The upcoming 70th anniversary of the Victory over Nazism and the end of World War Two in Europe more and more spotlights the most important fundamental things that determine Ukrainian citizens’ attitude to this important event in world history. Let us try to name some of them.
First. The hysterical chauvinistic campaign in the Kremlin-controlled Russian media (“we would have won even without Ukraine,” “the Victory proves that Russians and Ukrainians are the same nation,” “our grandfathers defeated the Nazis, and we continue their cause,” etc.) conclusively proves that a weakened and agonizing empire is making a furious last-ditch effort to defend a false myth about “our glorious Victory.” Indeed, this is the last ideological “stronghold” of Putinism, beyond which there is a void, if not an abyss. The Kremlin knows that there are no more resources to support the “spiritual mainstays” of a superpower. When this bastion falls and the Russians finally get rid of propagandistic gibberish, the whole structure will tumble down.
Second. Instead of dissociating ourselves from an “alien holiday,” we must, on the contrary, tell the truth – actively, insistently, and even aggressively – about a huge and decisive contribution of Ukrainians to the Victory over Nazism. We must fiercely and unyieldingly deny Putin’s Russia the “right” to monopolize the WWII Victory – and put this position across the whole world. We must say to the Russians deceived by governmental propaganda: our and your grandfathers fought against Nazism not for a situation when Russian soldiers and their terrorist henchmen in eastern Ukraine are occupiers, behave like Hitlerites in 1941, kill and torture people, and commit genocide against the Ukrainians!
Third. It is memory and the war’s humanitarian component. Nobody can still say at what price the Victory was won. Different historians assess the losses of Ukrainians (both civilians and the military) in WWII as ranging between 6 and 12 million people. There was only one other comparable disastrous event for our nation in the 20th century – the apocalyptic 1932-33 Holodomor. Such horrible and boundless tragedies need, above all, a nationwide consideration, sorrow, and a fair and truthful memory. What is needed is national unity of all the Ukrainians, no matter which side of the “barricades” their grandfathers fought on. This is in fact the reason why the Verkhovna Rada resolved, following the European practice, that May 8 be celebrated as Remembrance and Sorrow Day and May 9 as Victory Day.
All the aforesaid is a mere fraction of a wide circle of issues discussed at the roundtable “Word War Two: Ukrainian Contribution, Ukrainian Exploit, Ukrainian Vision” on April 17 at Den’s editorial office. The event was covered by the national TV channel 1+1. What united all the participants was the intention not to squeeze very complicated problems of history into rigid patterns but to think, seek the truth, and doubt. The participants were Yurii SHCHERBAK, writer, diplomat, doctor, public activist and politician, Den’s regular contributor; Oleksandr LYSENKO, Doctor of History, chief of the World War Two History Department at the Institute of Ukraine’s History; Myroslav POPOVYCH, full member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, director of the Hryhorii Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, regular contributor to Den; Serhii HRABOVSKY, political writer, philosopher, one of the most active contributors to Den; Serhii HROMENKO, research associate at the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory; Boris SOKOLOV, Russian historian and political writer (Moscow). The debate was moderated by Den’s editor-in-chief Larysa IVSHYNA.
Larysa IVSHYNA: “Our newspaper, which our dear guests might know, is trying to closely monitor societal attitudes to the problems of the WWII Victory. Here is my first question to our respected experts: is celebrating May 8 and May 9, the two important dates at the end of the war, a necessary compromise, the consequence of a transitional condition of our society which is now at the stage of ‘maturing’ for new assessments, or is it a very important qualitative step forward?”
Yurii SHCHERBAK: “I’ll begin from afar. I still remember the first day of the war in 1941 in Kyiv, as if it were today, and the war’s last day in May 1945 also in Kyiv to which we came back in 1944. So, the war left a deep imprint on my heart – and I think forever. It is, above all, the memory of that war as a huge people’s woe, an overwhelming catastrophe to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. And I think that today, when a new war is raging, which, thank God, is not of the WWII scale but can be, in my view, the prelude to a third world war, when we can see all the hardships that befell our people, many have involuntarily recalled the black years 1941-45.
