“The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” This thought, expressed by William Faulkner, an outstanding master of the 20th-century world literature, may seem disputable and even doubtful. In the mentality of a large proportion of today’s 20-year-olds (not all of them, however), even the incomparable tragedy of WWII and the Great Patriotic War is perceived like something extremely abstract due to the seemingly insuperable time gap. Be it this tragedy, or the calamity of the Mongol invasion, or the repressions and terror famine of the 1930s – for them, so advanced and sophisticated, these are all half-fictional phantoms which must have never existed in real life.
I reiterate: this vision of history is not typical for all young people. Should it be so, this nation would have no future whatsoever. Yet there are enough of them. Their number is frightening.
When the German teens visiting Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp near Krakow, answer the question about who Hitler was literally as follows: “He was a political figure of the 1930s;” when their peers, the Russian skinheads, march (no matter what they are carrying, Stalin’s portraits, Orthodox icons, the official tricolor, or “nationally” modified swastika) chanting “God is for Rus’! Aliens out of Russia! Death to the enemies – Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia!...” – one must clearly realize that these are the manifestations of one and the same phenomenon. The loss of memory leads to a xenophobic “illness,” which inevitably ruins the psyche of the nation, or at least a part of it. That is why no initiative, the more so an official, governmental one, concerning the problems of cleansing of the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War, can leave the society indifferent. Thus, the humanitarian block of the new Ukrainian coalition government has put forward an initiative concerning the holding of Memorial days at schools and universities on the eve of Victory Day.
The need for such events does not essentially raise any doubts. However, the experience of holding similar memorial days in the Soviet times (and this experience is not yet completely forgotten), the observations of similar practices among our neighbors from the post-Soviet territories, and their comparison with substantially different memorial traditions practiced by the European nations which participated in WWII, suggests a number of awkward questions.
What is the government’s concept of the planned memorial days? Will there be anyone to tell the young about the immeasurable tragedy of the Ukrainian nation, which lost at least eight million lives in the fight for its right to live? The nation who defended this right caught between two tyrants, one with a neat toothbrush mustache, the other, with a bushy and sinister one? The nation who fought an apocalyptic war, combining both a deathly fight with the invaders and a civil war (the second aspect being of special importance)?
Or perhaps we are, for the umpteenth time, to hear the disgusting, lofty pseudo-patriotic speeches about the mighty and invincible Great Soviet State (led by the great Russian nation)? As a rule, the last phrase is not added – but it is implied according to Freud. Speakers of this ilk must well remember the famous toast by their generalissimo idol ‘to the great Russian nation, the most outstanding of all the Soviet nations,’ pronounced right after the Victory.
Is anyone going to tell the young that war, and aggression of any kind, are the worst crimes against the humanity, Nature, and God. And that for this reason Victory Day is inseparably associated not only with the joy of triumph, but also with tears, mourning, and sadness?
Or are they again going to set off “Bandera’s West,” which “shot at our backs,” against the “devoted” (aka “Orthodox” and “our”) East, which “has not repudiated its ancient Russian name?” Are they again going to try to produce anti-Western, anti-NATO, and anti-European hysteria, and in doing so, abase their own allies in that war? These questions are not in the least unimportant.
There are fears that our new officials in power might follow the approach set in Nikita Mikhalkov’s recently presented film Burnt by the Sun 2 (The Day has already written about it). The power-state pathos, noisy battle scenes, and a lot of melodrama – and little truth about the war.
Wouldn’t it be wiser to use the experience of another brotherly Slavic nation, Poland (who lost at least six million lives in that war, also being on Hitler’s “death list”)? The analysis of Polish art (verbal, cinematographic, and fine) allows one to see that at the core of the story (even in such an epic work as Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn) there lies not so much the fate of the state and of the nation, as that of an individual, unique human being.
The Life and Fate (using the title of Vasilii Grossman’s great war novel) of this very individual, who himself might tell the young at least a part of the truth about those infernal horrors, or else the immersion into the history of one’s own family, one’s grandfather or great-grandfather, their lovers, fiancees, and friends – that’s what might become a true lesson of memory for the generation which is soon to decide this country’s future.
The problem is, however, in that it takes at least such things as the sense of human and national dignity, the unity of the people (and this does not come by itself in the hour of trial), and the habit to abide by the Truth.
All of these are characteristic, albeit not entirely, of the Polish society, because it did not grow on the products of the Soviet propaganda or the post-Soviet information space. Conversely, Ukraine has so far failed to escape from this space, and is highly unikely to do so without some titanic effort. The Polish nation was brought up on the age-long universal humanistic traditions of European culture – which is pretty self-explanatory.
