Zero Point Ukraine. Olena Stiazhkina

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СКАЧАТЬ conclusions and decisions.

      The objective of the research is to think on the obstacles that prevent adequate description of the personal experiences of World War II in Ukrainian lands. Among such obstacles are: their non-uniqueness; the “unfinished past” with its political and ethical challenges; the specifics of the visibility and invisibility of Ukrainians that marked both historical and political global discourse; the notions about the geographical and political borders of Ukraine; features of Ukrainians’ existence as a community and as a society; the diversity and instability of identification models for people who did or did not deal with the experience of war; the problem of an adequate vocabulary to describe life under occupation and the lack of an established chronology and chronotope of World War II from the perspective of its contemporaries.

The depiction of the human experience of surviving (or not surviving) war always encounters a series of obstacles when the stories about valor, sacrifice, despair, betrayal, death enforce the impossibility of unbiased analysis and sometime give rise to strategies of intentional omission. And politics, including the politics of memory, encourages selective historical amnesia that may have various objectives: from ensuring unity of the nation to justifying the conduct of elites; from the needs of economic modernization to creating a system of international unions; from legitimizing social changes to restoring trust in civil society. As Tony Judt2 notes, all European states with wartime experience failed to adequately describe it. Fear of being prosecuted for collaborationism,3 non-heroism of people under occupation,4 assigning all responsibility for the war to Germany,5 different vocabularies to describe things done by Germans and things done by “us,” myths of Resistance Movements,6 artificial ideological concepts of national unity in the face of the enemy,7 the long-lasting invisibility of the victims and executioners of the Holocaust, propaganda claims about the state being the “victim of an insidious enemy”—all were both the cause and the result of the fact that “Europeans (governments and peoples alike) postponed any collective effort to come to terms with the memory of war that had rounded them out. … [T]hey simply left the matter unresolved, buried, neglected, and selectively forgotten.”8

Timothy Snyder labels the history of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, the history of “bloodlands,” as at least fourteen million people died there during the 1930s and 1940s. As Hannah Arendt mentions in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, “Stalin’s war against the Ukraine in the early thirties was twice as effective as the terribly bloody German invasion and occupation.”9

Anne Applebaum states: “This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. … During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes.”10

In Tony Judt’s account: “If the problem in Western Europe has been a shortage of memory, in the continent’s other half the problem is reversed. Here, there is too much memory, too many pasts on which people can draw, usually as a weapon against the past of someone else.”11

According to Chris Lorenz, “most historians regarded 50 years’ distance as the absolute minimum for (warm) memory to ‘cool down’ and to transform into (cold) history.”12 Yet “too much memory,” encountered by historians in the second half of the twentieth century, not only did not “cool down,” but also set the problem of the inevitability of the past, remaining a burdensome part of the present.13 And this has changed and continues to change historical science. Aleida Assmann observed that historians “renounced the idea that the past is a sphere of something that no longer exists and thus is unreachable for human influence.” Assmann emphasizes that the past, considered as done and dusted, “under certain circumstances may return to the sphere of relevance and active involvement in the present.”14 The Russian war against Ukraine, started by the Kremlin in 2014, is the best illustration of this point.

Besides “too much memory,” history as an academic discipline and the historiography of World War II over the last thirty years were influenced, sometimes even pressured in a positive way, by the “politics of recognition”15 that emerged and flourished not in academic circles but among social activists and campaigners in Europe and North America.

The “politics of recognition” is a story about people who may or should be present and accepted in society with all their misfortunes and moments of happiness. Charles Taylor describes it as follows: “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.” Therefore, the “politics of recognition” is a way to avoid harm, oppression, “imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”16

      For historical science such a notion of human nature was an absolute novelty that eventually introduced as themes for historical research the following: the past as it is and its influence on the present and the future; stories about the price paid by the “speechless” and oppressed for successful military interventions and great victories; the problem of the suffering, violence, oppression, and responsibility of those who performed these acts, both ordinary people and high-ranking officials. The “politics of recognition” does not make the historians’ work easier, yet it enables a “mix of history and memory” that Dipesh Chakrabarty called “historical wounds.”

According to Chakrabarty, “Historical wounds are not the same as historical truths but the latter constitute a condition of possibility of the former. Historical truths are broad, synthetic generalizations based on researched collections of individual historical facts. They could be wrong but they are always amenable to verification by methods of historical research. Historical wounds, on the other hand, are a mix of history and memory and hence their truth is not verifiable by historians.”17 Thus, to focus on “historical wounds” is quite problematic. Nevertheless, the emancipatory potential of this focus can hardly be overestimated. Those who carry historical wounds (be they individuals, certain groups and communities) now become not only “visible” but also included as part of the range of historical problems, with all the complexity of their wartime experience as prolonged in memory up till now.

“Historical wounds” are not “permanent formations,” their presence in experience and memory may be overcome through working on the past, in particular, through the practices of analysis and the description of this past, through the honest and painstaking verification of historical facts. “The social consensus on which they are based is always open to new challenges and this, in principle, can be undone.”18

      Concepts of the “politics of recognition” СКАЧАТЬ