Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 by John-Paul Himka (review)

Abstract

This book review was to have been written by a different reviewer a year ago. The reviewer eventually decided not to write a review, but never explained the reasons for this. Besides issues of professional ethics, there might be a political reason for such sabotage, at least after February 24, 2022. With the Russian Federation unleashing a genocidal war against Ukraine under the absurd pretext of its denazification, some may see a discussion of the dark pages in Ukraine’s past as facilitating Russian propaganda and undermining the Ukrainian cause in general. If so, it is flawed logic. If anything set post-Soviet Ukraine apart from Russia over the past two decades, it was not the rule of law or the level of corruption but a discussion of Ukrainian society’s complicity in World War II–era genocides – the Holocaust and the so-called Volhynian massacre of Poles. Even if inconsistent and halfhearted, public debates of these traumatic events in Ukraine were matched in Putin’s Russian Federation by a total denial of its own rich genocidal past at the expense of Soviet history’s hysterical glorification. Russia’s denialism went as far as to repudiate responsibility for episodes that were officially recognized as criminal by Soviet officialdom back in 1990, such as the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners in 1940. Russia’s Memorial Society, the main custodian of historical memory of Soviet terror and its perpetrators, was legally and illegally harassed for years until it was required by the Supreme Court to shut down in 2021 and was officially outlawed in 2022. Systematic retrospective populism – the glorification of the righteous Soviet nation in the past – has evolved into full-scale domestic Nazism, as the Soviet has increasingly become identified with ethnically Russian, and a revival of the Russian-Soviet idealized community has become the ultimate political priority. By contrast, a critical or at least skeptical attitude to Ukrainian nationalism of the 1940s has prevented modern Ukrainian society from embracing organicist nationalism, even in the face of Russia’s creeping aggression since 2014.1 When Russia unleashed open war against Ukraine in Febru-