The leading Ukrainian historical journal, Ukraina Moderna (Modern Ukraine), has undergone a change of format, editorial team, and cover design – and all of these changes are for the better. Ukraina Moderna is the publication of Lviv University’s Institute of Historical Research, a much respected research center, where the journal’s high academic standards were first formed. Now, however, the editors represent Ukraine’s three major cities and capitals of the country’s principal historical regions: Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv. Moreover, the newly established editorial board of thirty historians from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, and Japan suggests the journal’s ambition to become a leading international academic periodical devoted to Ukrainian history.
The changes in the format and content also reflect the transformation of Ukraina Moderna from the country’s best regional periodical into a premier national journal with a growing international presence. Western Ukrainian topics no longer predominate on the journal’s pages. Instead, every issue begins with a forum on a major historical issue with the participation of foremost specialists from Ukraine and abroad. Possibly inspired by the success of Ab Imperio’s “thematic” issues, Ukraina Moderna is now trying to organize entire issues around forum topics, although unrelated articles may also be included. Thus, the issue under review is devoted to World War II. The Ukrainian title of this special issue is ambiguous and can be translated into English either as “The Victors’ War against the Defeated” or as “The War as Seen by Its Victors and Losers.” In any case, the intention here is clearly to address the subsequent memory wars as much as the war itself.
The opening forum, “The Second World War as a Challenge for Ukrainian Historiography,” is very effective in establishing the main interpretive differences. The Western scholars (including Western-educated Ukrainians, such as Andriy Zayarnyuk) are extremely critical of the official politics of memory in independent Ukraine and suggest more attention to the Holocaust, Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, and the massacre of Polish civilians in Volyn. The Polish historian Grzegorz Motyka points out that Ukraine has yet to go through the shock, debate, and catharsis that Poland went through after the publication of Jan Gross’s famous book.^[1] In contrast, Ukrainians from Ukraine, with the exception of Oleksandr Lysenko, do not seem to be hearing the debates going on in world historical scholarship. Anatolii Rusnachenko disagrees that collaborationism is an important issue to be researched. Ivan Patryliak, who teaches at Kyiv University, claims that ethnic Ukrainians in the Red Army “sacrificed their lives for aims that were foreign and incomprehensible to them,” and their combat deaths “did not help with biological survival of Ukrainians as a separate ethnos” (P. 50).
The ensuing first two articles focus on a concept very relevant to this discussion. Ton Zwaan provides a theoretical overview of the concept of “genocide.” Andrii Portnov discusses its applications to Ukrainian history, including the Famine, the Holocaust, and the ethnic cleansings in Volyn. The other two research articles in this issue are case studies of everyday life in Ukraine under the German occupation. Taras Kurylo writes about the “strength and weakness” of Ukrainian nationalism in occupied Kyiv, where nationalist activists arriving from Western Ukraine found, in the words of a 1943 Banderite report, “almost no national consciousness” (P. 122) – or, at least, not the variety that radical nationalists would recognize. Dmytro Tytarenko provides some very interesting information on organized cultural life under the occupation, especially about theater life, although I have some doubts about the notion that “the presence of Germans – a European spectator knowledgeable about art – oriented [local] theaters towards heightened responsibility for the results of their work” (P. 135).
A transcript of an interview with the late Marko Antonovych (recorded in Montreal in 1989) is a treasure trove of information about Ukrainian cultural life in interwar Czechoslovakia and Kyiv under the German occupation. Like many other young nationalists making their way to Eastern Ukraine as part of the OUN “expeditionary groups,” Antonovych ended up being assigned as an interpreter to a German army battalion and was issued the green German uniform. Needless to say, his unit, according to the interview, did not brutalize the population or commit any crimes against humanity. The part about Antonovych’s subsequent stay in Kyiv presents greater interest. There, the locals clearly distinguished “yours” or “Galicians” from “ours.” Antonovych cites the words of the Melnykite leader Oles Olzhych, who said in frustration: “Marko, nobody wants us here” (P. 165).
Victor Petrov’s “Historiosophical Etudes” (1946), published under the rubric “Archive,” are devoted to the comparison of early modern and modernist art. The connection to the war in this case is the author, a prominent Ukrainian writer, thinker, and literary scholar, who escaped from Ukraine with the Germans, and disappeared under mysterious circumstances in West Germany in 1949. His fellow émigrés believed that he was abducted by the Soviets, but in the 1960s it was learned that Petrov, who reappeared in Kyiv as a respected archaeologist, was a Soviet agent. Today some Western scholars of Ukraine call this highly original thinker the “Ukrainian Foucault.”
Miscellaneous short articles and comments unrelated to the issue’s main theme include the statement of editorial philosophy from the editor of the Polish journal Arcana – an installment in the series of “introductions” that Ukraina Moderna solicits from select journals in East Central Europe and Russia. One hopes that this tradition will continue, even though another one is going to end with this issue, namely, a short survey of journal content for various foreign-language journals focused on Eastern Europe. The present issue features the detailed summaries of 2006 volumes of East European Politics and Societies, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Ab Imperio, and Nations and Nationalism.
The book review section of Ukraina Moderna is always very interesting, but this time I would like to highlight two lengthy reviews of books on wartime Ukraine. Taras Kurylo and John-Paul Himka demonstrate the selective use of sources in Volodymyr Viatrovych’s apologetic book on the OUN’s position towards the Jews.^[2] (Viatrovych has recently been appointed head of the Ukrainian Security Service’s archive, a de facto custodian of the most sensitive documents held in Kyiv.) Oleksandr Melnyk criticizes one of the best recent Western books on World War II in Ukraine, Karel Berkhoff’s Harvest of Despair,^[3] for not adopting a critical eye toward German reports about the popular mood and later memoirs by anti-Soviet refugees, which could distort the picture on the ground as much as Soviet reports, and for the very same reason, although in the opposite direction.
Last but not least, Ukraina Moderna maintains not only high standards of scholarship but also a strict publishing schedule. Just as I was completing this review, the next, and equally interesting issue (№ 3 [14] for 2009), had arrived. Its theme is “Marxism in Eastern Europe.”