O P I N I O N
Ukraine
Distorted Nationalist History in Ukraine
Studies on Nazi Collaboration in Ukraine and Current Attempts to Glorify the Collaborators
Recent Publications by Dr. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (Berlin):
2011: “The Act of 30 June 1941, and its 2011 Commemoration in Ukraine” in Defending History, 25 June 2011.
Program of the 15-16 Oct 2013 Kiev Conference on Antisemitism (on the Centenary of the Beilis Trial)
The following is the text of the final program received today from the organizers:
International Conference on Anti-Semitism
on the occasion of 100th anniversary of the Beilis Trial
15-16 October, 2013, Kyiv, Ukraine
Fairmont Grand Hotel
2013 Started on Wrong Note in Capitals of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania
WARSAW: Statue of “Praying Hitler” is unveiled in the Warsaw Ghetto. Reports in the Guardian, Daily Mail, Huffington Post.
New Paper by Per Anders Rudling on the Ukrainian Far Right
An important new paper by Dr. Per Anders Rudling of Lund University, Sweden, has appeared in the new volume, Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text. The collective volume brought out by Routledge (New York & London) is edited by Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson.
Dr. Rudling’s paper, entitled “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda” comprises the sections:
An International Appeal from the Head of the Ukrainian Independent Council of Jewish Women
O P I N I O N
by Eleonora Groisman
The author is president of The Ukrainian Independent Council of Jewish Women, and edits the newspaper Jewish Kiev. Authorized translation into English provided by the author is by Mr. Valery Novoselsky (executive editor of Public Diplomacy Network and of Roma Virtual Network). See:
http://evreiskiy.kiev.ua
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jewish_Daily_News/message/92
http://www.facebook.com/evreiskiy.kiev.ua
Appeal to the representatives of international governmental and non-governmental organizations by a group of social organizations and citizens of different countries concerned about the growth of antisemitism in Ukraine:
In the 2012 elections to the Verkhovna Rada the far-right nationalist Svoboda party passed. To date, the Svoboda fraction has 37 parliament members, within the total of 450 parliament members.
Ukrainian Holocaust Revisionists Woo Canada, Exposed by Historian from Lund, Sweden . . .
SUMMARY OF EVENTS AND COVERAGE:
1: Ultranationalists sponsor a North American lecture tour for a Lviv-based museum director (his museum features a profoundly photoshopped image). Harvard University (18 Oct) and a meeting with Canada’s prime minister (19 Oct) are included; the PM unwittingly lends credence to the Holocaust revisionist campaign emanating from Eastern Europe.
2: Lund University (Sweden) historian Dr. Per Anders Rudling protests.
3: Canadian missile lands in Sweden: nationalist organizations complain to the vice-chancellor at Lund University in Sweden about Dr. Rudling.
4: Exclusive: Per Anders Rudling in DefendingHistory.
5: Scholars issue open letter.
Jewish Center in Ukraine Apparently Duped into Honoring a Nazi Collaborationist Organization
According to a report received today from a publication in Ukraine (reproduced in full below), the launch of the new Menorah complex in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, billed as the city’s largest building, includes a new museum containing an exhibit that naively whitewashes the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an infamous pro-Hitler fascist organization responsible for many Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. The exhibit is quoted in the report as including information on Jews “saved” by the OUN, with no mention of its large-scale record of murder.
Ukrainian Holocaust-Revisionist Museum Seeks Legitimacy with Well-Oiled North American Tour; Dr. Rudling Protests
1: Ultranationalists sponsor a North American lecture tour for a Lviv-based museum director. Harvard University (18 Oct) and a meeting with Canada’s prime minister (19 Oct) included.
2: Lund University (Sweden) historian Dr. Per Anders Rudling protests.
3: Canadian organizations complain to the vice-chancellor in Sweden about Dr. Rudling.
4: Exclusive: Per Anders Rudling in DefendingHistory
5: Scholars issue open letter
Swedish Historian Stands up to Ukrainian Ultranationalists’ “Conquest of Canada”
1: Ultranationalists sponsor a North American lecture tour for a Lviv-based museum director. Harvard University (18 Oct) and a meeting with Canada’s prime minister (19 Oct) included
Continue reading
Canadian Prime Minister Manipulated into Praising Holocaust-Distorting Museum in Ukraine
In the course of remarks criticizing the current Ukrainian government for its human rights abuses, made in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper added words of praise for a visiting director of a Holocaust-distorting museum in Ukraine who was on a Canada lecture tour last week, and for the museum itself. The museum, in Lviv, Ukraine, glorifies and sanitizes some of the local Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators. An account of the prime minister’s remarks appeared in a 19 October 2012 report in the Toronto Sun.
There is no suggestion that the Canadian prime minister agrees with the Ukrainian Holocaust revisionists, or would wish to compliment those glorifying the local perpetrators. Instead, the episode is seen as yet another instance of a well-oiled lobby being able to confuse, combine and confound issues in dealings with Western personalities and institutions that stand far from these issues. Attempts to make heroes of the local Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators, in the spirit of antisemitic East European (ultra)nationalism, have also been documented this year in Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania.
Open Letter in Support of Per Anders Rudling
O P I N I O N
Recently, Dr. Per Anders Rudling of Lund University in Sweden has articulated his criticism of a highly problematic lecture tour in North America, which features Ruslan Zabily, the director of the Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum in Lviv, Ukraine. Mr. Zabily, whose academic credentials are slim, is given a forum as a speaker at several prestigious universities. His role in nationalist history activism in Ukraine and his links and contributions to organizations that diminish the violence, ethnic and political, of Ukrainian World War Two nationalism are not problematized.
