Zero Point Ukraine. Olena Stiazhkina

Ukrainians were objectified and appropriated by the Kremlin administration. Therefore, national unity became not only an achievement but also a source of numerous historical wounds, inflicted both by totalitarian regimes in a vertical dimension and by communities and individuals in a horizontal dimension. The Ukrainian history of World War II is a part of European history; it is one of the many variants of stateless nations’ stories in which people endured the pressure of various ideological, political, social directives and international agreements. Situational strategies and unstable tactics of life under occupation, choosing or not choosing some side as “ours” (our state, our army), attempts by people to distance themselves from resistance or betrayal, or to join them—all these modes of dealing with war were typical of most Europeans who did or did not survive World War II. A comparative European perspective is not an artificial, scholarly construct, but a useful instrument for analyzing similar and different processes. It helps to remove some sort of taboo around the sensitive subject of the manifestations of evil, while nonetheless allowing us to study and make those—invisible, forgotten, devoid of voice and memory—who did Good on a daily basis visible and perceptible again.

      To acknowledge the complexity, nonlinearity, reversibility, and rigidity of certain processes related to dealing with war, unfortunately, means thinking about the future. The future that, after the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine ends, should be not the history of the stigmatization of the survivors of occupation but the practices of understanding (i.e. by the means of history) of the tragedy that affected the occupied, the captive, and the displaced.

1 First published in: Academia. Terra Historiae. Studii na poshanu Valeriia Smoliia [Academia. Terra Historiae. Studies in honor of Valeriy Smoliy], vol. 1, Prostory istorii [Spaces of history], ed. H. Boriak, S. Blashchuk, V. Horobets, A. Kudriachenko, V. Matiakh, V. Tkachenko, V. Soloshenko, and O. Yas (Kyiv: NAN Ukrainy. Instytut istorii Ukrainy, DU “Instytut vsesvitnoi istorii Natsionalnoi akademii nauk Ukrainy,” 2020), 587–608.

2 Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe. World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. István Deák, Jan Tomasz Gross, Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 293–325.

3 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 400.

4 István Deák, Norman M. Naimark, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution during World War II (Boulder: Westview Press., 2015), 288.

5 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 296.

6 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tea Sindbæk, Usable History. Representations of Yugoslavia’s difficult past from 1945 to 2002 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 248.

7 Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution Against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 410.

8 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 303.

9 Hannah Arendt, Dzherela totalitaryzmu [The origins of totalitarianism] (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2005), 467.

10 Anne Applebaum, “The Worst of the Madness,” The New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/11/worst-madness/.

11 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 307.

12 Chris Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time, or The Sudden Presence of the Past,” in Performing the Past, Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010), 85; see Mark Salber Phillips, “History, Memory and Historical Distance,” in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2004), 86–109.

13 See Johannes Czwalina, Movchannia hovoryt. Teperishnie zalyshaietsia, tilky chas mynaie. Zmitsniuvaty myr, osmysliuvaty mynule [Silence speaks: The present remains, only time passes. Strengthening peace through making sense of the past], trans. Olha Plevako (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2016); BerberBevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence. Time and Justice (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 262.

14 Aleida Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen? Vzlet i padenie temporalnogo rezhima Moderna [Is time out of joint?: On the rise and fall of the modern time regime] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017), 125.

15 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–73.

16 Ibid., 25.

17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History and the Politics of Recognition,” in Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 77–78.

18 Ibid., 78.

19 Chris Lorenz, “Geschichte, Gegenwärtigkeit und Zeit,” in Phänomen Zeit. Dimensionen und Strukturen in Kultur und Wissenschaft, ed. Dietmar Goltschnigg (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2011), 134, quoted in Aleida Assmann, Raspalas svyaz vremen? Vzlet i padenie temporalnogo rezhima Moderna [Is time out of joint?: On the rise and fall of the modern time regime] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017).

20 National Holodomor-genocide Museum, “Recognition of Holodomor as genocide in the world,” accessed June 1, 2020, http://old.memorialholodomor.org.ua/eng/holodomor/genocide/act/.

21 Jeffrey K. Olick and Brenda Coughlin, “The Politics of Regret. Analytical Frames,” in Politics and the Past. On Repairing Historical Injustices, ed. John Torpey (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 37–62; Karolina Wigura, Wina narodów, Przebaczenie jako strategia prowadzenia polityki [Nation’s guilt. Forgiveness as a political strategy] (Warsaw-Gdansk: Scholar, 2011), 269.

22 “Speech of the President of Ukraine in the Israeli Knesset,” Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, December 31, 2015, https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/news/speech-of-the-president-of-ukraine-in-the-israeli-knesset/.

23 “Ukraintsi znovu prosiat proshchennia za Volyn,” [Ukrainians again apologize for Volyn], Istorychna pravda, June 3, 2016, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2016/06/3/149102/.