Historical memory in Lviv

Lviv is a beautiful city in western Ukraine. In many ways it has a distinct spirit, reflecting its different historical heritage from the rest of the country. Lviv, together with the eastern Galicia region of which it is the most important city, had spent much less of its history under Russian or Soviet rule. As part of the partition of Poland in the 18th century, Lviv had been annexed to the Austrian Hapsburg Empire. After an attempt to establish an independent Ukrainian state at the end of the First World War, Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine was incorporated into the restored Polish state. But while Lviv itself had a predominantly Polish and Jewish population, with Ukrainians in a minority, in the surrounding territory of eastern Galicia Ukrainians were in the majority.

Dissatisfaction with Polish rule was strongly felt among the Ukrainian population, and radical nationalists of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) carried on a violent campaign of terrorist attacks targeting the Polish state as well as Ukrainians who they regarded as traitors or collaborators. The onset of the Second World War seemed to offer them another chance to establish an independent state under their exclusivist, totalitarian rule. After the invasion and dismemberment of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939, most of the OUN leadership took refuge in the German occupied west of the country, where they established close ties with the Nazis. Following a split in the organisation, a more radical faction, the OUN-B, so-named after its leader, Stepan Bandera, made plans for a national revolution they hoped to carry out in Ukraine with Nazi support.

The OUN-B was a typical fascist organisation of its day, in its totalitarian ideology, its intolerance towards other nations in the territory it claimed, and its vicious antisemitism. Its members adopted the outstretched arm fascist salute, and drew inspiration from other fascist movements in Italy, Slovakia and Croatia, as well as Germany. Bandera, as “providnyk” (leader), throughout his life insisted upon the leadership principle (“führerprinzip” in German) of unswerving submission to the leader’s will.

When the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, they did not allow Bandera to cross into the newly occupied territory. But other OUN leaders were quick to take up the opportunity. When the German army reached Lviv, one of Bandera’s key subordinates, Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed a new Ukrainian state on 30 June. The arrival of the German army was followed by a bloody pogrom against the city’s Jewish population, in which a militia organised by the OUN-B took a prominent part.

Lviv’s brief experience of Soviet rule in 1939-41 had been brutally repressive. Tens of thousands of people were arrested, and frequently tortured, and hundreds of thousands were deported. Before the hasty Soviet withdrawal from the city in the face of the German advance, the NKVD secret police were ordered to shoot all remaining political prisoners. Thousands were murdered in NKVD prisons in Lviv.

Memorial to the victims of communist crimes, Lviv

I visited the National Museum - Memorial of the Victims of the Occupying Regimes “Prison on Lonsky Street”, located in one of the prisons where the NKVD murders took place. While the museum depicts the harsh prison regime during periods as a Polish, Soviet and Nazi gaol, its particular focus is on the NKVD murders, during which, according to the information provided, 1,681 were killed, or 41 per cent of the NKVD murders carried out in prisons in Lviv. However, as the historian John-Paul Himka has described, the museum gives an incomplete account of the bloody events at Lonsky prison in the days before and after the Soviet withdrawal from the city in June 1941.

Upon the arrival of the German army in the town, the bodies of the murdered prisoners were brought out into the prison yard, where shocked Lviv residents came to identify their loved ones. As the English-language text at the museum acknowledges, Jewish residents of Lviv were rounded up and forced to carry out the bodies, which were already decomposing in the summer heat. What the museum does not relate is how these Jews were savagely beaten and murdered, and how this developed into a full-scale pogrom, during which Jews were dragged from their homes, beaten and humiliated in the street, raped and murdered. This is a serious omission, made worse by the emphasis that during the Nazi occupation it was mainly Ukrainians, members of the OUN, who were victimised at the prison. Thus while the museum’s account glosses over the massacre of Jews that took place inside Lonsky Prison as well as elsewhere in the city, it presents the organisation whose members actively participated in that massacre as the primary victims of Nazi repression.

