The Great Patriotic War Commemorations

The issue of the commemoration of the Great Patriotic War is closely linked to the campaign to rewrite the history of what is termed “the national liberation movement” in support of an independent Ukraine during this pe­riod.

In June 1993, Professor Stepan Zlupko raised the question of what the war meant to the Ukrainian people and whether it is fair to term it the Great Pa­triotic War. For Ukraine, in his view, the term is false. There were millions of deaths, but it was not patriotic because it was not fought in the interests of the Ukrainian people, who performed the role of cannon fodder for the Red Army. Ukrainians in Ukraine, he writes, had no rights before, during, or after the war. True, there was a Ukrainian SSR, but this was a token state and the republican government could not even construct a cinema without the per­mission of Moscow. According to Zlupko, the Bolsheviks occupied Ukraine with some help from Ukrainian traitors, and began anti-human experiments, which reached an apogee with the “Holocaust” of 1932-33 and the mass de­struction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, along with the vicious reprisals in Western Ukraine. The Soviet Union therefore was not a motherland for Ukrainians, and if it was not a motherland, how is it possible to term the war “patriotic”? He explains the fact that many Ukrainians joined the Red Army by saying that they were deceived. In fighting in the Red Army, they were dy­ing for an alien cause, and many of them had little choice in the matter be­cause they were conscripted by force.⁵⁴ The element of compulsion is also brought up by a Western Ukrainian who fought in the Soviet army, Mykhailo Lytvynchuk. If anything, he is even more forthright than Zlupko. The victory that the Russians are preparing to celebrate, he writes in April 1995 on the eve of the 50th anniversary, was for Ukrainians a repeated enslavement by “the Moscow-Bolshevik hordes.” Military boards drafted people aged 17-65 years without concern for their health. He makes reference to Soviet estimates that some 6 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army and says these sources are silent about the fact that half of them were killed. Soldiers from Western Ukraine who were sent to the front always had to operate in the most dangerous areas, and under the guns of the Soviet security forces.

Concerning his own role in the Red Army, Lytvynchuk comments that the UPA could not accommodate everyone because of the strain on material re­sources. On the other hand, those who fought in the Red Army did fight for Ukraine against the mortal enemy: Nazism. Lytvynchuk promotes national unity in Ukraine on the 50th anniversary by proclaiming all Ukrainians who fought in the war fighters for Ukraine, regardless of whether they were Soviet soldiers, UPA insurgents, or members of the SS Division Halychyna.⁵⁶ An­other article that appeared in the same venue nine days later continued the theme under the title “USSR is not a motherland for Ukrainians; hence the Second World War is not the Great Patriotic War for us.” The war, writes Yaroslav Tymchyshyn, was unleashed by Nazi Germany with the active assis­tance of the Soviet Union, an even bloodier regime. These two “anti-human” regimes tried to expand their spheres of influence, capturing new territories and sacrificing entire peoples in their ambitious quests. Liberation from Nazi Germany signified further enslavement for Ukraine by the Bolsheviks. Tym- chyshyn's claim that “our motherland is Ukraine” and not the “Moscow Em­pire” is an attempt to monopolize Ukrainian thinking, since the statement would not be universally accepted in Ukraine. To some extent he recognizes this fact in his statement that unfortunately, many functionaries and scholars are still tied to the tenets of Moscow propaganda and the colonial policy of the “criminal” Communist Party. Obsequiousness is their common character­istic, which is why they cannot stand on their feet proudly and say the words of freedom. Ukrainians have traitors in their midst, in his view, and to accept the USSR as a motherland is to assault the foundation on which the act of independence of Ukraine was based.

