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What were Ukrainians like when they entered World War II and how did they become so? What were they like when they came out of it and how did they become so? Did that war truly end for Ukrainians (especially with regard to the attack on Ukraine by the Russian Federation in 2014)? The aim of this work is to search for and reflect on the explanatory concepts that would allow the description and analysis of catastrophe and betrayal, of the modes of survival and the search for joy, the growth of national self-awareness and the abandonment of national roots, the heroic deeds and cowardice, the righteousness and involvement in killing, the violence and escape, the guilt and sacrifice of the people who lived in Ukraine and who were dragged into the maelstrom of World War II. It is an attempt to approach the analysis of the life of ordinary citizens, while avoiding the logic of binary oppositions, artificial categorizations, and divisions into relatively “good” and relatively “bad” Ukrainians.

The scope of the problem raised seems overwhelming, but every journey begins with a single step. As we take such a “step,” it is too early to expect some definitive conclusions and decisions.

The objective of the research is to think on the obstacles that prevent adequate description of the personal experiences of World War II in Ukrainian lands. Among such obstacles are: their non-uniqueness; the “unfinished past” with its political and ethical challenges; the specifics of the visibility and invisibility of Ukrainians that marked both historical and political global discourse; the notions about the geographical and political borders of Ukraine; features of Ukrainians’ existence as a community and as a society; the diversity and instability of identification models for people who did or did not deal with the experience of war; the problem of an adequate vocabulary to describe life under occupation and the lack of an established chronology and chronotope of World War II from the perspective of its contemporaries.

The depiction of the human experience of surviving (or not surviving) war always encounters a series of obstacles when the stories about valor, sacrifice, despair, betrayal, death enforce the impossibility of unbiased analysis and sometime give rise to strategies of intentional omission. And politics, including the politics of memory, encourages selective historical amnesia that may have various objectives: from ensuring unity of the nation to justifying the conduct of elites; from the needs of economic modernization to creating a system of international unions; from legitimizing social changes to restoring trust in civil society. As Tony Judt2 notes, all European states with wartime experience failed to adequately describe it. Fear of being prosecuted for collaborationism,3 non-heroism of people under occupation,4 assigning all responsibility for the war to Germany,5 different vocabularies to describe things done by Germans and things done by “us,” myths of Resistance Movements,6 artificial ideological concepts of national unity in the face of the enemy,7 the long-lasting invisibility of the victims and executioners of the Holocaust, propaganda claims about the state being the “victim of an insidious enemy”—all were both the cause and the result of the fact that “Europeans (governments and peoples alike) postponed any collective effort to come to terms with the memory of war that had rounded them out. … [T]hey simply left the matter unresolved, buried, neglected, and selectively forgotten.”8

Timothy Snyder labels the history of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, the history of “bloodlands,” as at least fourteen million people died there during the 1930s and 1940s. As Hannah Arendt mentions in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, “Stalin’s war against the Ukraine in the early thirties was twice as effective as the terribly bloody German invasion and occupation.”9

Anne Applebaum states: “This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. … During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes.”10

In Tony Judt’s account: “If the problem in Western Europe has been a shortage of memory, in the continent’s other half the problem is reversed. Here, there is too much memory, too many pasts on which people can draw, usually as a weapon against the past of someone else.”11

According to Chris Lorenz, “most historians regarded 50 years’ distance as the absolute minimum for (warm) memory to ‘cool down’ and to transform into (cold) history.”12 Yet “too much memory,” encountered by historians in the second half of the twentieth century, not only did not “cool down,” but also set the problem of the inevitability of the past, remaining a burdensome part of the present.13 And this has changed and continues to change historical science. Aleida Assmann observed that historians “renounced the idea that the past is a sphere of something that no longer exists and thus is unreachable for human influence.” Assmann emphasizes that the past, considered as done and dusted, “under certain circumstances may return to the sphere of relevance and active involvement in the present.”14 The Russian war against Ukraine, started by the Kremlin in 2014, is the best illustration of this point.

Besides “too much memory,” history as an academic discipline and the historiography of World War II over the last thirty years were influenced, sometimes even pressured in a positive way, by the “politics of recognition”15 that emerged and flourished not in academic circles but among social activists and campaigners in Europe and North America.

The “politics of recognition” is a story about people who may or should be present and accepted in society with all their misfortunes and moments of happiness. Charles Taylor describes it as follows: “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.” Therefore, the “politics of recognition” is a way to avoid harm, oppression, “imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”16

For historical science such a notion of human nature was an absolute novelty that eventually introduced as themes for historical research the following: the past as it is and its influence on the present and the future; stories about the price paid by the “speechless” and oppressed for successful military interventions and great victories; the problem of the suffering, violence, oppression, and responsibility of those who performed these acts, both ordinary people and high-ranking officials. The “politics of recognition” does not make the historians’ work easier, yet it enables a “mix of history and memory” that Dipesh Chakrabarty called “historical wounds.”

According to Chakrabarty, “Historical wounds are not the same as historical truths but the latter constitute a condition of possibility of the former. Historical truths are broad, synthetic generalizations based on researched collections of individual historical facts. They could be wrong but they are always amenable to verification by methods of historical research. Historical wounds, on the other hand, are a mix of history and memory and hence their truth is not verifiable by historians.”17 Thus, to focus on “historical wounds” is quite problematic. Nevertheless, the emancipatory potential of this focus can hardly be overestimated. Those who carry historical wounds (be they individuals, certain groups and communities) now become not only “visible” but also included as part of the range of historical problems, with all the complexity of their wartime experience as prolonged in memory up till now.

“Historical wounds” are not “permanent formations,” their presence in experience and memory may be overcome through working on the past, in particular, through the practices of analysis and the description of this past, through the honest and painstaking verification of historical facts. “The social consensus on which they are based is always open to new challenges and this, in principle, can be undone.”18

Concepts of the “politics of recognition” and “historical wounds” emerged under the umbrella concept of subaltern studies, while working on the colonial past of the oppressed and of the oppressors. To a certain extent, these concepts install metaphor into the field of historical knowledge. However, this metaphor sets up a framework of broad understanding, in which the victimization of the subdued nations modulates to a more moderate view of the complex and contradictory interplay between metropolis and periphery, in which the one-way diktat of “Big Brother” and the one-man tyranny of Stalin or Hitler are supplemented by the acknowledgment of the involvement (whether forced or voluntary) of those who shaped the strategies and conditions of subdual.