In line with typical Nazi propaganda, the OUN conflated Jews with communism. Supposed “Jewish Bolshevism” and the Jewish population were held responsible for the NKVD murders in Lviv, despite the fact that Jews were among the NKVD’s victims. Ukrainian newspapers at the time played up this association, whipping up passions against the city’s Jews. Of course, those newspapers were produced under the supervision of the German occupiers. But the conflation of Jews and communists and hostility to Jews as an enemy of the Ukrainian people were key aspects of OUN ideology.

The English-language text in the museum states that among its aims is “to encourage patriotism among the citizens of Ukraine.” As has been described by Himka, as well as by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and other historians, this is in line with a practice among OUN apologists in the Ukrainian diaspora and in western Ukraine to rewrite history so as to glorify the role of the OUN and to minimise, deny or ignore the fascist nature of the organisation, its collaboration with the Nazis and the terrible crimes its members perpetrated. It is a narrative which in recent years been pressed upon the rest of the country as well.

As it became clear that Nazi Germany would lose the war, the OUN tried to distance itself from its earlier fascist associations, and presented itself as resisting both Nazi and Soviet occupation. In fact the OUN-B’s initial overtures to the German occupiers in 1941 had been rebuffed, as the latter had no interest in supporting Ukrainian aspirations to establish an independent state. Several OUN-B members, including Bandera himself, were arrested by the Germans. Nevertheless, many members of the OUN-B militia joined the Ukrainian police force established by the Germans, which participated extensively in the holocaust. And when in 1942 the OUN-B established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), many members of the Ukrainian police deserted to the new organisation. While the OUN-B tried to downplay its earlier fascism and Nazi collaboration, the UPA continued to murder Jews, as well as massacring tens of thousands of Poles in a genocidal campaign to cleanse the Eastern Galicia and Volhynia regions of Poles.

OUN apologists claim that the organisation was not responsible for the Lviv pogrom in July 1941, for which they blame the Germans and criminal elements in the Lviv population. But as numerous Jewish survivors attested, the OUN-B militia was extensively involved in rounding up the Jewish victims. Furthermore, photographs of the events taken by Germans show that many perpetrators were wearing the OUN-B militia’s armbands. The museum at the prison on Lonsky Street claims to bear witness to the terrible events that took place there. But its omission of the pogrom and silence about the role played by members of the OUN-B, whose members it presents as heroes and victims, is an unconscionable distortion of history.

Close by the Lonsky prison museum is a monument to the victims of communist crimes. It is marked by the Ukrainian trident, and does not indicate that there were also non-Ukrainian victims. However, elsewhere in the city, a monument to the NKVD murders commemorates Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish victims.

Rossoliński-Liebe’s book, “Stepan Bandera, the Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult”, describes how, as the Soviet Union collapsed, monuments glorifying the OUN and Bandera began to be erected in western Ukraine. A large statue of Bandera was unveiled in Lviv in 2007. The rehabilitation of Bandera and the OUN was stepped up during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, from 2005-10, who designated Bandera, as well as another leading OUN-B figure, Roman Shukhevych, as heroes of Ukraine. This move was reversed under Yushchenko’s successor, Viktor Yanukovych, but the rewriting of history to glorify the OUN as fighters for Ukrainian independence, while glossing over or denying their crimes and their Nazi collaboration has gathered pace since the onset of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014.

The designation of Bandera as a hero was denounced by the European Parliament as well as by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation which promotes remembrance of the holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also sharply condemned the decision of the Ukrainian parliament in 2018 to mark Bandera’s birthday on 1 January. The glorification of Bandera and the OUN is also widely denounced in Poland. The noted historian of the holocaust and of Ukraine, Timothy Snyder, in an article in the New York Review of Books in February 2010, described Yushchenko’s rehabilitation of Bandera as ethically unsound and as casting a shadow on his political legacy.