A somewhat more rational analysis is provided by I. Antsyshkin on the 54th anniversary of the end of the war. He attempts to elucidate what holiday is being celebrated in Ukraine. He points out the differences between Ukraine and the West: in the West, people celebrate the end of war whereas in Ukraine, the celebration is of a victory in a Great Patriotic War. Was it great and was it patriotic, he asks, answering his own question that the status of “great” is not really in doubt if measured by the number of victims, the amount of human grief, and the heroism of all the peoples of the USSR, by the shocking errors of the Soviet leadership, and the joy of those who re­turned home. Yet for Antsyshkin the status of “patriotic” has to be measured by the extent of popular support. The Second World War in the Soviet Union cannot be considered patriotic because nearly one million Soviet citizens served in the Wehrmacht police forces. Almost 20 national groups in the USSR were declared to be traitors and deported. Millions of Soviet citizens refused to return home from the Western zones of occupation. Antsyshkin then repeats the familiar dictum of the nationalist perspective, namely that for the Ukrainian people after the bloody Civil War, the Famine of the 1930s, and the deportations of 1939, the war could not be patriotic. The second part of Antsyshkin's article draws attention to the Soviet tendency to diminish the importance of battles fought by the Western allies and their assistance to the USSR.

In 2003, Ukrainian film director Serhii Bukovs'kyi produced a film called “Viina: Ukrains'kyi rakhunok,” which represented a fairly balanced account of Ukraine during the Second World War. The film provoked a lengthy critique in the pages of Ukraina moloda by Roman Zahoruiko, the former UPA insur­gent cited above, who chided Bukovs'kyi for a failure to capture what was termed the “in-depth Ukrainian essence” of the war and how it related to Ukraine and Ukrainians, and specifically why the war yet again separated Ukrainians into different and often hostile groups, as well as the morally cor­rect stand of each group. Zahoruiko considers that only national historians can provide an accurate picture of the war. One could begin, in his view, by educating Ukrainians through interviewing on TV living witnesses to and par­ticipants in battles featuring Ukrainians. He is tired of hearing “veterans of the so-called Great Patriotic War.” He equates the anti-Ukrainian content of Bukovs’kyi’s film with the issue of ownership of the mass media. This film was ordered by Moscow and the pro-Moscow oligarchs around Ukrainian presi­dent Leonid Kuchma. Why, he wonders, did the film fail to mention 350 years of “Muscovite occupation” of Ukraine, plans to deport Ukrainians en masse from their homeland in 1944, or the matter of genocide against Ukrainians when Russian generals sent thousands of poorly armed Ukrainian youngsters to their deaths? Zahoruiko then descends into an anti-Semitic diatribe, claim­ing that the film was part of a Jewish intrigue, alongside Russians and new Ukrainians tied to the Kuchma regime.

The Second World War in Ukraine was the subject of a more reflective ar­ticle in the main historical journal in the spring of 2004. O. E. Lysenko admits that the war remains a problematic factor in contemporary Ukraine, provok­ing confrontation and agitated reactions in much of Ukrainian society in re­sponse to efforts to depart from the established stereotypes of the Soviet past. In his view, such a reaction can be explained by the enduring power of ideas and images internalized by many Ukrainians from the Soviet period. He trans­fers these perceptions to current social and economic issues—alienation from the government, lack of social guarantees, and a failure to assist Soviet veter­ans who are now enduring difficult times. These factors only exacerbate the irritation with the notion of rewriting the history of the war. Much now falls on the shoulders of historians to resolve this conflict, says Lysenko. Without doubt the Soviet view was one-sided, as it emphasized some issues and ig­nored others. The portrayal of the OUN and UPA was exclusively negative because Soviet historiography was a servant of official ideology. Therefore the historian must free his discipline from historical constraints in order to bring about an “objective reconstruction of the past.” Scholars must be both objec­tive and apolitical. To date, from the Ukrainian side, Lysenko finds studies and documentary collections on the war years to be unsatisfactory. They re­flect the weak contacts with scholars abroad, a lack of opportunity for re­search in archives, and the legacy of Soviet historical writing. Foreign schol­ars, on the other hand, are starting to provide innovative approaches to the topic. He proposes that historians should move from the macro-levels of study offered by Soviet history, and move to the micro-history of social groups, families, and individuals. Oral history is an important component that could have a positive impact on such studies.⁶⁰

