opportunity to bring change.

The response to Andrukhovych is encapsulated by the title of Ukraine’s national anthem: Ukraine is not yet dead!

This article first appeared in the Edmonton Journal, 13 April 2011. Copyright David Marples.

Re-examining the Nazi-Soviet Pact 70 Years On

David Marples

August 23 marks the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty between the two totalitarian powers of USSR and Nazi-Germany, as well as a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence between Hitler and Stalin.

In May 2009, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev authorized a commission to investigate cases of historical revisionism of the Second World War to the detriment of Russia. The move followed the approval a year ago of new school textbooks in Russia that reassessed the role of Stalin, acknowledging that he made some errors but noting in turn his achievements and successes, particularly in the war years. Taken together they symbolize the new Russian policy of identifying contemporary Russia with the former Soviet regime.

Last month, Russia responded furiously to a proposal by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to declare the date August 23 one of commemoration of the victims of Fascism and Communism. In Moscow’s view, it is not possible to equate the evils of Nazism with Stalin’s regime.

A recent article in Vesti Nedeli by Il’ya Kanavin (June 21) also focused on the Pact, citing historian Natalya Narochnitskaya’s view that by the terms of the Pact, the USSR was only regaining territories that were formerly part of the Russian Empire. Citing this same author, Kanavin maintains that Stalin was obliged to make a deal with Hitler for the following reasons.

First, it was essential to keep the German army as far from the Soviet border as possible as the USSR was at war with Imperial Japan in the Far East and could not be fighting on two fronts simultaneously.

Second, Germany and Poland to that point were in close collusion and could even be termed allies, based on the agreement of 1934, that contained secret clauses on mutual military aid. He emphasizes that such secret protocols were a staple of treaties in this period.

Third, with the removal of some 38,000 Soviet officers during the Purges, Stalin needed time to train new military leaders and produce more arms.

Fourth, Stalin was isolated because the only potential allies, Britain and France, had no intention of reaching an agreement with the USSR. A year earlier the two democratic countries had participated in the notorious Munich agreement that led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia through the policy of appeasement. Only Churchill opposed Hitler but world leaders were allegedly more afraid of Stalin than the German dictator.

Lastly, Kanavin maintains that the Soviet Union should not take be blamed for permitting Hitler a free hand in his assigned sector of Poland. Stalin then had little choice but to sign the agreement, in full knowledge that he was only postponing the conflict.

These arguments can be questioned on a number of grounds, and not least because they distinguish between a rapacious Hitler regime and a defensive-minded and implicitly benign Stalin government that eventually would bear the brunt of the war.

The comment that Stalin was occupying only territories formerly under the Russian Empire is inaccurate. In the summer of 1940, for example, after forcing the Romanians out of Bessarabia, Stalin also occupied northern Bukovina (today it is the Chernovtsy Oblast of Ukraine) that had never been under Russian rule. When Molotov visited Germany late in 1940 he made several more territorial demands that reportedly led Hitler to accelerate plans for the invasion of the USSR.

Eastern Poland’s Volhynia region was part of the Russian Empire but Eastern Galicia had only been under Russian rule briefly during the First World War. It is hard to perceive acquisition of these territories as anything other than the westward expansion of the USSR.

But it is the assault on the annexed population that belies the arguments of Kanavin and Narochnitskaya, and particularly because there are several instances of collaboration between the two occupying powers. Both systematically eradicated the Polish population—the Nazis overtly and the Soviets through deportations and secret executions in forests such as Katyn. More than 15,000 Polish officers were executed.

Stalin, however, claimed to be liberating subject populations—Ukrainians and Belarusians—who wished to join the USSR. The Soviet advance only took place 16 days after the German invasion of Western Poland. In this way the Russian side did little fighting—only in Grodno did the Poles offer much resistance—and was able to pose as a friendly power.

However, having eliminated all vestiges of Polish rule, the new government organized mass deportations of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews in 1940 and 1941. A similar policy was deployed after the USSR occupied the three Baltic States in the summer of 1940.

President Medvedev and Russian historians have to face a few home truths. Even Kanavin concedes that the mass execution of Red Army officers weakened the Soviet military. But this action was part of the Terror that the Stalin regime applied both domestically and in newly conquered territories, committing mass murders on an epic scale. Today, the Baltic States consider the entire period 1940-90 to have been one of Soviet occupation. That is why their citizens initially welcomed the Germans in the summer of 1941. Large sectors of Western Ukraine remain alienated from Moscow today for the same reason.

By the agreement of August 23, 1939, two dictators acted in Machiavellian fashion. It is facile to suggest that Stalin should be regarded differently because he emerged as a victorious war leader responsible for the defeat of Fascism. His naïve trust in Hitler, manifested by the Treaty, also was responsible for the Soviet failure to respond in the first days of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ leading to the mass loss of territory and capture of millions of Soviet citizens.

August 23 was a dark day for Russia, as it was for the rest of Europe and that is how it should be remembered.

