The Liberal Dilemma
President Yushchenko’s decree bestowing the title of Hero of Ukraine on Bandera took the Ukrainian liberal elite by surprise. For years its most prominent representatives had been associated in one way or another with the national-liberal camp in Ukrainian politics—the coalition of nationalist and liberal forces that brought about Ukrainian independence in 1991 and fueled the Orange Revolution of 2004 that brought Yushchenko to power.
His Bandera decree indicated that the coalition was all but dead. Yushchenko’s decree was treated with understanding by intellectuals with nationalist leanings but rejected by their liberal counterparts.For one, argued the liberals, Bandera was too controversial a figure to be treated as a national hero. He divided Ukraine instead of uniting it. Politically, the decree allowed the Russian leadership to claim that the Orange camp had pro-Nazi sympathies; it also alienated the Polish elites, which until then had been among the strongest supporters of Yushchenko’s attempt to join the European Union. That was one reason for the liberal rejection of Yushchenko’s effort to make a hero of Bandera. The radical nationalism of Bandera’s ideology, as well as the xenophobic and anti-Semitic views of the OUN leadership, were equally important.17
While they did not welcome the decree, many liberals also did not believe that the new president’s revocation of the title of hero was the right way to proceed. As Iaroslav Hrytsak, one of the leading intellectuals of the national-liberal camp, explained in his blog in the Lviv Internet publication Zaxid.net, while Yushchenko’s decree had divided Ukraine, the revocation could not stitch it back up. Many in the national-liberal camp did not welcome the February 2010 resolution of the European Parliament that called on the new president of Ukraine to annul his predecessor’s decree.
The Ukrainian intellectuals were especially disappointed by the support for that resolution on the part of the Polish members of the European Parliament, who, they believed, had failed to appreciate the complexities of the political situation in Ukraine and, by passing such a resolution, strengthened the hand of the new authoritarian leaders of Ukraine and their Russian backers. Hrytsak suggested that the ideal solution for Ukraine would be to agree on some form of historical amnesia. Not very optimistic in that regard, he called on his readers to accept a situation in which minorities had the right to their own historical narratives and heroes. Hrytsak cited London, with its monuments both to Cromwell and to Charles I, as a possible model for the implementation of such politics of memory.18While anti-Semitism featured prominently in the statement of the nonexistent “Movement of ι January,” and both communists and liberals touched upon it in their debates on the participation of members of the Bandera faction of the OUN in the Holocaust, the subject remained marginal. It moved much closer to the center in the debate on Bandera’s legacy that was provoked by the Yushchenko decree among students of Ukrainian history in North America. The debate split a group of scholars, formerly maintaining something of a consensus in their assessment of Ukrainian history, who were associated in one way or another with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. Most of those who took part in that debate during the first half of 2010 stressed the close relation between the ideological premises of the Bandera organization and European fascism, putting the emphasis on the anti-Semitic element of nationalist ideology and nationalist collaboration in the Holocaust. One of the participants in the debate, John-Paul Himka, referred particularly to the results of his recent study of the Jewish pogrom in Lviv immediately after the German takeover of the city in late June and early July 1941.19
Many of the contributions to the Canadian debate appeared the same year in Ukrainian translation in a book compiled by Tarik Amar, Ihor Balynsky, and Iaroslav Hrytsak but had limited impact on the discussion of Bandera’s legacy in Ukraine. The very division of the memory camps in Ukraine along the Bandera- Stalin line made the Holocaust theme marginal at best.