This is not the place to reiterate Dr. Rudling’s precise and fair criticism in detail. Full documentation can be found at:
Major New History Paper on the Ukrainian Waffen SS
A major new paper on the history and nationalist mythology of the Ukrainian Waffen SS, by Dr. Per Anders Rudling of Lund University, Sweden, has appeared in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Its title is “‘They Defended Ukraine’: The 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1) Revisited.”
The abstract reads as follows:
Ukrainian Ultranationalists Sponsor Lecture Tour Across North American Universities
O P I N I O N
by Per Anders Rudling
Last week, a Canada-wide lecture tour by Ruslan Zabily was announced. He is the former director of the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement and the current director of the Lonsky Street Prison National Memorial Museum (for short: the Lonsky Museum) in Lviv, Ukraine.
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The lecture tour includes some of the most prestigious universities in Canada — the universities of Alberta, Toronto, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Ottawa — as well as Harvard University’s Ukrainian Studies Institute in the United States. The lectures in Alberta and Toronto are facilitated by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; the Peter Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine; the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies; the Harvard Institute of Ukrainian Studies and its Chair of Ukrainian Studies.
Canadian Missile Lands in Sweden
The following is the letter dated 5 October signed by a number of leading figures of Ukrainian nationalist groups in Canada and sent to the vice-chancellor of Lund University in Sweden complaining about the opinions voiced by postdoctoral fellow Per Anders Rudling, a prominent young historian. [Updates: Dr. Rudling’s DefendingHistory.com article on the subject is here; an open letter from scholars supporting him is here.]
Public Statement Concerning Instrumentalization of Academic Publications in Ukraine
O P I N I O N
by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe and Per Anders Rudling
Vadym Kolesnychenko, a member of the parliamentary faction of the Party of Regions, recently published a volume (http://r-u.org.ua/kniga/kniga.pdf) of Russian language translations of articles written by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, Per Anders Rudling and Timothy Snyder.
The articles appeared originally in journals such as Kritika, New York Times Review of Books, Carl Beck Papers and KakanienRevisited. Mr. Kolesnychenko translated and published the volume without the approval or consent of the authors. We regard this conduct as unethical.
Our objections to the political instrumentalization of our work by the Party of Regions are the same as our reservations to analogous instrumentalization by pro-nationalist groups and organizations.
- Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe
- University of Hamburg
- Per Anders Rudling
- Lund University
“Civil” Discourse in Ukraine
O P I N I O N
by Jared McBride
I sent the following op-ed, “Euro 2012: Maydan of hate?” to the Kyiv Post in late December regarding the hate literature that is often sold on Maidan Nezalezhnosti. It was published on 21 December 2011. One can read the comments made on the Kyiv Post‘s website here (taken today from the Comments section following my op-ed).
In response to my op-ed I had my educational background questioned; I was deemed a supporter of Kaganovich, Tabachnyk, and Yanukovych in no particular order; I was given various history lessons that have nothing to do with the letter at hand (and nothing to do with history either); conspiracy theories were shared; and I was called names, not least “son of a bitch.” The last epithet was perhaps the most ironic bearing in mind that I am fortunate to have a mother who raised me to have enough dignity to not insult people on internet forums while hiding behind false names.
The Seventy Years Declaration in Ukrainian
Сімдесят років Декларації
З нагоди річниці конференції «Остаточного рішення»
З приводу сімдесятиріччя офіційного прийняття нацистською владою «Остаточного рішення єврейського питання», ми нижче підписуємо:
Owning a Massacre: ‘Ukraine’s Katyn’
O P I N I O N
by Ivan Katchanovski
Preface
Ukrainska pravda, Dzerkalo tyzhnia, Zaxid.net, Den, Gazeta.ua, Glavred, and UNIAN, which all devote either special sections or many publications to such historical issues as newly uncovered World War II era mass graves, refused to publish a Ukrainian-language version of the following Open Democracy article on the misrepresentation of the Nazi mass execution of Jews in Volodymyr-Volynskyi as a Soviet massacre of Poles. The Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty published a Ukrainian version of my article in the op-ed section of their website. However, the article was removed from their website without any explanation a few hours after its online publication. My email to the director and the webmaster of the Ukrainian service of the Radio Liberty got no response. In contrast, a report claiming that the victims uncovered in Volodymyr-Volynskyi were Poles executed by the Soviet secret police remains on the website of this radio station funded by the US government.
Introduction
Such historical issues as Stalin’s policies of mass murder and activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), attract a great deal of the media coverage in contemporary Ukraine. However, the media reporting on these issues is often politically biased, and it even involves a self-imposed censorship concerning the involvement of the OUN and the UPA in Nazi genocide.
Strasti za Banderoju (‘Bandera Passion’)
B O O K S / O P I N I O N
by Franziska Bruder
The 2010 anthology Strasti za Banderoju (Bandera Passion, alternate translations include Bandera Ecstasy or Bandera-mania), edited by Tarik Syril Amar, Ihor Balyns’kyi and Iaroslav Hrytsak, assembles key contributions to three debates conducted in the years 2009-2010 around the person of Stepan Bandera, leader of the main wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
The first debate, staged on an Internet platform in L’viv in 2009, was occasioned by Bandera’s 100th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his assassination. It was followed in 2010 by another round triggered by then-Ukrainian president Viktor Iushchenko’s decision to convey upon Bandera the title Hero of Ukraine. The editors divided that second round into two parts: the debate conducted in Ukraine and the debate conducted in North America.