Zero Point Ukraine

Nevertheless, “historical wounds”—both as a concept and as an element in the politics of memory—are oriented not only to national historical narratives. They demand compensation and activation of the mode of visibility and recognition; not only do they request historical visibility but also political apologies from those who inflicted violence, ignored and hushed up genocides and social catastrophes. “Historical wounds” do not let the past “cool down,” locking it instead in a perpetual and inescapable present. As Chris Lorenz says, “the idea of a hot present transforming into a cold past is by itself a desired time model for those who would wish to see the past as over and done with. Usually they are the ones who face a sentence themselves.”19

In the history of the 1930s through the 1950s, whether or not survived by the Ukrainians, there are numerous historical wounds, acknowledged in the condemnation of Nazism by the Nuremberg trials, in the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide,20 in the European politics of regret21 and in actual official apologies by Ukraine to the nations of Israel22 and Poland,23 as well as by Poland24—to the Ukrainian nation. Yet the fact that on the scales weighing crimes against humanity the actions of the Nazi and Soviet powers were not deemed comparable becomes a stumbling block for “cooling down” the “heated time.” It also complicates choosing the most suitable framework for the historical analysis of the success or failure of coming to terms with World War II in Ukrainian lands. Nazism was condemned, while communism as the Soviet variant of totalitarianism was not. Only recently—on July 3, 2010—was another attempt to condemn communism made. Initiated by the Czech government, a number of renowned European politicians, historians, and dissidents signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.25

The authors of the Declaration called on the European community to recognize Nazi and communist regimes as the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century and to develop unified criteria to identify the victims of both totalitarianisms. Those who signed the declaration emphasized “reaching an all-European understanding that both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes … are destructive in their policies of systematically applying extreme forms of terror, suppressing all civic and human liberties, starting aggressive wars … and that as such they should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted the 20th century.”26

Still, this proposition was received with some ambivalence, so the question about recognizing the crimes of the communist regime remains open27 not only for politicians, but for historians as well. For instance, attempts at a synthetic view of Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes before and during World War II28 made by Timothy Snyder in his milestone work Bloodlands received significant criticism from historians and intellectuals.29 They also labeled as controversial his statement regarding the interconnection and mutual reaction in plotting genocides, as well as the framework that presents Stalin and Hitler as equal criminals.

Significant efforts were made toward recognizing the equal culpability of Nazism and communism in starting World War II when the European Parliament adopted the resolution of September 19, 2019 “On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe.” The document emphasizes that the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact paved the way for the outbreak of the most devastating war in European history, “dividing Europe and the territories of independent states between the two totalitarian regimes and grouping them into spheres of interest.”30 However, despite these efforts, the academic vocabulary used in telling the story of World War II is still formed in a way that practically disables any kind of justification of Nazism, yet tends to “normalize” communism.31 The Soviet Union’s contribution in the defeat of Nazi Germany was one of the reasons for such “normalizing.” Thus, the historical wounds inflicted upon the subdued nations remain open, aggravating not only political coping with the past but also scientific research on it. Ukrainians who survived or did not survive the war are trapped in the space formed by several standpoints, the most powerful of which are the narratives of the “victors over universal evil” and the “victims who suffered atrocities under all the regimes.” Both of these narratives are quite problematic.

Thus, the powerful narrative of victory is partly invented by the Soviet historical canon when Ukrainians are depicted as part of the victorious Soviet-Russian nation, but is also partly appropriated by the new Russian political rhetoric in which only the “Russian nation” is presented as the victor. As Peter Dickinson rightly observes, “Western histories of the war routinely refer to Soviet forces collectively as ‘the Russians.’ We learn that ‘the Russians’ suffered twenty-seven million losses.” Western historians and intellectuals omit Ukraine, millions of Ukrainian soldiers who served in the Red Army, as well as the scale of losses among Ukrainian civilians. Therefore, under the influence of the Soviet (and subsequently Russian) discourse, “this staggering omission demonstrates the sheer size of Europe’s Ukraine-shaped blind spot,”32 instead of presenting the true Ukrainian contribution.

Thus, the narrative produced by historical research about the overall tragedy, the mass killings, deportations, and violence, becomes problematic, as there is no actual “full stop” to it. The problem is not one of including capacity and agency alongside victimhood and “being an object” in the list of the components of “tortured life”33 (a term coined by Alexander Etkind). The problem is also about Nazi crimes against humanity receiving symbolic and real punishment, while the crimes of the Stalin regime (and of the communist regime in the broader sense), the crimes of those who executed or instigated mass violence, though recorded, analyzed and to some extent memorialized,34 lack the legal basis of condemnation of communism. Thus, these unrequited crimes turn what should be “full stops” into ellipses, creating a danger of misreading them as “to be continued”35 and preventing the “hot present” from cooling down into the “cold past.”

