Seeking the Truth about A 60-Year-Old War
“Lviv was occupied, Ternopil was occupied. We retreated through Yarmolyntsi all the way to Dunayivtsi, so we could survive until morning, and march on. German aircraft spotted us somewhere near Zalisetsky Forest. They dropped bombs on us. Two of our men were killed. It was then I realized what war was all about. This was my baptism by fire,” Academician Petro T. Tronko of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine told The Day.
I spoke with this doyen of historical science during a break at the 11th All-Ukraine Scholarly Conference “The Great Patriotic War: New Pages from History, Names, and Events,” which took place in Khmelnytsky on Oct. 15-16. Petro Tronko had just delivered a substantial report on the Ukrainian people’s contribution to the victory. The place where he had his baptism by fire was about seventy kilometers from Khmelnytsky. Afterwards Viktor Prokopchuk, who holds a Ph.D. in history, suggested, “Mr. Tronko, let’s take a ride to Zalisetsky Forest.”
Among the tall trees and the surrounding distance there is nothing to remind you of the war. But there are memories of a brief hair-raising episode painfully embedded in the memory of a Soviet Army private, who fought during the Great Patriotic War, one of its few surviving participants and researchers. The other speakers who presented research papers during the plenary and section meetings were people from the post- war generations: respectable, titled scholars and young local history enthusiasts from Kyiv, Kamianets- Podilsky, and other cities.
Khmelnytsky is a city located on the boundary between the western and central parts of Ukraine, territories where WWII is traditionally interpreted in different ways. This is precisely why the organizing committee chose this city to host the conference. They wanted to try and summarize divergent views on Ukraine’s role in that war, hold discussions, and find some answers to questions pertaining to the role and place of that third-party force in that bloody drama of the twentieth century. “We must preserve the memories of the past, we must erect memorials and temples commemorating the fallen soldiers, we must keep flowers blooming on their graves; this is important for the living, not the dead,” emphasized I.O. Herasymov, Chairman of the Council of the Ukrainian War Veterans Organization in his address to the conference.
The timing of the conference had a special meaning: the scholarly discussions taking place in the lecture rooms of the Khmelnytsky University of Management and Law were held on the eve of the 60th anniversary of Ukraine’s liberation. Oleksandr Zavalniuk, a researcher from Kamianets-Podilsky, said there is a gap in historical memory relating to that period. What do the sons and grandsons of fallen soldiers know about the war? What will their children and grandchildren know? Unlike other countries, Ukraine still lacks its own published history of the Great Patriotic War. At issue is the proposal to compile a 26-volume chronicle that would reflect the participation of every Ukrainian city, town, village, and area.
“Scholarship is a road filled with potholes,” Oleksandr Zavalniuk told the audience. This road is buffeted by ideological winds. So how can one avoid being led astray? How to immortalize the truth of all those episodes and battle scenes in an era when three forces were at play, when millions were being killed? Academician Tronko views the Young Guard tragedy through the eyes of a researcher, and sees it almost the way Aleksandr Fadeyev did in his literary version. He also mentioned the cunning initiators of a discussion on this subject, recently published in a newspaper.
The real unvarnished truth can be found in the archives. Here one can find information about feats of combat, treason, love, hatred, devotion, self-sacrifice, and other human qualities that are revealed in times of great trials. “The time has come to strip the war of some of its heroic frills,” said conference participant Yuri Danyliuk, a leading research fellow at the National Academy’s Ukrainian History Institute.
M. P. Vavrenchuk, who holds a Ph.D. in history, has studied archival data pertaining to the Nazi special services in occupied Ukraine. His findings show that the Germans could not complain about a lack of “voluntary assistants.” There were provocations and acts of treason, with gruesome results. In the town of Siomaky, which was burned down during the Nazi occupation, 182 residents were killed, among them 56 children. Verebiivka was also burned down.
Some of the papers presented at the conference were examples of painstaking scholarship. The Kyiv- based historian O. Ye. Lysenko offered a comparative analysis of the two World Wars. After summarizing a considerable amount of archival data, he succeeded in convincing the audience that the Ukrainian card in WWI was played precisely the way it was played during WWII. This subject remains topical.
