Читать книгу Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust - John-Paul Himka - Страница 13

A decisive turn in the historiography resulted from the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. The opening of the Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Soviet archives made available to scholars a vast amount of fresh material to understand the Holocaust in the east of Europe, including the activities of Ukrainian nationalists.79 Moreover, the political restraints on research were removed. Scholars in the postcommunist sphere could now write whatever they wished, free from censorship and communist party control. Polish scholars no longer had to refrain from writing about the fate of Poles in territories that were once in the Soviet Union but now formed parts of independent Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.80 Even Ukrainian nationalists had been worried about writing their own history as long as Ukraine was communist, since revealing too much could lead to reprisals against nationalists and their families still residing in Soviet Ukraine.81 Now those fears were gone. The result of these new sources and new freedoms was the blossoming of a diverse historiography on the question of the Ukrainian nationalists and the Jews during the Holocaust.

The first to professionally mine the new sources were two German scholars, Thomas Sandkühler and Dieter Pohl, who each produced a German-sized monograph on the Holocaust in Galicia, in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Both followed the practice of what was then mainstream Holocaust historiography: they paid relatively little attention to victims and their testimony and relied heavily on documents emanating from German structures. Pohl argued that the attitudes of the autochthonous, non-Jewish population were relatively unimportant in determining the general course and final outcome of the mass murder in Galicia: essentially the German occupation authorities made the decisions and executed them themselves. Whether resisting or aiding the Germans in the murder, the actions of what Pohl called “the Christian population” were of secondary importance in influencing events.82 Pohl characterized the Bandera faction of OUN as antisemitic for much of the war, particularly in the spring and summer of 1941 and again in 1944, as the Soviets closed in, stating also that in 1942-43 OUN distanced itself from the Germans’ murder of the Jews.83 (During the latter period Ukrainian opinion in general had cooled towards the Germans and their “final solution.”)84 Pohl was not able to link OUN directly to any concrete war crimes. His treatment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in relation to the Holocaust reached no clear conclusion.85 In my own review of Pohl’s book, I characterized it as follows: “This is an ambitious and pioneering work. It is not a synthesis based on a corpus of pre-existing monographs; instead, it attempts a comprehensive portrayal of the Holocaust in Galicia largely on the basis of primary sources. It opens the field for further, in-depth monographic research of specific problems and incidents.”86

It was in this period too that Jeffrey Burds began to lecture and write about OUN and UPA in an entirely new vein. Although the texts he published then did not directly concern the Holocaust but rather focused on the immediate postwar period,87 they demonstrated that sources in the newly opened post-Soviet archives could provide a much deeper knowledge of the nationalists’ actions than other historians had ever imagined. Also, his revelations about the ruthlessness of OUN and UPA helped break the spell of the nationalists’ own historiography.

Directly related to wartime OUN’s Jewish politics was a documentary publication by Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk: the full text, or rather texts, of the July 1941 autobiography of nationalist leader Yaroslav Stetsko, mentioned above in connection with Michael Hanusiak and to be discussed in some detail below.88 In their introduction to the autobiography Berkhoff and Carynnyk surveyed some of OUN’s anti-Jewish pronouncements, which they found to be written in “vicious language” and to be encouraging “a deadly antisemitism.”89

Martin Dean’s Collaboration in the Holocaust investigated the actions of local police in certain regions of Belarus and Ukraine during the Nazi occupation. Although a very valuable study, it exemplified a trend that was still strong in the 1990s: Dean studied the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without knowledge of the relevant East European languages. Dean was trained in history (his first book was on Austrian policy during the late-eighteenth century wars with revolutionary France) and was then employed in the war crimes unit in Scotland Yard. He moved from there to the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, where he has continued to write and compile impressive works on Holocaust history. Collaboration in the Holocaust was based on archival sources and eyewitness testimonies. It outlined the influence of OUN on the local Ukrainian police in German service and the role of those policemen later in UPA. But his work focused on areas outside the center of OUN and UPA activity, which was Galicia and Volhynia.