Lysenko is also concerned about terminology and believes that contempo­rary historical studies are contaminated by an ideological vocabulary that con­tinues to be used long after its originators—the Communist leaders—have disappeared from the scene. They include terms such as “bourgeois and so­cialist intelligentsia,” “collectivization,” “industrialization,” “cultural revolu­tion,” “socialist realism,” and “enemy of the people.” Such terms, says the author, obscure rather than reflect reality. Another example is the phrase “Ukrainian-German bourgeois nationalism” because the goals of the German National Socialists and the OUN were not identical, and the former consis­tently refused to recognize Ukrainian statehood as a legitimate goal. Thus the task for historians is to explore the parameters and characteristics of the dominant ideology, the way in which these are used, mutual influences, how the political apparatus functions, and the degree of its effectiveness. In the West—and Lysenko clearly has a very high opinion about historical writing in developed capitalist countries—most historians accept the emancipation of ideology from class or social structure, and refuse to treat ideology as the to­tality of ideas contained by human minds. Rather ideology affects different spheres from scientific knowledge, to religion, and everyday behavior.⁶¹ It is fair to say that Lysenko's appeal—at least in terms of current writing in Ukraine about the Second World War—has not been widely taken up because historians or publicists still tend to write in a highly emotional fashion, basing their publications on political history and ideology rather than the microcos- mic approach. His suggestions also require a considerable leap from what is clearly a non-objective approach to history, or history as propaganda, as en­capsulated by Soviet writing, with the Second World War arguably the most difficult place to start, in revising past views.

One historian who has constantly tried to perform such a task is Yurii Shapoval, in major publications as well as in a lengthy series of articles in Ukrains’kyi Istorychnyi zhurnal and regular items in the popular media. Shapoval's book Ukraine in the Twentieth Century: People and Events in Diffi­cult Times is a serious attempt to include the latest archival findings alongside what is more familiarly known, and he firmly rejects Soviet stereotypes.⁶² As the 60th anniversary of the war approached in 2005, Shapoval published an article in which he criticized Ukrainian historiography, which he feels is still dominated by retrogressive narratives that idealize and mythologize the topic and continue to promote the stereotypes of “Brezhnev-Stalin historiography.” These self-righteous scholars still reject the story of Ukraine in their narratives about the war, in his opinion. He begins with the statement that by concluding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the two dictators, Hitler and Stalin, divided Europe. There was no place in their planning for an independent Ukraine. The annexation of Western Ukraine in 1939 should be considered part of this conspiracy, and therefore one cannot praise the Soviet regime and Stalin for unifying Ukrainian lands, as is sometimes the case. In 1940-41, he adds, about 320,000 people were deported from Western Ukraine to remote regions of the USSR and thousands of prisoners and POWs were executed in 1941, just as the Soviet-German war started. Hence two totalitarian systems were in operation during the war, and Ukraine suffered under both of them. He also questions the term “Great Patriotic War,” which he maintains is an artificial and ideological term. The population during wartime was not monolithic as this term implies. There were at least three different groups: those in the Red Army by force or conviction, those who fought against the Communists, and the silent majority that was prepared or obligated to conform to the different regimes.⁶³