[This article first appeared in the Moscow Times, August 20, 2009]

Russian Duma’s Discussion of Second World War Revisionism in the Near Abroad States

By Ilya Khineiko

In Russia as well in other post-Soviet states, history, particularly the history of the Second World War, is not merely a matter of academic debate. Politicians from the highest echelons of power often find it instrumental to dwell on controversial historical issues. Last October, in a letter sent to the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev weighed in on the proper interpretation of the Ukrainian Famine, the Holodomor. In December 2008, the Russian parliament decided to move in a similar direction, creating a working group to draft a new law against the rehabilitation of Nazism and Nazi collaborators in the post-Soviet states. Chaired by deputy head of the Duma’s Committee for CIS Affairs, Konstantin Zatulin, the group produced a legislative draft proposal with a lengthy title “On the countermeasures against the rehabilitation of Nazi criminals and their facilitators in the new independent states on the territory of the former Soviet Union.” It was published by the pro-government news agency Regnum on 20 April 2009 (full Russian text is available here: http://www.regnum.ru/news/1153517.html).

Probably the most striking feature of the bill is the issue of jurisdiction as it explicitly targets Russia’s neighbors. While the notion of universal jurisdiction has gained ground in the past decade, an attempt to direct domestic legislation against a specific set of countries represents a novel approach to international law. Furthermore, according to a Russian legal expert quoted in the Moscow Times, the proposed legislation would violate the Russian Criminal Code as it “only allows penalties for crimes committed in Russia.”

However, even the stated intention to focus on all former Soviet republics is somewhat misleading. In an interview with Radio Liberty, Konstantin Zatulin singled out Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine where “the attempts to rehabilitate Nazi criminals and their facilitators… have become a matter of state policy”. He admitted that any similar actions in other, more remote, countries, such as Australia for example, would be of no concern to the bill’s authors. According to Radio Liberty, many Verkhovna Rada deputies are convinced that the bill is directed primarily against Ukraine. This comes as no surprise as Zatulin’s troubled relationship with Ukrainian authorities is well known. In July 2008 he was denied entry into Ukraine. Ukrainian Security Chief Valentyn Nalyvaychenko later explained that Zatulin had violated a Ukrainian law on the status of a foreigner during a previous visit to Ukraine when he made statements regarding the country’s territorial integrity.

The reaction of Ukrainian parliamentarians has been uniformly negative. Yuri Kostenko from Our Ukraine sharply criticized the bill, saying that it would turn Russia into a new “gendarme of Europe.” Even members of the ostensibly pro-Russian Party of Regions were not impressed. According to Valery Konovalyuk, as far as the international law is concerned, such legislative initiative does not represent a sound approach. In the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations, the bill can be considered a response to the draft law against Holodomor denial that President Viktor Yushchenko submitted to the Verkhovna Rada in December 2008. Although the Ukrainian bill does not attempt to prosecute people outside Ukraine, it proposes to imprison those who deny the genocidal character of the Holodomor against the Ukrainian people, an interpretation vigorously contested by Russia’s authorities and most Russian historians.

Perhaps the most ambiguous and controversial aspect of the new legislation is its definition of what constitutes a rehabilitation of Nazism and who should be deemed Nazi facilitators. The draft states that a Nazi facilitator (posobnik) is someone who served in or collaborated with the German occupation administration on the territory of the USSR voluntarily or as a result of mobilization (sic! – I.Kh.). Rehabilitation of Nazism is defined as “any actions aimed at… the reinstatement of rights, glorification, [as well as any attempts] to restore reputation of Nazi criminals and facilitators and their organizations by bestowing them with benefits, state or societal awards and to deny Nazi genocide and crimes against humanity”. This incredibly vague definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and obfuscates the true intentions of the bill’s authors, namely to criminalize any opinion that questions the role of the USSR in the Second World War. According to Konstantin Zatulin, “There were no third forces in the Second World War. The logic of war compelled people either to side with Nazi Germany and then start shooting at Soviet soldiers or to choose the side of the anti-Hitler coalition.” Zatulin’s definition does not differ substantially from the old Soviet line that equated anti-Soviet resistance with Nazi collaborationism. That the struggle against alleged ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’ is being used to defend the Soviet past and its remaining symbols is revealed in Zatulin’s statement made in early April. In an interview with the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, he called the dismantling of the statue of the Soviet Soldier in the city of Stryj in Lviv oblast an outrageous act and promised to accelerate work on the appropriate legislation.

While the draft bill purports to target equally Russian citizens and citizens of other post-Soviet states, it is unlikely that the legislation would be ever applied against the rise of pro-Nazi sentiment in Russia itself. In an ironic twist of events, a few days after the bill’s publication, fans of the Russian soccer club Spartak Moscow unveiled a banner commemorating the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday during a game in the Russian Premier League. Understandably, such an act caused outrage among the Russian public and was roundly condemned. However, a Duma representative, Gennady Gudkov, stated that the perpetrators could only be fined under the current legislation, being seemingly unaware of the proposed bill that seeks to criminalize precisely such actions. Indeed, should this bill be adopted, its main brunt will likely be directed not at individuals but at ‘hostile’ states. As such it will just serve as another weapon in the growing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, in which history is just another battlefield.