831349

research-article2019
EEPXXX10.1177/0888325419831349East European Politics and SocietiesBaranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust

East European Politics and

Societies and Cultures
Volume 34 Number 1
February 2020 241­–260
© 2019 Sage Publications
Conceptualizations of the 10.1177/0888325419831349
https://doi.org/

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Holocaust in Soviet and hosted at

http://online.sagepub.com

Post-Soviet Ukraine and

Belarus: Public Debates and
Historiography
Olga Baranova
Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

This article investigates how the Holocaust was recollected, presented, and interpreted
in Ukraine and Belarus during the Soviet era. It further examines the changes that have
taken place in the representation of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Belarus in the post-
communist period. First, the article aims to explain the ideological reasons why the
Jewish origin of many Nazi victims was largely played down or ignored in the Soviet
historiography. Second, it investigates the new political dynamics in independent post-
communist Ukraine and Belarus that have influenced public discourse and historio-
graphical reflections on various issues of the Second World War, including the
persecution of the Jews. As well as historiography, the article investigates the develop-
ments that have taken place in contemporary Ukraine and Belarus regarding com-
memorative practices, monuments, museum exhibitions, and education initiatives to
honor the victims of the Holocaust and to promote knowledge about this event.

Keywords: Second World War; Belarus; Ukraine; Holocaust; Commemoration

Introduction

On the eve of the German invasion in the summer of 1941, the territories of what
is today Ukraine and Belarus constituted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
(USSR) and the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). The western parts of
both republics were annexed by the Soviet Union from Poland in October 1939, fol-
lowing the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. In the first five decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, these territories became “bloodlands”1 as they experienced unprecedented
political violence starting with the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of
1917, Stalin’s ruthless collectivization, industrialization, and brutal purges and
repressions in the 1930s, followed by the genocidal onslaught of the Nazis in the
1940s.
242 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

When the Germans occupied Ukraine, there were about 2.5 million people whom
the Nazis would have considered Jews, out of the total population of 41 million. The
Jews were predominantly settled in the western, former Polish, territories, where
they made up about 10 percent of the population. In Lviv, for example, Jews consti-
tuted more than a third of the population. It was estimated that about 1.5 million
Ukrainian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.2 The death rate among the Jews in
Ukraine was more than 60 percent, but many more Jews were murdered in western
Ukraine than in the central and eastern parts of the republic. While in western Ukraine
(Galicia and Volhynia) about 90 percent of the Jewish population was annihilated, in
Kharkiv more than 90 percent of the Jews survived the war.3
Belarus proportionally had the largest Jewish population in Europe. The census of
1938 listed about 375,000 Jews living in BSSR. After the annexation of the western
part from Poland in 1939, the Jewish population tripled.4 After the unification of all
Belarusian territories, the number of Jews in the republic was around 1 million out of
the total population of 9.5 million. In the first postwar census, however, only 150,000
Jews were registered, which means that around 80 percent of the prewar Jewish
population perished during the Shoah in Belarus.5
During the Second World War, Belarusian and Ukrainian territories became a the-
atre of the Holocaust. The majority of Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews were shot by
the Einzatsgruppen and buried in ravines and mass graves. In Ukraine, Jews were
deported to the extermination camps only from Galicia, which was a part of the
General Government (Polish territories occupied by Nazi Germany). Before annihi-
lation, the Jews in Belarus and Ukraine were squeezed into ghettoes, or detained in
concentration and labour camps.6 Belarus and Ukraine became the graveyard not
only of local Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews but also of Jews transported there from
other parts of Europe—mainly from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia
and Moravia (the part of Czechoslovakia that was under German occupation), the
Warthegau (western Polish territories annexed by the Third Reich), and the General
Government.7
Although the Nazis were the major perpetrators and instigators of the Holocaust,
a certain percentage of the locals (ethnic Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, and
Poles) supported Nazi Germany especially in the early years. There were some
nationalistic organizations such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)
and the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA) in Ukraine and the Belarusian People’s
Self-Assistance and the Belarusian Regional Self-Defense in Belarus that assisted
the Nazis in the implementation of their occupation policies, including the persecu-
tion of the Jews. Cooperation with the Holocaust on the occupied territories of
Ukraine and Belarus took many forms and was expressed in different ways. These
included pogroms, theft and misappropriation of Jewish property, silent approval and
even justification of German policies against the Jews, refusal to assist Jewish neigh-
bours with food and shelter, denunciations and disclosure of information to the
German authorities about Jews in hiding, participation in the rounding up of Jews,
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 243

and acting as guards of ghettos and concentration camps. What is more, there were
cases when local policemen (the Schutzmannschaften) were involved in mass
shootings.8
Considering that an extremely high number of Jews perished on Belarusian and
Ukrainian territories, it remains of crucial importance to investigate the Holocaust
there. Similarly, it is crucial to analyze and be aware how the Shoah was presented,
interpreted, and memorialized in Soviet and later in post-Soviet Belarusian and
Ukrainian historiography and commemorative practices.

Soviet Historiography of the Holocaust

In the first post-war decades, the issue of the Second World War (or the Great
Patriotic War as it was officially called in the Soviet Union) attracted much attention
from Soviet historians and publicists, often themselves active participants or wit-
nesses of the events. Soviet official multi-volume monographs represented the war
as a genuine popular resistance and defensive struggle, where all Soviet citizens,
regardless of nationality and social background, fought side by side for the liberation
of the motherland against the Nazi invaders. They emphasized such issues as the
heroism and sacrifice of the Soviet people as a whole, the Red Army operations, the
importance of the Soviet partisan resistance, and the leading role of the Communist
party and never forgot the Nazi systematic execution of Soviet commissars by the
Einsatzgruppen, the sufferings of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) in concentration
camps and brutalities, and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Soviet civil-
ians.9 Among the subjects usually avoided by Soviet historians were nationalist
insurgencies in the western republics such as Ukraine, Lithuania, or Belarus; activi-
ties of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), disaffection of some social groups
with Soviet pre-war policies, Soviet citizens’ collaboration with the German occupa-
tion authorities, banditry and pillage of the local civilian population by Soviet parti-
sans, anti-Semitism among the civilian population and in the armed forces, and facts
of the participation and extent of involvement of local Soviet citizens in the persecu-
tion of the Jews as well as the Jewish origins of many victims and Soviet resistance
fighters.
Although Soviet historiography extensively emphasized the atrocities committed
by the Nazis against Soviet citizens, it rarely focused specifically on the murder of
the Jewish population under the occupation. According to most estimates, about 2.5
million Soviet Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and about two hundred thou-
sand more died in combat.10 It was about 10 percent of all Soviet deaths,11 at a time
when Jews comprised only 2.5 percent of the total prewar Soviet population.
However, despite the fact that of all the peoples inhabiting the western borderlands
of the Soviet Union the heaviest losses were borne by the Jews, emphasizing the
Jewish origin of the victims was discouraged.12
244 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

