The year 2007 is rich in jubilees that stand out from the anniversary of a fundamental event - the February Revolution in Russia. This year we are celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Central Rada, the first national Ukrainian government, and of the Ukrainian National Republic. But one should not forget about two other events that occurred in 1917: Nov. 7, the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, and Dec. 25, the proclamation of Soviet Ukraine in Kharkiv. Thus, the stormy year of 1917 ended with the birth of Soviet power.
Ukrainians born before 1991 come from the Soviet past. During this period the word “Soviet” applied to everything: the government, the country’s name, system, culture, way of life, and even the people. Why did this power manage to leave its imprint on practically everything? Why is it so deep-seated in Ukrainian society? Why is it so difficult to reconsider what happened to us during the Soviet era? The Day’s regular contributor, Professor Stanislav Kulchytsky, offers answers to these and other questions.
1. DEFINING THE PROBLEM
From the perspective of a scholar, Soviet power-related problems as an object of research are divided into two interrelated fields: our idea of this era and what it was in reality. I am working on a book that explores these problems, and I would like to share some of my preliminary conclusions with The Day’s readers.
What was Soviet power in reality? Although this range of problems cannot be called a blank spot, it does not often occur in research. What was our idea of Soviet power when it still existed? There are almost no studies on this subject, for two reasons: the very small number of accessible sources and the clear unwillingness of researchers to analyze the evolution of their own political philosophies. In contrast with the natural sciences, where it is possible to achieve fundamental results at a rather young age, major discoveries in history are usually made by older-generation scholars. In this case, innate talent should be complemented by decades-long experience. Meanwhile, any research into Soviet power-related issues is very painful for the older generation. The Soviet power hammered its vision of itself, one very far from the actual state of affairs, into the heads of people from childhood until their last breath.
I obtained all my academic degrees in the Soviet era, and I am still holding the positions that I had before 1991. People of approximately my age often ask me why I now have a different attitude to Soviet power than before. Such reproaches only show that my critics have not changed their philosophical viewpoints. Well, that is their right. But I too have the right to analyze my own evolution with respect to a political system that no longer exists.
If the Soviet era were a thousand years away from us, it would interest no one but historians. But it vanished just less than two decades ago and it still affects us. This is manifested in the actions of government officials, academics, and free artists whose minds are overburdened by the stereotypes of the past era. It is therefore very important to understand the nature of the Soviet period in Ukraine’s national history.
2. STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM
Until recently we lived in a world split by the rivalry of two superpowers. The Soviet Union looked powerful and invincible. Western political scientists came up with a popular theory of convergence, which calls upon mankind to borrow the advantages of both superpowers. Now we have to reconsider the USSR’s strengths and weaknesses.
Here, the approaches of Arnold J. Toynbee to the history of humanity can be of help. The famous British scholar regarded history as a successive rise and decline of civilizations under the challenge-response pattern. Using Toynbee’s set of terms, one can say that the advent of Soviet power on the territory of Eastern Europe and some other countries triggered civilization-scale social changes. When citizens of the USSR were being vetted for a visit to a capitalist country (mandatory procedures included the submission of a recommendation from the local party cell, 12 photographs, and a detailed resume, as well as a briefing at the CC CPSU in Moscow), they found themselves temporarily in a different civilizational dimension. I know this from my own experience.
The communist civilization differed from all others by its artificiality. Every civilization developed “on the shoulders” of the previous one, but a different destiny awaited the communist civilization: it could either collapse in a matter of years (European scenario) or be gradually swallowed up by the civilization in the bowels of which it was born (Asian scenario).
The communist civilization was short-lived because it rested on the principles of collective ownership typical only of long-gone primitive societies. At issue here is the question of collective property that was not distributed among the producers and not of private property in the form of a joint-stock company or a cooperative. Thank God, we already know the difference between a cooperative and a kolhosp (collective farm), while in Soviet times we could not escape the horrible oxymoron “kolhosp-cooperative form of ownership.”
Communism was a disease that affected the social body, weakened by revolutions and wars. Since the communist system was established in the wake of revolutions, this created the false impression that it was organically linked to them. I am sure that many people trace Soviet power and the resulting system back to the Russian Revolution or, to be more precise, its artificially separated fragment called the October Revolution. In reality, the communist revolution was a “revolution from above,” i.e., not a revolution but a reform imposed on society by a government that was independent of it.
