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CHAPTER 4
Reclaiming the Past, Confronting the Past:
OUN–UPA Memory Politics and Nation
Building in Ukraine (1991–2016)
Yuliya Yurchuk
Controversies over the history and memory of the wartime nationalist
movement represented by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN) and its military arm the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)1
occupy center stage in Ukrainian public life today. For more than two
decades now, this issue has dominated Ukrainian debates on mem-
ory politics, with successive political leaders using their position on the
OUN–UPA as a primary means of self-denition. And yet the promi-
nence of this topic was not inevitable or pre-ordained. Rather, we
are dealing with a process whereby what was originally a regional and
rather marginal narrative has gradually become more prominent since
the 1980s. In this chapter, I trace the history of this memory from 1991
© The Author(s) 2017
J. Fedor et al. (eds.), War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8_4
Y. Yurchuk (*)
Department of History and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University,
Alfred Nobels allé 7, 14189 Huddinge, Sweden
e-mail: yuliya.yurchuk@sh.se
I would like to thank Julie Fedor and Tatiana Zhurzhenko for their helpful
comments on the draft of the chapter.
108 Y. YURCHUK
to the present. Via an analysis of the changing ofcial political discourse
over this period, I investigate what role the issue of the OUN and UPA
has played in Ukrainian political debates, and how it has been instrumen-
talized by different political actors. Which political forces supported and
which opposed the establishment of the heroic narrative of the OUN and
UPA, and why? My account traces how memory politics changed with
the major transformations in Ukrainian political and social life during this
period. I argue that post-independence memory politics in Ukraine have
been shaped in crucial ways by the tension between two different frame-
works of dealing with the past: reclaiming the past, which involves the
reordering of hierarchies between previously dominant and subordinate
groups in a society, on the one hand; and Vergangenheitsbewälting or
“coming to terms with the past,” which emphasizes a critical view on the
difcult aspects of the past, on the other.
Competing myths: the “great patriotiC War”
vs Ukrainian “national liberation”
Post-Soviet Ukrainian memory politics need to be viewed rst and fore-
most in the context of the enduring legacy of the Soviet war myth. The
signicance of World War II in the foundational mythology of the Soviet
Union cannot be overestimated; the importance, workings and func-
tion of the Soviet war myth have been well established by distinguished
scholars (see in particular Tumarkin 1994 and Weiner 2001). The nodal
point of this foundational myth was an emphasis on a pronounced anti-
fascism that symbolically divided the world into two camps: fascist and
anti-fascist. The anti-fascist banner was used as a key justication for
Soviet ideology and as proof of the superiority of the Soviet system
(Grunenberg 1993). In the interests of preserving the purity of this
myth, no questioning or criticism of the Soviet leadership or the Red
Army’s actions during or after the war was permitted (Kattago 2008).
In the last years of the Soviet Union, the ofcial narrative of the Great
Patriotic War started to be questioned in some former Soviet republics.
Not everyone within the former Soviet Union saw the Red Army’s vic-
tory as liberation. For many, especially in the Baltic republics, the victory
over Nazism marked the beginning of Soviet occupation. Anti-Soviet
narratives of World War II now laid the ground for new national identi-
ties in the post-Soviet space. In Ukraine, the history of the OUN and
UPA became one of the new themes taken up by national democratic
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 109
groups that formed in the late 1980s under the umbrella of the People’s
Movement of Ukraine (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy). Some of the national
democrats who emerged from the dissident sphere had personally
encountered former UPA ghters in the Gulag. Many UPA veterans
were still alive at this point, and now joined the local associations of the
victims of political repressions that were set up in the late 1980s. Thus,
despite its suppression by the authorities, the history of the UPA was
preserved as a living memory in Ukraine. The UPA ghters were remem-
bered rst and foremost as victims of the Soviet regime.
Two competing narratives of the history of the OUN and UPA have
tended to dene them categorically as either “villains” or “heroes”
(Marples 2007). During the Soviet period, the OUN and UPA were
stigmatized as a small anomalous group of “bourgeois nationalists”
and “fascist collaborators” against the broader picture of the “normal”
“brethren” Ukrainian people who welcomed Soviet rule and “reunica-
tion” with the Russian people (Yekelchyk 2004). Partly as a reaction to
this Soviet narrative, the Ukrainian national democratic opposition has
tended to present the OUN and UPA rst and foremost as heroic ght-
ers and martyrs for Ukraine’s independence—a narrative that had long
been promoted by the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the USA and
which elides or airbrushes the negative aspects of the organizations’
actions and ideology.
The history of the OUN and UPA can be classied as difcult knowl-
edge, that is, knowledge about a group’s past which is hard to position
in the realm of glory, pride, or victimhood, in other words, in the space
of positively laden affect (Yurchuk 2014: 41). This applies in particular
to the issue of collaboration with Nazi Germany and OUN–UPA atti-
tudes towards ethnic minorities living in the territory of Ukraine, rst
of all Jews and Poles (Himka 2005; Melamed 2007; Berkhoff 2008).
With World War II approaching, the OUN accepted support from Nazi
Germany. The OUN leadership believed that the German aggression
against the Polish state and the Soviet Union would increase Ukraine’s
chances of independence and that Nazi Germany would support the
Ukrainian cause. But the Nazis were not even prepared to counte-
nance creating a Ukrainian puppet state, let alone granting Ukraine its
independence. Soon after the OUN–B proclaimed the establishment
of a Ukrainian state in L’viv on 30 June 1941, the day the Wehrmacht
entered the city, the Nazis moved to arrest many OUN members, includ-
ing their leader, Stepan Bandera. Especially from this point, the OUN
110 Y. YURCHUK
relations with Nazi Germany became complicated; sometimes they col-
laborated, and sometimes they fought against the Germans, impro-
vising and adapting their position as they went along (Bruder 2007).
Consequently, the term “collaboration” does not fully or accurately
reect the OUN’s complicated relations with Nazi Germany.
The OUN members, many of whom joined the auxiliary police,
were involved in the extermination of the Jewish population in Western
Ukraine in the rst weeks and months of the German occupation
(Himka 2011a, b). In 1943–1944 the UPA committed mass killings
of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia as the OUN leaders believed
that once the war was over the Polish population would pose the main
threat to forming an independent Ukraine in these territories (Motyka
and Libionka 2002; Ilyushyn 2009; Motyka 2011). Complicity in
the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing of the Polish population (ofcially
declared a genocide in Poland in 2016) corresponded with the ideology
of the OUN, a radical form of ethnic nationalism inuenced by Italian
fascism (Bruder 2007; Zaitsev 2013). Nationalism, however, did not pre-
vent the persecution of ethnic Ukrainians deemed insufciently loyal by
the OUN (Snyder 2003: 164). Most of these difcult aspects of the past
are often ignored, neglected, simplied, or outright denied by propo-
nents who have been trying to establish heroic visions of the OUN and
UPA in Ukraine since the 1990s.
