Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

A Conceptual Turn: Jan Gross’s Neighbors

The publication of Jan Gross’s short but explosive book Neighbors in 2000-01122 transformed the historiography of the Holocaust as it transpired in Eastern Europe, including in Ukraine. The book described vividly, graphically how Poles in Jedwabne murdered the town’s Jewish inhabitants in July 1941. It generated immense commentary and controversy, but the primary matters of contention (the number of victims and the presence or absence of Germans) have little bearing on how it affected historiography. There were three aspects of Neighbors that were revolutionary, even if they were not without some antecedents. The first was the focus on non-German participation in the extermination of the Jewish population. One might say that this turned the spotlight on the “microbiota” of the world war and the Holocaust, that is, on non-state actors following their own agendas, which sometimes involved the murder of Jews. In particular, Gross directed attention to the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union but before the German leadership made the decision to kill all of European Jewry. One result of Gross’s work was that in the early twenty-first century a large literature on the pogroms and related anti-Jewish violence in Western Ukraine appeared.123 Particularly noteworthy was Kai Struve’s detailed historical account of the violence across Galicia, which brought many new sources to bear and revealed the important role of German actors in the pogroms, especially the soldiers of Waffen-SS Wiking.124 The interest in the pogroms also led to renewed research on one of their contextual factors, the mass murder of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD, which occurred at different sites in western areas of Ukraine between the launch of the German invasion and the evacuation of Soviet forces.125

The second way in which Gross’s little volume was revolutionary was that it placed the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe firmly within East European studies. Gross was an East Europeanist. Until Neighbors he was best known for two studies of Polish territories under German and Soviet occupation. He knew the languages, historical context, social relations, and culture of Poland before he embarked on his studies of the Holocaust and postwar antisemitism. He had earned his doctorate at Yale in 1975, and his book on Polish society under German occupation appeared four years later. He had behind him a quarter century of publications on Polish sociology and modern history before he published Neighbors. He had not dealt with the Holocaust in his earlier work, and when he finally came to that theme he brought a wealth of training and scholarly experience to it. Until Neighbors, East European studies and Holocaust studies had been on separate tracks. Friedman and Spector were Holocaust specialists; they came from Eastern Europe and so knew the languages and cultures, but their scholarly interests did not extend beyond Jewish history. Armstrong was an East Europeanist, but he avoided dealing with the Holocaust. Hilberg wrote his great work without much knowledge of Eastern Europe and sometimes operated with stereotypes.126 After Neighbors a number of persons trained in East European studies undertook work on the Holocaust. Aside from myself, examples include Kai Struve, who wrote an excellent study of peasant and nation in late nineteenth-century Galicia before he turned to an examination of the pogroms of 1941, and Per Anders Rudling, whose doctoral dissertation concerned the development of Belarusian nationalism but who has also worked on OUN-UPA and the Holocaust. What had occurred as a result of Gross’s intervention was that the Holocaust in Eastern Europe had begun to be treated as a part of East European history. One could no longer just parachute intellectually into an East European locality and follow what the Germans did there—one had to have deeper contextual knowledge. In 1992 Christopher Browning published his pathbreaking study of Holocaust perpetrators, Ordinary Men. It followed a German reserve police battalion as it murdered its way through Poland but did not cite any sources in Polish. No scholar in the West in the 1990s thought this unusual. But when, at the end of the 1990s, Omer Bartov decided to write a history of interethnic relations and the Holocaust in the small Galician town of Buchach, the demands of scholarship were different. The immersion in the languages and cultures and physical space of Galicia required a large investment of time. In the end, it took this prolific author two decades to write his microhistory, Anatomy of a Genocide.

The third revolutionary feature of Gross’s book was that it reintegrated victims’ testimony into mainstream Holocaust scholarship, after decades of marginalization. His particular views on survivors’ testimony will be discussed in the next chapter, on sources, but the overall point is that he demonstrated the crucial importance of moving beyond what perpetrators had to say and listening also to the victims. Christopher Browning exemplifies the change of attitude. When he wrote Ordinary Men back in the early 1990s, he did not use any testimonies or other first-person documents other than those of the perpetrators, except to establish chronology.127 But in the twenty-first century he has become an advocate of reintegrating victim narratives into Holocaust studies. In a lecture he delivered at the USC Shoah Foundation in March 2018, he said:

