Zero Point Ukraine
The situation with the Soviet Ukraine, taking into account how deeply rooted the myth of the “Great Patriotic War” was and the mode of thinking about Ukraine and Ukrainians within the primordial paradigm of being “one people with the Russians,” raises the question about the legitimacy of the Soviet regime after suppressing the national revolution. This question should be the subject of lengthy discussion and careful reasoning. Omitting for the moment reflections about the occupational/colonial/imperial nature of the Bolshevik regime,65 the emphasis should be placed on the few parameters of the existence of the Soviet Ukrainians. In the broader context, fitting them into the Soviet state vision of the collaboration problem was quite problematic. The question is not what the people living in the Ukrainian lands thought they were; it is rather whether the Soviet state considered their citizens to be the peasants who could not obtain passports or the “former people” and victims of purges who were stripped of their civil rights. Did the Soviet state consider itself to be legitimate in the territory where it organized systematic repressions during the 1920s and 1930s, where it sentenced to death or sent to the GULAG the “Petlurists,” “soldiers of the UNR army,” members of Ukrainian parties? Or was all of the above some perverse acknowledgment of the existence of an independent Ukrainian state, recognition of the potential of its supporters, even acceptance of the possibility of the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty? Karel Berkhoff, assessing the rapid and sometimes panicked evacuation/escape of the Soviet party functionaries from Ukrainian territory during the initial German attack in the summer of 1941, fittingly noted that during these defining days, “from a ‘Western’ perspective the Soviet authorities behaved not as a native government, but as a conqueror who had to leave.”66
Pondering the problem of state collaborationism in its Soviet-Russian version, one may come to the paradoxical conclusion that by engaging in relations with the Soviet authorities and acting in its interests, the people of the Western Ukraine “betrayed” the Polish state, and that the people from the left bank of the Zbruch river betrayed the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR).
However, the problem of collaboration/betrayal is a hard one for historians of World War II. As Eleonora Narvselius and Gelinada Grinchenko rightly note, the concept of “betrayal” was never stable or “cemented” once and for all. The meaning of the term depends upon changes in the definition of boundaries (geographic, political, and mental); upon whether there is a conscious “us” as a marker of common group identity (neighbors, ethnic, regional, national, professional, etc.); upon how contemporaries assessed the circumstances of betrayal (and this account may differ significantly from the judgment of subsequent generations); upon the pre-war and pre-occupation psychological, national, social intentions of people; upon the ideas about whom to consider an enemy; upon the result that the occupation/betrayal did or did not have, etc.67
It is important to emphasize that Ukrainians who endured occupation during World War II, did not accede to the Soviet definition of collaboration. The myth about the “nationwide condemnation of traitors and minions” that widely circulated in Soviet discourse does not stand up to fact-checking: people and communities, making their judgments, tended to build their conclusions on the specific circumstances, situations, traits of those involved in it; they often showed solidarity and preferred to keep secrets about the behavior of people whose actions during the occupation did good to the community or to certain individuals.68
Studying the issue of betrayal/collaboration in the circumstances of ongoing war and with no independent Ukrainian state obviously needs some shift of focus: from the interests of the USSR to the interests of ordinary men, from “unconditional condemnation imposed by the dominant—primarily nation-centered—ideological discourses to compassion and respect for the personal choices of those who, through their independent action, positioned themselves against politically oppressive systems or collective pressure.”69 This task, though very clear, is not that simple, as scenarios of people’s lives under occupation often look like a zigzag; they were inconstant and resist incorporation into any stable concept, except for the concept of “moral gray zone” (Primo Levi’s term) that “possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.”70
The issue of time—the chronology and chronotope of war—is also problematic and open to disput. The modern time regime, formed by the intellectuals around the ideas of the linearity, homogeneity, continuity, and inevitability of time, no longer answers either political or ethical challenges of contemporary historiography. The modern time regime, oriented to the history of nationhood and statehood of the Western European model, “worked” solely on the expulsion of “others,” legitimizing the right to only single-nation statehood, forming the lines of “us–others” and employing categories like “timely” or “untimely” when explaining revolutions, revolts, wars, etc.71