In the early years of Ukraine’s independence, the Soviet Great
Patriotic War myth, now adjusted to the nation-building agenda,
remained at the core of the ofcial memory politics. The heroic cult
of the OUN and UPA was relevant only in those regions of Western
Ukraine where the OUN and UPA were active, that is in the L’viv,
Ivano-Frankivs’k, Rivne, Luts’k, and Ternopil’ oblasts. At the national
level the heroic cult of the OUN and UPA was in fact rather mar-
ginal up to 2005 when, in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Viktor
Yushchenko embarked on the ofcial “rehabilitation” of Ukrainian
nationalism, seen as the long awaited restoration of historical justice. In
subsequent years, two alternative, indeed mutually exclusive narratives of
the OUN and UPA and their role in Ukrainian history polarized pub-
lic opinion and contributed to the political conict which split Ukrainian
society and the ruling elites. Since the 2013–2014 Euromaidan in par-
ticular, the history of radical Ukrainian nationalism has been instrumen-
talized by Russian state propaganda that demonizes the OUN and UPA
and equates Ukrainian nationalism with “fascism.” At the same time, the
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 111
Ukrainian Institute for National Remembrance promotes the heroic cult
of the OUN and UPA as a model for today’s ght against the Russian
aggression.
“reClaiming the past” vs
“Coming to terms With the past”
The memory of the OUN and UPA has resonated so strongly in
Ukrainian society in part because it goes in tandem with the need to
reclaim history as part of the national liberation project that has been
closely connected to nation- and state-building processes. The concept
of “reclaiming the past” in the process of nation building as a way of
dealing with colonial legacies in the post-Soviet space was introduced
by Taras Kuzio (2002). Indeed, “reclaiming the past,” or regaining
control over the narrative of national history which during the Russian
and Soviet rule was imposed from the imperial center, has been on the
agenda of national democrats since the late 1980s. It corresponds with
the vision of Ukraine as a post-colonial state still struggling to emanci-
pate its national identity, collective memory, and culture from colonial
legacies (e.g. Riabchuk 2008). My usage of the term “reclamation”
also draws upon the scholarship on the discursive and narrative forma-
tion of identity (Godrej 2011). Here, reclamation is viewed as a strategy
employed as part of the effort to create a new order after the fracturing
of an old one. In this way, reclamation can be an effective strategy for
resistance, giving the silenced the power to tell their own story.
The American philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson conceptualizes
the telling of stories as a method of resistance. She underlines the inher-
ently selective nature of the process of constructing one’s narrative of the
self: “By selectively depicting and characterizing the acts and events of
my life that are important to me … by plotting these various elements
in ways that connect my stories to other stories that give my stories their
overall signicance, I come to an understanding of who I am” (Nelson
2001: 6). In this sense, telling stories about the past can become a
resource for counter-narratives aimed at resisting and undermining the
oppressive identity and replacing it with one that fosters dignity and
respect. Counter-narratives can thus become tools for repairing the dam-
age inicted on identities by abusive power systems. In what follows
I argue that the heroic narrative of the OUN–UPA was formed as
a counter-narrative that followed the logic of reclamation. In this
112 Y. YURCHUK
connection, the Soviet narrative about the OUN–UPA as “fascist col-
laborators” has been denounced as false and violently imposed by the
Soviet regime, and in its place a counter-narrative has been formed
which presents the OUN and UPA as “heroic ghters for Ukraine’s
independence,” a “national resistance” movement, and an “anti-Soviet
underground.”
At the same time, the controversial history of the OUN and
UPA, in particular its abovementioned dark sides, requires a criti-
cal attitude towards the past. Consequently, the concept of
Vergangenheitbewältigung or “coming to terms with the past” is also rel-
evant here. This term refers rst of all to the German model of dealing
with the Nazi past, whereby history is approached with awareness and
recognition of the nation’s own guilt (Leggewie and Meyer 2005: 30;
Fischer and Lorenz 2007). The notion of coming to terms with the past
posits a critical attitude and moral responsibility for a nation’s wrongdo-
ings in the past as a crucial part of democracy and human rights culture.
While the German case remains exceptional, Vergangenheitbewältigung
lies at the core of what has been labeled “European memory culture”
(Leggewie 2008). There is a dynamic tension between the two princi-
ples operating here: as a new nation-state, Ukraine seeks to reclaim its
history and identity; at the same time, as a nation which has declared
a commitment to European values and made European integration its
strategic goal, it is learning to deal with its past in a responsible way.
As a post-colonial state, Ukraine needs to produce its own history, dis-
tanced from the Soviet master narrative; as a (potentially) European
state it is expected to be self-reexive and self-critical about its past. The
post-colonial agenda of reclaiming the past may be questioned on the
grounds that glorifying national heroes and silencing or even denying
their involvement in perpetrating atrocities and human rights violations
runs counter to the proclaimed adherence to European values. This ten-
sion is most visible in the case of OUN–UPA memory politics. While
some critics of the politics of glorication of the OUN–UPA wonder
why democratic Ukraine should choose to take up the legacy of such
an undemocratic organization as the OUN (see Rudling 2010: 268),
nationalist-oriented Ukrainian historians such as Volodymyr Viatrovych
claim that the OUN and UPA ghters for national independence still
serve as an important role model in a country that continues to be
engaged in a struggle against Russian imperialism. In the following sec-
tions I demonstrate how this dynamic tension between reclaiming the
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 113
past and confronting the past has unfolded in Ukraine during the post-
Soviet decades.
Filling in the “blank spots”
oF history Under gorbaChev and beyond
The policy of perestroika (perebudova in Ukrainian) proclaimed by
Gorbachev in 1985 brought along the politics of glasnost’ that allowed
open discussion of previously silenced historical issues. Alexander Etkind
has pointed out that the drive for truth was strong in Soviet society,
where access to knowledge about the past (even the past of one’s closest
family) was limited and where memory had a largely prescriptive char-
acter, whereby the forms and content of remembering were censored
and ltered by the state (2013: 74). Political developments in the nal
years of the Soviet Union from the mid-1980s through to the deni-
tive Soviet collapse in late 1991 were shaped in important ways by the
struggle to recover historical truth. Civic activists and journalists worked
to map the so-called “blank spots” of Soviet history, to generate public
debate around these previously silenced issues and to bring this new his-
torical knowledge to society. The blank spots included the state terror of
the Stalin period, the man-made Great Famine of 1932–1933, and the
Ukrainian nationalists’ armed struggle for independence. Activists from
Narodnyi Rukh, the Memorial Society, and other civic initiatives were
the rst to respond to Ukrainian society’s growing demand for historical
knowledge.
It was only upon the attainment of national independence in 1991
that the Ukrainian state adopted the agenda of “reclaiming the past,”
rst of all by means of symbolic politics and reform of the educa-
tion system. But the ofcial politics of memory waged during the early
years of independence was quite ambiguous, and the gure of the rst
president—Leonid Kravchuk, the former Ukrainian Communist Party
head of ideology who now embraced the nation-building agenda—
reected this ambiguity. A compromise between the old and new politi-
cal elites resulted in the emergence of a hybrid state in which political
power remained in the hands of the former communist elite, but was
now adorned with a facade of national symbols promoted by national
democratic groups (Wilson 1997, 2005; Riabchuk 2008). As Mykola
Riabchuk has argued, the post-Soviet former communist elite (the
114 Y. YURCHUK
“sovereign communists,” as he called them) did not embrace all the
national symbols and narratives wholeheartedly; rather, they accepted
them “opportunistically as something to be further bargained, negoti-
ated and re-interpreted” (2008: 4). Meanwhile, the former communist
elite managed to retain some power by transforming its social capital
into economic assets. By contrast, the democrats were mainly in charge
of “soft politics”—identity politics, education, and culture. The key
task in this realm was to replace the dominant historical narrative of the
Soviet era with a new narrative of Ukrainian national history that would
enable “reestablishment of a unied historical memory” (Kuzio 1998:
214). During the Soviet period, as we have seen, the history of Ukraine
had been presented as the continuous striving for unication with the
Russian “elder brother”; in the post-Soviet years, Ukrainian history was
re-narrated as a centuries-long struggle for independence.
