It was at these times that the Ukrainians were making supreme efforts to attain freedom and national independence. During both World War I and World War II the interrelations of Ukrainians and Jews reached the highest point of tension. Relations between Jews and Ukrainians were clouded at times by mutual accusations that followed upon bitter conflicts affecting both peoples adversely. There they shared the lot of the Ukrainian people in their misery and the ongoing struggle for freedom and national emancipation. First of all, a substantial part of Europe's Jewish population lived in Ukraine for several centuries. Introduction Viewed in historical perspective the question of Ukrainian-Jewish relations is an extremely important one, not only as regards the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples, but also in the light of world peace and international well-being. Concentrating on Ukrainian and Polish history, this article explores how the radical right historical discourses appeared in the post-Soviet space, what types of historians were involved in them and what kinds of distortions and obfuscations have predominated.
These discourses impacted as well on historians who in general were critical of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of nationalism, war criminality or East Central European fascism. Post-Soviet historical discourses were shaped not only by journalists or political activists, but also by radical right historians. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was simultaneously accompanied by the “rebirth” of nationalism that was not free from antisemitism and racism, and which triggered different types of nationalist distortions of history and obfuscations of the Holocaust. For a long time the history of these movements was unknown or distorted by Soviet propaganda and propagandist publications written during the Cold War by veterans of these movements living in the West and cooperating with Western intelligence services. Among them was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. This allowed historians to investigate the history of nationalist and radical right organisations and armies that, during the Second World War, had been involved in the Holocaust and other atrocities. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the archives of the former republics and satellite states of this multiethnic empire were opened.
0 kommentar(er)
