In this maelstrom, a young scholar at the Institute of Literature by the name of Ihor Ostash had the idea of organizing an International School of Ukrainian Studies (Mizhnarodna shkola ukrainistiki). As a doctoral student in political science, I had only decided a few months before to focus on Ukraine (on language politics). I heard of the school from Alex Motyl at Columbia and signed up. I taught myself Ukrainian from a dictionary and landed in Ukraine in early August with my American friend Charles Furtado, without really having heard Ukrainian before. Ostash brought us upon arrival to a radio station and I was asked straight-up to answer in Ukrainian. It may not have been pretty, but it wasn’t Russian. The School brought together mostly diaspora Ukrainians, from Latin America, North America, and Central Europe. Since the Amerikanis did not speak Russian, and the Central Europeans did not speak English then, Ukrainian became the only common language and I learned fast.

Ostash’s school did not outlast his career in politics (he became a deputy in the 1994  parliament) and diplomacy (the world being small, he has served as Ukraine’s Ambassador to Canada since 2007, a ten minute drive from the Chair of Ukrainian Studies), but the memories of the school, which I ended up attending three times, have remained strong. And here I was, twenty years later, taking part in an exhilirating Summer School in Dnipropetrovsk, on July 5-9, and living anew the rare intensity of the experience, although from the other side, as a faculty and co-organizer.

The Summer School is the brainchild of Guillaume Colin and Anna Colin Lebedev, both former doctoral students at SciencesPo in Paris. Guillaume works in the cultural and scientific section of the French Embassy in Kyiv and the School is officially “under the patronage” of, and largely financed by, the Embassy, thanks to his initiative. (For comparison, the Canadian Embassy has virtually a zero budget on culture). Anna, who defended her dissertation last year on the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers in Russia, is the chief organizer, in terms of program and logistics. For someone born in Russia who came to France at the age of 14, she is also the quintessential Franco-Russian (although I can’t see her in any other way than French), with native fluency in either language.

While my 1990 School was primarily on Ukrainian language and culture, the Colin-induced Summer School is on social sciences. A first edition, on the study of memory, was held in Uman’ in 2009. The Second Summer School, in Dnipropetrovsk, was sponsored by three university-based institutions—in Ukraine, France, and Canada—and a fast-rising Ukrainian scholarly journal. The Ukrainian involvement came from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Doctoral School and its director Mychailo Wynnyckyj, Canadian-born, but living in Ukraine for the past eight years. Wynnyckyj is known to long-time UKL readers as someone who provided daily analysis during the Orange Revolution. To the army of dezhurnaias, who populated every floor of the resolutely pre-Orange Hotel Dnipropetrovsk where we stayed, he was the celebrity who appeared almost every night on the popular talk show Shuster Live in the past year. Mohyla, currently in the news for having been placed under the jurisdiction of the ever so subtle Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk, is one of the few higher educational institutions in Ukraine that produces internationally competitive graduate students, as the yearly Danyliw Seminar application process can attest.

The French partner, with the unwieldy name of the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen, or CERCEC, is located within the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), one of the two top social science institutions, along with SciencesPo, in Paris, and the only one with an actual research center devoted to the area. While the CERCEC’s traditional emphasis has been on history, its director, Alain Blum, straggles historical research (his forthcoming book, co-authored with Yuri Shapoval, is on the police in Ukraine in the 1930s) and contemporary demography (the theme of his presentation at the School), and research fellows are increasingly sought in sociology and political science.

The Chair of Ukrainian Studies completes the trio. Since the Chair is based in an officially bilingual (French-English) university, and devoted to the study of an unofficially bilingual (Ukrainian-Russian) state, a School where all four languages can be informally heard all day can only be a natural. The Chair may be functioning in English for its publications, international seminars, UKLs, blog, web site, and announcements on Facebook, but you wouldn’t believe how French is actually spoken behind the scenes all year long…and now on the road!

The theme of the Dnipropetrovsk School was on “Post-Soviet Transformations”, not limited to Ukraine, and yet half of the students were from Ukraine, although several are currently based abroad. This was the great change from twenty years ago. The 2010 School was split down the middle between Ukrainian and international students working on Ukrainian or regionally-related themes and was a unique opportunity to get acquainted with promising students and young scholars. A field is vibrant if young people are drawn to it. A School is a great way to tap these networks.