The new national narrative which was established in the early inde-
pendence years draws on the populist Ukrainian historiography based
on the traditions of romanticism and positivism that was established by
mid-nineteenth-century historians. This scheme underlines the distinc-
tiveness of the Ukrainian people among other Slavs and demonstrates
that Ukraine has always followed its own separate historical path (Kohut
2011). Within this scheme, the goal of Ukrainian history is national
independence and state sovereignty. In this framework, the Ukrainian
nationalist struggle for independence during World War II came to be
seen as one of the pivotal elements in the history of national liberation.
The Ukrainian diaspora in the USA and Canada played a key role in
developing the heroic image of the OUN and UPA after World War II
(Himka 2005; Rossoliński-Liebe 2010; Rudling 2011b, 2013).2 During
the early years of independence, this role became even more important,
as members and organizations of the Ukrainian diaspora were active
in bringing this heroic narrative to Ukraine. For instance, the diaspora
worked closely with local patriotic organizations such as Prosvita and
Plast in the early 1990s in organizing commemorative events in Hurby
(the site of a major battle between the UPA and the Soviet NKVD in
spring 1944) or in smaller villages where the UPA conducted their
actions (Yurchuk 2014).
Ukrainian diaspora historians played an important role in changing
paradigms of history writing. Before Ukraine produced its own post-
Soviet history textbooks, Canadian historian Orest Subtelny’s Ukraine:
A History (Subtelny 1988; rst published in Ukraine in 1991) often
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 115
served as a textbook in Ukrainian schools and universities. Subtelny’s
book features only a couple of pages on the topic of the OUN and the
UPA, but it was the rst to ll in the blank spot on this topic. Subtelny’s
approach largely corresponded with the narrative promoted by the
national democrats. In his book, the OUN is presented as an organiza-
tion that “strove to become a broadly based ideological/revolutionary
movement, whose objective was the achievement of integral nationalist
goals” (1993: 444) and the UPA is labeled the “underground resist-
ance” (473). Subtelny dealt with the UPA massacres of Poles in Volhynia
and Eastern Galicia in a rather cursory fashion, underlining the recipro-
cal character of the mass killings. It is important to note, however, that
the very fact of mentioning these events was revolutionary for its time
(474–475).3
Schools and universities were the main channel for disseminating the
newly formed national historical narrative after 1991. Thus, while his-
tory education was used to establish Homo Sovieticus during the Soviet
period, in independent Ukraine, history education was used to establish
Homo Ukrainicus (Richardson 2004; Kas’ianov 2008; Kasianov 2012).
As the Swedish historian Johan Dietsch has argued, in independent
Ukraine “‘nationalization’ became a lens through which all education
was to be ltered and with which it was possible to rid the educational
apparatus of Soviet remnants” (Dietsch 2006: 80). In this connection,
history education can be seen as an instance of what Pierre Ricoeur has
called the “forced memorization” of past events “held to be remarkable,
even founding, with respect to the common identity” (Ricoeur 2004:
85). In school and university textbooks the OUN and UPA were pre-
sented as an integral part of the history of Ukrainian national liberation
and state building.4 The liberation struggle became the dominant lens
through which the ideology and activities of these organizations were
interpreted. The formation of this memory of national liberation and
underground resistance, like the formation of any memory, was a highly
selective process. In this case, any facts that could undermine the aw-
less status of the resistance movement were suppressed, while the strug-
gle against the Soviet regime, on the contrary, was underlined wherever
possible (Dietsch 2006; Marples 2007). Of course, the actual teaching
practice on the ground often diverged from the ofcial curriculum, as
demonstrated by Peter Rodgers’s study of history teaching in eastern
Ukraine (2008). Still, at the level of the ofcial state education poli-
cies, the contents of the history textbooks demonstrate the new master
116 Y. YURCHUK
narrative of the heroic OUN and UPA as a “liberation movement.”
Moreover, the broader narrative of World War II history also changed
during this period because the Soviet concept of the Great Patriotic War
was dropped and replaced in textbooks with World War II. To sum up,
during the early years of independence the Soviet taboo on the topic of
the OUN and UPA was broken and the newly formed heroic narrative
of the national liberation struggle during and after World War II entered
media coverage, history writing and education.
the kUChma presidenCy: a deCade oF ambivalenCe
The 1994 presidential elections were held in the context of widespread
economic hardship linked to the post-Soviet transition. The elections
brought to power Leonid Kuchma, who ran on a platform centered on
promising to stabilize the country. In his election campaign, Kuchma
appealed to the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, prom-
ising better relations with Russia and an end to the “reign of Galician
nationalism,” by which he meant the inuence of the Western Ukrainian
elites on Kyiv (Wolczuk 2001: 139).5 A former “red director,” Kuchma
presented himself as an “efcient administrator” free of ideological senti-
ment, and as a commonsense politician whose aim was maintaining the
status quo and avoiding conict (Kulyk 2010: 320–321).
During his term in ofce (1994–2004) Kuchma made some conces-
sions to national democrats, whose support he often needed in order to
break the Communist majority in the parliament. Thus, for example, it
was under Kuchma that Holodomor commemorations were added to
the ofcial calendar. At the same time, however, Kuchma did not touch
the foundations of the Soviet commemorative culture; in fact, he even
ordered the ofcial celebration of the jubilee of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky,
the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine from 1972 to 1989.
Acutely aware of the controversial nature of the OUN–UPA issue and
the strong prejudices against Ukrainian nationalism in the east of the
country, Kuchma adapted his speeches to the political preferences of
the local population. Thus, when in L’viv, he praised the UPA; when in
Donbas; the Soviet Army veterans (Portnov 2013). Commemoration of
the OUN and UPA remained a local phenomenon limited to small towns
and villages in the L’viv, Luts’k, Ternopil, and Rivne regions, where
the UPA was active. Even in these regions, it was only after 2000 that
the rst monuments appeared in big cities, and these were for the most
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 117
part local initiatives nanced by local councils, private businesses and
individuals.
Kuchma justied his reluctance to address the UPA issue at the
national level by citing the lack of consensus among the ruling elites. At
the time, heated debates were raging on this issue in the parliament, with
the national democrats and the Communists representing opposing posi-
tions. The national democrats demanded recognition of the UPA veter-
ans as equal to Soviet Army veterans in terms of ofcial status, rights,
and pension provisions. The left forces in the parliament, who contin-
ued to see the history of the OUN and UPA from the Soviet perspec-
tive, vehemently opposed this demand. Kuchma initially played a waiting
game. Eventually, in 1997, on his initiative, a special governmental com-
mission was established with the aim of investigating and evaluating the
history of the OUN and UPA. The commission included a working
group of professional historians, led by Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi.
