Kyiv must become Victory Center

How are Ukrainians to regard the dates May 8 and May 9 in conjunction with what happened 70 years back and parliament’s recent vote passing a package of anticommunist bills? Below is an interview with a person who is absolutely morally entitled to talk about that victory. His name is Yevhen S. Hrytsiak and his life story reflects the complexity and diversity of the tragic history of the Ukrainian people that during World War II fought on several fronts against Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarian machineries. In 1942, after enrolling in a trade school in Sniatyn, he joined the youth wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to train to fight the German occupier. In 1944, during a major Soviet offensive, he was drafted into the Red Army, fought courageously, was wounded and received military awards. In 1949, his OUN membership was discovered, he was arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was then commuted to 25 years in prison camps. In 1953, he led the Norilsk uprising that would eventually undermine the Stalin regime and the Soviet totalitarian system.

Mr. Hrytsiak, what does the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation mean to you personally?

“At the front, I met a Ukrainian who was born in Alma-Ata. He was 52 and I was 18. We found out we had similar worldviews. I could ask him straight questions. I asked how come we Ukrainians aren’t fighting for Ukraine but sometimes even against each other on the opposite sides of the front, and we can’t even defend ourselves. By way of reply he told me a joke. During the First World War, to enhance morale, the soldiers were told they shouldn’t be afraid to die because all who got killed in battle would go right through the Pearly Gates. Well, there they stood in front of the Gates, a Britt, a German, and a Ukrainian. Out came Saint Peter and said, ‘We let in only those who know what they died for. What did the three of you die for?’ The Britt replied he’d died for the Empire. The German clicked his heels and barked, ‘For discipline!’, but the Ukrainian fidgeted and then said, ‘I dunno. Word was we’d be given some land.’

“I recently re-read a Polish version of the book Wars and Peace originally published by Den. It’s a great book. Larysa Ivshyna’s foreword says too bad we didn’t have our own Pilsudski, that we don’t have the right kind of organization, that something just doesn’t work here. During WWI we had lots of otamans [Ukr. for chief or commander] who acted each his own way and scattered our forces; we didn’t have a single leader. We had Petliura, Vynnychenko, Skoropadsky, lots of other otamans – I won’t even try to list them all, so the Bolsheviks destroyed our disorganized army unit by unit. Perhaps we just can’t bring ourselves to recognize a single command. I don’t know for sure, but this is very sad. Now we have good guys fighting on the eastern ATO front, but we also have separate volunteer battalions, the Right Sector and the OUN, that don’t want to serve under a single command. And I don’t know the leaders responsible for this attitude.”

What do you think May 8 and May 9 mean to Ukrainians?

“That’s not a holiday but a tribute to reconciliation. Putin said Russia would’ve won WWII without Ukraine. As it was, 8 million Ukrainians died under that bad Russian command. Russia is now producing absolute fascism and has no moral right to talk about defeating the Nazis during that war. Looking back, the impression is that WWII was won by the Germans, not by the Soviet Union. You realize this after comparing the political, economic, and administrative system of Germany to that of Russia. The German people shook off the totalitarian Nazi yoke whereas the Russian people is still under the Bolshevik yoke. During the Anschluss, Hitler said that Austrians and Germans were a single German people. Putin says Ukrainians and Russians are a single people. Russians have never recognized Ukraine as a separate people or nation with its own history and culture. We have all of this and this is our own, and what we have in common with Russians is that which they stole from us.”

How do you feel about Ukraine finally disassociating itself from the Kremlin Victory Parade and marking the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation on May 8, as is practiced in the West?

“That’s the way it should be. How can we celebrate Victory Day with Russia, a country which is at war with us, which has sent 25 ‘humanitarian convoys’ to the Donbas, which keeps supplying armaments, manpower, officers who supervise combat operations against us? What victory? I think they will mark May 9 this year with special pomp, they will demonstrate their might. They will keep the old totalitarian tradition of celebrating the event.

“The Remembrance Day ought to be marked on May 8, the date of signing the Act of Military Surrender [first signed on May 7 at Reims, France, then on May 8 in Berlin. – Ed.], but Russia transferred the date to May 9, so as not to celebrate the event with the West that had materially supported Russia during the war, including half a million US motor vehicles without which it would have been unable to fight. Not a single Katyusha multiple rocket launcher was mounted on a Russian truck because no Russian model was strong enough; under the launcher’s weight the vehicle was practically uncontrollable and the salvo could – and would – hit both the enemy and friendly troops. Soldiers joked: ‘They aimed and fired and the rockets hit right back home.’

“At long last Ukraine will mark May 8 with the Western countries. I’m sure that our state has the moral right to have the center of V-E Day festivities transferred from Moscow to Kyiv. However, I don’t quite see the Ukrainian president flying to Poland on that date. Well, the reason is perhaps that he is a product of the past epoch.”

Ukrainians are fighting courageously in the East, but how long do you think they will have to fight to repulse Russia’s aggression? When will Ukraine mark its Day of National Reconciliation and victory over the Russian aggressor?

“Our political leadership may be desirous of a [nation-]state, but they just can’t because each has relatives and friends subject to lustration, so there isn’t likely to be a complete clean-up of the government machine. In this sense Petro Poroshenko appears to be very weak.

“Hopefully the younger generation of politicians will be stronger, but the current transition ones aren’t trustworthy, they go about their jobs very sluggishly. They are former Soviet bureaucrats; despite their current Ukrainian status, they remain ones deep inside. Of course, there are true Ukrainians among them, also those who are still unsure, waiting to see which way the wind is blowing.

“As for reconciliation within Ukraine, the Donbas refuses to accept the other part of our state and this attitude can be changed probably only by war. People who live in the east of Ukraine have got so used to Russia, they’ll choose it if given the choice. Of course, there are people there who are all out for Ukraine, but most of them have already left for the free part of Ukraine, so most who remain on occupied territory are Soviet people. They have been deceived, but they don’t realize this.

“I think Russia will never leave us alone, except when the West hits it with sanctions real hard. Mathematically speaking, we stand no chance of winning the war. Spiritually speaking, we do stand a chance because the spirit sometimes gets the better of a much stronger enemy.”