“It seems to me that now we need not so much to collect wartime facts and figures (very much has been done in this field) as to reconsider that war and debunk Soviet-era false myths which are very durable because they used to be ‘hammered’ into human minds, from the kindergarten onwards. We must know the war not in the paradigm of Soviet propaganda, not in the imperial Russian dimensions, but in the dimensions of Ukraine and the sufferings that fell to the Ukrainian people’s lot. Therefore, we must first of all recall that the Ukrainians who took part in that war were not only in Soviet Ukraine, but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the US, Canada, and the UK. I also think it is absolutely necessary to shatter the old propagandist myth that Ukrainian nationalists were doing nothing but collaborating with the Nazis. Yes, it is true that Melnyk followers (OUN-M) did collaborate on some points, while this applies to OUN-B to a far lesser extent. But I want to remind you that there was also a national democratic group, UNR, which immediately and decisively refused to establish ties with German military, intelligence, and propaganda centers. We must recall here such a figure as Oleksandr Shulhyn.
“We recently heard Putin say absolutely cynically that Russia could have won World War Two even without Ukraine. This total lie is, unfortunately, finding a broad response in Russian society. But we can say and prove that Russia would have lost the war, had it not been for Ukraine and the enormous sacrifices the war inflicted on our people. In 1941 Ukraine broke off, at the cost of immense casualties, the Nazi offensive towards Moscow. And the Soviet Union managed to prepare for the Battle of Stalingrad as a result of fierce clashes in Ukraine. Ukraine became a lethal zone of strategically important heavy battles. We should never forget the immortal words of Oleksandr Dovzhenko: ‘The destiny of humankind is being decided in the fire of war on the fields and in the villages of Ukraine, on our ill luck. So unhappy is our land. So unhappy is our fate.’”
L.I.: “All these opinions and arguments are extremely interesting and important. But I suggest we get back to the following question: is marking both May 8 and May 9 a temporary compromise or does this mean that the resource of the Soviet vision of history is being exhausted but, at the same time, the new has not yet blazed the trail for itself, and we should take rather a cautious approach to this?”
Yurii SHCHERBAK:“Of course, it is a compromise. Between what and what? Between the tradition of marking May 8 in Western Europe as Remembrance and Reconciliation Day and the pompous celebration of Victory Day in the Soviet tradition. Incidentally, I personally think that Russia suffered an utter defeat in the clash with the German military power – as a matter of fact, it lost the war, not to mention a civilization split with the West. And today this virus, this bacillus of Nazism, is very dangerously infecting Russia itself. I think that, like the Battle of Thermopylae, the battles of 1812 and 1914, all the WWII battles will in the course of time go down and occupy a proper place in history.”
L.I.: “In our view, it is obvious that Russia has lost a moral right to speak of Victory Day and monopolize the Victory – especially due to the annexation of our territories and aggression in the east. Some are saying that Ukraine can become a country that will rally together all those who fought and clear the way to an adequate vision of this tragedy. But I think there is so far not enough systemic work in this sphere. Why are no sufficient efforts being made so that the Ukrainian contribution to the Victory and the Ukrainian role in the war become a powerful factor that will consolidate society?”
Myroslav POPOVYCH: “To begin with, I do not think we should ‘stoop’ to a debate about what to call that war – Second World War, Soviet-German, Great Patriotic, or something else. The function of a name is very simple – to unmistakably indicate the object in question. In this context, it does not matter whether we will speak of the Great Patriotic or a Soviet-German war. But this is ‘pure theory.’
“Like Mr. Shcherbak, I remember the first and the last days of the war very well. The word ‘patriotic’ does not matter to me, though I stayed on the occupied territory and waited for the liberation (people used this very word – ‘liberation’). At the beginning of the war, people were divided along the following lines: ‘Germans-Russians,’ ‘Germans-Reds,’ ‘Germans-Soviets.’ And when ‘ours’ (the Soviets) entered the city on horseback in 1944, all my neighbors (they were ordinary people: peasants and minor civil servants) came running to kiss the horses on the mouth, for they’d been waiting for them. But the word ‘patriotic’ has nothing at all to do with this.
“It is also artificial to oppose May 8 to May 9. For we know that the signing of the act on Germany’s unconditional surrender was deliberately repeated by Stalin at 0.50, Moscow time, on May 9 because he thought that the act signed by the Western allies the day before, on May 8, did not reflect the USSR’s decisive contribution to the Victory.
