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REPORT
The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past Volodymyr Viatrovych is erasing the country’s racist and bloody history — stripping pogroms and ethnic cleansing from the official archives.
• BY JOSH COHEN
• MAY 2, 2016
When it comes to politics and history, an accurate memory can be a dangerous
thing.
In Ukraine, as the country struggles with its identity, that’s doubly true. While
Ukrainian political parties try to push the country toward Europe orRussia, a
young, rising Ukrainian historian named Volodymyr Viatrovych has placed
himself at the center of that fight. Advocating a nationalist, revisionist history
that glorifies the country’s move to independence — and purges bloody and
opportunistic chapters — Viatrovych has attempted to redraft the country’s
modern history to whitewash Ukrainian nationalist groups’ involvement in the
Holocaust and mass ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War II. And right
now, he’s winning.
In May 2015, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a law that
mandated the transfer of the country’s complete set of archives, from the
“Soviet organs of repression,” such as the KGB and its decedent, the Security
Service of Ukraine (SBU), to a government organization called the Ukrainian
Institute of National Memory. Run by the young scholar — and charged with
“implementation of state policy in the field of restoration and preservation of
national memory of the Ukrainian people” — the institute received millions of
documents, including information on political dissidents, propaganda
campaigns against religion, the activities of Ukrainian nationalist
organizations, KGB espionage and counter-espionage activities, and criminal
cases connected to the Stalinist purges. Under the archives law, one of four
“memory laws” written by Viatrovych, the institute’s anodyne-sounding
mandate is merely a cover to present a biased and one-sided view of modern
Ukrainian history — and one that could shape the country’s path forward.
The controversy centers on a telling of World War II history that amplifies
Soviet crimes and glorifies Ukrainian nationalist fighters while dismissing the
vital part they played in ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews from 1941 to 1945
after the Nazi invasion of the former Soviet Union. Viatrovych’s vision of
history instead tells the story of partisan guerrillas who waged a brave battle
for Ukrainian independence against overwhelming Soviet power. It also sends
a message to those who do not identify with the country’s ethno-nationalist
mythmakers — such as the many Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who still
celebrate the heroism of the Red Army during World War II — that they’re on
the outside. And more pointedly, scholars now fear that they risk reprisal for
not toeing the official line — or calling Viatrovych on his historical distortions.
Under Viatrovych’s reign, the country could be headed for a new, and
frightening, era of censorship.
Although events of 75 years ago may seem like settled history, they are very much a part of the information war raging between Russia and Ukraine.
Although events of 75 years ago may seem like settled history, they are very much a
part of the information war raging between Russia and Ukraine.
The revisionism focuses on two Ukrainian nationalist groups: the Organization
of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA),
which fought to establish an independent Ukraine. During the war, these
groups killed tens of thousands of Jews and carried out a brutal campaign of
ethnic cleansing that killed as many as 100,000 Poles. Created in 1929 to free
Ukraine from Soviet control, the OUN embraced the notion of an ethnically
pure Ukrainian nation.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the OUN and its charismatic
leader, Stepan Bandera, welcomed the invasion as a step toward Ukrainian
independence. Its members carried out a pogrom in Lviv that killed 5,000
Jews, and OUN militias played a major role in violence against the Jewish
population in western Ukraine that claimed the lives of up to 35,000 Jews.
Hitler was not interested in granting Ukraine independence, however. By 1943
the OUN violently seized control of the UPA and declared itself opposed to both
the Germans, then in retreat, and the oncoming Soviets. Many UPA troops
had already assisted the Nazis as Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in the
extermination of hundreds and thousands of Jews in western Ukraine in 1941
and 1942, and they now became foot soldiers in another round of ethnic
cleansing in western Ukraine in 1943 to 1944, this time directed primarily
against Poles. When the Soviets were closing in 1944, the
OUN resumedcooperation with the Germans and continued to fight the Soviets
into the 1950s, before finally being crushed by the Red Army.
This legacy of sacrifice against the Soviets continues to prompt many
Ukrainian nationalists to view Bandera and the OUN-UPA as heroes whose
valor kept the dream of Ukrainian statehood alive.
