Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Contents

SPECIAL SECTION: ISSUES IN THE HISTORY AND MEMORY OF THE OUN IV

Introduction Studies in the Course and Commemoration of the OUN’s Anti-Soviet Resistance*

NKVD Internal Troops Operations against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1944–45

History Education and Reconciliation: The Ukrainian Nationalist Underground Movement in Secondary School Curricula, Textbooks, and Classroom Practices (1991–2012)

Observing Trends in Ukrainian Memory Politics (2014–2019) through Structural Topic Modeling

SPECIAL SECTION: A DEBATE ON “USTASHISM,” GENERIC FASCISM, AND THE OUN I

Introduction Discussing Ukrainian Historical Ultra-Nationalism in Comparative Perspective*

On Ustashism and Fascism: A Response to Critics

Fascism, Ustashism, and the Ecumenical Application of Ideal Types

A New Turn: On the Need for a Transnational Interpretation of the Ustaša and OUN

Accommodating “Stateless Nations” in the Conceptualization of Fascism

Gravity of Void: Remarks on the Structural Consistency and Empirical Validity of the Notion of “Ustashism”

“Saving the OUN from a Collaborationist and Possibly Fascist Fate:” On the Genealogy of the Discourse on the OUN’s “Non-Fascism”

Reviews

Thane Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe. Harvard University Press, 2020.

Maria A. Rogacheva, Soviet Scientists Remember: Oral Histories of the Cold War Generation. Lexington Books, 2020.

Zuzanna Bogumił, Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past. Trans. from the Polish by Philip Palmer. Berghahn Books, 2018.

Bettina Renz, Russia’s Military Revival. Polity, 2018.

Marlene Laruelle (ed.), The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan. Lexington Books, 2019.

Beth A. Fischer, The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan’s Cold War Legacy. University Press of Kentucky, 2020.

Victoria Donovan, Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia. Northern Illinois University Press, 2019.

Brandon M. Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects. Cornell University Press, 2019.

Andrew Monaghan, Dealing with the Russians. Polity, 2019.

About the Guest Editors

SPECIAL SECTION:

ISSUES IN THE HISTORY AND MEMORY OF THE OUN IV

GUEST EDITED BY

YULIYA YURCHUK AND ANDREAS UMLAND

Introduction

Studies in the Course and Commemoration of the OUN’s Anti-Soviet Resistance*

Yuliya Yurchuk and Andreas Umland

This is the fourth installment in a series of thematic JSPPS sections of research papers on the memory and history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) as well as the OUN Bandera-wing’s military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukr. abbrev.: UPA).1 Within this series, historians and social scientists detail findings from their research on interwar and war-time Ukrainian radical nationalism as well as its contemporary public and scholarly interpretations and representations—not least, against the background of the Russian–Ukrainian war since 2014, and its related propaganda campaigns.2 The third 2020 special section, for instance, dealt with the OUN’s and UPA’s complicated relationship to German Nazism, the participation of OUN members in the Holocaust, and the issue of whether certain East European ultra-nationalist movements like the OUN or the Ustaša should be classified as fascist.3

Debating Ukrainian Nationalism’s World War II Record

These and other recent peer-reviewed papers have provided the background for the start of a separate series of—at least, two—JSPPS special sections under the title “A Debate on ‘Ustashism,’ Generic Fascism, and the OUN,” the first installment of which is printed in this issue.4 This discussion complements our earlier research articles—including the present ones—on the OUN, yet markedly departs from traditional collected editions. The ustashism debate in JSPPS, to be sure, also refers to a plethora of empirical details and contains some relevant quotes, as ordinary academic papers and the present series of special sections do.

Yet, the ustashism debate consists of uniformly non-reviewed and largely disputational commentaries rather than research articles proper. Within the series “A Debate on ‘Ustashism’, Generic Fascism, and the OUN,” a variety of scholars in the fields of comparative fascism, East European right-wing extremism, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalism discuss a 2015 seminal paper by Oleksandr Zaitsev (Ukrainian Catholic University at L’viv) on the OUN’s “ustashism,” in the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies.5 A first response to Zaitsev’s paper was published in 2020 in JSPPS in the form of a research paper by two specialists on the Ustaša, Tomislav Dulić and Goran Miljan (Uppsala University), who focused on the relationship between fascism and abolitionism.6 For the “Debate on ‘Ustashism’, Generic Fascism and the OUN,” we have asked a number of experts on the East European far right, historical Ukrainian nationalism, and comparative fascism to voice their opinion on the different approaches to the OUN by Zaitsev, and Dulić/Miljan.