The above-mentioned methodological challenges are not the only difficulties encountered by Ukrainians when conceptualizing the history of World War II. The intricate complexity of what was happening in Ukrainian lands from the 1930s to the 1950s is still such that eighty years’ distance makes the geographical borders of these lands perfectly clear. Yet they were not so clear and visible to those involved in the maelstrom of war and in the “Soviet nation-building” of the period. Due to the colonial practice of cutting up the borders (both of administrative regions within Ukraine and between other republics) implemented by Moscow in the acquired territories, many Ukrainians happened to be “thrown out” beyond Ukraine’s borders. Local communities were ruined or (as in the case of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR) other nations were considered as “almost Ukrainians.” Incorporation into Ukraine was not an obvious step for the people of Zakarpattia, whose leaders at the time of the fall of Czechoslovakia envisioned their self-preservation in a union with the Reich. Ukrainians in Poland were perceived as a problem and a threat, so the Polish government by means of “pacification,” encouraging “osadnik” settlers, and “consolidation of the state” imposed colonial practices and assimilation policies aimed at forming some “Polish Ukrainians.” Meanwhile, a powerful Ukrainian diaspora in Europe and in North America already existed, being almost the only Ukrainians who knew for certain that they lived not in Ukrainian lands.

What makes all the attempts to analyze the life and death of Ukrainians during the World War II even more problematic and acute is the modernized definition of “Ukrainians.” Using the term today, we mean a political nation, one which was still in the making at the beginning of the twentieth century. As George Liber rightly pointed out, “this history of the first half of the twentieth century recognizes that unspoken assumptions about national identity and political engagement in the past do not necessarily coincide with those of the present.”36 Thus, it would be fair to acknowledge that Ukrainians entered the World War II not as a political nation but as a group of various communities with very different levels of national consciousness and identity. Along with the Ukrainians who saw themselves as a community with a long-lasting historical tradition, there also were the “Soviet Ukrainians,” “malorosy” [Little Russians, a pejorative term], “Polish Ukrainians,” Rusyns, Hutsuls, Lemkos, etc. Still, this “self-identification” was not necessarily stable: some may have become self-aware as Ukrainians during the war while the others preferred to see themselves as part of the “great Russian people.” In addition, survivors and non-survivors of the war included other nations and communities: Poles, Jews, Germans, Belarusians, Moldovans, Greeks, Tatars, Armenians. Their strategies and tactics of survival when caught in the maelstrom of war, and afterwards, dealing with its unfinished tragedy, were at times based on the effort to preserve their identity and at other times on the forced or voluntary change of this identity as an alternative to death or repression. The concept of “enemy nations”37 (and practical punitive actions against them) was invented not only by the Nazis: Stalin’s totalitarian apparatus started demonstratively designating “enemy nations” and punishing them beginning in the 1930s. Timothy Snyder describes it as follows: “Stalin was a pioneer of national mass murder”;38 long before Hitler, Stalin’s “achievements” included “Polish,” “German,” “Romanian,” “Bulgarian,” “Greek” and other national purge “operations”39 that caused bloody tragedies for entire nations living alongside the Ukrainians. Hitler in turn also started his mass killings with the Poles. Christopher Browning writes: “If the Nazi regime had suddenly ceased to exist in the first half of 1941, its most notorious achievements in human destruction would have been the so-called euthanasia killing of seventy to eighty thousand German mentally ill and the systematic murder of the Polish intelligentsia. … The Jewish Holocaust ever since has overshadowed National Socialism’s other all-too-numerous atrocities.”40

However, the atrocities of Soviet communism against the “enemy nations” did not stop after the Nazis were defeated:41 targets of mass deportation-murders were Crimean Tatars, so-called “Ukrainian nationalists,” “cosmopolitans” (a euphemism covering up an antisemitic campaign that only Stalin’s death brought to a halt). The regime performed violence by the hands and actions of people42 who were members of the power and party structures, career ladder-climbers and exploiters, ideological fanatics, true sadists, and conformists, the “ordinary people.”43 Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Belarusians, Armenians, etc., all were of their number. Their names are recorded in the ordinances and directives of the NKVD (MVD)—NKGB(MGB), in party documents, and memoirs. Still, in the midst of total terror there were also those who helped, saved, and showed humanity. The names of the latter were captured, if at all, in family lore, as to speak about and to remember those who disobeyed the system even in the slightest way was dangerous both for those saved and for their saviors.

It is clear that situations of prolonged terror that caused “historical wounds” were brought about not only by the regimes in power but also by local communities, neighbors, local instigators of deportations and mass murders. Yet the “politics of recognition” as a conceptual approach enables seeing “historical wounds” of another kind: “wounds” made by the invisibility, devaluation or non-recognition of the sacrifice and heroism of some people who were omitted in the post-war heroic canon.