Within the modern time regime, other, non-modern, ways of experiencing and dealing with time “disappeared” or were excluded. In this linear chronological scheme, the past was marked as an irreversible process that one may and should be “distanced” from. Yet, as Chris Lorenz points out, the catastrophes of the twentieth century “undermined the claim that academic history can keep ‘distance’ from them.”72 Time marked by catastrophes forms a temporal anomaly and turns out to be “reversible” (Berber Bevernage). Aleida Assmann observes: “alongside the episodes that we restore in order to reuse, there are episodes that haunt us, as they are out of our control; remaining latent, they sooner or later overtake us.”73 Abolition of the statute of limitations on crimes against humanity, as Bevernage remarks, proves to be a marker of the rejection of the linear notion of time.74 Chris Lorenz emphasizes that “recognition of ‘historical wounds’ is an essential ingredient of ‘presentism’ and that this presupposes a time conception which is not ‘erasive’ and which can explain duration.”75 The idea of the presence of the past in the present, of the reversibility and duration of time, its non-linearity for different people and communities, illustrates, according to George Liber, how “the people of Ukraine did not follow a linear, inevitable, or irreversible road to the present. Their history contains many contingencies, discontinuities, and complex turning points.”76 Criticism of the modern time regime as a project that “did not see” and “did not take ‘others’ into account” encourages us to ask questions about the conventional calendar and chronology of presenting World War II, in the context of Ukrainians’ past requiring a “politics of recognition,” in scholarly writing as well. The attempt to produce a chronology of World War II for Ukrainian society via the established Soviet myth of the “Great Patriotic War,” backed up by the Russian historians and propagandists of the early twenty-first century, has obviously failed. Still, the conventional “calendar” of World War II starting on September 1, 1939 and ending on September 2, 1945, is not fully adequate for describing the true history of the war for Ukrainians. Part of the Ukrainian lands (Carpatho-Ukraine) was occupied by Hungary in the spring of 1939 following the fall of Czechoslovakia (the latter “acquired” these lands after WWI). Also, September 2, 1945 was not the end of the war for some Ukrainians. “Martial law” was abolished in 1945 for Soviet Ukraine, but only in 1946 for Western Ukraine.77 Establishment of state boundaries (by “exchanging some areas of state territories”) between Poland and the USSR78 proceeded till 1951 and threw many people into situations of loss79 (of a home, freedom, family, citizenship, and sometimes life). For them the war apparently went on after the “relocation.”
As it went on for the soldiers of OUN-UPA, who did not recognize Soviet authority and continued an armed struggle against the USSR in the late 1940s and early 1950s.80
Taking into account all the above-mentioned arguments, it would be reasonable to introduce into scientific circulation the position that several entry and exit points exist for the possible analysis/consideration of Ukrainians and World War II. With the colonial framework abandoned, one may discover one such point to be the “Ukrainian question”: “raised” during World War I and “closed” (without victory) with the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine.
Assembling the chronology of Ukrainian history around this question, George Liber in his Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954 noted that the formation and evolution of modern Ukraine was an “interactive response to the total wars and mass violence of the last century.” The scholar affirms Timothy Snyder’s assessment of East Central Europe as Europe’s bloodlands, but challenges Snyder’s claim that mass murders started in 1932. “‘The Great Powers’ inaugurated this long-term bloodshed in 1914,” remarks Liber and calls the Holodomor of 1932–1933 and Soviet social experiments81 the “second total war,” labeling it as “an integral part of the continuum of the mass violence of the First and Second World Wars unleashed.”82
The researcher emphasizes that there is no need to differentiate between world wars and the interwar period within the great transformation that eventually produced modern Ukraine. Moreover, in George Liber’s opinion, during 1914–1954 Ukraine endured three wars, with the interwar era as a period of bloody social engineering, one that may be assessed according to the categories of total war and respective wartime losses, wartime violence. All of the above played a crucial role for Ukrainian nation-building and, at the same time, for nation-destroying.
