Images of the gypsies in the collection of the Museum of Art in Cluj
/ Imagini ale țiganilor în colecția Muzeului de Artă din Cluj
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Perspective Politice
Abstract
This article is about the voluntary or involuntary contribution of the Roma through the history to the economical and social development in the Romanian space. Over the centuries, Roma have suffered social exclusion, discrimination, slavery and deportations to Nazi and Romanian concentration camps. What is less documented is that they have managed to survive over the centuries as an ethnic group, even becoming privileged in certain fields. The Roma attained a high level of privilege as handicraftsmen in an agrarian cultural space, as army tools providers, as famous musicians and appreciated entertainers; they gained recognition as of being from a different culture and speaking another language. Therefore, this article is part of a series of analyses of Roma contribution to economic and social development of the societies that they live in, focusing on Romania – home of the largest population of Roma in Europe . I have decided to start with Roma slavery for two reasons: first of all, Roma were first mentioned in Romanian history as slaves and second, the role and economic contribution of the slaves in the Romanian Principalities are highly relevant for the current situation of the Romanian Roma. This article makes use of the available literature on slavery of Roma ethnic groups in the Romanian Principalities as well as other materials related to Roma history, including anthropological and sociological research.
Keywords: cost, Roma, romanian principalities, slavery.
The abolition of State Slavery in Wallachia:
unknown laws and miss-interpreted events
The need to study the abolition of Wallachia`s State Slaves can be expressed by simply looking at the dates when different historians or sources placed this event: 1831, 1837, 1838, 1843, 1847. This event is unique in Romanian historiography due to the shallow and imprecise knowledge projected upon it, while lacking any debate over each one of these dates. One can only look at the different moments that historians presented over time and assume the existence of a certain fault in either perceiving the event or in elaborating or applying the law itself. We attempt to shed light on the matter and identify the law that would be rightfully considered the abolition law. This alone should provide an interesting inquiry into how institutions and laws worked (or failed to work) at that time. Secondly, since the event we`re analyzing is the abolition of slavery, it is easy to understand the great potential it had to influence individual and family life of the individuals in question. Our second objective was to focus on and to document this particular impact in order to provide an image of how in this context individuals were affected by institutional failures.
Dimensions of Antigypsyism in Europe (2019)
History of Antigypsyism in Europe: The Social Causes
https://www.academia.edu/39936154/_2019_Dimensions_of_Antigypsyism_in_Europe
European Network against Racism & Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma
European Network against Racism & Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma
Markus End
More Info: part of the anthology "New Faces of Antigypsyism in Modern Europe", edited by Hristo Kyuchukov
Publication Date: 2012
More Info: part of the anthology "New Faces of Antigypsyism in Modern Europe", edited by Hristo Kyuchukov
Publication Date: 2012
Roma also Fought: The History of Romani Participation in the Anti-Fascist Movement in Croatia during World War II.
Roma Rights Journal of the European Roma Rights Centre, 1 (2017), pp. 9 – 16.
https://www.academia.edu/33081648/Roma_also_Fought_The_History_of_Romani_Participation_in_the_Anti-Fascist_Movement_in_Croatia_during_World_War_II._Roma_Rights_Journal_of_the_European_Roma_Rights_Centre_1_2017_pp._9_16
Danijel Vojak
The Roma settled in Croatia in the second half of the 14th century and are one of the oldest minority groups in Croatia today.1 Their history in Croatia was for the most part marked by periods of unsuccessful assimilation – attempts made by state and local authorities that were often accompanied by antiziganist violence. The violent, repressive pressure exerted by Croatian authorities against the Roma reached its peak during World War II, when the pro-fascist Ustaša government committed genocide against them. Most of the pre-war Roma population was destroyed, but a small part of it managed to survive the war. Historiographical research on the suffering of Roma in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska – NDH) is still in its infancy and many of its aspects therefore remain almost completely unknown. One of these aspects concerns research on the active armed resistance of Roma towards the pro-fascist Ustaša authorities. The author intends to show that the Roma participated in the Croatian anti-fascist resistance movement and to present a comparison to similar examples of resistance in several other European countries. The research is based on archival and museum research in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia as well as an analysis of relevant periodicals and literature.
