Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi 437

East European Politics and Societies Volume 24 Number 3 Summer 2010 435-463 © 2010 Sage Publications 10.1177/0888325410364673 Commemorating the Future http://eeps.sagepub.com hosted at in Post-War Chernivtsi http://online.sagepub.com Svetlana Frunchak University of Toronto, Canada

Throughout the Second World War and the post-war period, the city of Chernivtsi was transformed from a multiethnic and borderland urban microcosm into a culturally uni- form Soviet socialist city. As the Soviets finally took power in this onetime capital of a Hapsburg province in 1944, they not only sponsored further large-scale population transfers but also “repopulated” its history, creating a new urban myth of cultural uni- formity. This article examines the connection between war commemoration in Chernivtsi in the era of post-war, state-sponsored anti-Semitism and the formation of collective memory and identities of the city’s post-war population. The images of homogeneously Ukrainian Chernivtsi and Bukovina were created through the art of monumental propaganda, promoting public remembrance of certain events and personalities while making sure that others were doomed to oblivion. Selective commemoration of the wartime events was an important tool of drawing the borders of Ukrainian national identity, making it exclusivist and ethnic-based. Through an investigation of the origins of the post-war collective memory in the region, this article addresses the problem of perceived discontinuity between all things Soviet and post-Soviet in Ukraine. It demonstrates that it is, on the contrary, the continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet eras that defines today’s dominant culture and state ideology in Ukraine and particularly in its borderlands.

Keywords: post-war Ukraine; Chernivtsi and Bukovina; Jews; historical memory and identity; nationalism

n his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev described in detail his participation in the Idesign of a monument to General Nikolai Vatutin to commemorate his leading role in Ukraine’s liberation. The then head of the Ukrainian State Committee of Arts, M. Khrapchenko (who had a Ukrainian surname but in fact came from the Smolensk region and was “not a Ukrainian,” remarked Khrushchev), rejected the

Author’s Note: I am grateful to Lynne Viola, Jan T. Gross, Pieter Judson, John Paul Himka, Kate Brown, Steven Jobbit, Heather DeHaan, Alex Melnyk, and the anonymous reviewers for EEPS for their invalu- able comments on earlier drafts. This article has also benefited from the audience at the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boston, 12-16 November 2009, and the members of the Work in Progress History discussion group at University of Toronto. Research for this article has been partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Scholarship (2008) and the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies Research Grant (2009).

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inscription proposed by Ukraine’s political leader: “To general Vatutin from the Ukrainian people.” Khrapchenko believed that “that would be a nationalist inscription.” He said, “Probably Bazhan1 thought it up, and after all, Bazhan is a nationalist.” Khrushchev replied,

Wait a minute. It wasn’t Bazhan who proposed it. It was I. Bazhan was also pleased by it, I don’t deny that, but what kind of nationalism is there in this—an expression of gratitude from the Ukrainian people to a Russian? This honor—this statement of gratitude—will have the opposite effect. The Ukrainian nationalists will go out of their minds if an inscription is dedicated in the name of the Ukrainian people to a Russian.

Khrushchev remembered that a lot of effort was required from him in defending the wording of the inscription and that he won out only when he appealed to Stalin and said that the whole thing was outrageous. According to Khrushchev, Stalin answered, “Tell them to go to hell! Do what you propose, and that’s all there is to it.” And so Khrushchev did, feeling proudly until his late days when he wrote his memoirs that the monument stood in Kiev in memory of Vatutin’s life and work and “acknowledg- ment by the Ukrainian people of the services he rendered in the struggle against the aggressor.” Khrushchev spoke out of a conviction, common among Ukrainian elites of the day, that there were two types of Ukrainian nationalism, dangerous and alien bourgeois nationalism and Soviet Ukrainian nationalism, the official ideology of the Ukrainian semi-state. The major difference between the two ideologies, as Khrushchev made clear in his remark, was their attitude towards Russia. Of course, the Soviet variety was never acknowledged as nationalism but was branded patriotism instead. An “outsider” like Khrapchenko could not always distinguish between the two. (“There are educated people who concern themselves with problems of culture in the Soviet Union,” Khrushchev reflected on the matter. “But that man showed his igno- rance and lack of political education.”)2 But whether he spoke from the position of an internationalist or a great-Russian chauvinist, politically ignorant (in the context of Soviet Ukraine), Khrapchenko got it right: it was Ukrainian nationalism and a perfect example of state nationalist monumental propaganda of the twentieth century. This Ukrainian nationalism—a modern ideology based on the firm belief in a real, natural, and rather ancient unity of people that had righteously enjoyed its own polity— was described by scholars with deferent metaphors such as “ethnic particularism” or racism without racial theory.3 Undoubtedly, this nationalism (I will adhere to this general term) was restricted—limited, negotiated, Soviet, communist—as was the nature of its semi-state, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) within the Soviet Union. This nationalism was an inseparable part of a more comprehensive ideology of the USSR, defined by different historians “the friendship of peoples,” a brand of imperialism, national Bolshevism, or simply Soviet state ideology.4 This Soviet Ukrainian nationalism was controversial since it was territorial but also ethnic

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and primordialist. It was cultural and linguistic but also geopolitical—but it was by no means unique as every nationalism is controversial in one way or another. None of the above contains any path-breaking news. A number of credible works, including the ones cited earlier in this article, demonstrated that the Soviet state sup- ported the spread of modern nationalism and used national markers and identities (often newly created) for its repressive politics.5 Such conceptualization of the Soviet nationality policy has now become widely accepted among Western scholars. Timothy Snyder, for example, described the Soviet nationality policy as a contradic- tory combination of “an early modern approach to nationality” with some aspects of modern understanding of the question. If the former prescribed dividing the land into national territorial units and encouraged distinct languages, the latter rooted the nation in the masses rather than elites, assigning a nationality to every citizen, and thus in fact created nationalities.6 In his case study of Lithuanian nationalism, Snyder aptly remarked that the nationalist dreams about nationhood of the few Lithuanian Romantics of the nineteenth century, reinterpreted by the Lithuanian nationalists of the twentieth century in ethnic terms, were fulfilled under Soviet rule in Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic that was by no means Russian.7 However, when it comes to discussing the history and contemporary situation of Ukraine, there is still a strong tendency to separate the notions of “Soviet” and “Ukrainian” or to equate the terms “Soviet” and “Russian/Russified,” which leads to a serious analytical fallacy. This separation creates a perceived dichotomy between the Ukrainian (defined in terms of indigenous population and society) and the alien Soviet power (defined in terms of a foreign state or empire). For instance, Snyder himself asserted in his discussion of Soviet historiography that “Ukrainians were told that Kyivan Rus’ was a Russian state,”8 leaving out another very important aspect of the Soviet Ukrainian historical myth: Kievan Rus’ was interpreted, first and fore- most, as a cradle of the three brotherly nations: Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. Soviet interpretation of the medieval Kievan Rus’ appropriated some claims from Ukrainian pre-Soviet Romantic historiography and refuted others, maintaining a certain degree of continuity while changing important stresses.9 Although emphasiz- ing the common “roots,” Soviet historical narrative recognized separate Ukrainian (and Belorussian) nation, thus legitimizing modern Ukrainian nationalism and the construction of Ukrainian polity by means of creating national institutions, promoting national language and symbolic culture, and purifying the Ukrainian body national from foreign elements when and where their presence seemed dangerously strong to the authorities. Both constructs—the national myth and the national polity— were inherited and put to use by the post-Soviet Ukrainian state. Through the magnifying lens of a local case study, this article focuses precisely on this continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet historical eras in Ukraine. This continuity, rather than an alleged radical break from the Soviet past often declared by Ukrainian elites, defines today’s dominant culture and state ideology in Ukraine. Contemporary Ukrainian state nationalism is an heir primarily to Soviet Ukrainian

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cultural policies rather than the integral nationalism preached by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), remolded and developed after World War Two by some scholars and amateurs in Ukrainian diaspora in the West, and widely promoted by many educational and cultural institutions in the post-Soviet Ukraine.10 I draw on several examples of monumental commemoration of the war in the city and region of Chernivtsi11 that reflected the policies and practices of cultural transformation in the borderland regions incorporated into the Ukrainian republic in the course of World War Two. Although my primary concern is with memory and memorials, this article also discusses some events of the war era. I discuss actual events only to provide necessary background for analysis without aspiring to give the topic of World War Two in Bukovina the comprehensive and detailed consideration that it deserves. I begin with the standard war memorials constructed in the city. Next, I outline the peculiarities of the Holocaust in the region and show how local wartime victims were (or were not) remembered and commemorated by the Soviet regime. Finally, I discuss how local Soviet Ukrainian officials solved the question of commemorating local resistance heroes in Chernivtsi. I conclude the article with a reflection about the meaning of post-war conceptualization of the war for the later development of Ukrainian state ideology and official memory. Chernivtsi experienced its golden age as an urban center in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century. The city developed as the provincial capital of Bukovina after the region’s incorporation into the Habsburg Empire in 1774-1775.12 The area later known as Bukovina had constituted the margins of the medieval Slavic states and the early-modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the mid-fourteenth century. Since then, the region gradually became a part of the Moldavian Principality, later within the Ottoman Empire. A typical eastern European borderland, it was largely populated by Orthodox Slavic- and Romanian-speaking peasants and an insignificant number of Jews. The latter were (again, as was typical of the region) concentrated in Chernivtsi, at that time nothing more than a little town with crooked streets and small houses. By the end of the Hapsburg period of its history (1775-1918), Bukovina had become a home for numerous migrants, chief among them Germans (both Protestant and Catholic), Jews (including Hasidic Jews), Romanians, and Polish Roman-Catholics as well as less numerous Russians (Old Believers), Slovaks, Czechs, and Hungarians (or, more specifically, Szeklers). The modern city of Chernivtsi, which was, in fact, the cre- ation of the Hapsburg Empire, was then a primarily German-speaking provincial capital featuring a university, an opera, and all the other attributes of a small central European city modeled after the capitals of east-central Europe. The city’s population also grew remarkably throughout the Austrian period. In the 1850s, Chernivtsi had about 20,000 residents, consisting of Germans (35 per cent), Jews (23 per cent), Romanians (22 per cent), Eastern Slavs (16 percent), and Poles (4 per cent).13 The census in 1910 showed an urban population of 87,100, 34 per cent of whom were Jews, 18 per cent Eastern Slavs, 17 per cent Poles, 16 per cent Romanians, and

