SUMMARY:

In his article Alexander Osipian explores politics and varying representations of memory of the Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict during the after the Second World War. Osipian contends that the violent encounter between Polish and Ukrainian partisans in 1942-47 at the margin of the central conflict between the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union has been largely forgotten. In the first part of his article the author demonstrates how a “civil war” in an ethnically mixed borderland was informed and sustained by historically formed national claims for the territory, respectively, in Polish and Ukrainian narratives of national history. The interethnic violence and changing ethnic balance of this borderland territory was also underpinned by the Nazi drive to change the ethnic map of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s policy of repression and resettlement on this territory after the conquest. The second part of the article ponders the dynamics and consequences of subsequent obliteration of this conflict (and retrospectively the violent history of Polish-Ukrainian encounter) in the mnemonic narratives of the Soviet period (analyzed on the basis of history textbooks, public ceremonies, and politics of the PDR and USSR). The author argues that this obliteration was partly due to the Soviet ideological control over historical memory and contained an attempt to overcome the historical animosities for the sake of building the socialist solidarity in the Eastern Bloc. Another reason for obliteration was the expected therapeutic effort of forgetting on the side of new Polish and Ukrainian leadership. The author’s overview suggests that the return of nationally framed signification of the past during Perestroika and the post-Soviet period posed questions about the Volyn’ tragedy and brought about a larger issue of tackling the “unusable” past.