Roma and Conflict: Understanding the Impact of War and Political Violence -
https://www.academia.edu/33208065/Roma_and_Conflict_Understanding_the_Impact_of_War_and_Political_Violence_-_Roma_Rights_Journal_1_2017
Roma Rights Journal 1/2017
Marek Szilvási
This issue of Roma Rights Journal examines the impact of conflict on Romani populations in modern Europe. As marginalised populations subjected to both random and very specific cruelties, Roma were viewed by warring parties with a mixture of ambivalence and contempt, and deemed to be communities of little consequence. As a consequence, Roma were also excluded from the peace-building processes that followed the conclusion of hostilities. In addition to situations where Roma were the direct targets of murderous aggression, or written off as collateral damage " caught between two fires " , articles in this issue also examine incidents where Roma actively took a side, and refute notions of Roma and Travellers as being " a people without politics. " The contributions in this issue address long-standing lacunae, for as long as Europe's largest ethnic minority is rendered invisible and written out of the histories of Europe's wars and conflicts; and excluded from the politics of reconstruction and peace-making, the continent's self-understanding will remain fatally flawed.
Roma Rights Journal of the European Roma Rights Centre, 1 (2017), pp. 9 – 16.
https://www.academia.edu/33081648/Roma_also_Fought_The_History_of_Romani_Participation_in_the_Anti-Fascist_Movement_in_Croatia_during_World_War_II._Roma_Rights_Journal_of_the_European_Roma_Rights_Centre_1_2017_pp._9_16
Danijel Vojak
The Roma settled in Croatia in the second half of the 14th century and are one of the oldest minority groups in Croatia today.1 Their history in Croatia was for the most part marked by periods of unsuccessful assimilation – attempts made by state and local authorities that were often accompanied by antiziganist violence. The violent, repressive pressure exerted by Croatian authorities against the Roma reached its peak during World War II, when the pro-fascist Ustaša government committed genocide against them. Most of the pre-war Roma population was destroyed, but a small part of it managed to survive the war. Historiographical research on the suffering of Roma in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska – NDH) is still in its infancy and many of its aspects therefore remain almost completely unknown. One of these aspects concerns research on the active armed resistance of Roma towards the pro-fascist Ustaša authorities. The author intends to show that the Roma participated in the Croatian anti-fascist resistance movement and to present a comparison to similar examples of resistance in several other European countries. The research is based on archival and museum research in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia as well as an analysis of relevant periodicals and literature.
Roma and Conflict: Understanding the Impact of War and Political Violence -
https://www.academia.edu/33208065/Roma_and_Conflict_Understanding_the_Impact_of_War_and_Political_Violence_-_Roma_Rights_Journal_1_2017
Roma Rights Journal 1/2017
Marek Szilvási
This issue of Roma Rights Journal examines the impact of conflict on Romani populations in modern Europe. As marginalised populations subjected to both random and very specific cruelties, Roma were viewed by warring parties with a mixture of ambivalence and contempt, and deemed to be communities of little consequence. As a consequence, Roma were also excluded from the peace-building processes that followed the conclusion of hostilities. In addition to situations where Roma were the direct targets of murderous aggression, or written off as collateral damage " caught between two fires " , articles in this issue also examine incidents where Roma actively took a side, and refute notions of Roma and Travellers as being " a people without politics. " The contributions in this issue address long-standing lacunae, for as long as Europe's largest ethnic minority is rendered invisible and written out of the histories of Europe's wars and conflicts; and excluded from the politics of reconstruction and peace-making, the continent's self-understanding will remain fatally flawed.
Lovro Kralj. "Paving the Road to Death: Antisemitism in the Ustasha Movement (1929-1945)" (project summary)
Right-Wing Politics and the Rise of Antisemitism in Europe 1935-1941, 2019
Summary of a dissertation project titled "Paving the Road to Death: Antisemitism in the Ustasha Movement 1929-1945." published in Frank Bajohr, Dieter Pohl, eds. Right-Wing Politics and the Rise of Antisemitism in Europe 1935-1941 (Wallstein Verlag, 2019): 233-239.
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Right-Wing Politics and the Rise of Antisemitism in Europe 1935-1941
Historiography of the Ustasha Movement: Review Max Bergholz and Ivo,Slavko Goldstein.pdf
2017 Lovro Kralj
This essay reviews recent developments in the historiography of the Ustasha movement through the prism of two recently published studies: Bergholz, Max: Violence as a Generative Force. Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community. Ithaka: Cornell University Press 2016. ISBN: 978-1-5017-0492-5; 464 p. and Goldstein, Ivo; Goldstein, Slavko: The Holocaust in Croatia. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts- burgh Press 2016. ISBN: 9780822944515; VII, 728 p.
