'Making Sense of War'

In 2002 Amir Weiner published a book under this title in which he dis­cussed the impact of the Second World War on the elites and general population of Vinnytsia oblast in Ukraine during the postwar era.

Prior to the VE Day celebrations in Moscow and Kyiv, public debate in Ukraine centred on the issue of whether the country had fought in the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people or participated in the Sec­ond World War. The first interpretation meant sticking to the old Soviet myth of the war, which treated only Red Army soldiers as legitimate combatants and portrayed the cadres of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), who fought both the Soviets and the Nazis in western Ukraine, as German stooges. The second option allowed Ukrainian intellectuals to develop a Eurocentric or Ukrainocentric interpretation of the war, as opposed to a Russocentric one. Within that framework, Ukraine emerges as a country that fought against and was one of the major vic­tims of both totalitarian systems of the twentieth century - fascism and communism.⁴⁵ The choice of concept was not only important for the interpretation of history but also had serious political implications for the Ukrainian government and society at large.

At President Yushchenko's initiative, the new Ukrainian government sought to do away with the Soviet-era tradition of commemorating Victory Day with a formal parade and attempted to use the occasion to encourage reconciliation between Red Army and UPA veterans, who had fought one another during the war. Among other things, such a rec­onciliation was supposed to help bridge the gap between eastern and western Ukraine that had opened up during the divisive presidential elections of 2004. Like many of the plans of Yushchenko's revolutionary government, the high hopes invested in the VE Day commemorations were disappointed. First, the Soviet Army veterans' organization pro­tested against changing the format of the celebrations. Then the idea of reconciliation was opposed by the communists and their allies in parlia­ment, who protested the extension of government benefits enjoyed by combatants in the 'Great Patriotic War' to UPA fighters. The govern­ment, trying to avoid a new conflict between the two veterans' groups and their supporters, decided to abandon the idea of changing the tra­ditional VE Day anniversary celebrations. The communists maintained their control over the Soviet veterans' association and preserved their de facto political monopoly on the commemorations.⁴⁶ When on 15 October 2005 UPA supporters tried to celebrate the sixty-third anni­versary of the founding of the army with a demonstration in Kyiv, they were physically attacked by communists and supporters of radical pro­Russian groups.⁴⁷ Once again, worshippers of 'the great Stalin' inter­vened to oppose Ukraine's attempt to break with the Soviet past. After the VE Day celebrations Ukraine remained as divided as before in its attitudes toward the Second World War and its outcome.