Now, as Ukraine seeks to free itself from Russia’s grip, Ukrainian nationalists
are providing the Kremlin’s propaganda machine fodder to support the claim
that post-revolutionary Ukraine is overrun by fascists and neo-Nazis. Thenew
law, which promises that people who “publicly exhibit a disrespectful attitude”
toward these groups or “deny the legitimacy” of Ukraine’s 20th century
struggle for independence will be prosecuted (though no punishment is
specified) also means that independent Ukraine is being partially built on a
falsified narrative of the Holocaust.
By transferring control of the nation’s archives to Viatrovych, Ukraine’s
nationalists assured themselves that management of the nation’s historical
memory is now in the “correct” hands.
* * *
From the beginning of his career, he was an up-and-comer. Viatrovych has the
equivalent of a Ph.D. from Lviv University, located in the western Ukrainian
city where he was born, and is articulate and passionate, albeit sometimes with
a short fuse. The 35-year-old scholar first made a professional name for
himself at the Institute for the Study of the Liberation Movement known by its
Ukrainian acronym TsDVR, an organization founded to promote the heroic
narrative of the OUN-UPA, where he began working in 2002. By 2006, he had
become the organization’s director. In this time, he published books glorifying
the OUN-UPA, established programs to help young Ukrainian scholars
promote the nationalist viewpoint, and served as a bridge to ultra-nationalists
in the diaspora who largely fund TsDVR.
In 2008, in addition to his role at TsDVR, Viktor Yushchenko, then president,
appointed Viatrovych head of the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) archives.
Yuschenko made the promotion of OUN-UPA mythology a fundamental part of
his legacy, rewriting school textbooks, renaming streets, and honoring OUN-
UPA leaders as “heroes of Ukraine.” As Yuschenko’s leading memory manager
— both at TsDVR and the SBU — Viatrovych was his right-hand man in this
crusade. He continued to push the state-sponsored heroic representation of the
OUN-UPA and their leaders Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman
Shukhevych. “The Ukrainian struggle for independence is one of the
cornerstones of our national self-identification,”
Viatrovych wrote in Pravda in 2010.
“Because without UPA, without Bandera, without Shukhevych there would not
be a contemporary Ukrainian state, there would not be a contemporary
Ukrainian nation.” Viatrovych is alsofrequently quoted in the Ukrainian media,
once even going so far as todefend the Ukrainian SS Galician division that
fought on the side of the Nazis during World War II.
After Viktor Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, Viatrovych faded from
view. Yanukovych hailed from eastern Ukraine and was a friend of Russia, and
didn’t share the scholar’s nationalist reading of history. During this period
Viatrovych spent time in North America on a series of lecture tours, as well as a
short sojourn as a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
(HURI). He also continued his academic activism, writing books and articles
promoting the heroic narrative of the OUN-UPA. In 2013 he tried to crash and
disrupt a workshop on Ukrainian and Russian nationalism taking place at the
Harriman Institute at Columbia. When the Maidan Revolution swept
Yanukovych out of power in February 2014, Viatrovych returned to
prominence.
The new president, Poroshenko, appointed Viatrovych to head the Ukrainian
Institute of National Memory — a prestigious appointment for a relatively
young scholar. Although it’s not clear what drove Poroshenko’s decision,
Viatrovych’s previous service under Yuschenko undoubtedly provided him the
necessary bona fides with the nationalists, and Poroshenko’s decision was
most likely a political payoff to the nationalists who supported the Maidan
Revolution. Nationalists provided much of the muscle in the battle against
Yanukovych’s security forces during the Revolution and formed the core of
private battalions such as Right Sector, which played a key role fighting
separatist forces in the Donbass after the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Though his political star has continued to rise, Viatrovych’s integrity as a
historian has been widely attacked within Western countries as well as by a
number of respected historians in Ukraine. According to Jared McBride, a
research scholar at the Kennan Institute and a fellow at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the glorification of the OUN-UPA is not just
about history. It’s a current political project to consolidate a very one-sided
view within Ukrainian society that really only has a deep resonance within the
western province of Galicia.”
Though Viatrovych’s view is popular in western Ukraine where many Bandera
monuments and street names exist (TsDVR itself is located on Bandera Street
in Lviv), many Ukrainians in the south and east of the countrydon’t
appreciate the World War II-era nationalist’s legacy. In Luhansk, in the
country’s east, and Crimea, local governments erected monuments to the
victims of the OUN-UPA. In this regard, imposing the nationalists’ version of
history on the entire country requires eradicating the beliefs and identity of
many other Ukrainians who do not share the nationalists’ narrative.