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15 per cent Germans.14 In 1918, Bukovina became a province of the Romanian state, making Chernivtsi one of the largest city in Greater Romania and one of its five university centers. According to the Romanian census of 1930, the population of Chernivtsi was 112,427 with the following ethnic composition: 38 per cent Jews, 27 per cent Romanians, 14 and 1/2 percent Germans, 10 per cent Ukrainians, 8 per cent Poles, and 2 and 1/2 per cent others.15 Only a part of this change in ethnic percent- ages was due to the actual population movements, such as an influx of Romanians from other parts of the country after the incorporation of the city into Greater Romania in 1918. The other important aspect of this change is explained by re- classification of ethnic identities. For example, many Orthodox Bukovinians claimed Romanian rather than eastern Slavic identity, while some assimilated Jews who previously registered as Germans of Jewish faith were choosing or forced to identify as Jews. The war began in Bukovina in 1940, when the Soviet Army entered the northern part of the region and annexed it to the Soviet Union together with Bessarabia. While the annexation of Bessarabia was agreed upon beforehand in a secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany on 23 August 1939, Northern Bukovina was taken “impromptu” given Romania’s rather helpless international position. On 28 June 1940, two days after sending a note to the Romanian government requesting the return of Bessarabia with Northern Bukovina (the latter on the grounds of the alleged ethnic, linguistic, and cultural connections of the local population with the Ukrainian people), Soviet troops marched onto the streets of Chernivtsi. The city was destined to become another Soviet urban center, but the transformation was delayed for several years. When the Soviet-German war began on 22 June 1941, the province and the city were evacuated by the Soviets immedi- ately and with no serious resistance, leaving the territory with no political power for a few days before the Romanian administration returned to Bukovina following the official invaders, the Nazi German forces. Soviet rule was re-established in Chernivtsi on 23 March 1944 and in the region in September of 1944.16 The war became the major historical “moment” in the history of the Chernivtsi province according to the official historical scholarship and ideology of Soviet Ukraine. It was conceptualized as the “Liberation” and the ultimate “Reunification” of long-suffering Bukovina with its Ukrainian brethren in the friendly family of Soviet nations under the leadership of the heroic Russian people.17 Given the importance of monumental propaganda for Soviet politics and culture,18 the war had to be commemorated. Commemoration of the war and the victory was ordered as the first priority for Soviet Ukrainian local architects, planners, and administrative authorities.19 Therefore, soon after Soviet power was re-established, the architectural authorities of Chernivtsi20 began planning a grand memorial of the victory and reunification (which were inseparably connected and merged into a single historical event). A simple obelisk-stele was designed and erected in a big hurry, without approval from Kiev, resulting in a piece of monumental “art” so outrageous in its

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ugliness and poor quality that it was mentioned at a national conference of Soviet architects of Ukraine in Kiev as an example of how the war should not be commemorated.21 The bent stele was quietly removed from the square in front of the city hall. The Chernivtsi architectural commission announced a competition for the best project of an appropriate memorial. After vigorous discussions among local architects, artists, and ideologues, and due approval by Kiev specialists, a new memorial was constructed in 1946 on a different cite, in front of the regional Communist Party committee, in the place of an unfinished Romanian memorial to an unknown soldier.22 The monument that exists today became one of the very few widely mentioned and quoted in Ukrainian popular literature “monuments of architecture and history” from Chernivtsi province, although it does have its own ridiculous issues that did not escape the attention of locals and visitors. The memorial depicts the standard, several-meters-high figure of a Soviet soldier holding the banner in one hand (which, if unbent, could reach at least his knee). The monument’s base was designed as a tribune, making it the place of all official public events and com- memorations in the city, related to the war or not. The victory, the liberation, and the reunification of Bukovina with Ukraine were made, visually, literally, and quite materially, the heart and the central pillar of the city’s and the region’s identity that, even more than the Soviet Ukrainian post-war identity in general,23 depended on the war as the new beginning of history. This was an object of core and radical memorial politics that sent a direct and strong message from the Ukrainian center, dictating the official Ukrainian interpretation of the war and the entire history of the region, superimposing it on any local interpretations of the past that could exist, and order- ing its internalization through mandatory and frequent public ceremonies. Another example of such standard and radical, non-negotiable monumental politics was a memorial site in the form of a mass grave of “Red Army soldiers who died defending Bukovina from German-Romanian occupants in the Hertsa region,”24 a Romanian area that was annexed together with Northern Bukovina to provide a buf- fer zone between the major city and the state border.25 The installation of such a memorial in a district populated by Romanians, many of whom were heavily infused with radical nationalist Romanian propaganda,26 ran counter to the early Soviet party memoranda that called local authorities for extra sensitivity and caution while implementing new cultural policies in the newly incorporated Northern Bukovina.27 Whatever were the historical and cultural identities of Hertsa locals, the message behind the memorial told them that their land was now Ukrainian and that Romania was an enemy. Whether they believed it or not (and they hardly did, although at least some of their children probably would), Hertsa locals had to “speak Bolshevik,”28 or rather its local brand, “Soviet Ukrainian,” even if they were allowed to speak it in Romanian translation.29 As opposed to the “careful Sovietization” of 1940-1941, in post-war Soviet Ukraine, there was no place for excessive sensitivity to a tiny national minority in the immediate proximity to the border. Many historians of the twentieth century have argued that it was common for national(ist) governments all

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over Europe before, during, and especially after the Second World War to treat cultural minorities as abnormalities in the healthy body national. These abnormalities were cured by standard and radical, hard-line policies, even if cultural.30 The grand victory memorial in Chernivtsi and the modest Hertsa memorial to fallen soldiers were two typical examples of such policies. Such strong but general monumental messages were not enough, though. The Ukrainian government urged local administrations to commemorate the war locally, through concrete and familiar events, narratives, and heroes.31 Decrees and letters to regional party committees called for the beautification of war tombs, better maintenance of cemeteries, conservation of places of battles and acts of resistance, and commemoration of local heroes. In Chernivtsi, this requirement presented a problem. Generally, the two-sided task of localizing Ukrainian socialism and Ukrainianizing concrete structures of urban life that was in the core of the post-war transformation of this city was highly challenging. The problem was that, essentially, Chernivtsi was a Jewish-German city: German in terms of the most widely spoken language, and Jewish in terms of the number of its Jewish residents (of diverse political, cultural, and religious backgrounds) and the influence that they had on the city’s development and appearance. At the time of Austrian annexation, Chernivtsi was primarily a Jewish town; its major street was called Main Jewish street or Large Jewish street; beyond the central “Jewish town,” settlements were sparse and rural in type.32 The major urban land marker and the only religious building located within the city core was the Large synagogue located on the highest point of the area, indicating the prevalence of Jewish population in the center of pre-1774 Chernivtsi. This old synagogue gave the name to the street it stood on (Synagogengasse) and was later replaced by a new one that remained the biggest synagogue in the city until the construction in 1873-1877 of a choral reformist synagogue, the Temple.33 In the pre- Soviet period, the city’s German-language high culture was maintained primarily by assimilated Jews. Chernivtsi’s oldest part, the Yiddish-speaking lower town, was an important part of the city’s structure, while one of the most important Hassidic centers in the world developed in Sadagora, a small neighboring town that is today a part of the city.34 This cultural image began to change during World War One, when Chernivsti became a battlefield of the Eastern Front, and more so between 1918 and 1940, when Bukovina was part of Greater Romania. The process of cultural homogenization, so typical a fate for the borderland regions long claimed and finally acquired by a nationalistic interwar European state, began to simplify the cultural demographics of Bukovina.35 However, the city not only retained its dominant Jewish-German culture until the outbreak of World War Two but also received a large influx of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returning from Transnistria and other regions at the end and after the war. According to a report from the local party leader Ivan Zeleniuk to Kiev in April 1944, the estimated number of Jews in Chernivtsi was 17,341, or 42 per cent of the (again, estimated) entire city’s population.36 An NKVD report from 13 June 1944 gave the number of 23,213, or 53 per cent of the total

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population. Fifty per cent of these Jews, according to the head of the province NKVD, arrived to Chernivtsi from Romania and eastern provinces of the USSR. Those who were denied registration in the city “settled” throughout the province, which had at least 30,713 Jews as far as the NKVD was informed.37 Even the lower number from April 1944 was higher than the 1930 percentage of 38 per cent, which is rather unusual for post-Holocaust eastern Europe, which largely emerged from the war deprived of the majority of its Jewish population. The way the Holocaust happened in Chernivtsi and Bukovina was also rather unusual (not to say, of course, that the word “usual” is applicable to the Holocaust otherwise). After several acts of mass executions performed by Nazi officials in the city38 and initial concentration in ghettos, many Jews from Bukovina (as well as of several neighboring regions) were deported to the camps in Transnistria,39 a region used by Romanian authorities for deportation, imprisonment, and the occasional execution of Jews from Bukovina, Bessarabia, and neighboring territories. The majority of the prisoners of Transnistrian camps died from starvation, disease, mal- nutrition, and atrocities. However, because Transnistria was not an industrialized death camp per se but rather a semi-organized exile territory, the survival rate in these eastern European region was higher than the European average.40 At the same time, probably as many as twenty thousand Jewish residents of Chernivtsi were able to stay in the city throughout the war or at least for a long time, thanks to the system of “authorizations” granted to important professionals, businessmen, and other indi- viduals by the Romanian authorities.41 However, this was not the entire story of Jewish wartime experiences in Chernivtsi. This story began still under Romanian rule with occasional anti-Jewish violence, although it was not widespread in the region.42 Then, after the transfer of Bukovina to the USSR in June of 1940, followed arrests and deportations of “political ene- mies” and “socially unreliable elements” that culminated in a wave of mass repressions in mid-June of 1941. This wave was by no means unique to the Chernivtsi region but rather a part of a larger campaign of cleansing the newly annexed western territories of the USSR that lasted from the fall of 1939 until late June 1941 and was interrupted only by the outbreak of the Soviet-German war. About thirty thousand people were deported to eastern Soviet territories from the Moldavian Autonomous Republic and the Chernivtsi and Izmail provinces of the Ukrainian SSR; probably ten thousand of them were from Northern Bukovina.43 For the city of Chernivtsi this campaign meant mass arrests, evictions from their houses, and deportations of mainly the Jewish population. Of course the arrests did not affect exclusively Jews and were by no means caused by an official racial policy; all kinds of politically suspicious or socially unreliable people could become the targets of NKVD raids. For example, radical Ukrainian nationalists were among the first arrest victims.44 However, in the wider context of World War Two, these arrests and deportations can be conceptualized as pre-Holocaust state-sponsored pogroms in the atmosphere of growing popular anti-Semitism.45 At least, they were probably perceived so by

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Chernivtsi’s non-Jewish locals who knew little about Soviet class politics but were brainwashed with Romanian anti-Semitic propaganda and who often appropriated (by stealing, buying for low prices, deceiving local traders who were not familiar with Soviet money, etc.) the deportees’ belongings or watched the authorities doing so.46 Then, during the few days of power vacuum in the region after Soviet troops left and before Romanian military rule was established on 7 July 1941, radical Ukrainian and Romanian nationalists47 organized several pogroms and mass mur- ders of Jews throughout Chernivtsi province.48 Finally, soon after the German-Soviet war ended, Chernivtsi province witnessed an unprecedented “evacuation” of the Jewish population to Romania in 1945-1946. Concerned with the high concentration of Jews who had stayed in Chernivtsi throughout the war or who had returned to the province after the deportation to Transnistria, the Soviet government issued a special decree that allowed and, in fact, demanded emigration to Romania of Jews who had been Romanian citizens prior to 1940. This resulted in a unique Soviet population transfer that was probably equally desired by the Jews of Bukovina, local authorities, and the central authorities of the USSR and Ukrainian Republic.49 However, mutual interest usually did not mean mutual respect or leverage in power relations: the departing Jews, especially those who still had accommodation and belongings in Chernivtsi, were abused on a mass scale by Soviet bureaucrats anxious to receive the vacated apartments and possessions that were not so voluntarily left behind.50 In fact, the transfer that was officially branded “evacuation” in Soviet decrees51 was referred to as “eviction” or “kicking out” (vydvorenie) in the secret inner People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and party correspondence.52 In his information note on the population of the city and the province, the head of Chernivtsi NKVD, Rudenko, who was later involved in the largest “affairs” around “Jewish” apartments and possessions, remarked—it seems, with surprise and frustration—that “at the time of liberation of the city of Chernivtsi by the detachments of the Red Army, the best apartments, with full furniture sets, in the city center as well as in its outskirts, were occupied by the Jewish population, which comprises 1,360 apartments.”53 In all of these experiences, the local non-Jewish population was often involved either as direct perpetrators (rarely), or as witnesses and beneficiaries of violence against Jews.54 But of course, there was “no Holocaust” in the Soviet Union. Official Soviet interpretation of the war did not recognize “exclusive suffering” by any particular groups of Soviet population, although it was in fact based on the notion of “exclusive heroism” of the Russian people and other nationalities that were acknowledged as important and valiant contributors to the victory over Nazism.55 Ukrainians were on this list. Local authorities of Chernivtsi had a hard time reconciling the framework of equal suffering and hierarchical heroism with the demand to commemorate the war locally. In the large city and a provincial capital of Chernivtsi, there were victims of specific anti-Jewish violence, and there were places of mass shootings of Jews by the Nazis in July 1941 that were widely known by locals.56 At least this aspect of the Holocaust had to be acknowledged, but obviously in a Soviet way. As