Nevertheless, “historical wounds”—both as a concept and as an element in the politics of memory—are oriented not only to national historical narratives. They demand compensation and activation of the mode of visibility and recognition; not only do they request historical visibility but also political apologies from those who inflicted violence, ignored and hushed up genocides and social catastrophes. “Historical wounds” do not let the past “cool down,” locking it instead in a perpetual and inescapable present. As Chris Lorenz says, “the idea of a hot present transforming into a cold past is by itself a desired time model for those who would wish to see the past as over and done with. Usually they are the ones who face a sentence themselves.”19

In the history of the 1930s through the 1950s, whether or not survived by the Ukrainians, there are numerous historical wounds, acknowledged in the condemnation of Nazism by the Nuremberg trials, in the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide,20 in the European politics of regret21 and in actual official apologies by Ukraine to the nations of Israel22 and Poland,23 as well as by Poland24—to the Ukrainian nation. Yet the fact that on the scales weighing crimes against humanity the actions of the Nazi and Soviet powers were not deemed comparable becomes a stumbling block for “cooling down” the “heated time.” It also complicates choosing the most suitable framework for the historical analysis of the success or failure of coming to terms with World War II in Ukrainian lands. Nazism was condemned, while communism as the Soviet variant of totalitarianism was not. Only recently—on July 3, 2010—was another attempt to condemn communism made. Initiated by the Czech government, a number of renowned European politicians, historians, and dissidents signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.25

The authors of the Declaration called on the European community to recognize Nazi and communist regimes as the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century and to develop unified criteria to identify the victims of both totalitarianisms. Those who signed the declaration emphasized “reaching an all-European understanding that both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes … are destructive in their policies of systematically applying extreme forms of terror, suppressing all civic and human liberties, starting aggressive wars … and that as such they should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted the 20th century.”26

Still, this proposition was received with some ambivalence, so the question about recognizing the crimes of the communist regime remains open27 not only for politicians, but for historians as well. For instance, attempts at a synthetic view of Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes before and during World War II28 made by Timothy Snyder in his milestone work Bloodlands received significant criticism from historians and intellectuals.29 They also labeled as controversial his statement regarding the interconnection and mutual reaction in plotting genocides, as well as the framework that presents Stalin and Hitler as equal criminals.

Significant efforts were made toward recognizing the equal culpability of Nazism and communism in starting World War II when the European Parliament adopted the resolution of September 19, 2019 “On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe.” The document emphasizes that the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact paved the way for the outbreak of the most devastating war in European history, “dividing Europe and the territories of independent states between the two totalitarian regimes and grouping them into spheres of interest.”30 However, despite these efforts, the academic vocabulary used in telling the story of World War II is still formed in a way that practically disables any kind of justification of Nazism, yet tends to “normalize” communism.31 The Soviet Union’s contribution in the defeat of Nazi Germany was one of the reasons for such “normalizing.” Thus, the historical wounds inflicted upon the subdued nations remain open, aggravating not only political coping with the past but also scientific research on it. Ukrainians who survived or did not survive the war are trapped in the space formed by several standpoints, the most powerful of which are the narratives of the “victors over universal evil” and the “victims who suffered atrocities under all the regimes.” Both of these narratives are quite problematic.

Thus, the powerful narrative of victory is partly invented by the Soviet historical canon when Ukrainians are depicted as part of the victorious Soviet-Russian nation, but is also partly appropriated by the new Russian political rhetoric in which only the “Russian nation” is presented as the victor. As Peter Dickinson rightly observes, “Western histories of the war routinely refer to Soviet forces collectively as ‘the Russians.’ We learn that ‘the Russians’ suffered twenty-seven million losses.” Western historians and intellectuals omit Ukraine, millions of Ukrainian soldiers who served in the Red Army, as well as the scale of losses among Ukrainian civilians. Therefore, under the influence of the Soviet (and subsequently Russian) discourse, “this staggering omission demonstrates the sheer size of Europe’s Ukraine-shaped blind spot,”32 instead of presenting the true Ukrainian contribution.

Thus, the narrative produced by historical research about the overall tragedy, the mass killings, deportations, and violence, becomes problematic, as there is no actual “full stop” to it. The problem is not one of including capacity and agency alongside victimhood and “being an object” in the list of the components of “tortured life”33 (a term coined by Alexander Etkind). The problem is also about Nazi crimes against humanity receiving symbolic and real punishment, while the crimes of the Stalin regime (and of the communist regime in the broader sense), the crimes of those who executed or instigated mass violence, though recorded, analyzed and to some extent memorialized,34 lack the legal basis of condemnation of communism. Thus, these unrequited crimes turn what should be “full stops” into ellipses, creating a danger of misreading them as “to be continued”35 and preventing the “hot present” from cooling down into the “cold past.”

The above-mentioned methodological challenges are not the only difficulties encountered by Ukrainians when conceptualizing the history of World War II. The intricate complexity of what was happening in Ukrainian lands from the 1930s to the 1950s is still such that eighty years’ distance makes the geographical borders of these lands perfectly clear. Yet they were not so clear and visible to those involved in the maelstrom of war and in the “Soviet nation-building” of the period. Due to the colonial practice of cutting up the borders (both of administrative regions within Ukraine and between other republics) implemented by Moscow in the acquired territories, many Ukrainians happened to be “thrown out” beyond Ukraine’s borders. Local communities were ruined or (as in the case of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR) other nations were considered as “almost Ukrainians.” Incorporation into Ukraine was not an obvious step for the people of Zakarpattia, whose leaders at the time of the fall of Czechoslovakia envisioned their self-preservation in a union with the Reich. Ukrainians in Poland were perceived as a problem and a threat, so the Polish government by means of “pacification,” encouraging “osadnik” settlers, and “consolidation of the state” imposed colonial practices and assimilation policies aimed at forming some “Polish Ukrainians.” Meanwhile, a powerful Ukrainian diaspora in Europe and in North America already existed, being almost the only Ukrainians who knew for certain that they lived not in Ukrainian lands.

What makes all the attempts to analyze the life and death of Ukrainians during the World War II even more problematic and acute is the modernized definition of “Ukrainians.” Using the term today, we mean a political nation, one which was still in the making at the beginning of the twentieth century. As George Liber rightly pointed out, “this history of the first half of the twentieth century recognizes that unspoken assumptions about national identity and political engagement in the past do not necessarily coincide with those of the present.”36 Thus, it would be fair to acknowledge that Ukrainians entered the World War II not as a political nation but as a group of various communities with very different levels of national consciousness and identity. Along with the Ukrainians who saw themselves as a community with a long-lasting historical tradition, there also were the “Soviet Ukrainians,” “malorosy” [Little Russians, a pejorative term], “Polish Ukrainians,” Rusyns, Hutsuls, Lemkos, etc. Still, this “self-identification” was not necessarily stable: some may have become self-aware as Ukrainians during the war while the others preferred to see themselves as part of the “great Russian people.” In addition, survivors and non-survivors of the war included other nations and communities: Poles, Jews, Germans, Belarusians, Moldovans, Greeks, Tatars, Armenians. Their strategies and tactics of survival when caught in the maelstrom of war, and afterwards, dealing with its unfinished tragedy, were at times based on the effort to preserve their identity and at other times on the forced or voluntary change of this identity as an alternative to death or repression. The concept of “enemy nations”37 (and practical punitive actions against them) was invented not only by the Nazis: Stalin’s totalitarian apparatus started demonstratively designating “enemy nations” and punishing them beginning in the 1930s. Timothy Snyder describes it as follows: “Stalin was a pioneer of national mass murder”;38 long before Hitler, Stalin’s “achievements” included “Polish,” “German,” “Romanian,” “Bulgarian,” “Greek” and other national purge “operations”39 that caused bloody tragedies for entire nations living alongside the Ukrainians. Hitler in turn also started his mass killings with the Poles. Christopher Browning writes: “If the Nazi regime had suddenly ceased to exist in the first half of 1941, its most notorious achievements in human destruction would have been the so-called euthanasia killing of seventy to eighty thousand German mentally ill and the systematic murder of the Polish intelligentsia. … The Jewish Holocaust ever since has overshadowed National Socialism’s other all-too-numerous atrocities.”40

However, the atrocities of Soviet communism against the “enemy nations” did not stop after the Nazis were defeated:41 targets of mass deportation-murders were Crimean Tatars, so-called “Ukrainian nationalists,” “cosmopolitans” (a euphemism covering up an antisemitic campaign that only Stalin’s death brought to a halt). The regime performed violence by the hands and actions of people42 who were members of the power and party structures, career ladder-climbers and exploiters, ideological fanatics, true sadists, and conformists, the “ordinary people.”43 Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Belarusians, Armenians, etc., all were of their number. Their names are recorded in the ordinances and directives of the NKVD (MVD)—NKGB(MGB), in party documents, and memoirs. Still, in the midst of total terror there were also those who helped, saved, and showed humanity. The names of the latter were captured, if at all, in family lore, as to speak about and to remember those who disobeyed the system even in the slightest way was dangerous both for those saved and for their saviors.

