In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

by Tim Judah

Indeed, now the pendulum has swung again. In May 2015 President Poroshenko signed into law two acts passed in April by the Verkhovna Rada. One banned communist and Nazi propaganda, meaning it would be illegal to deny, “including in the media, the criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917–91 in Ukraine.” The second criminalized denying the legitimacy of “the struggle for the independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century,” including the role of the OUN and UPA. Before signing the law some seventy scholars of Ukraine, mostly but not only in the West, signed an open letter to Poroshenko asking him to veto the acts. They had been passed with little or no debate. “The potential consequences of both these laws are disturbing,” they argued: Not only would it be a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization [UPA] that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine, but also it would exempt from criticism the OUN, one of the most extreme political groups in western Ukraine between the wars, and one which collaborated with Nazi Germany at the outset of the Soviet invasion in 1941. It also took part in anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine and, in the case of the Melnyk faction, remained allied with the occupation regime throughout the war.