The Prison on Lonts’kyi Street: Memory Dialogue or Memory Monologue?

Courtyard of the museum, photo by Uilleam Blacker

The Prison on Lonts’kyi Street: Memory Dialogue or Memory Monologue?

Uilleam Blacker

First published on the Current Ukrainian Politics Blog:

http://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/the-prison-on-lontskyi-street-memory-dialogue-or-memory-monologue/

L’viv’s wartime history is complex, and demands sensitivity and an understanding that victimhood and guilt are not always exclusive categories. The history of the site of the prison on Lonts’kyi Street speaks to this complexity. It speaks of the Polish state that forcefully oppressed Ukrainian political and cultural aspirations, and also of the Poles tortured, killed and deported by the Soviets. It reminds of Ukrainian victims of the Soviets, but also of Ukrainians’ part in the L’viv pogrom of 1941; it speaks of the Jewish victims of that pogrom, and of wider anti-Semitic violence and murder. This site speaks to the history of interwar Lwów, where Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews failed to build a strong enough society to withstand the chaos that the war would bring. For these reasons, it is a good thing that there is a museum at Lonts’kyi. Its history of the tragic intertwining of the fates of various groups makes it a perfect location to examine that history and learn from it. Unfortunately, the current museum does not take advantage of this opportunity.

Memory and Language in Ukraine: some reflections on a recent journey

It is hard to underestimate the usefulness of physically visiting landscapes of memory. This simple act can be just as instructive as hours spent in libraries or trawling the internet. As well as affording the opportunity to learn things that one would otherwise miss, it allows one to connect to the memories that one studies practically, rather than simply theoretically. It can also challenge many of the assumptions we make as we approach our subject, and many of the conclusions we draw as we study from afar.

Symbols of Soviet and Greek-Catholic memory co-exist in L'viv (photo: U. Blacker)

One assumption that falls apart as one walks through Ukraine’s memoryscapes is that of the ‘two Ukraines’. That is, two different territories, two different cultures, two different memories, and of course, two different languages. Observing Ukraine from a distance, through the media, it is easy to concur. East versus West, Russian versus Ukrainian, Stalin versus Bandera, etc. Ukraine’s ‘split personality’ has been sharply underlined by the recent political conflict over the language bill. Russian tries to squeeze out Ukrainian, and Ukrainian tries valiantly to resist linguistic colonization. The two languages fight each other, like deputies in the parliament, like partisans against insurgents.

Yet language is not war. One does not have to choose a side to fight for. In this case, it is quite possible to inhabit two camps at once. Languages are not ideologies, and can be combined, can co-exist. This is the case in Ukraine, as is evident to anyone who visits the country. And just as language is not unitary, neither is that other important constituent of identity, memory. Both language and memory diverge, re-converge, overlap, quarrel and even engage in dialogue. The one thing they do not do is separate out cleanly, simply and irrevocably.

Sites of Forgetting II, by Andriy Portnov

Somewhat unexpectedly for me, my text about how a ‘Death Tower’ of a Nazi concentration camp for Soviet POWs was transformed into a five-star hotel in Lviv, published a week ago at the ‘History Lessons’ portal, in English translation on the 'Memory at War' collective blog, and in Ukrainian at Polit.ua, prompted a broad response. I received a great many letters and comments, and these have shaped the theme of this essay: the problem of reflecting on sites of forgetting.

Historian Andriy Portnov on Sites of Forgetting in Lviv

Andriy Portnov reflects on the forgotten war-time history of a five-star hotel in central Lviv which once housed a Nazi concentration camp for Soviet POWs.

Image source: Wikipedia

Ukraine's Monument War

Ukraine began 2011 with a war of monuments. The most significant blow of the ‘conflict’ thus far was struck on 31^st December, when a monument to Stalin in Zaporizhzhia was blown up. The monument was erected by the local Communist party on the territory of its headquarters in 2010. The bust was reportedly decapitated on 28 December, before its complete destruction on New Year’s Eve. The authorities have reacted robustly to the incident, according to Dzerkalo Tyzhnia and other Ukrainian media, arresting members of nationalist organizations throughout Ukraine. The culprits are wanted on charges of terrorism.

My Joy: a powerful cinematic exploration of post-Soviet traumatic memory

Traumatic memory is central to the latest film by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, My Joy (Schast'e moe). The film tells the darkly picaresque story of a flour deliveryman who, on a journey through rural Russia, encounters petty corruption, theft and violence. While clues such as the uniforms of the militia indicate that the film is set in Russia, it could take place almost anywhere in the rural, post-Soviet sphere. On his own website Loznitsa suggests that this is important to the film, saying ‘it is connected with the degradation and dying out of the space that speaks in the language of Platonov’s The Foundation Pit’. The local, rural dialects that form one aspect of Platonov’s language, and the culture they represent, are certainly strongly present in the film, although deeper affinities can also be found in its narrative ambiguity, journey structure and Dostoevsky-like examination of human baseness, cruelty and morality. What is most striking about the film, however, is its attitude to the past, or more specifically, how past traumas persist in the present.