The Embassy, Mohyla, CERCEC and the Chair also partnered with Ukraina Moderna, a remarkable “thick” journal edited by Andrij Portnov, a young scholar actually hailing from Dnipropetrovsk, who convinced the rest of us to bring the School to the formerly closed city which exemplifies the contradiction of economic transformation and Soviet inertia. Andrij, whose new book Uprazhnenie s istoriei po-ukrainski, seeks to present the controversial Ukrainian “politics of memory” to a Russian audience, is one of those polyglots who glides effortlessly between German, French, English, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian (although he was beaten by one of our students who could actually speak seven languages). He also provided the link with the local intelligentsia: four guests came to the School for a lively roundtable in mid-week. Since Guillaume’s work at the Embassy is necessarily transient, like all diplomatic postings, the challenge is for the partnering institutions to make the Summer School a permanent fixture. At this very early juncture, the prospects are bright.

The School program featured presentations by students on their work (two of them were actually past the doctoral stage), lectures by faculties on the theme of the day, and excursions. (Invited faculties included Peter Rutland, Ioulia Shukan, Donnacha O Beachain, Vladimir Gelman, Myriam Désert and Sergei Zhuk). All in the middle of the heat wave that afflicted Europe and North America! Thankfully, air conditioning could more or less be counted upon, although the dearth of restaurants in the city meant for long walks back and forth, which is fine to keep in shape, but less so in stifling humidity. The food was a blur, except on closing night at a Japanese restaurant, but summer schools are meant to be a bonding experience, not culinary ones. The key was to have a bottle of mineralna (preferably nehazona) handy at all times.

Substantively, the School revealed quite interesting research projects. Mihai Varga (University of Amsterdam, defending this Fall) investigated the paradox of weak industrial trade unions in Ukraine whose strikes in 2008-2010 prompted a swift government intervention in their favor. Political involvement, from the Tymoshenko Bloc or the Party of Regions, made up for the paucity of mobilizational resources. Christine Plank (University of Vienna) studies the little-known sector of “agro-fuel”, the capacity to produce energy from agricultural compounds. Since independence, EU protectionism on agriculture has deprived rural Ukraine of a growth export market, but the EU’s increasing reliance on agro-fuel as an alternative source of energy could break the deadlock. Iryna Solonenko (International Renaissance Foundation) showed how EU norms have failed to take root in Ukraine, compared to its Central European neighbors, since the fact that Ukraine was not on a EU membership track meant that Ukrainian elites knew they could get away with non-compliance at no cost. A more upbeat take, on Ukraine’s “European Choice”, was presented by Kateryna Shynkaruk (Shevchenko University, Kyiv). Serhiy Kudelia (Mohyla Academy) explained how constitutional reforms that took away the presidential power to nominate and dismiss ministers—a power that Yanukovych now seeks to restore for himself, surprise, surprise…—removed their incentives to implement presidential executive orders. In this model, people comply if they are coerced.

On the identity front, Huseyin Oylupinar (University of Alberta) works on the memory battle of Poltava, which has received far less coverage than anything having to do with Bandera and the OUN. In 2007, the local commemoration of Mazepa, seen as a “traitor” in Russian-Soviet narrative, and a hero in the Ukrainian national  one, was essentially hijacked by the Russian state, with the support of the Tymoshenko Bloc-controlled city administration and in an area that had voted massively for Yushchenko in 2004. Khrystyna Chushak (University of Monash, Australia) notes that a serious reflection on the meaning of the Soviet heritage in Ukraine never took place and she is interested in finding out how the very word “Soviet” is being used in its Russian (sovietskii) and Ukrainian (radianskyi) forms in intellectual discourse, a discourse that she does not want to limit to traditional “national” voices. Myroslava Keryk (Lazarus University, Poland) works on the changes in urban landscape, gender relations, and social identity in the heretofore border mining town of Chervonohrad in Western Ukraine. Lisa Vapné (SciencesPo, Paris) studies the puzzle of Soviet Jews, whose Jewish identity, while not outwardly meaningful in the Soviet context, still mattered in terms of Jewish social networks and whose presence as immigrants in Germany, a society politically open, yes socially close to immigration may have the effect of enhancing their Jewish identity.