The idea of a “thirty years’ war” and modernization “with the built-in mechanism of violence” is supported by the Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak. He also proposes the consideration that anthropological changes, later on incorporated in the “Sovietization” scenario, were rooted in World War I, which “raised” but did not solve the “Ukrainian question.”83
Introducing individuals’ and communities’ chronological framework into academic circulation is another no less productive addition that should be included in the course of reflections about the war. When did the war start and when did it end from the point of view of the ordinary man (or a certain community)? The moment of the official declaration of war was not always such an “entry point”; instead, often it was the moment when established structures of everyday life were ruined or when the occupiers “arrived” (or when their actions clashed with expectations, or when their behavior changed). From the viewpoint of the human perception of time—of the time of changes as catastrophes and of catastrophes being a part of everyday life—one may question, following Mykola Borovyk, the uniqueness of wartime experience. Borovyk inquires: “From what we know today, may we say that the life of an ordinary Ukrainian peasant or city dweller radically changed in 1947 compared to 1944? He worked at the collective farm or rushed to his work at a plant, panicking if he was late: he could be imprisoned for that. He lived from hand to mouth, paid enormous taxes, wore military outfits, waited for hours in lines to get basic necessities. His chances of dying were great even without active warfare. Also, is it not the same around 1933? Except, perhaps, that some had a higher chance of dying than others. Still, the scale of the losses is quite comparable. So how exactly were these years different from the point of view of the daily life of an ordinary citizen?”84 Borovyk proposes that we see and research continuity and not some separate fragments starting from the period of the 1930s until 1953, when extreme circumstances formed everyday structures and caused certain scenarios of human behavior.
Bruno Latour remarks that time “has a modern and a nonmodern dimension, a longitude and a latitude. … Calendar time may well situate events with respect to a regulated series of dates, but historicity situates the same events with respect to their intensity.”85 The intensity of the events of World War II, obviously, varied: it was different for certain states and people, for certain people and communities. The intensity of events formed not only an academic historicity but also a local, familial, personal one. The intensity of events caused the unevenness of the temporal “entry” into the war and formed nonlinear scenarios of everyday choice. Some people were taken captive, were imprisoned or died from the bullets or in the air strikes of the occupiers during the very first days of attack (the Soviet attack on Poland or the German invasion of Soviet Ukraine). For others, occupation may have seemed almost “invisible” or they perceived it as an exciting, potentially romantic, adventure.86
The “exit point” may have been equally unstable: some perceived it as the authorities’ permission to return home after evacuation, for others it meant amnesty, rehabilitation and authorized return from Soviet deportation. Some saw it as a story of the abolition of the ration card system in 1947, for others it was their house rebuilt. Some felt the “exit” when “Victory Day” was proclaimed an official holiday (in 1965), for others it was the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence.
Concluding this attempt of setting a methodological framework, it should be noted that a great number of issues, badly in need of consideration and reconsideration, are left out of this research.
This study did not and could not give definitive and exhaustive answers to all the questions raised. Yet such “questions without answers” have been experienced by all respectable historians of virtually all the countries whose citizens had their own wartime experience of World War II. Ethnic, political, state- and nation-building considerations have formed obstacles to a holistic analysis of the human dimension of World War II. Striving for a holistic approach, one should take into account that the whole unfolds sequentially and unveils itself gradually. In our contemporary stage of anthropological history of World War II it may be useful to adopt the methodology of recognition and the framework of “historical wounds” that not only enable us to become aware of victimhood but also to work with the agency of Ukrainians, to see the interactions of people under occupation not only through vertical links with the representatives of the different powers, but also through the horizontal links between local and social communities. The latter, though they experienced injustice and crimes, were not devoid of compassion, aid, and solidarity. In order to sequentially unfold the history of ordinary Ukrainians during the years of World War II, the historical accent should be placed on temporal and spatial cracks that either rupture identification or, on the contrary, contribute to building people’s self-identification as Ukrainians. Analyzing the history of World War II from the Ukrainian perspective, it is important to remain focused on both the lack of nation-state status and the range of problems relating to the process of unifying all Ukrainian lands under one state. Unification was both a process and a result of large-scale European collisions, where the interests of Ukrainians were objectified and appropriated by the Kremlin administration. Therefore, national unity became not only an achievement but also a source of numerous historical wounds, inflicted both by totalitarian regimes in a vertical dimension and by communities and individuals in a horizontal dimension. The Ukrainian history of World War II is a part of European history; it is one of the many variants of stateless nations’ stories in which people endured the pressure of various ideological, political, social directives and international agreements. Situational strategies and unstable tactics of life under occupation, choosing or not choosing some side as “ours” (our state, our army), attempts by people to distance themselves from resistance or betrayal, or to join them—all these modes of dealing with war were typical of most Europeans who did or did not survive World War II. A comparative European perspective is not an artificial, scholarly construct, but a useful instrument for analyzing similar and different processes. It helps to remove some sort of taboo around the sensitive subject of the manifestations of evil, while nonetheless allowing us to study and make those—invisible, forgotten, devoid of voice and memory—who did Good on a daily basis visible and perceptible again.