Page Numbers: 6
Publication Date: 2017
Understanding Ustasha violence
ALEXANDER KORB
The Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945) was a multi-ethnic entity in which a range of political and military powers cooperated with and fought against one another. No lesscomplicated were the ruling Ustasˇa movement and its relationship with Nazi Germany andFascist Italy. The persecution of the Serbs, the Jews, and the Roma in the IndependentState of Croatia was marked by differences and similarities, which were reflected thedecision-making process within the Ustasˇa leadership. Over time, this mass violence (andUstasˇa decisions) moderated due to a variety of factors: the interethnic civil war, victimreactions, local factors, and the harvest. The Italians and Germans, however, also played arole in the persecution of the Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Croatia. Simplifying narratives of the Ustasˇa as marginal collaborationist and state-centered concepts of genocide areinadequate when it comes to explaining Ustasˇa violence.
In this article I analyze the variations in violence directed against Jews, Serbs,and Roma committed by the Croatia’s fascist Ustasˇa movement in the IndependentState of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzˇava Hrvatska—NDH). The NDH was one of themost heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, and complicated in Hitler’s Europe. Indeed,it was home to a transnational matrix of a range of political and militarypowers including Croatian Ustasˇe, the Croatian Army, Serb Cˇetnici, Muslim militias, Communist partisans, and German and Italian occupying forces Adding tothis mix was a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society comprised of Catholic andUniate Greek-Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic and Protestant Germans,Hungarians, Slovaks and Czechs, Rusyns, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews as wellas Roma of Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim faiths. Violence occurred in manydirections. Religious, ethnic, social, and political motives for persecution over-lapped, both nationally and locally. Boundaries between victims and perpetratorswere often blurred; collective violence was interactive, procedural, and perma-nently changing
The Fascist Kernel of Ukrainian Genocidal Nationalism
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies, Number 2402. Pittsburgh: The Center for Russian and East European Studies 2015.
This study briefly presents the history of the radical form of Ukrainian nationalism, paying special attention to the geopolitical circumstances which formed this movement. Then, it analyzes some aspects of this phenomenon, such as its main ideologists, racism, antisemitism, religion, rituals, leaders, concepts of revolution, and the ethnic, political and mass violence conducted before, during, and after the Second World War. This short monograph argues that the extreme and genocidal form of Ukrainian nationalism did have a fascist kernel and should be considered a form of European or East-Central European fascism. Nevertheless, because of the specific cultural, social, and political Ukrainian circumstances the radical form of Ukrainian nationalism differed from better-known fascist movements such as German National Socialism or Italian Fascism, and thus it requires a careful and nuanced investigation.
Volume: 2402
Publisher: The Carl Beck Papers
Publication Date: 2015
Inter-Fascist Conflicts in East Central Europe: The Nazis, the “Austrofascists,” the Iron Guard, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 168-191.
The history of European fascism is characterized by both cooperation
and conflicts between movements, regimes, and individuals. Hypernationalism and racism, two intrinsic elements of fascism, simultaneously united and divided the leaders, members, and adherents of movements and regimes. The Italian Fascists, the German Nazis, and a number of other similar movements and regimes wanted to unite and create Europe on their terms. They usually called it “New Europe,” but they did not agree on which countries ought to be included as self-governing nationstates, and which ones should be subordinated to the major regimes. A huge problem for the creation of a fascist Europe and also of a fascist European community was the obsession with violence, including the belief that conflicts should be resolved by war. Nevertheless, it was neither violence nor the ultranationalist and racist nature of fascism that caused the most brutal conflicts between fascists. As this chapter will demonstrate, inter-fascist clashes frequently resulted from pragmatic subjects, the desire to keep “order” in particular parts of Europe, and sometimes also from cultural and political misunderstandings.
Publication Name: Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 168-191.
Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe, 1918–1945
Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 1-38.
Fascist movements and regimes have usually been conceived as and
presented themselves as national political forces. In fact, contemporaries as well as scholars have highlighted hyper-nationalism as one of the most important features of fascism which separated fascist movements and regimes from each other. Not accidentally, all attempts to forge a “Fascist International” foundered between the two world wars. Many historians have therefore dismissed or failed to recognize crossborder cooperations between fascists. In fact, the hyper-nationalism of fascist movements and their social Darwinist doctrines, as well as the expansionist and racist policies of the Third Reich and Fascist Italy, have led most experts to argue that fascist internationalism or international fascism was merely a camouflage and a sham. The interpretation that “international fascism is unthinkable, a contradiction in terms” has received broad support from most historians. As a corollary, fascism has largely been investigated in the framework of national history. Beyond volumes that have collected national case studies, few systematic comparative studies have been published. In particular, cross-border interactions between fascist movements and regimes have largely been dismissed in historical scholarship.
Publication Name: Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 1-38.
