World Socialist Website: Tim Snyder Changes Conclusions on Ukrainian Fascism

An article, posted today online and printed in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, is yet another deplorable example of Professor Timothy Snyder’s role as a historical falsifier and apologist for Ukrainian fascism.

Snyder mockingly dismisses Russian references to Ukrainian nationalists’ mass murder of Poles and Jews during World War II as “a past that never happened” and “nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history.”

But at an earlier stage of his career, Snyder wrote detailed accounts of the genocidal activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). His article, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943,” appeared in the May 2003 edition of Past and Present.

This 37-page scholarly article focused on the OUN’s mass killing of Poles in Volhynia. The OUN’s military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA], wrote Snyder, “killed about fifty thousand Volhynian Poles and forced tens of thousands to flee in 1943.”

“By the end of April 1943,” according to Snyder’s account, “the UPA had perhaps ten thousand soldiers under its command, and had reduced much of Volhynia to mutual slaughter.” Snyder continued:

Throughout April and throughout Volhynia, UPA soldiers surrounded colonies and villages, burned houses, shot or forced back inside those who tried to escape.

In mixed settlements, the UPA’s security services warned Ukrainians to flee by night, then killed everyone remaining at dawn. This was a co-ordinated attack by armed men upon a leaderless and disorganized population.

This was not Snyder’s only “necrophiliac account” of mass murder by Ukrainian nationalists. In an article published in February 2010 in the New York Review of Books, Snyder explicitly denounced then Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s cover-up of OUN crimes.