In its concluding report, published in 2005, the historians’ working
group noted the extreme complexity of the issue. The working group
concluded that it would be problematic to establish a single non-con-
tradictory narrative of the history of the OUN–UPA which would be
accepted unconditionally in all regions of Ukraine, given how much
local experiences of World War II had differed (“Conclusions” 2005).
The concluding report addressed controversial issues such as the situa-
tional alliance with Nazi Germany, and strove to do so in a non-partisan
manner, avoiding the stereotypes and biases of the standard Soviet and
heroic narratives alike. In this way, the commission’s work constituted
an important step towards contemporary European practices of coming
to terms with the past and set clear limits on the reclamation of the past
paradigm within which the national democrats operated.
Overall, in the early 2000s, the heroic memory of the OUN and UPA
continued to be cherished to a greater degree in those regions where
their activities still remained in the communicative memory of the local
population. In Eastern and Central Ukraine, however, the popular atti-
tude to the OUN and UPA remained largely negative, as these organi-
zations were still associated rst and foremost with radical Ukrainian
nationalism and collaboration with the Nazis. At the national level, as
far as commemorative practices were concerned, Kuchma adhered to
the conclusions of the historians’ working group and made no attempt
to impose a single narrative of the OUN and UPA. Nevertheless, his-
tory textbooks nationwide continued to disseminate the narrative of the
118 Y. YURCHUK
OUN and UPA as a “liberation” and “resistance” movement. Later, after
the Orange Revolution and especially after the Euromaidan, it would be
this heroic narrative that was institutionalized in the memory politics at
the national level.
memory at War:
the past enters Ukrainian eleCtoral politiCs
Kuchma’s last years in power were characterized by a deep political crisis.
Following the murder of an independent Ukrainian journalist Georgiy
Gongadze in 2000, allegations of Kuchma’s role in the murder led to the
political isolation of the Ukrainian president in the West and pushed him
to seek closer relations with Moscow. Some of his former allies turned
into political rivals. Viktor Yushchenko, the Prime Minister in 1999–
2001 and Yulia Tymoshenko, the vice prime minister on energy issues
in Yushchenko’s cabinet, created their own parties. Viktor Yushchenko’s
“Our Ukraine” bloc, which united a number of small national demo-
cratic and nationalist parties, won successes in the 2002 parliamentary
elections. The strengthening of the national democratic opposition and
the fragmentation of the left (Oleksandr Moroz’s Socialist Party, unlike
the Communists, had now joined the anti-Kuchma coalition) created a
new political constellation on the eve of the 2004 presidential elections.
Viktor Yushchenko, the popular leader of the parliamentary opposi-
tion, represented the national democratic camp, combining a national
emancipation agenda with the pro-European choice. His opponent
from the “party of power,” chosen by President Kuchma as his succes-
sor, the acting Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, was a representative
of the Donetsk oligarchic clan. While Yushchenko’s pro-Ukrainian and
anti-Communist electorate was concentrated in the west and center, the
Russian-speaking Yanukovych appealed to voters in the east by labeling
his opponent a “nationalist” and even “fascist.” Both candidates built
their election campaign on divisive historical narratives and symbols.
As early as 2002 Yushchenko began to attend local UPA commem-
orative ceremonies on a regular basis. For instance, on 13 October
2002 he took part in the unveiling of a UPA memorial (in the form
of the Ukrainian coat of arms on the top of a hill) in the small village
of Hutvyn, in Kostopil’ region, about 80 km from Rivne (Fomenko
2002; Kolodiazhnyi 2002). Never before had small villages attracted so
much attention from such high-ranking state ofcials. It was precisely
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 119
during this period of Yushchenko’s growing popularity as a leader of the
national democratic opposition that the OUN and UPA commemora-
tions that had started in villages and small towns in the 1990s moved
to the cities. In 2002, the rst monument to the UPA in an oblast capi-
tal center was built in the West Ukrainian city of Rivne. The monument
was dedicated to Klym Savur, a UPA leader notorious for his role in
the mass killing of Poles in Volhynia in 1943 (Motyka 2011, 2013). In
2003 the construction of an impressive monument to Stepan Bandera
started in L’viv (unveiled in 2007). At the regional level the attitude to
the OUN and UPA among the local elites strongly correlated with afli-
ation to the rival camps. Such afliation was often demonstrated through
participation in a memory project, such as construction of a monu-
ment, or a commemorative ceremony. In Rivne, for instance, support for
Yushchenko was demonstrated through memory projects dedicated to
the OUN and UPA, while support for Kuchma was displayed through
memory projects dedicated to Soviet partisans (Yurchuk 2014).
Yushchenko’s exhortations to the memory of OUN and UPA touched
the hearts of many in the western regions of the country, where this mem-
ory had a strong emotional charge conveyed through family stories and its
pronounced anti-Soviet associations. Moreover, by the 2000s throughout
the country a new generation of voters appeared who had been raised on
the textbooks in which the OUN and UPA were represented as ghters
for liberation, in line with the “resistance” narrative. This narrative in turn
contributed to the attractiveness of the idea of resistance more broadly,
including resistance to the present Kuchma regime.6
The struggle between President Kuchma and the national democratic
opposition was reected in the debates and activities around the 60th
anniversary of the Volhynia massacre which coincided with the begin-
ning of the presidential election campaign in 2003.7 Both Kuchma and
Yushchenko faced the difcult task of stating a clear position on the
Volhynian events without alienating Ukrainian or Polish public opin-
ion. As president in ofce, Kuchma prioritized Ukrainian–Polish coop-
eration and thus supported the politics of reconciliation. In July 2003
Kuchma and Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski met in the vil-
lage of Pavlivka to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Volhynia
events, now declared a “common tragedy” shared by the Ukrainian and
Polish peoples. Kuchma was deeply unpopular in Western Ukraine at the
time, and his politics of reconciliation with Poland was rejected by the
nationalist-minded public who saw it as an admission of Ukrainian guilt.
120 Y. YURCHUK
At the same time, at the peak of the “Kuchmagate” scandal over the
Gongadze killing and other crimes, Ukrainian liberals and pro-European
public intellectuals aspiring to Ukrainian–Polish reconciliation at the civil
society level denied Kuchma’s legitimacy as a leader and his moral right
to apologize on behalf of the Ukrainian nation (Hrytsak 2004: 134).
Against this background, Yushchenko’s ambivalent position was gen-
erally perceived as more “balanced.” With an electoral base in Western
Ukraine, Yushchenko emphasized the Ukrainian victimhood narrative
and the legitimacy of the memory of Polish atrocities against Ukrainians.
In his letter to Adam Michnik on the theme of Ukrainian–Polish rela-
tions during World War II, Yushchenko stressed that Ukrainian efforts
aimed at studying the crimes committed against Ukrainians by Poles
were not driven by any “desire to belittle the Polish tragedy” but instead
reected a striving on the part of Ukrainians to “know their own his-
tory better” (Yushchenko 2003).8 In this way Yushchenko positioned
the history of the conict rmly within the framework of reclamation of
the past. His main argument was that Ukraine had long been deprived
of knowledge about its own history and was now struggling to regain
this knowledge. Yushchenko’s image as a pro-European politician was so
strong before and shortly after the Orange Revolution that his sympathy
for the OUN and UPA did not affect his popularity in Poland. It was
due to Yushchenko’s personal involvement that the protracted conict
around the Polish “Eaglets’” war cemetery in Lviv was nally settled in
2005: with his high moral credit in both Poland and Western Ukraine,
Yushchenko was able to achieve more in terms of practical reconciliation
than the outgoing and rather unpopular President Kuchma.