In our 2017, 2018, and 2020 introductions to the first three sections “Issues in the History and Memory of the OUN,” freely accessible on the JSPPS website, we reflected upon topical events in Ukraine at that time, as well as on ongoing memory production and historical debates related to historical Ukrainian radical nationalism. We briefly chronicled and contextualized Ukraine’s peculiarly evolving Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) before and after the Euromaidan.7 In our last introduction of early 2020, we noted that the election of Volodymyr Zelens’kyi as President of Ukraine and the departure of the incumbent Petro Poroshenko, contrary to some observers’ expectations, had not resulted in an about-face when it came to governmental Ukrainian memory approaches with regard to the OUN. In early 2021, this statement still holds.

The new director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINP) attached to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Anton Drobovych, appointed in December 2019, changed the vector of the Institute’s work only moderately. Under Drobovych’s leadership, the UINP’s main activities have entailed a stronger focus on promotion of some relatively new themes in government-supported national memory like, for instance, such historic figures as the legendary football player and coach Valeriy Lobanovs’kyy (1939–2002), or the world-famous avant-garde artist and art theorist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935). By early 2021, the policies of the Remembrance Institute’s new leadership since 2019 have not produced any debates comparable to the heated discussions prompted by the 2014–2019 UINP head Volodymyr V’iatrovych’s advocacy for a hagiographic OUN commemoration.8

The 2020 Babyn Yar Memorial Debate

Despite relative continuity in Ukraine’s official history policies after the election of Zelens’kyy as President of Ukraine, and in spite of only limited public interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 was, however, no less turbulent than preceding years when it came to Ukrainian memory affairs. The most heated public controversies during 2020 were no longer related to the history and memory of the OUN, but instead to one of the most tragic pages in the history of Ukraine’s capital. A major Ukrainian public discussion evolved in 2020 around the question of how to memorialize the September 1941 Nazi mass killing of most of Kyiv’s Jewish population in the ravine of Babyn Yar (literally: Old Woman’s Gully) which was then located near, but has now become a part of, the city. Over the entire period of Kyiv’s occupation by the Nazis during 1941–43, about 100,000 people were killed and/or buried at Babyn Yar.9

In spring 2020, a public dispute started when Ivan Kozlenko, a Ukrainian film-director and, at that time, head of Kyiv’s reputed Dovzhenko Cinema Art Center, published an op-ed on the planned project for a Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC). Kozlenko criticized the BYHMC’s new art director, the Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who had been appointed to this post in December 2019.10 In Kozlenko’s opinion, Khrzhanovsky’s plans for the future BYHMC entailed the application of unethical artistic methods to the public memorialization of the Nazis’ mass killings at Babyn Yar.11

Also in April 2020, the BYHMC planning committee’s main consulting historian since 2017, the Dutch Holocaust and Eastern Europe expert Karel Berkhoff, demonstratively left the project.12 Berkhoff too accused the new leadership of the BYHMC of inappropriate approaches to the memory of the tragedy at Babyn Yar.13 In the following months, a major public debate involving many Ukrainian public figures and prominent writers took off. Two open collective letters signed by hundreds of intellectuals from Ukraine and abroad were published. The signatories demanded that the BYHMC project be cancelled on the grounds that, in their opinion, it violated basic ethical norms that should govern the work of a museum devoted to a genocidal mass murder like that at Babyn Yar.14

Khrzhanovsky’s controversial project for the BYHMC was partly inspired by the famous Stanford prison and Milgram shock experiments. His main concept was to immerse the memorial’s visitors into the “real life” of Kyiv in 1941 when the city was occupied by German troops, and the mass extermination of Jewish population of Kyiv took place. Before entering the memorial and beginning this interactive experience, each visitor would, moreover, have to undergo a psychological test for the purposes of being assigned a role as a member of one of three groups: perpetrators, witnesses, or victims.

By early 2021, when we wrote this introduction, the controversy had not yet been resolved. As a result of the 2020 debates, there had emerged a situation in which two projects were competing at the memorial space at Babyn Yar: the “National Historical Memorial Preserve Babyn Yar,” commissioned by the Ukrainian government and developed by the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; and the above BYHMC project, a private initiative funded by three oligarchs of Ukrainian-Jewish origin, all of whom are residents of the Russian Federation—a factor which further fueled the controversy.

