PERSPECTIVES: Telling the stories of World War II (07/01/01)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Telling the stories of World War II

"Suddenly, they advanced on our position! We moved up ... bullets ... the fire ... enemy... mumble ... ."

The story faded into the distance as I walked past a group of five or six elderly men at a park bench in Lviv. I heard neither the beginning nor the end, just a few phrases signaling that this was one of tens of millions of similar stories that have been told since the end of World War II.

Here in America, you see them on TV, now old and stooped, reminiscing about Pearl Harbor or D-Day. Recently, the occasion, more often than not, has been the release of a movie with glamorous stars acting out what ordinary people did more than half a century ago. For Americans, World War II was "the good war;" now, with all the resources of mass media, we're celebrating the triumph over evil and honoring the heroic men and women who made that possible.

We didn't always feel quite as upbeat about World War II. A generation ago, Americans looked more critically at their conduct of the war. Emblematic were books like Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Slaughterhouse Five" about the Allied firebombing of Dresden or Joseph Heller's "Catch 22," a devastating and often hilarious critique of the military's bureaucratic stupidity. Both went on to become popular movies.

Americans also looked at wartime attitudes toward African-Americans or Japanese-Americans who were forced into "relocation camps," and debated the morality of President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All this, to be sure, reflected the civil rights movement and the ambiguity many felt about the war in Vietnam and Cold War nuclear doctrine. Nonetheless, the examination of America's role in World War II was sincere, and it served a national purpose.

Like others, Ukrainian Americans contributed to the war effort. A 1944 commemorative book from a single parish in Cleveland - Ss. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church - lists 482 who were serving in the armed forces. Another Ukrainian from Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima. For Ukrainian Americans, there was never any question about serving in the armed services.

For Ukrainians in Ukraine it wasn't that simple. For them, the option of good or evil did not exist. There was only evil. Few remember that World War II effectively began on August 23, 1939, when Germany and the USSR signed the Ribbentropp-Molotov Pact, dividing Europe between them. A week later, on September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two weeks after that, the Soviet Union invaded from the East.

The story of Hitler's aggression is familiar. Stalin's record in World War II was similarly vile, but much of it is now forgotten. As Hitler's partner from 1939 to 1941, he seized western Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia (present-day Moldova) and parts of Finland. Typically, Soviet police conducted mass arrests, massacres and deportations of "bourgeois" elements: teachers, writers, journalists, clergy, political leaders, artists and lawyers.

Stalin also presided over the mass deportation of entire nations within the Soviet Union: the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachay and others. (Ukrainians, he told Churchill at Yalta, were too numerous to deport.) Like the Nazis, Stalin's henchmen created many mass graves, most notoriously at Katyn Forest, where thousands of Polish officers were murdered.

Stalin's collaboration with the Nazis ended in June 1941, when Hitler double-crossed his partner and invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin couldn't believe it. Millions of his subjects, though, were overjoyed, naively thinking that they had been liberated at last. Hitler, of course, turned out to be every bit as brutal as Stalin, and he soon lost whatever goodwill he had with the oppressed Soviet peoples. Stalin, for his part, initiated a tactical retreat politically, allowing for more religious and national expression. With enormous sacrifice on the part of the Soviet peoples and massive material support from America, the USSR ultimately defeated Germany on the Eastern Front.

During the war and after, the Soviets worked to turn themselves into the good guys. The Allies obliged by forgiving Stalin his collaboration with Hitler and covering up his war crimes. In one of history's greatest ironies Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin's chief prosecutor during the purge trials, also presided over war crimes trials at Nuremberg.

Afterwards, the Soviets cultivated an idealized version of their conduct in what they called the "Great Patriotic War." That myth is perpetuated to this day with annual May Day parades, Victory Day commemorations, etc. Veterans with rows of medals on their lapels march behind red banners and portraits of Stalin. Personally, I find this offensive - but understandable. All of us are shaped by a critical decade. The veterans, like the ones in the park in Lviv, will always remember how the enemy advanced on their position and how bravely they fought back. No one can deny them that.

What I find astonishing, though, is how the current Russian government clings to the Soviet version of World War II. Last year Lithuania approached Russia - the legal successor state to the USSR - seeking compensation for the damage done to the country by Soviet occupation. The Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry replied that the Baltic Republics "voluntarily" joined the Soviet Union. In March of this year, the Russian deputy foreign affairs minister reiterated that position, insisting that Soviet troops entered the Baltics only after its leaders requested it. There was no occupation or annexation, he said.

America is far from perfect, but we do have a moral gyroscope that keeps adjusting the country's direction. World War II was clearly a justified war, yet Americans still examined their collective conscience and came to terms with many of the country's shortcomings during the war. Apologies were offered, reparations paid and posthumous medals awarded. For Russians and many Ukrainians, in contrast, there appears to be little effort to come to terms with the past, even though it is important for their respective futures as democracies that they do so.

This is particularly critical for Ukraine. Caught between Stalin's horrors and Hitler's atrocities, no nation in World War II endured a longer occupation, suffered greater destruction or weathered more long-lasting combat. Ukrainians served in the Red Army, the Insurgent Army, the Vlasov Army (the Russian Liberation Army) and the Galicia Division, and wound up in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. Millions ended up in anonymous graves or no graves at all.

Countless narratives have been spun to describe aspects of that tragic era, but an overriding framework that would synthesize these stories into one that is specific to Ukraine does not yet exist. That task awaits historians, artists and statesmen of the future.

One thing is certain: the old Soviet lie about the Great Patriotic War is grossly inadequate. It accommodates Hitler's evil. Room has to be made for Stalin's.

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