During his ofcial visit to Poland on 9 May 2003, Yushchenko made
a point of visiting Auschwitz. In this way, he connected a symbolic ges-
ture demonstrating his commitment to European memory culture with
his own family history (his father was in Auschwitz as a Soviet POW).
In June 2004 the “Our Ukraine” faction in the Ukrainian parliament
expelled Oleh Tiahnybok, the future leader of the radical national-
ist Svoboda, for his anti-Semitic and xenophobic public statements.
Seeking to reach a broader electorate in the 2004 presidential elections,
Yushchenko also spoke in favor of reconciliation between the UPA and
Soviet veterans and tried to embrace the anti-fascist narrative, as his visit
to Auschwitz shows.
At the same time, Yushchenko’s opponent Viktor Yanukovych
denounced him as a “fascist.” Yanukovych was a proponent of the
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 121
neo-Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War which had already been
reinstitutionalized in Russia by this stage by President Putin. On 28
October 2004, three days before the preliminary ballot, a pompous pub-
lic celebration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Ukraine from
Nazi occupation was organized in Kyiv (Radio Svoboda 2004). On the
occasion of this celebration, Putin made a three-day visit to Ukraine in
order to demonstrate Russia’s support for Yanukovych.
Ultimately, Yanukovych’s stake on Russian support misred. The
younger generation of voters rmly supported Yushchenko’s drive to
emancipate Ukraine from its Soviet and communist legacy and his pro-
European orientation. The Russian government’s strongly negative reac-
tion to the Orange Revolution and its continuing denunciation of the
Ukrainian leadership as “nationalist” and “fascist,” together with Russian
ofcial memory politics around the war more broadly, all contributed to
a strengthening of the heroic narrative of the OUN and UPA as part of
the new national consciousness in Ukraine. Especially after Putin’s rise to
power in 2000, Russian memory politics had become increasingly hostile
to the new national history narratives of other former Soviet republics.
In the ofcial Russian narrative of World War II, Russians were por-
trayed as the only participants in the victory over Nazi Germany while
Ukrainians along with representatives of other nationalities were increas-
ingly bracketed out of this narrative (Astrov 2012). Russian neo-impe-
rialist and nationalist interpretations of the Great Patriotic War myth
alienated many Ukrainians, and a new understanding of World War II as
a national tragedy in which Ukrainians ghting in both the Soviet Army
and the UPA were seen as victims and heroes started to gain popularity.
Controversy over normalization oF the
oUn–Upa memory
Yushchenko’s victory in the 2004 presidential election marked the begin-
ning of the normalization9 of OUN–UPA memory at the state level
by both discursive and institutional means. The narrative supported by
President Yushchenko can be called “integration-oriented” (Portnov
2013: 175), as it was an attempt to merge the heroic cult of the UPA
and some elements of the Great Patriotic War myth. In the rst months
of his presidency Yushchenko spoke about reconciliation through dia-
logue between the veterans of the Soviet army and the UPA and prom-
ised to provide the same social benets to both groups. In practice,
122 Y. YURCHUK
however, Yushchenko failed to translate these declarations into any con-
crete political steps.10 His attempt at initiating a “joint” celebration of
Victory Day by both UPA and Soviet Army veterans in Kyiv in 2005 was
a dismal failure. Reconciliation was not a popular idea in a society torn
by “memory wars” while Soviet veterans’ organizations often supported
the Party of Regions and the Communist Party against the Orange
coalition.
With the purpose of institutionalizing the new politics of memory, in
2006 Yushchenko sanctioned the foundation of the Ukrainian Institute
of National Remembrance. The Institute was established as a central
executive body operating under the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers with
the aim of “restoration and preservation of the national memory of the
Ukrainian people” (Postanova 2006). In 2008, Volodymyr Viatrovych,
a young historian from L’viv who had previously worked at the Center
for Research of the Liberation Movement and was known for his afrma-
tive nationalist approach to Ukraine’s past, was appointed the academic
adviser to the head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) in charge of
its archives. President Yushchenko assigned the SBU the new functions
of managing archives, conducting historical research, and popularizing
the new ofcial approach to Ukrainian history. The archives related to
the history of the OUN and UPA were to a large extent declassied and
opened to historians.
The Institute of National Remembrance cooperated with the SBU
and the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement (L’viv) to
organize an exhibition “The UPA: History of the Unbowed” which
traveled throughout Ukraine from September 2008 to May 2009. The
exhibition presented the UPA as heroic ghters for Ukraine’s independ-
ence while avoiding controversial issues of complicity in the Holocaust
and mass killings of the Polish population. About 60,200 people visited
the exhibition and more than 350 different mass media outlets covered
the event, resulting in more than a hundred articles in the printed media,
and dozens of mentions on national and local TV and radio programs
(INR 2009). Luts’k and Rivne boasted a record number of visitors to
the exhibition; here, excursions for schoolchildren and students were
organized. By contrast, in the east and south of the country where local
councils were largely in the hands of the Party of Regions, the exhibition
met with a negative reaction, and at best with indifference. In Luhans’k
the exhibition was sabotaged by the municipal authorities and ended up
being canceled. In Odesa a parallel anti-UPA exhibition was organized
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 123
and in Zaporizhzhia, a local Communist Party deputy destroyed
one of the exhibits (INR 2009). Moreover, in spring 2010 Vadym
Kolesnychenko, a notorious pro-Russian deputy from the Party of
Regions, organized a counter-exhibition “The Volhynia Massacre: Polish
and Jewish victims of the UPA,” which was shown in Kyiv and Odesa.
The fact that Kolesnychenko did this in cooperation with a nationalist
Polish “association of victims of Ukrainian nationalism” caused particular
outrage in the Ukrainian media.
In 2007 Ukrainian society split over memory politics once again when
Yushchenko granted the title of Hero of Ukraine to Roman Shukhevych,
the commander of the UPA. Even more controversially, in January
2010, during his last days in ofce, Yushchenko granted the same title
to Stepan Bandera, the icon of radical Ukrainian nationalism.11 This
controversial decree also had signicant international resonance. It was
criticized by Polish President Lech Kaczyński (who otherwise personally
sympathized with Yushchenko and shared his conservative agenda), as
well as by other Polish politicians and by the Roman Catholic Church
in Poland. Jewish organizations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center
declared their deep concern regarding the decree which was seen as
part of the relativization of the Holocaust (Rudling 2010: 263). On 22
February 2010 the European Parliament, at the initiative of its Polish
members, passed a special resolution denouncing Yushchenko’s deci-
sion (“Resolution” 2010). The resolution was welcomed by the Russian
authorities, while Yushchenko personally wrote a letter to the European
Parliament seeking to justify his action.
Despite this widespread criticism, Yushchenko considered memory
politics to be one of the main successes of his presidency. Lacking any
notable achievements in the realms of the economy or international rela-
tions (the EU membership which he had promised was still a very distant
prospect), he focused instead on his less tangible victories in the eld of
memory politics. For Yushchenko, history had been reclaimed, and this
was his victory.