Shapoval then examines Ukraine's situation in more detail. At first—and he cites a comment by Demyan Korotchenko, the Second Secretary in the Ukrainian party leadership from 1939—a majority of the civil population tried to adopt itself to the occupation regime. Others realized that freedom would not come from either the Kremlin or Berlin. Thus when Stets'ko an­nounced Ukraine's independence on 30 June 1941, it was not an action taken by German collaborators, but a reflection of the thinking in Ukrainian society. In Shapoval's view, this is why the so-called liberation of Ukraine in 1944 is a topic that should be revisited: “no such liberation took place.” True, the Nazis had been expelled from Ukrainian territory, but another war was beginning in the western regions that would last until the mid-1950s. Shapoval remarks that there were two Holocausts that took place in Ukraine during the war: the first was the total extermination of the Jews; the second was the systematic elimi­nation of the Slavic population: Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Belarusians. But Stalin in his view was no liberator, and even when the Red Army crossed the Polish border, the leader's goal was to capture Poland's industrial installa­tions rather than free political prisoners in Nazi death camps.⁶⁴ His article fits well with the new narrative that could be termed “nationalist” and seeks to replace the former Soviet version of events. The difficulty, and it is evident even in this short article, is that the new version does not fit easily into a straightforward narrative. As we have seen, the declaration of independence of 30 June 1941 was a controversial event that was not accepted widely in Ukraine or by Ukrainians living outside Soviet borders. Moreover, it occurred at least in the belief that the Germans might accept the situation, as is evident from the tone and contents of the first communiques of Stets'ko and his com­panions.

The same issue has perplexed Canadian historian Roman Serbyn, as re­vealed in an interview conducted in Montreal in June 2006 (which covers sev­eral topics, including the Famine of 1932-33), and published in Den' newspa­per the following month.⁶⁵ Serbyn reveals that he was visiting Ukraine in the year prior to the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and felt that it was “outrageous” that Ukraine should find cause to celebrate the exchange of one tyrant for another, particularly as the Stalin regime ac­counted for more deaths in Ukraine than Hitler. He conducted inquiries as to the origins of the phrase “Great Fatherland War” but no one was interested. He notes that the term was coined on the first day of the war and appeared in print in an article in Pravda the following day. In his view it constitutes a myth that this was a patriotic war, based on three premises: first, the unity and pa­triotism of the peoples of the Soviet Union; second, that Ukraine was liber­ated by the Red Army; and third, that the Soviet people were victorious. How­ever, in his view there was no freedom in Ukraine and the Red Army cannot be considered as “the real victors.” Serbyn discusses the choice of 9 May as the official Victory Day, and Stalin's toast to the Russian people in late May 1945, at which time he cited the other nationalities of the USSR as cogs in the machine without which the leaders could not attain victory. He notes that the holiday was restored by Brezhnev in 1965, and angrily condemns the “metal monstrosity of a woman warrior” on the right bank of Kyiv's Dnipro River, and comments that independent Ukraine simply accepted both the holiday and its accompanying myth. The interviewer, whose pro-UPA sympathies are evident, then wonders why this myth is still extant when the UPA and the Di­vision Halychyna lack official recognition in independent Ukraine. Serbyn reels off a list of organizations that have promoted the “myth” that includes the CPSU, Red Army veterans, the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, ethnic Russians, and Ukrainian Russophones. He maintains that the concept of the “Great Fatherland War” is impeding unity between Ukrainians who took part in the war in three different military units: the Red Army, the UPA, and, especially, the Division Halychyna.⁶⁶

In May 2005, an article by Lyudmyla Shanhina provides the results of a survey in Ukraine by the Razumkov Center (the number of respondents is not cited) on attitudes to Victory Day. She reports that 86% of Ukrainians in­tended to celebrate Victory Day, 10% did not, and 4% had not decided. Of those surveyed, 60% regard 9 May as the day of victory over Nazi Germany; and 51% think that the victory was won by the Soviet Union; whereas 9% feel it was won by the countries of the anti-German coalition. 21% consider the date a day of commemoration for war heroes, and for 10% it is a day of mourning for war victims. The survey makes several distinctions in the num­ber of celebrants: 91% in the eastern regions of Ukraine compared to 65% in the west; up to 90% in the age group over 40 intended to celebrate Victory Day compared to 79% in the range of 18 to 29 years. For the younger genera­tion, the day is considered part of history rather than one affecting one's fam­ily personally (43% versus 11%). For those over sixty, however, the respective figures are 20% and 35%. In this respect the survey was unable to determine any regional differences. The survey then asked: what kind of war was the Second World War for Ukraine? The results were as follows: 59% felt it was a just war waged by the Soviet people against foreign aggressors, an opinion held by only 31% in the western regions, but 65% in Central and Eastern Ukraine, and 68% in the south. Just 14% consider the war one of two totalitar­ian states on the territory of Ukraine (the figure is 27% in the west). A re­ported 49% consider the war a “just war of the Soviet people” and among older respondents that figure rises to 68%. Finally, 67% of those surveyed be­lieve that Nazi Germany was responsible for starting the war (50% in the west); 1% blame Western countries; and 19% think all participants were equally responsible (30% in the west).⁶⁷