Holocaust Obfuscation and Envy in the Debate
about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
This essay contextualises the recent controversy about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), which opened in September 2014 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by documenting the background shadowing the campaigns spearheaded by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress against CMHR advisory board plans to install a permanent gallery devoted to the Holocaust. Their history demonstrates how these ultranationalist lobbies have glorified the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, its militant wing (UPA), and the Waffen-SS Galizien while rationalising or occluding their roles in Second World War period massacres of Jewish and Polish civilians
Holocaust Amnesia: The Ukrainian Diaspora and the Genocide of the Jews
https://www.academia.edu/28177433/Holocaust_Amnesia_The_Ukrainian_Diaspora_and_the_Genocide_of_the_Jews
G. Rossoliński-L...
Over one and a half million Ukrainian Jews fell victim to the Holocaust between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1944. The majority of them were shot near their homes or ghettos by German Kommandos and local collaborators. Many Ukrainians were witnesses to this genocide or participated in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors. Nonetheless, in the collective memory of the Ukrainian diaspora, which has produced an extensive body of literature, the
Holocaust remained almost completely in the dark, unmentioned. Because of the inaccessibility of Soviet archives as well as a tendency among historians to concentrate on official records, this lapse in memory has not become a subject of historical research until recently. At the same time, Holocaust research focused mainly on German perpetrators and frequently refused to take notice of reports
and memoirs left by survivors because of their allegedly disputed use within the historical discipline. The published works of historians such as Philip Friedman, Shmuel Spector, and Eliyahu Yones, who were themselves Holocaust survivors and who did not neglect non-German perpetrators, received little attention from German and North American specialists of Ukrainian history and scholars of National Socialism. Only in recent years has a scholarly debate turned its attention to this blind spot in the memory of the Ukrainian diaspora and to the narrative that was constructed by it.
Holocaust Amnesia: The Ukrainian Diaspora and the Genocide of the Jews
https://www.academia.edu/28177433/Holocaust_Amnesia_The_Ukrainian_Diaspora_and_the_Genocide_of_the_Jews
G. Rossoliński-L...
Over one and a half million Ukrainian Jews fell victim to the Holocaust between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1944. The majority of them were shot near their homes or ghettos by German Kommandos and local collaborators. Many Ukrainians were witnesses to this genocide or participated in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors. Nonetheless, in the collective memory of the Ukrainian diaspora, which has produced an extensive body of literature, the
Holocaust remained almost completely in the dark, unmentioned. Because of the inaccessibility of Soviet archives as well as a tendency among historians to concentrate on official records, this lapse in memory has not become a subject of historical research until recently. At the same time, Holocaust research focused mainly on German perpetrators and frequently refused to take notice of reports
and memoirs left by survivors because of their allegedly disputed use within the historical discipline. The published works of historians such as Philip Friedman, Shmuel Spector, and Eliyahu Yones, who were themselves Holocaust survivors and who did not neglect non-German perpetrators, received little attention from German and North American specialists of Ukrainian history and scholars of National Socialism. Only in recent years has a scholarly debate turned its attention to this blind spot in the memory of the Ukrainian diaspora and to the narrative that was constructed by it.
Celebrating Fascism and War Criminality in Edmonton. The Political Myth and Cult of Stepan Bandera in Multicultural Canada,
Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe
The cult surrounding Stepan Bandera began to develop immediately following the assassination of the radical nationalist and fascist western Ukrainian politician on October 15, 1959. Bandera was assassinated in Munich by the Soviet secret agent Bohdan Stashyns’kyi. Certain factions of Ukrainian diaspora organized memorial celebrations in Canadian cities including Edmonton, as well as in several other countries outside of the Soviet Union. Initially, these celebrations took place annually, but eventually they were held every five years. They consisted of a memorial service (panakhida) and a political-ideological-cultural component during which several vocal activists of Ukrainian nationalism did readings of heroic and patriotic poems or sang OUN and UPA songs. At these celebrations, Bandera was commemorated as a great Ukrainian hero and martyr who had died for Ukraine. Bandera’s fascist and anti-Semitic beliefs as well as pogroms and war crimes which the OUN and UPA had organised and conducted during World War II were denied. The climate of the Cold War and the politics of multiculturalism that Canada had adopted in 1971 facilitated the radical nationalist and neo-fascist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora to claim that the Bandera cult and myth were authentic and very natural components of the Ukrainian culture and identity. Thus the cult and myth have been interpreted as being important contributions to the Canadian policy of multiculturalism. Every kind of critique of this neo-fascist and anti-Semitic cult were repelled as being anti-Ukrainian and chauvinistic attacks against the Ukrainian community and the Ukrainian nation.