The Yushchenko era resulted in rather controversial outcomes. The
politics of memory institutionalized by Yushchenko at the state level was
aimed at creating a new afrmative narrative of national history which
included the OUN–UPA as heroic ghters for Ukraine’s independence.
This politics was criticized by many Western and Ukrainian historians
and intellectuals who saw it as a one-sided attempt to whitewash con-
troversial aspects of history of Ukrainian nationalism (Amar et al. 2010).
124 Y. YURCHUK
Favoring reclamation of the past the Ukrainian Institute of National
remembrance showed little interest in a more critical approach. Certainly,
Yushchenko’s politics were permanently under attack, but the criticism
by his political opponents came mainly from the left, pro-Russian and
Soviet-nostalgic perspective and was dismissive of the whole phenome-
non of Ukrainian nationalism by indiscriminately labeling all UPA ght-
ers “fascists,” “Nazi collaborators,” and “traitors.” This criticism had
little in common with European practices of “coming to terms with the
past,” which call for a non-ideological approach based on grounded his-
torical research and education. And yet, the very attempt at normaliz-
ing the memory of the OUN–UPA, despite its highly divisive effects on
Ukrainian society, internationalized the debate about Ukrainian history,
stimulated public discussions about the controversial issues of the past,
and actually made possible a critical approach to the OUN and UPA
from a pro-Ukrainian perspective.
eUromaidan and beyond
The victory of Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 presidential elections
brought about a new radical turn in the Ukrainian politics of memory.
In May that year, a joint Ukrainian–Russian–Belarusian celebration
of the Victory in World War II was held, and the notion of the Great
Patriotic War returned to the public utterances of high-ranking politi-
cians. This was the rst time that a military parade with the participa-
tion of the Russian military took place in Kyiv; previously such parades
had taken place only in Sevastopol, as host of the Russian Black Sea
Fleet. In May 2011, the Ukrainian parliament amended the Law
“On the Immortalization of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War of
1941–1945” which ordered the use of the Soviet ag—the “Banner
of Victory”—next to the national ag on the Victory day and other
occasions such as the anniversary of the liberation of a given city from
German occupation. This amendment, which was later canceled by the
Constitutional Court, provoked violent clashes between the pro-Russian
Soviet veterans and nationalist “Svoboda” activists in L’viv on 9 May.
The Institute of National Remembrance’s status was now downgraded
from a state executive body to a research institution. It was assigned a
new director: Valeriy Soldatenko, a Soviet-trained historian and a mem-
ber of the Communist Party. The theme of the OUN–UPA disappeared
almost entirely from the ofcial political discourse—it was now conned
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 125
to the rhetoric of the nationalist “Svoboda” party, whose xenophobia
and exclusive nationalism made the ruling Party of Regions look like the
lesser evil.
The dramatic events of 2013–14—the Euromaidan revolution, the
annexation of Crimea by Russia, and the subsequent war in Donbas—
radically changed the political context of Ukrainian debates about the
past. Historical symbols and myths played an important role during the
Maidan protests, mobilizing people and helping them make sense of the
rapidly changing reality. During the rst weeks of the peaceful protests,
EU ags and the blue-and-yellow ags of Ukraine dominated the scene.
The more resolute the resistance to the Yanukovych regime became,
the more visible were references to the Ukrainian Cossackdom, which
embodied the ght for freedom and national liberation (Jilge 2014: 239).
The red-and-black ags of the Ukrainian nationalists (historically a
symbol of the OUN–B)12 were part of this collage of symbols and histor-
ical myths—and this raised an important question about the role of radi-
cal nationalism in the Maidan revolution. The OUN and UPA symbols
(including portraits of Stepan Bandera) were displayed mainly by nation-
alists from “Svoboda” party and the newly formed “Right Sector,” and
although far from being non-controversial, they “were not atly rejected
by more liberal or cosmopolitan protesters for fear of splitting and weak-
ening the movement” (Kulyk 2014: 100). The OUN and UPA greeting
“Glory to Ukraine!”—“Glory to Heroes!” rang out in the speeches from
the Maidan stage and from the crowds. The greeting was “appropriated
by the bulk of the protesters and imbued with a new meaning, free of
the original claims to ethno-national superiority and exclusivity” (ibid.:
101). The crowds also sang UPA songs. “Glory to Ukraine!”—“Glory
to Heroes!” sounded at the mourning ceremony for the “Heavenly
Hundred” on the Maidan. In this way, the greeting that served dur-
ing the clashes with the riot police as a symbol of courage, devotion to
Ukraine and willingness to ght, now came to stand for grief, self-sacri-
ce, and gratitude of the living to the dead.
In general, Stepan Bandera and the OUN–UPA largely lost their neg-
ative meaning for many Kyiv protesters during the Euromaidan (Jilge
2014: 247). One of the reasons was that “the very embrace of violence
as a legitimate means of resisting the repressive regime led many of them
to accept the violent nationalist resistance of the past as one of their role
models” (Kulyk 2014: 104). At the same time, the use of the OUN and
UPA symbols on the Maidan was criticized by many liberal and leftist
126 Y. YURCHUK
protesters who saw in them a threat of splitting the protest movement
and a pretext for Russian propaganda denigrating it as “fascist.” This
criticism became especially vocal when “Svoboda” Party organized its
traditional torch-lit march on 1 January, Stepan Bandera’s birthday.
With the war in Donbas unfolding, the greeting “Glory to
Ukraine!”—“Glory to Heroes!” became increasingly connected to the
memory of the fallen Ukrainian soldiers. In the new political context
symbols of Ukrainian nationalism acquired new meaning as the current
ght against the Russian aggression made some aspects of the OUN–
UPA legacy more acceptable for the Ukrainian society. On the one hand,
the war legitimized the tradition of radical Ukrainian nationalism and
gave new impetus to the politics of “reclaiming the past,” as the current
activities of the Institute of National Remembrance demonstrate. On the
other hand, as L’viv historian Vasyl’ Rasevych (2014) has noted, we are
dealing here with a new Ukrainian history—since the beginning of the
Maidan, the history of an emerging political nation is being written, and
this new history is more appealing than the divisive legacy of the OUN–
UPA. An empowered civil society with strong pro-European aspira-
tions—the main outcome of the Revolution of Dignity—is an important
precondition for “coming to terms with the difcult past.” This process
is, however, hampered by the continuing military conict in Donbas,
which serves to strengthen nationalist sentiment.
dilemmas oF deCommUnization
and the memory oF the oUn–Upa
Although Ukraine had already experienced various political cam-
paigns and legislative initiatives aimed at removing Soviet symbols and
denouncing the Communist ideology (most notably in the early years
of independence and after the Orange Revolution), it was only in April
2015 that a wide-reaching ofcial “decommunization” program was
launched. Four memory laws were adopted by the Ukrainian parlia-
ment, comprising the Law on Commemoration of the Victory over
Nazism in World War II (1939–1945); the Law on Condemnation of
the Communist and National-Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes
in Ukraine and Prohibition of Propaganda of their Symbols; the
Law on the Legal Status and on Honoring the Memory of Fighters
for Ukraine’s Independence in the 20th Century; and last but not
least, the Law on Access to the Archive of Repressive Organs of the
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 127
Communist Totalitarian Regime (1918–1991) (Decommunization
Laws 2015).
