Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. Группа авторов

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illustrate that commemoration and discussions of the events of World War II in Ukraine can often not help but to, in one way or another, include and touch upon certain aspects of the history of the OUN and UPA. This recurring circumstance is one of the reasons why we are continuing the present series of special sections dedicated to the history and memory of the OUN and UPA.

      Remembering the OUN-UPA’s Fight Against the Soviet Regime

      The present section contains three research papers that deal with the history and memory of the OUN-UPA from different perspectives, yet touch upon similar substantive issues. The first article focuses on the last months of World War II while the two following studies deal with contemporary representations of the organization’s war-time and post-war history. They are all concerned with the course and remembrance of the OUN-UPA’s armed, self-sacrificing resistance to Stalinist rule.

      Grzegorz Motyka’s paper “NKVD Internal Troops Operations against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1944–45” highlights the brutal Soviet repression of the UPA in the final period of World War II. His article contributes to the growing research on Soviet operations against disobedient civil populations as well as underground movements such as the OUN-UPA. Motyka describes in detail the Soviet anti-nationalist operations within which the OUN and UPA were suppressed by the armed forces of the USSR’s People Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Russ. abbrev: NKVD). The author illustrates why and how these “pacifications” were especially cruel and far-reaching. The NKVD’s repressions were directed not only against the members of the underground movement themselves, but also against parts of the civilian population that supported or were suspected of supporting the anti-Soviet resistance movement. About four hundred thousand residents of Western Ukraine were, in one way or another, affected by Soviet state-terror.

      On the basis of an analysis of history textbooks and curricula, she concludes that textbooks often offer “mono-perspectival” and politicized narratives when discussing controversial issues and conflicts. From this, Myshlovska concludes that these representations often structurally circumscribe the possibilities for conflict transformation and reconciliation. Nevertheless, focus group discussions conducted with schoolteachers in different regions of Ukraine in 2011 and 2012 revealed that teachers do sometimes take on a conflict mitigating role, by way of presenting various perspectives on disputed issues and inviting discussions, within the classroom, of wrongdoing by all conflicting parties in past conflicts.

      These results may be in need of further interpretation as they point towards a variety of potential determinants of the UNIP’s publications policies. One hypothesis emerging from Luschnat-Ziegler’s study could be that, as hagiographic interpretations of the OUN-UPA were becoming increasingly mainstream in Ukraine’s mass media since 2014, the perceived need for propagating them further via publications in the governmental UINP declined. As a result, the topic moved from a potentially high position on the UINP’s agenda under its then director V’iatrovych to only fifth place, among the topics identified by Luschnat-Ziegler.

      The fifth installment of this series is currently scheduled to be published by JSPPS, in autumn 2021. Proposals for further sections “Issues in the History and Memory of the OUN” are welcome. These should take the form of a set of abstracts and notes on contributors, and can be emailed to the journal’s General Editor (details at www.jspps.eu).

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