How should one evaluate these results? In the first place, the questions are somewhat limited and it would have been interesting to know the attitude of respondents to the various Ukrainian military units in the war. However, the results indicate that independence in Ukraine has not brought a radical change of perspective, a situation that Serbyn has also surmised. Implicitly at least they signal a negative attitude to the recognition of OUN-UPA, and likely there would be even less inclination to recognize the veterans of the Division Halychyna as official participants in the war. The view of the war as Soviet and one that served to unite the people of Ukraine remains in place for most residents, and even in the western regions it embraces a major portion of the population. Where Western Ukraine differs significantly from the other re­gions is in its perception of the war as a “just” one. Such an attitude would surely be less likely in a region that commemorates the OUN and UPA heroes through statues, museums, and street names. The Razumkov survey is star­tling in its illustration that the attitude to the war of the younger generation does not differ radically from that of the older generation. Thus the difference in perception is regional rather than generational. The problem in general with commemoration of the war is that whether or not one blames official propaganda and myths long perpetuated by a now defunct regime, a large pro­portion of the population currently accepts this perspective and refuses to change its attitude to the war. What one has to ask therefore is whether the new version being proposed, with recognition of OUN-UPA and even the Di­vision Halychyna as combatants alongside the Red Army, will be just as rigid and propagandistic in its own way. Will the outcome be a rational discussion of the war, or will it simply replace the original (Soviet) victors with a new version that can be incorporated into the national history of Ukraine (UPA as the main heroes), the sort of interpretation that has slowly begun to be in­cluded in school textbooks?

Notes

1 Yaroslav Hrytsak, “On the Relevance and Irrelevance of Nationalism in Ukraine,” Second Annual Stasiuk-Cambridge Lecture, University of Camridge, England, 20 February 2004.

2 Oleksandr Marushchenko, “Ukraina v Druhii svitovii viini: istoriohrafichni doslidzhennya 90h rokiv,” Istoriya v shkoli, No. 5-6 (2000): 2-4.

3 Ibid.

4 Nancy Popson, “The Ukrainian History Textbook: Introducing Children to the ‘Ukrainian Nation',” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2001): 325-350.

5 Viktor Mysan, Opovidannya z istorii Ukrainy (Kyiv: Heneza, 1997), pp. 174-179.

6 Ibid., pp. 179-181.

7 Ibid., pp. 188-190.

8 F. H. Turchenko, Novitnaya istoriya Ukrainy: Chastyna persha 1917-1945 (Kyiv: Heneza, 1998), pp. 246-249.

9 Volodymyr Lytvyn, Valerii Dmolii, and Mykola Shapovatyi, Ilyustrovana istoriya Ukrainy (Kyiv: Al'ternatyvy, 2001), p. 174. Lytvyn, a politician, former Speaker of Parliament, and close ally of former Ukrainian president Leonid D. Kuchma, has been accused of violating copyright laws and plagiarism in his writing. See, for example, Hryhor'ii Nemyrya, “Sim mi- fiv abo sproba ‘koryhuval’noho presynhu?',” Dzerkalo tyzhnya, No. 3, (26 January-1 Febru­ary 2002): [http://www.zn.kiev.ua/nn/show/378/33632].

Ibid., pp. 189, 204-205, 217, and 226.

O. D. Boyko, Istoriya Ukrainy (Kyiv: Akademvydav, 2003), pp. 398-399.

F. H. Turchenko, P. P. Panchenko, and S. M. Tymchenko, Novitnaya istoriya Ukrainy, Part 1: 1939-2001 (Kyiv: Heneza, 2001), pp. 5-8.