The Babyn Yar memorial controversy, to be sure, is not entirely unique. It should be positioned within the broader context of world-wide debates about the limits and ethics of adequate representation of tragic historic events. In the present Ukrainian situation, the discussion of the idea of dignity in memory politics became even more relevant and urgent through the Euromaidan protests, also called “the Revolution of Dignity.”15 Khrzhanovsky is trying to show, with his methods, that every human being can be stripped of her or his dignity—an aim of his project that he has repeatedly described in interviews. His opponents instead speak about the need to protect human dignity. The new director of the UINP, Anton Drobovych, who had worked with the previous team of the BYHMC project until 2019, i.e., before the arrival of Khrzhanovsky, also mentions dignity as a main theme in his critique of the new BYHMC team’s project.16

The history and memory of Babyn Yar as a major site of the Holocaust is, in a number of ways, also connected to the history and memory of the OUN and UPA. Above all, recent studies have confirmed earlier allegations concerning Ukrainian ultra-nationalist collaboration with the Nazis that included certain Ukrainians’ participation in the extermination of Ukraine’s Jews.17 A number of scholarly papers and books published in recent years have detailed and/or summarized partly already known and partly only recently documented episodes in which OUN members and subunits participated in the Holocaust.18

At the same time, a whole number of Ukrainian nationalists were killed by the Nazis and some were buried in the Babyn Yar ravine, together with other victims of German mass murder. Among the twenty-five monuments and memorial signs currently located at Babyn Yar, there is thus also a monumental cross in memory of 621 members of the OUN killed by the Nazis and buried in the ravine as well as a separate monument to Olena Teliha, a poet and OUN leader killed by the Nazis and buried in Babyn Yar in 1942. These instances 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).

2 Per Anders Rudling, “Yushchenko’s Fascist: The Bandera Cult in Ukraine and Canada,” Yaroslav Hrytsak, “Ukrainian Memory Culture Post-1991: The Case of Stepan Bandera,” Yuliya Yurchuk, “Rivne’s Memory of Taras Bul’ba-Borovets’: A Regional Perspective on the Formation of the Founding Myth of the UPA,” and Łukasz Adamski, “Kyiv’s ‘Volhynian Negationism’: Reflections on the 2016 Polish–Ukrainian Memory Conflict,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 129–290; Ivan Gomza, “Catalytic Mobilization of Radical Ukrainian Nationalists in the Second Polish Republic: The Impact of Political Opportunity Structure,” Igor Barinov, “Allies or Collaborators? The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Nazi Germany during the Occupation of Ukraine in 1941–43,” Myroslav Shkandrij, “Volodymyr Viatrovych’s Second Polish–Ukrainian War,” and John-Paul Himka, “Correspondence,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 4, no. 2 (2018): 35–132.

3 Kai Struve, “The OUN(b), the Germans, and Anti-Jewish Violence in Eastern Galicia during Summer 1941,” Yuri Radchenko, “The Biography of the OUN(m) Activist Oleksa Babii in the Light of His ‘Memoirs on Escaping Execution’ (1942),” Tomislav Dulić and Goran Miljan, “The Ustašas and Fascism: ‘Abolitionism,’ Revolution, and Ideology (1929–42),” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 6, no. 1 (2020): 205–306.

4 Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 7, nos. 1 & 2 (2021).

5 Oleksandr Zaitsev, “Fascism or Ustashism? Ukrainian Integral Nationalism of the 1920s–1930s in Comparative Perspective,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 48, nos. 2–3 (2015): 183–93. See also, more recently: idem, “Integral Nationalism in the Absence of a Nation-State: The Case of Ukraine,” in Marco Bresciani (ed.), Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe (Routledge, 202o), 118–42.

6 Dulić and Miljan, “The Ustašas and Fascism.”

7 Andreas Umland and Yuliya Yurchuk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Memory Politics, Public Debates, and Foreign Affairs,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 115–28, spps-jspps.autorenbetreuung.de/files/umland_yurchuk_3_2.pdf (accessed 16 April 2018); idem, “Essays in the Historical Interpretation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 4, no. 2 (2018): 29–34, spps-jspps.autorenbetreuung.de/files/yurchuk_umland_jspps_4.2_2.pdf (accessed 26 January 2020); and idem, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and European Fascism During World War II,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 6, no. 1 (2020): 181–204, spps-jspps.autorenbetreuung.de/files/06-01-jspps-intro_02.pdf (accessed 26 January 2020).

