Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi 437
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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 person- alities while making sure that others were doomed to oblivion. Selective commemora- tion 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). 435 Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 436 East european Politics and Societies inscription proposed by Ukraine’s political leader: “To general Vatutin from the Ukrainian people.” Khrapchenko believed that “that would be a nationalist inscrip- tion.” He said, “Probably Bazhan1 thought it up, and after all, Bazhan is a national- ist.” 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 bour- geois 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 Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at University of New England on June 8, 2015 Frunchak / Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi 437 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, promot- ing 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