“I can remember the first mighty flash of joy on May 9, 1945. But the first thing I thought of after this wave of glee was: there will be others killed in the upcoming war against Japan. This is what people were worried about. I remember fearlessly walking the streets, stepping over the corpses. And the scattered antipersonnel mines (in little boxes) were a customary thing. And thinking about death was a rational response to what might happen to us: there’s no more death! Later on, this thought turned into the somber image of a world war in which the USSR is engaged.
“So, I would call for discussing the war as such or, to be more exact, the goals the parties to the war set and the results – the extent to which they met these goals. Here I would accept the most radical views if it is about the role of Ukraine. Besides, I can say that today’s attempts in some foreign countries to justify the Russian aggression boil down to equating the position of our people, our nation, and very diverse forces in that-day and present-day Ukraine, with the position and activities of only one faction of the nationalist movement (just one!), i.e. revolutionary or, to be more exact, Banderaite OUN. I knew Yevhen Stakhiv, one of the well-known Banderaite, very well – he understood quickly and in good time that it was necessary to drop the slogan ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians’ and seek a new idea, entirely different from the one they were accustomed to. Therefore, one should not outline their position by just turning 20-30-40 or more years back.”
L.I.: “And is Ukraine prepared now to have a new, modern, platform by the efforts of our leading ‘brains,’ the best intellectuals?”
M.P.: “In my opinion, it is not only prepared, but also has a position. For, like it or not, Ukraine must be the defender of democratic ideals which, incidentally, were formed with its participation, too. The point is we cannot possibly go without Western democratic principles. This is why we are speaking of European values. Otherwise, we will suffer a major historical defeat – for generations ahead.”
L.I.: “I’d like to specify one thing. Whenever we say that Russia has no moral right to misappropriate the Victory, we can see that almost nothing has been done to persuade public opinion – both here and in Europe – that it is really so. And now, when that war has not yet been properly comprehended, we have a war in the Donbas. There is a direct link here. This is a deep and still unbridged gap which is still to become a fact of mass awareness. At the same time, Russia is very actively using all kinds of propaganda, Stalinist and post-Stalinist myths, to attack the population of our eastern regions from the angle of being monopolists of the Victory (“our grandfathers fought”). So, the question is whether Ukraine is prepared to speak of itself, its role, and its mission.”
Serhii HRABOVSKY: “I want to emphasize: Russia has never, not only now, had the right to hold a Victory parade. For it is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact it signed that opened the ‘gate’ of WW II. We should drop the ‘black and white’ vision of this war imposed on us before. Of course, it was not ‘patriotic’ for Ukraine. The proof of this is at least the fact that we can recall not a single Soviet Ukrainian wartime song that enjoyed mass-scale popularity. Conversely, a lot of insurgent songs came up at the time.
“It should be taken into account that Ukrainians are one of the unique nations that bore the burden of all the six years of WWII – from the first to the last day – as servicemen of various armies. We must synthesize this memory today. There is an example of India whose citizens also fought on the different sides of the front line. But they have achieved an integrated vision of their national history.
“The concept we can offer the world should be based on anti-totalitarianism. In the summer of 1943, when the result of the war was not yet obvious, OUN(r) took a democratic coup by approving a national democratic program for the first time. That was an attack on all totalitarian and imperialist forces. This call remains topical today. Now, in the new conditions, we are fighting against the same enemy, for we can see a moving unity of Putin’s Russia and European communists, neo-Stalinists, and neo-fascists. Ukraine must persuade the world to fight against all the neo-totalitarian forces as global evil.”
L.I.: “This is quite convincing, for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought against Stalin and Hitler at the same time. It is a phenomenon indeed. But there is a thing to be taken into account. The Ukrainian National Republic suffered a defeat also because, surrounded by undemocratic states, it was irresponsibly super-democratic. Besides, each of our attempts to create a state provoked harsh criticism from the advocates of ‘pure democracy.’ Why, may I ask you all, is Chancellor Merkel going to Moscow (albeit on May 10, not 9)? Moreover, why do many Western leaders have a ‘guilt complex’ towards Russia but none of them feels guilt towards Ukraine in spite of a horrible death toll of war? I don’t think we are raising this question actively enough.”