'Не умер Сталин'

Но как тут быть, когда внутри нас
Не умер Сталин?

But how are we to live here, when inside us
Stalin is not dead?

Boris Chichibabin, 1959

The image above comes from Wednesday's match between Metallurh FC Zaporizhzhia and Chornomorets' FC Odesa. The sign, which reads 'Zaporizhzhia against Stalin,' is a response to the recent erection of a monument to Stalin by the Communist Party of Ukraine in Zaporizhzhia.

Metallurh won the match, 1:0.

Clash in Kyiv over 'Volyn Massacre' Exhibition

Yesterday in Kyiv a group of Ukrainians protested an exhibition at Ukrainian House organised by a 'human rights group' called 'Russophone Ukraine' (Русскоязычная Украина, a project of Party of Regions MP Vadim Kolesnichenko) and the Polish 'Society for Honouring the Memory of the Victims of the Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists.' Video of the confrontation is embedded above. The exhibition is entitled 'The Volyn Massacre: Polish and Jewish Victims of OUN-UPA [Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army]'. An essay on the memory of the Volyn Massacre among the Ukrainian diaspora by John-Paul Himka can be read here. As with other events of this period, the historical scholarship on the massacre -- not to mention public discourse about it -- is often fraught and lacking in contextualization.

This volatile collision of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian memories of wartime violence is the focus of our project, 'Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.'

Battle over Bandera

On 22 January, in one of his last acts as President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko declared Stepan Bandera, leader of the wartime Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a 'Hero of Ukraine.' The bestowal of the honour upon this controversial historical figure -- national freedom fighter according to some, terrorist and Nazi collaborator according to others -- has provoked fallout at home and in Poland and Russia. (For more on Bandera in our contemporary context, see David Marples's Heroes and Villians: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine.) Yesterday Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in a sit-down with President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbaev, commented directly on these developments, characterising Yushchenko's decision as 'essentially spit[ting] in the face of his political sponsors' (по сути, «плюнуло в лицо» своим политическим спонсорам). He proceeded to say that he hoped that 'this difficult period in the life of the Ukrainian people, brothers to us all, has passed' (этот тяжелый период в жизни братского нам всем украинского народа позади; emphasis mine).

Incoming Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, while he disagrees with Yushchenko's decision, has indicated that he will not revoke Bandera's 'hero' status. In a press conference today, Yushchenko in effect responded to both Putin and Yanukovych by saying that 'without Bandera, there would be no Yanukovych. Yanukovych would not have become president of an independent country' (Якби не було Бандери, не було б Януковича. Янукович би не став президентом незалежної країни).

The photos of strikingly similar representations of Bandera and Lenin in the collage above are taken from Gazeta.ua.

German-Polish Reconciliation

Władysław Bartoszewski has just published his new book O Niemcach i Polakach. Wspomnienia. Nadzieje. Prognozy (with the help of Rafał Rogulski and Jan Rydel, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010) potentially roughly translated into About Germans and Poles. Memories. Hopes. Prospects. Few people have such credentials to write about Polish-German contacts as this survivor of Auschwitz, veteran of the Warsaw Uprising and activist in the underground Council to Aid Jews during the Second World War and later professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the 1980s, Poland’s foreign minister in 1995 and currently the Polish government’s representative for Polish-German relations. His book traces the evolution of the interactions between the two nations from the war, through the visits to Poland of East German activists of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (an organisation confronting the legacy of Nazism) and the West German aid to the Polish Solidarity movement, to the Polish-German cooperation after 1989. As reviews of the book suggest, Bartoszewski confirms in it his reputation as a perceptive observer and great story-teller. One can find few more insightful pictures of how much changed between Poland and Germany in the last seventy years. A review of the book can be found here.