American Jewish scholar and activist William Korey (director of the Anti-
Defamation League who fought for the interests and rights of Jews in the Soviet
Union and wrote extensively on anti-Semitism in Russia) argued that the Soviet
authorities suppressed any public discussion of the Holocaust and attempted to oblit-
erate the Holocaust in the memories of Soviet Jews as well as non-Jews.13 According
to Korey, while in the West, especially in the United States, the Holocaust was
emphasized in curricula for children and adults, Soviet elementary and secondary
school textbooks carried no references to Jews or anti-Semitism at all. Polish Jewish
historian Lukasz Hirszowicz who analyzed the representation of the Holocaust in
Soviet commemoration policies, exhibitions dedicated to the Great Patriotic War,
textbooks, academic publications, literature and films, wrote that the Holocaust in
the Soviet Union was a kind of non-event.14 This phenomenon is sometimes explained
as a deliberate policy by the Soviet regime to conceal the murder of the Jews, because
of Stalin’s anti-Semitism, its legacy, and traditional hostility toward Jewish culture.
Soviet accounts about the war in general played down or universalized the murder
of the Jews, however the event as such was not completely erased from Soviet his-
tory books. It was rather adapted and rewritten conforming to the confines of a spe-
cific ideological narrative. Within this general framework there were also some
exceptions and variations in narratives in national republics. Zvi Gitelman, the
American Jewish political scientist, has mentioned that the word Holocaust itself
was unknown to Soviet historians; it did not enter Russian usage until the 1990s and
was transliterated from English.15 However, Gitelman acknowledged that this does
not mean that Soviet scholars did not know about or denied the Holocaust. In discus-
sions of the destruction of the Jews, they used other terms like “extermination,”
“annihilation” (unichtozhenie), or “catastrophe” (katastrofa).16 The Great Soviet
Encyclopaedia, for example, admitted that the “Nazis carried out a policy of mass
extermination of the Jews and about six million Jews were murdered in the Second
World War, among them many Soviet ones.”17 A survey of Soviet literature reveals
that there was no uniform treatment of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Some
works do admit and describe the Shoah, others discuss only some aspects of it, while
others prefer to refrain from mentioning the national and ethnic origin of the victims.
Therefore Gitelman concludes that even if there was any official Soviet policy with
regard to the treatment of the Holocaust, it was not applied universally and
diligently.18
Nevertheless, what is important about Soviet historiography, especially in the first
post-war decades, is that it did not treat the Holocaust as a separate, uniquely Jewish,
phenomenon and fate. When Soviet historians did discuss Nazi atrocities against the
Jews, they usually viewed that catastrophe as an integral part of a larger phenome-
non—Nazi genocide and the tragedy of all Soviet citizens (Jews, Russians,
Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Roma) who became targets of the Nazi racial policies of
enslavement and extermination directed not only at Jews but also at Slavs and Roma.
In other words, Soviet historians acknowledged that many Jews were killed by the
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 245

Nazis and that Jews were often treated in a most brutal way, but they asserted that
similar things happened also to other national groups in the occupied areas of the
Soviet Union. As Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer argued, the Jewish Holocaust is
unique since the Germans never systematically killed Slavs (Belarusian or Ukrainian
civilians) solely on ethnic grounds—usually they were executed on suspicion of
resistance activities or of supporting partisans—while for the Jews the very fact of
being of Jewish heritage was enough to be murdered.19 Nevertheless, accounts of
Jewish suffering were included as an indistinguishable part of the martyrdom and
death of all Soviet citizens, and consequently there was no special Jewish Holocaust.
As Gitelman ironically noted, “if the Nazis gave the Jews ‘special treatment,’ the
Soviets did not.”20
It is, therefore, important to understand the political-ideological reasons for such
a peculiar treatment of the Holocaust in Soviet history writings about the Second
World War.
Stalin’s anti-Semitism definitely played an important role in this attitude. It is well
known that Stalin fostered several anti-Semitic campaigns and show trials in the
Soviet Union, including the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of many Jews in
1948 (some of them leaders of the Jewish anti-fascist committee created during the
war), the execution of Jewish writers in 1952, and the “doctor’s plot,” when six
Jewish doctors were imprisoned for allegedly conspiring to murder Stalin. Although
the worst excesses subsided after the death of Stalin in 1953, the inhibitions, taboos,
and distortions regarding “Jewish matters” lingered for decades in the Soviet Union.21
However, Stalinist anti-Semitism alone does not suffice to explain why the Jewish
origin of many Nazi victims was largely ignored in many works of the Soviet period;
there were other political, ideological explanations for this.
Martyrdom is a powerful stimulus to a group’s sense of identity. Soviet authori-
ties used the narrative about the Great Patriotic War as a basis for the legitimization
of the Soviet regime and as a unifying experience that was supposed to reinforce the
feeling of community among all Soviet people. Therefore, speaking separately of
the tragedy of Jewry and emphasizing the Jewish role and fate was discouraged
since it could diminish all-Soviet effort and suffering, reinforce individual Jewish
national consciousness, and retard assimilation of the Soviet Jews. Moreover, it was
considered to be mistaken to distinguish and emphasize the victimhood of the ethnic
Jews to the prejudice of the victimhood of other nations and ethnic groups of the
Soviet Union who also suffered and bore huge losses under the Nazi occupation.
The Jews, in fact, were not the only victims of the Nazi genocidal policies in the
Soviet Union. About 1.5 million ethnic Belarusians and 2 million ethnic Ukrainians
were killed during the Nazi occupation. “No country in the world lost as many of its
non-Jewish citizens in the war against Nazism as did the Soviet Union, so that the
fate of the Jews in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, or any other country in the
West stands in sharp contrast to that of their co-nationals than it does in the East.”22
In the Soviet Union, Jewish losses constituted about 10 percent of the entire losses
246 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