With the weakening and then total collapse of the Soviet system, OUN and UPA came under reexamination in Ukraine. After decades of condemnation of the nationalist organizations, calls for rehabilitation emerged in the public discourse, particularly in the Lviv newspaper Za vil’nu Ukrainu.90 Already in March 1990, the foremost proponent of reform in Soviet Ukraine, Rukh (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy—People’s Movement of Ukraine), raised the issue of the nationalists’ political rehabilitation.91 Before long, the government began to turn to Ukraine’s scholarly establishment to advise on the issue. On 12 June 1991 the head of the commission on defense and state security of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, Vasyl Durdynets, wrote to the Ukrainian academy of sciences with the request to find someone to prepare a background paper on OUN, UPA, and the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The task was entrusted to Viktor Koval, a historian in his mid-seventies specializing in the Second World War. Koval had studied in his native Kyiv and worked there in the academy’s Institute of the History of Ukraine. The text he speedily produced, by 1 July, argued that “OUN and UPA conducted a national-liberation struggle for the construction of a sovereign and democratic Ukraine, in which people of all nationalities would enjoy the same political and social rights.” Durdynets, who had long been an official in the Communist Party of Ukraine, repudiated the report and demanded that the academy withdraw it and replace it with another. The academy complied immediately, formally withdrawing Koval’s report on 3 July.92 But the OUN-UPA issue would not go away for the Ukrainian public, government, or academia. In particular, veterans’ groups—Red Army veterans and UPA veterans—were confronting one another, especially on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of UPA celebrated in 1992. In 1993 the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) again decided that there was a need to investigate the legacy of OUN-UPA, but the efforts of a parliamentary committee proved insufficient to the task. Finally, in 1997 a working group of historians, under the leadership of Stanislav Kulchytsky, was charged with unearthing the true history of OUN-UPA and evaluating its heritage. The task proved more complicated than anyone expected, and the commission made no concrete progress until the early 2000s.

A few studies related to our topic did appear in Ukraine in the 1990s. Yakov Khonigsman’s short book on the Catastrophe of Lviv Jewry, which came out in 1993, built on earlier studies, especially on the works of Philip Friedman and Tatiana Berenstein (the latter unavailable to me), as well as on a modest selection of documentation from Lviv archives. It made little use of memoirs and testimonies. In fact, in the foreword to the book, Bogdan Semenov stated that the volume “is not written from the words of eyewitnesses, where in the main the element of subjectivity or emotionality figures,” but “according to the materials of archival documents.”93 Khonigsman avoided the topic of any OUN involvement in the events he described. Later, in 1998, Khonigsman published a book that looked at the Holocaust across Western Ukraine, encompassing the Ukrainian historical regions of Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia, but primarily concentrating on Galicia. This book made more use of survivor testimonies and was more deeply researched in archives, principally in the Lviv archives, but also in those of Kyiv and elsewhere. In this book Khonigsman pointed out how antisemitic OUN was.94 Like many other historians before him, he did not differentiate the militia established by OUN from the Ukrainian auxiliary police established later by the Germans; hence he ascribed crimes of the militia to the auxiliary police.95 Khonigsman had nothing to say about UPA and the Jews.

More interesting was a book on “the behavior of the local population of Eastern Galicia in the years of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’“—Zhanna Kovba’s Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla (Humaneness in the Abyss of Hell) published in 1998 by the Judaica Institute in Kyiv. Kovba conducted extensive archival research, consulting in particular the records of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in the State Archive of Lviv Oblast (DALO) and OUN documents in the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (TsDAVO). She consulted Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian memoirs and also interviewed many people from throughout Galicia who had lived through the events of World War II. It was a book with an openly declared agenda: to destroy “the two fundamental deceitful myths which impede objective perception of the relations among peoples in these difficult times: that Ukrainians were almost the instigators of German crimes against the Jews...; that Jews were guilty of annihilating Ukrainians under Soviet rule.”96 And although Kovba had a tendency to make generalizations and prefer evidence that showed both Ukrainians and Jews in a favorable light,97 she also included information that went against the grain of her overall interpretation. She was unwilling to hazard an evaluation of OUN’s stance and actions during the Jewish tragedy because she found the evidence too contradictory; more research was required in order to make sense of things.98 What comes through most clearly in Kovba’s book is the mixed feelings of the 1990s: with the collapse of communism, both Jewish suffering and Ukrainian suffering were being articulated, and it was difficult to afford recognition to and reconcile them both.99