Serhii HROMENKO: “I think the explanation of the German chancellor’s decision you spoke about is much more simple and favorable to Ukraine. The point is there is a real election system in Germany. And, accordingly, many Germans want the war in the east to stop in any possible way. So, Ms. Merkel’s government cannot but take it into account. She has to address both sides of the conflict and act as a ‘messenger of peace.’ And she is not going to Moscow on May 9 to show the world that she does not support Putin’s policy, but she is going there on May 10 to appease her voters who want peace ‘at any price.’
“From the angle of academic science, everything is OK today. In the previous years, the only problem was the political will of some heads of state. The first two presidents were not interested in these problems, the third spoke more than he did, and the fourth – we know his attitude. Only now is there a political will of the state to tell its citizens and foreigners the truth about reconsideration of the war. If the Poppies of Memory campaign, launched by the president’s wife Maryna Poroshenko on the initiative of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, starts well and ‘explodes,’ we will be able to speak of a great symbolic victory over Soviet traditions. It is likely to be the case. I think a time will come for a new schoolbook and comics-graphical novels for children.”
L.I.: “Thank you. I am very glad. I must say many are in bad need of these recommendations because in the previous years even journalists were at a loss about how to speak and what vocabulary to use. As for complexes, I’d like to note that we discuss this with the Germans and it is their standpoint. It is not the standpoint of Den’s journalists. I don’t think Ukrainian society is thinking in these categories. I can say it is all maneuvering, diplomacy, and it is comfortable. But we should take it into account, and when the ball is in our court, we have no right not to react.”
Oleksandr LYSENKO: “Unfortunately, we often indulge in wishful thinking. New laws are being passed now, a new frame of categories is being formed, and new recommendations for universities are being provided. Instead of ‘liberation of Ukraine,’ we say ‘ousting,’ instead of ‘victory day,’ we say ‘reconciliation day.’ I can’t agree to some things here. But is society prepared for this? I may be told: ‘Why pay attention to society? We should put up new markers and pull people up to them.’ That’s right. But, to assess whether one law or another will work, it is first necessary to conduct a sociological survey. The Razumkov Center’s polls in 2009-13 showed: residents of all the regions of Ukraine consider this holiday as Victory Day. Contacts with academics indicate quite different attitudes to innovations. In my view, society is not prepared now for abrupt changes. I have friends in Cherkasy who annually gather on Victory Day, toasting to this event on street benches. Incidentally, there are young and elderly people among them. This is the way they mark the end of the war. Victory Day resembles today St. John the Baptist’s, a pagan feast given a new Christian twist. But we should distinguish between rite and faith. As for Victory Day, here the ‘rite’ is a ceremonial part which politicians and the state exploit, and ‘faith’ is what people feel when they hear the words ‘second world war’ or ‘great patriotic,’ it is the allusions and associations they call up in their minds. It is blood, death, slave labor, filtration camps, but also victory and valor. Today, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory is calling on us not to mark this day as victory of the Ukrainian people. Is this right?”
S.Hromenko: “We are speaking about something else. In its recommendations, the institute calls for breaking with the Soviet tradition to honor one nation as victor. Instead, we suggest emphasizing the concrete victories of certain individuals. We do not deny the victory of the Ukrainian people – we only call for honoring everyone separately instead of a great mass of people – everyone who fought in the Soviet Army, the UPA, and in all the armies of Western allies.”
O.L.: “I think the people who went through that horrible war have the right to honor this day at their level the way they deem it necessary. At the same time, the state is used to exploiting Victory Day in a certain ideological manner. After the war was over, society expected, quite naturally, this day to be marked. The state put it into a shape that it needed. This brought about grandiose official holidays. We must make a choice: shall we only remember the victims or leave the people some optimism that will keep their energy up? For there are not so many victories in Ukrainian history… It seems to me we must keep this optimistic component intact and free of the official gloss.”
L.I.: “It is an important and very disputable issue. It needs to be discussed. But I would also like to say that Ukrainian literature and films have shown very few characteristic Ukrainian figures who could be of use during the transition from a period when all things Ukrainian were hushed up and there was only a united nation and a mutual victory. But there were also those inside, including the Red Army, who remained Ukrainian. They were just not singled out. Perhaps the only exception here is Dovzhenko’s diaries. But they are full of tragedy. Very regretfully, there is no good documentary serial about Dovzhenko. There is an excellent film Diary. Dovzhenko. 1941-1945 by Mykola Vinhranovsky, but it needs to be rethought and corrected. What was the truth about Ukraine in war? All these layers need to be synthesized.”