The School also featured sociological research on elite political networks (Tetiana Kostiuchenko, Mohyla), regime transformation in Russia and Ukraine (Inna Melnykovska, Kiel University, Germany), attitudes towards well-being (Olena Muradyan, Kharkiv University), and regional identity (Gennadii Korzhov, Donbas). Several presentations were also devoted to non-Ukraine topics, the most inventive, arguably, by Perrine Poupin (EHESS, Paris), using a video camera to analyze urban demonstrations in contemporary Russia.

And, yes, one of the excursions included a visit to the famous Sobor immortalized by Oles’ Honchar, although we couldn’t get in.  We did visit afterwards a male monastery, a most pleasant affair until a young monk showed up at the souvenir shop and started to treat the Uniates and “vse ostal’nye” among us as“raskolniki”, which was not the most optimal of conducting business. Speaking of business, the unexpected success of our outdoor program was a visit to a successful young entrepreneur (and graduate of the Mohyla MBA Program), who delighted us with tales of how he and his partners manage to be constantly one step ahead of government, custom and tax officials. The key point of the meeting is that he does not mind paying taxes, and even a “surcharge” that does not quite land in state coffers, as long as everyone, meaning his competitors, is charged equally.

The 2011 Summer School will likely be in Western Ukraine. Stay tuned!

These results suggest that the political opposition is undergoing a major restructuration in Ukraine, with Tymoshenko in a free fall (Yushchenko has not been a player electorally in more than a year). The Party of Regions does lead in Central Ukraine, but with only 34 percent of the vote among those intending to vote (and not against all). In Eastern and Southern Ukraine, the Regional domination is scary, with 64% and 81% of the vote that counts. Island of opposition seem to be disappearing in Yanukovych’s Russian-speaking fiefdom. Interestingly, most of the support for Tyhypko, initially seen as a challenge to Yanukovych in the East, comes from Central and Western Ukraine (as well as in the South, presumably in Kherson and Mykolaiv, the two areas whose support for the Orange Revolution was significant). In terms of support for potential presidential candidates, Tyhypko is now nearly head to head with Tymoshenko, just below 12%, yet far behind Yanukovych.

And so it is in the admittedly different setting of Ukraine. Since independence, the language question has periodically reared its head. In the wake of the Black Sea Fleet Accords, the Holodomor turnaround, and renewed pressure on the media, the government of President Viktor Yanukovych apparently intends to change the language law and grant Russian the status of “minority language” all over Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education seems to have lifted the requirement of Ukrainian-language entrance examination (UKL445, item 9) in higher educational institutions and subsidies to the Ukrainian-language publishing industry are in jeopardy. If these changes come to pass, this would suggest that Yanukovych and his acolytes have failed to grasp, in all these years, the sensitivity of language in national politics.

Language politics is about incentives. Wherever political claims collide over the use of a language against another in public institutions, one language is always more socially attractive than the other. In the language of youth, one language is more “cool” – give greater chance of life mobility – than the other. Language politics consists in giving incentives to speakers of the socially dominant (“cool”) language to learn and use the other language, which, more often than not, happens to be the language of the demographic majority. In proclaiming French as the official language of Quebec in 1977, the idea was to make English-speakers, mostly unilingual back then, learn French. Not that my separatist (we say “souverainistes” here) friends would ever notice, but the policy was a great success. The vast majority of English-speakers beyond 50 are now bilingual (far more than French-speakers) and half of the parents whose children are eligible to study in English schools prefer to send them to French schools, and there would be no other reason for them to do so unless they believe that French has become essential to make it in Quebec society. This is what the Soviet Union called “perspektivnyi”. French has become a perspektivnyi yazyk, a language that opens up possibilities, even though English obviously remains the language of mobility in Canada and the United States, and the “cool” language globally.