during the war, while in other countries the percentage of Jewish victims in com-
parison to non-Jews was much higher. Therefore, to give the war to the Jews could
erode the legitimating power of the experience and could arouse great resentment
among other nationalities.
Another reason was the unwillingness of the Soviet authorities to mention and to
discuss the role played by local Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Lithuanians in the per-
secution of the Jews.
The Soviet treatment of the Black Book is very revealing. Soviet Jewish novelist
Ilya Ehrenburg and writer, journalist, and war-reporter Vasilii Grossman collected
important material that included official documents and a large number of written
and oral testimonies, diaries, and letters of Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish war-
time residents about the fate of Soviet Jews during the Second World War. The book
had 1,200 typescript pages and was intended to be published in Russian and Yiddish.
In 1945 a review commission concluded that “too much is recounted in the sketches
about the vile activity of collaborators among the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, et al.”23
In 1947, the head of the Agitprop (propaganda) department Georgii Alexandrov
wrote that “in reading the book . . . one gets a false picture of the true nature of fas-
cism. . . . Running through the whole book is the idea that the Germans murdered and
plundered the Jews only. The reader unwittingly gets the impression that the Germans
fought against the USSR for the sole purpose of destroying the Jews . . . whereas
Hitler’s ruthless slaughters were carried out equally against Russians, Jews,
Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and other peoples of the Soviet Union. . . . As
a result of these considerations ‘the Black Book in the USSR may not be pub-
lished.’”24 Finally, all copies were sent to storage warehouses where they were
destroyed in 1948. Thus because it singled out Jewish suffering, the major and prob-
ably the only post-war work that treated the Holocaust in the Soviet Union as sui
generis, has never been published in the USSR. However, manuscript copies sur-
vived and were sent abroad, where they were published in English, Hebrew, and even
in Russian.25
The controversy over the construction of a monument at Babi Yar—the site close
to Kiev where more than one hundred thousand of the city’s inhabitants including
almost thirty-four thousand Jews were shot in September of 1941—is also quite tell-
ing. For many years, no monument was placed there to commemorate this tragic
event, and there were plans to turn this site into a park and a stadium. Public support
for the erection of a monument began to mount after the protest by Soviet writer
Viktor Nekrasov in 1959 and a famous poem Babi Yar by Soviet poet Yevgeny
Yevtushenko published in 1961. Finally, public pressure resulted in a memorial
placed at Babi Yar, but the inscription says that here in 1941–1943, the German fas-
cist invaders executed more than one hundred thousand citizens of Kiev and prison-
ers of war.26 Despite the fact that more than 30 percent of those killed by the Nazis in
Babi Yar were Jews, there was no separate reference to the Jewish tragedy during the
Soviet era.27
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 247

Although the Black Book has not appeared in the USSR and there was no inscrip-
tion mentioning the Jewish victims on the monument in Babi Yar, a considerable
amount of documentary material about the Holocaust appeared during the war and its
immediate aftermath. For example, the Soviet report of January 6, 1942, emphasized
the Nazi treatment of the Jewish population: It mentioned the killing of Jews in Lviv,
the mass execution of Jews in Kiev, and murders especially directed against unarmed
and defenseless Jews.28 In 1945–1946, the reports of the Extraordinary State
Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Crimes of the German Fascist
Occupiers that mentioned Nazi atrocities against Jews were published. Soviet diplo-
mat Andrei Gromyko in his declaration at the United Nations linked the Soviet sup-
port for Jewish aims in Palestine with the special sufferings of the Jewish people
under the Nazis. Many references to the events of the Holocaust did appear in the
Soviet mass media and were included in reports on war criminals and war crime tri-
als. The Soviet media reported the Nuremberg trials, and many journalists made
Jewish references in their articles. In the reports on the Manstein’s trial, the murder
of Jews and Roma was quoted in official Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestiia of
September 11, 1949. Newspaper Novoe vremia, issue 13 of 1952 and issue 2 of 1953,
mentioned the destruction of more than 5 million Jews and put the Jews at the head
of the list of nations who suffered from Nazi extermination policies. Later, in 1960–
1962, the Soviet media gave much space to the Eichmann case and his execution in
Israel and wrote a lot about the hunt for major Nazi criminals such as Martin
Bormann, Josef Mengele, Franz Stangl, and others, and in this context found good
words for Simon Wiesenthal.29 According to Hirszowicz, this was not because of the
Soviet will to commemorate Jewish victims but because of the Soviet interest in con-
nection with the policies of the Western powers vis-à-vis Germany and former Nazi
cadres as well as the Soviets’ own post-war persecution of “collaborators,” anti-
Soviet elements, and nationalists, especially from Ukraine and the Baltic States.30
During the Soviet times, Belarus became known as a “partisan republic.” The
emphasis on heroic partisan resistance and sacrifices by all citizens of the republic
became especially pronounced after Piotr Masherov became the head of the
Belarusian Communist Party in 1965. Being a veteran of the partisan movement
himself, Masherov used this narrative to consolidate and legitimize his power.31
Following the common Soviet tendency, the Holocaust was marginalized and pre-
sented as equal to other ethnic groups. However, there were also some exceptions.
For example, a documentary collection on Belarus titled Prestupleniia nemetsko-
fashistskikh okkupantov v Belorussii, 1941–1944 (The Crimes of the German-Fascist
Occupiers in Belorussia, 1941–1944) published in Minsk in 1965 made more refer-
ences to fate of the Jews: it included, among others, the order establishing the ghetto
in Minsk, descriptions of Germans killing Jews wantonly, mass murders of Jews in
the Brest-Litovsk area, and the extermination of the Jews in Pinsk, a German report
on the resistance of one of the condemned man and a photograph of Jews being
herded into the Grodno ghetto. The origins and purpose of the ghettos were explained,
248 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