“AT THE FRONT, THE PRICE OF LIFE AND DEATH WAS ENTIRELY DIFFERENT”
M.P.: “I agree to all that you said. But I’d like to add something. I had a close friend – the now late Niko Chavchavadze, director of the Georgian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy. His ancestors were Georgian kings. His father, a Georgian insurgent army officer in the 1920s, died under arrest. Niko Chavchavadze fought in World War Two and was a lieutenant by the end of it. It was awfully strange for me to hear his wartime stories. He felt freer at the front than in the Stalinist rear, where he was a slave and could always be ‘put away.’ At the front, the price of life and death was entirely different. Those people were bearers of the attitudes described, particularly, in Dovzhenko’s diaries. What the Ukrainian participants in the war endured cannot be measured by statistics. They brought forth the awareness of their own dignity. This dignity sprouted even in the conditions of a communist dictatorship. Those sprouts may have been pale like the weeds that struggle through asphalt. But that was also a victory. The ideas that inspire us today in the shape of European values were already living in that era under the press.”
L.I.: “There was the Nuremberg Trial after World War Two, the chief criminals were punished, and Germany was expiating its sins for a long time. As for the reincarnated Stalinism, Europe has not yet drawn any proper conclusions. We can see today the continuation of this policy in eastern Ukraine.”
M.P.: “It is the philistine’s dimension of history that weakened the West even in the 1920s-1930s before Hitler came to power. Today, we can see the same symptoms of helplessness and playing with the electorate in ‘exalted’ values.”
Valentyn TORBA: “We have in fact no time today, for we are in a state of war. We’ve been holding out for six month and badly need a victory. Do you have an impression that certain debates are being provoked in society in order to pull out of us this ‘brick’ of the victory that legitimately belongs to us?”
Yu.Shch.: “A war can be waged in two systems. The first way is dictatorship, martial law, and an all-out people’s war. It is quite possible, but the Ukrainian leadership has opted for another – political and diplomatic – way. Bankova St. keeps saying that a military victory is impossible. It is the doctrine of the EU, of Merkel. I think it is a wrong option. The doctrine of political deals is powerless if you encounter a cheat and a war criminal. But, on the other hand, we understand that a full-scale war means missile strikes on Kyiv or Dnipropetrovsk. It means an attack of Russian troops through Belarus on western Ukraine. They are ready to use nuclear weapons. It is a junta, a bunch of criminals, who robbed the Russian people of the right to have nuclear weapons. Another way is the way of Britain and Israel. We must think how to preserve the state’s democratic nature during a war.”
L.I.: “In all these years, Den has been laying a supranational groundwork for intellectuals to communicate, no matter where they live – in Moscow, Europe, or America. Our contributors are our true asset. One of them, Moscow-based historian Boris Sokolov, is going to join our discussion by Skype.”
“PUTIN’S ATTITUDE TO UKRAINE IS LIKE THAT OF STALIN AND HITLER IN ONE PERSON”
Boris SOKOLOV: “I categorically object to the opinion, now popular in Russia after Putin spoke it out, that a victory in the war could have been possible without Ukrainians. The war left 40 to 41 million Soviet people, including about 27 million servicemen, dead. Approximately a fifth of them were Ukrainians. At the end of 1945, the Red Army numbered about 11 million soldiers, out of whom about three million were residents of Ukraine. If Ukraine had not existed at the time, the number of the Germans the USSR killed would have been 600,000 fewer. The Red Army could not have won in these conditions. Ukraine suffered some of the greatest human and economic losses. All the Ukrainian industrial areas and the largest cities were destroyed. Unfortunately, the current Russian leadership continues to act in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact style. To be more exact, there is no ‘Ribbentrop’ now, so Putin’s attitude to Ukraine is like that of Stalin and Hitler in one person. The task of Ukraine and the world community today is to stop him. Unfortunately, not only Russian, but also Ukrainian generals are fighting today on the basis of Soviet experience, for they don’t have any other. They are fighting the way the Red Army was in WWII. But it would be better to follow the example of the US, British, and German armies. As for the UPA, I must say that, in spite of all the contradictions, it was the only side that represented the Ukraine people proper. Incidentally, it stayed in contact with not only the Germans, but also with Soviet partisans. You can read this, for example, in the diary of Rudniev, the commissar of Kovpak’s detachments.”
