PERSPECTIVES: News from Ukraine (08/18/02)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

News from Ukraine

Ukraine has been in the news a lot this summer, most of it involving tragedy and death. In July more than 60 coal miners died in three separate methane gas explosions nearly a mile underground in the Donetsk Basin. Then there was the SU-27 Soviet-era fighter jet that crashed into a huge crowd at a Lviv airshow, killing close to a hundred spectators and injuring hundreds more. These disasters, though, paled in comparison to the discovery of 225 murder victims - 80 of them children - in the cellar of a 17th century monastery in Zhovkva, also near Lviv.

According to a front-page article in the July 23 issue of The Washington Post, "Some of the skulls have single, small bullet holes in the back others have cracks down the front, apparently from an ax, or have been crushed on top, possibly by a hammer." Then, a few days later, in a cover story in its Sunday Magazine, The New York Times reported that an informant betrayed the location of a battalion of Ukrainian guerrillas. All but four were killed in a massive tank, artillery and air assault, once again just outside of Lviv.

Astute readers will note, of course, that I mix tragedies from a few weeks ago with those from more than half a century past. The guerrillas were killed in a Nazi assault in 1943. The massacre in Zhovkva happened in the late 1940s, apparently perpetrated by psychopaths from the NKVD, the secret police organization that morphed into the KGB.

Although the Post and the Times stories were totally separate from each other, it's interesting to note the common thread between the annihilation of the guerrillas and the monastery massacre. It goes back to before World War II, when the Soviets killed millions of Ukrainians in the artificial Famine and Terror. Not surprisingly, the population hated Stalin. This was particularly true in western Ukraine, which became part of the Soviet Union in 1939, 20 years after the rest of the country. When the Germans invaded in 1941 and Hitler started matching Stalin atrocity for atrocity, people in the central and eastern regions rallied to the Soviet Union. In the west, where Soviet rule was still weak, tens of thousands joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The Times story about the World War II partisan group was related by Daniel Mendelsohn, in his article "What Happened to Uncle Schmiel?" Mr. Mendelsohn, a descendant of Holocaust victims, went to Ukraine to discover how his relatives had died. He also wanted to confirm a lifelong conviction, which he used as a recurring refrain: "the Ukrainians were the worst."

Ultimately, Mr. Mendelsohn was frustrated: "All during our trip, I had been disappointed because we didn't find anything to confirm the stories I had been told." Instead, he found contemporary Ukrainians to be welcoming and friendly.

Mr. Mendelsohn also failed to learn how his relatives died. Then unexpectedly, half a year later, a stranger from Australia who grew up alongside Uncle Schmiel and his family called with details about their fate. Four were arrested and either shot or gassed. Two others escaped to the woods, where the Ukrainian guerrillas sheltered them from the Nazis; until they were all betrayed, that is. Nearly a thousand Ukrainians and two Jewish girls were annihilated. It turned out the informer, of all things, was Jewish.

What about the grisly discovery in the Zhovkva monastery? "After the war, Ukrainian partisans who had battled the fascists refused to lay down their arms and fought the Soviets into the 1950s," the Post reported. Those murdered were victims of the Soviet campaign to "pacify" western Ukraine after the defeat of the Nazis. In all likelihood, the Ukrainian partisans the Soviets sought to destroy were elements of the same army that had sheltered Mr. Mendlesohn's relatives just a few years before.

It's interesting how these 60-year-old events are news, as relevant in 2002 as any coal mine explosion or air show catastrophe. And why? Because they confound accepted wisdom. For more than 50 years Ukraine was isolated behind the Iron Curtain. During that time Soviet propagandists drummed a constant message that much of the world accepted - indeed, many Ukrainians started believing it: that those who worked for Ukraine's independence were fascists and Nazi collaborators. In a particularly perverse twist, the Soviets charged the UPA with collaboration. The fact that there were Ukrainians who helped the Nazis gave the charge an element of believability. Only this one was false. In World War II and afterward the UPA fought the Soviets, to be sure, but first they turned their guns against the Nazis.

As for the secret police, Soviet propaganda depicted them as the heroic vanguard of a revolutionary movement that had to act firmly, but only to build the perfect society. Many accepted this message at face value as well, while rejecting stories from Ukrainian refugees about unspeakable cruelties and massacres of genocidal proportions.

On the eve of Ukraine's 11th anniversary of independence, the past still casts an enormous shadow over contemporary Ukraine. In responding to the tragedies of July, President Leonid Kuchma pointed the finger at "the incomplete reform process." That's shorthand for blaming Soviet-era attitudes and management practices. Indeed, the Communists were notorious for cutting corners, ignoring safety considerations and human decency, even common sense itself. Millions were sacrificed - "liquidated as a class" - to serve some larger purpose. Just as the Cheka morphed into the NKVD and then the KGB, you can draw a straight line from Lenin to Stalin's Famine, to the mass murder at the Zhovkva monastery, to Chornobyl, to the "incomplete reform process."

In the midst of such tragedy, articles about the receding past are welcome news, not because they make for pleasant reading, but because they help to dispel illusions, starting with the one that looks with nostalgia to the Soviet Union for solutions to Ukraine's problems today. The horrors at Zhovkva show what a dead end that would be. As for those seeking confirmation that "Ukrainians were the worst," Mr. Mendelsohn discovered that reality was much more complex, compelling and heroic than the oft-repeated stereotype.

Sixty years ago Ukrainians of many different backgrounds were forced to pick either Stalin or Hitler. Many chose neither. Now their bones are being found all over Ukraine. They deserve to be buried with dignity, honor and reverence. For the most part, though, the flesh, bones and sinew of the millions who died at the hands of communism and fascism have long since been recycled into the rich, black soil of Ukraine herself. For that reason, the land is as sacred as any cemetery and, yes it cries out for truth.

Now, as its citizens cope with the criminal legacy of history's greatest monsters, we're discovering that in Ukraine, the past is not yet history - it's news.

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