Of Lords and Lordlings
I closely follow your every publication concerning the national liberation war in Western Ukraine in the 1940s-1950s. I do because it is our Ukrainian history. We know nothing or little of it, because we were unfortunate enough to study “History of the CPSU,” not of Ukraine. Recently I read Ivan Khmil’s “Hucksterish Circumlocutions of the OUN-UPA Apologists” (The Day, October 9, 2001) and two reviews whose authors took a rather tolerant stand.
However, the reviewers overlooked a significant figure, namely Comrade Petro Symonenko who used Prof. Khmil as a pawn, himself hiding out in the woods, so to speak. Too bad for Prof. Khmil having to act that way, and even worse that he has not learned anything from history.
Personally, I wonder: Why did Comrade Symonenko act this way? Why did he not write the article himself, why did he not respond to an acute issue such as this one? I think because, unlike his colleagues, the esteemed Borys Oliynyk and Heorhy Kriuchkov, people with a European if not global way of thinking, Symonenko’s is at the lordling level, in his case a provincial party functionary from Donetsk oblast who suddenly make a head- spinning party career. His every public appearance is a case study in grandiloquence. Everything he says is accompanied by a facial expression as hard as steel. I think if he were asked why people acted that way in Western Ukraine he would say shortly, “Because they are Bandera followers.” Granted, but what made them follow Bandera?
My grandfather Ivan was arrested on March 7, 1931, because he spoke in support of a fellow villager who was unjustly dispossessed as a kulak, and my grandmother and three small children were shipped off to Siberia in a boxcar and left in the taiga, beyond Nizhni Tagil. She tried to return home to the Donbas, but was caught on the train. Her children were sent to a children’s home, and no one knows what happened to her. The same thing happened to a great many Ukrainian families. The Communist authorities acting that way did not meet with nationwide resistance. Why? I think because the Ukrainians, enslaved by Russia for centuries on end, lacked what people living in the western territories had, dignity. It was that same dignity that the White Guard officers, rebellious Tambov peasants, Kronstadt seamen, Central Asian basmachis or Afghan Mujaheddin had, a dignity that manifested itself in response to Bolshevik-Communist aggression.
At one time I graduated with honors from the Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, just as ex-Speaker Tkachenko did (and bragged about it in public, as though there were anything to brag about!). We had to study a lot of the classics of Marxism-Leninism, Lenin in the first place. You should see the kind of instructions he wrote on various documents as Chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars [Bolshevik equivalent of premier]. They all spell blood, an ocean of blood!
We were taught from childhood that Lenin was so very kind-hearted. But he was the one to start concentration camps, GULAG, mass shootings and hangings without trial, Tukhachevsky’s gas attacks on rebellious Tambov peasants, hostage system, and uprooting intellectuals. Fascism started not with Mussolini and Hitler, but with Lenin.
In the fall of 1991, Pavel Voshchanov, Boris Yeltsin’s former press secretary, published a telegram signed by Lenin: “We must ride into Estonia piggyback on Bulakhovich and hang 100-1,000 [local] bureaucrats and clergymen. A thousand rubles award for every man hanged.” I pictured myself as a railway station telegrapher and Red Army men bursting in, grabbing me and dragging me to the gallows. I asked myself why, put a chair to the wall, stood on it, and took Lenin’s portrait off the wall. Forever. I did it after thirty years of party membership. For the Western Ukrainians one year was enough, when about a million of them were sent to Siberia, to realize what the Bolshevik “liberators” were all about. Small wonder that they should welcome the Germans (until they showed themselves for what they really were) and hope to win Ukrainian independence with their help. It was precisely according to Lenin who wrote that, in reaching one’s goal, even an alliance with the devil is permissible. As the Germans revealed their true identity, very much like their Bolshevik brothers, a military resistance movement started that would continue under the Soviets, after Ukraine’s liberation.
We in the east of Ukraine were taught from childhood that the Bandera adherents were bandits. I remember reading in the Literaturnaya Gazeta (or was it Izvestiya?), sometime in 1989, about a woman from Tula oblast [Russia]. In the late 1940s, after graduating from a college of medicine, she was sent to work for an NKVD unit in Western Ukraine. “Once,” she recalls, “we were ordered to attend the shooting of bandits. The latter turned out young fellows from Western Ukraine. Each shouted Glory to Ukraine! before dying.” Even then the woman thought that bandits didn’t die that way. If not bandits, then who were they? I think they were heroes of the Ukrainian national liberation movement. So we should treat them accordingly, and the same applies to the state.
I also think that in the ten years of Ukrainian independence the social confrontation between the eastern and western territories has slackened. Words like Bandera adherents are not heard as often as previously, meant as expletives addressed not only to Western Ukrainians, but also to all those speaking Ukrainian. Schools and organizations practicing interregional children tourist trips are doing a very important thing. Aid coming to calamity-stricken western regions from the east also serves rapprochement. I am sure that reconciliation will finally come to Ukraine, the way it did in to some Western countries. After all, we know from history that every war is followed by peace.
Dear Comrade Symonenko, I am sure that Dolores Ibarruri was happy to leave the Soviet Union and return to her native Spain, now ideologically at peace. Draw your own conclusions.