To that effect, Viatrovych has dismissed historical events not comporting with
this narrative as “Soviet propaganda.” In his 2006 book, The OUN’s Position
Towards the Jews: Formulation of a position against the backdrop of a catastrophe,
he attempted to exonerate the OUN from its collaboration in the Holocaust by
ignoring the overwhelming mass of historical literature. The book was
widely panned by Western historians. University of Alberta professor John-Paul
Himka, one of the leading scholars of Ukrainian history for three
decades, described it as “employing a series of dubious procedures: rejecting
sources that compromise the OUN, accepting uncritically censored sources
emanating from émigré OUN circles, failing to recognize anti-Semitism in
OUN texts.”
Even more worrisome for the future integrity of Ukraine’s archives under Viatrovych is his notoriety among Western historians for his willingness to allegedly ignore or even falsify historical documents.
Even more worrisome for the future integrity of Ukraine’s archives under Viatrovych
is his notoriety among Western historians for his willingness to allegedly ignore or
even falsify historical documents.“Scholars on his staff publish document collections
that are falsified,” said Jeffrey Burds, a professor of Russian and Soviet history at
Northeastern University.“ I know this because I have seen the originals, made copies,
and have compared their transcriptions to the originals.”
Burds described an 898-page book of transcribed documents produced by one
of Viatrovych’s colleagues, which Viatrovych uses to support his claim that he
will release anything from Ukraine’s archives for review by researchers. Burds,
however, described this as a “monument to cleansing and falsifying with
words, sentences, entire paragraphs removed. What was removed?” Burds
continued. “Anything criticizing Ukrainian nationalism, expressions of dislike
and conflict within the OUN/UPA leadership, sections where the respondents
cooperated and gave evidence against other nationalists, records of atrocities.”
Burds’s experience was not unusual. I corresponded with and interviewed
numerous historians for this article, and their grievances against Viatrovych
were remarkably consistent: ignored established historical facts, falsified and
sanitized documents, and restricted access to SBU archives under his watch.
“I have had trouble working in the Security Service of Ukraine Archive when
Viatrovych was in charge of it,” said Marco Carynnyk, a Ukrainian-Canadian
émigré and longtime independent researcher on 20th century Ukrainian
history. “I also have evidence that Viatrovych falsified the historical record in
his own publications and then found excuses not to let me see records that
might expose that.”
McBride echoes Carynnyk’s views, noting, “When Viatrovych was the chief
archivist at the SBU, he created a digital archive open to Ukrainian citizens and
foreigners. Despite this generally positive development, he and his team made
sure to exclude any documents from the archive that may cast a negative light
on the OUN-UPA, including their involvement in the Holocaust and other war
crimes.”
As frustrating an experience as many historians already endured with
Viatrovych, placing all of the nation’s most sensitive archives under his control
is an indication that things will only get worse. Based on his history,
Viatrovych could be expected to tightly control what is — and is not — available
from the archives at the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
* * *
Ukrainian historians have openly fretted about how the new archives law will
affect their research. The Union of Archivists in Ukraine opposed the law, and
Ukrainian historian Stanislav Serhiyenko slammed it as an opportunity for
Viatrovych and his Memory Institute to “monopolize and restrict access to a
certain significant period of documentary layers that do not meet its primitive
vision of the modern history of Ukraine or, in the worst case, can lead to the
destruction of documents.
Unbiased study of Soviet history, OUN, UPA, etc., will be impossible.” Seventy
historians signed an open letter to Poroshenko asking him to veto the draft law
that bans criticism of the OUN-UPA. Viatrovych countered, “The concern about
the possible interference of politicians in academic discussions, which was one
of the main reasons behind the letter, is unnecessary.”
Serhiyenko’s concerns, however, are well founded, and a recent incident
demonstrates the pressure Ukrainian historians face to whitewash the OUN-
UPA’s atrocities.
After the open letter was published, the legislation’s sponsor, Yuri
Shukhevych, reacted furiously. Shukhevych, the son of UPA leader Roman
Shukhevych and a longtime far-right political activist himself, fired off aletter to
Minister of Education Serhiy Kvit claiming, “Russian special services”
produced the letter and demanded that “patriotic” historians rebuff it. Kvit,
also a longtime far-right activist and author of an admiring biography one of the
key theoreticians of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism, in turn ominously
highlighted the signatories of Ukrainian historians on his copy of the letter.
