In mental life nothing which had once been formed can perish - that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances... it can once more be brought to light... on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation.
Sigmund Freud1
Each of the total wars and revolutions in the first half of the twentieth century generated enormous and unprecedented human losses, igniting large-scale political crises within empires, countries, and regions across the world.
These states of emergency, Peter Gourevitch emphasized in a different context, “pry open the political scene, throwing traditional relationships into flux. Groups, institutions, and individuals are torn loose from their moorings, their assumptions, their loyalties, ‘cognitive road maps.’ Circumstances become less certain, and solutions less obvious. Crises thus render politics more plastic.”2 In this political freefall and subsequent social chaos, new openings, opportunities, and possibilities emerged, if only for a short period, forcing people to reassess their identities and their political relationships. Each of these massive social conflagrations weakened or completely shattered civil society’s capacity to resist the encroachment of various authoritarian regimes, their introduction of rigid political categorizations based on national, state, and social identities, and their sweeping social engineering projects, launched to “improve the human condition.”3 The total wars in East Central Europe, more so than the ones in the West, triggered new borders as well as a radical set of psychological readjustments and social realignments.4The total wars and revolutions of the twentieth century represented the “critical junctures” in the development of modern Ukraine.5 Between 1914 and 1954 the Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians living there endured an unparalleled and almost uninterrupted cycle of constant mobilizations and demobilizations, divisions into separate and oftentimes antagonistic national groups, and mass violence. Each of these major turning points produced widespread psychological unmoorings, as people lost their sense of place in the world. The First World War, the subsequent revolutions and Civil War, and the famine of 1921-2 initiated the first of four great psychological traumas during the past century.
Industrialization, de-kulakization, collectivization, the famines of 1928-33, and the purges ushered in the second. The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the famine of 1946-7, which generated millions of deaths, deportations, and voluntary and involuntary population transfers and migrations, inaugurated the third. The collapse of the USSR, Ukraine’s independence, and its uneven adaptation to the standards of the international political economy precipitated the fourth mass behavioural disorientation.As empires collapsed and fell in 1917 and 1918, the new states emerging throughout East Central Europe and the Russian Empire not only redrew their borders, but also challenged the loyalties of the men and women who lived within them. New states introduced new policies which favoured some of their citizens and discriminated against others. This process of political breakdown, social disorder, and political reassembly forced the peoples of Ukraine to examine the fundamental nature of their land, its borders, and who constituted their compatriots. Although Ukraine represented a homeland for Ukrainians, it also served as a homeland for many non-Ukrainians, making the process of Ukrainian nation building and state building difficult and contentious. This conflict over which groups and which ideology had the right to define Ukraine raised the brutal level of violence this region endured to unprecedented heights. In the first half of the twentieth century, mass violence diffused new ideas, options, and alternatives, and acted as the primary agent of change in East Central Europe. Over the long run, the unintended consequences emerging from one crisis often helped to ignite the next.6 Each catastrophe enhanced Ukraine’s role as a geopolitical pivot and as a cleft state.