The communist seizure of power failed to bring about people’s rule, which was proclaimed by the propagandists. What it really begot was a dictatorship of communist leaders under the guise of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In fact, the abolition of private property introduced by the leaders under the slogan of the nationalization of the means of production boiled down to replacing the owner. The private ownership of the means of production did not vanish but ended up in the hands of a group of leaders, i.e., it turned into a hitherto unseen civilizational monster. The privatization of the state by the leaders triggered the privatization of the means of production by the state.
The Soviet system had the following fundamental advantage: an extremely powerful mobilizational potential in a country with colossal human and natural resources. This is why the Soviet Union played a crucial role in World War Two, became a superpower, and managed to impose its politico-economic model on a number of other countries. But the Soviet system also had a fundamental weakness in comparison to market-economy countries: the alienation of producers from the means of production, which resulted from the privatization of these means by a small group of top-ranking people. The fundamental advantage of a nationwide economic complex over a market economy in the shape of unlimited mobilizational potential and the fundamental advantage of a market economy in terms of effectiveness were two sides of the same medal.
Guided by slogans from The Communist Manifesto, Russian communist leaders liquidated their bourgeoisie. This means they got rid of capital, one of the two agents of production. There was only one agent left - a hired labor force proclaimed as the owner of all means of production. This sounded great as a line in the Soviet Constitution, but in practice it made the Soviet economy totally ineffective. The leaders saw that this economy was dead and tried to resuscitate it not only by injunctions but also by encouraging the working class to govern the production process via shop-floor Communist Party cells and trade union organizations. This complemented the bureaucratic control of production and served as an excellent illustration of the “people’s power,” but it could not contribute much to making the process more economically viable. The national economy was ineffective from its very inception, but its inferiority to that of the leading Western countries became especially evident in the postwar decades, when the scientific and technological revolution pushed the world economy from the industrial to the postindustrial stage of development. The Soviet Union got its second wind during the 1970s world energy crisis. The flow of petrodollars prolonged its unreformed existence for another two decades. But the first serious attempt to carry out reforms led to a precipitous and simultaneous disintegration of the system, state, and party.
3. SPECIFICS OF THE POST-SOVIET ERA
Communism was radically changing the way of life and thinking, but it could not make people from different cultures, religions, and historical traditions toe the same line. The post-Soviet states differ from each other by the quality of workforce, mentality of their peoples, and natural resources. But they were all facing the same task: to carry out a transition from an administrative to a market economy, from totalitarianism to certain forms of a democratic order. This is the painful route of “catch-up” modernization.
The former Soviet republics broke into three more or less clearly distinguishable groups. The first group is comprised of the Baltic countries. The All-Union center had restructured socioeconomic relations in them but was too slow to Sovietize the people. These countries were able to join the European Union comparatively fast.
The second group consists of the former tsarist colonies. The Soviet government failed to wipe out elements of ancient civilizations in them. After the USSR collapsed, the countries of Central Asia and the Transcaucasus quite soon restored their traditional, albeit modernized, lifestyle.
The third group is the nucleus of the former Russian Empire: Russia proper, Ukraine, and Belarus. An examination of this topic will require more than one paragraph.
In the 1920s some historians and economists (Mykhailo Volobuiev, Oleksandr Ohloblyn, Mykhailo Slabchenko, and others) put forward the thesis of Ukraine’s colonial status in the tsarist empire. The idea caught on and was even applied to the Soviet era. However, the claim that Ukraine was a colony of tsarist Russia sounds too optimistic. In making this declaration, we are trying to persuade ourselves that the tsarist government recognized the reality of Ukraine if only in its status as a colony. It is common knowledge, however, that they considered the “Little Russians” and Belarusians ethnographic branches of the single Russian nation. But the communist leaders did recognize the existence of the Ukrainian nation, investing it with the rights of a “titular nation” that ruled in an ostensibly independent republic and was allowed to be — “together and on par with” Russia — a founder of the Soviet Union. Like in tsarist times, Ukraine was being industrialized at a rapid rate.