It is clear that situations of prolonged terror that caused “historical wounds” were brought about not only by the regimes in power but also by local communities, neighbors, local instigators of deportations and mass murders. Yet the “politics of recognition” as a conceptual approach enables seeing “historical wounds” of another kind: “wounds” made by the invisibility, devaluation or non-recognition of the sacrifice and heroism of some people who were omitted in the post-war heroic canon.

Attempts to see people caught in the war requires words and terms that would allow the description of certain general processes or those sharing similar traits. Usually, the word “society” is used in such an analysis. This term is useful but still deceptive and a subjective analytical category that contributes to the fixation of certain Soviet dichotomies (though rooted in the logic of the Enlightenment), such as “party and people,” “state and society,” etc. The search for “society,” that is, social interests and values, consciously recognized by all or by a majority of people, and for which the community is eager to work together, in the Soviet state (that included most of the Ukrainian lands) faces, on the one hand, an evident process of atomization. The latter was the result of the “submission by fear”44 that gripped all categories of society. On the other hand, the search for “society” encounters occasionally manifest “polyphony”45 and situational, short-lived, changeable systems of solidarity that emerged and dissolved under the threat of dangers and the fear of “purges,” Holodomor, war, or another wave of repressions.

The concept of “state” is equally problematic for analyzing what happened to people in the period. In the stories about the practices of terror, violent and disciplinarian actions, mobilization and organizational activities directed at society, the “state” often appears as a depersonalized (sacred or mechanistic) institution that acts rationally, solving its own pragmatic objectives.

Such a perception and thus the representation of Soviet power (the Soviet state) is both an echo of pre-modern notions of power46 and an element in the sacralization47 of power structures that was part of Soviet mythology. Meanwhile, as Caroline Humphrey says, such concepts as state, public authorities, state institutions had a very specific shape during the “socialism” era. This specific nature disables simple binary oppositions like “state”/”society,” “public sphere”/”private sphere,” as the system of public affairs permeated the whole social space, recreating itself anew at every level (at the level of enterprise and the collective farm, school or hospital, family or neighborhood, etc.), hence forming/having a multilevel (in the author’s terms) “nesting hierarchy.”48 Stanislav Kulchytsky, analyzing the nature of Soviet state project, proposes that it be perceived as a fulfilled model of “state-society,” which is “not looming over society but absorbs it, i.e. dissolves all existing horizontal links and structures; it penetrates society with vertical structures; it ‘atomizes’ society, putting every person face to face with himself.”49 In view of the re-creation of power at all levels, encounters with it regarding mobilization, evacuation, return, imprisonment, etc., were never depersonalized, but—mandatorily—personified.

“Power,” as already mentioned, always had a name, body, biography, and history; therefore, individual relations and motives underlying the choices made by people during the long war had not only ideological but also individual intentions, including revenge or aid, betrayal or rescue, trust or contempt.

Political scenarios, implemented in the Soviet Ukrainian lands from the 1920s to the 1950s, included, among other factors, both the Soviet experiment of creating a “new communist society” and imperial strategies and practices of ruling Ukraine as a “dominion.” A distinct “colonial flavor” could also be sensed in directives and the rules of life set for Ukrainians by the governments of Poland, Romania, Hungary. Capture of Ukrainian territories by Nazi Germany, as Wendy Lower describes it, was “the most radical colonization campaign in the history of European conquest and empire building.”50 But were the people able to fully realize the scenarios implemented by one or another regime? Did they truly comply with the authorities’ directives? Did they get these directives right?

Social foundations were fragile and unstable from the 1930s to the 1950s. Sharp and not so sharp political turns could change the lives of people and communities quite abruptly but they could also (though quite rarely) go unnoticed. Besides, the speed with which the authorities issued their instructions faced the inertia of those charged with executing them and their inability to comprehend the authorities’ requirements, a situation that formed the background of the total violence advocated as almost the only way that would lead to the “bright future.” Characterizing the change in application of the Soviet experiment (from the global project that relied on the proletariat up to following Russian imperial tradition of building a “great state”), Serhy Yekelchyk remarked, “if in the 1920s the USSR was a state of equal nationalities and unequal classes, by the end of the 1930s it turned into a state of equal classes and unequal nationalities, with the center being more and more associated with the Russian nation.”51 Those labeled as “enemy nations” did notice the change (but did they understand it?). As Yekelchyk observes, Ukrainian Soviet intellectuals—historians, writers, filmmakers—contributed to that change by consenting to and constructing the unique position of Ukraine—the position of “almost one nation, a younger brother.” Still, the people who for different reasons had chosen the Soviet project were not consciously fully aware of this change. During the late 1930s, some part of the Ukrainians, men and women, predominantly city dwellers, was still engaged in the process of incorporating the Soviet identity, “unpacking” themselves (in Igal Halfin’s terms) through the categories of class, through the practice of intolerance to the “former people,” through the ideas of the global proletarian revolution and the search for “class enemies” among the surrounding people. At the start of the war they were conscious communists, proletarians by origin, thus they perceived the enemy attack on the USSR as an encroachment on “socialist revolution” and as the “machinations of world imperialism.” However, when they survived the war and occupation, their conception of themselves and the world may have changed radically—if they survived at all.

Deeply lacking the historical, political background, and knowledge of what was happening, these people, with their inability to analyze and focus on local interactions (including personal offenses), produced reactions that seem bizarre now. For instance, Jews expressed happiness about the annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union: “You wanted Poland without Jews, so now you have Jews without Poland.”52 On the other hand, some Ukrainians were excited about “the collapse of the Polish state”53 and “had built triumphal arches and put up red or yellow-blue flags. Entering troops were sometimes showered with flowers, embraced, kissed, or greeted with bread and salt in a traditional gesture of hospitality.”54

For the country folk of Ukrainian Soviet lands who survived genocide, the experience of occupation, particularly if it was not marked by famine, may not have been the most horrid catastrophe given the one that they had survived already. Moreover, when the Germans entered, it was often perceived as the possibility of liberation from communism, and for the deported rich peasants, dubbed “kurkuls,” it meant a chance to return home from distant places of involuntary settlement.

Yet there was no single reaction, no scenario of the perception of war that did not undergo some change. In Western Ukraine, the hopes invested in the “Soviets” were eventually dashed. Illusions about the Germans, these were also gone, as well as the ones about the possible liberalization of the regime after ousting the Nazis. The mirror that reflected human behavior in both regimes was always distorted by some kind of propaganda, according to which people were expected to see themselves and judge their actions. Nevertheless, the reduction of all manifestations of human and inhuman action exclusively to the influence of the authorities’ directives would be incorrect. People saw, acted, and passed judgment on themselves and others not only under coercion: they betrayed and saved, became minions of or resisted the regime; hid and consented; collaborated and survived; participated in crimes or warned about them—according to their own notions of good and evil, of right and wrong. And these notions were not fully appropriated by any state, not the Bolvshevik’s or the Reich’s.

