The Convolutions of Historical Politics

Interventions: Challenging the Myths of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian History

Interventions: Challenging the Myths of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian History john-pAul hiMkA I was asked to reflect on my experiences as a challenger of nationalist historical myths, in this case, Ukrainian myths about traumatic aspects of the twentieth-century.1 By myths here I mean unexamined components of an ideologized version of history, articles of faith more than of reason. In this essay, I will first try to explain my motivations for challenging such myths, even though I realized it would cause considerable discomfort both to my targeted audience and to me. Then I will describe and evaluate the strategies I chose for my interventions. This will be followed by a description of the backlash to my interventions , and of my reactions to it. Finally, I will say what I think has been achieved so far by my efforts to change thinking in the Ukrainian discursive sphere. But before proceeding to the body of this article, it is necessary to explain what myths I have been challenging. One of the areas of contention is the interpretation of the great famine that racked Ukraine in 1932–1933. In the mythicized version, Stalin unleashed the famine deliberately in order to kill Ukrainians in mass and prevent them from achieving their aspirations to establish a nation state. I, however, point out that the precondition for the famine was the reckless collectivization drive, which almost destroyed 1 This article grows out of research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Pinchas and Mark Wisen Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the University of Alberta. I am grateful for detailed comments on an earlier from Dominique Arel, Myrna Kostash, and Per Anders Rudling; I did not follow all their suggestions, but their input did much to improve this text. 212 The Convolutions of Historical Politics Soviet agriculture as a whole. I do not deny that the famine in Soviet Ukraine and in the Ukrainian-inhabited Kuban region of Soviet Russia was more intense than elsewhere in the Soviet Union, that its intensity resulted from particularly severe measures applied to Ukraine and Kuban, and that the severity was connected with a major offensive against perceived nationalism in the Communist party of Ukraine. My somewhat more nuanced view is a problem for the mythologists, who want the world to recognize that the famine, or as they call it—the Holodomor—was a genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948. This campaign became Ukrainian state policy during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10). Although I do think that what happened in Ukraine in 1932–1933 could fit under the capacious UN definition (“deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”), I oppose the campaign for recognition as genocide for a number of reasons. The genocide argument is used to buttress the campaign to glorify the anti-Communist resistance of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II. I do not think that Ukrainians who embrace the heritage of the wartime nationalists should be calling on the world to empathize with the victims of the famine if they are not able to empathize with the victims of the nationalists. I think, further, that there is something wrong with a campaign that finds its greatest resonance in the area of Ukraine where there was no famine, and in the overseas diaspora deriving from that region. I have problems with all the anger at Russians and Jews that gets wrapped up in the genocide campaign. And I also have problems with the UN definition itself, which excludes victims of social and political mass murder and has become a category for political manipulation (witness the international repercussions of whether what happened in Armenia and Darfur constitute proper genocides).2 2 I presented my views more fully in “Problems with the Category of Genocide and with Classifying the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 as a Genocide ,” paper presented to the Department of History, University of Winnipeg ; Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre; Department of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, September 16, 2008; also in a Ukrainian version at the International Scientific Conference “Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: Reasons, Demographic Consequences , Legal Treatment,” Ukrainian Institute of National Memory and 213 Challenging the Myths of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian History I also have...