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20 Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder KR AKIVS'KI VISTI, THE NKVD MURDERS OF 1941, AND THE VINNYTSIA EXHUMATION John-Paul Himka Introduction Violent discourse and discourse supportive of violence accompanied the conflicts that raged in the borderlands in the twentieth century. Here we look at an example of this that is particularly interesting because it involves the mass violence of two of the major competitors for the borderlands, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in a discourse formulated in understanding with Germany by one of the autochthonous peoples of the region, the Ukrainians. It concerns crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet authorities as they were used in propaganda to justify the violence of the German occupiers and those who collaborated with them. Specifically, this chapter looks at two incidents in which mass violence perpetrated by the Soviet political police, the NKVD, was exposed in the Ukrainian press under German occupation. The first incident is murders committed in the summer of 1941. After Germany and the Soviet Union put an end to the multinational Second Polish Republic in September 1939, the Ukrainian territories, Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviets immediately undertook a massive deportation of the regions’ Poles to Siberia, the first in a series of ethnic cleansings and genocides to unfold on the Polish–Ukrainian borderlands over the following eight years. Certain categories of Jews and a relatively small number of Ukrainians were also deported by the Soviets in 1939–41. The new Communist authorities Ukrainianized the region by subduing and Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder 379 deporting the Polish elite, but persecuted Ukrainian nationalists. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the prisons of Galicia and Volhynia happened to be full of Ukrainian nationalists, but also, in the larger cities, Jewish and Polish political prisoners. Because of the rapidity of the German advance into the new western borderlands of the USSR, the NKVD proved unable to evacuate these prisoners before the Germans would arrive. Not wishing to leave them as potential collaborators with the invaders, they killed them hastily. Thousands of corpses were found in prison basements after the Germans took the cities and towns of Western Ukraine.1 The Nazis used these gruesome discoveries for propaganda and also to incite a series of murderous pogroms against the Jews by local inhabitants throughout the western borderlands.2 The second incident whose media coverage will be examined in this study is the Vinnytsia exhumation of 1943. In the aftermath of their defeat at Stalingrad, the Germans exhumed thousands of bodies from mass graves underneath a park and playground in Vinnytsia . An international team of forensic experts3 as well as police investigators from Germany descended upon the exhumation site and determined that the victims had been shot in the back of the head by the NKVD in 1937–38, that is, during Stalin’s Great Terror. The Nazis used the Vinnytsia exhumation for an international propaganda campaign similar to the one unleashed with respect to the exhumation of slain Polish officers at Katyn a few months before.4 I focus on how these incidents of mass violence committed by the Soviet state were reported, in particular on the issue of the ascription of ethnicity to both the victims and the perpetrators. It is a study of some of the uses that can be made of mass murder. The newspaper that I have chosen to analyze is the Ukrainian-language daily Krakivs'ki visti. It was published in Kraków, which became a center of Ukrainian nationalist activity in 1939, after the Red Army marched into eastern Poland. Many Ukrainian nationalists left Eastern Galicia at that time and transferred their activities to the German zone. The German authorities allowed the establishment in Kraków of a Ukrainian Central Committee, with which Krakivs'ki visti was closely associated. The committee was headed by Professor Volodymyr Kubijovyč, a geographer who specialized in mapping ethnicity. Kubijovyč leaned toward the Mel'nyk rather than the Bandera faction of Ukrainian nationalists.(The two factions took their names from their leaders, Andrii Mel'nyk and Stepan Bandera. The Melnyk faction was stronger in emigration and in Bukovina, while the Bandera faction was stronger in Galicia and Volhynia. The leadership of the Mel'nyk faction was older than that of the Bandera faction.) Although carefully censored by the German press bureau, Krakivs'ki visti enjoyed more autonomy than any other legal Ukrainian...

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