Poles and Jews during the Second World War

The passing year brought further contributions to the discussions about the attitudes of Catholic Poles towards the Jews during the Second World War, perhaps the most complex and controversial topic in modern Polish history and one of the most painful and politically charged aspects of collective memory in the country. After the most thoroughly researched Polish study of the Warsaw Ghetto (Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, Getto warszawskie: przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście, 1st edn. Warsaw, 2001) became available in English owing to the translation by Emma Harris for Yale University Press (The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, New Haven, 2009), its co-author, Barbara Engelking, the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, together with Dariusz Libionka, the director of the Research Department of the Majdanek State Museum, turned her attention to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Their book Żydzi w powstańczej Warszawie (Warsaw, 2009) explores the place of Jews and Polish freedom fighters’ attitudes towards them during the doomed attempt of the Polish Home Army to liberate Warsaw from the Nazis before its capture by the Red Army. As the authors explain in an interview with the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, their aim was to show “the entire spectrum of [Polish] responses” to the Jews (“My staramy się pokazać całe spektrum postaw”). They conclude that during “the last battle for free Poland, nobody had time for the Jews” (“Rozgrywała się ostatnia bitwa o wolną Polskę, nikt nie miał głowy do Żydów”). The interview can be found here on the website of Gazeta Wyborcza.

History Lessons from Putin

by Alexander Etkind
Originally published in the 17 September 2009 edition of The Moscow Times

Soviet ideology was always about the future. By contrast, today’s official Russian ideology seems to be focused squarely on the past.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent article for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza — written to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland — expresses his determination to make 20th-century European history a major part of the Russian government’s business. That article reflects the deep, unresolved problems of Putin’s era: the inability to distinguish between the Soviet past and the Russian present; an unscrupulous mix of political conservatism and historical revisionism; and indifference, bordering on incomprehension, with regard to the key values of democracy.

In his article, Putin did not mourn the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, he even praised the democratic movements that buried the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence, and he expressed no sympathy for the 20th century’s revolutions, which he called “deep wounds” that humanity inflicted on itself.

What really worries Putin is the balancing of World War II and Stalinism in Soviet history. Calling for a “contextual” and “causal” view of history, he acknowledges the Stalinist terror but interprets it as a response to the extraordinary need to defeat Nazism.

Putin summarizes his understanding of the scale of the war by recalling the loss of “27 million lives of my compatriots.” That number has grown over the years, as Soviet officials broadened the definition of wartime deaths to mean total “population loss,” rather than direct military casualties. Official estimates of Soviet deaths in World War II thus rose from 7 million (the figure put forth under Stalin) to 20 million (Khrushchev) to 26.6 million (Gorbachev), with civilian deaths accounting for at least two-thirds of Putin’s estimate.

Unfortunately, Putin does not explain whom he counts as his compatriots. If he meant those who lived within Russia’s contemporary borders, the number would have been much lower. Instead, he includes all citizens of the Soviet Union who died during the war, including millions of Ukrainians, Belarussians, and others. And, when the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic countries, Königsberg, parts of Poland, Finland, Moldova, and Japan, their citizens, too, became Soviet compatriots.

Moreover, because Putin’s “contextual” history subordinates Soviet-era suffering to the purpose of fighting the Great Patriotic War, his number mixes those who died in battle fighting for the Soviet Union with those whom the Soviets killed through mass murder, deportation, and forced labor. By this logic, one could also reclassify the victims of the terror, collectivization, and famine of the 1930s in order to boost the number of Hitler’s casualties in the Soviet Union.

Putin connects two events that triggered World War II, the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, in one causal construction. Both acts of collusion with Nazi Germany were immoral mistakes, writes Putin, but the latter was merely a response to the former. To be sure, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Edouard Daladier signed a shameful treaty with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. But when Hitler breached the treaty, both Chamberlain and Daladier lost popular support, and, by the start of World War II, neither was still in office. The dictators remained, however, Molotov and Stalin among them.

Moreover, while the Munich Agreement cynically blessed Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, it was a public document that meant what it said. But the truly important part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was its Secret Protocols, which divided Europe into two imperial domains, Stalin’s and Hitler’s, without the consent — or even the knowledge — of the nations consigned to them. Molotov, who remained in power throughout the war and until 1956, denied the existence of the Secret Protocols until his death 30 years later. Democracies make shameful mistakes, but they eventually correct them, or at least apologize for them. And they dethrone those who got them into trouble.

It is wrong, and even immoral, to equate democratic and dictatorial practices. But this is the new Russian equation.

Cover image from Peter Andrews, Reuters.

Yanukovych proposes World War II Liberator monument

During a visit today to the Donets'k oblast, Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych proposed to erect a monument to the World War II "Liberator" (Визволитель) on the border of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. According to Ukrains'ka pravda, the leader of the Party of Regions said, "We know who brought freedom and peace to our land," adding in Kremlin-friendly language that he was against attempts to "rewrite history."