Revealing and studying these complicated and delicate mechanisms requires application of the methods of psychology, sociology, and the other humanities to historical sources. To describe the wartime history of people using the categories of good and evil is a hard task, taking into account the specific features or the sources and historians’ research objectives. Though this task is hard, it is still worth applying these categories in order to understand the causes and consequences of the civilizational catastrophes of the Nazis and communism. As Stanley Milgram55 and Philip Zimbardo56 have shown, these categories are rooted in the nature of social interaction and may sprout even in democratic states. “Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in ‘total situations’ that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.”57

The “politics of recognition” aimed at healing “historical wounds” requires just as much, if not more, incorporating the category of the good into historical analysis. Analyzing the origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarks that totalitarianisms created such conditions that “conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible.”58 This conclusion by the prominent thinker was one of the hard consequences of the humanitarian silence of the 1940s and 1950s when it came to working with the recent past of World War II and the analysis of the communist regime recreated by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

However, over time the search for the good became part of European59 and Ukrainian60 historiography. Still, the question of whether good and justice are possible, whether they may win amid mass violence and genocides, remains polemical and open to this day. This is particularly true from the point of view of when the stories of the people who saved others—from death sentences, deportations, total extermination—are introduced into scientific circulation.

The issue of collaboration also needs a balanced and conscientious analysis: both as a concept that requires a reasoned position from the author who defines it and as a phenomenon that requires a deeper comprehension, taking into account all the complex historical, social, anthropological, ethical, and political aspects. From the point of view of the Soviet, and partly of the contemporary Russian, canon, understanding collaboration during the wartime years of World War II was and still is a political question, as the state interests of the USSR were the point of reference to assess “betrayal.” Thus, collaboration was presented as cooperation with the enemy in the interest of the invader-state in order to harm the “native” government. In fact, such a definition allows the stigmatization of all the people who remained in the occupied territories while also supporting and legitimizing in a Soviet manner the concept of “traitor nations,” i.e. “Ukrainian-German bourgeois nationalists who assisted the fascists.”61 Still, from the very start of its formation, the Soviet canon of collaborationism lacked a reliable historical and political basis. As Sarah Fainberg observes, “Western Ukraine, which was brutally conquered by the Red Army and Sovietized in 1939, and where the Soviet regime was mainly associated with the NKVD repressions before, during and after the war, sees itself as a victim of both Soviet and Nazi atrocities.”62 Thus, the people of the region did not consider themselves loyal Soviet citizens. Characteristically, the USSR allies in the war also did not see these people as Soviet citizens. For instance, after the end of World War II, in May 1946, the government of the United Kingdom issued recommendations regarding repatriation of Soviet citizens from the United Kingdom to the USSR. It contains an eloquent definition of those to be compulsory repatriated: “Only persons who were both citizens of and actually within the Soviet Union on the 1st of September, 1939, will be regarded as Soviet citizens for this purpose.”63 Olesya Khromeychuk investigated that in the British documents the soldiers of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) were labeled as “undetermined Ukrainians” or “doubtful Poles” but under no circumstances as Soviet citizens.64

The situation with the Soviet Ukraine, taking into account how deeply rooted the myth of the “Great Patriotic War” was and the mode of thinking about Ukraine and Ukrainians within the primordial paradigm of being “one people with the Russians,” raises the question about the legitimacy of the Soviet regime after suppressing the national revolution. This question should be the subject of lengthy discussion and careful reasoning. Omitting for the moment reflections about the occupational/colonial/imperial nature of the Bolshevik regime,65 the emphasis should be placed on the few parameters of the existence of the Soviet Ukrainians. In the broader context, fitting them into the Soviet state vision of the collaboration problem was quite problematic. The question is not what the people living in the Ukrainian lands thought they were; it is rather whether the Soviet state considered their citizens to be the peasants who could not obtain passports or the “former people” and victims of purges who were stripped of their civil rights. Did the Soviet state consider itself to be legitimate in the territory where it organized systematic repressions during the 1920s and 1930s, where it sentenced to death or sent to the GULAG the “Petlurists,” “soldiers of the UNR army,” members of Ukrainian parties? Or was all of the above some perverse acknowledgment of the existence of an independent Ukrainian state, recognition of the potential of its supporters, even acceptance of the possibility of the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty? Karel Berkhoff, assessing the rapid and sometimes panicked evacuation/escape of the Soviet party functionaries from Ukrainian territory during the initial German attack in the summer of 1941, fittingly noted that during these defining days, “from a ‘Western’ perspective the Soviet authorities behaved not as a native government, but as a conqueror who had to leave.”66

Pondering the problem of state collaborationism in its Soviet-Russian version, one may come to the paradoxical conclusion that by engaging in relations with the Soviet authorities and acting in its interests, the people of the Western Ukraine “betrayed” the Polish state, and that the people from the left bank of the Zbruch river betrayed the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR).

However, the problem of collaboration/betrayal is a hard one for historians of World War II. As Eleonora Narvselius and Gelinada Grinchenko rightly note, the concept of “betrayal” was never stable or “cemented” once and for all. The meaning of the term depends upon changes in the definition of boundaries (geographic, political, and mental); upon whether there is a conscious “us” as a marker of common group identity (neighbors, ethnic, regional, national, professional, etc.); upon how contemporaries assessed the circumstances of betrayal (and this account may differ significantly from the judgment of subsequent generations); upon the pre-war and pre-occupation psychological, national, social intentions of people; upon the ideas about whom to consider an enemy; upon the result that the occupation/betrayal did or did not have, etc.67

It is important to emphasize that Ukrainians who endured occupation during World War II, did not accede to the Soviet definition of collaboration. The myth about the “nationwide condemnation of traitors and minions” that widely circulated in Soviet discourse does not stand up to fact-checking: people and communities, making their judgments, tended to build their conclusions on the specific circumstances, situations, traits of those involved in it; they often showed solidarity and preferred to keep secrets about the behavior of people whose actions during the occupation did good to the community or to certain individuals.68

Studying the issue of betrayal/collaboration in the circumstances of ongoing war and with no independent Ukrainian state obviously needs some shift of focus: from the interests of the USSR to the interests of ordinary men, from “unconditional condemnation imposed by the dominant—primarily nation-centered—ideological discourses to compassion and respect for the personal choices of those who, through their independent action, positioned themselves against politically oppressive systems or collective pressure.”69 This task, though very clear, is not that simple, as scenarios of people’s lives under occupation often look like a zigzag; they were inconstant and resist incorporation into any stable concept, except for the concept of “moral gray zone” (Primo Levi’s term) that “possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.”70

The issue of time—the chronology and chronotope of war—is also problematic and open to disput. The modern time regime, formed by the intellectuals around the ideas of the linearity, homogeneity, continuity, and inevitability of time, no longer answers either political or ethical challenges of contemporary historiography. The modern time regime, oriented to the history of nationhood and statehood of the Western European model, “worked” solely on the expulsion of “others,” legitimizing the right to only single-nation statehood, forming the lines of “us–others” and employing categories like “timely” or “untimely” when explaining revolutions, revolts, wars, etc.71