The formula is simple, yet endlessly controversial politically. If someone knows that he will always get by speaking his preferred language, then he won’t learn the other one. This is why bilingualism does not work in terms of having two languages granted equal official status on a given territory. If Russian and Ukrainian were to be proclaimed state languages in Ukraine (“state language” and “official language” mean the same thing), then Russian-speakers would feel that they don’t have to bother with Ukrainian any more and would be perfectly at ease answering in Russian to a query in Ukrainian. The social dominance of Russian would remain unaffected, preventing Ukrainian from becoming perspektivynyi. (Yes, the social value of languages is as constructed as identities are constructed.) Obviously, when the Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk lifts the entrance  exam requirement in Ukrainian, he sends a message — still a little confusing, according to Oxana Shevel (UKL445, item 9) — that Ukrainian is not that needed to get a diploma in Ukraine, and therefore not perspektivnyi.

In terms of the official status of languages, the strategy of President Yanukovych’s Party of Regions has evolved over the years, from demanding that Russian be made a second state language to calling for Russian to be a “minority language” in Ukraine. This is line with the requirements of the European Charter for Minority Languages, which has been ratified by Ukraine in September 2005. Of course, in a liberal democracy, the protection of the official language must go hand in hand with the protection of minority languages. The problem in Ukraine is that it is not clear who the minority is. Borys Kolesnikov, a Party of Region MP in charge of drafting a new language law, thinks that it applies to “those who speak (volodiiut) Russian.”

Yet there is no country in the world that defines its minorities in terms of what they can speak (in Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens can speak Russian). The criteria used is generally akin to mother tongue and it happens to be the sole category used in the Ukrainian census (ridna mova, although a better translation is native language). Crucially, the Charter does not specify how minorities are to be counted, i.e., the statistical threshold that establishes when a “minority” is recognized on a given territory. For Kolesnikov, you only need 10%, while the Yushchenko government, in ratifying the Charter, said 50%. (The tradition in the first country to abide by language thresholds, Austria-Hungary, was 20%). The application of any of these criteria – from 10 to 50%, from “native language” to the ability to speak a second language — would bring hugely different results.

Don’t hold your breath, however, for a substantive discussion about all this. Lest anyone needs a reminder, Ukraine is a state based on the unrule-of-law. How else could it be described when the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land, contradicts its own previous ruling in allowing deputies to defect from electoral factions and form a parliamentary majority (UKL443, 17 May 2010, item 14)? Or when Yanukovych declares to the world that the Holodomor was not a genocide before changing the law that says the opposite? The use of language in public domains is not about to be legally codified in Ukraine. The battle is over the principle of making Ukrainian a language that counts in Ukraine. Leonid Kuchma understood the electoral imperative of identifying the state with Ukrainian within months of winning the presidency in 1994 (and after having campaigned on making Russian a second state language). It is puzzling that Yanukovych does not seem share this basic electoral truth.

The question is pertinent. If we believe in an open debate on controversial aspects of a national narrative, such as the role of the OUN and Bandera during World War II, then we have to have a clear idea about the players interested in these matters.

There are three types of players in a debate over memory: political actors, civil society actors, and scholars.

Political actors construct an official narrative in order to achieve political goals. A classic example was the Soviet omission of the Holocaust from narratives of the “Great Patriotic War” to project the “unity of the Soviet people.” It is also fairly clear that Soviet organs used evidence, perhaps even fabricated some, to depict OUN members as “Nazis” and discredit Ukrainian nationalism and the very idea of Ukrainian independence. Since Russia entirely coopted this narrative and criminalized attempts to revise the official state narrative on World War II, with the creation of a state commission on “falsifications,” it would appear pointless to expect contemporary Russian state officials to abide by the rules of an open debate.

Civil society actors may also push their political agenda. Velychenko points to the rise of a Jewish diaspora lobby, increasingly Orthodox in profile and lacking a liberal disposition towards Israeli policy and, by implication, Ukraine and its history. His point is that an open debate on Jewish-Ukrainian history is increasingly difficult, if not illusory, if one side looks at it with a closed mind. It would also not be unfair to point out that Potapenko, as someone engaged North American Ukrainian community organizations, is also approaching the matter with an activist goal in mind, that of preserving the honor of the OUN.