It is wrong to consider Ukraine a colony of Soviet Russia for the simple reason that the terms “center of empire” and “colony” are market- economy notions. Yet there was always a clear national component in the Kremlin’s policies, which was aimed at overcoming overt or possible separatism. Party leaders made equally full use of the patriotic national feelings of the Soviet peoples as well as of grassroots chauvinism in all its varieties. They did not aspire to wasting efforts on Russifying the entire population of the country, but such a goal was applied to Ukrainians and Belarusians if the situation was conducive to this.
Following the party’s instructions, Aleksandr Udaltsov, dean of Moscow University’s History Faculty, raised the question of the ancient Slavs’ ethnogenesis during a meeting at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR on Sept. 10, 1938. In 1939 he formed a commission that included I. Orbeli, V. Struve, S. Tolstov, and others with the goal of proving that the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian nations originated from the same ancient Rus’ nation. The idea of a single nation as the common ancestor of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian peoples was finally endorsed after the CC CPSU passed the resolution “On the 300th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia” in 1954. This was a kind of concession to the national feelings of Ukrainians and Belarusians because before the revolution their existence had been flatly denied. At the same time, the idea of a single ancient Rus’ nation was used to lay the theoretical groundwork for the Russification of “fraternal peoples,” because the point was to erase national differences between them, which were allegedly caused by unfavorable historical circumstances.
It is difficult to say which country — Ukraine or Russia — made a greater effort to bring down the USSR. However, after achieving the established goal, the Russian political elite immediately presumed that it was the successor of the former All- Union Communist Party and Soviet center. While the national republics regarded the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States as a “civilized divorce,” Russia saw it as a way to restore the multinational state that had once existed as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The economic dependence of the new states on Russia, especially in the field of energy supply, is playing the main role in the long-term policy of “gathering the lands.”
There were two reasons why the Ukrainian Communist Party-Soviet elite embraced anti-Soviet slogans in its quest for independence. Firstly, it needed to retain power in a republic that was caught up in a national liberation movement. Secondly, it intended to erect an ideological barrier between itself and the All-Union center. This tactic proved effective.
The ideologues of modern Russia have adopted a concept of statehood that incorporates both pre-revolutionary and Soviet historical myths. Since there is no informational barrier between the two countries, the impact of Soviet myths on Ukrainian public awareness remains strong. Yet, the positive attitude to Soviet power in our country is primarily determined by internal factors.
4. BARRIER BETWEEN THE GENERATIONS
The Institute of Ukrainian History and the Kyiv Mohyla Academy Publishing House are planning to republish the three volumes of memoirs of our emigre compatriots. They were written in 1983-84 and published in Washington in 1990 under the aegis of the US Commission on the 1932-1933 Ukraine Famine.
We will be able to get the full picture of the eyewitness accounts of a generation that no longer exists. Some former Ukrainian villagers frankly recalled not only the Holodomor but their entire life during two Soviet-era decades. A striking detail is that they chose to speak openly in the twilight of their lives in a state located on the opposite side of the globe. Asked whether they had discussed the causes of the famine in 1933, 78-year-old Yevfrosyna Zoria from the hamlet of Kruhlyk, near Hadiach, said:
“Good Lord! You couldn’t possibly say anything. And people were even very afraid to talk. One person was afraid of another because they didn’t trust each other. Because if I say something to you today, someone else will know this tomorrow. I tell you, parents did not say anything to their own children. But if you already understood, if you understood anything, then that was good. If you didn’t understand, then your parents didn’t tell you. Because parents were afraid to say things to their own children, not just to strangers.”
Two and a half decades after the Holodomor, hundreds of thousands of prisoners came home from the Stalinist GULAG. They were strictly told not to talk about the conditions of their stay in the camps. But it was not so much the official “signed statement about non-divulgence” as the actual reality that forced them to hold their tongues even when they were communicating with their own children. Kids will be kids: a carelessly dropped word about the Soviet government could cost them and their parents dearly.
This is how a barrier was created between the generations: the life experiences of the preceding one did not enter the consciousness of the next one.
5. NOSTALGIA FOR THE PAST
In most parts of Ukraine there are no more people left who suffered from the mass repressions of the Leninist-Stalinist era. Except for the youngest generation, our population consists of people who were raised in the Soviet school, i.e., people with a thoroughly deformed historical memory. The barrier between the generations forces us to exert our own efforts to learn and assess the political reality in which we were born and learned to think. As the above-mentioned Holodomor eyewitness said, “If you understood anything, then that was good.”