8 Ibid. On V’iatrovych, see in JSPPS: Shkandrij, “Volodymyr Viatrovych’s Second Polish–Ukrainian War.” For a Polish reaction to a provocative Facebook post by V’iatrovych, see, for example: Krzysztof Janiga, “Duda obok zbrodniarza z UPA na fotomontażu szefa ukraińskiego IPN,” Kresy.pl, 3 July 2017, kresy.pl/wydarzenia/spoleczenstwo/duda-obok-zbrodniarza-upa-fotomontazu-szefa-ukrainskiego-ipn/. See also: Christopher Gilley and Per Anders Rudling, “The History Wars in Ukraine Are Heating Up,” History New Network, 9 May 2015, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159301 (accessed 10 February 2020); Andreas Umland, “Sylvester Stallone as a Boxer,” Historians.in.ua, 24 May 2015, http://www.historians.in.ua/index.php/en/avtorska-kolonka/1520-andreas-umland-sylvester-stallone-as-a-boxer-a-comment-on-the-infamous-ukrainian-decommunization-laws-and-professional-expertise-in-ukrainian-public-affairs%20 (accessed 10 February 2020); Jared McBride, “How Ukraine’s New Memory Commissar Is Controlling the Nation’s Past,” The Nation, 13 August 2015, www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-ukraines-new-memory-commissar-is-controlling-the-nations-past/ (accessed 10 February 2020); Josh Cohen, “The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past,” Foreign Policy, 2 May 2016, foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/02/the-historian-whitewashing-ukraines-past-volodymyr-viatrovych/ (accessed 10 February 2020); Tarik Cyril Amar, “The Radical Historian Rewriting Ukraine’s Past,” WYNC Studios, 20 May 2016, www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/radical-historian-rewriting-ukraines-past (accessed 10 February 2020); Per Rudling, Jared McBride, and Tarik Amar, “Ukraine’s Struggle with the Past Is Ours Too,” Open Democracy, 15 June 2016, www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-s-struggle-with-past-is-ours-too/ (accessed 10 February 2020); Andreas Umland, “Bad History Doesn’t Make Friends,” Foreign Policy, 25 October 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/25/bad-history-doesnt-make-friends-kiev-ukraine-stepan-bandera/ (accessed 10 February 2020); “Historians Sign Petition Objecting to the Inclusion of a Nationalist Who Praised a Nazi Collaborator,” History News Network, 8 March 2017, historynewsnetwork.org/article/165383 (accessed 17 February 2021); and David R. Marples, “Memory Laws: Censorship in Ukraine,” E-International Relations, 5 July 2020, www.e-ir.info/2020/07/05/memory-laws-censorship-in-ukraine/ (accessed 17 February 2021).

9 Vladyslav Hrynevych and Paul-Robert Magosci (eds.), Babyn Iar: Istoriia i pamiat’ (Dukh i Litera, 2016).

10 “Memorial’nyi tsentr Babiy Iar izmenil nabliudatel’nyi sovet i komandu proekta,” Levyi Bereg, 5 December 2019, https://lb.ua/culture/2019/12/05/443987_memorialniy_tsentr_babiy_yar.html (accessed 17 February 2021).

11 Ivan Kozlenko, “Totalitarnyi dovhobud, Ch. 1,” Levyi Bereg, 14 April 2020, https://lb.ua/culture/2020/04/14/455215_totalitarniy_dovgobud_shcho_z.html (accessed 24 June 2020). This article was followed by further op-eds.

12 See, for instance: Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Belknap Press, 2008).

13 Karel Berkhoff, “Z etychnykh mirkuvan’ bil’she ne mozhu publichno pidtrumuvaty proekt Memorialu ‘Babyn Iar’”, Glavkom, 22 April 2020, https://glavcom.ua/columns/KarelBerkhoff/gollandskiy-istorik-karel-berkgof-z-etichnih-mirkuvan-bilshe-ne-mozhu-publichno-pidtrimuvati-proekt-memorialu-babin-yar-675364.html (accessed 17 February 2021).