Scholars, of course, are not immune to political or cultural (ethnic) biases and to pretend the contrary makes one falling for an epistemological delusion. A scholar cannot be entirely detached from the perspective of his given cultural, social, and political milieu. Yet the commitment to scholarship is a commitment to empathize with a multiplicity of perspectives, to marshal evidence from a multitude of sources, and to elaborate a fair and balanced narrative about a meaningful problem (such as organized violence perpetrated in Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s). Most importantly, scholars, unanimous in their modern view that identities and narratives (i.e. how events are represented in speeches, in textbooks, in museums etc.) are “constructed” – we just have to read the early expert commentaries on the violence in Kyrgyzstan to realize how unanimous these views have become — have at all times to nurture a critical distance towards “official” narratives, whether they emanate from state or civil society actors. Finkel claims that it is among scholars, and foremost among Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine, that the debate on the OUN has to take place. As was the case in Israel two decades ago when these “New Historians” “deconstructed” the official narrative regarding the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 and brought forward, with great controversy, the responsibility of Zionist actors in these acts of mass violence.

I tend to agree with Finkel, but with a caveat. This is indeed a conversation that Ukrainians need to have among themselves, but scholarship is now a global undertaking, magnified by the speed of communications, and if a debate on mass violence is open, then it cannot know any borders. Ukrainian scholars must be part of a global conversation. Scholarship has also become increasingly comparative. Thus, in investigating the role of OUN actors in violence committed against civilians during the war, we need to understand how groups— seen by a critical mass of people as conducting a national-liberation struggle— operate. It is at this level that a comparison with Israel 1948, among other cases, can be useful. Not in terms of deflecting responsibility for what happened in Ukraine in World War II, but of attempting to understand the complex linkages that can be found between national mobilization and mass violence across cases. If we study the OUN as a national-liberation movement, then we have to study national-liberation movements to understand the OUN.

An open debate presupposes three things. The first is that scholars must be humble in their ability to influence societal or state discourse. It is rare that political actors change the official narrative following the publication of a book (although it did happen, to some extent, with Jan Gross’ Neighbors in Poland in the early 2000s). Scholars must first engage scholars. As Marco Carynnyk and Cyril Tarik Amar argued, at a conference on World War II in Kyiv last September, “it all starts here”, even if the wider societal impact may not be apparent.

The second is that a scholarly narrative is never final. Potapenko argues that since five investigations have apparently cleared the OUN (and the Nachtigall Battalion and Bandera personally) of war crimes (in some cases by omission, as with the absence of evidence adduced by the Soviet Extraordinary Commission and the Nuremberg trial), then the case is closed. But this is not how scholarship operates. With the availability of new archival evidence, memoirs and testimonies, perhaps including this very same Extraordinary Commission, no case should ever be considered settled.

The third, implied by Potapenko and many others in debates, is that critical claims towards the OUN are either inspired by Russia or serve its interests. In other words, scholars may use evidence emanating from a tainted source or they may use evidence that will then be used for tainted (political) purposes. This view is mistaken. Yes, evidence can be sometimes fabricated, but most of the time official state narratives on the memory of violent events is about omission, i.e., emphasizing some facts, while keeping silent on others. The aim of scholarship is to expose the one-sidedness and partiality of such official narratives – such as the Russian state narrative, but also the OUN standard narrative – and this is best done by completing these one-sided narratives, rather than dismissing them outright. And, yes, scholarly findings can be, and are often, manipulated by state (and civil society) actors. If that were to be a cause for restraint, no open academic debate could be taking place in Ukraine or elsewhere. The basic point, here, is that in the new “European values” that Ukraine claims to share, the democratization of historical memory is seen as a value in itself, not as something that can be postponed, due to the contingency of the moment.

***

From Yevgeny Finkel, PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 14 June 2010:

I have just read the Dr. Velychenko’s rejoinder [UKL446] to Dominique Arel’s blog post “OUN-Bandera, the 1948 War in Israel, and the Utility of Open Debate” [reproduced in UKL445], and I decided that I also have a couple of things to say about this debate, especially given the fact that I am probably the only Ukraine-born Israeli political scientist, studying contemporary Ukraine.

I don’t intend to spend much time on debate over the similarities and differences of the 1948 War and the events that took place in Ukraine during the WWII besides the fact that I find the term “displacement” rather inaccurate and I was very sad to hear Dr. Velychenko using it to describe the fate of Jewish communities in Ukraine. There might be arguments over the participation of particular units in particular massacres, and there definitely were cases of UPA units saving Jews, but still, the term displacement seems highly inappropriate in such a context. Also, I fully subscribe to the call for an open debate that will only strengthen the democracy in Ukraine, and therefore I was highly disappointed by Dr. Velychenko reply to this call.