De-Mythologizing Bandera: Towards a Scholarly History of the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement // Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. 2015. Vol. 1. No 2. P. 411-420. Олександр Зайцев
"Multiculturalism, Memory, and Ritualization: Ukrainian Nationalist Monuments in Edmonton, Alberta," .
Nationalities Papers Vol. 39, no. 5, (September, 2011): 733-768
Canadians of Ukrainian descent constitute a significant part of the population of the Albertan capital. Among other things, their presence is felt in the public space as Ukrainian monuments constitute a part of the landscape. The article studies three key monuments, physical manifestations of the ideology of local Ukrainian nationalist elites in Edmonton: a 1973 monument to nationalist leader Roman Shukhevych, a 1976 memorial constructed by the Ukrainian Waffen-SS in Edmonton, and a 1983 memorial to the 1932–1933 famine in the Ukrainian SSR. Representing a narrative of suffering, resistance, and redemption, all three monuments were organized by the same activists and are representative for the selective memory of an “ethnic” elite, which presents nationalist ideology as authentic Ukrainian cultural heritage. The narrative is based partly upon an uncritical cult of totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and terroristic political figures, whose war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and collaboration with Nazi Germany the nationalists deny and obfuscate. The article argues that government support and direct public funding has strengthened the radicals within the community and helped promulgate their mythology. In the case of the Ukrainian Canadian political elite, official multiculturalism underwrites a narrative at odds with the liberal democratic values it was intended to promote. The failure to deconstruct the “ethnic” building blocks of Canadian multiculturalism and the willingness to accept at face value the primordial claims and nationalist myths of “ethnic” groups has given Canadian multiculturalism the character of multi-nationalism.
Myth Making with Complications,"
Fascism 5 (2016): 26-65
Ukrainian president Viktor Iushchenko’s posthumous designation of Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), the supreme commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as a Hero of Ukraine in 2007 triggered intense, and polarized debates in Ukraine and abroad, about Second World War-era Ukrainian nationalism and its place in history. Particularly sensitive are Roman Shukhevych’s whereabouts in 1940–1943, when he served in German uniform, as a Hauptmann, or captain, in the battalion Nachtigall in 1941 thereafter, in 1942–1943 in Schutzmannschaft battalion 201, taking part in ‘antipartisan operations’ in occupied Belarus. This article analyzes the controversy regarding the memory of Roman Shukhevych.
Schooling in Murder: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych in Belarus 1942
In 1943, a majority of the commanders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, UPA) consisted by people who had collaborated with Nazi Germany in 1941-42. Many of which had served in the auxiliary policy force, the Schutzmannschaften. That Roman Shukhevych, the supreme commander of the UPA served as officer in the Nachtigall battalion in 1941 is well known. Less known is his activities as a Hauptmann in Schutzmannschaft battalion 201 in Belarus in 1942, where he took part in counter-insurgency campaigns against Soviet partisants. The year 1942 is often omitted from pro-nationalist accounts of the UPA. This article is an attempt to reconstruct this blank spot in Shukhevych biography.
More Info: “Schooling in Murder: Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych of Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201,” paper presented at the international conference Prawda historyczna a prawda polityczna w badaniach naukowych. Przykład ludobójstwa na kresach połudiowej Polski w latach 1939-1946, University of Wrocław, June 21, 2010. Published as “Szkolenie w mordowaniu: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 i Hauptmann Roman Szuchewycz na Białorusi 1942 roku,” in Bogusław Paź (ed.), Prawda historyczna a prawda polityczna w badaniach naukowych. Przykład ludobójstwa na kresach połudiowej-wschodniej Polski w latach 1939-1946, (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2011), 191-212.
UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST ARMY OUN–UPA AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE
THEORY AND PRACTICE
Historical representation of the wartime accounts of the activities of the OUN–UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Ukrainian Insurgent Army)
Per Anders Rudling parudling@ualberta.ca
Introduction
Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine
Ivan Katchanovski
Tudy analyzes controversies and public attitudes concerning the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
and Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The research question is: Which factors affect attitudes toward the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera in contemporary Ukraine? This article employs comparative and regression analyses of surveys commissioned by the author and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2009 and 2013 to determine the effects of regional and other factors on attitudes toward these organizations and the OUN-B leader. The study shows that regional factors and perceptions of these organizations' involvement in mass murder were the strongest predictors of the views concerning the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera. Their public support is strongest in Galicia and weakest in the East and the South, in particular, in Donbas and Crimea, two major conflict areas since the “Euromaidan.”