To acknowledge the complexity, nonlinearity, reversibility, and rigidity of certain processes related to dealing with war, unfortunately, means thinking about the future. The future that, after the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine ends, should be not the history of the stigmatization of the survivors of occupation but the practices of understanding (i.e. by the means of history) of the tragedy that affected the occupied, the captive, and the displaced.
1 First published in: Academia. Terra Historiae. Studii na poshanu Valeriia Smoliia [Academia. Terra Historiae. Studies in honor of Valeriy Smoliy], vol. 1, Prostory istorii [Spaces of history], ed. H. Boriak, S. Blashchuk, V. Horobets, A. Kudriachenko, V. Matiakh, V. Tkachenko, V. Soloshenko, and O. Yas (Kyiv: NAN Ukrainy. Instytut istorii Ukrainy, DU “Instytut vsesvitnoi istorii Natsionalnoi akademii nauk Ukrainy,” 2020), 587–608.
2 Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe. World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. István Deák, Jan Tomasz Gross, Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 293–325.
3 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 400.
4 István Deák, Norman M. Naimark, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution during World War II (Boulder: Westview Press., 2015), 288.
5 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 296.
6 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tea Sindbæk, Usable History. Representations of Yugoslavia’s difficult past from 1945 to 2002 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 248.
7 Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution Against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 410.
8 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 303.
9 Hannah Arendt, Dzherela totalitaryzmu [The origins of totalitarianism] (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2005), 467.
10 Anne Applebaum, “The Worst of the Madness,” The New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/11/worst-madness/.
11 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 307.
12 Chris Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time, or The Sudden Presence of the Past,” in Performing the Past, Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010), 85; see Mark Salber Phillips, “History, Memory and Historical Distance,” in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2004), 86–109.
13 See Johannes Czwalina, Movchannia hovoryt. Teperishnie zalyshaietsia, tilky chas mynaie. Zmitsniuvaty myr, osmysliuvaty mynule [Silence speaks: The present remains, only time passes. Strengthening peace through making sense of the past], trans. Olha Plevako (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2016); BerberBevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence. Time and Justice (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 262.
14 Aleida Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen? Vzlet i padenie temporalnogo rezhima Moderna [Is time out of joint?: On the rise and fall of the modern time regime] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017), 125.
15 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–73.
16 Ibid., 25.
17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History and the Politics of Recognition,” in Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 77–78.
18 Ibid., 78.
19 Chris Lorenz, “Geschichte, Gegenwärtigkeit und Zeit,” in Phänomen Zeit. Dimensionen und Strukturen in Kultur und Wissenschaft, ed. Dietmar Goltschnigg (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2011), 134, quoted in Aleida Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen? Vzlet i padenie temporalnogo rezhima Moderna [Is time out of joint?: On the rise and fall of the modern time regime] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017).
20 National Holodomor-genocide Museum, “Recognition of Holodomor as genocide in the world,” accessed June 1, 2020, http://old.memorialholodomor.org.ua/eng/holodomor/genocide/act/.