Dr. Velychenko is correct – the deeds of OUN should be discussed neither with US Zionists or non-Zionist Jews, nor with Israeli teenagers, whose attitudes he extensively quotes, and probably, at this stage, not even with Ukrainian Jews, whom he previously accused of hypocrisy. And not because of what their co-ethnics, or compatriots, or even direct ancestors did or did not do more than 60 years ago, but simply because they are not part of the debate. Dr. Velychenko intention to show that others were equally bad completely misses the mark. The debate, first and foremost should be in Ukraine and among Ukrainians. It should be led by the Ukrainian academic and intellectual elite. 1948 or other events are simply have nothing to do with the story of OUN, unless they are used as an excuse not to engage in such definitely painful a debate.

And here I would like to refer to the Israeli experience. The very painful deconstruction of the official historical narrative took place in Israel, and it was done by Israeli historians, who did not ask “with whom we should or should not discuss Israeli history”. The deconstruction has taken place in a country which is in a state of war with most of its neighbors. This didn’t seem to bother these New Historians. That their findings would be (and are) used against their own country by states which still prevent any form of open debate regarding their role in the conflict did not bother them either. Moreover, when these New Historians were widely attacked and criticized by the old academic establishment, the debates concentrated mainly on historical accuracy of these studies, rather than on political usefulness. And these studies eventually had not only an academic, but also a much broader political and social impact on the Israeli state and its leaders, and I invite everyone to look at the article by Michal Ben-Joseph Hirsh, “From Taboo to the Negotiable: The Israeli New Historians and the Changing Representation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 5, No. 2, June 2007.

Neither the “Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jews, the Kremlin’s anti-Ukrainian strategy” nor their relationship to “anti-Arab pro Likud Orthodox and Zionist Jews” (whatever this means) should have any impact on Ukrainian debates over OUN. It is first and foremost and internal Ukrainian debate that should be eventually expanded to include also Poles and Jews, and Polish and Jewish actions in these particular circumstances of WWII. References to Zionism, anti-Arab attitudes of American and Israeli Jews, and the 1948 War distract the debate from its original purpose. They should be discussed, but at this stage they also should be detached from the OUN debates. In the Israeli case, we have a pretty reliable historical narrative of what happened in 1948, a narrative that is highly critical of many Israeli actions. We are still waiting for the Arab states to open their archives and for Arab New Historians to emerge and to tell what their states actually did in 1948. In the OUN case, we are also still waiting for this deconstructions of the myth and a critical and honest evaluation of the events. Therefore, at this stage, comparing these two narratives will obscure, rather than reveal.

A honest historical debate will only strengthen Ukrainian democracy as it strengthened the Israeli one, and Ukrainian academic and intellectual elites should lead this clearly uneasy and painful process. For now, unfortunately, I don’t see this happening (there are some exceptions, of course!), and Dr. Velychenko’s remarks only reinforce this perception.

It seems to me that the category of “Holodomor denial” conflates two distinct strands in the charged debate over the Holodomor—that of “Famine-as-Mass-Murder” denial and that of “Famine-as-Genocide” denial.

The classic case of  Holodomor denial was the official Soviet policy, until 1987, of denying that a famine occurred in Ukraine (or elsewhere) in 1932-1933. Anyone using the word “famine” was denounced as a stooge of hostile foreign interests bent on defaming the Soviet Union. The ideological rationale was simple: collectivization was meant to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet economic system and an admission that it killed millions of people would delegitimize the Soviet project. In 1937, Stalin had the organizers of the Soviet census shot for having produced an accurate population count that showed that millions of people were missing in Ukraine.

The Soviet denial of the famine is on the same plane as the so-called Holocaust “revisionist” literature that denies that gas chambers existed and is beyond the pale of academic debate. (In Germany and France, Holocaust denial is also illegal, but this is another issue altogether). This does not mean, however, that this brand of denial literature should not be researched as an artefact of political and social discourse. Arguing that the Ukrainian Famine, or the Holocaust, or other incontrovertibly documented cases of mass violence against civilians, did not happen is morally contemptible and scientifically fraudulent. Yet seeking to understand why and how agents of state power, or socially meaningful social actors and organizations, engage in denial 101 is central to the scholarly enterprise.