concluding that the Nazi “revived ghettos in occupied territories, turning them into
camps for the mass annihilation of the Jewish population.”32
In addition, the Jewish Holocaust was mentioned, discussed, and highlighted as a
separate topic in the Soviet Yiddish-language journal Sovietisch Haimland published
between 1961 and 1991. However, since not many people in the Soviet Union could
read Yiddish, this journal had a very limited circulation and audience.33
Nevertheless, even if some Soviet works acknowledged that Jews were the main
victims of Nazism, they completely avoided references to Jews as resistance fighters
and Soviet heroes and generally played down their role in the armed resistance strug-
gle against the German invaders. They even tried to reinforce stereotypes of Jews as
cowards unable to carry arms. For example, Panteleimon Ponomarenko—Red Army
general, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus, and the leader of the
Soviet partisan movement—complained to the centre that the Jewish population of
Belarusian cities was thinking only to save its own skin and preferred to flee rather
than to fight on the frontline.34 He noted that Jews constituted around 8–10 percent
of the republic’s population, but among partisans they made up only 2.7 percent,
which meant that the proportion of Jews in the partisan movement was three times
smaller than their proportion in the republic’s population.35
Gitelman noticed that the same approach was applied in museum exhibitions. For
example, the seventeen-year-old Jewish partisan Masha Bruskina, who was hanged
by the Nazis in Minsk, was identified as an “unknown partisan” in the Minsk Museum
of the Great Patriotic War, despite the fact that she was identified by her relatives and
other testimonies. According to Gitelman, the refusal by the authorities to identify
her by name and nationality was seen by some Jews as a deliberate refusal to
acknowledge Jewish heroism.36
It is worth mentioning that at the same time, the issue of the Holocaust and the
locals’ cooperation in the persecution of the Jews was equally a sensitive issue and a
source of embarrassment for Diaspora historians. Ukrainian and Belarusian émigrés,
often former supporters of the German cause, in their writings, for understandable
reasons, preferred to play down the facts of the participation of their compatriots in
German atrocities against the Jews, highlighting instead their work to secure national
independence whilst stressing the limited alternatives that were available to them.
Disappointed with Polish policies towards ethnic minorities and traumatized by the
Soviet purges, they came to see Nazi Germany as a vehicle to achieve sovereignty.
They tried to whitewash their wartime experience of collaboration and ignored or
even denied their own complicity in the Holocaust. In 1960 Viktor Ostrowsky, son of
Rodislav Ostrowsky, who was a head of the Belarusian Central Rada, a collabora-
tionist body, published a book Anti-Semitism in Belorussia and Its Origins in London,
where he argued that the predominant attitude of Belarusians toward Jews was empa-
thy and sympathy and they did not participate in the Nazis’ genocide, but were equal
victims. He also stated that Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians had anti-Semitic
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 249

feelings, but not Belarusians, and that the Jews themselves were somehow respon-
sible for their fate.37

Post-1991 Memory and Representation of the Holocaust

Ukraine
During Gorbachev’s glasnost and following the declaration of independence by
Ukraine and Belarus in 1991, the taboos on studying certain issues were lifted and
the archives in Minsk, Kiev, and Moscow were opened. The Holocaust began to
emerge from obscurity. However, there was still limited interest in the Shoah beyond
the Jewish community that in the 1990s constituted a tiny percentage of the popula-
tion of Belarus and Ukraine. Many aging Jewish survivors were now living abroad
in Israel or the USA and they published their memoirs in the West, but few of them
were translated and republished in Ukraine and Belarus. In addition, Ukrainian and
Belarusian citizens became aware of Stalin’s crimes such as the famine of 1932–
1933 in Ukraine, the Kurapaty and Katyn massacres in Belarus, and the many other
repressions, terror, and political purges by Stalin.
In independent Ukraine, there was a need to reconstruct national history and to
build an identity that would be distinct and distant from the Soviet one. Following
this goal the concept of patriotism was significantly changed from its previous Soviet
conception. Some Ukrainian scholars preferred to adopt the approach of Diaspora
historiography of the Cold War period. Especially in western Ukraine, there is a
strong tendency to condemn Soviet crimes more roundly than Nazi crimes, to white-
wash the wartime experience of collaboration, to rehabilitate the Ukrainian national-
ists including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian
Insurgency Army (UPA) fighters, and to glorify and depict them as national heroes
and victims of Stalin’s and Hitler’s totalitarian regimes who were struggling for the
independence of their country.38
Canadian historian John-Paul Himka argued that of particular importance for
understanding the reception of the Holocaust in post-communist Ukraine is the ques-
tion of what role the non-Jewish population of Ukraine played in the implementation
of the Nazi policies.39 Although the debates over the Holocaust were not so intense
and frequent as in neighbouring Poland over Jedwabne and Kielce,40 similar patterns
can be noticed in Ukraine. There is a tendency to present one’s own nation as inno-
cent while blaming others: The Germans were the main perpetrators and instigators,
the Poles and the Lithuanians had anti-Semitic attitudes and collaborated in the
Holocaust, while the Ukrainians did not take part in anti-Jewish actions. For exam-
ple, Ukrainian historian Volodymir Viatrovych—the director of the Centre for
Research of Liberation Movement in Lviv and the director of the Ukrainian Institute
of National Memory—denied the fact that OUN militia took part in pogroms in Lviv
250 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

and argued that they were Polish criminals who wore blue and yellow armbands.41
The Ukrainian nationalist historians do not deny the Holocaust as such—just the
participation of their own nation in it. In addition, in contemporary Ukraine the mem-
ory of the Holocaust competes with the memory of the Holodomor—the famine of
1932–1933—and NKVD purges in the late 1930s, and quite often the Nazi crimes
are compared to the crimes of the Soviet regime. It was even claimed that more
Ukrainians died in the Holodomor (estimated at between 2.5 and 7.5 million) than
Ukrainian Jews in the Holocaust (estimated at 1.5 million), and some even held that
the Soviet repressions before the war could justify the collaboration of certain
Ukrainian nationalists with Nazi Germany during the war.42
Especially under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, 2005–2010, the OUN
were made into national heroes and several institutions like the Ukrainian Institute of
National Memory denied Ukrainian nationalist complicity in the Holocaust, while
the famine of 1932 was described as the main crime against the Ukrainian nation and
a genocide.43
Overall, in independent Ukraine the population remains divided over the politics
of memory of the war. There is even a division of nomenclature: some Ukrainians
refer to it as the “Second World War,” which started in 1939 with the German and
Soviet invasion of Poland, and emphasize the fact that between 1939 and 1941 the
Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies through the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact,
and others as the “Great Patriotic War,” which started in 1941 with the German inva-
sion of the Soviet Union.44
With regard to the historiography of the Second World War, there is also a polarity
of views that, as Himka argues, can be termed “traditionalism” versus “renewal” or
“nationalists” versus “liberals.” This divide affects not only the historiography of the
Second World War specifically, but the whole historiography of modern Ukraine
more generally. One side strives to speak the language of scholarship, the other, the
language of ideological standards and patriotic constructions of national history. The
goal of the first is to provide various discourses and versions, even if they are unpleas-
ant and disturbing, to show the complexity of the picture and to analyze persons like
Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky or Stepan Bandera as historical personalities with
all their contradictions. The goal of the second, in contrast, is to educate a new gen-
eration of Ukrainian “patriots,” to create national heroes, and to use historical per-
sons as models for identification.45
Some progress has been made with regard to Holocaust education in contempo-
rary Ukraine. In 1994, the Ministry of Education and Science formally introduced
Jewish Holocaust themes into the secondary school curriculum. However, often the
Holocaust is presented in the world history course, rather than the national history
course, and discussed as something that happened in Germany or Poland but not in
Ukraine. In 2000, the Ministry of Education introduced a special course on the his-
tory of the Holocaust in history departments in the universities. In addition, there are
two local institutions that work to improve Holocaust education: the Ukrainian
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 251

