There’s history and there’s myth. What’s the difference? Historians peruse documents, ledgers, letters, newspapers, memoirs, oral accounts, films, photographs to create a record of what happened. Myth is its essence, distilling it all into a narrative a nation, religion, etc. universally accepts, almost on a subconscious level, to celebrate events and heroes with music, poems, icons, bank notes, paintings and lullabies mothers sing to newborns.
World War II was a global catastrophe like no other. There are thousands upon thousands of books in which every day is documented: huge military operations; horrific, heroic and criminal experiences of millions who died and those who survived. There are movies, memoirs, artwork, graveyards, museums and untold numbers of shoeboxes with family memorabilia.
Last November, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited President Donald Trump and other global leaders to join him for the May 9 parade on Red Square featuring tanks, missiles and columns of troops saluting Russia’s president as he and the country commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. President Trump said he would like to attend, but at a minimum would send a high-level delegation. Others, citing Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, declined.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and its ubiquitous Lenin commemorations, October Revolution and May Day parades, the World War II victory celebration is Russia’s biggest holiday, and Mr. Putin promotes it to validate his country’s greatness and justify his rule as steward over its historic legacy and promises for a shining future. Doing so, he’s creating a modern-day myth: that Russia heroically delivered humanity from Nazi tyranny while the rest of the world stood by.
The Russian World War II myth relies on history even as it obliterates it. The Red Army did indeed destroy the Nazi Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, marching all the way to Berlin. That’s the history, justifying for Mr. Putin the massive choreography of a Red Square parade. But that myth also relies on a network of lies and taboos. It’s basically forbidden to write about the Hitler-Stalin Pact that launched the war. Shamelessly and absurdly, Mr. Putin blames Poland for World War II, the prime victim in September 1939. The massive Lend Lease assistance America provided Stalin starting in 1941 – munitions, food, logistics, intelligence – is forgotten. Mention of the NKVD murders of Ukrainian, Polish and Baltic military and civilian leadership is also banned. Ukrainians’ collective response to the Nazi invasion in June 1941 is utterly distorted. Ukrainians did indeed welcome Germans as liberators. Entire Soviet armies in Kyiv and elsewhere surrendered without resistance. Why defend Joseph Stalin, who had engineered the Holodomor, launched the Great Terror and decimated the Soviet military with executions in the 1930s?
History, of course, records that the Germans came not as liberators but as tyrants and oppressors no different than Stalin, seizing grain and livestock, forcing young people into slave labor. They murdered Jews, executed those who resisted, and subjected the nation to slaughter and ruin. In less than a year, the people turned against them, especially in western Ukraine where the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists provided the military, social and political infrastructure to form the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). It’s an amazing story: how a people beleaguered by both the Nazis and the Soviets maintained tens of thousands of partisans in the field for nearly a decade – a staggering accomplishment dwarfing the famed French Resistance, a Ukrainian story yet to be told in all its complexity.
Crafting Mr. Putin’s overweening depiction of Russia defeating Nazi Germany, Kremlin myth-makers downplay the contribution of non-Russian peoples in the war even though millions of them served in the Red Army. Worse: even as they deny Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler (1939-1941), Russian propagandists echo their Soviet-era counterparts, depicting World War II Ukrainians, especially the UPA, as collaborators with Germany, allowing Mr. Putin’s warped politics to smear the Orange Revolution (2004-2005) and the Euro-Maidan Revolution of Dignity (2013-2014) as “neo-Nazi” manifestations, inspired and funded by the United States and other Western countries.
So here’s the history. Early in the war, Stalin effectively acknowledged that Ukrainians would not fight for the Soviet Union and made a strategic pivot: the struggle was for Ukraine. Posters were produced with an angry Taras Shevchenko admonishing Ukrainians to “sprinkle liberty with the evil blood of tyrants.” National radio replaced the Soviet national anthem with Danylo Kryzhanivsky’s stirring music to Shevchenko’s “The Dnipro Roars and Groans.” The Red Army awarded military medals featuring Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Volodymyr Sosiura’s “Love Ukraine as You Love the Sun” also achieved anthem-like proportions, inspiring Ukrainians, including millions in the Red Army.
In 1944, with the Wehrmacht being driven back to Berlin, the UPA focused its independence fight on the Soviet Union. The Kremlin countered, awarding Kyiv with its own Foreign Ministry and a separate Commissariat for National Defense. Historian Yaroslav Bilinsky in “The Second Soviet Republic” (1964) contends that was to undercut the UPA’s appeal so Moscow could argue that Soviet Ukraine was already a sovereign state. No need for the UPA. And indeed, months after the end of the war, Soviet Ukraine became a charter member of the United Nations. Nearly half a century later in 1990-1991, its hitherto hollow and subservient institutions were decisive as officials moved the country toward independence.
The UPA? By 1950, it was pretty much crushed, its warriors, civic/cultural leaders and social supporters killed, exiled or blended into Soviet society, or having escaped. And yet, it remained a critical force. Solzhenitsyn in the “GULAG Archipelago” recounts how young Ukrainians in the early 1950s, fresh off the guerrilla trails, were horrified by the slavery in Siberian labor camps and “reached for their knives,” staging uprisings and largely dismantling the Stalin-era GULAG.
World War II? There are millions of stories but three major narratives: the Holocaust; rallying Soviet Ukraine against the Nazis; rallying Western Ukraine to the UPA. Each from different circumstances contributed to what we have today: a free and sovereign Ukrainian republic that happens to have a Jewish president. What’s needed now is a national myth – in the most positive sense of that word – one to weave the different social/political/ethnic strands into a unified narrative of Ukraine’s heroic stance in World War II. That’s up to historians, musicians, novelists, politicians and others to forge. I’m confident we’ll get there.
Russia? The coronavirus spared us from having to endure Mr. Putin’s mendacious myth. The May 9 parade was cancelled.
Andrew Fedynsky’s e-mail address is [email protected].