We must give credit to the Soviet power: it took pains to correct our way of thinking. By this I mean the de-Stalinization campaigns conducted by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956-64 and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985-91. However, the correction was insufficient — you cannot pull yourself out of the quagmire by your own hair.
The literature on Soviet-era repressions is colossal. This topic has been the subject of films that almost all of us have seen and of books written by talented writers, which have been read by millions of people. Society is well informed about the crimes that the state committed against it. The relative human toll of the repressions in Ukraine is comparable to the horrific genocide in Cambodia. But why do so many people link them not with the institution of power as such but with individual political figures that controlled this institution?
In recent times, even Stalin is no longer quite so sinister in the eyes of many citizens. This is partly due to Russian influence. Russia shares the same past with Ukraine but is lagging behind us in interpreting it. The cult of leaders is becoming a political necessity in the neighboring country, and therefore the results of controlled de-Stalinization campaigns and a free post-Soviet reconsideration of the past are being gradually revised.
There are no political prerequisites in Ukraine for the formation of a cult of leaders, but what is really fueling the revision is the grimaces of post-totalitarian democracy. Displayed on television screens in popular talk-show formats, the scrambling of politicians for the electorate provokes such disgust that people who are used to dictatorship begin to feel nostalgia for the orderly and relatively safe past, beginning with the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956) and onwards.
What is crucial here is that totalitarian state institutions have immeasurably greater technical possibilities to influence society than those of a post-totalitarian democracy. Whenever the Kremlin launched a de-Stalinization campaign, the supreme power carefully saw to it that everything was kept within certain limits as far as content and depth are concerned. When the now forgotten lecturer Nina Andreeva cried, “I cannot forgo my principles!” her patrons were immediately stripped of political clout.
Things are different in a democratic society. A media baron hires journalists who will express his ideological views even if they run counter to national interests. As a result, society receives a professionally perfect information product with dubious or harmful ideological content. In truly democratic countries, it is parliament and public opinion that protect national interests. In a post-totalitarian society, these levers cannot have an essential impact on the situation. Suffice it to recall the clashes in the Verkhovna Rada over the assessment of such Stalinist actions as the terror by famine or the Sovietization of western Ukraine. After a lengthy struggle, parliament finally passed a law on the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people, but failed to institute effective sanctions against irreverent attitudes to this national tragedy.
Unfortunately, not all politicians heed historians’ arguments. Moreover, fact-based arguments can be found only in small-circulation academic publications.
6. THE ROLE OF INFORMATION ON THE HOLODOMOR IN RECONSIDERING THE RECENT PAST
Social scientists have not yet really looked into the dynamics of society’s historical memory at the crucial stage of the 1980s and 1990s. In the further analysis of this subject I will therefore occasionally refer to what is close to hand — my own consciousness, all the more so as the two historical problems now spearheading the current political struggle are still the subjects of my years-long research. I mean the 1932-33 Stalinist terror by famine and the Sovietization of western Ukraine.
When the February Revolution abolished censorship, the Bolsheviks were pleased more than anybody else. But they later banned all newspapers except their own and introduced the most severe kind of censorship in Bolshevik newspapers. I think many people still remember the masking word “Glavlit” followed by two letters and a certain number of figures. This mark was a must on every printed piece of paper, even a wedding invitation. Then came glasnost, part of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the archives were opened up, and the media began to expose Soviet-era crimes. The history of the USSR, as described in multivolume official publications, suddenly turned out to be a solid blank spot.
History was dealt with by scholars under the watchful eye of Glavlit. But the censors’ duty was only to allow or disallow what had already been written. How to write was the preoccupation of Stalin, who published A Short Course of the History of the AUCP(b) in 1938. This book became the yardstick by which to measure works on history. Even after the 20th Party Congress, when it was withdrawn from circulation, the Stalinist set of stereotypes found a place in other normative publications.
Like every Soviet school alumnus, I was immune to “anti-Soviet propaganda.” This was induced through the following fundamental postulates: the class struggle as the motive force of historical progress, the bourgeoisie as the impoverisher of the proletariat, the proletariat as the most advanced class of society, the peasantry as the petty bourgeoisie, etc. Being in thrall to these stereotypes was as unremarkable as breathing.