Within the modern time regime, other, non-modern, ways of experiencing and dealing with time “disappeared” or were excluded. In this linear chronological scheme, the past was marked as an irreversible process that one may and should be “distanced” from. Yet, as Chris Lorenz points out, the catastrophes of the twentieth century “undermined the claim that academic history can keep ‘distance’ from them.”72 Time marked by catastrophes forms a temporal anomaly and turns out to be “reversible” (Berber Bevernage). Aleida Assmann observes: “alongside the episodes that we restore in order to reuse, there are episodes that haunt us, as they are out of our control; remaining latent, they sooner or later overtake us.”73 Abolition of the statute of limitations on crimes against humanity, as Bevernage remarks, proves to be a marker of the rejection of the linear notion of time.74 Chris Lorenz emphasizes that “recognition of ‘historical wounds’ is an essential ingredient of ‘presentism’ and that this presupposes a time conception which is not ‘erasive’ and which can explain duration.”75 The idea of the presence of the past in the present, of the reversibility and duration of time, its non-linearity for different people and communities, illustrates, according to George Liber, how “the people of Ukraine did not follow a linear, inevitable, or irreversible road to the present. Their history contains many contingencies, discontinuities, and complex turning points.”76 Criticism of the modern time regime as a project that “did not see” and “did not take ‘others’ into account” encourages us to ask questions about the conventional calendar and chronology of presenting World War II, in the context of Ukrainians’ past requiring a “politics of recognition,” in scholarly writing as well. The attempt to produce a chronology of World War II for Ukrainian society via the established Soviet myth of the “Great Patriotic War,” backed up by the Russian historians and propagandists of the early twenty-first century, has obviously failed. Still, the conventional “calendar” of World War II starting on September 1, 1939 and ending on September 2, 1945, is not fully adequate for describing the true history of the war for Ukrainians. Part of the Ukrainian lands (Carpatho-Ukraine) was occupied by Hungary in the spring of 1939 following the fall of Czechoslovakia (the latter “acquired” these lands after WWI). Also, September 2, 1945 was not the end of the war for some Ukrainians. “Martial law” was abolished in 1945 for Soviet Ukraine, but only in 1946 for Western Ukraine.77 Establishment of state boundaries (by “exchanging some areas of state territories”) between Poland and the USSR78 proceeded till 1951 and threw many people into situations of loss79 (of a home, freedom, family, citizenship, and sometimes life). For them the war apparently went on after the “relocation.”

As it went on for the soldiers of OUN-UPA, who did not recognize Soviet authority and continued an armed struggle against the USSR in the late 1940s and early 1950s.80

Taking into account all the above-mentioned arguments, it would be reasonable to introduce into scientific circulation the position that several entry and exit points exist for the possible analysis/consideration of Ukrainians and World War II. With the colonial framework abandoned, one may discover one such point to be the “Ukrainian question”: “raised” during World War I and “closed” (without victory) with the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine.

Assembling the chronology of Ukrainian history around this question, George Liber in his Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954 noted that the formation and evolution of modern Ukraine was an “interactive response to the total wars and mass violence of the last century.” The scholar affirms Timothy Snyder’s assessment of East Central Europe as Europe’s bloodlands, but challenges Snyder’s claim that mass murders started in 1932. “‘The Great Powers’ inaugurated this long-term bloodshed in 1914,” remarks Liber and calls the Holodomor of 1932–1933 and Soviet social experiments81 the “second total war,” labeling it as “an integral part of the continuum of the mass violence of the First and Second World Wars unleashed.”82

The researcher emphasizes that there is no need to differentiate between world wars and the interwar period within the great transformation that eventually produced modern Ukraine. Moreover, in George Liber’s opinion, during 1914–1954 Ukraine endured three wars, with the interwar era as a period of bloody social engineering, one that may be assessed according to the categories of total war and respective wartime losses, wartime violence. All of the above played a crucial role for Ukrainian nation-building and, at the same time, for nation-destroying.

The idea of a “thirty years’ war” and modernization “with the built-in mechanism of violence” is supported by the Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak. He also proposes the consideration that anthropological changes, later on incorporated in the “Sovietization” scenario, were rooted in World War I, which “raised” but did not solve the “Ukrainian question.”83

Introducing individuals’ and communities’ chronological framework into academic circulation is another no less productive addition that should be included in the course of reflections about the war. When did the war start and when did it end from the point of view of the ordinary man (or a certain community)? The moment of the official declaration of war was not always such an “entry point”; instead, often it was the moment when established structures of everyday life were ruined or when the occupiers “arrived” (or when their actions clashed with expectations, or when their behavior changed). From the viewpoint of the human perception of time—of the time of changes as catastrophes and of catastrophes being a part of everyday life—one may question, following Mykola Borovyk, the uniqueness of wartime experience. Borovyk inquires: “From what we know today, may we say that the life of an ordinary Ukrainian peasant or city dweller radically changed in 1947 compared to 1944? He worked at the collective farm or rushed to his work at a plant, panicking if he was late: he could be imprisoned for that. He lived from hand to mouth, paid enormous taxes, wore military outfits, waited for hours in lines to get basic necessities. His chances of dying were great even without active warfare. Also, is it not the same around 1933? Except, perhaps, that some had a higher chance of dying than others. Still, the scale of the losses is quite comparable. So how exactly were these years different from the point of view of the daily life of an ordinary citizen?”84 Borovyk proposes that we see and research continuity and not some separate fragments starting from the period of the 1930s until 1953, when extreme circumstances formed everyday structures and caused certain scenarios of human behavior.

Bruno Latour remarks that time “has a modern and a nonmodern dimension, a longitude and a latitude. … Calendar time may well situate events with respect to a regulated series of dates, but historicity situates the same events with respect to their intensity.”85 The intensity of the events of World War II, obviously, varied: it was different for certain states and people, for certain people and communities. The intensity of events formed not only an academic historicity but also a local, familial, personal one. The intensity of events caused the unevenness of the temporal “entry” into the war and formed nonlinear scenarios of everyday choice. Some people were taken captive, were imprisoned or died from the bullets or in the air strikes of the occupiers during the very first days of attack (the Soviet attack on Poland or the German invasion of Soviet Ukraine). For others, occupation may have seemed almost “invisible” or they perceived it as an exciting, potentially romantic, adventure.86

The “exit point” may have been equally unstable: some perceived it as the authorities’ permission to return home after evacuation, for others it meant amnesty, rehabilitation and authorized return from Soviet deportation. Some saw it as a story of the abolition of the ration card system in 1947, for others it was their house rebuilt. Some felt the “exit” when “Victory Day” was proclaimed an official holiday (in 1965), for others it was the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence.

Concluding this attempt of setting a methodological framework, it should be noted that a great number of issues, badly in need of consideration and reconsideration, are left out of this research.