None of this deters the OUN’s Ukrainian apologists. There is a widely held perception today in Ukraine that their history has too long been seen through a Russian or Soviet lens, and that they should now tell their own story. There is considerable justification for this view. In the Soviet Union, the OUN and Bandera were denounced as Nazi collaborators and criminals, but the immense crimes of the Soviet regime, its savage repression of resistance to Soviet rule in western Ukraine, and the mass executions and deportations, were covered up. In response to any who criticise the glorification of Bandera and the OUN or denounce their record, a stock reply from Ukrainian OUN apologists is to claim that they are spreading Soviet and Russian propaganda. However, such inferences do not hold weight in light of the clear historical record of the fascist nature of the OUN, its Nazi collaboration and the horrendous crimes committed by many of its adherents.

I also visited the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes “Territory of Terror”, which is located in what was during World War II Lviv’s Jewish ghetto. This was also the location of a Soviet transit camp from 1944-1955, for deportations to the east. The museum’s exhibits and accompanying texts commemorate the mass murder of Lviv’s Jewish residents, both in the city’s ghetto and at the Janowska slave labour camp on the outskirts of the city, as well as the deportations by the Soviet regime. In general, it gives a much fuller account of the horrors inflicted by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes than is the case at the Lonsky prison museum. That said, it does not document the crimes committed by the OUN and the UPA, whose members are depicted as victims. Notably, a series of displays in front of the museum when I visited, about individual victims, mostly concern Ukrainian victims rather than Jews, many of them OUN and UPA, or members of their families.

This troubling lionisation of people with such an unsavoury record is likely to continue to stain the country’s reputation. Ukraine has rightly received enormous international support for its heroic struggle against Russian aggression. Yet key allies, notably Poland, are among the countries that are particularly offended by such historical revisionism. What is especially baffling is that modern Ukraine, a democratic state aspiring to membership of the European Union, with a Jewish president and a Crimean Tatar defence minister, has nothing to do with the intolerant, totalitarian fascism espoused by Bandera and the OUN. Yet it is very hard to find Ukrainians who are willing to push back against the nationalist narrative, at least in public. In recent decades much has been done to uncover Ukraine’s painful history of Soviet repression. A more serious, honest and frank discussion of other aspects of the country’s difficult 20th century history is also needed.

Museums and monuments in Warsaw

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine had stopped all air travel to the country, my journeys to Kyiv in the autumn of 2022 and again in the summer of 2023 passed through Warsaw. With events in Ukraine very much on my mind, I took the opportunity to visit a couple of the monuments to the resistance in Poland during the Second World War.

The Warsaw Uprising Monument commemorates the battle of Poland’s resistance to seize control of the capital from the retreating German occupiers before the arrival of the advancing Soviet forces. The uprising, which began on 1 August 1944, was both heroic and tragic, as the Soviet army stopped short of the city and waited while the Germans brutally suppressed it and then destroyed the city in its aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, as Stalin refused to allow any meaningful supplies to the resistance. The uprising may be seen as the beginning of the Cold War, as the Polish Home Army’s vision of a pro-Western Polish state clashed with the Soviets’ determination to crush any independent Polish spirit and to subsume the country into its expanding empire of proxy states in central Europe. The people of Warsaw paid the price for the Nazi brutality and Soviet callousness.

The Warsaw Uprising monument

The monument depicts Home Army soldiers in action amid the ruins of the shattered city, as well as a group emerging from the sewers, which had been an important way for the insurgents to move around. It was only erected in 1989, at the very end of communist rule in Poland. Until then communist Poland had downplayed and distorted the importance of the uprising. Home Army veterans were disparaged and, in the immediate post-war period, even arrested. No commemorations of the Home Army or the uprising were permitted. The cynicism with which the Soviet army stood back and watched as the Germans destroyed Warsaw meant that the uprising was an uncomfortable event for the communist regime.