Ibid., pp. 8, 25.

Ibid., p. 27.

Ibid., pp. 28-29, 40-41.

H. D. Temka and L. S. Tupchienka, ed., Istoriya Ukrainy: Posibnyk (Kyiv: Akademiya, 2002), pp. 308, 341-342.

Ibid., pp. 342-344.

Ibid., pp. 345-348.

Ibid., p. 349.

V. D. Mironchuk and H. S. Ihoshyi, Istoriya Ukrainy (Kyiv: MAUP, 2002), pp. 215-216, 221-222.

M. O. Skrypnyk, et al, Istoriya Ukrainy: nachal'nyi posibnyk (Kyiv: Tsentr navchal'noi litera- tury, 2003), pp. 240-241, 251-253.

Ibid., pp. 262-263.

Boyko, Istoriya Ukrainy, pp. 479-480, 505-507.

“O popytkakh politicheskoy rehabilitatsii OUN-UPA: rezolyutsii XXVIII s'ezda Kompartii Ukrainy,” Pravda Ukrainy, editorial, 19 December 1990.

V. Lutsenko, “Demokratychna metushnaya,” Nadnipryanskapravda, 7 August 1991, p. 2. Cited in Visti z Ukrainy, No. 27 (1991): 1.

A. Boita, “U skhidnii Ukraini-dobri lyudy, a v zakhidnii-lyshe zlochyntsi,” Visti z Ukrainy, No. 34 (August 1991): 1-2.

“Pershyi zbir soyakiv UPA,” Literaturna Ukraina, 6 February 1992, p. 7.

Editorial, Literaturna Ukraina, 16 April 1992, p. 1.

Larysa Khorolets', “Heroyam slava!” Literaturna Ukraina, 13 August 1992, p. 2.

Yurii Shapoval, “Skazaty vsyu pravdu: do 50-richchya UPA,” Literaturna Ukraina, 1 October

1992, p. 7.

Volodmyr Yavors'kyi, “Yakshcho derzhava ne pustyi zvuk,” Za vil'nu Ukrainu, 18 May

1993, p. 2.

Ibid.

Viktor Koval', “Ukrains'ka Povstans'ka Armiya: dovidka Instytutu istorii AN URSR dlya Komisii Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy z pytan' bezpeky vid 1 lypnya 1991 roku,” Ukraina i Svit, No. 37 (2-8 October 1996): 10.

Nina Romanyuk, “Ya istymu lushpaiky, aby Ukraina bula!” Ukraina moloda, 2 September 1998, p. 6.

Wiktor Poliszczuk, Bitter Truth: The Criminality of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Toronto, 1999), pp. 27, 370-372.

Stanislav Kul'chyts'kyi, “Ukrains'ki natsionalisty v chervono-korychnevii Yevropi (do 70- richchya stvorennya OUN),” Istoriya Ukrainy, No. 5 (February 1999) 6-7.

Iziaslav Kokodnyak, “50 rokiv bezsmertiya,” Za vil'nu Ukrainu, 3 March 2000, p. 3.

Roman Rytiak, “Za shcho my skorodyly spysamy vorozhi rebra?” Za vil'nu Ukrainu, 28 July 2000, p. 4.

Roman Serbyn, “‘Tretya syla' v p'yatomu kuti,” Ukralna moloda, 21 June 2001, p. 4.

Ibid.

Ivan Khmil, “Hucksterish Circumlocutions of the OUN-UPA Apologists,” The Day Digest, 9 October 2001; [http://www.day.kiev.ua/268044/].

Cited in RFE/RL Newsline, 28 March 2002.

Kost Bondarenko, “Istoriya, kotoruyu ne znaem ili ne khotim znat'?” Zerkalo nedeli, 25 March-5 April 2002.

