FORUM:
The Second World War as a Challenge to Ukrainian Historiography
We invited our Forum participants to express their thoughts about the degree of success that Ukrainian scholars have had in forging new, more dialogic and more ambiguous visions of the Second World War; about possible approaches to the phenomenon of collaboration in the territories occupied by the Nazis; and, finally, about the place of Ukrainian discussions on the Second World War within a larger historiographical context, as well as the future of these debates.
Timothy Snyder (Yale University) states that the search for the meaning of the Second World War is not exactly the task of the historian. It is the task of historians to allow themselves to be surprised by the evidence of the past, and to make sense of that evidence for others. Andrii Zayarniuk (Winnipeg University) argues that Ukrainian historiography lacks an open discussion of the most morally unsettling aspects of the War, notably the Holocaust and the problem of its local perpetrators and accomplices. Grzegorz Motyka (Polish Academy of Sciences) writes about fears of many Ukrainian historians that the disclosure of truth about the war crimes may compromise the Ukrainian resistance movement. Helinada Hrinchenko (Vasyl Karazin Kharkiv University) talks about the importance of research on memory of the Second World War, which, in her opinion, has barely been done in Ukraine. Karel C. Berkhoff (Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam), while noting some positive tendencies in the development of post-Soviet Ukrainian historiography points to the "intellectual timidity" of many studies. Anatoliy Rusnachenko (Borys Hrinchenko Kyiv Pedagogical University) notes that in today's Ukraine the problem of the treatment of the civilian population by the Red Army and Soviet partisans remains a de facto taboo. Omer Bartov (Brown University) writes about the paradoxical complementarity of the Ukrainian Nationalist and Soviet narratives about the war in Ukraine, specifically in obfuscating the subject of the Holocaust of the Jews. In the author's opinion, a serious engagement with this problematic would only strengthen Ukrainians' sense of national identity. Oleksandr Lysenko (Institute of Ukrainian History, National Academy of Sciences, Kyiv) believes that historiography continues to be inhabited by myths about the "universal resistance" in the rear of the German army, as well as by the notions about the allegedly inimical xenophobia of Ukrainians. In the author's opinion, the Ukrainian historiography particularly lacks theoretical and methodological studies in history of the Second World War. Andrzej Gill (Institute for East-Central Europe, Lublin) notes how the model of the "Great Patriotic War" in contemporary Ukraine combines elements of Soviet and Ukrainian Nationalist narratives and regards as symptomatic a lack of interest of many Ukrainian historians in the problem of perception of Ukrainians' historical experience in other historiographies. (For example, attitudes of Poles towards the "re-unification of Ukrainian lands" in 1939, resultant from the Soviet-Nazi agreements). Aleksandr Gogun (Sankt-Petersburg) thinks that the lack of publications on certain subjects does not necessarily mean mat they are "taboo." Ivan Patrylyak (Taras Schevchenko University, Kyiv) writes about the inability of Ukrainian historiography fully to break free from the stereotypes of the Soviet era. His emotionally-metaphorical text is a condensed statement of central theses of the Ukrainian nationalist version of the history of the Second World War. Finally, Johann Dietsch (Lund University, Sweden) believes that despite efforts of some historians and political elites, a considerable segment of Ukraine's population continues to adhere to the Soviet vision of the 'Great Patriotic War" and suggests that historians elaborate a new civic history of the Second World War in Ukraine, a narrative capable of encompassing both the Great Patriotic War and the Ukrainian nationalist experience.