In a recent debate (UKL441, 16 February 2010, items 9-13), John Paul Himka, of the University of Alberta, was pilloried for having included Doug Tottle’s 1987 infamous screed Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard on the syllabus of the course “The Great Famine of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine in History and Memory”, which he taught in Winter 2009. Tottle was a member of the Communist Party of Canada, but we know from archival research done by Ukrainian historian Liudmyla Hrynevych (2007 conference paper at the University of Toronto) that his book had been “reviewed” by three institutes of the Ukrainian SSR before publication. In essentially presenting the official state position of the time, however indefensible, on the famine (Conquest, Mace), Tottle is worth studying as an item of the politics of memory (denial and omission being key dimensions of any politics of memory), the same way that the Soviet postwar policy of omission towards the Holocaust on Soviet-occupied territory has been the subject of a growing body of historical literature. As a contribution to our understanding of what happened in 1932-33, the Tottle book, it goes without saying, like other famine-denial ones, is worthless.

The outright denial about the existence of the famine appears to be over. In Dobczansky’s review of Holodomor denial literature, recent authors – from Russia and Ukraine – have kept the hysterical polemical tone of lore (Ukrainian nationalists being fascists and Nazis, having invented the Holodomor to hide their crimes etc.), but they no longer deny that a famine took place. This is in line with the official Russian position, actually going back to 1987, that famines, in the plural form, resulted from Stalinist excesses. (The recent Famine Resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe [PACE], supported by the Russian Federation delegation, says that “mass starvation” was “caused by cruel and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime.”)

This literature, however, is generally weak on agency. Its authors tend to emphasize that these were tragic times, that collectivization was unpredictable, that the Soviet Union was isolated, and so forth. The general drift being that, the PACE resolution notwithstanding, the extent to which the decisions and actions that led to the famine were deliberate and, crucially, avoidable, is left ambiguous. This is also in line with the current Russian ambivalence towards the 1930s, an ambivalence that generally privileges the achievements of Stalinism (making the Soviet Union a great power) over its human costs, such as the Famine.

This, to me, justifies placing this literature alongside the old Soviet denial discourse as types of “Famine-as-Mass-Murder” denial. Mass violence perpetrated against civilians, including the mass violence of modern famines, results from the purposive (“deliberate”) actions of political (state or non-state) actors. This is actually the meaning of the Ukrainian coinage Holodomor: to “kill” (moryty) by “hunger”. A famine is when people “die” by hunger. A Holodomor is when the deaths by hunger are caused by political agency. People are killed. The famine in Ukraine, and the famines in the RSFSR and Kazakhstan, resulted from political decisions (in insurance parlance, they were not “Acts of God”). As a matter of fact, the comparative study of famines tells us that all modern famines, since the 1850s, are Holodomory to different degrees.

The dividing line is agency. On one side are those who deny the Holodomor, the politically-induced (“man-made”) famine, either outright (no famine) or through ambivalence, obfuscation, omission, or, to paraphrase Dobczansky, by diminishing the scale and significance of the political factor in the causality chain. On the other are those who question, based on historiographical findings and/or theoretical debates, whether the Holodomor constituted a genocide. This literature includes those who deny outright that the concept of genocide applies and those whose position is more agnostic, or ambivalent. The work of the Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin certainly belongs to the former. Kondrashin has been making wild and, to my knowledge, unsubstantiated claims on the demographics of the Famine lately (that more people died of hunger in the RSFSR – Kazakhstan excluded – than in Ukraine in 1932-33, a claim uncritically reproduced in article 7 of the PACE resolution, contradicting the earlier claim, in Article 5, that Ukraine “suffered the most”), but he is a serious historian that actually has an article in the same latest issue of Holodomor Studies. (The Editor, Roman Serbyn, must be commended for his commitment to open debate).

