Stalin's Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination by Serhy s> Yekelchyk (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 773 As a memorial volume, the text workswell, aided by the inclusion of photographsof each survivor(then and now) and eight pages of sketchesof life in Auschwitz by the survivorJan Komski. To be fully effective as a historical text, this book really needs to be read alongside a more detailed study. The editor provides a brief historicalintroduction, outlining the context for these memories,but this is not reallyadequatein termsof providinga clear sense of either the historicalor the historiographicalcontext. For example, a subtext that runs throughout the book concerns Polish-Jewishrelations. In his introduction , the editornotes the existenceof two majorcurrentsin Polishattitudes towards the Jews, philosemitism and antisemitism(p.2). Lukas insists that a 'smallminorityof Poles openly approvedof German policies toward theJews and [.. .] activelyaided the Nazis', while otherswere 'passivehumanitarians', and some actively assistedPolishJews. This is undeniablytrue and a number of intervieweesrecount their horrorat German treatmentof theJews and/or their efforts to offer assistance. While we should never forget that primary responsibilitylies with the German occupiers, Lukas neverthelesspresents a somewhat simplistic picture in his introduction, making no mention of the recent controversyover Polish involvementin the massacresatJedwabne and elsewhere,or of more criticalassessmentsof the role of Polish clergyin hiding Jewish children (in terms of their attitudesin some cases to attemptsby relatives or representativesof the Jewish community to retrieve these children after the war). An additionalproblem, from an academic perspective,lies in the uncritical approach to testimony: it is unclear how these testimonies have been constructed .The majorityare based on interviewswith the editor;some are based on interviewswith family members or elsewhere (e.g. transcriptsof television programmes);others are drawn from previously published memoirs. In the case of interviews, we do not know what questions were asked or how the transcriptshave been edited. No attemptis made to identifyor tease out some of the differencesbetween these testimonies. Given the now extensive critical literature on Holocaust testimony and traumatic memory, this is again potentiallyproblematicfrom an academic point of view. In conclusion, if approached as a memorialvolume and/or a collection of oral histories, this is a fascinating book. However, it is one that should be handled with care and needs to be supplemented and contextualized from other sources if it is to be used for scholarlypurposes. Department of Theology & Religion ISABELWOLLASTON University ofBinningham Yekelchyk, Serhy. Stalin'sEmpireof Memoy:Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination. Universityof Toronto Press,Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London, 2004. XX + 231 PP. Illustrations.Map. Notes. Bibliography . Index. $53.00: ?32.00. SERHY YEKELCHYK has writtena scrupulouslyresearchedand exhaustivestudy of the forging of Stalinist representationsof Ukrainian history, which casts 774 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 valuable light on the nature and limits of the Party'seffective power in the field of propaganda.He not only establisheshow the Grand Narrative- or, more exactly, the variousnarratives- of Stalinistmythologywere writtenbut also explores how they were received and how centre-peripheryrelations worked in the field of ideology and propaganda.Yekelchyksuggests,in common with most contemporaryhistorians,that the totalitarianmodel needs, if not to be jettisoned, at least to be refined,pointing to the periphery'sattempts to modulate the centre's rhetoric and the tendency of local elites' views to diverge from those of the authoritiesin Moscow. Yekelchyk adopts a chronological approach, examining how Ukrainian historiansand writerswere enjoined in the I930S to collaboratein the refashioning of Ukrainian history in accordance with Moscow's preoccupations. The late twenties and early thirtiessaw a series of attackson leading Ukrainian historiansof both left and right for nationalistdeviations and failure to pen works celebrating the class struggle and inculcating Soviet patriotism. Waves of arrestsensued and it was not until 1938that Ukrainiannationalism began to be exploitedby the regime in tandem with the gradualrehabilitation of Russian national tradition.The promotion of the 'GreatUkrainiannation' continued with the annexation of Western Ukraine in 1939 and the outbreak of war in I94I, culminating,as a trend,in I943. The illusionsabout the rebirth of the nation thereby encouragedwere rapidlyshatteredafter the war, when the emphasiswas firmlyplaced on the superiorityof the Big Brother,Russia. The seventeenth-centuryunion with Russia, presented before the war (on Stalin'scommand) as a lesser evil and during it as part of the historicalfight for freedom, became a beneficial, inevitable and voluntary 'reunification' (thoughnot withoutbecoming a focus of...