I often talk with journalists from different countries, publications and with different views. The more professional the journalist, the less they show their own preferences and try to listen and reflect the opinion of the person they are talking with. Many of whom have questions that provoke a discussion. But the questions posed by journalist Josh Cohen are certainly not journalistic but rather those of a prosecutor.
After reading several lines of his initial email request for my comments on Feb. 25, I already understood: he is talking to me as if I was the accused. He asked: “How would you respond to Western historians’ allegations that you or your staff have a willingness to ignore or even falsify historical documents?” And other questions of that nature. Adhering to “democratic” standards, Cohen gave me the opportunity to justify myself: “We would welcome any statement you would like to make in response to these allegations so that they may be included in the article Foreign Policy intends to publish… As we are close to publication, I would great appreciate a reply in the next two days.”
Despite the angry tone and the accusations of its intent (evidence of actions were not found because he had none) I have prepared detailed answers, fragments of which they printed. Not in order to present my heavily edited point of view, but in order to create the impression of preserving balance in his work.
It’s not that I’m new to such kind of “scientific” debate.
Take the piece by Jared McBride with the “revealing” title: ‘How Ukraine’s New Memory Commissar Is Controlling the Nation’s Past.’ And it was only after reading the piece by Jeffrey Burds that I not only found out about my so-called falsifications or censorship, but also learned that some major “falsifying” occurs in a mysterious 898-page book the title of which he unfortunately fails to mention.
I was surprised by the words of Canadian historian Marco Carynnyk about his problems with accessing the SBU archive when I was director. Perhaps, Cohen misunderstood his words because there is a letter from Marco (who I hope will forgive me for being forced into publishing our private correspondence from 2010): “You know, perhaps I do not agree with your evaluation of some aspects of Ukrainian history. But I will always be grateful to you for the fact that in the last year you gave me access to the (Security Service of Ukraine) SBU archives.” And this was not preferential treatment. When I headed the SBU archives, for the first time ever people were ensured equal access.
Volodymyr Viatrovych is the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
Stanislav Serhiyenko, a Ukrainian historian, represents the angered colleagues from Ukraine in Cohen’s work. I could not recall a famous historian with that name. Why? I understood after receiving a Facebook message from the director of the SBU archives Andriy Kohut. Stanislav Serhiyenko is a left-wing student activist, a regular contributor the pro-Russian publication Gazeta 2000, financed by the Foundation named for the scandalous Oles Buzina. Kohut also said that, contrary to what he told Cohen, Serhiyenko never complained to the archive staff about not having access to the archives.
What is equally strange is the author’s text is full of mistakes and distortions. Here are just a few: I became the director of the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement in 2002 and not in 2006 (this is an important detail because it demonstrates the author’s negligence, he didn’t even check Wikipedia); under President Viktor Yushchenko street names were not renamed after leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurrection Army (UPA). And on those occasions they were, there was never any direct involvement from the president.
Likewise, Cohen’s claim that I defended the soldiers of the Waffen SS “Galicia” Division cannot be substantiated by any examples. Instead I write about them as victims of war, Ukrainians mobilized by hostile propaganda to fight for someone else’s purpose. Finally, it was not the president who appointed me the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (and not my “Memory Institute” as Cohen puts it), rather this was done by a government decree. At the time of my appointment (March 25, 2014) Petro Poroshenko was not yet president. Therefore, to say he enlisted the support of nationalist forces is ridiculous. Moreover, I am not a member of any political party.
The deeper the author gets into history, the more errors there are. With ease he states unconfirmed figures: 70-100,000 Poles were “killed by the UPA”. These were the figures quoted in political statements but there is no scientific study based on sources, or at the very least reliable methodology in calculating these numbers.
The origin of the figure of “35,000 Jews killed by nationalists in western Ukraine” is also unclear. It’s the number you can’t find in the works of even those historians who are the heaviest critics of OUN.
Cohen is as ease with his use of numbers, just as he is with his sources.
The supposed “order” by Klyachkyvskiy about the “destruction of all Poles age 16 to 60” was deemed a fake.
One of Cohen’s leading arguments is that I am “whitewashing” Ukrainian history by including the Ukrainian liberation movement within Ukraine’s national historical narrative and ignoring it’s involvement in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the Second World War.
He calls this a “revisionist history” while I would disagree. During the Soviet Union, the mention of the nationalists was automatically associated with the Nazis (even though the two were not the same thing) and the Holocaust was almost completely Sovietized – the Jews were not the victims of the Holocaust but rather “Soviet citizens” were (as is stated on the memorial to the victims of Babi Yar in Kyiv). In no way am I, or the Institute of National Memory, falsifying the “narrative of the Holocaust”, especially when that narrative is all but forgotten in Soviet Ukrainian historical texts. If anything, the Institute has worked hard to place the Holocaust – and its memory – back into the Ukrainian national historical narrative by including it in public displays and discussions.
The history of the Ukrainian liberation movement also cannot be simplified into a couple of paragraphs that indicate its creation in 1929 and involvement in the war in 1941.
Cohen systematically ignores more than 10 years of history where the Ukrainian nation was split between two larger countries, devastated by genocide, the Pacification, the Great Terror, repression and inter-ethnic strife. Yes, the OUN was a militant organization – no historian denies that fact. But what Cohen is doing is denying the importance of the OUN to western Ukrainian history during the interwar period – something he himself accuses me of doing with the memory of Red Army soldiers. I, nor the Institute of National Memory, are denying the “heroism of the Red Army during World War II” – the many commemorations and remembrance celebrations that are included in the May 8-9 festivities throughout Ukraine are a indication of this. Red Army soldiers sat side-by-side last year with the veterans of the UPA and neither group had any problem with this.