Using survivor testimony has difficulties....It is problematic evidence. But all historical evidence is problematic in one way or another. Anybody who relies on uncomplicated evidence isn’t going to be able to write history. But the issue is not do we use it, but how do we use it. To not use survivor memories is to lose whole areas of the Holocaust that we have no other set of evidence for.128

The present monograph comes out of the post-Neighbors consensus: it examines non-German perpetrators, it proceeds from immersion in regional history and culture, and it makes copious use of testimonies and related ego documents. This is now becoming, at least in the West, the main stream of scholarship on the Holocaust in Ukraine and is represented by many, and diverse, practitioners, including Tarik Cyril Amar, Omer Bartov, Delphine Bechtel, Franziska Bruder, Jeffrey Burds, Marco Carynnyk, Simon Geissbühler, Taras Kurylo, Jared McBride, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe,129 Per Anders Rudling, and Kai Struve. Scholars sharing the same consensus have also been studying the Holocaust on territories adjacent to Ukraine, notably Diana Dumitru, Jan Grabowski, and Vladimir Solonari. A few other traits of this scholarly trend need to be mentioned. One is that it is in constant dialogue with Western scholarship on the Holocaust as well as with the historiography on twentieth-century Ukraine—in Western academia, the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Ukraine itself. The main languages of its publications are English and German, but many of its texts have been translated into Ukrainian as well as Polish and Russian. The representatives of this historiographical tendency are critical of both the nationalists and their interpretation of the past.

Close to the group described above are other Western historians who have made important contributions to the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Wendy Lower has written on German perpetrators, co-edited a collective monograph on the Shoah in Ukraine as well as edited an English translation of one of the few diaries of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust in Galicia; she has also written on the bloody summer of 1941 in Ukraine. Vladimir Melamed, originally from Lviv and the author of a Russian-language history of Lviv’s Jewish community, has written an original study of Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust based on the oral histories collected by the USC Shoah Foundation. Frank Golczewski has published a number of important studies that relate to OUN and to the Holocaust in Ukraine.

In the past few decades Polish historiography on OUN and UPA has been extensive and has been mainly concerned, of course, with the nationalists’ slaughter of the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943-44. One of the most important Polish historians working in this area is Grzegorz Motyka. His major study Ukraińska partyzantka (The Ukrainian Partisan Movement) contains a chapter on UPA and the Holocaust, but like Dieter Pohl a decade earlier he was unable to arrive at clear conclusions.

Contemporary Polish historiography remains divided over the scholarly contributions of Jan Gross. Neighbors has had, and continues to have, a controversial reception in Poland. Some prominent Polish historians and intellectuals reject Gross’s work,130 but mostly in consideration of what it says or implies about Polish society. Worth singling out is Bogdan Musial’s “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen,” an informative study of the violence—Soviet, Nazi, and Ukrainian nationalist—in the summer of 1941. It originally appeared in August 2000 and was less antagonistic to Gross’s scholarship than Musial’s later texts and those of other Polish historians in his camp (such as Marek Jan Chodakiewicz). But “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen” has been criticized by Western scholars for exaggerating the role of Jews in the Soviet apparatus in Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine in 1939-41 and thus implying a certain justification for the pogroms that broke out in the wake of the German invasion.131

The Rehabilitation of OUN and UPA in Ukraine

An even more important division has been created by the recrudescence of a pro-OUN historiography, this time in Ukraine rather than in the diaspora. It is a historiography that takes little notice of Western scholarship, except occasionally as an irritant. It also neglects or rejects the use of contemporary testimony by persons of non-Ukrainian ethnicity, particularly Poles and Jews. It does not conceal its political purpose, the exposition of a heroic national myth. Although it is not without genuine achievements, from the point of view of historical scholarship it is a historiographical silo.

As mentioned earlier, in the 1990s, as a response to calls to rehabilitate OUN-UPA as well as to protests of Red Army veterans and others against such rehabilitation, the Ukrainian parliament looked to Ukraine’s historians to investigate the historical role of the nationalists and to provide information on which a decision could be based. In 1997 a working group was set up, headed by Stanislav Kulchytsky. In the mid-1980s Kulchytsky had been part of a Soviet Ukrainian commission to refute allegations that there had been a manmade famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. Later, when Ukraine became independent, and especially when President Viktor Yushchenko (2005-10) made the famine, the “Holodomor,” a central component of his historical and identity politics, Kulchytsky changed his views and became the chief historian of the famine and a strong proponent of the idea that the Holodomor was a genocide.132