This study did not and could not give definitive and exhaustive answers to all the questions raised. Yet such “questions without answers” have been experienced by all respectable historians of virtually all the countries whose citizens had their own wartime experience of World War II. Ethnic, political, state- and nation-building considerations have formed obstacles to a holistic analysis of the human dimension of World War II. Striving for a holistic approach, one should take into account that the whole unfolds sequentially and unveils itself gradually. In our contemporary stage of anthropological history of World War II it may be useful to adopt the methodology of recognition and the framework of “historical wounds” that not only enable us to become aware of victimhood but also to work with the agency of Ukrainians, to see the interactions of people under occupation not only through vertical links with the representatives of the different powers, but also through the horizontal links between local and social communities. The latter, though they experienced injustice and crimes, were not devoid of compassion, aid, and solidarity. In order to sequentially unfold the history of ordinary Ukrainians during the years of World War II, the historical accent should be placed on temporal and spatial cracks that either rupture identification or, on the contrary, contribute to building people’s self-identification as Ukrainians. Analyzing the history of World War II from the Ukrainian perspective, it is important to remain focused on both the lack of nation-state status and the range of problems relating to the process of unifying all Ukrainian lands under one state. Unification was both a process and a result of large-scale European collisions, where the interests of Ukrainians were objectified and appropriated by the Kremlin administration. Therefore, national unity became not only an achievement but also a source of numerous historical wounds, inflicted both by totalitarian regimes in a vertical dimension and by communities and individuals in a horizontal dimension. The Ukrainian history of World War II is a part of European history; it is one of the many variants of stateless nations’ stories in which people endured the pressure of various ideological, political, social directives and international agreements. Situational strategies and unstable tactics of life under occupation, choosing or not choosing some side as “ours” (our state, our army), attempts by people to distance themselves from resistance or betrayal, or to join them—all these modes of dealing with war were typical of most Europeans who did or did not survive World War II. A comparative European perspective is not an artificial, scholarly construct, but a useful instrument for analyzing similar and different processes. It helps to remove some sort of taboo around the sensitive subject of the manifestations of evil, while nonetheless allowing us to study and make those—invisible, forgotten, devoid of voice and memory—who did Good on a daily basis visible and perceptible again.

To acknowledge the complexity, nonlinearity, reversibility, and rigidity of certain processes related to dealing with war, unfortunately, means thinking about the future. The future that, after the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine ends, should be not the history of the stigmatization of the survivors of occupation but the practices of understanding (i.e. by the means of history) of the tragedy that affected the occupied, the captive, and the displaced.

1 First published in: Academia. Terra Historiae. Studii na poshanu Valeriia Smoliia [Academia. Terra Historiae. Studies in honor of Valeriy Smoliy], vol. 1, Prostory istorii [Spaces of history], ed. H. Boriak, S. Blashchuk, V. Horobets, A. Kudriachenko, V. Matiakh, V. Tkachenko, V. Soloshenko, and O. Yas (Kyiv: NAN Ukrainy. Instytut istorii Ukrainy, DU “Instytut vsesvitnoi istorii Natsionalnoi akademii nauk Ukrainy,” 2020), 587–608.

2 Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe. World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. István Deák, Jan Tomasz Gross, Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 293–325.

3 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 400.

4 István Deák, Norman M. Naimark, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution during World War II (Boulder: Westview Press., 2015), 288.

5 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 296.

6 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tea Sindbæk, Usable History. Representations of Yugoslavia’s difficult past from 1945 to 2002 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 248.

7 Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution Against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 410.

8 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 303.

9 Hannah Arendt, Dzherela totalitaryzmu [The origins of totalitarianism] (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2005), 467.

10 Anne Applebaum, “The Worst of the Madness,” The New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/11/worst-madness/.

11 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 307.

12 Chris Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time, or The Sudden Presence of the Past,” in Performing the Past, Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010), 85; see Mark Salber Phillips, “History, Memory and Historical Distance,” in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2004), 86–109.

13 See Johannes Czwalina, Movchannia hovoryt. Teperishnie zalyshaietsia, tilky chas mynaie. Zmitsniuvaty myr, osmysliuvaty mynule [Silence speaks: The present remains, only time passes. Strengthening peace through making sense of the past], trans. Olha Plevako (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2016); BerberBevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence. Time and Justice (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 262.

14 Aleida Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen? Vzlet i padenie temporalnogo rezhima Moderna [Is time out of joint?: On the rise and fall of the modern time regime] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017), 125.

15 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–73.

16 Ibid., 25.

17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History and the Politics of Recognition,” in Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 77–78.

18 Ibid., 78.

19 Chris Lorenz, “Geschichte, Gegenwärtigkeit und Zeit,” in Phänomen Zeit. Dimensionen und Strukturen in Kultur und Wissenschaft, ed. Dietmar Goltschnigg (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2011), 134, quoted in Aleida Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen? Vzlet i padenie temporalnogo rezhima Moderna [Is time out of joint?: On the rise and fall of the modern time regime] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017).

20 National Holodomor-genocide Museum, “Recognition of Holodomor as genocide in the world,” accessed June 1, 2020, http://old.memorialholodomor.org.ua/eng/holodomor/genocide/act/.

21 Jeffrey K. Olick and Brenda Coughlin, “The Politics of Regret. Analytical Frames,” in Politics and the Past. On Repairing Historical Injustices, ed. John Torpey (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 37–62; Karolina Wigura, Wina narodów, Przebaczenie jako strategia prowadzenia polityki [Nation’s guilt. Forgiveness as a political strategy] (Warsaw-Gdansk: Scholar, 2011), 269.

22 “Speech of the President of Ukraine in the Israeli Knesset,” Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, December 31, 2015, https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/news/speech-of-the-president-of-ukraine-in-the-israeli-knesset/.

23 “Ukraintsi znovu prosiat proshchennia za Volyn,” [Ukrainians again apologize for Volyn], Istorychna pravda, June 3, 2016, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2016/06/3/149102/.

24 “Bracia Ukraińcу,” Liberté!, July 4, 2016, http://liberte.pl/bracia-ukraincy/; “Poliaky prosiat v ukraintsiv vybachennia za istorychni kryvdy” [Poles again apologize to Ukrainians for historical wounds], Istorychna pravda, July 7, 2016, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2016/07/4/149125 .

25 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism. June 3, 2008, http://www.praguedeclaration.eu/.

26 Ibid.

27 See Yana Primachenko, “Sovetskoe vs natsionalisticheskoe: protivostoyanie diskursov i praktik v postsovetskoy Ukraine” [The Soviet vs the nationalistic: Confrontation of discourses and practices in post-Soviet Ukraine], Studia Universitatis Moldaviae, no. 10 (2017): 270.

28 This attempt was not the first one. For example, Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, outrightly compared Stalin’s communism with Hitler’s Nazism as similar systems of people’s extermination.

29 For discussions on Timothy Snyder’s book see Daniel Lazare, “Timothy Snyder’s Lies,” Jacobin, September 9, 2014, www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/.

30 “Importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe,” European Commission, September 19, 2019, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2019-0021_EN.pdf.

31 Arguments in favor of such stand mostly are similar to the following: “Stalin’s Soviet Union opportunistically seized former territories of the Tsarist Empire, and established the inhuman Gulag system. But it was not the aggressor against Nazi Germany and fascist Italy but the victim of aggression; and Soviet resistance was the major factor in the destruction of Nazism and restoration of democracy in Europe.” Robert William Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (Houndmills, London: Macmillan Press, 1997), 56.

32 Peter Dickinson, “History as a Weapon in Russia’s War on Ukraine,” October 4, 2017, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/history-as-a-weapon-in-russia-s-war-on-ukraine/.

33 Alexander Etkind, Krivoe gore: Pamyat o nepogrebennyih [Warped Mourning. Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied], trans. Vladimir Makarov, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018), 49.

