Zero Point Ukraine. Olena Stiazhkina

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