Manipulation of the Ukrainian Identity

With the creation of the Soviet internal passport system in the early 1930s, every citizen at the age of sixteen living in urban areas declared his or her national identity based on that of his or her parents.

For most Soviet citizens, the documentation of national identities did not produce any adverse consequences in the 1930s. Many did not take this registration seriously. But when the German-Soviet War broke out, these passports produced life and death consequences. These documents divided the Soviet citizens into those the Nazis wanted to exterminate im­mediately (such as the Jews, who possessed their own separate nationality category) and those who remained merely expendable.

Millions of Soviet citizens may have possessed a Ukrainian “nationali­ty” in their passports but did not necessarily imagine themselves as mem­bers of a community separate from the Russian-speaking Soviet public. Many of these men and women may have conflated all of the Eastern Slavs into a category “nashi” (our people), which included all East Slavs, but excluded Poles, Jews, and ethnic Germans. Millions of peasants (who did not gain access to passports until 1974) may have primarily identified themselves with their village or locality, not their ascribed identity. This should not be surprising. Ukrainization lasted only for a short period of time, and those who promoted it, usually the most nationally conscious, experienced arrest, imprisonment, execution, or exile. Despite its suppres­sion, Ukrainization did raise the level of Ukrainian national conscious­ness, although it is difficult to ascertain by how much or for how long.¹⁸⁴

As the supreme arbiter of national hierarchies in RK Ukraine, Koch gave preferential treatment to the Ukrainian language and culture over the Russian.

When members of the several-thousand-strong OUN expeditionary groups arrived in Soviet Ukraine in June 1941, just ahead or behind the invading German troops, they knew almost nothing about the day-to-day life of the local population and were shocked to encounter very little of the national consciousness they had experienced in Eastern Galicia.¹⁸⁶ Although Ukrainians in the east spoke Ukrainian, they responded unenthusiastically to the integral nationalism Galician Ukrainians aggressively promoted.¹⁸⁷ Having survived the brutalities of collectivization, the famines, and the purges, they rejected the OUN’s adherence to authoritarianism and one- party rule. Central and Eastern Ukrainians, moreover, asked penetrating questions about the content of the social and political programs the OUN would introduce after the collapse of Soviet rule, questions that the new­comers could answer only in vague terms.¹⁸⁸ In light of Ukraine’s experi­ences during the First World War, revolution, Civil War, collectivization, industrialization, famine, and the purges, this reaction remained unsurpris­ing.

As a consequence of the above-mentioned spontaneous meetings be­tween the Galicians and their eastern compatriots and the German losses at Stalingrad and Kursk, the leadership of the OUN-B began to reconsider its political program. At the Third Extraordinary Grand Assembly on 21-5 August 1943, at the height of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in Volhynia, the OUN-B condemned “fascist national-socialist programs and political concepts” as well as “Russian-Bolshevik communism” and pro­posed a system of free peoples and independent states “[as] the single best solution to the problem of world order.” The organization’s new social and economic program emphasized a mixed economy, worker participation in management, free movement of labour, and free trade unions. The OUN-B claimed that it would introduce civil liberties, including freedom of the press and speech, even respecting the rights of national minorities.¹⁸⁹

Although these changes overturned the OUN-B’s earlier policy, repre­sented by the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” the organization still viewed itself as the spearhead of the Ukrainian national liberation move­ment. As a group representing a people without a state, its members were totally committed to the creation of an independent Ukrainian state ex nihilo from all the territories with Ukrainian-speaking majorities in East Central Europe. (In light of their ideological predispositions, its members did not recognize the Ukrainian SSR as an independent or as a Ukrainian state, certainly not as a political entity representing the interests of the Ukrainian majority.) In the course of the Second World War, the OUN- B’s political ideology changed from a highly authoritarian one, influenced by the prevailing European fascist ethos that sought to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, to one more moderate and somewhat more liberal, if not social-democratic.¹⁹⁰ But the creation of a Ukrainian state remained the OUN-B’s primary goal; only the form of this future state’s government changed.

The OUN-B defined itself as a national liberation movement. As such, it was similar in structure, ideology, and ethos to other twentieth-century national liberation movements, not unlike Vietnam’s Viet Minh, Algeria’s National Liberation Front, Ireland’s Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army, the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang, or the Palestine Liberation Organization.¹⁹¹ All of these organizations fought to create independent states and all employed violence, oftentimes in immoral, senseless, or counterproductive ways against civilians.