Attempts to see people caught in the war requires words and terms that would allow the description of certain general processes or those sharing similar traits. Usually, the word “society” is used in such an analysis. This term is useful but still deceptive and a subjective analytical category that contributes to the fixation of certain Soviet dichotomies (though rooted in the logic of the Enlightenment), such as “party and people,” “state and society,” etc. The search for “society,” that is, social interests and values, consciously recognized by all or by a majority of people, and for which the community is eager to work together, in the Soviet state (that included most of the Ukrainian lands) faces, on the one hand, an evident process of atomization. The latter was the result of the “submission by fear”44 that gripped all categories of society. On the other hand, the search for “society” encounters occasionally manifest “polyphony”45 and situational, short-lived, changeable systems of solidarity that emerged and dissolved under the threat of dangers and the fear of “purges,” Holodomor, war, or another wave of repressions.

The concept of “state” is equally problematic for analyzing what happened to people in the period. In the stories about the practices of terror, violent and disciplinarian actions, mobilization and organizational activities directed at society, the “state” often appears as a depersonalized (sacred or mechanistic) institution that acts rationally, solving its own pragmatic objectives.

Such a perception and thus the representation of Soviet power (the Soviet state) is both an echo of pre-modern notions of power46 and an element in the sacralization47 of power structures that was part of Soviet mythology. Meanwhile, as Caroline Humphrey says, such concepts as state, public authorities, state institutions had a very specific shape during the “socialism” era. This specific nature disables simple binary oppositions like “state”/”society,” “public sphere”/”private sphere,” as the system of public affairs permeated the whole social space, recreating itself anew at every level (at the level of enterprise and the collective farm, school or hospital, family or neighborhood, etc.), hence forming/having a multilevel (in the author’s terms) “nesting hierarchy.”48 Stanislav Kulchytsky, analyzing the nature of Soviet state project, proposes that it be perceived as a fulfilled model of “state-society,” which is “not looming over society but absorbs it, i.e. dissolves all existing horizontal links and structures; it penetrates society with vertical structures; it ‘atomizes’ society, putting every person face to face with himself.”49 In view of the re-creation of power at all levels, encounters with it regarding mobilization, evacuation, return, imprisonment, etc., were never depersonalized, but—mandatorily—personified.

“Power,” as already mentioned, always had a name, body, biography, and history; therefore, individual relations and motives underlying the choices made by people during the long war had not only ideological but also individual intentions, including revenge or aid, betrayal or rescue, trust or contempt.

Political scenarios, implemented in the Soviet Ukrainian lands from the 1920s to the 1950s, included, among other factors, both the Soviet experiment of creating a “new communist society” and imperial strategies and practices of ruling Ukraine as a “dominion.” A distinct “colonial flavor” could also be sensed in directives and the rules of life set for Ukrainians by the governments of Poland, Romania, Hungary. Capture of Ukrainian territories by Nazi Germany, as Wendy Lower describes it, was “the most radical colonization campaign in the history of European conquest and empire building.”50 But were the people able to fully realize the scenarios implemented by one or another regime? Did they truly comply with the authorities’ directives? Did they get these directives right?

Social foundations were fragile and unstable from the 1930s to the 1950s. Sharp and not so sharp political turns could change the lives of people and communities quite abruptly but they could also (though quite rarely) go unnoticed. Besides, the speed with which the authorities issued their instructions faced the inertia of those charged with executing them and their inability to comprehend the authorities’ requirements, a situation that formed the background of the total violence advocated as almost the only way that would lead to the “bright future.” Characterizing the change in application of the Soviet experiment (from the global project that relied on the proletariat up to following Russian imperial tradition of building a “great state”), Serhy Yekelchyk remarked, “if in the 1920s the USSR was a state of equal nationalities and unequal classes, by the end of the 1930s it turned into a state of equal classes and unequal nationalities, with the center being more and more associated with the Russian nation.”51 Those labeled as “enemy nations” did notice the change (but did they understand it?). As Yekelchyk observes, Ukrainian Soviet intellectuals—historians, writers, filmmakers—contributed to that change by consenting to and constructing the unique position of Ukraine—the position of “almost one nation, a younger brother.” Still, the people who for different reasons had chosen the Soviet project were not consciously fully aware of this change. During the late 1930s, some part of the Ukrainians, men and women, predominantly city dwellers, was still engaged in the process of incorporating the Soviet identity, “unpacking” themselves (in Igal Halfin’s terms) through the categories of class, through the practice of intolerance to the “former people,” through the ideas of the global proletarian revolution and the search for “class enemies” among the surrounding people. At the start of the war they were conscious communists, proletarians by origin, thus they perceived the enemy attack on the USSR as an encroachment on “socialist revolution” and as the “machinations of world imperialism.” However, when they survived the war and occupation, their conception of themselves and the world may have changed radically—if they survived at all.