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early as 1945 the Chernivtsi architectural commission projected a commemorative plaque on River Prut at the place of the most mass shootings and monuments at different cemeteries (five in total) “to the victims of mass executions and tortures by the German-Romanian occupiers.”57 These projects, though, were either never real- ized or neglected rather soon after their construction.58 The authorities chose local events that were not related to the touchy issues of anti-Jewish violence for more open, grandiose, and widely popularized stone commemoration.59 According to a widespread Soviet practice, the tank of the Red Army Guards lieutenant Pavel Nikitin who first entered Chernivtsi on 25 March 1944 was installed on a pedestal on the Central Train Station square in 1946.60 In the same year of 1946, a memorial to General Bobrov and other high-ranking officers who par- ticipated in the liberation of the province and later perished elsewhere was installed in the city’s central park. Initially local architects planned to combine this memorial with the Liberation/Victory monument, but Kiev authorities insisted that “these two themes . . . be elaborated in two separate monuments.”61 A monument to the fallen soldiers was constructed near the main entrance to the “Russian” cemetery (the Christian part of the city’s historic cemetery that also had a “Jewish” part) in 1948 and 1949. In front of the monument, a field of Soviet officers’ graves covered with solemn black marble gravestones was arranged.62 It was this Russian part of the historical cemetery where all the victory and war-specific events were commemorated and celebrated, while the Jewish cemetery with a modest common grave of the Holocaust victims was slowly deteriorating, as more and more Jews were leaving the region. Chernivtsi architects also worked hard on a project to commemorate the fallen soldiers of the first Czechoslovak detachment that fought on the Soviet side and died on the territory of Bukovina. The discussions were long, and the competition for the best project had to be extended. The winning project was characterized by the commission as simple and tranquil as appropriate for a tomb monument; it also “reveal[ed] clearly the particular Czech artistic forms” to appeal to Czech visitors.63 All of these “localized” memorials were used to evoke the feelings of deep gratitude for liberation and eternal remembrance in the local population. As required by Kiev, they were rather specific monuments. However, they were local only in terms of the location of the events they commemorated. The heroes they were dedicated to were newcomers, or even passers-by, in Chernivtsi. One important element was still missing in this emerging picture of World War Two commemoration in the city of Chernivtsi: the local resistance movement. In 1952, this gap was finally filled. On the occasion of the up-coming tenth anniversary of the death of a group of young communists (komsomoltsi, or Komsomol members) from the town of Khotyn, the second-largest urban center of the province, the Chernivtsi provincial government decreed to commemorate the young fallen heroes with a “solid” memorial on their grave in Chernivtsi. The authorities also ordered that Khotyn street in Chernivtsi be renamed Khotyn Komsomoltsi Street and that permanent exhibits be opened dedicated to the resisters in Chernivtsi and in Khotyn.

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Constant public references and numerous commemoration ceremonies in front of the memorial quickly made the phrase “Khotyn Komsomoltsi” synonymous with “antifascist resistance in Chernivtsi.”64 The group of fifteen young people, “primarily Ukrainians from Khotyn,” whose activities were uncovered one year after their com- mencement, five of whom were executed by Romanian authorities in 1942,65 became the official local wartime heroes of Chernivtsi.66 Not for the first time, Khotyn, not even a historical part of Northern Bukovina, “saved” Chernivtsi province for the sake of the official representation of appropriate cultural and ideological symbols.67 Was there no resistance in Chernivtsi? Did the city, populated primarily by people alien or indifferent to the Soviet regime, submit unconditionally to its old-new master, the Romanian state? In fact, there was resistance in Chernivtsi. This resistance was comparable in scope to the one in Khotyn but more continuous than that of the undoubtedly heroic but inexperienced Khotyn Komsomol members. To begin with, there was an official “underground party committee” dispatched by the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party to Chernivtsi province in 1941. This official underground organization was headed by a former senior lector of the Chernivtsi province party committee, Olexiy Boyarko, and the head of the military department of one of the village district party committees, Zakhar Gleb. Both were arrested by the Romanian state security police, the Siguranţa, very soon upon their arrival, in November 1941, and executed in the spring of 1942.68 This was enough for them to be mentioned in some popular literature about the city and province in the context of wartime events.69 Apparently, though, their official appointment by the Central Committee and their death in the hands of Romanian occupants were not enough for them to be venerated as the heroes of Chernivtsi province. And yet Chernivtsi did have active antifascist resistance groups throughout the war. Soon after the German-Romanian military regime was established in Chernivtsi in 1941, local communists and socialists (mostly former members of Romanian Communist Party and Bund, but also those without any political affiliation) who also happened to be mostly Jewish by nationality began their attempts to create an underground organization for resistance. An organization of young people, most of them members of the Komsomol, led by Martin Batero, Ianosh Deutsch, and Leon Retter, later joined a group of older anti-fascists, led at different times by Bruno Wasserman, Willy Glesner, Stefan Laszlo, Bursch Shweifel, L. Engel, and L. Krakus. The group, which had about 150 members throughout the occupation period, was engaged in the activities typical for the occupied urban centers where police control was very strong and access to resources such as arms and technology limited. They organized antifascist agitation among workers, composed lists of victims of German and Romanian terror, and staged several actions of sabotage at Chernivtsi factories producing shoes and clothes for the Romanian army. They listened to Soviet and other allies’ radio broadcasts on a self-made station constructed by a member who was an engineer, translated reports into German or (often very bad) Ukrainian, and spread leaflets in

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 446 east European Politics and Societies the city.70 While many members were deported to Transnistria or executed, the organization existed until the day of official liberation by the Red Army, according to its official reports and recollections of one of its leaders, Batero. The organization left several folders of documents about their actions. On the eve of the liberation, the group established radio connection with the approaching Red Army detachments and focused on protecting “socialist property” of the city from “robbery” by the retreating Romanians. On 29 March 1944, it was Batero, Engel, and four other resistance members who hoisted the red banner on the tower of Chernivtsi city hall.71 In the specific context of the city of Chernivtsi and in the midst of late-Stalinist, state-sponsored, and popular anti-Semitism that grew especially strong in the Ukrainian SSR, these people’s foreign-sounding names, of course, could not be put in the same sentence with the “heroic fighters against fascist invaders of the Soviet Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi.” It was not only because most of them were so-called “local communists,” people deemed potentially useful but suspicious by Soviet Ukrainian statesmen.72 There are fair reasons to argue that—again, in the specific context of Chernivtsi region that had only been ruled by Soviets for one year prior to the war—this group could theoretically pass the tough, complex, and politically loaded process of “verification” of the claimed partisans and underground resisters. This bureaucratic but often arbitrary verification process was conducted by various parties such as Communist Party officials, secret police, and partisan staffs. Generally, the verification was inseparably connected to the general purge of the society of Soviet Ukraine based on the behavior and choices that its citizens, and particularly communists, made during the war and occupation.73 This verification also became the major venue of negotiation of one’s political identity that left some space for manipulation both for the state (to a larger degree) and its subjects under scrutiny (to a lesser degree). In practice, in the verification process in the immediate post-war years, the major criterion for recognition as a resister or a partisan was act- ing on the orders of the official party committees rather than the actual acts of resistance. Another important issue for the investigators was identifying “false partisans” who claimed alleged resistance activities only to cover their actual collaboration with the occupants or other “treacherous” activities.74 In the case of the Chernivtsi region, it was officially recognized by the party authorities and later in official historiography that local party committees had failed to establish official underground organizations before they evacuated the province.75 The only officially appointed resistance leaders, Boyarko and Gleb, did not have a chance to conduct any organi- zational or actual subversive activity before they lost their lives. Thus, post-war Soviet officials (and propagandists) in Chernivtsi province had to deal with the so- called “spontaneous” organizations in order to be able to report any resistance at all. This was not unique to Chernivtsi, and there were ways to “legitimize” such spontaneous organizations in Stalinist terms. The most typical way was to “create” the appropriate party leadership and guidance where it did not exist by means of shifting around archival documents and simply creating narratives as needed.76 According to

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the available original documents, in respect to the official connection to the party organs, the situation was similar in the cases of Khotyn and Chernivtsi underground groups. In fact, the initial report of the organization-instructional department (OIV) of the Chernivtsi province party committee that was directly responsible for the resistance verification clearly indicated that neither of these organizations was connected to or guided by the Communist Party of Ukraine. According to the report, their activities were similar in scope, and none of them were doubted as unreliable or potentially false.77 Both organizations of Martin Batero (in Chernivtsi) and Kuz’ma Galkin (in Khotyn) were branded as Komsomol and youth organizations, which allegedly made it easier to legitimize them without connection to the official party organs. Both Batero and Galkin, as well as most of their immediate colleagues, joined Komsomol during the preceding year and were too young to have any previ- ous party membership or political experience. The organization in Chernivtsi led by the older anti-Fascists, including Engel, was mentioned in the OIV report as separate from Batero’s group and branded as a “Jewish anti-Fascist organization.”78 Interestingly, the actual reports of the group of Batero-Engel (which, according to these reports, acted as a single organization rather than two separate groups) did claim that “before the retreat of the Red Army, comrades Batero and Reter received from the secretary of the Stalin district committee of the Komsomol organization [of the city of Chernivtsi] a task to stay in the city and organize an underground Komsomol organization.”79 In his interview, Batero asserted the same.80 This fact, however, was ignored in the official OIV report. In terms of membership, the Khotyn group was much smaller than the Chernivtsi group, according to the reports. In terms of survival, although the leaders of the Chernivtsi group did survive, unlike the leaders of the Khotyn group, a substantial number of the group members were deported to Transnistria and died (as mentioned in the report and later in Batero’s interview), thus also perishing in the hands of Romanian authorities. Theoretically, both groups were candidates for recognition as resisters and for local commemoration, for the lack of official organizations, in the newly incorporated Chernivtsi. None of the groups could be suspected of collaboration with the enemy. In case of Khotyn komsomoltsi, they were executed by Romanian authorities as rebels. In case of Chernivtsi resisters, communist authorities in Chernivtsi were well aware of the “special treatment” that Jews received from the German and Romanian authorities, in spite of the official rhetoric that denied any specifically “national” suffering.81 And yet Khotyn Komsomol members were chosen to become the venerated heroes, while the Chernivtsi group was subject to further scrutiny by a special provincial commission organized by the provincial party committee in the fall of 1945. Upon investigation, the commission concluded that “the practical activity of this organization was extremely limited . . . , did not preclude the oppressors from fulfilling their plans in Chernivtsi province . . . [and] was not truly a Communist organization.”82 By comparison based on the initial reports, the same conclusion could be made about the Khotyn organization. Probably to make the case stronger,