Subsequently, Kvit approached at least one of these Ukrainian historians, an
established and well-regarded scholar, and demanded that he write a response
to the open letter reversing his position and condemning it.
As the letter noted, the four laws’ “content and spirit contradicts one of the
most fundamental political rights: the right to freedom of speech.… Over the
past 15 years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has invested enormous resources in the
politicization of history. It would be ruinous if Ukraine went down the same
road, however partially or tentatively.”
If Ukrainian historians cannot safely sign a simple letter related to free speech,
what chance is there that they will be allowed to perform objective research on
sensitive topics once Viatrovych gains control of the nation’s critical archives?
In response to an e-mail I sent to Viatrovych on Feb. 24 (in which I alerted him
to the publication of this article and also asked him for comment regarding the
depiction of World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist organizations in
contemporary Ukraine), he vehemently denied the accusations leveled against
him in this article.
Viatrovych called the Western historians’ allegations that he ignores or falsifies
historical documents “baseless.” In response to a question about whether the
Union of Archivists of Ukraine’s concerns were valid, Viatrovych replied,
“During all of my work connected to the archives, I have worked exclusively
with their opening, therefore I don’t see any reasons to fear that I will now
restrict access to them.”
In that same response, Viatrovych also denied the OUN and UPA ethically
cleansed Jews and Poles after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, dismissing
the accusations as an “integral part of the USSR’s informational war against
the Ukrainian liberation movement beginning from the Second World War.”
While Viatrovych also stated (via e-mail) that some OUN members held anti-
Semitic views, he argues that “the largest group of OUN members were those
who thought that the extermination of Jews by the Nazis was not their
concern, since their main goal was to defend the Ukrainian population against
German repression,” Viatrovych wrote. “It is for this reason that [at the
beginning of 1943] they [the OUN] created the UPA. Accusations that the
soldiers of this army took part in the Holocaust are unfounded since at the
moment of its creation, the Nazis had almost completed the destruction of the
Jews,” he concluded.
The problem is that Viatrovych’s defense of the OUN and UPA doesn’t comport
with the detailed evidence presented by numerous Western historians.
The OUN’s ideology was explicitly anti-Semitic, describing Jews as a
“predominantly hostile body within our national organism” and used such
language as “combat Jews as supporters of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime”
and “Ukraine for the Ukrainians! … Death to the Muscovite-Jewish commune!”
In fact, even before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, OUN leaders such as
Yaroslav Stetsko explicitly endorsed German-style extermination of Jews.
Viatrovych’s logic for the UPA also rings hollow. Hundreds of testimonies from
Jewish survivors — many exhaustively documented by Himka — confirm that
the UPA slaughtered many of the Jews still alive in western Ukraine by 1943.
Moreover, while Viatrovych presents the UPA’s killing of between 70,000 and
100,000 Poles in 1943-1944 as a side effect of a “Polish-Ukrainian War,”
historical documentation once again contradicts him.
Indeed, UPA reports confirm that the group killed Poles as systematically as the
Nazis did Jews. UPA supreme commander Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi
explicitly stated: “We should carry out a large-scale liquidation action against
Polish elements. During the evacuation of the German Army, we should find
an appropriate moment to liquidate the entire male population between 16 and
60 years old.” Given that over 70 percent of the leading UPA cadres possessed
a background as Nazi collaborators, none of this is surprising.
While Viatrovych’s debates with Western historians may seem academic, this
is far from true. Last June, Kvit’s Ministry of Education issued a directive to
teachers regarding the “necessity to accentuate the patriotism and morality of
the activists of the liberation movement,” including depicting the UPA as a
“symbol of patriotism and sacrificial spirit in the struggle for an independent
Ukraine” and Bandera as an “outstanding representative” of the Ukrainian
people.”
More recently, Viatrovych’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory proposed
that the city of Kiev rename two streets after Bandera and the former supreme
commander of both the UPA and the Nazi-supervised Schutzmannschaft
Roman Shukhevych.
The consolidation of Ukrainian democracy — not to mention its ambition to join
the European Union — requires the country to come to grips with the darker
aspects of its past. But if Viatrovych has his way, this reckoning may never
come to pass, and Ukraine will never achieve a full reckoning with its
complicated past.