If I had been in contact with the previous generation, such family life events as my grandfather’s death in 1933 or my father’s arrest in 1937 would have triggered resentment against the government. Many people did have a hidden resentment, although it is difficult to see this even in KGB archival documents. What does not raise any doubts is that the number of open declarations of disagreement with the government in Ukraine did not exceed even a thousand throughout the period from the emergence of the first dissidents until 1991.
Hidden resentment, which is poisonous to life, passed me by. I was glad when the Radianska Shkola publishing house issued the book The Party of Lenin Is the People’s Strength, intended for senior school pupils. Rereading it now, I can see what really stood behind the book’s logic. But I can also see that people lived in a Leninist “commune state” and worked to the best of their ability. We are still reaping the material and intellectual fruits of their labor. We sometimes squander those achievements mindlessly (for example, the twice-sold Kryvorizhstal steel mill).
The upheaval in my world perception occurred after I joined a group of scholars organized by a decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and vested with the right to use the classified archive of the prewar CC CP(b)U. The group was formed in response to the creation of the US Commission on the 1932-1933 Ukraine Famine. The commission, headed by executive director James Mace, was supposed “to impart knowledge about the famine to the world and ensure better public understanding in the US of the Soviet system by elucidating the role of Soviets in its organization.”
It may seem strange that a doctor of sciences had to spend several years in order to understand the mechanism of the Holodomor. But this is no stranger than the decision of the CC CP(b)U to form a group of scholars to find arguments that would disprove the accusations that the Soviet government had organized a manmade famine. The Politburo of the CC CP(b)U was certain that such arguments could be found. This certainty can be explained by the very nature of the government that made this decision in the absence of any openness and carefully doled out information to its functionaries, depending on their place in the hierarchy.
To add color and liveliness to this dry text, I will turn to Khrushchev’s memoirs. When he was dictating them after his retirement, he mentioned the collectivization-related famine in the Ukrainian countryside. He notes that he learned about this not from the information he had in 1932-33 as second secretary of the Moscow City and Oblast Committee of the AUCP(b) but from foreign press roundups that were prepared for him later, when he was first secretary of the CC CPSU. So Khrushchev had no information during the famine in spite of his high rank in the party hierarchy. His reaction to these press roundups was: “How many people died at the time? Now I cannot say. This information leaked into the bourgeois press, which sometimes published — until the very last days of my tenure — articles on collectivization and what it had cost the Soviet people. I am saying this now, but at that time I, first of all, knew nothing of the kind and, second, even if I had known something, there would have been such explanations as sabotage, counterrevolution, kulak conspiracies that had to be exposed, etc.”
When Ukrainian party leaders needed to clarify any historical matters, they would turn to experts at academic institutes. We would prepare the required memos, using such hackneyed cliches as sabotage, counterrevolution, and kulak conspiracies. Higher-ranking leaders in the Kremlin were also in the same situation. They could not receive unbiased information about the course of historical development in their own country because research institutes employed experts who had been educated from a tender age in the stereotypes of Stalin’s Short Course of the History of the AUCP(b). Of course, those historians could use special repositories where Western books and periodicals were stored. But this literature was considered ideologically hostile and was consciously shunted aside, all the more so as the East- West confrontation did not have a very positive effect on Western historians and political scientists.
In December 1987 the Ukrainian leadership had to admit the long-hushed-up fact of the famine. In a speech on the 70th anniversary of Soviet power in Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky said it had been caused by a drought (weather forecasters immediately denied this by quoting precise figures). Shcherbytsky’s successor Volodymyr Ivashko named a different cause — excessive grain delivery targets. Those who still have a rosy view of the Soviet era cling stubbornly to this version. A famine caused by grain delivery targets should also be classified as a manmade one, but the government can say in defense that by robbing peasants of their last grain it was saving starving factory workers. The export of bread in 1932-1933 is also defended: the USSR needed hard currency to pay for the industrial equipment without which it could not have stood up to Nazi Germany. Unconvincing as they are, these arguments are still disguising the government’s true face.