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most of the acts of resistance declared by the members of Chernivtsi organization (treated here as a single entity rather than two separate groups) were classified as “legends” and “fiction.” Actions of sabotage that were recognized as real were declared “crimes” that in fact benefited Romanians rather than the USSR.83 Engel and other leaders of the organization were also accused of anti-Soviet moods, desire to emigrate, and the intention to “ascribe to themselves the merits before the Soviet power and by this means acquire confidence of the Soviet and party organs.”84 All of the above allows us to conclude that it was precisely their nationality that made the group of Engel and Batero absolutely unsuitable for veneration or at least modest recognition in the official popular discourse of World War Two in Chenrivtsi, let alone perpetuation in monumental propaganda. This claim does not assume that it was, technically and literally, the nationality of these people that did not allow them to “pass” the verification as resisters, or that it was a priori impossible for a Jew to be recognized as a hero in the USSR. In fact, some of the group members were “promoted to leading positions” after the war. (Interestingly, though, Martin Batero, who was “sent to Moscow to study,”85 was actually listed as French by nationality in the special commission report quoted above.) These people could not be recognized as heroes in post-war Chernivtsi because some of them were leaving the city together with their synagogue-attending, German-speaking parents; because many of them and their relatives were witnesses to the specifically Jewish tragedy that was not officially recognized by the Soviet myth of the war; because their names sounded foreign to the Ukrainian and Russian languages and revealed their “different” identity; because they were hated by many Slavs who had been brainwashed by fierce anti-Semitic propaganda during the war;86 because they were allegedly (or actually) not loyal to the Soviet state and some of them fought against fascisms but not for the Soviet power. In short, they could not be heroes because they were not wanted in Chernivtsi to begin with and therefore were being evicted as a national group, as demonstrated earlier in this article. They did not belong to the Ukrainian nation that was proclaimed the official master of Northern Bukovina and Chernivtsi. This Soviet Ukrainian nation, based on “the wholeness of its territory” and “ethnic unity,” according to the most accredited Soviet historical monograph about the Great Patriotic War in Northern Bukovina,87 could accommodate minorities but needed heroes from its own people. The cited monograph confirms the validity of the conclusions made here. Published after the era of the extreme late-Stalinist anti-Semitism and after the initiative by the central Ukrainian Propaganda and Agitation Department to identify “unknown resisters” that led to recognition of many among those who did not pass the verification process in the 1940s, the book made sense of the abrupt narratives from the post-war resistance reports in Chernivtsi according to the by then crystal- lized ethos of the Ukrainian SSR. Obsessed with ethnic identities and focused on Ukrainian national suffering, its author, S. Komarnyts’kyi, nonetheless made sure to use the word “Jewish” as seldom as possible in a history of a heavily Jewish region

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and city, substituting it with the terms “peaceful residents” and “Soviet citizens” according to the context. He amended the embarrassingly short story of Gleb and Boyarko with emotional descriptions of their last days and a detailed account of the alleged organization by them of an underground network while in Romanian prison.88 He described the detailed story of Khotyn Komsomoltsi as “the bright page in the struggle against fascist occupants,” paying great attention to the biographies of the group members and mentioning their Ukrainian and occasionally Russian nationality.89 He even recognized the contribution of Romanian communists to the cause of the liberation of Bukovina.90 When discussing the numerous cases of resistance in the province, he mentioned the acts of “various groups in the city of Chernivtsi” and listed actions mentioned in the original reports from 1944 without mentioning any names but those of Batero and some Martiuk, one of the few members of Chernivtsi group with Slavic last names. Batero himself was mentioned as “komsomolets’ Baterro, a German by nationality.”91 None of the Batero group’s resisters, though, made their way to the wider popular discourse of World War Two in Bukovina. If Jews of Chernivtsi could be occasionally, willy-nilly recognized as victims, they could by no means pass as heroes.

* * *

Monumental propaganda is not only about remembering things and people that are being commemorated but also (and probably even more) about forgetting those not represented by stone narratives. The Jews of Chernivtsi, including victims, fighters, rabbis and communists, businessmen and poor shoemakers, were easily forgotten as they, and their particular cultural marks, were leaving the city for good throughout the Soviet period. After the mass “evacuation” of Jews from Chernivtsi in 1945-1946, Jewish emigration from this city was never fully forbidden and small numbers continued to leave the city throughout the Soviet period. When, in the late 1970s, emigration became easier, the last mass emigration of Jewish population followed, which deprived the city of almost all its Jewish residents. The forgetting of Jews was sponsored by the Soviet Ukrainian government through, among other things, installation of the war memorials that stressed the Ukrainian origins of the region and the feelings of ethnicity-based Ukrainian patriotism while marginalizing (to the point of silencing) the wartime fates of the city’s Jewish population. The results of this state-sponsored forgetting were not always straightforward, though: for several decades the city retained its Jewish population and thus, to a certain extent, the living memories of the wartime experiences and often pre-war life of local Jews. With time, however, the monuments seem to have acquired lives of their own, continuously expressing the desire for the future that would resemble the recent past that they (mis)represented, the past of Ukrainian pre-Soviet Chernivtsi and Bukovina. This future was transformed into present as Cnernivtsi residents were “pragmatically” remembering Ukrainian national existence in their city in order to legitimize and

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localize their Ukrainian identities.92 By the time when, after several decades, anti- Semitism was no longer an acute political issue and certain channels for constructing alternative public memories began to open, the future-past once fabricated by the monuments had become a demographic and cultural reality of the city. According to the 2001 census, the city had a population of 236,700 characterized by a national composition typical of present-day urban Ukraine: 78 per cent Ukrainians, 11 per cent Russians, a modest minority represented by 6 per cent Romanians and Moldavians, and a miniscule percentage of “others” that included Jews.93 Any alternative narrative of Chernivtsi’s past, if told in this Ukrainian city, sounded surreal and implied feelings of uneasiness, discomfort, or even guilt.94 If in the post-war decade the imagined past was used to project the desirable future, in the late Soviet period a more convinc- ing project was at work: the real present was being projected back into history. Forgetting became the most comforting way of “remembering” the city’s Jewish past. In almost an Orwellian development, the city’s Jewish past was sent to the black hole of history while the new scenario of history was internalized by locals. As its other aspects were partially altered, this forgetting of non-Ukrainian past travelled, unchanged, from the Soviet to post-Soviet narrative about Ukrainian history and culture. If the rhetoric of “past multiculturalism” is employed in contemporary Chernivtsi, it is mostly to flirt with the city’s visitors and foreigners. Lately, there has been an increased interest in the city by tourists and international research- ers who often bring their own memories and postmemories (as well as money to invest) with them as they return, physically or metaphorically, to the birthplace of their families and ancestors. These sons and daughters, but more often grand-sons and grand-daughters of the pre-war Chernivtsi, mostly rely on the alternative image of the city, that of a lost multicultural world which was, or seems to have been, too comfortable to be lost forever.95 This world was called by Paul Celan, who was born and formed as a poet in inter-war Chernivtsi, and whose poetry is one of the most important emblems of Western memory of the Holocaust, a city “where human beings and books used to live.”96 Today, this image of the non-existent Czernowitz “lives” in a virtual space on the World Wide Web.97 The visitors to the real Chernivtsi find it to be populated not only by other people but also by very different books. Until recently, the vocabulary of multiculturalism in Ukrainian Chernivtsi remained in most instances a political tool and a cultural cliché as the intellectual and public discourses and their visual representations are dominated by the Ukrainian nationalist narrative about the city’s past. The narrowness of Ukrainian alleged reconcilia- tion with past diversity is not lost on the Jewish “pilgrims” to the city of their origin. Describing the experience of their research in Chernivtsi, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer remarked, with a degree of (expected) disappointment, that “the memorial debates [they] engaged in only served to demonstrate how fraught the politics of memory are, and are likely to be in the foreseeable future, in Ukraine.”98 Even Ukrainian intellectuals who are fascinated by the “historical phenomenon of multiculturalism” in Chernivtsi find it extremely hard to reconcile the idealization, and

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perceived resurrection, of the past “ethnic tolerance” with the overarching ethos of Ukrainian ethnic-based nationalism and state-building.99 The following three examples from Chernivtsi illustrate this point well. In 1991, a group of historical preservation activists organized a commemoration of an Austrian-era monument destructed by Soviet government in 1949. The monument, popularly known as Black Eagle, had been erected in memory of the fallen soldiers of a Chernivtsi regiment of the imperial army. Local preservationists interpreted the monument as a symbol of tolerance and multiculturalism and organized a mass commemorative ceremony that involved Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, Roman Catholic, and Jewish religious services. However, the “monument to the monument” installed in the former place of the Black Eagle was a wooden Orthodox Christian cross,100 a symbol that speaks volumes to the relation between the fast-passing moments of oral expressions of remembering the “others” and the incessant monumental embodiments of Ukrainian (Slavic, Christian, Orthodox) identity of Chernivtsi. In 2006, a doctoral candidate at Chernivtsi State University made an unprecedented move for local historical scholarship. He defended a dissertation entitled “The Holocaust in Northern Bukovina and Khotyn Region.” After years of careful, veiled Soviet-style references to anti-Jewish violence by the lonely activists of Jewish revival in the province, this was a major step towards the re-conceptualization of the region’s history and the beginning of return of its Jewish participants into its almost homogeneously Ukrainian narrative. However, the dissertation focuses on the “Romanian” and “German” Holocaust, making only a marginal reference to the mass killings of Jews by Ukrainian nationalists in 1941and abstaining from serious revisions of the place of OUN in Ukrainian history.101 In 2008, after several years of work by an activist of the Jewish revival in Chernivtsi, Natalia Shevchenko, and with reluctant and modest support of local government, a museum of “Jewish culture” was opened in Chernivtsi, in two rooms of the grandiose four-storied building of the former Jewish national house. To the great surprise and disappointment of many Jews of Chernivtsi background who watched the development closely, the museum represented Jewish life in the city until 1940 and had not even a single reference of the Holocaust. In response to query about this lacuna, Chernivtsi authorities replied that they wanted the museum to be about life, not about death.102 These cases represent the way the contemporary Ukrainian intellectual elite tend to treat the Holocaust: by partial recognition of somebody else’s faults, remaining silent about participation of “their own” people in the “harvest of despair”103 that devastated Ukrainian lands in 1939-1945. They recognize Jews as their former neighbors, but not as neighbors-turned-victims. Continuity in commemorating the war and using it as an apocalyptic moment in history is not as obvious in Ukraine as it is in Russia, where the victory continues to be the major pillar of popular national identity. For Ukraine, the war is a much more “difficult moment.” On the one hand, events, notions, and personalities not related

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 452 east European Politics and Societies to the Ukrainian territory or ethnically defined “people” were omitted from post- Soviet Ukraine’s official war myth. On the other hand, elements of the alternative, non-Soviet, or, in Soviet parlance, bourgeois nationalist interpretation of Ukrainian history were added.104 These add-ons to the superficially revised Soviet narrative results in many painful controversies that are extremely hard to reconcile in today’s Ukraine, such as the one of simultaneous veneration of Soviet and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) veterans as heroes that President Yushchenko insists on. It is quite possible that the war as the major event will also slowly die out from the pantheon of popular memory and culture in Ukraine. However, the way Ukraine, its culture, and its society was imagined and reconstructed after the war and, impor- tantly, after the Holocaust, continues to be imperative to the contemporary state of affairs. Ukraine without its Jews, or at least without the Holocaust as it happened in Ukraine—with active participation and mass witnesses by locals—is much more convenient, or comfortable, for its elites and, largely, wider masses of population. Although radical Ukrainian nationalism was (and still is, for it by no means is con- signed to history) of course openly anti-Semitic, the paradigm of Ukraine without Jews (and particularly, Chernivtsi without Jews) was undoubtedly firmly established among the intellectual circles and public throughout the years of Soviet Ukrainian education, propaganda, and internalization of their messages in public ceremonies.