Deeply lacking the historical, political background, and knowledge of what was happening, these people, with their inability to analyze and focus on local interactions (including personal offenses), produced reactions that seem bizarre now. For instance, Jews expressed happiness about the annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union: “You wanted Poland without Jews, so now you have Jews without Poland.”52 On the other hand, some Ukrainians were excited about “the collapse of the Polish state”53 and “had built triumphal arches and put up red or yellow-blue flags. Entering troops were sometimes showered with flowers, embraced, kissed, or greeted with bread and salt in a traditional gesture of hospitality.”54

For the country folk of Ukrainian Soviet lands who survived genocide, the experience of occupation, particularly if it was not marked by famine, may not have been the most horrid catastrophe given the one that they had survived already. Moreover, when the Germans entered, it was often perceived as the possibility of liberation from communism, and for the deported rich peasants, dubbed “kurkuls,” it meant a chance to return home from distant places of involuntary settlement.

Yet there was no single reaction, no scenario of the perception of war that did not undergo some change. In Western Ukraine, the hopes invested in the “Soviets” were eventually dashed. Illusions about the Germans, these were also gone, as well as the ones about the possible liberalization of the regime after ousting the Nazis. The mirror that reflected human behavior in both regimes was always distorted by some kind of propaganda, according to which people were expected to see themselves and judge their actions. Nevertheless, the reduction of all manifestations of human and inhuman action exclusively to the influence of the authorities’ directives would be incorrect. People saw, acted, and passed judgment on themselves and others not only under coercion: they betrayed and saved, became minions of or resisted the regime; hid and consented; collaborated and survived; participated in crimes or warned about them—according to their own notions of good and evil, of right and wrong. And these notions were not fully appropriated by any state, not the Bolvshevik’s or the Reich’s.

Revealing and studying these complicated and delicate mechanisms requires application of the methods of psychology, sociology, and the other humanities to historical sources. To describe the wartime history of people using the categories of good and evil is a hard task, taking into account the specific features or the sources and historians’ research objectives. Though this task is hard, it is still worth applying these categories in order to understand the causes and consequences of the civilizational catastrophes of the Nazis and communism. As Stanley Milgram55 and Philip Zimbardo56 have shown, these categories are rooted in the nature of social interaction and may sprout even in democratic states. “Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in ‘total situations’ that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.”57

The “politics of recognition” aimed at healing “historical wounds” requires just as much, if not more, incorporating the category of the good into historical analysis. Analyzing the origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarks that totalitarianisms created such conditions that “conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible.”58 This conclusion by the prominent thinker was one of the hard consequences of the humanitarian silence of the 1940s and 1950s when it came to working with the recent past of World War II and the analysis of the communist regime recreated by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

However, over time the search for the good became part of European59 and Ukrainian60 historiography. Still, the question of whether good and justice are possible, whether they may win amid mass violence and genocides, remains polemical and open to this day. This is particularly true from the point of view of when the stories of the people who saved others—from death sentences, deportations, total extermination—are introduced into scientific circulation.

The issue of collaboration also needs a balanced and conscientious analysis: both as a concept that requires a reasoned position from the author who defines it and as a phenomenon that requires a deeper comprehension, taking into account all the complex historical, social, anthropological, ethical, and political aspects. From the point of view of the Soviet, and partly of the contemporary Russian, canon, understanding collaboration during the wartime years of World War II was and still is a political question, as the state interests of the USSR were the point of reference to assess “betrayal.” Thus, collaboration was presented as cooperation with the enemy in the interest of the invader-state in order to harm the “native” government. In fact, such a definition allows the stigmatization of all the people who remained in the occupied territories while also supporting and legitimizing in a Soviet manner the concept of “traitor nations,” i.e. “Ukrainian-German bourgeois nationalists who assisted the fascists.”61 Still, from the very start of its formation, the Soviet canon of collaborationism lacked a reliable historical and political basis. As Sarah Fainberg observes, “Western Ukraine, which was brutally conquered by the Red Army and Sovietized in 1939, and where the Soviet regime was mainly associated with the NKVD repressions before, during and after the war, sees itself as a victim of both Soviet and Nazi atrocities.”62 Thus, the people of the region did not consider themselves loyal Soviet citizens. Characteristically, the USSR allies in the war also did not see these people as Soviet citizens. For instance, after the end of World War II, in May 1946, the government of the United Kingdom issued recommendations regarding repatriation of Soviet citizens from the United Kingdom to the USSR. It contains an eloquent definition of those to be compulsory repatriated: “Only persons who were both citizens of and actually within the Soviet Union on the 1st of September, 1939, will be regarded as Soviet citizens for this purpose.”63 Olesya Khromeychuk investigated that in the British documents the soldiers of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) were labeled as “undetermined Ukrainians” or “doubtful Poles” but under no circumstances as Soviet citizens.64