ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
Contents
Essay IV Ukraine in 1943–1953: Re-Sovietization and an Unexpected Turn of the Unfinished War
Preface
Lateral roads are the conduits parallel to the forward edge of the battlefront. They may be railroads, highways or dirt roads. What matters is not their properties but the opportunities they offer.
Lateral roads are about providing space for maneuver and a basis for lateral communication between the units, about preparing for an offensive, supplying weapons, evacuating the wounded, about reinforcement potential, about communications. And, along with all this, they are about war as such.
It was historian Tamara Vronska who introduced me to the term “lateral road.” And she, in turn, was introduced to it by Mykhailo Koval, a World War II historian who undertook the burial of the “Great Patriotic War” myth, under which, as part of the concept of the “Great Russian People,” Ukrainians were interred. Koval was among the first to reveal the struggle and tragedy of Ukrainians, to give voice to the prisoners of war, Ostarbeiters, the displaced, to those who endured occupation, to those who did or did not survive the war. In some sense, these potent attempts of the 1990s were lateral roads—forgotten/banned, but utterly important trends that enabled the unbiased study of the course of World War II and its consequences for Ukraine.
My book is about lateral roads as well. It is about the possibility and necessity of Ukrainian “maneuver” and intensification of communications between historians, philosophers, social anthropologists. It is about the “visibility mode” that is being developed and opened for Ukraine with the change of methodological framework, with the incorporation of Ukraine into the European context, with reassessment and “reclassification” of spatial and temporal categories, with restoration of agency for the communities and groups that were “appropriated” by “outsider” historical narratives and “dissolved” in broad generalizations.
The idea of the book and its realization are linked to the important project of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The overall idea of the project is to produce the “Outlines of the History of Ukraine,” based on anticolonialism/postcolonialism principles, from the standpoint of Ukraine and Ukrainians as a political nation.
The themes offered to me under the project turned out to involve both a challenge and a risk. A challenge—because World War II was not part of the core of my research endeavors. Even my book Stigma of Occupation: Soviet Women in Their Self-Imagination of the 1940s (2019) was aimed not so much at describing war events as the scenarios of surviving it, of “blending in” with the state concepts; it was important for me to set the problem of the nonlinearity of different experiences, of burden and total fear that marked the choice of the “Soviet” side made by the women who survived or did not survive occupation. Certainly, as often happens, after it was finished and published, some concern grew about whether the book could have been better, as not all the plots/ideas were totally clear and polished.
Thus, there were some “reserves” that could be used for the project. The risk lay in the question: are these reserves sufficient? Would the social and temporal distance between the subjects I usually focus on and the ones I happened to be immersed in due to analysis of the enormous scope of historiographical material by Ukrainian and foreign historians be a drawback or an advantage? Would personal experience of war (one launched against Ukraine by the Russian Federation in 2014)—my own experience of witnessing aggression and occupation—help?
All these questions are still open. Yet these questions allowed me to realize that the texts on the project were nothing else than lateral roads—a space for maneuver out of letters and paper, for communication, connection between historians working on World War II, between the histories of European states, between the general trends that defined and accompanied the global catastrophe and its features in Ukrainian lands.
While working on the project the text turned out to be lengthier than planned and its style appeared to be slightly different from the usual classical academic writing. Therefore, while my work in the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine goes on, the work conducted conducted so far, probably, already needs a reader. Such, at least, is the opinion of the Dukh i Litera publishing house and of Leonid Finberg, one of its leaders and inspirers. He came up with the idea of publication. Yet the responsibility for all possible faults, is the author’s—mine—alone.
The four presented outlines are not linked by the logic of systematically presenting all the events of World War II. The first is about the methodological framework applicable to the analysis of World War II Ukrainian history. I shall reason the need to continue discussion about the chronology of World War II, about temporal cracks engulfing both certain events and the memory of them. I propose to rethink the concepts of “betrayal” and “collaboration,” especially in the context of people’s accounts about who was and who was not an occupying force in Ukrainian lands. Also worth reconsidering are the complex categories of Good and Evil that could be useful not only for a philosophical understanding of the events, but also for their historical analysis; ideas of “historical wounds” and responsibility; perceptions of the “heated time,” not ending in 1945, etc.
The aim of the second outline is to analyze pre-war mobilization and to rethink this established, politically loaded, and “conceptually stressed” plot in Soviet mythology. It should be noted that, aside from providing the factual outline, determining the chronological and political sequence of events, this “mobilization story” played a significant role in forming the myth of the “Great Patriotic War.” It painted a historical picture that emphasized the unexpectedness, abruptness, suddenness of war, which, although “ripening in the militarist circles of Western imperialism,” nevertheless caught the “peaceful Soviet state” by surprise. Arguments in favor of this picture were the facts of the clear unpreparedness for war of the military and productive facilities. The concept of “Germany attacking without a declaration of war” backed up the idea of abruptness and explained the gaps in defense preparedness. In the second outline, analyzing the social and political processes orchestrated by the Bolshevik authorities during the 1920s and 1930s, I contend that mobilization and militarization were integral parts of the policy of the Soviet state; also, most of the constituent components of the state of emergency and martial law that were set out in legislation (namely, obligatory labor, rationing, regulation of working hours, requisitions, restrictions of entry and exit, courts-martial, administrative exile, expulsion, etc.) were a constant of everyday life and formed a specific, undeclared state of perpetual war well before the start of World War II and the official declaration of “martial law” on June 22, 1941.
The idea of the third outline was to form a consistent picture of establishment/ruin/restoration of the occupation regimes; also, it was an attempt to answer the question: how similar and different were the occupation regimes in Ukrainian lands? What were the differences rooted in? What were the expectations, fears and hopes of people amid the fall of one regime and the establishment of the other state and quasi-state structures? How did the occupation (occupations)