Notes

1. A survivor of the repression of the “Ukrainian literary renaissance” of the 1930s, one of the most venerated establishment writers in Soviet Ukraine since 1941; a longtime member of the Central Committee (CC) of Ukrainian Communist Party (Bolshevik) (CP[B]) and the deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR); the head of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine (1953- 1959); from 1958 head of the editorial board of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia publishing house. 2. This and preceding quotes are from Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs, vol. 1, Commissar (1918- 1945), trans. George Shiver (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 601. 3. The term “ethnic particularlism” was suggested by Yuri Slezkine in his article “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53:2 (Summer 1994): 414–15; Eric Weitz conceptualized Soviet nationality policy in racial terms in his book A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) and the article “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race,” Slavic Review 61:1 (2002): 1–29. Other important recent studies of Soviet state-promoted nationalism include Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto, 2004); and Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place. From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 4. Terry Martin (see above) adopted the “Friendship of Peoples” as a term to indicate Soviet state ideology and approach to nationality questions since late 1930s; David Brandenberger described Soviet state ideology as “national Bolshevism.” See National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Several historians reconceptualized the USSR as a particular type of empire (as opposed to a more traditional Sovietological understanding of Soviet Union in pure terms of imperial domination and

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 Frunchak / Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi 453 national/colonial subjugation), drawing on recent developments in colonial and post-colonial theory. For example, Douglas Taylor Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and the above-mentioned works of Terry Martin and Serhy Yekelchyk). 5. One recent study that focuses on promoting Polish national identity in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and later using Polish nationality for political repression in the 1930s is Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place. 6. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 186. 7. Ibid., 97. 8. Ibid., 210. 9. While the founder of the modern Ukrainian historiography, Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, was banned from the national pantheon as a bourgeois nationalist, and his argument about the continuity of (proto) Ukrainian statehood from Kievan Rus’ to Galician-Volhynian principality rather than Muscovite state and later Russian Empire was rejected, Hrushevs’ky’s premise of basing the history of Ukraine on the wider masses of people rather than elites and political institutions that allowed to legitimize Ukrainian nation was transferred to the Soviet variant of Ukrainian historical narrative. For more, see Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory; Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 125–32. 10. This is not to deny the important impact of the ethnic-based violence and nationalist propaganda by OUN during World War Two that contributed, together with other instances of ethnic violence and the Holocaust, to radicalization and ethnicization of the general ethos and national identities of the masses and the elites alike in Ukraine and Poland. See, for example, Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 154–214. 11. For the sake of convenience, I use the current official name of the city, Chernivtsi, throughout the text rather than it various historical names that included Czernowitz, Cernauţi, and Chernovtsy. 12. The classic and still the best history of the city of the pre-Austrian and Austrian periods is Raimind Friedrich Kaindl’s Geschichte von Czernowitz von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (Chernivtsi: Pardini, 1908); see also Raimund Friedrich Kaindl, Zur Geschichte der Schtadt Czernowitz und ihrer Umgegend (Chernivtsi: Czopp, 1888); see also a reprint of this work in Ukrainian and German: Raimind Friedrich Kaindl, Geschichte von Czernowitz von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart/Istoriia Chernivtsiv vid naidavnishykh chasiv do siohodennia (Chernivtsi: Zelena Bukovyna, 2005). 13. The numbers of “Ukrainians” and “Romanians” in Bukovina have been debated for a long time by Ukrainian and Romanian historians. The Austrian statistical records classified populations primarily according to their language of communication (Umgangssprache) and religion. Because of the multiple names used for various ethnic groups in the region, and because the majority of both Romanian- and Slavic-speaking population shared the Orthodox religion, the Austrian statistics left space for multiple interpretations by the interested national groups in later times. Raimund F. Kaindl wrote in his Geschichte von Czernowitz: “unter . . . den ‘Moldauern’ . . . wir Rumänen und Ruthenen verstehen müssen” (p. 263). Kate Brown in A Biography of No Place writes extensively on the difficulties of national classification in borderlands, noting that even the categories of language and religion, not to mention nationality, were not fixed enough when it came to censuses. If this fluidity of categories was not a problem for scrupulous colonial Austrian statisticians who kept multiple records according to the different categories, it did present a big problem for the later Romanian and Ukrainian writers of the region’s history who understood the nationality of local population as essential for their scholarly enterprises. 14. See Austrian census statistics quoted in Stepan Kostyshyn, Vasyl’ Botushans’kyi, Olexandr Dobrzhans’kyi, Yuriy Makar, Olexandr Masan, and Liubomyr Mykhailyna, eds., Bukovyna. Istorychnyi narys (Chernivtsi: Zelena Bukovyna, 1998), 161–62. 15. Romanian census statistics quoted in Denys Kvitkovs’kyi, Teofil Bryndzan, Arkadii Zhukovs’kyi, eds. Bukovyna—ïï mynule i suchasne (Paris: Zelena Bukovyna, 1956), 429. For population statistics, see

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 454 east European Politics and Societies also Hanna Skoreiko, Naselennia Bukovyny za zvstris’kymy uriadovymy perepysamy pruhoï polovyny XIX—pochatku XX st.: istoryko-demohrafichnyi narys (Chernivtsi: Prut, 2002), 133–55. 16. For general background on World War Two in Bukovina, see Hermann Weber, Die Bukowina im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Völkerrechtliche Aspekte der Lage der Bukowina im Spannungsfeld Zwischen Rumänien, Sowjetunion und Deutschland. Darstellung zur Auswärtigen Politik (Hamburg, 1972); Vasyl’ Botushans’kyi, Serhy Hackman, Yuriy Makar, Olexandr Masan, Ihor Piddubnyi, and Hanna Skoreiko, Bukovyna v konteksti ievropeis’kykh mizhnarodnykh vidnosyn (z davnikh chasiv do seredyny XX st) (Chernivtsi: Ruta, 2005), 586–660. 17. For example, Na onovlenii zemli. Shcho dala radians’ka vlada trudiashchym Pivnichnoii Bukovyny (Chernivtsi, 1941); Sovetskaia Bukovina (K godovshchine osvobozhdeniia ot Rumynskikh boyar) (Chernivtsi: Otdel propagandy i agitatsii obkoma KP(b)Ukr, 1941); G. Medvedenko and I. Starovoitenko, “Besarabiia i Pivnichna Bukovyna (istoryko-heohrafichnyi narys),” Komunistychna osvita 8 (1940): 24–37; S. Komarnyts’kyi, Radians’ka Bukovyna v roky Velykoï Vitchyznianoï viiny 1941-1945 rr. (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1979) and the post-Soviet updated edition of this book, Vony nablyzhaly peremohu. Bukovyna ta Bukovyntsi v roky Velukoii Vitchyznianoii viiny 1941-1945 rr. (Chernivtsi, 1995); S. Komarnyts’kyi, “Vklad trudiashchykh Radians’koi Bukovyny u peremohu nad fashysts’koiu Nimechchynoiu,” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal 7 (1970): 47–53; S. Komarnyts’kyi, “Z istorii komso- molu Pivnichnoi Bukovyny (1920-1945 rr.),” Ukraïns’kyi Istorychnyi Zhurnal 7 (1969): 61–68; P. Svytko and S. Komarnyts’kyi, “Borot’ba proty fashysts’kykh okupantiv na Bukovyni v 1941-1944,” Ukraïns’kyi Istorychnyi Zhurnal 8 (1965): 66–72. 18. See Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Revolution: Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Heaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 19. See the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of Ukrainian SSR and CC of the CP(B) of Ukraine from April 1, 1944 “On beautification of the graves and commemoration of the memory of soldiers who perished in struggle for the liberation and independence of the Soviet motherland” in O. Iakymenko, ed., Zakonodavstvo pro pam’iatnyky istoriï ta kul’tyru (Zbirnyk normatyvnykh aktiv) (Kiev: Vydavnytstvo politychnoï literatury, 1970), 220–21. The decree was widely communicated and its fulfill- ment reinforced through numerous letters, inquiries, and memos from Kiev to local administrations as well as planning organizations. As a result, in the end of the 1940s, 90 per cent of all monuments were dedicated to the events of the Revolution and World War Two in most provinces of Ukraine. By the end of the 1950s, only less than 2 per cent of all registered monuments were “pre-October.” See S. Kot., ed., Istoryko-kulturna spadshchyna Ukraïny: problemy doslidzhennia ta zberezhennia (Kiev, 1998), 40. 20. The architectural commission and an architectural-artistic council affiliated with it were responsible for the design of public places and monumental art among many other tasks. See Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Chernivetskoï Oblasti (hereafter, DAChO, translated State Archives of Chernivtsi Province), f.932, op.1, spr.347, ark.1. 21. Tvorchi zavdannia arkhitektoriv Ukraïny u vidbudovi mist i sil (Kiev-Lviv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo tekhnichnoï literatury Ukraïny, 1946), 44–45. 22. DAChO, f.932, op.1, spr.350, ark.20; Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Vyshchykh Orhaniv Vlady ta Upravlinnia Ukraïny (hereafter, TsDAVOVU, translated Central State Archive of Supreme Organs of Power and Administration), f.R-2, op.7, tom.III, spr.178, ark.106–9; Serhii Osachuk, Volodymyr Zapolovs’kyi, and Natalia Shevchenko, Pam’iatnyky Chernivtsiv (Chernivtsi: Zelena Bukovyna, 2009), 38–39. 23. For the development of the argument about the particular importance of the myth of World War Two for ideology, culture, and general ethos of Ukrainian republic, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 24. DAChO, f.932, op.1, spr.363, ark.1–2. 25. Hertsa region was added to the territory of Northern Bukovina with no historical or ethnographical grounds whatsoever. This is not to claim that any of “historical and ethnographical” justifications of