Members of the OUN-B lived in an environment of illegality and con­spiratorial activity. They were young and fanatical believers in the Ukrainian cause. They remained hostile to all real and perceived enemies, whether the occupying powers, competing national movements, other na­tions, or potential traitors in their own midst. They embraced violence and often terrorism. Their enemies responded in kind. And most of these per­ceived enemies (with the exception of the Jews) enjoyed access to larger armies and more guns.

Because the OUN-B was completely dedicated to constructing an inde­pendent Ukrainian state from the territories claimed and/or occupied by Poland, the USSR, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, the political elites and masses in these states formed after the First World War regarded the Ukrainian nationalist movement (and the OUN-B in particular) as an existential threat that needed eradication.¹⁹² For them, the making of an independent Ukraine meant the unmaking of their own states. By raising the flag of the dispossessed and exploited Ukrainians, the OUN-B threat­ened the stability and the territorial integrity of all of these East Central European states.

Under these circumstances, the OUN-B could not and would not intro­duce, let alone implement, the new August 1943 program during a bitter struggle against the largest army on the Eurasian continent and against the Poles in Western Volhynia.

Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk reinforced the idea that the USSR would soon defeat Nazi Germany. In preparation for this victory, the Communist Party’s propaganda machine promoted a dual identity among its non-Russian citizens. By combining the overall Soviet identity and a regional and/or republican identity, the ruling elite hoped to neutral­ize the anti-Soviet resistance movements in the Soviet western border­lands. In highlighting Soviet Ukrainian patriotism, which emphasized the independence and sovereignty of the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet family of nations, the authorities implied fundamental changes in the sta­tus of the republic and its citizens after the war.¹⁹⁴

On 1 February 1944, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR allowed the re­publics of the USSR to create republican military formations and to enjoy relations with foreign countries as well as to create ministries of defence and foreign affairs. The writer Alexander Korniichuk became Soviet Ukraine’s foreign minister, and Kovpak the first defence minister. Although Soviet Ukraine never formed independent military formations, it did be­come a founding member of the United Nations in 1945, remaining a member even before its formal independence in December 1991.

In terms of these identities, the Soviet one preceded the other national identities, with the exception of the Russian, which remained the “more equal” one. As these Ukrainian territories re-entered the USSR, the Soviet state regained control of the Ukrainian cultural elite’s ability to represent their own Ukrainian identity and reality.

Collectivization, the Holodomor, and the Soviet terror of the 1930s de­stroyed the old social fabric and helped reduce an individual’s solidarity with others, not only across national communities, but also within one’s own group.¹⁹⁶ The German occupation and its brutal reprisals for helping partisans and Jews raised this wide-scale anomie to an unprecedented lev­el. The war produced even more trauma. Each cataclysm built upon the previous one and each expanded the levels of social alienation. Neighbours not only divorced themselves from neighbours, but they may have also experienced a profound social distance within themselves.

The multinational, multicultural, multilingual, and multiconfessional communities across Ukraine, as in most of East Central Europe, lived to­gether, but apart. With rare exceptions, members of each nation constituted a single society centred on itself and did not belong to a commonwealth of different communities. They may have lived next to each other physically, but they did not necessarily interact with each other psychologically. Without regular personal interactions between and among members of these various groups, it was difficult to establish trust, the expectation “that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms” with other communities.¹⁹⁷ Trust is a necessary ingredient in all social relations, especially in multinational states. Without this mutual dependability, suspicions fester, especially during times of crisis and radical change. Political and economic downturns encourage people in one group to highlight their differences with other groups and to reinforce their suspicions that members of other communities conspire to work against their interests. In the small town of Berezhany (BrzeZany) in Eastern Galicia, for example, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews did not fraternize with each other before the war, “so that when bad times arrived, there was no one to turn to.”¹⁹⁸

This pattern of social relationships among these groups prevailed through­out Eastern Galicia, Western Volhynia, and even Central Ukraine. Although many Ukrainians possessed negative feelings towards Poles and Jews, it is no less true that many of the latter also had hostile feelings towards Ukrainians. Each national community in Ukraine emphasized ethnic ste­reotypes in defining their neighbours. In other words, each group could or would not empathize with the others, and when catastrophe stuck, as it of­ten did even before the war, the response was “That’s not my problem” (Tse ne moia sprava).

In reaction to the various social cataclysms and subsequent traumas they encountered, people built psychological barriers between their own group and other groups, even if they experienced similar traumas. Over time, these invisible ramparts became long, deep, and high Chinese walls, dividing groups by language, religion, and class. Keeping the strangers and “Barbarians” away from one’s physical and psychological perimeter be­came a priority. In the course of the war, solidarity with fellow human beings, especially those outside one’s group, quickly evaporated.