L.I.: “What do you think will be the reaction of Russian public opinion to the absence of anti-Hitlerite coalition leaders at the Moscow celebrations?”
B.S.: “Russian public opinion has got used to this kind of things. Five years ago, Angela Merkel and the president of Israel were the only serious politicians to come to Moscow. Russian society seems to be taking a casual attitude and attach no special importance to these things. The same applies to Putin. Russian public opinion is under the influence of official propaganda which knows how to turn any diplomatic defeat into a victory.”
S.Hromenko: “I must say that the figures Mr. Sokolov cited are his own viewpoint. I don’t know any other historians in the world, who share it. I can only agree that Ukrainian victims accounted for approximately a fifth of all or even a fourth if you take into account not only ethnic Ukrainians.”
S.Hrabovsky: “The official figure of 27 million is also beneath all criticism. At the end of the war, the Red Army was 11-million strong on paper only – it was far smaller in reality. Khrushchev told Dovzhenko about 13 million Ukrainians who had died.”
Yu.Shch.: “Hunczak cites the figure of 12 million. The US correspondent Edgar Snow wrote about 11 million. Officially, Ukraine’s death toll was 2.5 million servicemen and 5.5 million civilians. Germany lost a total 6.5 million, including 4.5 million servicemen and 2 million civilians. This testifies to a very good organization of civil defense in Germany.”
O.L.: “There was a unique project in the mid-to-late 1990s – ‘Ukraine’s Book of Remembrance.’ Its first goal was to find out the number of those killed in Ukraine during WWII. Kryvosheiev’s group worked with the still classified documents, and they found out the figure 8.6 million, which was transposed on the entire CIS. When Prof. Mukovsky and I were writing the book The Valor and Sacrifices of Ukrainians on the Fronts of World War Two, we found that there were no methods and sources to assess the number of the dead. And when a unique structure – regional editorial boards of the ‘Book of Remembrance’ – was created, we collected more than 250 volumes of information and set up an electronic database. We recorded the figure 6,038,000 of our citizens who died. But, on the initiative of the then minister of culture, this project was shelved because a group of historians with Gen. Gerasimov at the head (he celebrated May 9 on Red Square only) filed a recommendation to revamp the editorial board. So, when we wrote texts, we were edited by the Russian speakers who deeply hated Ukraine. A navy captain crossed all the words ‘Ukrainian’ in my text.”
Photo by Mykola TYMCHENKO, The Day
S.Hrabovsky: “Incidentally, this online database was deleted several years ago – the Party of Regions did this once it came to power. They immediately launched the project ‘Ukraine’s Electronic Book of Remembrance, 1941-1945.’”
Ihor SIUNDIUKOV: “That war resulted in enormous casualties which human mind will hardly be able to fathom. But what did the further course of history show? Did these sacrifices become a weighty factor in the liberation and democratization of Ukraine at least in the long term? Was the military victory a victory in terms of civilization? For, after repenting to some extent, the defeated Germany integrated into the Western world and outstripped the USSR.”
M.P.: “When we come into a broad and unbounded world, in which no one knows where the beginning and the end is, it is mindless to ask what the victory consisted in and who won. In any case, we should not say that one nation won and another suffered a defeat. Did the German nation suffer a defeat in the world war? In spite of a huge number of losses, I cannot call it national defeat for quite an apparent reason.
“In general, we should not put this kind of assessments and the common maxims we use into the hands of politicians. There is a purely political approach, when it is said that there cannot be 8, 6, or 4 million dead – there must be 10 or, on the contrary, 1.5 million. We have got used to these approaches, which is a Stalinist legacy. The problem Ms. Ivshyna was speaking about can only be solved if a disinterested search for the truth highlights the spots that block the vision of the picture as a whole.”
S.Hrabovsky: “An irrefutable result of World War Two is that the world is short of one global evil. Nazism was cursed, crushed, and marginalized in the person of its descendants.
“Secondly, the Ukrainian national movement, at least its leading currents, has dropped radical nationalist ideas and stepped on the national democratic ground. It is about active and viable, not boundless, democracy. This change in all trends of the Ukrainian liberation movement is extremely important.