The emergence of a cult of OUN and UPA in Ukraine provoked a reaction from a maverick within the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, Viktor Polishchuk. Polishchuk had been born into an Orthodox family in Volhynia, but in 1940, during the first period of Soviet rule in the region, he and his mother and siblings were deported to Kazakhstan. (His father had been arrested by the Soviets in 1939 and was never seen again.) They were allowed to return to Ukraine after the Soviet reconquest in 1944, but to Dnipro oblast rather than Volhynia. In 1946 the family moved to Poland (Polishchuk’s mother was Polish). Polishchuk studied law there and worked as a lawyer and a prosecutor; but after he openly declared his Ukrainian nationality in 1956 he was fired from the prosecutor’s office and endured other instances of discrimination. In 1981 he emigrated to Canada, where, being very particular about proper Ukrainian usage, he worked as an editor in Ukrainian-language media. Based in Toronto and well informed through the circumstances of his employment about Ukrainian diaspora life, he came into contact with nationalist circles; he had not been acquainted with nationalists in Ukraine or Poland. Although he had no personal experience of what OUN-UPA had done in Volhynia during the war, he knew from friends and relatives that the nationalists had slaughtered many of its former Polish inhabitants, including members of his own extended family.100

A follower of the debates in Ukraine after the fall of communism, he was upset by prominent political and cultural figures calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA and blamed the Ukrainian diaspora for reintroducing nationalism to Ukraine.101 This is what provoked him to write Hirka pravda (Bitter Truth), published at his own cost in 1995. (The book appeared in Polish in the same year and later in an English translation.) The text was an indictment of OUN and UPA for the mass murder of the Polish inhabitants of Volhynia. At this time, by his own admission, Polishchuk did not have enough material to write about UPA’s murder of Jews and others.102 Later on he found plenty of relevant documentation,103 but his documentary publications remained focused primarily on the murder of Poles.104 His 1995 text did not yet use archival material, although he hoped that soon such material would become available.105 Later Polishchuk did gain access to the relevant archival documents and cited and reproduced them in his publications. But the 1995 text was based entirely on published sources as well as some personal communications.

Polishchuk’s book was not well received by Western, Ukrainian, or Polish historians, even though Polishchuk wrote from an anti-Soviet perspective and was careful to make a distinction between Ukrainians as such and OUN.106 The prolific Canadian historian of modern Ukraine David Marples categorized the book as differing little from the Soviet perspective “in terms of the one-sidedness of the outline.”107 Volodymyr Serhiichuk, a pro-nationalist Ukrainian scholar best known for numerous documentary compilations on modern Ukrainian history, devoted a short book to a refutation of Polishchuk’s Hirka pravda.108 Polishchuk himself he called a “supposed Ukrainian” (nibyto ukrainets’). Yurii Shapoval, one of the first Ukrainian historians to work with NKVD documents, rejected Polishchuk’s work as anti-Ukrainian.109 The dean of Lviv’s Ukrainian historians, the late Yaroslav Isaievych, labeled Polishchuk “a ‘professional’ of anti-Ukrainian hysteria.”110 Polish specialists in modern Ukrainian history were of a similar opinion. Ryszard Torzecki called him a former prosecutor for the NKVD (which he was not) and felt that he “was not worth talking about.”111 His views were also criticized by Rafał Wnuk, although not as vehemently: “W. Poliszczuk holds a special place among the non-scientists. As a Ukrainian political scientist who deals, so to speak, ‘scientifically’ with the problem of Ukrainian nationalism, he is sometimes seen as a credible person.”112 Both Shapoval and Torzecki equated Polishchuk with a much less credible writer, the propagandist Edward Prus.113