Journal Name: Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 48 (2-3), 217-228
Publication Date: Oct 15, 2015
The OUN, the UPA, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine
Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, 2019Ivan Katchanovski
Ivan Katchanovski
The issue of the political rehabilitation and glorification of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) became one of the central political issues in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. It provoked major political and historical controversies and debates in Ukraine and other countries. Presidents Yushchenko and Poroshenko, their parties, far right organizations, and many Ukrainian historians attempted to recast the OUN-B and the UPA as parts of a popular national liberation movement that fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and to present the OUN-B and UPA leaders as national heroes. They denied, minimized or justified the involvement of the OUN-B and the UPA leaders and members in the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.The analyses of biographic publications, historical studies, and archival documents show that the majority of the OUN-B and UPA leaders and very large proportions of their members collaborated with Nazi Germany, mainly in the beginning of the Second World War. early half of the top and middle-ranked leaders of these organizations andat least until the end of 1943 the majority of UPA members served in various police formations. They assisted the German occupation authorities in implementing genocidal policies towards the Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles by helping to carry out mass shootings and create conditions intended for the physical annihilation of the entire Jewish population and large numbers of Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles, specifically in Volhynia. The fact that many police commanders and large numbers of policemen in various locations and formations followed orders from the OUN-B by deserting en masse from their service, in particular in Volhynia in the spring of 1943, and forming the basis of the UPA shows that these commanders and police members were de facto controlled by the OUN-B.
More Info: In Black , Peter; Rásky, Béla; Windsperger, Marianne (Eds)
Page Numbers: 67-93
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust
Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide or Ukrainian-Polish Conflict? The Mass Murder of Poles by the OUN and the UPA in Volhynia
Ivan Katchanovski
This paper analyzes the mass-murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of communism. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers offered different and often divergent theories of this historical event. It is often presented in Ukraine as a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict. In contrast, in Poland, the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia is often characterized as genocide. A research question is whether this was a Ukrainian-Polish conflict, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This study analyzes a variety of archival documents, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts. It offers an estimate of Polish casualties derived from analysis of OUN-UPA, Polish, and Soviet, and sources and demographic data. This study concludes that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) represented not a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict or genocide of Poles but that it was a part of ethnic cleansing.
More Info: Paper presented at the 19th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New York, US, April 24-26, 2014
Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943-1944
Jared McBride
The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml’ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.
Debating, obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements
Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the archives of the former republics and satellite states of this multiethnic empire were opened. This allowed historians to investigate the history of nationalist and radical right organisations and armies that, during the Second World War, had been involved in the Holocaust and other atrocities. Among them was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. For a long time the history of these movements was unknown or distorted by Soviet propaganda and propagandist publications written during the Cold War by veterans of these movements living in the West and cooperating with Western intelligence services. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was simultaneously accompanied by the “rebirth” of nationalism that was not free from antisemitism and racism, and which triggered different types of nationalist distortions of history and obfuscations of the Holocaust. Post-Soviet historical discourses were shaped not only by journalists or political activists, but also by radical right historians. These discourses impacted as well on historians who in general were critical of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of nationalism, war criminality or East Central European fascism. Concentrating on Ukrainian and Polish history, this article explores how the radical right historical discourses appeared in the post-Soviet space, what types of historians were involved in them and what kinds of distortions and obfuscations have predominated.
More Info: East European Jewish Affairs Vol. 42, No. 3, December 2012, 199–241.
Andreas Umland and Yuliya Yurchuk,
Historical representation of the wartime accounts of the activities of the OUN–UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Ukrainian Insurgent Army)
Per Anders Rudling parudling@ualberta.ca
Introduction
When it comes to assessing the history of the violent 20th century, historical analysis hasoften been restricted by ideological blindness and selective interpretation. This is not anissue limited to one side of the ideological spectrum, or to any particular ethnic community.
This article focuses on the nationalist historiography of the post-war or “third wave” of Ukrainian immigrants to North America and the largely positive representation of the OUNand UPA by some high-profile Ukrainian historians. In this paper, I attempt to highlight thediscrepancy between theory and practice, and I suggest that the change in the ideology of the OUN was not followed by changes in practice.