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 Frunchak / Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi 455 annexation of new territories into the Soviet Union were legitimate or objective; however, Stalinist ideologues did not even attempt to interpret the case of annexation of Hertsa region in cultural and ethno- graphic terms. For more on the details of the question of adding Hertsa region to the Soviet part of divided Bukovina in 1940, see Botushans’ky et al., Bukovyna v konteksti ievropeis’kykh mizhnarodnykh vidnosyn (z davnikh chasiv do seredyny XX st), 596, 612–13. For a Romanian perspective on this question, see for example Ion Gherman, Istoria Tragică a Bucovinei, Basarabiei şi ţinutului Herţa (Bucharest, Romania: All, 1993). 26. At the time of Soviet annexation, Hertsa region was populated almost exclusively by a Romanian population with a low percentage of bilingual persons, which led to immense difficulties in administering this area due to the language barrier and the lack of reliable Romanian-speaking cadres. For example, the following documents from DAChO refer to various problems in Hertsa, including mass crossing of the border by the population, and reveal that Soviet authorities had virtually no control other than military power over the area during the early years of Soviet power: f.1, op.1, spr.4, 5, 6, 8, 29 (combined), ark.65; f.1, op.1, spr.28, ark.114–6; f.1, op.1, spr.30, 31, 32, 33 (combined), ark.47–50. Note that some files (spravy) in DAChO have been re-arranged in the post-Soviet period. The classification, though, remained the same, resulting in many cases when new single folders contain documents previously located in separate files. In such cases, new combined files list numbers of old files the documents come from. It is not clear, though, what materials come from what files, since the sheets of the new files are re-numbered, resulting in an awkward reference system with multiple file (sprava) numbers but single sheet (arkush) references. 27. DAChO, f.1, op.1, spr.28, ark.31; f. 1, op.1, spr.30, ark.17. 28. The concept of “speaking Bolshevik” as the obligatory official language for self-identification and self-expression in Stalinist society belongs to Stephen Kotkin—see his Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Even earlier, Jan Gross conceptualized the Stalinist regime as the one that depended largely on the “destruction of language” (along with the destruction of communities) so that the structure of language was radically modified, the speech was ritualized, and there was “no more lapse in time between naming and judging” (and often believing, I would add). See Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad. The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 29. Officially, after several years of confusing messages and policies, official language and ethnicity of Romanians in Chernivtsi province was identified as “Moldavian.” The term “Romanian” was mostly reserved for the discourse about the “historical other” in the region, that is, the “Romanian occupation,” “Romanian boyars”, and “nationalist, capitalist interwar Romanian state” as well as the post-war Socialist Romanian state. 30. See Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 31. For example, in August 1947, a letter from the CC of CP(B) of Ukraine to all province CP committees called to pay more attention to monuments and commemoration related to revolution and World War Two (Kot, Istoryko-kulturna spadshchyna Ukraïny, 40). In May of the same year of 1947, a directive followed that required the necessary work to be finished, criticizing particularly Lviv and Chernivtsi for dragging behind in this important political task. Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads’kykh Orhanizatsii Ukraïny (Central State Archive of Civic Organizations of Ukraine; hereafter, TsDAHOU), f.1, op.23, spr.4929, ark. 5–6; DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.674. 32. Kaindl, Geschichte von Czernowitz, 239. 33. For the architectural argument about the cultural dominance of Jews and its reflection in the urban structure of the old town, see Bohdan Kolosok, “Mistobudivna spadshchyna Chenrivtsiv,” in Architekturna spadshchyna Chernivtsiv Avstriis’koii doby (Materialy konferentsii 1-4 zhovtnia 2001 r.) (Chernivtsi: Zoloti lytavry, 2003), 20; Roman Mohytych, “Mistobudivel’nyi rozvytok Chernivtsiv u XIV-XIX

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 456 east European Politics and Societies st. Shliakhy okhorony urbanistychnoho seredovyshcha mista,” in Architekturna spadshchyna Chernivtsiv, 28, also published in Visnyk instytutu “Ukrzakhidproektrestavratsiia” 12 (2002): 68–75. For an art- historical argument about the signs of Jewish culture and religion in the city’s later architecture, see Natalia Shevchenko, Chernovitskaia Atlantida (Chernivtsi, 2004). 34. The classic works on the history of Jews of Bukovina and Chernivtsi are Hugo Gold, ed., Geschichte der Juden in der Bukowina. Ein Semmelwerk, 2 vols. (Tel-Aviv, Israel: Alamenu, 1962) (also partially available in English translation online at http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/ [accessed 27 October, 2009]). More recent and specific works include Fred Stambrook, “The Golden Age of the Jews of Bukovina, 1880-1914,” Working Papers in Austrian Studies (Center of Austrian Studies, University of Manitoba, Canada, 2003); Martin Broszat, “Von der Kulturnation zur Volkgruppe. Die Nationalestellung der Juden in der Bukowina im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift 200:3 (1965): 572–605; David Sha’ari, “The Jewish Community of Czernowitz under Habsburg and Romanian rule. Part One: Habsburg Rule,” Shvut 6 (1997): 150–83; J. Leslie, “Der Ausgleich in der Bukowina 1910: Zur öster- reichischen Nationalpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in E. Brix et al., eds., Geschichte zwischen Freiheit und Ordnung: Gerald Stourzh zum 60. Geburtstag (Graz, 1991). Particularly illuminating is a comparative case study by Albert Lichtblau and Michael John, “Jewries in Galicia and Bukovina, in Lemberg and in Czernowitz: Two Divergent Examples of Jewish Communities in the Far East of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,” in Sander L. Gilman, ed., Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 29–66. 35. Radical politics of cultural homogenization were not successful in Bukovina until the late 1930s. The city retained its “Austrian character” even later, throughout the war years. The best historical accounts of the period are Mariana Hausleiter, Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina: Die Durchsetzung des national- staatlichen Anspruchs Grossrumäniens 1918-1944 (Munich, Germany: R. Oldenbourg, 2001); Mariana Hausleiter, “Gegen die Zwangsrumänisierung: die Kooperation von Bukowiner Deutschen, Juden und Ukrainern in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” WerkstattGeschichte, 32 (2002): 31–43; and Hausleiter’s chapter on Bukovina in Irina Livezeanu, ed., Cultural Politics of Greater Romania. Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995): 49–89. Numerous memoirs are also very illuminating. For example, see Georg Drozdowski, Damals in Czernowitz und Rundum. Erinnerung eines Altlsterreichers, Wiederaufgelegt von der Georg-Drozdowski-Gesellschaft (Klagenfurt, 2003); Vernon Kress, Pervaia zhyzn’. Nevydumannaia povest’ (Moskva: Globus, 2001); Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life (New York: Schocken Books, 2004); Pearl Fichman, Before Memories Fade (n.p.: Book Surge Publishing, 2005). Novels and other fiction by Karl Emil Franzos, Gregor von Rezzori, Rosa Auslander, and other writers who had lived in the inter-war Bukovina also contain biographical and memoir component that reveals strong continuity between Austrian and Romanian periods. 36. TsDAHOU, f.1, op.23, spr.817, ark.4; see also Mordechai Altshuler, “The Soviet ‘Transfer’ of Jews from Chernovtsy Province to Romania, 1945-1946,” Jews in Eastern Europe 2:3 (1998): 54–75. 37. Data from a report by the province NKVD head Rudenko (DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.61, ark.1–2). Most probably, many survivors were unable or scared to return to their homes in rural areas and smaller towns where their homes were often appropriated by others. In the atmosphere of post-war hunger, scar- city, and popular anti-Semitism often encouraged by Ukrainian nationalists’ detachments active in many rural areas, they were attracted to Chernivtsi by the rumors of possibilities to emigrate, better employment opportunities, and comparative safety. 38. Between 6 and 8 July 1941, up to several thousand Jews in Chernivtsi were killed by Nazis. Among the first victims were the major rabbi and chorus members of the reformist Temple. Nazis gath- ered approximately two thousand victims in the Romanian House in Chernivtsi and later took them to the shore of the Prut River, made them dig graves, tortured some of them, and shot most of them. Many more Jews were killed on the streets and cemeteries of the city during these days. DAChO, f.653, op.1, spr.103, ark.2; G. L. Chabashkevich, et al., eds. Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi. Chernovitskoie obshchestvo ievreiskoi kul’tury im. Shteinbarga. Vestnik. Svidetel’tsva uznikov fashystskikh lagerei-getto, iss. 3 (Chernivtsi, 1994), 143; Aleksandr Kruglov, Sbornik dokumentov i materialov ob unichtozheniiu natsistami evreev

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Ukrainy v 1941-1944 godakh (Kiev: Institut iudaiki, 2002), 30, 173; O. A. Surovtsev, “Holokost u Chernivtsiakh v roky rumuno-nimets’koii okupatsii,” Bukovyns’kyi istoryko-etnohrafichnyi visnyk, iss. 4 (Chernivtsi: Zoloti lytavry, 2002), 89–92. 39. Transnistria was created as a political unit by Nazi rulers to compensate Romania for the regions of Transylvania and southern Dobrudja which had been lost to Hungary and Bulgaria, respectively. It was a territory of approximately forty thousand kilometers situated between the Dniester and the Bug rivers, in the south corner of what is today Ukraine. 40. See, for example, J. Ancel, “The Romanian Way of Solving the ‘Jewish Problem’ in Bessarabia and Bukovina, June-July 1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988): 187–233; Dalia Ofer, “The Holocaust in Transnistria. A Special Case of Genocide,” in Lucian Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock, eds., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945 (New York: Sharpe, 1993); D. Ofer, “Life in the Ghettos of Transnistria,” Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996): 229–47; A. Shachan, Burning Ice: The Ghettos of Transnistria (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); E. Ophir, “Was the Transnistria Rescue Plan Achievable?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6:1 (1991): 1–16; V. P. Shchetnikov, “K istorii ievreiskikh lagerei-getto na territorii Transnistrii: 1941-1944,” Holokost i suchasnist’ 1 (2003): 14–15; J. Ancel, Transnistria 1941-1942. The Romanian Mass Campaigns. History and Documents Summaries, vols. 1-3. (Tel Aviv, 2003); J. Ancel, Transnistria, vols. 1-3 (Bucharest, Romania: Atlas, 1998); Julius S. Fisher, Transnistria: The Forgotten Cemetery (South Brunswick, NJ: T. Yoseloff, 1969); L. Sushon, Transnistriia v adu. Chernaia kniga o katastrofe v Severnom Prichernomorie (po vospominaniiam i dokumentam) (Odessa, 1998). For information concerning Chernivtsi and the province specifically, L. Sh. Zinger, L. P. Liapunova, et al., eds., Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi. Chernovitskoie obshchestvo ievreiskoi kul’tury im. Shteinbarga. Vestnik. Svidetel’tsva ochevidtsev, iss. 1 (Chernivtsi, 1991); Ie. M. Finkel’ and P. V. Rykhlo, eds., Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi. Chernovitskoie obshchestvo ievreiskoi kul’tury im. Shteinbarga. Vestnik. Svidetel’tsva uznikov fashystskikh lagerei-getto, iss. 5 (Chernivtsi, 1996), 46–50. 41. Up to twenty thousand Jews in Chernivtsi received “authorizations” to stay in Chernivtsi thanks to the efforts of the city’s mayor, Traian Popovici, who was opposed to deportations. See Traian Popovici, Spovedania/Testimony (Bucharest, 2000); parts of his Testimony is also available on http://czernowitz. ehpes.com/ (go to Popovici memorial pages) (accessed 27 October, 2009); see also Oleh Surovtsev, Holokost u Pivnichnii Bukovyni i Khotynshchyni v roku druhoï svitovoï viiny (Candidate of Science diss., National University of Chernivtsi, 2006), 112–13; also his “Dolia ievreis’koii hromady Pivnichnoii Bukovyny pislia podii Holokostu,” in Pytannia istorii Ukraiiny: Zbirnyk naukovykh statei, vol. 7 (Chernivtsi: Zelena Bukovyna, 2004), 133–37 and “Deportatsii ievreis’koho naselennia Pivnichnoii Bukovyny v 1941-1942 rokakh,” in Ternopil’s’kyi derzhavnyi pedahohichnyi universytet. Naukovi zapysky. Seriia: Istoriia, iss. 1 (Ternopil’, 2004), 128–33; Popovici’s memoirs quoted in Finkel’ and Rykhlo, Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 60–61. 42. Anti-Jewish violence intensified before and during the retreat of Romanian army and authorities in June 1940. See Botushans’kyi et al., Bukovyna v konteksti ievropeis’kykh mizhnarodnykh vidnosyn (z davnikh chasiv do seredyny XX st), 617–18. 43. Two largest categories of deportees from the western regions of Ukrainian SSR were ethnic Poles and Polish citizens of Jewish nationality. In 1941 alone, probably 275,000 Polish citizens were deported by Soviet authorities. On the deportations of 1939-1941, see Pavel M. Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2004), 117–23. Statistics on Chernivtsi region come from V. Kholodnyts’kyi, “Vplyv politychnykh protsesiv na demohraphichni vtraty narodonaselennia Chernivets’koï oblasti v 1940-1950 rr.,” Naukovyi visnyk Chernivets’koho Universytetu 6:7 (1996): 171. 44. Tamara Marusyk, Zakhidnoukraiïns’ka humanitarna intelihentsiia: realii zhyttia ta diial’nosti (40-50-ti rr. XX st.) (Chernivtsi: Ruta, 2002) and her several articles: “Represiï sered students’koï molodi Chernivtsiv u 40-kh rokakh XX st.,” Naukovyi visnyk Chernivts’koho Universytety 6:7 (1996), 113–20; “Represovane studentstvo,” Bukozyns’kyi Zhurnal 1:2 (1995): 117–24; Tamara Marusyk, “Studentstvo