The Warsaw Rising Museum opened in 2004, to mark the 60^th anniversary of the uprising. A big, sprawling museum over a number of floors, it is packed with artefacts, weapons, photographs, displays, videos and audio. The subdued lighting and a loud background noise, like a beating heart, produced a forbidding atmosphere. The museum was crowded, with large school parties rushed around. Disturbing impressions were thrown at me, but the thread of events through that terrible two months was hard to follow. I picked up some printed flyers that seemed randomly distributed around the museum, but which explained the course of events. I left with the feeling that they had tried to pack in too much, and that coherence had been lost along the way.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument

Another monument commemorating the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was unveiled in 1948, in the area where the ghetto had been. It consists of a large stone wall representing both the walls of the ghetto and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, with two large menorahs to either side. Inset in the wall are, on one side, insurgents of the uprising, and, on the other, a depiction of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people. Next to the monument is the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which was opened in 2013. This striking postmodern building has become a considerable landmark in Warsaw. The name Polin means both “Poland” in Hebrew, as well as “rest here”, which relates to the legend about the first Jews’ arrival in Poland. The museum relates a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland, once the largest Jewish community in the world, from its beginnings in the Middle Ages up to the holocaust and beyond.

The Polin museum, Warsaw

The museum’s layout draws visitors through the different phases of Jewish history in Poland. That Poland attracted such a large Jewish community reflected its exceptional tolerance among European states. Although Poland was not immune to antisemitic violence, its Jews were in general protected by the Polish Kings, who valued their contribution to the economy of their realm. As elsewhere, Jews in Poland thrived as traders. The Polin museum does not shy away from presenting uncomfortable aspects of Jewish history in Poland, including their engagement in the slave trade. It explains that, despite the Catholic Church’s objections to the enslavement of Christians, Poland’s kings were loath to act against it, because they profited from the trade. Catholic clergy in general opposed the tolerance shown towards Jews, but their objections were largely ignored by the country’s rulers.

With my mind on Ukraine, an especially striking section of the museum concerned the Bohdan Khmelnytsky rebellion of 1648. Ukraine was at the time part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Khmelnytsky’s Cossack rebellion against Polish rule especially targeted Jews, as well as Polish landowners and Catholic priests. Jews were seen as allies of the Polish landed aristocracy as they frequently acted as tax collectors. Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. The museum explained how, for the Jewish community in Poland-Lithuania, the Khmelnytsky rebellion was a cataclysmic event that ended their feeling of safety and security in Poland. Furthermore, from a Polish perspective, the Khmelnytsky rebellion was an important stage in the weakening of the Commonwealth, leading to its eventual demise and partition among the neighbouring states. For Poland’s Jews, the demise of the Commonwealth was also negative, as it meant that they lost the protection Poland had offered them, and were left at the mercy of rising antisemitism in the Russian and Austrian empires.

In Ukraine, Khmelnytsky has usually been seen as a positive historical figure. One of the country’s regions is named after him. A banknote bears his image. And there is an equestrian statue of him in the centre of Kyiv. However, some Ukrainians have seen him unfavourably, especially because, with his rebellion failing, after initial success, he turned to the Russian Tsar for support, which led to the incorporation of eastern and central Ukraine into imperial Russia. For Russia, Khmelnytsky was seen as a heroic figure, for his role in, according to the Russian view, uniting Russian lands. Indeed, the statue in Kyiv was erected in the 19^th century, under Tsarist rule.

Since independence, Ukrainians have been reassessing their history, a process that has been accelerated by Russia’s aggression. There is a widespread feeling that Ukrainian history has for too long been written from a Russian perspective. This feeling has considerable justification. The point is relevant for western historians as well, who all too often had a largely Russo-centric view of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, which did not give sufficient weight or importance to the non-Russian peoples under Tsarist and Soviet rule. But in addressing their history, Ukrainians need to take a critical look at uncomfortable episodes and historical Ukrainian figures whose records were far from unblemished. Polish-Ukrainian relations, as well as the treatment of the Jewish community, present difficult topics, and Ukrainians need also to consider the perspectives of others on their shared histories. As the Polin museum makes clear, Khmelnytsky is far from a heroic figure for some of Ukraine’s neighbours.