Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 by John-Paul Himka

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 by John-Paul Himka Ilya Gerasimov (bio) John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2021). 505 pp. Bibliography. Place and Name Index. ISBN: 978-3-8382-1548-8. This book review was to have been written by a different reviewer a year ago. The reviewer eventually decided not to write a review, but never explained the reasons for this. Besides issues of professional ethics, there might be a political reason for such sabotage, at least after February 24, 2022. With the Russian Federation unleashing a genocidal war against Ukraine under the absurd pretext of its denazification, some may see a discussion of the dark pages in Ukraine's past as facilitating Russian propaganda and undermining the Ukrainian cause in general. If so, it is flawed logic. If anything set post-Soviet Ukraine apart from Russia over the past two decades, it was not the rule of law or the level of corruption but a discussion of Ukrainian society's complicity in World War II–era genocides – the Holocaust and the so-called Volhynian massacre of Poles. Even if inconsistent and halfhearted, public debates of these traumatic events in Ukraine were matched in Putin's Russian Federation by a total denial of its own rich genocidal past at the expense of Soviet history's hysterical glorification. Russia's denialism went as far as to repudiate responsibility for episodes that were officially recognized as criminal by Soviet officialdom back in 1990, such as the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners in 1940. Russia's Memorial Society, the main custodian of historical memory of Soviet terror and its perpetrators, was legally and illegally harassed for years until it was required by the Supreme Court to shut down in 2021 and was officially outlawed in 2022. Systematic retrospective populism – the glorification of the righteous Soviet nation in the past – has evolved into full-scale domestic Nazism, as the Soviet has increasingly become identified with ethnically Russian, and a revival of the Russian-Soviet idealized community has become the ultimate political priority. By contrast, a critical or at least skeptical attitude to Ukrainian nationalism of the 1940s has prevented modern Ukrainian society from embracing organicist nationalism, even in the face of Russia's creeping aggression since 2014.1 When Russia unleashed open war against Ukraine in February [End Page 339] 2022, the diverse politics of history in the two countries became a major factor in drawing a clear-cut distinction between the Ukrainian and Russian sides as moral and immoral, humane and inhumane. Therefore, the publication of Himka's book discussing the painful topic of participation in the Holocaust by Ukrainian champions of national independence – the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – is the best testimony to the Ukrainian culture's antifascist potential. The fact that the book by a prominent Canadian scholar was published not by a Canadian university press and especially not by a Ukrainian Canadian academic one, but by the German ibidem-Verlag – regardless of the author's own intentions – is a troubling sign. Likewise, potential reviewers' obvious inclination to shy away from discussing the book tells volumes about the state of the field of Ukrainian history. Namely, it is decades ahead of the history of the Soviet-German war as it is written in the Russian Federation or in America, where almost equally uncritical eulogies of the Soviet war effort are produced. Yet it is decades behind the German history of World War II or the way America's controversial past is treated by historians in the United States. Fully aware of the politically charged potential of his topic, John-Paul Himka, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Alberta, went out of his way to produce an impartial and factually bulletproof narrative. The book's style and composition are reminiscent of early twentieth-century positivist historiography. It is demonstratively empiricist and opens with the chapters "Historiography" and "Sources," which is almost unheard of in modern historical monographs. Given...