World War II Re-explored

Abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ukraine experienced political violence on an unprecedented scale. Political violence by the Soviet government and the German occupation authorities resulted in the death of millions, through starvation, deportations, and massacres, and left wounds which still have not fully healed. Independently of the Soviets and Nazis, mass political violence was carried out also by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) whose ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews left up to one hundred thousand dead, a legacy which could not be openly discussed or researched, neither in the Ukrainian SSR, nor in communist Poland. The Soviet Ukrainian historiography reduced the Ukrainian Nationalists to hangmen and collaborators with Nazi Germany, whereas emigre nationalists constructed an elaborate cult of these groups as heroes and martyrs. This instrumentalization of the recent past produced mutually exclusive narratives. Following the two Maidan revolutions in 2004 and 2013/2014, there have been ambitious attempts by the Ukrainian government to produce a new historical canon, in which the most radical wing of the OUN figures prominently. This narration requires some topics to be avoided altogether, whereas others are treated in a highly selective fashion. Official memory policy has triggered stormy discussions about the recent past, reflecting deep divisions in a post-Soviet Ukrainian society, which has only begun the process of coming to terms with a difficult past. (Less)