While studying the documents of the prewar CC CP(b)U, I saw a famine caused by those grain deliveries. In Ukraine it was the same as in other grain-producing regions. The only difference is that in our republic the famine claimed tens of thousands of human lives twice over: following the grain deliveries during the 1931 harvest (in the first half of 1932) and the 1932 harvest (in the third quarter of 1932). But in the winter of 1932- 33, once there was no grain left in the countryside, Ukrainian peasants were robbed of all foodstuffs under the cover of a procurement campaign. This punitive action resulted in a much higher mortality rate than in other regions of the USSR. That it was a punitive action followed from the very name of the government’s move — in-kind punishment of “debtors.” If no grain was found, other foods were seized. I already knew in 1990-91 how this was done. The only thing I did not know was why it was done. It was not until 2000 that documents from the Kremlin archives, which show the reason why the punitive action was carefully disguised as a grain delivery campaign, were published.
But what I understood at the time was sufficient: the Soviet government stood above the law and did not stop short of committing crimes on a horrible scale. Knowingly and in cold blood, by resorting to necessary masking means, it would starve to death millions of Ukrainian peasants and repress those of its functionaries who attempted to forestall the destruction of people. Understanding this meant that my entire scholarly legacy of the three previous decades was almost entirely useless. I looked with boundless horror at the copies of my memos to the CC CP(b)U, in which the “food difficulties” of the early 1930s were attributed to kulak sabotage.
In 1987 I wrote another memo with a proposal to acknowledge the fact of the 1933 famine. I do not think it played any role, because the CC functionaries almost immediately lost interest in the working group they had formed. Meanwhile, the Mace commission began to publish the first results of its research, which in fact forced Shcherbytsky to admit that Ukraine had had a famine in 1933.
After 1991 I discontinued the wide-scale research of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, but in 2005 I took up this subject again from a specific perspective — the Holodomor as genocide.
Some people say that in calling upon the UN to define the Holodomor as genocide, Ukraine wants to obtain financial compensation from Russia. Some politicians and journalists are toying with this clearly futile idea. However, the true goal of this assessment of the Holodomor is different: its is aimed at bringing the historical memory of society in line with reality. A government system that wiped out millions of its citizens does not deserve the respect it inculcated in all of us.
The Day’s regular readers are familiar with my articles on the Holodomor as genocide, which appeared in 2005-2007 and were published as a book in August 2007. Another book is being prepared by the Nash Chas publishing house. Now that these books are available, I can finally say that an abrupt reversal in philosophical outlook has ceased to be a tragedy in my scholarly pursuits. Now I can look without pain at what I wrote in the 1970s and early 1980s.
7. THE PROBLEM OF THE OUN-UPA
In May 1992 some representatives of the Ukrainian Republican Party came to the Institute of Ukrainian History and suggested marking an UPA jubilee. In August of that year we and the Brotherhood of UPA Soldiers held a workshop at the Officers’ Building in Kyiv, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Since the history of the UPA was a blank spot for the vast majority of Ukraine’s citizens, the workshop suddenly became a matter of public interest.
The OUN-UPA problem, which emerged during this jubilee, has yet to be resolved. On May 28, 1997, the president of Ukraine decreed that a government commission be created to study the OUN and UPA question. The commission was assisted by a working group from the Institute of Ukrainian History. Over a period of eight years the institute has published about three dozen books and brochures totaling more than 6,000 pages. On the basis of this preliminary research a large collective monograph was published in 2005. This enabled us to prepare and publish in 2005 what the government wanted us to: a specialists’ conclusion with an assessment of the OUN and UPA’s activity.
It was no accident that we chose a three-tier pattern of work. Whoever doubted the validity of any provisions could turn to the previous monographs and documents prepared by the working group. However, this turned out to be an uphill job: the source materials were published by the Institute of Ukrainian History with a print run of 250 copies, while the Naukova Dumka publishing house issued 500 copies of the final collective monograph, as many copies as the funding permitted. The government only managed to find enough funds to publish 120,000 copies of the brochure with the specialists’ conclusion.
