"Terror Remembered, Terror Forgotten: Stalinist, Nazi, and Nationalist Atrocities in Ukrainian 'National Memory"

Jarosław Suchoples, Stephanie James, and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (eds.), World War II Re-explored: Some New Millennium Studies in the History of the Global Conflict (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), 2019


Per Anders Rudling

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ukraine experienced political violence on an unprecedented scale. Political violence by the Soviet government and the German occupation authorities resulted in the death of millions, through starvation, deportations, and massacres, and left wounds which still have not fully healed. Independently of the Soviets and the Nazis, mass political violence was carried out also by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) whose ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews left up to one hundred thousand dead, a legacy which could not be openly discussed or researched, neither in the Ukrainian SSR, nor in communist Poland. The Soviet Ukrainian historiography reduced the Ukrainian Nationalists to hangmen and collaborators with Nazi Germany, whereas emigre nationalists constructed an elaborate cult of these groups as heroes and martyrs. This instrumentalization of the recent past produced mutually exclusive narratives. Following the two Maidan revolutions in 2004 and 2013/2014, there have been ambitious attempts by the Ukrainian government to produce a new historical canon, in which the most radical wing of the OUN figures prominently. This narration requires some topics to be avoided altogether, whereas others are treated in a highly selective fashion. Official memory policy has triggered stormy discussions about the recent past, reflecting deep divisions in a post-Soviet Ukrainian society which has only begun the process to come to terms with a difficult past.

Page Numbers: 401-428
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Jarosław Suchoples, Stephanie James, and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (eds.), World War II Re-explored: Some New Millennium Studies in the History of the Global Conflict (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019)
https://www.academia.edu/39247124/_Terror_Remembered_Terror_Forgotten_Stalinist_Nazi_and_Nationalist_Atrocities_in_Ukrainian_National_Memory_


"Eugenics and racial anthropology in the Ukrainian radical nationalist tradition," Science in Context 32: 1 (2019): 67-91

Science in Context, 2019


Per Anders Rudling

Eugenics and race played significant roles in Ukrainian interwar nationalism, yet remain largely unstudied. The Ukrainian nationalists’ understanding of the racial makeup of their imagined community was contradictory as they struggled to reconcile their desire for racial “purity” with the realities of significant variations between the populations inhabiting the enormous territories which they sought to include in their intended state project. The “turn to the right” over the 1930s placed an increased onus on race, and eugenics came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in Ukrainian radical nationalism from around 1936. In 1941, the leading Ukrainian far-right organization, the OUN had developed a project for eugenic engineering, for their aborted state, declared in L’viv on June 30, 1941. Racial conceptualiza- tions of the Ukrainian community figured prominently well into the Cold War era, gaining a new actuality and meaning in an émigré community dispersed across several countries.
Doi: 10.1017/S0269889719000048
Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: Science in Context
https://www.academia.edu/39273178/_Eugenics_and_racial_anthropology_in_the_Ukrainian_radical_nationalist_tradition_Science_in_Context_32_1_2019_67-91