May 8: Is the Ukrainian history of the Second World War possible
For the past two decades, we have been writing an ambivalent history of Ukraine. A history in which we are trying to reconcile irreconcilable narratives. Khmelnytsky is the best example. He is a hero and a traitor. An attempt to move away from the black and white concept is a blasphemy and a marginalization for a scholar. At best, we allow ourselves small curtsies. This is not a problem. It is a disease of growth and maturation. The main thing is to go through this phase.
The Second World War and its history are thought of in the same trap-paradigm. We are either for glorification of Bandera or for continuation of the Soviet narrative about the contribution of Ukrainians in the Second World War.
But now, as strange as it may sound, we may not need a unified narrative. The fact is that we are sorely lacking in true facts. It is this fact that both current concepts will eventually crash into. Or rather, they will not crash into, but will turn into something new.
Why am I talking about true facts? The fact is that we are under pressure from the Soviet-Russian mythology of the people's war, supported by decades of research by scholars, hundreds of books and films. We have, relatively speaking, five or six of our own.
for every hundred Russian documentary and not-so-documentary pages
Plus, there is an ambivalent narrative in society, which only thanks to the current war has begun to tolerate the red and black flags in the southeast.But I repeat once again: we are sorely lacking in facts and generalizations. We have been talking about Stalinism for 40 years, but we still do not have a single significant monograph on Ukraine and Stalin. And this is just one example.
Above, I have already talked about the ambivalence of our historical narrative. But there is another problem: we are not writing Ukrainian history with its pros and cons, but mostly (I repeat, mostly) trying to write a narrative that refutes the Russian version of events.
Simply put, we are driving ourselves into a Procrustean bed instead of taking a broader view of the processes. If we write about Khmelnytsky, with few exceptions, we are afraid to say that the uprising was beneficial, and perhaps inspired by the Porte. If we talk about the fashionable 60s, we need an Italian author to point out the banal fact that part of this movement grew out of the Komsomol.
And there's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't humiliate Khmelnytsky or Chornovil. And, moreover, it doesn't break the national myth. It makes the myth stronger. Because it stops being flat. And it doesn't break against the truth, like the myth of the 28 Panfilovites.
The main problem is that there is no order at the state level (I'm afraid – no understanding) of the importance of this work. At the university level, I'm afraid, there is a fear of taking up this topic. Without a state order, it will not take off.
And now about the future. The current war, among other things, should "drown" a large mass of Soviet-Russian narratives of the Second World War. At the same time, the Russians will try to drown the current war in the narratives of the Second World War. They will make a lot of efforts to ensure that this drowning takes place in our country as well.
When we finally think about our history of the Second World War, it cannot be seen in isolation from the liberation struggles of the early 20th century (starting with the 1905 revolution, which has been unfairly forgotten) and from the current war.
I really hope someone wants to hear this.