34 Oleg Bazhan and Vadym Zolotaryov, “‘Velykyi teror’ na Kharkivshchyni: masshtaby, vykonavtsi, zhertvy” [“Great Terror” in Kharkiv region: scale, executors, victims], Kraieznavstvo, no. 1 (2012): 85–101, http://history.org.ua/JournALL/kraj/kraj_2012_1/12.pdf; Halyna Denysenko, “Mistsia pamiati i pamiatnyky zhertvam ‘Velykoho teroru’” [Memory sites and monuments to the victims of the ‘Great Terror’], Kraieznavstvo, no. 1 (2012): 101–108; Valeriy Vasyliev and Roman Podkur, Radianski karateli. Spivrobitnyky NKVS—vykonavtsi “Velykoho teroru” na Podilli [The Soviet punishers. NKVS staff as the executors of ‘Great Terror’ in Podillia region] (Kyiv: Vydavets V. Zakharenko, 2017); Vidlunnia Velykoho teroru. Zbirnyk dokumentiv u trokh tomakh [Reverberations of a Great Terror. Collected documents in three volumes], vol. 3, Chekisty Stalina v leshchatakh “sotsialistychnoi zakonnosti.” Ego-dokumenty 1938–1941 pp. [Stalin’s Cheka agents in the grip of “socialist law.” Ego-documents from 1938–1941], comp. Andri Savin, Oleksii Tepliakov, Mark Yunhe (Kyiv: Vydavets V. Zakharenko, 2019), 936.

35 The war against Ukraine, the cruelty of the occupiers, expansionist rhetoric of the Kremlin, and brutality of the “special operations” are very similar to the legitimization of the Soviet Union’s aggression against Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland; and respectively Hitler’s—against Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It is yet another proof that “to be continued” turned into reality of practical actions.

36 George O. Liber, Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954 (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 11.

37 Amir Wеinеr, “Naturе, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delinеating the Soviеt Soсio-Еthniс Body in the Agе of Soсialism,” Аmеrican Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1114–1155; Terry Мartin, “Modеrnization or Nеo-Traditionalism? Asсribеd Nationality and Soviеt Pгimordialism,” in Stаlinism: Nеw Directions, ed. Shеila Fitzpatгiсk (New York, 2000), 348–367; Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 813–861.

38 Timothy Snyder, Krovavyie zemli: Evropa mezhdu Gitlerom i Stalinyim [Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin], trans. Lukiya Zurnadzhi (Kyiv: Duliby), 127.

39 Oleksandr Rublov, Volodymyr Repryntsev, “Represii proty poliakiv v Ukraini u 1930-ti roky” [Repressions against the Poles in Ukraine during the 1930s], Z arkhiviv VUChK–HPU–NKVD–KHB 1/2 (2/3) (1995): 116–156; Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Volodymyr Nikolskyi, Oleksandr But, Petro Dobrov, and Victor Shevchenko, Knyha pamiati hrekiv Ukrainy. Naukove vydannia [The book of memory of the Greeks of Ukraine] (Donetsk: Region, 2005); Ivan Dzhukha, Grecheskaya operatsiya. Istoriya repressiy protiv grekov v SSSR [The Greek Operation of the NKVD. The history of repressions against the Greeks in the USSR] (Saint Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2006); Oleksandr Rublov and Larysa Yakubova, “‘Natsionalni spravy’ ta yikhnii vplyv na zhyttia natsmenhromad Ukrainy” [“National cases” and their influence on the minorities’ life in Ukraine], in Orhany etnopolitychnoho rehuliuvannia v konteksti polityky korenizatsii: ukrainskyi dosvid (Kyiv: Instytut istorii Ukrainy NAN Ukrainy, 2014), 225–235.

40 Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), іх.

41 Brian Glyn Williams, “Hidden Ethnocide in the Soviet Muslim Borderlands: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Crimean Tatars,” Journal of Genocide Research 4:3 (2002): 357–373; Stephen Blank, “A Double Dispossession: The Crimean Tatars After Russia’s Ukrainian War,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 9:1 (2015): 18–32. See also Lyman H. Legters, “Soviet Deportation of Whole Nations: A Genocidal Process” in Samuel Totten et al., Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 112–135.

42 Classification by Alette Smeulers. Quoted in Daria Mattingly, “Zhinky v kolhospakh—velyka syla”: khto vony—ukrainski pryzvidnytsi Holodomoru” [Women in kolkhozes—a great power: Who were they, Ukrainian perpetrators of Holodomor?], Ukraina moderna, September 20, 2018, http://uamoderna.com/md/mattingly-women-in-kolkhoz.

43 Christopher Browning coined the term “ordinary people” as a specific proper name for the Germans who participated in the “final solution of the Jewish question” as the members of the police battalion. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and The Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper, 1992), 271.

44 Tamara Vronska, Upokorennia strakhom: simeine zaruchnytstvo u karalnii praktytsi (1917–1953 rr.) [Submission by fear: Family members as hostages in the punitive practice (1917–1953)] (Kyiv: Tempora, 2013), 624.

45 Vladyslav Hrynevych, Nepryborkane riznoholossia: druha svitova viina i suspilno-politychni nastroi v Ukrainy, 1939—cherven 1941 [Untamed polyphony: The Second World War and socio-political moods in Ukraine, since 1939 up to June 1941] (Kyiv; Dnipropetrovsk: Lira, 2012), 508.

46 Svyaschennoe telo korolya: Ritualy i mifologiya vlasti [The sacred body of a king: Rituals and mythology of power], ed. Nina Khachaturyan (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), 486.

47 Christel Lane, “Legitimacy and power in Soviet Union: socialist ritual,” British Journal of Political Science 14:2 (1984): 207–217; James Thrower, Marxism-Leninism as the civil religion of Soviet society: God’s commissar (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).

48 Caroline Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society, and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Quoted in Aleksey Yurchak, Eto byilo navsegda, poka ne konchilos. Poslednee sovetskoe pokolenie [It had been there for good, until it stopped. The last Soviet generation] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014), 214.

49 Stanislav Kulchytsky, “Pochatok pohlynennia suspilstva derzhavoiu-komunoiu (1917–1928)” [The start of absorption of society by the commune-state (1917–1928)], in Vidnosyny derzhavy, suspilstva i osoby pid chas stvorennia radianskoho ladu v Ukraini (1917–1938 rr.). Kolektyvna monohrafiia, vol. 1, ed. Valeriy Smoliy (Kyiv: Instytut istorii Ukrainy NAN Ukrainy, 2013), 38.

50 Wendy Lower, “‘On Him Rests the Weight of the Administration’: Nazi Civilian Rulers and the Holocaust in Zhytomyr,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 225.

51 Serhy Yekelchyk, Imperiia pamiati. Rosiisko-ukrainski stosunky v radianskii istorychnii uiavi [Empire of memory. Russian–Ukrainian relations in the Soviet historical imagination] (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2008), 19–20.

52 Jan T. Gross, “The Sovietisation of Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, ed. Norman Davies, Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 66.

53 Ibid., 65.

54 Ibid.

55 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 256.

56 Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007).

57 Ibid., 211.

58 Arendt, Dzherela totalitaryzmu, 504.

59 Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Occupied Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1988); Emmy E. Werner, A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews (Boulder: Westview Press, 2002); Peter Grose, A Good Place to Hide: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives in World War II (New York: Pegasus Books, 2015).

60 Yakiv Suslenskyi, Spravzhni heroi [True heroes] (Kyiv: Tovarystvo “Ukraina-Izrail”, 1993); Zhanna Kovba, Liudianist u bezodni pekla [Humanity in the abyss of hell] (Kyiv: Sfera, 1998); Zhanna Kovba, Liudianist u bezodni pekla [Humanity in the abyss of hell] (Kyiv: Tsentr “Tkuma,” Dukh i litera, 2009); Doslidzhennia ta vykladannia istorii Holokostu. Ukraina, Niderlandy, Belhiia. Zbirnyk materialiv mizhnarodnoho proektu “Istoriia Holokostu v Ukraini ta Nyzhnikh Zemliakh [Researching and teaching the history of Holocaust. Ukraine, the Netherlands, Belgium. Collected materials of the “History of Holocaust in Ukraine and lower lands” international project], eds. Mark Otten and Yulia Smilianska (Kyiv; Arnkhem: Dukh i Litera, 2010); Pravednyky svitu ta inshi riativnyky pid chas Holokostu: pryklad Ukrainy u porivnialnomu konteksti: zbirka naukovykh statei [The righteous among the nations and other saviors during the Holocaust: An example of Ukraine in comparative context: Collected research papers] (Dnipropetrovsk: Instytut “Tkuma”, 2015), etc.