The conference participants noted that a great many archival materials remain to be studied. Documents dating from the Nazi occupation period, which were on display in the university hall, attracted the attention of local history buffs. The exposition contained graphic evidence, indicating precisely how the German occupation authorities treated the populace, included newspaper clippings, ads, information about cultural events, lists of names, etc. “Many pages of such chronicles remain to be read, but are still top secret,” says the director of the regional state archives P. Ya. Slobodianuk.
Who will read these pages tomorrow? V. S. Malakhovsky, head of the Department of Social Studies at Lyceum No. 142 in Kyiv told the conference about his students who, together with their fellow students from Warsaw, removed stacks of dusty newspapers from the archival shelves and were now returning events and names from oblivion.
V. S. Malakhovsky’s students, who were taking part in the conference, were advised by older experts in the field about what topics to explore and what research approaches they should adopt. “Ukraine’s Preparations for WWII: Power Technologies” was the title of V. Yu. Vasyliev’s research paper. In it the author seeks the answer to the question of how Ukraine was transformed into a bulwark of the USSR. The answer lies in a thorough analysis of Stalinist documents and further actions on the part of the Soviet government. There was nothing coincidental about Stalin associating Poland’s “external threat” with what was alleged as a widespread Pilsudski-controlled espionage network in the Soviet Union in general and within the Soviet Bolshevik Party (VKP (b) in particular. Here was the universal excuse for launching purges, imprisoning everyone who disagreed with the Soviet leadership’s course, and branding them counterrevolutionaries. Stalin’s rigid black-and-white approach paved the way for inhuman purges that were carried out on an unprecedented scale. In Ukraine, they were carried out under the able guidance of Pavel Postyshev, Secretary of the VKP (b) Central Committee. Many other party functionaries were summoned to the scene from other regions of the USSR. By January 1934, 60 percent of the chairmen of urban and rural district executive committees had been “replaced,” as were some 50 percent of district party committee secretaries. A pitched battle with “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” was underway. The researcher seems to have found an answer to the question about the origins of that third force: “Did Stalin and his entourage succeed in turning Ukraine into a ‘true bulwark of the USSR and a model Soviet republic’? Did they achieve the required social and ethnic homogeneity and ideological integrity in Ukraine, producing a new kind of Soviet-minded Ukrainians? I don’t think so. On the contrary, the Soviet leadership’s political course triggered a staggering amount of problems in Ukraine, and Communist Party leaders confronted them during WWII.”
Yu. Z. Danyliuk, a groundbreaking researcher, offered a very interesting presentation dealing with oral history. He reminded those present of Maksim Gorky’s “short but incisive article entitled ‘Special Rooms for Writing Memoirs Required’.” He noted, “In this article the writer broached the subject of collecting memories on a broader scale, without reducing it to craftsmanship. The writer believed that it is necessary to collect data for posterity, for our contemporaries, so they can see national history through the prism of individual perception.”
Perhaps all those twenty-six volumes of Ukrainian history during WWII should be written after all. Time is running out; today there are villages without any surviving war veterans. It is safe to assume that such “memoir rooms” will be packed by future researchers. Unfortunately, information about the “millions of victims” and “our fathers’ exploits” has little effect on certain representatives of the rising generation. Such a project could provide the real truth about that war, about its front and rear lines, occupied territories, and brothers who fought each other in the trenches. If Petro Tronko told the whole story of his baptism by fire at Zalisetsky Forest, no one would remain indifferent.
It is time to adopt new approaches to a lasting theme that still needs to be exposed fully and thoroughly by truthfully embracing all aspects. Unfortunately, the Khmelnytsky conference participants could not do this, owing to time limits. They did, however, broach the sensitive subject of the third force, multi-party involvement, but gave only a partial account of the Bolshevik and OUN undergrounds. They omitted the partisan movement, which is still believed to have started in 1943.
The conference speakers presented a variety of papers, some interesting, and others less so. There were also innovative papers intermingled with traditional ones. Serhiy Biloshytsky of Khmelnytsky, who has a Ph. D. in history, noted, “Before, these kinds of events took place at central educational establishments. The fact that this conference was held at the Khmelnytsky University of Management and Law is convincing proof that this institution has surpassed its regional status to become a leading school of higher education, and that it is in the process of obtaining top status.”