Serbyn makes essentially the same point in his June 2006 interview. Roman Serbyn, “Ukraine should abandon Soviet-era myths,” The Day Digest, No. 25 (25 July 2006), [http://www.day.kiev.ua/103]. This article is discussed below.

Oleh Hryniv, “Zatavrovani abreviaturamy,” Ukraina moloda, 30 August 2002, p. 4.

Anatolii Fomenko, “Pravda pro UPA,” Ukraina moloda, 10 October 2002, pp. 4-5. Information provided by V. P. Futala, Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, No. 2 (2003): 145. Yuri Kril, “Yuri Shukhevych: the Truth about UPA will be known,” The Day Digest, 15 Oc­tober 2002; [http://www.day.kiev.ua/259602/].

O. E. Lysenko and O. V. Marushchenko, “Vseukrains'ka naukova konferentsiya ‘Ukrains'ka povstans'ka armiya—fenomen natsional'noi istorii,” Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, No. 1 (2003): 147-149.

Roman Zahoruiko, “Zezlamnyi hin do voli,” Ukraina moloda, 14 October 2003, p. 10. Yevhen Sverstyuk, “Tsyu riku ne zahatyty,” Ukraina moloda, 20 November 2003, p. 6.

Serhiy Stepanyshyn, “Nationalist Internationalism: The Conference of the Captive Nations of Eastern Europe and Asia was held sixty years ago,” The Day Digest, 9 December 2003, [www.day.kiev.ua/].

Stepan Zlupko, “Velyka vitchyznyana chy druha svitova?” Za vil'nu Ukrainu, 22 June 1993, p. 2.

Mykhailo Lytvynchuk, “My voyuvaly ne za imperieyu,” Za vil'nu Ukrainu, 27 April 1995, p. 2.

Ibid.

Yaroslav Tymchyshyn, “SRSR ukraintsyam ne batkivshchyna—itzhe druha svitova viina dlya nas ne vitchyzniana,” Za vil'nu Ukrainu, 6 May 1995, p. 2.

I. Antsyshkin, “Velyka: ale chy vitchyzniana?” Ukraina moloda, 8 May 1999, p. 4.

Roman Zahoruiko, “Istorychne sharlatanstvo,” Ukraina moloda, 7 May 2003, p. 12.

O. E. Lysenko, “Druha svitova viina yak predmet naukovykh doslidzhen' ta fenomen is- torychnoi pam'yati,” Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, No. 5 (May 2004): 3-10.

Ibid., pp. 10-13.

Yurii Shapoval, Ukraina XX stolittya: osoby ta podii v konteksti vazhkoi istorii (Kyiv: Heneza, 2001).

Yurii Shapoval, “Ukrains'ka druha svitova,” Dzerkalo tyzhnya, No. 15, (23 April-6 May 2005).

Ibid.

Professor Serbyn also delivered the 2005 Shevchenko lecture at the University of Alberta on the same topic in March 2005 and at the VII ICCEES World Congress in Berlin in July 2005 on a panel organized by the author. In his abstract for this paper, Serbyn writes: “To the old founding myth of the Great October Revolution was thereby added a new myth of consolidation. Soon the new holiday became the most popular. It survived the collapse of the USSR in all the republics except the Baltic states. Its existence in Ukraine creates a paradoxical situation where a state born out of separatism, continues to celebrate a holiday intended to prevent disintegration.” ICCEES VII World Congress, Europe—Our Common Home?Abstracts 2005 (Berlin: Weltkongress 2005), p. 377.

66 Roman Serbyn, “Ukraine should abandon Soviet-era myths,” The Day Digest, No. 25 (25 July 2006); [http://www.day.kiev.ua/103]. The image of a “fatherland” war is Serbyn's ren­dition. Usually the reference is either to a patriotic or “motherland” war, hence the female statues in Kyiv and Volgograd (Stalingrad).

67 Lyudmyla Shanhina, “Dva dni do peremohy, abo myr nashomu domu,” Dzerkalo tyzhnya, No. 17 (7-13 May 2005) [http://www.zn.kiev.ua/ie/show/544/49954/].