14 The first open letter criticized the BYHMC project and its proposed methods of memorialization: “Khrzhanovs’kyi ne povynen pratsiuvaty v Babynomu Iaru: Zaiava,” Istorychna pravda, 30 April 2020, https://www.istpravda.com.ua/short/2020/04/30/157419/ (accessed 7 May 2020). The second letter was addressed to the President and Prime Minister of Ukraine demanding a transfer of authority over the memorialization of Babyn Yar to official state organs: “The Ukrainian Cultural and Academic Community’s Appeal about the Commemoration of Babyn Yar,” Krytyka, 22 May 2020, https://krytyka.com/en/articles/ukrainian-cultural-and-academic-communitys-appeal-about-commemoration-babyn-yar (accessed 20 June 2020).

15 More on the concept of dignity in relation to the Euromaidan, in: Mychailo Wynnyckij, Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity (ibidem-Verlag, 2019).

16 “Holava Instytutu Natspamiati Drobovych,” Hromadske, 8 May 2020, https://hromadske.ua/posts/glava-institutu-nacpamyati-drobovich-pid-shorsom-yak-variant-zrobiti-naduvnih-pokemoniv-abo-skulpturu-yaka-jogo-obnimaye (accessed 17 February 2021). See also: “Eksperymenty rosiianyna Khrzhanovs’koho peretvoriat’ ‘Babyn Iar’ na atraktsion dlia ‘frikiv’: Drobovych,” 4 kanal, 30 April 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFKNPhs_ZiU (accessed 17 February 2021); Oksana Denisova, “Holova INP Anton Drobovych: ‘Babyn Iar buv do Khrzhanovs’koho, Babyn Iar bude i pislia n’oho,” Suspil’ne, 4 May 2020, https://suspilne.media/31091-golova-inp-anton-drobovic-babin-ar-buv-do-hrzanovskogo-babin-ar-bude-j-pisla-nogo/ (accessed 17 February 2021).

17 In chronological order, until 2016: John A. Armstrong, “Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (1968): 396–410; Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 34, no. 2 (2004): 95–118; Frank Golczewski, “Die Kollaboration in der Ukraine,” in Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der “Kollaboration” im östlichen Europa 1939–1945, eds. Christoph Dieckmann et al. (Wallstein, 2003), 151–83; Vladimir Melamed, “Organized and Unsolicited Collaboration in the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 37, no. 2 (2007): 217–48; Wendy Lower, “Pogroms, Mob Violence and Genocide in Western Ukraine, Summer 1941: Varied Histories, Explanations and Comparisons,” Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 3 (2011): 217–46; Kai Struve, “Rites of Violence? The Pogroms of Summer 1941,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 24 (2011): 257–74; Per Anders Rudling, “Terror and Local Collaboration in Occupied Belarus: The Case of Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118,” Romanian Academy “Nicolae Iorga” History Institute Historical Yearbook 13 & 14 (2011 & 2012): 195–214 & 99–121; Kai Struve, “Tremors in the Shatter-Zone of Empires: Eastern Galicia in Summer 1941,” in Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires, eds. Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz (Indiana University Press 2013), 463–84; Frank Grelka, “Politics and Military Actions of Ethnic-Ukrainian Collaboration for the ‘New European Order’,” in Revisionist Politics in Europe, 1938–1945, eds. Marina Cattaruzza and Dieter Langewiesche (Berghahn, 2013), 126–41; Yuri Radchenko, “‘We fired all cartridges at them’: Ukrainische Hilfspolizei and the Holocaust on the Territory of the Generalbezirk Kharkiv, 1941–1943,” Yad Vashem Studies 41, no. 1 (2013): 63–98; Kai Struve, Deutsche Herrschaft, ukrainischer Nationalismus, antijüdische Gewalt: Der Sommer 1941 in der Westukraine (DeGruyter-Oldenbourg, 2015); Olesya Khromeychuk, “Ukrainians in the German Armed Forces During the Second World War,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 100, no. 343 (2016): 704–24; Kai Struve, “Anti-Jewish Violence in Summer 1941 in Eastern Galicia and Beyond,” in Romania and the Holocaust: New Research – Public Discourse – Remembrance, ed. Simon Geissbühler (ibidem-Verlag, 2016), 89–113; Raz Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016); Per Anders Rudling, “Dispersing the Fog: The OUN and Anti-Jewish Violence in 1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 44, no. 2 (2016): 227–45; Jared McBride, “Who Is Afraid of Ukrainian Nationalism?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17, no. 3 (2016): 647–63. There is a separate and, by now, large body of scholarly literature devoted specifically to the L’viv pogroms of summer 1941 which is not listed here.