“We have also forgotten that, in addition to Dovzhenko’s, there are also Oles Honchar’s front-line diaries. There was a special order that a sergeant who keeps a diary could face a firing squad or a punishment battalion, so it took courage to keep one. And no matter what our attitude to Honchar’s Standard Bearers is today, it was sort of a challenge to the widespread opinion that Ukrainians did not show their worth in the war. In the novel, Ukrainians are a self-sufficient force, albeit in the Red Army. Another dimension: it is the only epic that, despite all its ideologemes and naivety, shows that Europe is not alien to its characters. In this lieutenant-written prose book, Europe – Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria – is something different, but Honchar’s heroes – privates, sergeants, and officers – walk bravely across this Europe and find understanding everywhere. This is an extremely interesting moment of world perception, and I don’t think Honchar invented it – I think he recorded it.”
Roman HRYVINSKY: “Some of our adversaries in the Donbas, who are not just mercenaries but have certain ideological motives, still believe that World War Two continues and they are fighting against ‘fascists’ or ‘Banderaites.’ Moreover, they are fighting not only residents of Lviv, but also those of Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, etc. Why did no other than the World War Two lay the ideological groundwork for Russian propaganda and create a precondition for the current war? Why did Ukraine fail to put anything against this ideological attack?”
Yu.Shch.: “It is a very deft, albeit savage for normal people, trick to overlap the history of that war on the current Ukrainian government. The latter can be called anything but a bunch of Hitlerite henchmen. It is the woe of zombiefied people who are unlikely to be reeducated. It is a huge misfortune for me even to think that hatred is so infernal and intense after fire exchange that no one knows how long it will take to settle all this.
“It is no accident that Zatulin said in Russia that Ukrainian nationalism, which has been normally developing for 20 years, is very dangerous. For it is thanks to this factor that we have somebody to defend Ukraine. If there haven’t been 20 years of development, when people could read freely, including Den, we would not have this at all, and this is our luck.”
Dmytro KRYVTSUN: “The Verkhovna Rada recently passed some really important laws on de-communization of Ukraine, recognition of fighters for its independence, etc. But will this be properly marked in films, literature, and the press? What is Ukraine going to watch, hear, and read on May 8 and 9? Have these laws been passed belatedly and haven’t we lost in this period of time another generation that is now wearing ‘Colorado beetle ribbons’ in the Donbas?”
S.Hromenko: “If it is about short documentary, informational, and docudrama films and trailers, we will do all we can. We have not been exactly rushing for 23 years to make Ukrainian films on Ukraine’s participation in World War Two, so it is only natural that we have nothing. There are two more or less acceptable Soviet movies on WWII’s Ukrainian dimension – first of all, Only Old Men are Going to Battle, but it is obviously not enough. Making this kind of films requires money.
“Let’s face it: we won’t do anything before May 8-9, so this year we will try to bridge the information gap with what we have, but then the government should at last adopt a target-oriented program of national-patriotic education with due account of the abovementioned laws. It is necessary to reequip museums, remove all the Soviet trash from them, set up pre-draft training rooms in schools, revise methodical recommendations for teachers and schoolbooks. All this will take time. And this country will totally change by the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII – at least our institute believes in this and we will make an all-out effort.”
L.I.: “What are you going to do on May 8-9?”
S.Hromenko: “It is backbreaking work.”
S.Hrabovsky: “The same. I think I will be writing a work on World War Two.”
M.P.: “My book Red Century is to come out in Russian translation. More than ten years have passed since the first edition, and, naturally, many things need to be summed up in a way. Commentaries on commentaries. Briefly speaking, I will feel keenly our drawback – incomplete restructuring of all that surrounds us.
“What I consider the most unpleasant and dangerous is the couldn’t-care-less attitude. Nothing comes home to people. They are sure everybody is a fraud – some of those who have come will steal more than the others, and so on.”
Yu.Shch.: “I don’t think it is important whether to celebrate May 8 or May 9. Wise people will not be shouting – they will just remember, as I will do, their relatives who died in the war. But my primary concern is whether Russia will launch an offensive here and now. I regard today’s war as my own, and WWII was also mine.”
By Ihor SIUNDIUKOV, Valentyn TORBA, Roman HRYVINSKY, Dmytro KRYVTSUN, The Day