21 Jeffrey K. Olick and Brenda Coughlin, “The Politics of Regret. Analytical Frames,” in Politics and the Past. On Repairing Historical Injustices, ed. John Torpey (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 37–62; Karolina Wigura, Wina narodów, Przebaczenie jako strategia prowadzenia polityki [Nation’s guilt. Forgiveness as a political strategy] (Warsaw-Gdansk: Scholar, 2011), 269.
22 “Speech of the President of Ukraine in the Israeli Knesset,” Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, December 31, 2015, https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/news/speech-of-the-president-of-ukraine-in-the-israeli-knesset/.
23 “Ukraintsi znovu prosiat proshchennia za Volyn,” [Ukrainians again apologize for Volyn], Istorychna pravda, June 3, 2016, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2016/06/3/149102/.
24 “Bracia Ukraińcу,” Liberté!, July 4, 2016, http://liberte.pl/bracia-ukraincy/; “Poliaky prosiat v ukraintsiv vybachennia za istorychni kryvdy” [Poles again apologize to Ukrainians for historical wounds], Istorychna pravda, July 7, 2016, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2016/07/4/149125 .
25 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism. June 3, 2008, http://www.praguedeclaration.eu/.
26 Ibid.
27 See Yana Primachenko, “Sovetskoe vs natsionalisticheskoe: protivostoyanie diskursov i praktik v postsovetskoy Ukraine” [The Soviet vs the nationalistic: Confrontation of discourses and practices in post-Soviet Ukraine], Studia Universitatis Moldaviae, no. 10 (2017): 270.
28 This attempt was not the first one. For example, Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, outrightly compared Stalin’s communism with Hitler’s Nazism as similar systems of people’s extermination.
29 For discussions on Timothy Snyder’s book see Daniel Lazare, “Timothy Snyder’s Lies,” Jacobin, September 9, 2014, www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/.
30 “Importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe,” European Commission, September 19, 2019, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2019-0021_EN.pdf.
31 Arguments in favor of such stand mostly are similar to the following: “Stalin’s Soviet Union opportunistically seized former territories of the Tsarist Empire, and established the inhuman Gulag system. But it was not the aggressor against Nazi Germany and fascist Italy but the victim of aggression; and Soviet resistance was the major factor in the destruction of Nazism and restoration of democracy in Europe.” Robert William Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (Houndmills, London: Macmillan Press, 1997), 56.
32 Peter Dickinson, “History as a Weapon in Russia’s War on Ukraine,” October 4, 2017, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/history-as-a-weapon-in-russia-s-war-on-ukraine/.
33 Alexander Etkind, Krivoe gore: Pamyat o nepogrebennyih [Warped Mourning. Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied], trans. Vladimir Makarov, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018), 49.
34 Oleg Bazhan and Vadym Zolotaryov, “‘Velykyi teror’ na Kharkivshchyni: masshtaby, vykonavtsi, zhertvy” [“Great Terror” in Kharkiv region: scale, executors, victims], Kraieznavstvo, no. 1 (2012): 85–101, http://history.org.ua/JournALL/kraj/kraj_2012_1/12.pdf; Halyna Denysenko, “Mistsia pamiati i pamiatnyky zhertvam ‘Velykoho teroru’” [Memory sites and monuments to the victims of the ‘Great Terror’], Kraieznavstvo, no. 1 (2012): 101–108; Valeriy Vasyliev and Roman Podkur, Radianski karateli. Spivrobitnyky NKVS—vykonavtsi “Velykoho teroru” na Podilli [The Soviet punishers. NKVS staff as the executors of ‘Great Terror’ in Podillia region] (Kyiv: Vydavets V. Zakharenko, 2017); Vidlunnia Velykoho teroru. Zbirnyk dokumentiv u trokh tomakh [Reverberations of a Great Terror. Collected documents in three volumes], vol. 3, Chekisty Stalina v leshchatakh “sotsialistychnoi zakonnosti.” Ego-dokumenty 1938–1941 pp. [Stalin’s Cheka agents in the grip of “socialist law.” Ego-documents from 1938–1941], comp. Andri Savin, Oleksii Tepliakov, Mark Yunhe (Kyiv: Vydavets V. Zakharenko, 2019), 936.