Cohen only had to glimpse at the YouTube footage of the 2015 Remembrance Day concert in Kyiv to understand this. What Cohen has a slight grip on is the problem of Ukrainian history – eastern Ukrainian history and western Ukrainian history were never identical and one cannot please one group over another. If Ukrainian historians did what Cohen suggested, than western Ukrainian history would be left out of the national historical narrative (which is consequently, what occurred in the Soviet Union). Therefore, while he claims that in Luhansk and the east I am “ignoring half the population”, what he is suggesting is also ignoring the other half. What I, and the Institute are working hard on doing is advocating for a united national historical narrative in which all historical activities of all Ukrainians are mentioned – nationalist, communist and even those of the Diaspora Ukrainians who fought in the Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy, in Monte Cassino and the Pacific Theatre.
Cohen further simplifies the history of Ukraine during the Second World War into a very “Soviet” viewpoint. Ukrainians did kill other nationalities, but also killed other Ukrainians – just the same as other nationalities killed each other and Ukrainians in horrible ways. The history of Ukraine during the Second World War cannot be glimpsed in such a simple and black and white picture.
For example, the OUN-UPA did not collaborate with the Germans or the Soviets. There were individual pacts of understanding between all three but it was never systematic. Records even indicate that Red Army soldiers warned UPA units about incoming NKVD troops when the Ukrainian Front was pushing westward throughout Ukraine.
The accusations that the OUN and the UPA collaborated is xenophobia, their participation in the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing is characteristic of Soviet historiography and propaganda, and is to this day supported by a number of researchers in the West (including those referred to in Cohen’s article like Himka, Carynnyk and Burds). But the journalist presents his views as the only correct version of events. Therefore, attempts to oppose their views, based on newly discovered documents is deplorable “revisionism”.
These words have a clear association for Western readers with “Holocaust denial.” They are used in branding hundreds of modern Ukrainian and foreign researchers that characterize the activities of the UPA and the OUN as part of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement, a movement which fought against both totalitarian regimes – the communists and the Nazis.
Furthermore, Cohen insists that the OUN took an active participation in the 1941 Jewish pogrom in Lviv. There are no OUN documents to suggest such an active participation of the Organization during this time. Again, individual members of the OUN did take part but the Organization was more focused on announcing the June 30, 1941 Act of Restoring Ukrainian independence. Also, while it is true that Ukrainians did take part in the killing of Jews in Ukraine during the Holocaust the exact number is still unidentified and is certainly no greater than the number of other nationalities who also collaborated in the Holocaust with the Germans. OUN members also saved hundreds of Jews from German executioners – one of them being Olena Viter, a Greek-Catholic nun, OUN member and a Righteous Among the Nations.
What Cohen certain does understand is the importance of the “consolidation of Ukrainian democracy” which “requires the country to come to grips with the darker aspects of its past” but that can only be done with Ukrainians understand all sides of their national history and not just the one-sided heavily Sovietized version of Ukrainian history. Ukrainians need to come to terms with one of the most complex historical experiences (and nightmares) that occurred during the Second World War on their territory – an experience that differed regionally but also locally and even within families. That is important achievement of Ukraine’s historians. No matter what topic they write about, they now have the ability to write about it in a free, democratic and critical way (even with the luxury of having it openly criticized).
The most important conclusion drawn by the article published by Foreign Policy is that historical censorship and the rewriting of history is introduced by restricting access to the archives. A number of researchers expressed such concerns prior to the introduction of the decommunization law. A year has passed and there have been no cases of restrictions of academic freedom or access. Because the law does not contain the tools to do so. In contrast, the number of users accessing the old KGB archives has significantly increased, among them have been researchers from outside Ukraine (for example, Amir Weiner, Lynne Viola, Anne Applebaum). At the same time the number of Ukrainians accessing the archives has grown by almost 50 percent.
The transfer of historical documents from the Security Services, the Foreign Intelligence Services, the Ministry of Interior, would not only relieve them of the extra work holding them, but it also allows for the documents to be processed by historians and archivists, instead of law-enforcement officials.
And furthermore, the transfer (which by the way is only being prepared for and has not taken place, as Cohen incorrectly writes) is an important element of the general democratic transformation of a post-totalitarian society.
The International Council on Archives recommends: “Records produced or accumulated by former repressive bodies must be placed under the control of the new democratic authorities at the earliest opportunity and these authorities must assess the holdings in detail. (…)The security bodies must ensure the transfer of selected files and documents either to the national archives, to the institutions dealing with compensation or reparation for victims of the repression and purging of former officials, or to the Truth Commissions.”
This was why special archival laws were adopted last year which already operate in 11 post-communist countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania and etc.)
The opening of the communist secret service archives is the main guarantee against the state imposing one single view of the past, or, furthermore, one of the guarantees of democratic development. That is why Ukraine chose to follow the experience of its neighbors after the Euromaidan.
Otherwise we risk facing what is already happening eastward of Ukraine. The closed Russian archives (which were recently put under the direct control of Russian President Vladimir Putin) became the foundation for the rehabilitation of totalitarianism and are used for this purpose today.
But this is another, real story about the rewriting of the past and the use of archives. The one that failed to attract Josh Cohen’s attention.