The laws were prepared under the auspices of the Ukrainian Institute
for National Remembrance, whose status as a government body was
restored in 2014. Volodymyr Viatrovych, the director of the Institute
appointed by the new Ukrainian government, was one of the motors of
Yushchenko’s memory politics between 2005 and 2010. But, despite
a certain continuity with previous attempts, the “decommunization”
launched in 2015 is taking place in a completely new political context.
First, the Maidan protests all over Ukraine were followed by the dis-
mantling of Lenin statues, which were associated with the Yanukovych
regime and his neo-Soviet and Russia-oriented identity politics. This
movement from below, supported by nationalists as well as liberals, gave
strong legitimation to the Institute’s initiative. Second, the appropriation
of symbols and myths of the Great Patriotic War by the pro-Russian sep-
aratists in spring 2014 prompted the Ukrainian government to dissoci-
ate itself from the Russian–Soviet narrative of World War II. Against the
ongoing military conict with the Russia-backed separatists, the Institute
and the Ukrainian government consider memory politics as a national
security issue.
As far as World War II memory is concerned, the message and thrust
of the “decommunization laws” is far from unambiguous—some-
thing which is not surprising in the Ukrainian case. Replacing the
Great Patriotic War with the “victory over Nazism” and establishing
8 May as the Day of Memory and Reconciliation, the new legislation
did not, however, cancel Victory Day on 9 May—a holiday that is still
highly popular in Ukraine. In this way, while embracing the European
approach to commemorative politics, the government also made a con-
cession to those parts of the Ukrainian population who still identify
with the traditional meaning of Victory Day. In addition, the Institute
of National Remembrance moved to reappropriate the symbolic capi-
tal of the Victory for the contemporary Ukrainian cause. In April–May
2015 the Institute launched a public campaign on the occasion of the
70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Social advertisements on
TV and public billboards on the streets underlined both Ukraine’s con-
tribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and its ght for an independ-
ent state. Ukrainian heroes, men and women, who had fought against
Nazi Germany in the Soviet army, in the UPA and in the Allied forces,
were presented side-by-side. By recommendation of the Institute, a
128 Y. YURCHUK
new Ukrainian symbol of victory was also launched: a red poppy ower
inscribed with the slogan “1939–1945. Never again.” Referring to
both the European and Ukrainian traditions, the poppy replaced the St
George’s Ribbon, now associated with the imperialist and revanchist pol-
itics of Putin’s Russia.
Probably the most controversial of the decommunization laws (and the
one which received the most media attention) granted the OUN and the
UPA the ofcial status of “ghters for Ukrainian independence”—some-
thing Viktor Yushchenko had failed to pass through parliament during his
time in ofce. It should be noted, however, that the law does not prior-
itize the OUN and UPA; rather, they are mentioned among dozens of
other organizations and groups who now belong to the ofcially estab-
lished canon of independence ghters. The law also forbids the “public
expression of derogatory attitudes” towards these organizations, as well
as “public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle of Ukraine’s independ-
ence in the twentieth century”; moreover, the law declares that “dissemi-
nation” of Communist propaganda and symbols is an offence punishable
by a prison sentence of up to ten years. These provisions prompted sharp
criticism from professional historians in Ukraine and in the West
(“Letter” 2015).13 As Oxana Shevel summarizes the arguments, “critics
have noted that the laws have the potential to stie open debate over his-
tory by introducing legal punishment for publically expressing ‘wrong’
opinions about the communist period or about ghters for Ukraine’s
independence” (2016: 261). The new legislation has the potential to hin-
der independent scholarly inquiry and academic publications containing
information that might damage the heroic image of the “independence
ghters.” In the case of OUN and UPA history—a subject still await-
ing non-biased specialist study, especially when it comes to aspects such
as complicity in the Holocaust and ethnic violence in Volhynia—the new
legislation seems likely to have a particularly negative impact.
The decommunization laws and their treatment of the OUN and
UPA in particular have also been criticized as potentially aggravating
political divisions in Ukrainian society, alienating the east and south of
the country, as well as for their damaging effect for Ukraine’s interna-
tional reputation and the prospects for its European integration (Umland
2016). Indeed, as the public protests against the renaming of Moscow
Avenue to Bandera Avenue in Kyiv in June 2016 demonstrate, such deci-
sions are far from non-controversial and bear the potential to generate
and exacerbate conicts. On the international front, some consequences
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 129
of Ukraine’s memory politics can be observed in Poland where in sum-
mer 2016 the Senate voted to establish 11 July as a memorial day for
“the Poles who were the victims of the genocide committed by the
OUN and UPA”—in other words, ofcially recognizing the 1943–1944
massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists as an act of genocide.14 It
should be noted, however, that this move was only partly a reaction
to Ukrainian developments, and in many ways it had more to do with
domestic political tensions in Poland. A joint statement issued by the
presidents of Ukraine and Poland in August 2016 underlined the fact
that despite the “tragic pages of history of Ukrainian–Polish relations,”
the two countries remained partners (“Spil’na deklaratsiia” 2016). But in
any case, it is clear that the glorication of the OUN–UPA is not going
to win friends for Ukraine in the world and will not help it to integrate
in the European institutions.
To sum up, “decommunization” bears the idea of reclamation of the
past at its core, and the new legislation privileges and prioritizes this par-
adigm by establishing the national canon of “ghters for independence”
which includes the OUN and UPA. Those aspects of the new legislation
which politicize history, reduce its complexity by establishing “correct”
heroes, and forbid alternative opinions pose a danger of hindering inde-
pendent historical research and free public debate. In this way, the post-
colonial politics of reclaiming history clashes head on with the principles
of coming to terms with the past, and thus with the European princi-
ples to which Ukraine aspires. Some other elements of decommuniza-
tion, however, such as the opening of the former Soviet archives, on the
contrary, facilitate independent historical research and open discussions
about the past.
ConClUsion
Oxana Shevel has pinpointed the difculties faced by Ukraine in a pas-
sage that is worth quoting at some length. She writes:
The fundamental dilemma in Ukraine’s decommunization process is how
to undo the legal, institutional, and historical legacy of the Soviet era
without repeating the Soviet approach of mandating one “correct” inter-
pretation of the past and punishing the public expression of dissenting
viewpoints. This dilemma is further complicated by the fact that criticism
of the decommunization laws has come both from intellectual circles in
130 Y. YURCHUK
the West and in Ukraine that are genuinely concerned with upholding
freedom of expression and fostering free historical inquiry, and from retro-
grade forces in Ukraine and Russia concerned rst and foremost with keep-
ing Ukraine in the Russian sphere of inuence and preserving the Soviet
era memory regime with its assessments of events, groups and individuals
(Shevel 2016: 263).
In other words, Ukraine faces a twofold challenge: it must nd a way
to confront the nation’s difcult past in a critical and responsible man-
ner, but one that does not render impossible the task of reclaiming the
past, that is, of emancipation from old imperial narratives. The histo-
rian Andrii Portnov, a strong proponent of the Vergangenheitsbewälting
paradigm, has noted the effort that this dual task requires. The honest
and complete appraisal of “the history of ethnically exclusivist national-
ism, the terror politics of the OUN, and the anti-Polish and anti-Jew-
ish crimes of the UPA,” Portnov writes, must be combined with careful
attention to avoiding the ideological traps entrenched in this territory.