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Bukovyny pid tyskom stalins’kykh repressii,” Z arkhiviv VUcHK/GPU/NKVD-KGB 1/2:10/11 (1999): 455–68. 45. I could not so far find exact statistics on the nationality of deportees from Chernivtsi region. However, the Jews were the largest national ethnic group of the city. They also constituted the core of the city’s professional elite and entrepreneurial world, thus engaging in activities that made them “unreliable” or openly “alien” in the eyes of the Soviet regime. Those who were not targeted as large business owners and renters, could be (and often were) easily accused of Zionism and other political “crimes.” Archival documents (see below) also indicate that property of the Jewish residents in the city center often triggered their arrests. All of these factors made repressions of Jewish residents, at least in the central districts of the city, the most representative experience of state violence in 1940-1941. Archival documents from 1940-1941 about abuse of local population, most often Jewish (as revealed by their names even if the nationality was not indicated), are numerous. Local state and party authorities constantly discussed the “outrages” in the processes of arrests and re-distribution of residential property. DAChO, f.1, op.1, spr.58–59, ark.10–11; f.1, op.1, spr.27, ark.41; f.72, op.1, spr.2, ark.33–34; f.1, op.1, spr. 4–6, 8–29; f. 4, op.1, spr. 233, ark.54; f.4, op.1, spr.125, ark.23, 51, 59. Complaints sent to the highest province and city party organs contain many details about stealing, arbitrary evictions, and other forms of abuse. DAChO, f.1, op.1, spr.171, 174, ark.33, 62–77 (signed and anonymous complaints and informative letters to provincial CP committee); f.4, op.1, apr.233, ark.54; f.4, op.1, spr.125; f.2, op.1, spr.122b, ark.4–7,9; f.2, op.1, spr.18, ark.7,16; f.2, op.1, spr.17; f.1, op.1, spr.171. NKVD officials were often the first to take possession of the apartments and belongings of the “alien elements” who most often happened to be Jews. They also were in a position to “organize” arrests of the families whose residences, businesses, or other possessions they liked. For such cases, see DAChO, f.1, op.1, spr.171, ark.92–97; f.4, op.1, spr.233, ark.41. The widespread practice of appropriation of the property of Jews by private persons continued also later, throughout the war (see Chabashkevich et al., Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 147). The same and similar documents reveal, though, that sometimes Jews (as well as other locals) engaged in businesslike agreements with the new political masters to mutual benefits. 46. Whatever were the political beliefs of its “consumers,” the seeds of anti-Semitic propaganda often found fertile grounds in the minds of young Chernivtsi residents. For example, a Soviet information note from the first days of the war reported a Ukrainian worker at one of the city’s factories saying, “I wish our people [Ukrainian nationalists] come soon; then we will know what to do with the Jews (zhyds).” DACHO, f.1, op.1, spr.140, ark.49–51. In his novel-memoir My First Life (Pervaia zhyzn’. Nevydumannaia povest’), Vernon Kres (Peter Demant), who grew up in Romanian Chernivtsi, remarked that, by the end of the interwar period, nationalist rather than Marxist propaganda was often winning the souls of the less educated strata of the population (p. 277). 47. With the beginning of the war, a number of units of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and related organizations moved to Bukovina from neighboring Galicia and Volhynia and based in rural districts where Ukrainian speakers dominated. 48. Mass violence against Jews began in different areas of Northern Bukovina as soon as Soviet authorities and troops left them. In some cases—but not always—it was organized or inspired by Romanian and German military; in other cases the organizers were members of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or just locals. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Atrocities of German Fascists and Their Henchmen (popularly known by the Russian abbreviation GChK), in July 1941 alone, 11,347 Jews were killed in the province. Although in many cases it is hard to determine national identity or even names of the perpetrators, approximately equal numbers of victims in all the districts of the province, both Ukrainian- and Romanian-dominated, tell us that anti-Jewish violence was by no means connected to the support of the Romanian regime. (GChK statistics, available in the State Archive of Russian Federation [GARF], quoted in Finkel’ and Rykhlo, Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 62). As early as in late June and early July, when Soviet authorities were still in Chernivtsi but already did not control many rural districts of the province, they reported many cases of violence and atrocities perpetrated not only by Germans and Romanians who occasionally forced through the border, but also

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 Frunchak / Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi 459 local Ukrainian and Romanian nationalists. See, for example, DAChO f.1, op.1, spr.140. In at least several cases, groups of Ukrainian nationalists and their sympathizers undoubtedly organized killings of local Jews in the areas where they operated. See Chabashkevich et al., Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 151; “Rozplata,” Radians’ka Bukovyna, March 27, 1977, 3–4. Such cases are also described in unpublished memoirs by Mikhail Zhylin who led the investigation of 1941 mass killings cases in Chernivtsi province by the regional Prosecutor’s Office of Chernivtsi region in 1958 (I obtained a copy of the memoir from the author in May 2006). 49. Altshuler, “The Soviet ‘Transfer’ of Jews”; and Mikhail Mitsel’, Evrei Ukrainy v 1943-1953 gg.: ocherki dokumentirovannoi istorii (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2004), 70–85. 50. See, for example, materials on several cases of abuse by NKVD officials (including NKVD head Rudenko, his wife, and several other officials) in Chernivtsi province related to the transfer of Jews, TsDAHOU, f.1, op.23, spr.3870. 51. See the resolution no. 66/2 of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of the Ukr SSR and the CC of the CP(B) of Ukraine of February 26, 1946, “On the evacuation from the territory of Chernovtsy Province of the Ukrainian SSR to Romania of people of Jewish nationality who are residing in Northern Bukovina and were not Soviet citizens before June 28, 1940,” published in Altshuler, “The Soviet ‘Transfer’ of Jews,” 70–71. 52. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.61, ark.3. 53. Ibid., ark.12. 54. It must be noted that, as happened during the Holocaust throughout Europe, there were many cases when non-Jewish locals of Chernivtsi and the region saved and otherwise helped Jews. Such cases are mentioned in many of the sources cited above. (For example, lists of those who saved Jews in Chernivtsi province during the Holocaust can be found in Finkel’ and Rykhlo, Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 39–45.) My focus on the other forms of participation of non-Jewish locals in anti-Jewish violence of different kinds is by no means dictated by the desire to neglect or deny multiple cases of noble actions of those who helped the victims. However, part of my argument here is to bring back into the historical discussions facts and behaviors that have been neglected for too long by historians of Chernivtsi region. 55. For the argument that Soviet war commemorative politics were based on the twin institutions of hierarchical heroism and universal suffering, see, for example, Weiner, Making Sense of War, 208–35. 56. A report of the Chernivtsi Province Commission for the Accounting of Crimes and Losses Performed by Fascists Occupants from summer 1944 asserted, “Fascists murderers . . . tried to cover up the traces of their crimes. [F]or example, the bodies of the shot peaceful citizens, according to multiple witnesses of the residents of the city of Chernivtsi, were thrown to the Prut River. [Others] were buried in mass graves up to 300 bodies; the excavations showed that some people were buried alive” (DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.61, 65, 84, 77, 80, 87, ark.17–18). According to the unwritten rule of Soviet official communication, the report did not mention that the same local informants were also aware of the fact that the absolute majority of the killed were Jews. 57. DAChO, f.1245, op.1, spr.2, ark.3. 58. For example, a common grave on the Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi that was slowly deteriorating, together with the cemetery itself, throughout the Soviet era (see Zinger et al., Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 25). Only in 1990, on the initiative of local Jewish activists, a memorial plaque to local Jewish victims of the Holocaust was installed at the spot of shooting near the Prut River. Osachuk et al., Pam’iatnyky Chernivtsiv, 50. 59. The commemoration projects were outlined in a decree issued on 23 May 1944 by the province CP committee and government, “On maintenance [of tombs] and commemoration of memory of soldiers who perished in struggle for liberation and independence of the Soviet motherland.” DAChO, f.4, op.1, spr.440, ark.109. 60. Osachuk et al., Pam’iatnyky Chernivtsiv, 37. 61. DAChO, f.932, op.1, spr.350; f.1245, op.1, spr.2, ark.2; TsDAVOVU, f.2, op.7, spr.1780, ark.108; Osachuk et al., Pam’iatnyky Chernivtsiv, 40.

