Zero Point Ukraine. Olena Stiazhkina

and activation of the mode of visibility and recognition; not only do they request historical visibility but also political apologies from those who inflicted violence, ignored and hushed up genocides and social catastrophes. “Historical wounds” do not let the past “cool down,” locking it instead in a perpetual and inescapable present. As Chris Lorenz says, “the idea of a hot present transforming into a cold past is by itself a desired time model for those who would wish to see the past as over and done with. Usually they are the ones who face a sentence themselves.”19

In the history of the 1930s through the 1950s, whether or not survived by the Ukrainians, there are numerous historical wounds, acknowledged in the condemnation of Nazism by the Nuremberg trials, in the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide,20 in the European politics of regret21 and in actual official apologies by Ukraine to the nations of Israel22 and Poland,23 as well as by Poland24—to the Ukrainian nation. Yet the fact that on the scales weighing crimes against humanity the actions of the Nazi and Soviet powers were not deemed comparable becomes a stumbling block for “cooling down” the “heated time.” It also complicates choosing the most suitable framework for the historical analysis of the success or failure of coming to terms with World War II in Ukrainian lands. Nazism was condemned, while communism as the Soviet variant of totalitarianism was not. Only recently—on July 3, 2010—was another attempt to condemn communism made. Initiated by the Czech government, a number of renowned European politicians, historians, and dissidents signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.25

The authors of the Declaration called on the European community to recognize Nazi and communist regimes as the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century and to develop unified criteria to identify the victims of both totalitarianisms. Those who signed the declaration emphasized “reaching an all-European understanding that both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes … are destructive in their policies of systematically applying extreme forms of terror, suppressing all civic and human liberties, starting aggressive wars … and that as such they should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted the 20th century.”26

Still, this proposition was received with some ambivalence, so the question about recognizing the crimes of the communist regime remains open27 not only for politicians, but for historians as well. For instance, attempts at a synthetic view of Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes before and during World War II28 made by Timothy Snyder in his milestone work Bloodlands received significant criticism from historians and intellectuals.29 They also labeled as controversial his statement regarding the interconnection and mutual reaction in plotting genocides, as well as the framework that presents Stalin and Hitler as equal criminals.

Significant efforts were made toward recognizing the equal culpability of Nazism and communism in starting World War II when the European Parliament adopted the resolution of September 19, 2019 “On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe.” The document emphasizes that the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact paved the way for the outbreak of the most devastating war in European history, “dividing Europe and the territories of independent states between the two totalitarian regimes and grouping them into spheres of interest.”30 However, despite these efforts, the academic vocabulary used in telling the story of World War II is still formed in a way that practically disables any kind of justification of Nazism, yet tends to “normalize” communism.31 The Soviet Union’s contribution in the defeat of Nazi Germany was one of the reasons for such “normalizing.” Thus, the historical wounds inflicted upon the subdued nations remain open, aggravating not only political coping with the past but also scientific research on it. Ukrainians who survived or did not survive the war are trapped in the space formed by several standpoints, the most powerful of which are the narratives of the “victors over universal evil” and the “victims who suffered atrocities under all the regimes.” Both of these narratives are quite problematic.

Thus, the powerful narrative of victory is partly invented by the Soviet historical canon when Ukrainians are depicted as part of the victorious Soviet-Russian nation, but is also partly appropriated by the new Russian political rhetoric in which only the “Russian nation” is presented as the victor. As Peter Dickinson rightly observes, “Western histories of the war routinely refer to Soviet forces collectively as ‘the Russians.’ We learn that ‘the Russians’ suffered twenty-seven million losses.” Western historians and intellectuals omit Ukraine, millions of Ukrainian soldiers who served in the Red Army, as well as the scale of losses among Ukrainian civilians. Therefore, under the influence of the Soviet (and subsequently Russian) discourse, “this staggering omission demonstrates the sheer size of Europe’s Ukraine-shaped blind spot,”32 instead of presenting the true Ukrainian contribution.

Thus, the narrative produced by historical research about the overall tragedy, the mass killings, deportations, and violence, becomes problematic, as there is no actual “full stop” to it. The problem is not one of including capacity and agency alongside victimhood and “being an object” in the list of the components of “tortured life”33 (a term coined by Alexander Etkind). The problem is also about Nazi crimes against humanity receiving symbolic and real punishment, while the crimes of the Stalin regime (and of the communist regime in the broader sense), the crimes of those who executed or instigated mass violence, though recorded, analyzed and to some extent memorialized,34 lack the legal basis of condemnation of communism. Thus, these unrequited crimes turn what should be “full stops” into ellipses, creating a danger of misreading them as “to be continued”35 and preventing the “hot present” from cooling down into the “cold past.”

      The above-mentioned methodological challenges are not the only difficulties encountered by Ukrainians when conceptualizing the history of World War II. The intricate complexity of what was happening in Ukrainian lands from the 1930s to the 1950s is still such that eighty years’ distance makes the geographical borders of these lands perfectly clear. Yet they were not so clear and visible to those involved in the maelstrom of war and in the “Soviet nation-building” of the period. Due to the colonial practice of cutting up the borders (both of administrative regions within Ukraine and between other republics) implemented by Moscow in the acquired territories, many Ukrainians happened to be “thrown out” beyond Ukraine’s borders. Local communities were ruined or (as in the case of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR) other nations were considered as “almost Ukrainians.” Incorporation into Ukraine was not an obvious step for the people of Zakarpattia, whose leaders at the time of the fall of Czechoslovakia envisioned their self-preservation in a union with the Reich. Ukrainians in Poland were perceived as a problem and a threat, so the Polish government by means of “pacification,” encouraging “osadnik” settlers, and “consolidation of the state” imposed colonial practices and assimilation policies aimed at forming some “Polish Ukrainians.” Meanwhile, a powerful Ukrainian diaspora in Europe and in North America already existed, being almost the only Ukrainians who knew for certain that they lived not in Ukrainian lands.