Centre for Holocaust Studies in Kiev and the Tkuma All-Ukrainian Centre for
Holocaust Studies in Dnipropetrovsk. Both centres offer courses and training ses-
sions for teachers, organize conferences, produce publications, and publish a special
journal Holokost i suchasnist with contributions in Ukrainian and Russian.46 There is
also the Judaica Institute that sponsors events and seminars on issues concerning
Jewish history, including the Holocaust.47 In addition, there is a Holocaust museum
called Drobitskii Yar in Kharkiv.48
The most important memorial of the Holocaust in Ukraine is Babi Yar. In 1991,
large-scale commemorations of victims took place there dedicated to the fiftieth
anniversary of shootings. Leonid Kravchuk, who was about to become the first
President of Ukraine, addressed a large gathering that included guests from Israel
and elsewhere and acknowledged that this was a genocide and the guilt lay not only
with the fascists but with those who did not stop the murderers, and thus he indirectly
recognized Ukrainian complicity. The Jewish Council of Ukraine has been collecting
the names of Jewish victims and of rescuers at Babi Yar. Since 2000, the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was involved in plans to build a memorial com-
plex in Babi Yar with a park and a Jewish community centre. However some non-
Jewish Ukrainians felt uncomfortable and even contested the idea of making Babi
Yar an exclusively Jewish place of memory. Many citizens of Kiev from other ethnic
groups including Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians perished at Babi Yar, with
non-Jews constituting two-thirds of the victims, so there was a wide-spread feeling
that it would be wrong to build a memorial dedicated to a single nation.49 There are
monuments to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust in various Ukrainian cities
like Donetsk, Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odessa.

Belarus
After obtaining independence in 1991 there was a need to construct national his-
tory, but in the new history writings, as in Ukraine, the main focus was on the rev-
elation of Stalin’s repressions and national suffering. The mass graves of the thirty
thousand victims of Stalin’s terror in Kurapaty50 became the emblematic symbol of
Soviet crimes, and at this time, the atrocities of the Soviet regime were emphasized
rather than its glorious past. The historical narrative of the nationalist opposition in
the early 1990s resembled those of the émigrés (Diaspora) of the Cold War period
and there was a tendency to whitewash the wartime experience of collaboration,
depicting Belarusian nationalists as victims of two totalitarian regimes, Stalin’s
Soviet Union and Hitler’s Third Reich, and arguing that they were simply attempting
to find their way towards national sovereignty and did not have positive alternatives,
while the Jewish Holocaust did not generate much interest and remained a largely
marginalized topic. After the initial shock, many Belarusians became annoyed with
revelations that depicted the Soviet era in extremely dark colours and responded
with indifference and even irritation.51
252 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

After the election of Alexander Lukashenko as the first and, until now, the only
President of the Republic of Belarus in 1994, a neo-Soviet version of the past was
adopted. Since the late 1990s, Belarusian national historiography has restored the
Soviet narrative about the Great Patriotic War: Partisan resistance, heroism, and
redemptive victory during the War became the founding myth of Belarusian state-
hood. New editions of textbooks were produced, and few changes were made from
the previous Soviet version: The Great Patriotic War was depicted as the culminating
moment in Belarusian history. Defending the image of Belarus as a partisan republic
where the partisan resistance movement was the largest in the Soviet Union and the
second largest in Europe, after that of Josef Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, is seen by the
authorities as a patriotic issue. This narrative largely leaves out the activities of
nationalist Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Polish partisans on occupied Soviet territory
as well as those of the Jewish resistance and ignores and even denies the activities of
collaborators.
However, some adjustments were made to fit the political needs of the regime,
especially to mark a distance from Putin’s increasingly assertive Russia. In 2005 the
national Day of Independence of the Republic was changed from July 27 (the day
when Belarusian sovereignty was declared in 1990) to July 3 (when the Belarusian
capital Minsk was liberated from German occupation in 1944). In his speech in 2008,
President Lukashenko stated, “The day of liberation from the fascist occupants that
we celebrate as the main state holiday is the Day of Independence of the Republic of
Belarus. This is a holiday, in which the sacred and great notions of liberation, victory
and independence unite into a single whole.”52 The date of the liberation of Minsk
and not the date of the end of the war itself helps to nationalize war memory in
Belarus, although some observers mentioned that the date was not well chosen as in
early July 1944 a part of Belarusian territory was still occupied by the Nazis.53
The old Soviet monuments such as Khatyn (1966) and the Mount of Glory (1969)
were restored, and a new monument, “Partisan Belarus” (Belarus partizanskaia),
was opened in Minsk in 2005. In addition, a new Museum of the Great Patriotic War
and the Park of Victory was opened in Minsk in July 2014 for the seventieth anniver-
sary of the liberation of Minsk from the Nazi occupiers. On July 2, Russian president
Vladimir Putin visited Minsk and was invited to see the Museum. In present-day
Belarus, there are almost six thousand monuments dedicated to the Second World
War, and most of them are devoted to Soviet soldiers’ and partisans’ heroism.54
Despite a return to the Soviet version of history, a more complex picture of
Belarusians during the war, presented as victims but also as instruments of the execu-
tioners, appears in some Belarusian historical publications and independent journals
such as Belaruski Historychny Ahliad or Arche.55 A similar narrative was shown also
in a film entitled Okkupatsiia. Mysteries directed by Andrei Kudinenko and released
in 2003. This film generated public debates in Belarus, Russia, and Poland since it
provided a completely new variation on the theme of the resistance to the Nazi occu-
pation. The movie tells the stories of all sorts of Belarusians—those in the partisan
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 253