Rather, the political course of the OUN–UPA remained one of uncompromising ideological and ethnic extremism. This translated into a continuation of a policy the implementation of which completed the mass murder initiated in the summer of 1943. I also focus on the unwillingness of a number of Central Ukrainian and diaspora historians to confront this bloody past. This article will consider Ukraine in a European context, adjudged by the same tools of analysis as other European states, which is particularly apposite given contemporary circumstances. Confronting the past means challenging myths, something that is painful for a country still in the process of nation-building and actively constructing national myths. There are attempts at casting the OUN in a heroic light in the official Ukrainian historical narrative.At the same time, the Orange Revolution has shown that many Ukrainians identify with Europe and desire European integration. To a large extent, European integration requires realignment with liberal democratic or “European” values. Much like post-war Germany was forced to confront its history, post-Orange-Revolution Ukraine faces a similar challenge of Vergangenheitsbewältigung . If Ukraine is serious in its attempts to orient itself towards the European Union, the anti-democratic trends of the past need to be confronted rather than allowed to enter the new national mythology as doctored recollections.
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 2107 (Pittsburgh: University Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2011).
Per Anders Rudling
During the past decade, particularly under the presidency of the third Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010) there have been repeated attempts to turn the leading figures of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) into national heroes. As these fascist organizations collaborated with the Nazi Germany, carried out ethnic cleansing and mass murder on a massive scale, they are problematic symbols for an aspiring democracy with the stated ambition to join the European Union. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of memory management and myth making were organized, a key function of which was to deny or downplay OUN-UPA atrocities. Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora. Yushchenko’s legitimizing historians presented the OUN and UPA as pluralistic and inclusive organizations, which not only rescued Jews during the Holocaust, but invited them into their ranks to fight shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. This mythical narrative relied partly on the OUN’s own post-war forgeries, aimed at cover up the organization’s problematic past. As employees of the Ukrainian security services, working out of the offices of the old KGB, the legitimizing historians ironically dismissed scholarly criticism as Soviet myths. The present study deals with the myth-making around the OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust, tracing their diaspora roots and following their migration back and forth across the Atlantic.
"Memories of 'Holodomor' and National Socialism in Ukrainian Political Culture"
in Yves Bizeul (ed.) Rekonstruktion des Nationalmythos?: Frankreich, Deutschland und die Ukraine im Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2013), 227-258.
Per Anders Rudling
Subsequently, World War II brought nearly incomprehensible suffering and population losses.
A 2004 study lists the total Ukrainian war deaths at 6,850,000 people, or 16.3 % of the population. Of these, a full 5,200,000 were civilians,whereas military victims “only” constituted 1,650,000. Of these civilian deaths,at least 1.4 million, but perhaps as many as 2.1 million Jews were murdered in Ukraine.
The German occupation of Ukraine was extraordinarily harsh. Ukraine was divided between German, Romanian, and Hungarian occupants, the largest part organized as the so-called
Reichskommisariat Ukraine. The western most part way incorporated into the Greater German Reich, as the Distrikt Galizien.
Here the occupation was considerably milder, and the Ukrainian population played off against the Poles.Whereas Ukrainian national sentiments were suppressed in the rest of Ukraine they were partially supported in Galicia. Talented Ukrainians were offered scholarships to study in the Reich,and in 1943 even a GalicianWaffen-SS Division was formed.
The occupying authorities strictly guarded the sealed border to the Reichskommissariat, where the situation was quite different.
The brutal Reichskommissar Erich Koch banned education above the third grade, and mused that “if I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.”
Ukraine saw considerable resistance to the Nazi occupation. 4.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army to which The estimates differ greatly, and have been manipulated by various political interest groups.
Gregorovich, Andrew: Ukraine’s Population Losses in World War II: 7.5 million
Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine
Ivan Katchanovski
Tudy analyzes controversies and public attitudes concerning the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
and Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The research question is: Which factors affect attitudes toward the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera in contemporary Ukraine? This article employs comparative and regression analyses of surveys commissioned by the author and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2009 and 2013 to determine the effects of regional and other factors on attitudes toward these organizations and the OUN-B leader. The study shows that regional factors and perceptions of these organizations' involvement in mass murder were the strongest predictors of the views concerning the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera. Their public support is strongest in Galicia and weakest in the East and the South, in particular, in Donbas and Crimea, two major conflict areas since the “Euromaidan.”