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62. DAChO, f.1245, op.1, spr.24, ark.3, 6. 63. In the opinion of Soviet Chernivtsi architects, Czech peculiarities were represented by the combination of stern Middle Ages and early northern Renaissance elements and even a cross engraved on the tomb stone. They also insisted that the memorial was made from cheap local materials to please local financial authorities. DAChO, f.932, op.1, spr.359, ark.2–10. 64. Examples of fiction about Khotyn resistance include V. Petliovannyi, Khotyntsi (Kiev, 1965); M. Kaniuka and A. Nabatchikov, Krepost’ (Moscow, 1958); S Snihur, Polum’iani sertsia (Chernivtsi, 1958); I. Kurlat, Kuz’ma Galkin (Chernivtsi, 1958); M. Il’inskii, Gorodok na Dnestre (Moscow, 1970); S. Snigur, Al’pii’s’ki troiandy (Uzhhorod, 1973); O. Chernushenko, Borot’ba khotyns’kykh komsomol’tsiv- pidpil’nykiv proty nimetsko-fashysts’kykh zaharbnykiv (Stanislaviv, 1961). References to Khotyn young communists were included in a collection of letters of Soviet resistance fighters Govoriat pogibshyie geroi. Predsmertnyie pis’ma sovetskikh bortsov protiv nemetsko-fashystskikh zakhvatchikov (1941-1945) (Moscow, 1975) and a book on anti-fascist resistance in western provinces of Ukraine, V. Zamlins’kyi, Z viroiu v peremohu. Komunistynchna partiia na choli partyzans’koï borot’by proty nimets’ko-fashysts’kykh zaharbnykiv u zakhidnykh oblastiakh Ukraïny. 1941-1944 (Kiev, 1976). Scholarly work, however, was less numerous (for example, I. Slyn’ko, “Khotyns’ke pidpillia i partyzany u borot’bi proty nimets’ko- fashysts’kykh i rumuns’kykh zaharbnykiv,” in Heroïchna Khotynshchyna (Lviv, 1972), 92–115. 65. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.69–72, ark.4–5; f.1, op.2, spr.61, 63, l.1. 66. For a telling example of historical narrative in a specialized work, S. I. Komarnytskyi, Radianska Bukovyna v Roky Velykoï Vitchyznianoï viiny. 1941-1945 (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1979), 54–67; for references in popular literature, I. Minakov and V. Onykiienko, Chernivets’ka oblast’ (Chernivtsi: Oblvydav, 1958), 35; Iu. Khokhol and Iu. Kovaliov, Chernivtsi. Istoryko-arkhitekturnyi narys (Kiev: Budivel’nyk, 1966), 49–50; Kostyshyn et al., Bukovyna, 262. 67. Chernivtsi province (oblast) was organized on the basis of the northern part of the historical region of Bukovina. However, it also included parts of the historical region of Bessarabia that had eastern Slavic as well as Moldavian/Romanian population. (The larger part of Bessarabia, together with the former autonomous Moldavian republic within Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, formed the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in August of 1940, upon the annexation of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia from Romania to the USSR.) Explaining the annexation of Bessarabia to Ukraine was much easier for the Soviet ideologues, since this region historically had been a part of the Russian Empire. Bukovina, on the contrary, had no strong historical evidence of connections of any type with Ukraine and Russia. After the war, the largest town of the Bessarabian part of Chernivtsi province, Khotyn, became an important cultural symbol of the province with a late-medieval fortress that was interpreted in terms of Ukrainian national history. Additionally, Khotyn had a history of a social revolt of 1919 that was strongly exploited by Soviet propaganda together with the resistance by the group of young communists during the war. For more on this, see Svitlana Frunchak, “Carved in Stone? Reading and Translating Urban Space in Post-War Chernivtsi (1944-1959)” (Paper presented at the University of Toronto Russian and Eastern European History Discussion Group meeting, Toronto, Canada, 9 October 2009). 68. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.69–72, ark.3–4; f.1, op.2, spr.61, 63, akr.43. 69. For example, V. Demchenko and A. Sanduliak, Chernovtsy. Putevoditel’ (Uzhgorod: Karpaty, 1981), 16–17, 20; and Komarnytskyi, Radianska Bukovyna v Roky Velykoï Vitchyznianoï viiny,7–8. 70. At least 135 sheets of the leaflets and transcripts of the broadcasts of the Soviet and British radio broadcast, dated between July 1943 and 11 March 1944, were submitted by the group to the Soviet authorities along with other documents. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.69–72. These documents were mentioned as “unclaimed previously” in a publication for the first time in 1996 by the director of the Chernivtsi state archives, Yurii Liapunov, who explained the silencing of these materials by the nationality of their authors. Yurii Liapunov, “Slavim muzhestvo. Podpolie v Chernovtsakh,” in Finkel’ and Rykhlo, Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 7–11. 71. The reports can be found in DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.69–72 (combined). When in the late 1960s the Chernivtsi state archive initiated a project to collect recollection of anti fascist resistance members in

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 Frunchak / Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi 461 the province (in response to a campaign launched by the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the CC of Ukrainian CP to identify unknown resisters), Martin Batero was invited to Chernivtsi from Moscow where he lived and was interviewed. His recollections were published in Finkel’ and Rykhlo, Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 21–26. Most of the details of the reports and recollections are consistent, although the recollection has much less details. 72. In his memoirs, Khrushchev wrote about the complex decisions on whether to trust communists and their supporters of other political orientations from newly incorporated western regions, remarking that very many of them ended up in Soviet prisons. Khrushchev, Memoirs, 234–35. 73. The argument about the meaning and importance of the verification process is one of the central arguments made by Amir Weiner in his book on World War Two in Ukraine, Making Sense of War. 74. For more on the process of verification of partisans and underground resistance groups in the USSR, besides Weiner, Making Sense of War; Kenneth Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrilas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Oleksandr Melnyk, “‘And You Bastards Are Calling Yourself Partisans?!’ Negotiating Political Identity in Stalinists Ukraine” (Paper presented at American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies National Convention, Boston, 12-15 November 2009). 75. Komarnytskyi, Radianska Bukovyna v Roky Velykoï Vitchyznianoï viiny, 48. 76. Melnyk, “‘And You Bastards Are Calling Yourself Partisans?!’” 77. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.69–72, ark.4–7. 78. Ibid., ark.7 79. Ibid., ark.3. 80. Finkel’ and Rykhlo, Liudi ostaiutsia liud’mi, 22. 81. This is well demonstrated, for example, in the sections of materials of the Chernivtsi province GChK that describe the mass extermination of Jews in the province. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.62, 79, 84, op.5, spr.480 (combined), ark.20–22, 50. 82. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.69–72, ark. 44, 47. 83. Ibid., ark.45–47. 84. Ibid., ark.48. 85. An official note prepared by the Chernivtsi CP organization included information on a Chernivtsi “Jewish komsomoltsi resistance group.” However, the document also mentioned that some of the Jewish young communists left the country together with their parents. DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.69–72, ark.6–7, 32–43. 86. For example, a report from Chernivtsi province party committee secretary Zeleniuk to Khrushchev from 1944 asserted, “Jews constitute the majority of the city’s population. It is characteristic that many Jews were shot and deported to concentration camps. . . . A substantial part of Ukrainian population has alien attitudes towards Jews who live in the city. You can often hear: ‘We will not go to Chernivtsi while Jews are there.’” DAChO, f.1, op.2, spr.62, 79, 84, op.5, spr.480 (combined), ark.49–50. 87. Komarnytskyi, Radianska Bukovyna v Roky Velykoï Vitchyznianoï viiny, 28. 88. Ibid., 48–53. 89. Ibid., 54–66. Komarnytskyi also criticized numerous fictional and scholarly accounts about Khotyn heroes which allegedly misrepresented the real facts. Ibid., 7. 90. Ibid., 66–68. 91. Ibid., 53, 75. 92. On the relation between the act of remembering the past of physical, and particularly urban, space and the construction of personal identities and memories, Steven Jobbit, “Remembering Szatmár, Remembering Himself: The Geography of Memory and Identity in Ferenc Fodor’s ‘Szatmár Földje, Szatmár Népe, Szatmár Élete,’” Hungarian Studies Review 26:1-2 (2009): 21. 93. See http://www.city.cv.ua/English/History/ (accessed 20 November 2009). For more statistical data on Chernivtsi province, see http://www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/results/general/nationality/chernivtsi/ (accessed 20 November 2009).

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94. In his memoirist collection of essays and poetry, the writer Sviatoslav Bakis, who grew up and spent a large part of his life in Soviet Chernivtsi, reflects on the uneasiness he noticed among the remaining Jewish community in the later Soviet period regarding the revival of the Jewish history and culture in the city, implying that Jewish activists not only understood the limits of such potential revival but also felt that they were participants, and not (only) victims of the Soviet cultural project of re-imagining and re-constructing of the city’s past and future. Sviatoslav Bakis, Prutskii mir (Kiev: Dukh I litera, 2006), 127–29. 95. The most recent book dedicated to such returns and memory is a rich monograph by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, a hybrid study that combines a personal memoir, a historical study, and theory of memory: Ghosts of Home. The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). On the same theme, Florence Heymann, Le Crépuscule des lieux. Identités juives de Czernowitz (Paris: Stock, 2003); Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17:4 (1996): 659–86; Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Alti Rodal, “Bukovina Cemeteries, Archives and Oral History,” Avotaynu 18:3 (2002): 9–15. 96. Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner, quoted in Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, xiv. 97. A very rich resource of information about the pre-Soviet Chernivtsi and memory about it can be found on http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/, which has become a venue of communication between those who identify themselves with Jewish Czernowitz (rather than contemporary Chernivtsi) and, as such, a site of a virtual existence of the city’s image. 98. Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, xviii. 99. The work of a local journalist and historian Ihor Chekhovs’ky is a good example of the failure to reconcile the fascination with, and the imminence—in the face of the increasing interest of foreigners— of some kind of acknowledgement of “historical multiculturalism” of Chernivtsi with its unconditionally Ukrainian present and future. On the one hand, Chekhovs’kyi celebrated acts of rehabilitation of some personalities, facts, and ideas from the city’ non-Ukrainian past. He even admitted the profanation, sim- plification, and political speculation that some of these acts involve. Chekhovs’ky nonetheless remained trapped in the framework of nationally defined history telling that he revealed not only in ascribing a pre-determined and leading historical role to Ukrainians of Bukovina but also in a logical twist of using the “past multiculturalism” argument to demonstrate European-ness of Ukraine and Ukrainians rather than “returning” historical Chernivtsi to (non-Ukrainian) Europe. Ihor Chekhovs’kyi, Chernivtsi—kovcheg pid vitrylamy tolerantnosti (Chernivtsi: Ruta, 2004); Olexandr Masan and Ihor Chekhovs’kyi, Chernivtsi: 1408-1998. Narysy z istorii mista (Chernivtsi: Misto, 1998), 104–5 (on profanation of neo-multiculturalism, omitted from the later publication). 100. Chekhovs’ky, Chernivtsi—kovcheg pid vitrylamy tolerantnosti, 72. 101. Oleh Surovtsev described in detail one case of mass execution of Jews by an OUN leader (pp. 70-1) and briefly mentioned the participation of “OUN and local population” in the killings in his conclusions (p. 165). Surovtsev, 2006. 102. I am grateful to Natalia Shevchenko, who shared her experience of the museum organization during our meeting in summer of 2008. Numerous posts regarding the museum can be found on one of the biggest online resources dedicated to the historical heritage of the city, http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/ (go to Cz-L Archives) (accessed 27 October, 2009). Another example of a similar attitude is a publication by a group of local archivists and historians of voluminous collection of documents on the Jewish population of the region that concerns the period between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, although a number of detailed documents concerning the destruction of the Jewish communities of Bukovina are available and have been published in various collections and articles by Jewish historians (some of them cited above). Olexandr Dobzhans’kyi, Mykola Kushnir, and Maria Nikirsa, eds., Ievreis’ke naselennia ta rozvytok ievreiskoho natsional’noho rukhu na Bukovyni v ostannii chverti XVIII-na pochatku XX st (Chernivtsi: Nashi knyhy, 2007).

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103. The term belongs to the historian Karel Berkhoff—see his Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); for a more recent account, see Ray Brandon, Wendy Lower, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 104. A very good example is the already quoted history textbook Kostyshyn et al., Bukovyna. The authors almost fully preserved the Soviet interpretation of the wartime events while augmenting it by a narrative about OUN activities, presented in heroic terms.

Svetlana Frunchak is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Toronto and a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow in the Humanities. Her primary interests include modern Soviet and eastern European history, nationalism, urban culture and anthropology, micro and local history, and borderland regions.

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