brigades, those trying to get on with their lives amid the war, and those serving the
Germans in the police corps. It tells the stories of three symbolic characters—a local
man Adam who had an affair with a Polish woman; a Belarusian old woman, a
mother whose son was killed by a Nazi motorcyclist and who eventually forgave and
transferred her love and care to a German soldier wounded by partisans; and a young
man who could not forgive his mother for forgetting his dead father and going to live
with a policemen and Nazi collaborator, and whose naiveté was exploited by the
partisans to take revenge. Initially, Kudinenko’s film obtained an official go-ahead
for distribution in Belarus. But the authorities changed their decision after the movie
was selected at an international film festival in Moscow. They worried that the film
would undermine the official Belarusian narrative about the Soviet partisans and thus
would strike at the foundation of Belarusian identity. “The film does not correspond
to the historical truth, it can insult the sensitivities and patriotic feelings of war vet-
erans and make a negative influence on the education of the young generation,”
states the official explanation of the ban on the film. Kudinenko declared that the
primary aim of the film was not to reflect on a concrete ideology or state but those
real human stories when people become hostages of war circumstances, which prove
to be stronger than their efforts, and which could occur anywhere. However, Belarus
in particular has plenty of painful memories connected to the German occupation,
since a quarter of its population died, and in the aftermath many of those who sur-
vived the war were sent to Soviet labor camps on charges of collaboration. Much of
the country’s national mythology is tied to those experiences.56
As in the case of Ukraine, the Jewish Holocaust did not attract much attention
from Belarusian scholars and just as in Soviet times, the official Belarusian histori-
ography does not emphasize the peculiarity of the genocide of the Jews. The official
discourses on war victims refer mostly to Soviet citizens or the inhabitants of Belarus,
and the genocide of Jews is often presented as part of a more global Nazi policy of
extermination directed not only against the Jews but also the Slavs. For instance, in
his speech in July 2008, President Lukashenko, who is often criticized for his anti-
Semitic remarks, stated, “the Nazis aimed to exterminate peoples that according to
Hitler were sub-human like the Slavs, the Jews and others.” In another speech, he
stated, “Everybody says that Jews suffered, 6 million perished. But, almost 50 mil-
lion perished during the war. And not only Jews were killed. The calamity was for
everybody—people were killed. And, we also, the Belarusians and the Russians, our
fate was sealed as well.”57 Therefore, although the genocide of the Jewish people is
not denied in Belarus, these statements aim to demonstrate the equal fate of Slavic
and Jewish people during the war.
The Belarusian textbooks mention the extermination of the Jews and use the
notion of the Holocaust. For example, the 2004 textbook on the history of the Great
Patriotic War notices that extermination of the Jews was “particularly violent” com-
paring to other nationalities and concerned more than six hundred thousand people in
Belarus. Per Anders Rudling, however, argues that the university textbook of
254 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

Belarusian history Narysy hystoryi Belarusi dedicated fifty pages to the topic of the
Great Patriotic War but the word Jews appeared only once, and a relatively short
paragraph was dedicated to the many ghettos established in Belarus. In addition, in
the tradition of Soviet historiography, victims of the Einsatzgruppen were described
as Soviet citizens.58 Moreover, often the Jewish Holocaust is not seen as a part of
national history but as a foreign affair: the work of the Germans who were assisted
by Lithuanian and Ukrainian collaborators.
Monuments dedicated to the Holocaust exist but do not attract much attention
from the Belarusian media and are rarely used for official commemorations. Their
stand depends mostly on private financial support. The main Holocaust memorial in
Belarus is Yama (the Pit) in Minsk that was actually the first official Holocaust
memorial established on the territory of the Soviet Union. Erected in 1946 without
official permission, it was dedicated in Yiddish and Russian to the five thousand
Jews from the Minsk ghetto who were murdered at the site in March 1942. The
inscription says that it is dedicated to the Jewish victims of Nazism.59 In 1997, the
Belarusian President visited the Yama memorial for the first time. In 2000, the monu-
ment was renovated and re-dedicated with a walkway and plaza, trees planted for
Righteous Gentiles, and a sculpture depicting Jewish victims descending into the
ravine. Since then, it seems that there have been very few official commemorations
at the site. However, in 2008, Lukashenko participated in a wreath-laying ceremony
at the Yama memorial to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the demolition
of the Minsk ghetto.60
The most influential works on the Holocaust in Belarus are written by western
scholars,61 while the Belarusian body of literature remains relatively limited. It is
also quite telling that many Belarusian scholars of the Holocaust, such as Leonid
Rein, Leonid Smilovitsky, Yakov Basin, Vladimir Levin, and David Meltzer, are of
Jewish origin, they live abroad, in Israel or the USA, and they publish their works in
English. However, there are also some works on the Holocaust produced by
Belarusian scholars who live in Belarus such as Imanuil Ioffe, Evgeyj Rozenblat, and
Raisa Chernoglazova who publish in Russian and Belarusian. In addition, the Union
of Belarusian Jewish Public Associations and Communities (SBEOOO)—a member
of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress—in cooperation with Israeli and European
NGOs initiated a series of conferences, publications, and museum exhibitions on
various aspects of the Holocaust to fill the void and to raise Holocaust awareness in
the republic.62

Conclusion

The Holocaust was not denied or completely erased from the publications of the
Soviet period. There were some works that occasionally mentioned Jewish suffer-
ings and the fact that the Jews were the main targets of the Nazi extermination poli-
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 255

cies. However the common pattern was to play down the Jewish origin of many Nazi
victims and to avoid talking separately about the genocide against the Jews. The
general claim was that all Soviet people, whether the Jews, Russians, Belarusians,
or Ukrainians, suffered equally under the Nazi occupation and became subject to the
Nazis’ ruthless policies of genocide. Therefore general phrases like “execution of
Soviet civilians” were used in many Soviet works. Although some Soviet works
acknowledged Jews as the main victims, they almost completely ignored Jewish
participation in resistance activities, their heroism and contribution to the Soviet
victory. Again the general claim was that all Soviet people, regardless of nationality
and social background, were fighting together for the liberation of their motherland
from the German-fascist invaders.
Diaspora historians, mainly Ukrainian and Belarusian émigrés, often former sup-
porters of the German cause, were also not interested in discussing the Holocaust. In
their writings, they tried to whitewash the wartime experience of collaboration,
focusing instead on their activities to secure national sovereignty and describing
nationalists as victims of totalitarian regimes. They also denied the participation of
their compatriots in the persecution of the Jews and blamed others: The Germans, the
Poles, or the Lithuanians had anti-Semitic attitudes and were responsible for the
initial pogroms against the Jews and the Holocaust, but not the Belarusians and the
Ukrainians, whose predominant attitude towards the Jews was empathy and who met
with the same fate as the Jews, though on a smaller scale.
In the early 1990s, after the proclamation of independence by Ukraine and
Belarus, they felt a need to construct national histories. Important changes took place
in the historiography of the Second World War; at the same time, the continuities
from the previous Cold War period and similar trends and patterns were noticeable in
both countries. The main focus was on Stalin’s terror and there was a tendency to
condemn Soviet crimes more roundly than Nazi atrocities, and some even stated that
the famine of 1932–1933, ruthless Soviet pre-war policies, and Stalin’s repressions,
especially in western Ukraine and Belarus in 1939–1940, could justify collaboration
by some Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists with Nazi Germany, seen as a vehicle
to achieve national independence. Some scholars especially from western Ukraine
took the approach of Diaspora historiography of the Cold War period and sought to
whitewash the wartime experience of collaboration by nationalists, including OUN
and UPA fighters, presenting them as national heroes who were fighting for the free-
dom of their country, without considering the dark side of their legacy and even
denying their participation in the Holocaust. These scholars do not deny the Holocaust
as such, just the participation of their nation in the Nazi crimes against the Jews.
Despite the fact that taboos were lifted and archives were opened in the post-
communist period, there was still limited interest in the Jewish Holocaust beyond
the Jewish community. The Holocaust of the Jews was introduced as a theme in the
academic curriculum and in textbooks, but often treated as a foreign affair, some-
thing that happened in Germany or Poland and not as a part of national history,
256 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

