Zero Point Ukraine. Olena Stiazhkina

Using the term today, we mean a political nation, one which was still in the making at the beginning of the twentieth century. As George Liber rightly pointed out, “this history of the first half of the twentieth century recognizes that unspoken assumptions about national identity and political engagement in the past do not necessarily coincide with those of the present.”36 Thus, it would be fair to acknowledge that Ukrainians entered the World War II not as a political nation but as a group of various communities with very different levels of national consciousness and identity. Along with the Ukrainians who saw themselves as a community with a long-lasting historical tradition, there also were the “Soviet Ukrainians,” “malorosy” [Little Russians, a pejorative term], “Polish Ukrainians,” Rusyns, Hutsuls, Lemkos, etc. Still, this “self-identification” was not necessarily stable: some may have become self-aware as Ukrainians during the war while the others preferred to see themselves as part of the “great Russian people.” In addition, survivors and non-survivors of the war included other nations and communities: Poles, Jews, Germans, Belarusians, Moldovans, Greeks, Tatars, Armenians. Their strategies and tactics of survival when caught in the maelstrom of war, and afterwards, dealing with its unfinished tragedy, were at times based on the effort to preserve their identity and at other times on the forced or voluntary change of this identity as an alternative to death or repression. The concept of “enemy nations”37 (and practical punitive actions against them) was invented not only by the Nazis: Stalin’s totalitarian apparatus started demonstratively designating “enemy nations” and punishing them beginning in the 1930s. Timothy Snyder describes it as follows: “Stalin was a pioneer of national mass murder”;38 long before Hitler, Stalin’s “achievements” included “Polish,” “German,” “Romanian,” “Bulgarian,” “Greek” and other national purge “operations”39 that caused bloody tragedies for entire nations living alongside the Ukrainians. Hitler in turn also started his mass killings with the Poles. Christopher Browning writes: “If the Nazi regime had suddenly ceased to exist in the first half of 1941, its most notorious achievements in human destruction would have been the so-called euthanasia killing of seventy to eighty thousand German mentally ill and the systematic murder of the Polish intelligentsia. … The Jewish Holocaust ever since has overshadowed National Socialism’s other all-too-numerous atrocities.”40

However, the atrocities of Soviet communism against the “enemy nations” did not stop after the Nazis were defeated:41 targets of mass deportation-murders were Crimean Tatars, so-called “Ukrainian nationalists,” “cosmopolitans” (a euphemism covering up an antisemitic campaign that only Stalin’s death brought to a halt). The regime performed violence by the hands and actions of people42 who were members of the power and party structures, career ladder-climbers and exploiters, ideological fanatics, true sadists, and conformists, the “ordinary people.”43 Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Belarusians, Armenians, etc., all were of their number. Their names are recorded in the ordinances and directives of the NKVD (MVD)—NKGB(MGB), in party documents, and memoirs. Still, in the midst of total terror there were also those who helped, saved, and showed humanity. The names of the latter were captured, if at all, in family lore, as to speak about and to remember those who disobeyed the system even in the slightest way was dangerous both for those saved and for their saviors.

      It is clear that situations of prolonged terror that caused “historical wounds” were brought about not only by the regimes in power but also by local communities, neighbors, local instigators of deportations and mass murders. Yet the “politics of recognition” as a conceptual approach enables seeing “historical wounds” of another kind: “wounds” made by the invisibility, devaluation or non-recognition of the sacrifice and heroism of some people who were omitted in the post-war heroic canon.

Attempts to see people caught in the war requires words and terms that would allow the description of certain general processes or those sharing similar traits. Usually, the word “society” is used in such an analysis. This term is useful but still deceptive and a subjective analytical category that contributes to the fixation of certain Soviet dichotomies (though rooted in the logic of the Enlightenment), such as “party and people,” “state and society,” etc. The search for “society,” that is, social interests and values, consciously recognized by all or by a majority of people, and for which the community is eager to work together, in the Soviet state (that included most of the Ukrainian lands) faces, on the one hand, an evident process of atomization. The latter was the result of the “submission by fear”44 that gripped all categories of society. On the other hand, the search for “society” encounters occasionally manifest “polyphony”45 and situational, short-lived, changeable systems of solidarity that emerged and dissolved under the threat of dangers and the fear of “purges,” Holodomor, war, or another wave of repressions.

      The concept of “state” is equally problematic for analyzing what happened to people in the period. In the stories about the practices of terror, violent and disciplinarian actions, mobilization and organizational activities directed at society, the “state” often appears as a depersonalized (sacred or mechanistic) institution that acts rationally, solving its own pragmatic objectives.

Such a perception and thus the representation of Soviet power (the Soviet state) is both an echo of pre-modern notions of power46 and an element in the sacralization47 of power structures that was part of Soviet mythology. Meanwhile, as Caroline Humphrey says, such concepts as state, public authorities, state institutions had a very specific shape during the “socialism” era. This specific nature disables simple binary oppositions like “state”/”society,” “public sphere”/”private sphere,” as the system of public affairs permeated the whole social space, recreating itself anew at every level (at the level of enterprise and the collective farm, school or hospital, family or neighborhood, etc.), hence forming/having a multilevel (in the author’s terms) “nesting hierarchy.”48 Stanislav Kulchytsky, analyzing the nature of Soviet state project, proposes that it be perceived as a fulfilled model of “state-society,” which is “not looming over society but absorbs it, i.e. dissolves all existing horizontal links and structures; it penetrates society with vertical structures; it ‘atomizes’ society, putting every person face to face with himself.”49 In view of the re-creation of power at all levels, encounters with it regarding mobilization, evacuation, return, imprisonment, etc., were never depersonalized, but—mandatorily—personified.

      “Power,” as already mentioned, always had a name, body, biography, and history; therefore, individual relations and motives underlying the choices made by people during the long war had not only ideological but also individual intentions, including revenge or aid, betrayal or rescue, trust or contempt.

Political scenarios, implemented in the Soviet Ukrainian lands from the 1920s to the 1950s, included, among other factors, both the Soviet experiment of creating a “new communist society” and imperial strategies and practices of ruling Ukraine as a “dominion.” A distinct “colonial flavor” could also be sensed in directives and the rules of life set for Ukrainians by the governments of Poland, Romania, Hungary. Capture of Ukrainian territories by Nazi Germany, as Wendy Lower describes it, was “the most radical colonization campaign in the history of European conquest and empire building.”50