Jarosław Kaczyński: Putin 'spun a story'

A strong majority of Poles wanted Prime Minister Putin to apologise yesterday for the 17 September 1939 Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. He made no such apology, but offered a conciliatory hand to Polish readers (and the back of his hand to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko) in letter published yesterday in Gazeta Wyborcza. (The letter has been made available in English translation on Putin's website.) Here is the reaction of former Polish PM Jarosław Kaczyński this afternoon, referring to Putin as "prezydent":

Po pierwsze, nie było przeprosin... Putin snuł pewną opowieść, która jest właściwa dla nacjonalizmu. Rosja Stalina była przedstawiana jako zwykłe państwo. Były oczywiście jakieś przyjazne dla Polski akcenty, ale są one nie satysfakcjonujące.

First of all, there was no apology... Putin spun a story that was suitable for [Russian] nationalism. Stalin's Russia was presented as a normal state. There were some nice sentiments for Poland, but they were not enough.

Kaczyński went on to ask why Putin had been invited to Gdańsk in the first place.

Majority of Poles: 'Putin should apologise' for 1939

Together with other European leaders, the Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Prime Ministers are meeting in Gdańsk today to commemorate the 70th anniversary of World War II. Vladimir Putin's visit in particular is making headlines. According to a recent poll conducted by GfK Polonia for the newspaper Rzeczpospolita (The Republic),

Na pytanie, czy podczas uroczystości 1 września Władimir Putin powinien przeprosić za napaść na Polską 17 września 1939 r. "tak" odpowiedziało 76 proc. ankietowanych. Przeciwnego zdania było 18 proc. badanych. Nie miało zdania w tej sprawie - 6 proc.

As to the question, 'Should Vladimir Putin apologise for the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939 during the 1 September commemoration ceremonies,' 76% of respondents said 'Yes.' 18% of the polled were of the opposite view. 6% did not have an opinion on the matter.

Photo from Rzeczpospolita's website. A good article on the memory politics wrought by the 1939 invasion in Poland appeared in yesterday's Financial Times.

Timothy Snyder: 'Holocaust: The Ignored Reality'

Timothy Snyder's article in the upcoming 16 July New York Review of Books offers nothing less than a corrective to conventional twentieth-century European historiography in under 4,200 words. It will be read for a long time.

Snyder traces, sensitively but authoritatively, signs of 'the difference between history and memory' in twentieth-century Europe. Among other things, he argues that

[t]he emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical center of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia...

The geographic, moral, and political center of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.

As in his fine The Reconstruction of Nations (Yale, 2003), Snyder shows what a skilled, objective practitioner in comparative history can achieve: critical lessons for our common future.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again.

Another note from this past week: Masha Lipman's column in 19 June's Washington Post confronts what Snyder calls an 'imperialism of martyrdom.'

In the following excerpt she targets the logical cul-de-sac of the stated mandate of the Kremlin's new commission 'to counteract attempts to falsify history that undermine the interests of Russia' (“по противодействию попыткам фальсификации истории в ущерб интересам России"), which we discussed in a post on 13 June:

...[T]he goal of a government commission established last month by President Dmitry Medvedev's decree [is] to oppose attempts to falsify history that damage Russia's interests. This mission shows the potential for interpretation -- and abuse: It implies that genuine historical fact cannot be damaging to Russia's world stature, but also that there's nothing wrong with the distortion of facts if it embellishes the country's image.

The rest of Lipman's column can be read here.

Recent Sorties in the 'Memory War'

A quick update. On May 19, President Medvedev declared the creation of a special commission “to counteract attempts to falsify history that undermine the interests of Russia” (“по противодействию попыткам фальсификации истории в ущерб интересам России"). He did so days after recording this entry on his video-blog marking Victory Day, in which he states (after 3:06) that “attempts to falsify history” about World War II have become increasingly “angry and aggressive.” More about the ukase establishing the commission can be read in these Russian-language articles by RIA Novosti and Vedomosti and in this 11 June opinion piece by Janusz Bugajski from the Wall Street Journal Europe.

Who is responsible for these so-called “angry and aggressive” attempts to “falsify history,” according to the Kremlin? Medvedev has in mind, of course, Ukraine and Poland, who have recently announced a new development in their increasingly collaborative efforts to come to terms with the past.

On 11 June, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU, Служба безпеки України), which has become a significant actor in the investigation of Soviet crimes in Ukraine, announced that Poland's Institute of National Memory (IPN, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej) has given it a large store of archival documents relating to the activity of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, Українська повстанська армія) from 1944-47. More about the transfer can be read in this Ukrainian-language article on Korrespondent.net. The SBU noted that this was not the first time it has collaborated with IPN, and these strides in Ukrainian-Polish cooperation on the memory front clearly have the Kremlin feeling defensive.