A strange situation thus emerges: there is no blank spot anymore but information cannot reach the reading public because of lack of funds. Meanwhile, the beautifully designed book The OUN and UPA in World War Two: Problems of Historiography and Methodology by Valentyna Ivanenko and Viktor Yakunin was published last year in Dnipropetrovsk. The point is not in the title, although it is pointless to look for special research methods with respect to the OUN and UPA. I know both authors very well — I was the official opponent at the doctoral thesis defense of one of them. I can see that they are sincerely convinced that Soviet approaches to this issue are correct, although they know, quote, and criticize all the works of our working group and even devoted a whole chapter to our conclusion. We failed to convince them, although we managed to persuade the number of MPs required for passing the law calling the Holodomor an act of genocide. Why?
I think the OUN-UPA problem is more difficult to understand. The Holodomor could and still can serve as the departure point of a revolution in world perception for me and my peers. To understand the OUN-UPA problem, an individual from the part of Ukraine that began to be Sovietized in 1917 first needs to change his/her outlook.
It should be admitted that Ukrainians who were born on opposite sides of the Austrian-Russian imperial border have a different historical awareness. There is nothing strange or awful in this. We should thank our lucky stars that we have not become different nations with the same language. Speaking a common Serbo- Croatian language, the Serbs and Croats became different nations bitterly opposed to each other because of historical circumstances. To be more exact, we should thank not so much fate as the spiritual leaders of Ukrainians, above all, Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko, the two titans who dreamed of an independent and united Ukraine.
The western regions of Ukraine were Sovietized a generation after the eastern ones were. Both Sovietizations were equally cruel, but the generation that lived through them no longer exists in the eastern regions. There is a generation that was raised by the Soviet government and considers this government quite acceptable. This is why they do not understand the anticommunist sentiments of their western compatriots. Many people of this generation cannot understand why the western Ukrainians fought so fiercely in the ranks of the UPA against the Soviet power, i.e., against them or their parents whom the government used to Sovietize the western regions.
8. EXTERNAL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE HISTORICAL MEMORY
Although people’s attitudes to Soviet power are shaped, as a rule, by their own historical past, the Russian factor is also considerable. To many Russian citizens it seems that both countries should have the same view of the recent past and even the same history books. After all, this is a shared past!
The current Kremlin rulers have had a tolerant attitude towards the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine, proving this tolerance by low fuel prices. They were not worried that Lukashenko turned Belarus into a Soviet preserve in the post-Soviet space while Kravchuk and Kuchma adopted anti-Soviet state symbols. Kuchma began to have problems only when his book Ukraine Is Not Russia was published in Moscow. This title was treated as an anti-Russian one. The Kremlin does not treat anti-Russian declarations as tolerantly as it does anti-Soviet ones.
In the new century Russia has dramatically stepped up its ideological onslaught on Ukraine’s fully occupied informational space. The common experience of these two nations in the Soviet Union is shaping the vector of ideological influence: glorifying the achievements of Soviet power while almost completely ignoring its repressive policies. The two problems of shared Ukrainian- Russian history — the 1932-1933 famine and the OUN-UPA — could not have surfaced in the political life of Ukraine without this influence.
The subject of the 1932-1933 famine, from which Russia also suffered considerably, is not popular in that country. Also unpopular is the subject of Vlasov’s army and Russian SS divisions. At the same time, more and more literature is being published on the participation of Ukrainians in German military or paramilitary formations during the Second World War. Completely deliberately the UPA is being lumped in with these formations.
Working in Russian archives, the OUN-UPA working group was only looking for materials with neutrally- worded titles. Otherwise, they would have been denied access to archival materials. Too many people would like the public to be as poorly informed about the OUN-UPA problem and the Holodomor as it was in Soviet times. Our historical memory is being closely protected from upheavals.
9. COMMUNISTS, FORWARD TO THE PAST!
Every morning when I jog down Mykola Ushakov Street, I have to pass a concrete fence around the construction site of some high- rises. Written on the fence in red letters is the slogan, “Vote Communist!” and just beneath it someone has added in black letters: “Lynch the commie!” Society is divided by many parameters, one of them being the division into communists and anticommunists.
I cannot consider myself anticommunist because I was a CPSU member for 30 years. Yet the CPSU was a party that was different from the current Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Communist Party of Ukraine. The former CPU made an attempt to adapt to the new reality and even allowed the publication of a collection of party documents on the 1932-1933 famine. The current CPU is trying to make society retain Soviet-era historical memory as its own nutrient. Closely linked to the CPRF, Petro Symonenko’s CPU is a kind of agent that transfers foreign influence onto the historical memory of Ukrainian society.