while the Holocaust of Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews carried out by bullets and
local participation in the persecution of the Jews remained largely marginalized
topics.
There are some local bodies in Belarus and Ukraine that work to promote aware-
ness about the Holocaust: They organize training sessions for teachers, educational
seminars, study trips, they sponsor conferences and produce publications in the area
of Holocaust studies. However, these bodies are nongovernmental organizations and
in their activities they rely mainly on foreign grants, private funding, and cooperation
with western partners and NGOs.
Holocaust monuments and memorials exist, but they rarely attract the attention of
the authorities and media, and nothing like POLIN (the Museum of the History of
Polish Jews) in Warsaw or the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest exists in Kiev
or Minsk. The claims that the Jews were not the only victims of Nazism and thus it
would be mistaken to focus exclusively on Jewish fates and to privatize certain
places like Babi Yar in Kiev as Jewish memorials are quite frequent.
Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak argued that a reassessment of various
issues of the Second World War, especially Holocaust recognition and acknowl-
edgment of one’s own involvement in Nazi crimes in many European countries,
has never resulted only from inner debates; outside factors were also at work.
Often a decisive role was played by monographs written abroad and then “imported”
into the country, like Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order,
1940-1944 or Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community
in Jedwabne, Poland. The end of the Cold War and the prospect of membership in
the EU for Central and Eastern European countries also played an important role in
this process. British historian Tony Judt, in his famous book Postwar: A History of
Europe since 1945, stated that “the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . opened the way to a
more accurate perception of various issues of the war neglected or ignored after
1945.” Judt pushed the idea even further by saying that “Holocaust recognition
became our contemporary European entry ticket.”63 However, for Ukraine, and
especially for Belarus, there is no immediate prospect of becoming members of the
EU, and, therefore, recognition of the Holocaust and one’s own complicity in Nazi
crimes is not seen as a priority by the authorities in these countries. In addition,
although some influential monographs on local Ukrainian and Belarusian collabo-
ration in the Holocaust appeared in the West,64 they did not manage to spark intense
public debates like the books by Jan T. Gross in Poland, and nothing similar to
debates over Jedwabne and Kielce can be seen in present-day Ukraine and Belarus.
Therefore, despite the fact that some changes in conceptualization of the Second
World War took place in post-communist Ukraine and Belarus, the continuities and
trends of the Cold War period are still very much present in contemporary
Belarusian and Ukrainian narratives. Although it is true that the Holocaust has
started to emerge from obscurity, there are still some limitations and inhibitions on
its comprehensive and honest investigation.
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 257

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: The article benefited from funding of the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna.

Notes
1. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
2. Alexander Kruglov, “Jewish Losses in Ukraine, 1941–1944,” in The Shoah in Ukraine. History,
Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy M. Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008), 272–90. For estimated Jewish losses in Ukraine, see also Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine,
Dieter Pohl “Holocaust,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com (accessed 20 November 2017).
3. Kruglov, “Jewish Losses,” 284.
4. Per Anders Rudling, “The Invisible Genocide: The Holocaust in Belarus,” in Bringing the Dark
Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, ed. John-Paul Himka and Joanna
Beata Michlic (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 60.
5. See Weißrußland in Israel Gutman, ed., Enzyklopädie des Holocaust (Berlin: Argon, 1993), vol.
3, 1559–1562. The statistics provided by German historian Bernhard Chiari are quite similar: Chiari states
that of 920,000 Belarusian Jews, only 120,000–150,000 survived the war. So he estimated that about
800,000 Belarusian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. See Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front.
Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrußland 1941-1944 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998), 231.
6. According to an estimate, about 150 ghettos and 260 concentration camps were established on
Belarusian territory. See Leonid Rein, “Local Collaboration in the Execution of the ‘Final Solution’ in
Nazi-Occupied Belorussia,” Holocaust Genocide Studies 20, no. 3 (Winter 2006): 387.
7. Ibid., 387.
8. On local Belarusian and Ukrainian cooperation in the Holocaust see Leonid Rein, The Kings and
the Pawns: Collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013);
Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine,
1941-44 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003); Dieter Pohl, “Ukrainische Hilfskräfte beim Mord an den Juden,”
in Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalisten oder normale Deutsche?, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen,
Wallstein, 2002); Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian
Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2014).
9. The clearest examples of this kind of approach are the six-volume encyclopedia Istoriia Velikoi
Otechestvennoi vojny Sovetskogo Sojuza, 1941–1945 [History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet
Union, 1941–1945] (Moscow: Soviet Ministry of Defense, 1961–1965) and the three-volume work
Vsenarodnaia borba v Belorussii protiv nemetsko-fashistskikh zahvatchikov v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi
vojny (The Popular Resistance Struggle in Belarus Against the German-Fascist Occupiers during the
Great Patriotic War) (Minsk: BSSR Academy of Sciences, 1983).
10. The statistics on the number of Jews who died in the Soviet Union during the Second World War
vary to a great extent. Mark Kupovetsky mentioned the number of 2,733,00 Soviet Jews who died during
the war. This figure includes natural deaths and those due to harsh war conditions even in the unoccupied
areas. See Mark Kupovetsky, “Estimation of Jewish losses in the USSR during World War II,” Jews in
Eastern Europe 24 (Summer 1994): 2. Mordechai Altshuler asserts that the number of Jewish Holocaust
victims in the Soviet Union fluctuates between 2.5 million and 3.3 million. See Mordechai Altshuler,
Soviet Jewry since the Second World War (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 4.
11. In 1946, Josef Stalin stated that Soviet war losses were 7 million; in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev
revealed that Soviet losses during the Second World War were at least 20 million. Sergei Maksudov, a
Russian demographer living in the west, estimated Soviet war losses at between 25 and 27.4 million. An
258 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

