Zero Point Ukraine. Olena Stiazhkina

or another regime? Did they truly comply with the authorities’ directives? Did they get these directives right?

Social foundations were fragile and unstable from the 1930s to the 1950s. Sharp and not so sharp political turns could change the lives of people and communities quite abruptly but they could also (though quite rarely) go unnoticed. Besides, the speed with which the authorities issued their instructions faced the inertia of those charged with executing them and their inability to comprehend the authorities’ requirements, a situation that formed the background of the total violence advocated as almost the only way that would lead to the “bright future.” Characterizing the change in application of the Soviet experiment (from the global project that relied on the proletariat up to following Russian imperial tradition of building a “great state”), Serhy Yekelchyk remarked, “if in the 1920s the USSR was a state of equal nationalities and unequal classes, by the end of the 1930s it turned into a state of equal classes and unequal nationalities, with the center being more and more associated with the Russian nation.”51 Those labeled as “enemy nations” did notice the change (but did they understand it?). As Yekelchyk observes, Ukrainian Soviet intellectuals—historians, writers, filmmakers—contributed to that change by consenting to and constructing the unique position of Ukraine—the position of “almost one nation, a younger brother.” Still, the people who for different reasons had chosen the Soviet project were not consciously fully aware of this change. During the late 1930s, some part of the Ukrainians, men and women, predominantly city dwellers, was still engaged in the process of incorporating the Soviet identity, “unpacking” themselves (in Igal Halfin’s terms) through the categories of class, through the practice of intolerance to the “former people,” through the ideas of the global proletarian revolution and the search for “class enemies” among the surrounding people. At the start of the war they were conscious communists, proletarians by origin, thus they perceived the enemy attack on the USSR as an encroachment on “socialist revolution” and as the “machinations of world imperialism.” However, when they survived the war and occupation, their conception of themselves and the world may have changed radically—if they survived at all.

Deeply lacking the historical, political background, and knowledge of what was happening, these people, with their inability to analyze and focus on local interactions (including personal offenses), produced reactions that seem bizarre now. For instance, Jews expressed happiness about the annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union: “You wanted Poland without Jews, so now you have Jews without Poland.”52 On the other hand, some Ukrainians were excited about “the collapse of the Polish state”53 and “had built triumphal arches and put up red or yellow-blue flags. Entering troops were sometimes showered with flowers, embraced, kissed, or greeted with bread and salt in a traditional gesture of hospitality.”54

      For the country folk of Ukrainian Soviet lands who survived genocide, the experience of occupation, particularly if it was not marked by famine, may not have been the most horrid catastrophe given the one that they had survived already. Moreover, when the Germans entered, it was often perceived as the possibility of liberation from communism, and for the deported rich peasants, dubbed “kurkuls,” it meant a chance to return home from distant places of involuntary settlement.

      Yet there was no single reaction, no scenario of the perception of war that did not undergo some change. In Western Ukraine, the hopes invested in the “Soviets” were eventually dashed. Illusions about the Germans, these were also gone, as well as the ones about the possible liberalization of the regime after ousting the Nazis. The mirror that reflected human behavior in both regimes was always distorted by some kind of propaganda, according to which people were expected to see themselves and judge their actions. Nevertheless, the reduction of all manifestations of human and inhuman action exclusively to the influence of the authorities’ directives would be incorrect. People saw, acted, and passed judgment on themselves and others not only under coercion: they betrayed and saved, became minions of or resisted the regime; hid and consented; collaborated and survived; participated in crimes or warned about them—according to their own notions of good and evil, of right and wrong. And these notions were not fully appropriated by any state, not the Bolvshevik’s or the Reich’s.

Revealing and studying these complicated and delicate mechanisms requires application of the methods of psychology, sociology, and the other humanities to historical sources. To describe the wartime history of people using the categories of good and evil is a hard task, taking into account the specific features or the sources and historians’ research objectives. Though this task is hard, it is still worth applying these categories in order to understand the causes and consequences of the civilizational catastrophes of the Nazis and communism. As Stanley Milgram55 and Philip Zimbardo56 have shown, these categories are rooted in the nature of social interaction and may sprout even in democratic states. “Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in ‘total situations’ that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.”57

The “politics of recognition” aimed at healing “historical wounds” requires just as much, if not more, incorporating the category of the good into historical analysis. Analyzing the origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarks that totalitarianisms created such conditions that “conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible.”58 This conclusion by the prominent thinker was one of the hard consequences of the humanitarian silence of the 1940s and 1950s when it came to working with the recent past of World War II and the analysis of the communist regime recreated by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

However, over time the search for the good became part of European59 and Ukrainian60 historiography. Still, the question of whether good and justice are possible, whether they may win amid mass violence and genocides, remains polemical and open to this day. This is particularly true from the point of view of when the stories of the people who saved others—from death sentences, deportations, total extermination—are introduced into scientific circulation.

The issue of collaboration also needs a balanced and conscientious analysis: both as a concept that requires a reasoned position from the author who defines it and as a phenomenon that requires a deeper comprehension, taking into account all the complex historical, social, anthropological, ethical, and political aspects. From the point of view of the Soviet, and partly of the contemporary Russian, canon, understanding collaboration during the wartime years of World War II was and still is a political question, as the state interests of the USSR were the point of reference to assess “betrayal.” Thus, collaboration was presented as cooperation with the enemy in the interest of the invader-state in order to harm the “native” government. In fact, such a definition allows the stigmatization of all the people who remained in the occupied territories while also supporting and legitimizing in a Soviet manner the concept of “traitor nations,” i.e. “Ukrainian-German bourgeois nationalists who assisted the fascists.”61 Still, from the very start of its formation, the Soviet canon of collaborationism lacked a reliable historical and political basis. As Sarah Fainberg observes, “Western Ukraine, which was brutally conquered by the Red Army and Sovietized in 1939, and where the Soviet regime was mainly associated with the NKVD repressions before, during and after the war, sees itself as a victim of both Soviet and Nazi atrocities.”