In particular, historians need to work to move beyond the old binaries,
and to be aware of the ways in which a critical approach to the history
of Ukrainian radical nationalism has all too often entailed the downplay-
ing of Soviet crimes and the denial of Ukrainian historical subjectivity or
agency, whether intended or otherwise (Portnov 2016a).
Both paradigms—reclaiming the past, and coming to terms with the
past—can be powerful tools for constructing new stories and new iden-
tities, but they also have the potential to silence and oppress. As this
account of the past 25 years of Ukrainian memory politics has shown,
these two frameworks are often in stark opposition to one another; but
at other times, they feed on and fuel one another. Handling the complex
legacies of the history of the OUN and UPA is a daunting task by any
measure, and it has become even more so now that it has been taken
out of the regions where this history was primarily played out, and into
the center of the national political arena. As this chapter has shown, the
politicization of history and the instrumentalization of the complex leg-
acy of the OUN and UPA in electoral politics are fraught with the risk of
further polarizing Ukrainian society. The Ukrainian state still has to learn
how to handle its difcult past in the international arena; the importance
of Vergangenheitsbewälting is difcult to overestimate in Ukraine’s rela-
tions with Poland and Israel, and for the country’s European aspirations
in general. (This is true at least for the moment; it does seem likely that
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 131
the rise of nationalism that is underway in many EU countries at the
time of writing (2016) will destabilize the established consensus on cop-
ing with the difcult past as a precondition for European stability and
security.) Russian aggression against Ukraine which Putin’s regime legit-
imizes as the “ght against Ukrainian fascism” perpetuates the histori-
cal pattern of the nation as a “collective victim” and does not make the
task of coping with the past any easier. One thing is certain: at the level
of national memory, the legacy of the OUN and UPA will surely con-
tinue to present ground for disputes and discontent. The way Ukrainian
scholars, civil society activists, and the Ukrainian state deal with this dif-
cult past will be one of the most important tests of the maturity of the
Ukrainian democracy.
notes
1. The OUN was founded in Vienna in 1929 by radical Ukrainian nation-
alists and émigré intellectuals who refused to accept the defeat of the
Ukrainian forces in the Polish–Ukrainian war of 1917–1918 and the
resulting Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia. Unlike other Ukrainian
political organizations (such as the Ukrainian National Democratic
Alliance, UNDO) which preferred legal and parliamentary methods,
the OUN sought to achieve national independence through violence
and terrorism justied by repressions of Polish authorities against ethnic
Ukrainians. In 1940 the OUN split into two factions: a more moderate
group of older members led by Andrii Mel’nyk (OUN–M), and a more
militant group of young members led by Stepan Bandera (OUN–B).
Almost all the memory disputes around the OUN are focused on the
OUN–B. In the interests of clarity, in this chapter I generally use the
term “OUN” as a shorthand form. The UPA was created in Volhynia in
1941, and had been subsumed by the OUN by spring 1943. After World
War II the UPA continued to resist the newly established Soviet regime
in Western Ukraine until the early 1950s; many UPA ghters ended up in
the GULAG.
2. It should be stressed that post-war attitudes to the OUN–UPA were
inuenced by the diaspora from Eastern Galicia which tended to recount
the Galician experiences of the UPA, not the Volhynian ones (Rudling
2006: 180). The rst UPA units in Galicia were formed at the end of
1943, almost a year after the UPA was formed in Volhynia. In Galicia,
there were far fewer massacres of Poles, and the UPA was known pri-
marily for its post-war activities ghting the Soviets (Motyka 2011). It
was precisely these experiences that inuenced the construction of the
132 Y. YURCHUK
main historical narrative about the UPA, both in émigré scholarship and
in Ukraine. After 1991, Ukrainian “nationalizing” historians imported a
historical narrative of the OUN and UPA which had already been devel-
oped by émigré historians—members of the OUN and UPA soldiers who
migrated to the West (Dietsch 2006; Rudling 2011a: 751–53; Rudling
2013: 230; Satzewich 2002).
3. Subtelny, of course, was writing at a time when it was very difcult to
access archives in Poland and Ukraine. Since then, historical knowledge
on this topic has rapidly advanced as researchers have uncovered new
information.
4. Although there were many changes in the textbooks published between
1991 and 2014, in general one can say that it was the interpretation of
OUN and UPA as a “resistance movement” that became the ofcial version
in the textbooks; see Dietsch (2006); Marples (2007); Richardson (2004).
5. Kuchma tended to use the term “Galician nationalism” as a catchall
phrase for all national-democratic groups.
6. In my study of the popular reception of OUN–UPA memory, conducted
via the analysis of interviews, students’ essays, and posts on the livejournal
social media platform, I found the “resistance” narrative to be very wide-
spread. Furthermore, the parallel was often drawn between the OUN–
UPA anti-Soviet “resistance” and opposition to Kuchma or Yanukovych
(see Yurchuk 2012, 2014).
7. In dealing with the past conict, Ukrainian and Polish historians mainly
operated within the national history framework. In Ukrainian pub-
lic discourse the Volhynian conict was presented as a response to anti-
Ukrainian policies implemented by Poland in the interwar years and as a
(tragic but unavoidable) stage in the battle for national independence. In
this discourse the mass killing of Poles is presented as the Volhynian trag-
edy. In Polish public discourse, on the other hand, the 1943 Volhynian
conict is presented as the quintessence of the long-lasting Ukrainian
resentment against Poles that culminated in the massacre. The Polish terms
for this ethnic conict are the “Volhynian massacre” (Rzeź wołyńska), “gen-
ocide” (ludobójstwo), or “ethnic cleansing” (czystka etniczna). These differ-
ent narratives are not easily reconciled (for discussion see Portnov 2016b).
8. Yushchenko’s statement was published in the Warsaw newspaper Gazeta
Wyborcza but it did not appear in any Ukrainian paper of a similar status.
Later the article was republished in the L’viv based intellectual journal Ji,
a journal which has a rather limited readership.
9. According to Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (2015: 7), “normalization involves a
process through which a specic historical legacy comes to be viewed like
any other. The legacy may involve a particular era, an event, a person, or a
combination thereof. But for a given past to become normalized, it has to
shed the features that set it apart from other pasts. The normalization of
4 RECLAIMING THE PAST, CONFRONTING THE PAST … 133
the past can also shape the formation of group identity, enabling nations
and other collectively dened groups to perceive themselves as being
similar to, instead of different from, others. Normalization can further-
more liberate national governments to embrace the same kind of ‘normal’
domestic and foreign policies that are pursued by other nations.”
10. The issue of nancial support of the UPA veterans, however, has been
partly addressed at the local level. Some local councils in Western Ukraine
pay additional monthly allowances to the UPA veterans; see Portnov and
Portnova (2010: 36).
11. Yushchenko’s decree was canceled by a district administrative court in
Donets’k in April 2010, after Viktor Yanukovych won the presidential
elections.
12. See Note 2 for an explanation of this term.
13. See also discussion of the laws by the Ukrainian and international histo-
rians and intellectuals on the website of Krytyka (2015): “The Future of
Ukraine’s Past” (retrieved 9 January 2017 from https://kr ytyka.com/
en/solutions/featured/future-ukraines-past).
14. On the Polish response, see Rasevych (2016). Rasevych claims that pop-
ular attitudes to Ukrainians in Poland have dramatically worsened since
2014 as a result of Ukrainian ofcial memory politics.
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