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.
Through in-depth analysis of newly declassified documents, Motyka shows that the NKVD followed, among others, the principle of collective responsibility, as a result of which many—even in Soviet terms—innocent individuals were killed or otherwise persecuted by virtue of their belonging to a particular community or family. The author demonstrates that the OUN and UPA enjoyed broad support among the local Ukrainian population which helped the underground groups to continue their fighting until the mid-1950s. Many families’ oral and written memory of Soviet-inflicted mass violence and repression against the underground fighters, their relatives, and local supporters is an important determinant of today’s cult around the UPA and its leaders, in Western Ukraine.19
Oksana Myshlovska’s paper “History Education and Reconciliation: The Ukrainian National Underground Movement in Secondary School Curricula, Textbooks, and Classroom Practices (1991–2012)” deals with the representation of controversial issues related to the OUN and UPA in secondary school curricula and textbooks, and teachers’ responses to these, during the first two decades of Ukraine’s independence. Guided by theoretical insights into the role of representations of the past in conflict transformation and reconciliation, she explores the depiction of the conflict between the nationalist organizations and Soviet regime, and discusses the role of history teachers as mediators of the changing official curricula and textbooks. Myshlovska thereby contributes to the emerging subfield of history education studies regarding Ukraine’s nationalist underground movement.20
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.
The section ends with Marian Luschnat-Ziegler’s paper “Observing Trends in Ukrainian Memory Politics (2014–2019) through Structural Topic Modeling” where he analyzes online-publications produced by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (Ukr. abbr.: UINP) during Petro Poroshenko’s presidency, and Volodymyr V’iatrovych’s directorship of the UINP. Applying a sophisticated mathematical model to his data, Luschnat-Ziegler identifies key topics, trends, and connections in the narratives produced by the UINP. The author finds that web publications concerning the OUN and UPA comprised an altogether relatively low proportion of the output of the UINP in comparison to publications about other topics.21 Most of the UINP’s publications concerned the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity. The next three ranks in Luschnat-Ziegler’s table of topics were occupied by the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–21, the Holodomor of 1932–33, and the Second World War of 1939–45. The OUN-UPA was ranked fifth in the topics highlighted in UINP online publications of 2014–2019.
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 author also highlights the role of anniversaries in the formation of certain trends in memory discourse—an observation made by other researchers of national remembrance.22 Thus, the proportion of publications about the revolution of 1917–21 has grown since 2017. The topic of the Holodomor peaked yearly in November around the national Day of Repressions and Holodomor. Luschnat-Ziegler demonstrates how probabilistic topic modelling can be a valuable tool for researchers in the field of memory studies, enabling new insights to be derived from the rich quantitative material now available and intriguing hypotheses to be interpreted in view of the wider political and societal situation in which this or that historical topic rises and falls.
The articles in this and our three previous special sections highlight not only certain differences between the history and memory of the OUN and UPA.23 They also indicate changes in the ways these organizations have been remembered by Ukrainian society since independence in 1991. In spite of otherwise significant transformations, the topic of the OUN and UPA has, over the last thirty years, remained a uniformly contentious issue triggering not only heated scholarly discussions, but also larger public debates. Moreover, against the background of the Russian-Ukrainian war since 2014, a process of “securitization” of national memory underway in Ukraine, whereby historical discourses become matters of national security, and within which the topic of the OUN and UPA occupies a central position.24
1 * We are very grateful to Julie Fedor for her extremely careful and patient final editing of the contributions to this special section including this introduction. Per Anders Rudling, Łukasz Adamski, Yuriy Radchenko, and Gelinada Grinchenko too are acknowledged for their valuable help in preparing this section.
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).