At first glance, the CPU lost its political clout after the Orange Revolution. But the votes of Communist MPs were necessary to replace the Orange coalition in the Verkhovna Rada with an anti-crisis one, so the CPU got its second wind. It tried to use its influence in the government to boost the propagandizing of Soviet ideological values, above all in the mass media and schools.
On July 26, i.e., on the eve of the early parliamentary elections, the CPU organized the publication of an address of 215 Ukrainian intellectuals to the parties of the coalition. The aim of the address was revealed in the first two paragraphs. Academicians, professors, distinguished artists, and writers were allegedly expressing concern over the intention of some Party of Regions politicians to form a broad-based coalition with Our Ukraine because the two political forces had no ideological differences. In this kind of power setup the CPU would have been left out of the game. I was clearly displeased to see the names of dozens of my acquaintances among the signatories. Far removed from politics, they were being used by a party that was conducting its election campaign with typical demagogy.
On Aug. 3 the newspaper Komunist reprinted this address. It also carried an interview with Petro Tolochko, who was the first to affix his signature to the address. CPU newspapers had often printed articles that made short work of me. Here, too, the journalist Oleksii Ivanov invited the honorable professor to give his opinion on the extent to which Stanislav Kulchytsky is a professional and impartial historian.
Tolochko did not hide his viewpoint, although there is an unwritten law at the Department of History, Philosophy, and Law of the Academy of Sciences, where both of us work, to refrain from making political assessments of colleagues. He called me a tragic personality who has not found his place in any historical specialty. To substantiate this claim, he notes that today Kulchytsky is omnivorous and speaks ironically about the theory of Rus’ as the cradle of the three East Slavic peoples, although there is nothing about which one can speak ironically because this is the gospel truth. I also write about the Holodomor and the OUN-UPA. Clearly, I am a jack of all trades and master of none, according to Tolochko.
I agree that one should not make personal conclusions about a period that ranges from the 10th to the 20th century. But I have never dealt with the history of Kyivan Rus’. The idea of a “cradle” was packaged in the 20th century, and the names of its authors and the circumstances behind its emergence are common knowledge. I know that Tolochko has written a few books on the “cradle” and thus considers this theory the “gospel truth.” He may be right, but this type of reasoning reminds me of the Chekhov hero, who said: this cannot be because this can never be.
Nor does Tolochko approve of my studies on the Holodomor. He claims that I was awarded a doctoral degree “for the same collectivization and industrialization that were taking place in those times, and now he is turning everything in the opposite direction!” What can I say in answer to this? Should I have reversed, as was the practice not so long ago, towards The Short Course of the History of the AUCP(b)? I confess that I have forgone my principles. I am not like Nina Andreeva. But does it behoove you, Mr. Tolochko, to accuse others of failing to abide by their ideological principles? Kindly recall your own long “way of the cross” in politics — from Lazarenko to Symonenko. In all likelihood, these political somersaults were caused by more earthly factors, not ideological ones.
10. DID WE NEED SOVIET POWER?
Concluding the conversation about how Ukrainian society is now rethinking the recent past, one can note a broad range of opinions, depending on age and area. Soviet power turned the country into a superpower. This is the favorite battle cry of those who feel nostalgia for it. Soviet power halted scientific, technological, and social progress on the territory it enslaved, and now the nations of the former USSR once again have to catch up with the countries that we have been calling civilized in recent times. This is what its opponents say.
Perhaps both of these claims are correct, because they seem diametrically opposed only at first glance. But I must say this: any power is dangerous if society does not control it.
Why did the “workers’ and peasants’ power,” as it was called at its inception, begin to murder millions of workers and peasants? In 1991 I wrote my first book on the Holodomor and under its impression contributed the article “Do We Need Soviet Power?” to the newspaper Silski visti, which has a circulation of 2.5 million copies. The editor in chief, Ivan Spodarenko, printed the article without any editorial changes on June 7, 1991. He only changed the title for a more neutral one: “What Kind of Power Do We Need?” Rereading it now, I see that I was not mistaken in analyzing the mechanisms and evolution of power. The only difference between that article and the one I am going to contribute to upcoming issues of The Day is a less profound analysis.
