Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

Of the publications of the Lviv group, the most relevant to our topic is Viatrovych’s book on OUN’s attitude toward Jews, which came out in 2006.144 It sought to exonerate OUN and UPA from accusations of antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust, but it had serious flaws as a scholarly monograph. It handled sources in a one-sided manner, rejecting the authenticity or relevance of those that confirmed OUN’s hostility to Jews while accepting as valid a fabricated memoir by an alleged Jewish member of UPA.145 The latter was the only alleged Jewish survivor testimony that the book cited. It cited no sources or scholarly literature in German or English, nor did it take into account contextual or comparative factors that would have helped illuminate the issues. Also, it was apparent that Viatrovych could not recognize antisemitism when it appeared in OUN texts.146 Viatrovych’s book did, however, contribute to initiating a larger discussion about OUN and the Jews, and it published as an appendix two OUN texts on the subject.

Other historians working within a generally nationalist paradigm were more careful scholars than Viatrovych. In particular, Andrii Bolianovsky, also based in Lviv, published a number СКАЧАТЬ