The working group produced two key texts in 2000-05 that were meant to clarify the history of OUN and UPA and provide expert guidance on the evaluation of the nationalists.133 The first of these texts, Problema OUN-UPA, was produced in 2000 and intended as a preliminary outline of the issues.134 A not unsimilar document was produced in 2005, which bore the subtitle “expert conclusion” (fakhovyi vysnovok) but actually made no overt recommendations.135 In addition to these more programmatic documents, the working group published a collective monograph on the history of OUN and UPA.136 Much of the text of the two shorter, programmatic publications was drawn word for word from the collective monograph. The collective monograph in turn was drawn from more extensive studies by working-group members that preceded the collective monograph. Particularly useful for this book were the substantive treatments of OUN and UPA by Anatolii Kentii and Ivan Patryliak. Although the oeuvre of members of the working group tended to have a generally positive attitude toward the nationalists and played down their dark sides, it harvested much rich material from post-Soviet Ukrainian archives.

The working group did not explicitly call for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA, but that was clearly the direction in which their endeavors pointed. They were academics drafted to provide historical answers to a political question that has divided Ukrainian public discourse ever since it became possible to freely discuss the nationalist heritage. Their work had nothing at all to say about antisemitism as a component of OUN ideology or about OUN-UPA participation in the Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust itself is scarcely mentioned in their texts, although these texts all focus on World War II and on Ukraine, where a million and a half Jewish people were murdered. This omission can partly be explained by the working group’s overall tendency to whitewash the nationalists’ record. For example, it treated UPA’s mass murder of the Polish population as a tragedy rather than a crime. It saw both Poles and Ukrainian nationalists as culpable in the violence, denying that the mass murder had anything to do with a nationalist ethnic cleansing project.137

But perhaps at least equally important was another factor, namely the terms of the political debate into which the historians were asked to intervene. The “expert conclusion” divided the parties privy to the dispute into “adherents to and opponents of the nationalists, veterans of OUN and the CPSU, of UPA and the Soviet army.”138 European norms, including European concerns about the Holocaust, were absent from the context. The working group was responding to the critique of the nationalists developed by the Soviets, who were not concerned with the Holocaust at all, nor with antisemitism, nor even—considering Stalinism’s own record—with mass murder and ethnic cleansing. The working group was simply not thinking in a wider context. Most of the members of the working group were themselves products of the Soviet educational system and socialization. Kulchytsky and Kentii, perhaps the most influential individuals within the group, were both born in 1937. Four other historians who contributed to the collective monograph were born between 1955 and 1967, and thus were products of the Soviet higher educational system (Volodymyr Dziobak, Ihor Iliushyn, Heorhii Kasianov, Oleksandr Lysenko). The only member whose formative period was post-Soviet was Patryliak, who was born in 1976. Thus, the questions with which the working group wrestled were mainly those previosuly posed within Soviet discourse. As a result, issues of treason to the motherland and collaboration with the enemy were much more important for them at that time than whether OUN and UPA participated in the destruction of Ukraine’s Jewish population.

Political developments in Ukraine affirmed the working group’s attitude to OUN and UPA. The Orange Revolution of November 2004 brought Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency of Ukraine. He bestowed the honorific title “Heroes of Ukraine” upon both Roman Shukhevych, the commander of UPA, and Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most important faction of OUN. As he was leaving office in 2010, Yushchenko urged Ukrainians to name streets and public places after the heroes of OUN-UPA.139 His successor as president, Viktor Yanukovych, rolled back the cult of OUN, but it returned with new energy after the Euromaidan in 2014.140

The working group was based in the Institute of the History of Ukraine in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. Another, younger group of historians, based in the academy’s Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Lviv, embraced OUN and UPA even more forthrightly. The leader of the Lviv group was Volodymyr Viatrovych, who was just twenty-five when he founded the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement in 2002. Viatrovych remained director of the Center until 2008 when he was appointed head of the archive section of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, established by President Yushchenko. Shortly thereafter Viatrovych was also appointed head of the SBU archives. He became even more influential after the Euromaidan and headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory from 2014 to 2019. He consistently promoted the cult of OUN and UPA, downplaying their wartime crimes.141 He and his associate Ruslan Zabily, who directs the pro-OUN Lontsky prison museum in Lviv,142 have excellent connections with the Ukrainian diaspora in North America. They have spoken a number of times at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; both of these institutes have partnerships with the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement.143