PERSPECTIVES: Casting a sweeping eye (12/04/05)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Casting a sweeping eye

I was a little boy in the 1950s at the Plast scout camp near Buffalo and didn't know any better. So when one of the campers in the cot next to me said he didn't have a father, I wanted to know why not.

Wordlessly, he took a piece of string, tied a hangman's noose, held it to my face and dropped it. I gulped.

The Soviets did dreadful things in Ukraine. Nearly every Ukrainian I've known even slightly has a relative or ancestor who suffered Soviet prison, labor camp or execution, each individual tragedy a tiny portion of the torment that time has distilled into simple words: Famine, Terror, Genocide, Stalinism - shorthand for the ghastliness entire libraries can't adequately explain or fully describe. No wonder millions rejoiced in June 1941 when the German Wehrmacht crossed into Ukraine on their way to Moscow.

It didn't take long, however, for the Nazis to begin doing dreadful things of their own. Here, too, are millions of individual stories of prisons, camps, deportations and executions, each a tiny portion of the suffering we've abbreviated to a few horrific words: Eastern Front, Ostarbeiter, Fascism, Holocaust - shorthand for evil that defies comprehension.

I remember the boy who made the hangman's noose as being pretty quiet and, besides, he was from somewhere else - Toronto, Rochester, Syracuse or Buffalo - so I didn't play with him much, but I did glance at him from time to time with curiosity and trepidation. I knew my own father had been in a Nazi prison somewhere and something called the NKVD had tried to kill him, but that seemed almost normal.

Being hanged, though - that was a whole different story; one I never got to hear. My tent-mate couldn't bear to talk about his father and I wasn't going to ask any more questions. Someone hanged him - either the Soviets or the Nazis, probably. Both, I learned, did that routinely. Either way, many children were scarred for life.

In World War II, Ukrainians were tragically caught between two of history's most evil powers. Forced to choose sides, those in central and eastern Ukraine - with nowhere else to turn - rallied to the Red Army. In western Ukraine, paramilitary groups that had organized before the war to separate from Poland, morphed into the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), adopting the same mission as the Red Army - drive out the barbarian who marched to a swastika while presuming to rule over the "Untermen-schen" (subhumans) who had naively tossed flowers at his tanks and troops.

With much smaller forces and limited arms, the UPA adopted classic guerrilla tactics, disrupting Nazi supply lines, attacking ammunition dumps, harassing individual units. As for the Red Army, it fought immense battles. In they end, they drove the Nazis all the way back to Berlin.

Although UPA and the Red Army fought a common enemy, a clash between the two forces was unavoidable. Hiding in the forests and mountains of western Ukraine, amidst a supportive population that helped them stay in the field into the early 1950s, the UPA was fighting for nothing less than full independence for Ukraine. The Soviets, though, would have none of that. With Ukrainians on both sides, the decade-long struggle amounted to a civil war. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the UPA was ultimately subdued. But its legacy is incalculable.

Because the UPA challenged Stalin so openly and fearlessly, he had to take a political stand, as well as a military one. Historians John Armstrong, Yaroslav Bilinsky and others argue that Stalin created the accouterments of statehood for Soviet Ukraine - a separate Foreign Ministry and a seat in the United Nations - in order to undercut the UPA's rationale for fighting. That short-term tactic, however, had a long-term impact. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry and U.N. delegation - hollow institutions in 1944 and 1945 - became crucial in 1991 when independence was hanging in the balance.

The UPA also had an immediate and far-reaching impact on Soviet society and economy, where mass arrests and slave labor played such a central role. Thousands of UPA members had been killed fighting the Nazis and the Soviets, but many thousands more were captured and shipped to the gulag to join millions of others who were already there, including future Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The UPA, writes Solzhenitsyn, "brought the bacillus of rebellion" to the gulag: "These sturdy fellows, fresh from the guerrilla trails, looked around themselves ... were horrified by the apathy and slavery they saw, and reached for their knives." It was they, he maintains, who set in motion the revolt that forced the dismantlement of the vast network of slave labor camps. A handful of those released in the mid-1950s became the dissidents whose activism escalated a generation later into a revolution that toppled an empire.

Casting a sweeping eye on Ukraine's history since 1940, it's astonishing to see what's been achieved. Struggling for independence, Ukrainians took on two of history's greatest monsters - the Third Reich and the Soviet Union - and played critical roles in destroying both. Then they amazed themselves and the world when they defended their freedom in the Orange Revolution.

Today, Ukrainians commemorate their struggle against the Nazis with a thousand village monuments. The Red Army role in World War II is well-chronicled and celebrated. UPA's story, on the other hand, is neglected and unappreciated. They deserve better, even as they take satisfaction in the blue-and-yellow flag flying over government buildings, the trident, the currency, the growing use of Ukrainian, an Olympic team and Independence Square in the center of Kyiv.

Ironically, that's where several hundred UPA and Red Army veterans recently confronted each other: on October 15 on the UPA's 63rd anniversary and again on November 7, the 88th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, with 800 Kyiv police on duty and 6,000 more on call. As it developed, both sides - many of them with canes and some in wheelchairs - waved flags, sang songs, shouted slogans and then went home.

Ukraine has moved on, even if the two groups of now-frail veterans remain hostile to one another. And that's a shame, because they have much in common. Thanks to them, Europe has no more concentration camps; no child will be rendered speechless because some ideology killed his father. Both sides did a great thing for their country and the world. Too bad they can't acknowledge that.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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