Denying, or questioning, whether the Holodomor is genocide does not necessarily mean denying or questioning whether the Holodomor is mass murder. “Deliberate” mass killing actually captures three different processes. Political actors can deliberately choose to target an entire population on a given area for eradication (by means of extermination or deportation, a.k.a. ethnic cleansing). Or they can deliberately choose to exert violence to terrorize an entire population (by killing many). Or they can deliberately choose not to be bothered with the lethal consequences of their policies, consequences that any reasonable mind can anticipate. The various meanings of  deliberate actions and their historical, political, legal and ethical implications, is what we need to seriously debate. The starting point, as Oleksandr Melnyk and Tim Snyder put it recently, is that these people did not need to die. The Holodomor was tragic not because leaders faced an impossible choice. It was tragic because millions of civilians were victimized by a cruel regime.

In UKL444 (item 17), sent yesterday, Stephen Velychenko, of the University of Toronto, raises an important point in directly comparing the violence perpetrated against Poles and Jews by Ukrainian nationalists (OUN) in the 1940s with the violence perpetrated against Arabs by Jewish nationalists (Zionists) in 1948.

Velychenko does not equivocate. In Western Ukraine, for him, the OUN attempted to massively displace Poles and Jews. In the British (Palestine) Mandate, Zionist leaders prepared for the mass expulsion of Arabs, awaiting the opportunity that availed itself during the 1948 war. Of course, “displacement” seems hardly the term to describe what happened to Jewish communities in Ukraine during World War II. Further, the notion that the mass diplacement of Arab populations was premeditated long in advance is actually very much a minority view among those Israeli historians who have been deconstructing the Zionist official narrative of the 1948 war.

Yet his basic point is that armed formations, in the name of a national project, engaged in mass violence against civilians in both Western Ukraine and British Palestine, a mass violence, we could add, that took mostly the form of ethnic cleansing for Poles (in Ukraine) and Arabs (in Palestine), and of mass murder for the Jews (in Ukraine). Since mass violence against civilians can only be properly understood when studied comparatively, Velychenko is right that the comparison should include the events that marred the 1948 war. Especially since the Ukrainian national-liberation narrative is confronted with an adversarial Jewish memorial narrative of violent deeds committed in the name of this Ukrainian movement.

Where I differ with Velychenko is on the implications of the comparison. Velychenko claims that since Israeli deported civilians after it was recognized as a state, and before the ratification of the Fourth Geneva Protocol in 1949 prohibiting deportations, its legitimacy as an independent state is no longer at issue. No one, among Western critics, “calls for the dissolution of Israel.” For Ukraine, however, the “condemnations of the expulsions and deaths that did happen in the 1940s now morally compromise the very idea of Ukrainian independence to a much greater degree than the condemnation of Zionist expulsions compromise Israeli independence.”

For the sake of this blog’s brevity, I will leave aside the claim that Israel’s claim to sovereignty is secure (Benny Morris wrote a whole book last year (One State, Two States) on the so-called “delegitimization” movement of Israel that has been gaining strength in the recent past) and focus on the crux of the matter for Velychenko: open debate about World War II violence made in the name of Ukrainian nationalism weakens Ukraine’s right to independence, a right that happens to be called into question, much more openly of late, by the Russian state.

I would argue exactly the opposite. Ukraine’s capacity to openly and democratically investigate and debate the dark sides of its history is a necessary element in its quest to be recognized as a European – and independent – state. The more Ukraine can do that – and a lot was accomplished under Yushchenko – the more it distinguishes itself from Russia which, sadly, has reverted under Putin to a neo-Soviet memorial discourse emphasizing the might of the state at the expense of the fate of the individual.

This is not to single out Ukraine. All democratic states, in Europe, North America or elsewhere, are engaged, in different degrees, in a difficult reckoning about their pasts. An inquiry into the ambiguous legacy of the OUN and UPA has to go hand in hand, certainly for historians, with an inquiry on the violence perpetrated by Soviet formations, such as the massacre of civilian prisoners by the NKVD in 1941 and the killing and deportation of a stupendous number of civilians in Western Ukraine after the war. In other words, the Russian narrative, echoed in Eastern Ukraine, must be taken for what it is—as an attempt to demonize one side and whitewash another, an exercise that has little to do with scholarship, or with democracy. At the same time, the Ukrainian standard nationalist narrative, like all nationalist narratives, has be questioned openly and democratically. This can only strengthen Ukraine as a polity.