Journal Name: Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 48 (2-3), 217-228
Publication Date: Oct 15, 2015
The OUN, the UPA, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine
Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, 2019Ivan Katchanovski
Ivan Katchanovski
The issue of the political rehabilitation and glorification of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) became one of the central political issues in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. It provoked major political and historical controversies and debates in Ukraine and other countries. Presidents Yushchenko and Poroshenko, their parties, far right organizations, and many Ukrainian historians attempted to recast the OUN-B and the UPA as parts of a popular national liberation movement that fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and to present the OUN-B and UPA leaders as national heroes. They denied, minimized or justified the involvement of the OUN-B and the UPA leaders and members in the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.The analyses of biographic publications, historical studies, and archival documents show that the majority of the OUN-B and UPA leaders and very large proportions of their members collaborated with Nazi Germany, mainly in the beginning of the Second World War. early half of the top and middle-ranked leaders of these organizations andat least until the end of 1943 the majority of UPA members served in various police formations. They assisted the German occupation authorities in implementing genocidal policies towards the Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles by helping to carry out mass shootings and create conditions intended for the physical annihilation of the entire Jewish population and large numbers of Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles, specifically in Volhynia. The fact that many police commanders and large numbers of policemen in various locations and formations followed orders from the OUN-B by deserting en masse from their service, in particular in Volhynia in the spring of 1943, and forming the basis of the UPA shows that these commanders and police members were de facto controlled by the OUN-B.
More Info: In Black , Peter; Rásky, Béla; Windsperger, Marianne (Eds)
Page Numbers: 67-93
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust
Ivan Katchanovski
This paper analyzes the mass-murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of communism. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers offered different and often divergent theories of this historical event. It is often presented in Ukraine as a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict. In contrast, in Poland, the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia is often characterized as genocide. A research question is whether this was a Ukrainian-Polish conflict, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This study analyzes a variety of archival documents, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts. It offers an estimate of Polish casualties derived from analysis of OUN-UPA, Polish, and Soviet, and sources and demographic data. This study concludes that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) represented not a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict or genocide of Poles but that it was a part of ethnic cleansing.
More Info: Paper presented at the 19th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New York, US, April 24-26, 2014
Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943-1944
Jared McBride
The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml’ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.
Debating, obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements
Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the archives of the former republics and satellite states of this multiethnic empire were opened. This allowed historians to investigate the history of nationalist and radical right organisations and armies that, during the Second World War, had been involved in the Holocaust and other atrocities. Among them was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. For a long time the history of these movements was unknown or distorted by Soviet propaganda and propagandist publications written during the Cold War by veterans of these movements living in the West and cooperating with Western intelligence services. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was simultaneously accompanied by the “rebirth” of nationalism that was not free from antisemitism and racism, and which triggered different types of nationalist distortions of history and obfuscations of the Holocaust. Post-Soviet historical discourses were shaped not only by journalists or political activists, but also by radical right historians. These discourses impacted as well on historians who in general were critical of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of nationalism, war criminality or East Central European fascism. Concentrating on Ukrainian and Polish history, this article explores how the radical right historical discourses appeared in the post-Soviet space, what types of historians were involved in them and what kinds of distortions and obfuscations have predominated.
More Info: East European Jewish Affairs Vol. 42, No. 3, December 2012, 199–241.
“Introduction: The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Memory Politics, Public Debates, and Foreign Affairs,”
Andreas Umland and Yuliya Yurchuk,
Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 115
This second introduction, like the one to the first special section within this series, does not list many of the previous scholarly studies on this section’s topic in as far asmost of the relevant articles and books are listed in the two special sections’papers’ footnotes. We are very grateful to Julie Fedor for her extremely careful and patient final editing of the contributions to these two special sections (including this introduction). Responsibility for any remaining impressions and misinterpretations here and below lies, however, solely with the respective texts’ authors.
Reclaiming the Past, Confronting the Past: OUN-UPA Memory Politics and Nation-Building in Ukraine (1991-2016),
Reclaiming the Past, Confronting the Past: OUN-UPA Memory Politics and Nation-Building in Ukraine (1991-2016),
in: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, ed. Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila, and Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2017.
Yuliya Yurchuk
Yuliya Yurchuk
AND THE UKRAINIAN INSURGENT ARMY:UNWELCOME ELEMENTS OF AN IDENTITY PROJECT
Ab Imperio, 4/2010
John-Paul HIMKA
Introduction
What follows below are four polemical texts that aim to repudiate thelegacy of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and of itsarmed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They were motivated by the, unfortunately largely successful, campaign of former presidentViktor Yushchenko in Ukraine and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress(UCC) in the North American diaspora to put the glorication of these radical right nationalists at the very center of the Ukrainian national identity project.
On the most recent Remembrance Day in Canada (November 11, 2010), the UCC issueda statement containing this passage: “As Ukrainian Canadians we also remember and paytribute to the millions of men and women who perished ghting for the freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland. The men and women of the Ukrainian Sich Riemen, the1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Armyand the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.” The Ukrainian Sich Riemen foughtfor an independent Ukraine after World War I, and the 1st Ukrainian Division was aWaffen-SS unit in World War II
"The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948," Number 1505 in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001).
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East …, 2001
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