Clio and Nemesis

Those of us trained as professional historians have always had a special relationship with Clio, the Ancient Greek Muse of history. In this issue Yevhen Zakharov of Kharkiv touches on what remains in this society an open wound, how to understand the Second World War and Ukraine's role in it. The immense sacrifices made by the Soviet people in that war probably did more than anything else to emotionally wield a substantial segment of the population into a unity, a group who might have heard of World War II but thought (and still think) in terms the Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland, with the Soviet Army representing good and liberation and anything opposing it as collaborating with the ultimate evil, Hitler's Germany. Their war remains something separate from the outside world's war beginning only in 1941 and ending with the Battles of Berlin and Prague. Accordingly, Soviet entry into the war against Japan is remembered as the brief and essentially separate «Japanese War.» Any thought that their war ended in anything other than the triumph of good and glory is anathema to a whole generation of those who served at the front. Some might admit that perhaps there were «errors» and «excesses,» but the millions of lives claimed by Stalinism must surely be exaggerated and cannot detract from their generation's great and horribly costly achievement of «liberating» a fatherland that had truly become theirs.

For others who reject such Soviet values in favor of more traditional national ones, World War II was an unmitigated tragedy, beginning with the 1939 Hitler- Stalin Pact, a war in which Ukraine was caught between two equally loathsome, inhuman, and criminal totalitarian regimes. For many such people Ukraine's struggle for liberation was represented by the foredoomed Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought both the Germans and Soviets. The issue of what this country lived through up to the mid-1940s, Great Patriotic War or World War II, is not a question of fact but one of value, for in cases like this how we choose to name and understand a thing depends not on any objective fact but how we evaluate it through the prism of our own collective values. Thus the question of how to see the UPA struggle in Western Ukraine really goes to the heart of the coexistence of two diametrically opposed and mutually hostile communities of values, of two political nations in Ukraine, one still attached to the Soviet Union as Paradise Lost and the other hoping against hope that Ukraine can somehow be molded into a modern European nation. Thus far, neither is capable of triumphing over the other, and because of this Ukraine as a whole is incapable of determining what it wants to be. This identity crisis is one factor at the root of what is dragging this nation down into the quicksand of its own indecision. Having taken part in one conference here on Ukraine in World War II, I know better than most how deeply this emotional cleavage cuts even within the scholarly community.

In this case, Clio as the embodiment of history reminds one of yet another figure of Greek mythology, the divine avenger Nemesis. The inability to decide what to think about the past, what to identify with in that past, is truly, to borrow from Karl Marx, the dead hand of all the past generations that hangs like a curse on the brain of the living.