official report published by the Russian Academy of Science in 1993 estimated total Soviet population
losses of 26.6 million, both civilian and military.
12. In general on the Holocaust in the Soviet historiography, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War:
The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001). On the Holocaust in western Ukraine in the Soviet historiography, see Tarik Cyril Amar, “A
Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory,” in The
Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist,
and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 2014), 158–84.
13. William Korey, “Down History’s Memory Hole: Soviet Treatment of the Holocaust,” Present
Tense 10 (1983): 53.
14. Lukasz Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet
Union. Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the
USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993),
29.
15. Zvi Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in Bitter
Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1997), 18.
16. Ibid., 19.
17. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Moscow: The Soviet Encyclopedia Publishing House, 1970-
1979); English translation, vol. 9, 1975, 293.
18. Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography,” 18.
19. See Yahuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
20. Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography,” 20.
21. Ibid., 22.
22. Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust,” 31.
23. Shimon Redlich, ed., War, Holocaust and Stalinism (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1995), 355.
24. Ibid., 366, 368.
25. The Russian edition was published in Israel. The English version is The Black Book, trans. J. Glad
and J. S. Levine (New York: Holocaust Library, 1981).
26. Jewish Virtual Library, Babi Yar, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/babi-yar (accessed 20
November 2017). See also Karel C. Berkhoff, “Babi Yar Massacre,” in The Shoah in Ukraine. History,
Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy M. Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008), 303.
27. Only in September 1991, a monument “Menora” devoted specifically to Jewish victims was
erected for the fiftieth anniversary of this tragedy.
28. Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography,” 20.
29. Ibid., 20.
30. Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust,” 32.
31. Rudling, “The Invisible Genocide,” 62.
32. P. P. Lipilo and V. F. Romanovskij, eds., Prestupleniia nemetsko-fashistskikh okkupantov v
Belorussii, 1941–1944 [The Crimes of the German-Fascist Occupiers in Belorussia, 1941–1944] (Minsk:
Collection of materials and documents, 1965).
33. Rudling, “The Invisible Genocide,” 62.
34. Ibid., 64.
35. Evgenij Rosenblat, “Belarus: Specific Features of the Region’s Jewish Collaboration and
Resistance,” in Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust. Belarus, Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania, ed. David Gaunt, Paul Levine, and Laura Palosuo (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 279.
36. Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography,” 23.
37. See Viktor Ostrowsky, Anti-Semitism in Belorussia and Its Origins (London: Byelorussian Central
Council, 1960).
 Baranova / Conceptualizations of the Holocaust 259

38. See, e.g., exhibition by Volodymyr Boyko, head of the Museum of the National Liberation
Struggle in Lviv and works by Volodymyr Viatrovych, director of Center for Research of Liberation
Movement in Lviv. Several monuments to Bandera have been erected in western Ukrainian towns. On the
Bandera cult in Ukraine, see Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, 459–530.
39. John-Paul Himka, “The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Ukraine,” in Bringing the
Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, ed. John-Paul Himka and
Joanna Beata Michlic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 628.
40. The discussions about Polish anti-Semitism and complicity in the Holocaust were initiated by Jan
T. Gross’s books Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in
Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2006).
41. See Volodymir Viatrovych, Stavlennia OUN do evreiv: formuvannia pozitsyi na tli katastrofy
(Lviv: MS Publishing House. Centre of Research for Liberation Movement, 2006), 54.
42. See Johan Dietsch, Making Sense of Suffering: Holocaust and Holodomor in Ukrainian Culture
(Lund: Lund University Press, 2006).
43. Himka, “Reception of the Holocaust,” 640.
44. Ibid., 628.
45. Ibid., 634–35.
46. For more details on activities of these institutions, see http://www.holocaust.kiev.ua/eng/ and
http://tkuma.dp.ua/index.php/en/.
47. For more information, see http://judaica.kiev.ua/old/eng/indexEng.html.
48. See http://www.drobytskyyar.org/index.php?form_page=1&lang=en.
49. Aleksandr Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine: Memorialization of the Jewish
Tragedy at Babi Yar,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (2011): 371–89.
50. In 1988, burials were discovered in Kurapaty, on the outskirts of Minsk, where NKVD officers
killed, between 1937 and 1941, thirty thousand Belarusian and other civilians.
51. Rudling, “The Invisible Genocide,” 65.
52. “Vystuplenie Prezidenta A.G. Lukashenko na torzhestvennom sobranii, posviashennom Dniu
Nezavisimosti Respubliki Belarus’ (Dniu Respubliki) 3-go iulia 2008,” Belarus Segodnia, 8 July 2008.
Cited in Alexandra Goujon, “Memorial Narratives of WWII Partisans and Genocide in Belarus,” East
European Politics and Societies 24, no. 1 (2010), 9.
53. Goujon, “Memorial Narratives,” 10.
54. Archives of Belarus, “The History of the War: A Survey of Events,” https://archives.gov.by/eng/
index.php?id=104476 (accessed 21 November 2017).
55. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Remembering World War II in Belarus. A Struggle between
Competitive Historical Narratives,” in History, Language and Society in the Borderlands of Europe.
Ukraine and Belarus in Focus, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (Malmö: Sekel, 2006), 38.
56. Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova, eds., Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-
Soviet Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). See also Vitali Silitski, “A Partisan Reality
Show,” Transitions OnLine, 11 May 2005, http://www.tol.org/client/article/14025-a-partisan-reality-
show.html.
57. Goujon, “Memorial Narratives,” 15.
58. Rudling, “The Invisible Genocide,” 26.
59. Goujon, “Memorial Narratives,” 16.
60. Ibid., 16.
61. See works by Martin Dean, Christian Gerlach, and Bernhard Chiari.
62. General Information on Belarus Jewish Organizations from http://eajc.org/page425 (accessed 20
November 2017).
63. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005), 803.
64. See works by Karel Berkhoff, Martin Dean, and Dieter Pohl.
260 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

Olga Baranova, PhD, is an adjunct professor at the International University of Monaco. From September
2015 to September 2017, she was a research associate and lecturer in History and International Studies at
the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, Austria. In addition, she has been an EURIAS Junior Fellow at the
Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria, and a lecturer in Contemporary History at
Gonzaga University in Florence, Italy. She is a historian of twentieth-century Europe specializing on East
European and Soviet/Russian history and politics. Her research interests are in history of the Second
World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, politics of memory and identity in the Soviet Union and con-
temporary Belarus and Ukraine. She holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute (EUI)
in Florence, Italy, an MA in Central European History from the Central European University (CEU) in
Budapest, Hungary, and another MA in History and High Education from the Belarusian State
Pedagogical University Maxim Tank in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of the book Nationalism, Anti-
Bolshevism or the Will to Survive. Forms of Belarusian Interaction with the German Occupation
Authorities, 1941–44 (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010), and numerous articles in peer-reviewed
journals.