In my opinion, this was not a fair equation. There are one-sided authors, and there are unbalanced authors. Prus, unfortunately, belonged to the latter category. In communist Poland he specialized in propaganda against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church and Ukrainian nationalists and continued in the same vein after communism’s collapse; in both eras he was closely associated with the Polish nationalist right. Prus had been born in and survived the war in Galicia. As a teenager he joined in the defence of Poles threatened by UPA and later fought UPA in the “destruction battalions” (istrebitel’nye batal’ony).114 He later emigrated to Poland, earned a doctorate at the University of Warsaw, held various academic posts—none of any prominence, and wrote prolifically.

The book most relevant to the concerns of this monograph is Prus’s Holocaust po banderowsku (Holocaust Banderite-Style), published in 1995. Among much else, the book included an account of a meeting Prus claimed he had in London with Karl Popper, whom he described as “undoubtedly one of the most outstanding Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.” According to Prus, Popper called him, i.e., Prus, “the most outstanding expert in this area [the history of UPA] in Poland, and not only in Poland.” Also, Popper supposedly expressed amazement that the president of Ukraine at that time, Leonid Kravchuk, had not condemned the murders perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists against Jews and Poles. “And he warned the Jews that they should stop playing together with Ukrainian nationalists at the expense of the Poles, because this fraternization with criminals under the flag of totalitarianism is a blind alley, a road to nowhere.”115 To me, this account sounds like a fantasy or at least a hearty embellishment. (Popper passed away shortly before Holocaust po banderowsku was published.)

I think there was also a strong dose of fantasy in the “evidence” he brought to bear. Much of what he had to say was based on personal communications in his possession and was therefore unverifiable. Sometimes he gave proper citations for material he quoted, but in other cases he offered no citations whatsoever. For example, Holocaust po banderowsku contained a long quotation very relevant to the theme of this study attributed to Mykhailo Stepaniak, a member of the central OUN leadership captured by the Soviets; the quotation concerned the Third Extraordinary Assembly of OUN (August 1943).116 Prus offered no citation, although presumably the text would have been taken from the record of one of Stepaniak’s interrogations. I have not, however, been able to find the passage Prus quoted in the archival record of Stepaniak’s interrogation of 25 August 1944117 nor in published versions of his interrogations.118 Moreover, the quoted passage refers to the presence of Ivan Mitrynga at the congress, which seems highly unlikely, given that Mitrynga had broken with the Banderites in September 1941 and had joined forces with their rival Taras Bulba-Borovets. I suspect that the passage was the product of a vivid imagination rather than an excerpt from a genuinely existing document.

Moreover, he wrote in a style that had more in common with biblical prophecy than with historical scholarship. Referring to Stella Krenzbach, an alleged Jewish veteran of UPA to whom is attributed a memoir praising the Ukrainian nationalists,119 Prus stated that she acted “undoubtedly from a whisper from Satan, because Satan directed the hand of the genocidaire of Polish and Jewish children,” and that she was guilty of “blaspheming against Yahweh.”120 He also speculated that the apocalypse predicted by St. John the Revelator was not a once and final confrontation between good and evil but would be arriving in installments, one of which was the era of UPA. It was a time “of three clearly apocalyptic figures, as Hitler, Stalin, and [UPA commander Roman] Shukhevych-’Chuprynka,’ and of three hells let loose in the cause of and with the active permission of those who supported them: Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Ukrainian chauvinists.”121 In sum, Prus’s texts are untrustworthy and will not be cited in the narrative that follows. To equate Polishchuk with him is, I feel, a serious error.