61 Vladyslav Hrynevych, “Mit viiny ta viina mitiv” [The myth of war and the war of myths], Krytyka, May 2005, https://shron1.chtyvo.org.ua/Hrynevych_Vladyslav/Mit_viiny_ta_viina_mitiv.pdf?.

62 Sarah Fainberg, “Memory at the Margins: The Shoah in Ukraine (1991–2011),” in History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe Memory Games, eds. Georges Mink and Laure Neumayer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 91.

63 Olesya Khromeychuk, “Istoriia uperedzhen: spryiniattia dyvizii ‘Halychyna’ v 1947 i v 2011 rokakh” [The history of prejudice: Reception of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) in 1947 and in 2011], Ukraina moderna, January 23, 2012 http://www.historians.in.ua/index.php/en/avtorska-kolonka/97-olesya-khromeychuk-istoriia-uperedzhenspryiniattia-dyvizii-halychyna-v-1947-i-v-2011-rokakh; “Repatriation of Soviet Citizens,” (NA) CAB/129/10, May 29, 1946, http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-129-10.pdf quoted in Olesya Khromeychuk, “Radianska repatriatsiina misiia ta brytanska komisiia z perevirky bizhentsiv” [The Soviet repatriation mission and British commission on refugee verification], Ukraina moderna, December 8, 2016, http://uamoderna.com/md/khromeychuk-repatriation .

64 Olesya Khromeychuk, “Undetermined” Ukrainians. Post‐War Narratives of the Waffen SS “Galicia” Division (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013).

65 Roman Shporliuk, Imperiia ta natsii [Empire and nations] (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2000); Stephen Velychenko, “The Issue of Russian Colonialism in Ukrainian Thought: Dependency Identity and Development,” Ab Imperio 3:1 (2002): 323-67; Ewa Thompson, Trubaduri imperii: Rosiiska literatura i kolonializm [Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism] (Kyiv: Osnovy, 2006); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Mykola Riabchuk, Postkolonialnyi syndrom. Sposterezhennia [Postcolonial syndrome. Observations] (Kyiv: K.I.S., 2011); Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon (eds.), Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Vasyl Rasevych, “‘Sovity’ i ‘bolshevyky’ kolys i teper. Chy slid vvazhaty radianskyi period okupatsiinym?” [The “Soviets” and “bolsheviks” once and now. Should the Soviet period be considered as occupation?], September 29, 2017, https://zaxid.net/soviti_i_bolsheviki_kolis_i_teper_n1437655.

66 Karel Berkhoff, Zhnyva rozpachu. Zhyttia i smert v Ukraini pid natsystskoiu vladoiu [Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule], trans. Taras Tsymbal (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011), 296.

67 Eleonora Narvselius and Gelinada Grinchenko, “Introduction: ‘Formulas of Betrayal’—Traitors, Collaborators and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory”, in Traitors, Collaborators and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory. Formulas of Betrayal, eds. Gelinada Grinchenko and Eleonora Narvselius (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 1–30.

68 For details see Mykola Borovyk, “Collaboration and Collaborators in Ukraine During: Between Myth and Memory,” in Traitors, Collaborators and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory. Formulas of Betrayal, eds. Gelinada Grinchenko and Eleonora Narvselius (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 285–310; Olena Stiazhkina, Styhma okupatsii: radianski zhinky v samobachenni 1940-h rokiv [Stigma of occupation: Soviet women in their self-imagination of the 1940s] (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2019).

69 Narvselius and Grinchenko, “Introduction: ‘Formulas of Betrayal’,” 3.

70 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), 27.

71 Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time,” 77–81.

72 Ibid., 71.

73 Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen?

74 Quoted in: Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen?

75 Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time,” 70.

76 Liber, Total Wars, 11.

77 Tamara Vronska and Volodymyr Pylypchuk, “Transformatsiia osoblyvykh pravovykh rezhymiv na ukrainskykh zemliakh u XIX–XX stolitti” [Transformation of the special legal regimes in Ukrainian lands in 19th and 20th centuries], Naukovyi chasopys NPU imeni M. P. Drahomanova. Seriia 18: Ekonomika i pravo 31 (2016): 19; http://enpuir.npu.edu.ua/bitstream/123456789/18951/1/Vronska_Pylypchuk.pdf.

78 Anna Rogowska and Stanisław Stępień, “Polsko-ukrainskyi kordon v ostanni piv stolittia” [Polish–Ukrainian border in the last half a century], Nezalezhnyi kulturolohichnyi chasopys “Yi,” no. 11 (1997).

79 Roman Chmelyk, “Vidobrazhennia v pamiati mistsevoho naselennia protsesu tvorennia radiansko-polskoho kordonu v Ukraini (1939–1945 rr.),” [The process of formation of Soviet–Polish border in Ukraine (1939–1945) as it was reflected in the memory of the locals], Narodoznavchi zoshyty 102, no. 6 (2011), 947–952.

80 Anatolii Kentii, Narys borotby OUN-UPA v 1946–1956 rr. [An outline of fighting of OUN-UPA in 1946–1956] (Kyiv: [n.p.], 1999); Jeffrey Burds, “The Early Cold War in Soviet Western Ukraine, 1944–1948”, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1505 (2001); Yurii Kyrychuk, Ukrainskyi natsionalno-vyzvolnyi rukh 40–50-kh rokiv XX stolittia: ideolohiia ta praktyka [Ukrainian national liberation movement during the 1940s and 1950s: Ideology and practice] (Lviv: Dobra sprava, 2003); Yurii Shapoval, “Viina pislia viiny” [The war after war] in Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia u borotbi proty totalitarnykh rezhymiv [Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the struggle against totalitarian regimes] (Lviv: Instytut ukrainoznavstva im. I. Krypiakevycha NAN Ukrainy, 2004), 184–201.

81 Liber, Total Wars, 111–200.

82 Ibid., 111.

83 Yaroslav Hrytsak, “Persha svitova viina: ukrainska perspektyva” [The First World War: Ukrainian perspective], Ukraina moderna 23 (2016), http://uamoderna.com/md/hrytsak-unintelligible-war.

84 Mykola Borovyk, “Mit revoliutsii i nova skhema ukrainskoi istorii,” [The myth of revolution and the new scheme of Ukrainian history], Krytyka, August 2013, https://krytyka.com/ua/articles/mit-revolyutsiyi-i-nova-skhema-ukrayinskoyi-istoriyi.

85 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993), 68.

86 “‘Dnevnik. Myisli. Detali’. Vstupni zauvazhennia O. Betlii, K. Dysy, Yu. Kysloi” [“The diary. Thoughts. Details”. Introductory notes by Olena Betlii, Kateryna Dysa, Yulia Kysla] in Mizhkulturnyi dialoh, vol. 1, Identychnist (Kyiv: Dukh i litera, 2009). The text of the diary by the young girl from the Kirovohrad region, a member of the Komsomol, illustrates romantic feelings, first signs of love, dates, and talks with the Germans, not perceived by her as an occupying force.