Zero Point Ukraine. Olena Stiazhkina

allies in the war also did not see these people as Soviet citizens. For instance, after the end of World War II, in May 1946, the government of the United Kingdom issued recommendations regarding repatriation of Soviet citizens from the United Kingdom to the USSR. It contains an eloquent definition of those to be compulsory repatriated: “Only persons who were both citizens of and actually within the Soviet Union on the 1st of September, 1939, will be regarded as Soviet citizens for this purpose.”63 Olesya Khromeychuk investigated that in the British documents the soldiers of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) were labeled as “undetermined Ukrainians” or “doubtful Poles” but under no circumstances as Soviet citizens.64

The situation with the Soviet Ukraine, taking into account how deeply rooted the myth of the “Great Patriotic War” was and the mode of thinking about Ukraine and Ukrainians within the primordial paradigm of being “one people with the Russians,” raises the question about the legitimacy of the Soviet regime after suppressing the national revolution. This question should be the subject of lengthy discussion and careful reasoning. Omitting for the moment reflections about the occupational/colonial/imperial nature of the Bolshevik regime,65 the emphasis should be placed on the few parameters of the existence of the Soviet Ukrainians. In the broader context, fitting them into the Soviet state vision of the collaboration problem was quite problematic. The question is not what the people living in the Ukrainian lands thought they were; it is rather whether the Soviet state considered their citizens to be the peasants who could not obtain passports or the “former people” and victims of purges who were stripped of their civil rights. Did the Soviet state consider itself to be legitimate in the territory where it organized systematic repressions during the 1920s and 1930s, where it sentenced to death or sent to the GULAG the “Petlurists,” “soldiers of the UNR army,” members of Ukrainian parties? Or was all of the above some perverse acknowledgment of the existence of an independent Ukrainian state, recognition of the potential of its supporters, even acceptance of the possibility of the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty? Karel Berkhoff, assessing the rapid and sometimes panicked evacuation/escape of the Soviet party functionaries from Ukrainian territory during the initial German attack in the summer of 1941, fittingly noted that during these defining days, “from a ‘Western’ perspective the Soviet authorities behaved not as a native government, but as a conqueror who had to leave.”66

      Pondering the problem of state collaborationism in its Soviet-Russian version, one may come to the paradoxical conclusion that by engaging in relations with the Soviet authorities and acting in its interests, the people of the Western Ukraine “betrayed” the Polish state, and that the people from the left bank of the Zbruch river betrayed the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR).

However, the problem of collaboration/betrayal is a hard one for historians of World War II. As Eleonora Narvselius and Gelinada Grinchenko rightly note, the concept of “betrayal” was never stable or “cemented” once and for all. The meaning of the term depends upon changes in the definition of boundaries (geographic, political, and mental); upon whether there is a conscious “us” as a marker of common group identity (neighbors, ethnic, regional, national, professional, etc.); upon how contemporaries assessed the circumstances of betrayal (and this account may differ significantly from the judgment of subsequent generations); upon the pre-war and pre-occupation psychological, national, social intentions of people; upon the ideas about whom to consider an enemy; upon the result that the occupation/betrayal did or did not have, etc.67

It is important to emphasize that Ukrainians who endured occupation during World War II, did not accede to the Soviet definition of collaboration. The myth about the “nationwide condemnation of traitors and minions” that widely circulated in Soviet discourse does not stand up to fact-checking: people and communities, making their judgments, tended to build their conclusions on the specific circumstances, situations, traits of those involved in it; they often showed solidarity and preferred to keep secrets about the behavior of people whose actions during the occupation did good to the community or to certain individuals.68

Studying the issue of betrayal/collaboration in the circumstances of ongoing war and with no independent Ukrainian state obviously needs some shift of focus: from the interests of the USSR to the interests of ordinary men, from “unconditional condemnation imposed by the dominant—primarily nation-centered—ideological discourses to compassion and respect for the personal choices of those who, through their independent action, positioned themselves against politically oppressive systems or collective pressure.”69 This task, though very clear, is not that simple, as scenarios of people’s lives under occupation often look like a zigzag; they were inconstant and resist incorporation into any stable concept, except for the concept of “moral gray zone” (Primo Levi’s term) that “possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.”70

The issue of time—the chronology and chronotope of war—is also problematic and open to disput. The modern time regime, formed by the intellectuals around the ideas of the linearity, homogeneity, continuity, and inevitability of time, no longer answers either political or ethical challenges of contemporary historiography. The modern time regime, oriented to the history of nationhood and statehood of the Western European model, “worked” solely on the expulsion of “others,” legitimizing the right to only single-nation statehood, forming the lines of “us–others” and employing categories like “timely” or “untimely” when explaining revolutions, revolts, wars, etc.71

Within the modern time regime, other, non-modern, ways of experiencing and dealing with time “disappeared” or were excluded. In this linear chronological scheme, the past was marked as an irreversible process that one may and should be “distanced” from. Yet, as Chris Lorenz points out, the catastrophes of the twentieth century “undermined the claim that academic history can keep ‘distance’ from them.”72 Time marked by catastrophes forms a temporal anomaly and turns out to be “reversible” (Berber Bevernage). Aleida Assmann observes: “alongside the episodes that we restore in order to reuse, there are episodes that haunt us, as they are out of our control; remaining latent, they sooner or later overtake us.”73 Abolition of the statute of limitations on crimes against humanity, as Bevernage remarks, proves to be a marker of the rejection of the linear notion of time.74 Chris Lorenz emphasizes that “recognition of ‘historical wounds’ is an essential ingredient of ‘presentism’ and that this presupposes a time conception which is not ‘erasive’ and which can explain duration.”75 The idea of the presence of the past in the present, of the reversibility and duration of time, its non-linearity for different people and communities, illustrates, according to George Liber, how “the people of Ukraine did not follow a linear, inevitable, or irreversible road to the present. Their history contains many contingencies, discontinuities, and complex turning points.”76 Criticism of the modern time regime as a project that “did not see” and “did not take ‘others’ into account” encourages us to ask questions about the conventional calendar and chronology of presenting World War II, in the context of Ukrainians’ past requiring a “politics of recognition,” in scholarly writing as well. The attempt to produce a chronology of World War II for Ukrainian society via the established Soviet myth of the “Great Patriotic