Timothy Snyder: Who's Afraid of Ukrainian History?
[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale. His new book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, will be published this month.
 (October 2010).]
On summer evenings, the people of the west Ukrainian city Lviv come to sing: under the statue of Taras Shevchenko, the great poet who prophesied Ukrainian independence in the nineteenth century, on the street that was renamed Liberty Boulevard when Ukraine emerged from Soviet rule in 1991. The songs tell of beautiful dark-eyed girls pining for brave soldiers. In one song, young men must leave their homes to fight for freedom as partisans; in the next, they are overwhelmed and killed by Soviet forces. One of the more bellicose songs ends “We’ll cry out ‘Glory, glory, glory’ until the earth shakes,” accompanied by the stamping of feet on the cobblestones. These passionate Ukrainian laments overlook the fact that Lviv was once Polish Lwów, and before that Habsburg Lemberg. Well into the twentieth century it was a Polish-Jewish city. During World War II the Germans killed the Jews and the Soviets expelled the Poles, leaving the city to be resettled by Ukrainians from the countryside as it was annexed to an expanded Soviet Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom played a part in the elimination of Jews or Poles, fought desperately and courageously against Soviet rule. The songs celebrating them forget the people who used to live in Lviv, and the part the Ukrainian nationalists played in their removal.
This version of Ukrainian history, flawed though it is, was until recently part of a national conversation about the past. Now Ukrainian historians who draw attention to Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet rule find themselves under pressure from the state. On September 8, the Security Service (SB), under new leadership appointed by the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych , shut down a museum in Lviv devoted to the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis and the Soviets. The SB also arrested the museum’s director, a young historian named Ruslan Zabilyi, on charges of intending to pass state secrets to foreigners. On September 13 and 14, SB agents searched the offices of the museum’s research staff, confiscating two laptops containing archival documents for a planned exhibition on Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule. While the particulars of the case are murky, it is clear that the story goes beyond the fate of one historian. Under Yanukovych, Ukraine’s new memory engineers are using force....
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On summer evenings, the people of the west Ukrainian city Lviv come to sing: under the statue of Taras Shevchenko, the great poet who prophesied Ukrainian independence in the nineteenth century, on the street that was renamed Liberty Boulevard when Ukraine emerged from Soviet rule in 1991. The songs tell of beautiful dark-eyed girls pining for brave soldiers. In one song, young men must leave their homes to fight for freedom as partisans; in the next, they are overwhelmed and killed by Soviet forces. One of the more bellicose songs ends “We’ll cry out ‘Glory, glory, glory’ until the earth shakes,” accompanied by the stamping of feet on the cobblestones. These passionate Ukrainian laments overlook the fact that Lviv was once Polish Lwów, and before that Habsburg Lemberg. Well into the twentieth century it was a Polish-Jewish city. During World War II the Germans killed the Jews and the Soviets expelled the Poles, leaving the city to be resettled by Ukrainians from the countryside as it was annexed to an expanded Soviet Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom played a part in the elimination of Jews or Poles, fought desperately and courageously against Soviet rule. The songs celebrating them forget the people who used to live in Lviv, and the part the Ukrainian nationalists played in their removal.
This version of Ukrainian history, flawed though it is, was until recently part of a national conversation about the past. Now Ukrainian historians who draw attention to Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet rule find themselves under pressure from the state. On September 8, the Security Service (SB), under new leadership appointed by the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych , shut down a museum in Lviv devoted to the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis and the Soviets. The SB also arrested the museum’s director, a young historian named Ruslan Zabilyi, on charges of intending to pass state secrets to foreigners. On September 13 and 14, SB agents searched the offices of the museum’s research staff, confiscating two laptops containing archival documents for a planned exhibition on Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule. While the particulars of the case are murky, it is clear that the story goes beyond the fate of one historian. Under Yanukovych, Ukraine’s new memory engineers are using force....