SUMMARY:

Yuri Radchenko comments on Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York, 2018) from his vantage point as a Ukrainian historian of the Holocaust. He endorses the overall premise of the book but calls for a more nuanced approach to the analysis of its main collective protagonists, particularly the Ukrainians. Even among Ukrainian nationalists the differences between the main factions – the OUN(B) (Banderites) and OUN(M) (Melnykites) – were formidable and directly affected their stance vis-à-vis the Nazis, the Jews, and the Poles. Radchenko calls for historians following in Bartov’s footsteps to study more extensively in local archives, particularly the former KGB archives in Ukraine.