PERSPECTIVES: What's so important about June 22? (06/21/98)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

What's so important about June 22?

Five years ago on June 22, I was in a hotel room in Kyiv watching the morning news. "I doubt there's a person among us who doesn't know the significance of this day," the newscaster said. In the background, there was solemn music accompanying scenes of people laying wreaths at monuments around the country.

So what's so important about June 22, I thought? Please tell me. But the announcer didn't offer a clue, and I left the hotel wondering what that was all about. Later at lunch I found out when Vice Prime Minister Mykola Zhulynsky addressed a group of American businessmen and referred to the enormous devastation Ukraine had suffered at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviets. June 22, he informed the audience, was the day in 1941 when Nazi troops crossed the border into Ukraine and didn't leave for three years - years permeated with the smell of fire and death, desperation and fear.

A total of 6.8 million Ukrainians were killed in World War II. You don't really appreciate what that means until you go to a village or a town and look at a monument to the fallen - just about every community has one. There's a long list of names. What strikes you most is how often the same surname is repeated three, four, five times, one under the other. Probably brothers, you think ... or maybe a father and his sons.

Obviously, people in Ukraine remember June 22. To them it's what Pearl Harbor Day used to be for Americans. With Ukrainians, though, the memory seems so much fresher because the war was so much closer, not an ocean away, but right there down the lane or over that hill.

In fact, World War II, as a palpable experience that featured bombs and bullets, hunger and the hangman's rope, columns of Jews marched off to cattle cars and 2 million young men and women shipped to the Reich as slaves, lasted longer in Ukraine that it did anywhere else.

There was no homefront, where anxious mothers and wives waited for letters from the boys overseas. Ukraine was the front. Two cruel armies camped in people's backyards. Anyone in the way was likely to die a painful, lonely death. Just ponder these statistics: in Poltava alone, 100,000 peasant homes were destroyed out of a pre-war total of 362,000. In the Kamianets-Podilskyi region, where my mother and older brother endured the war, 470,000 civilians were killed and 103,000 were deported to Germany for slave labor - this out of an original population of 2 million.

The legendary journalist Edgar Snow, the source of these numbers, noted that World War II was "first of all a Ukrainian war ... a relatively small part of the Russian Soviet Republic itself was actually invaded," he wrote in 1945 in "The Pattern of Soviet Power," "but the whole Ukraine, whose people were economically among the most advanced and numerically the second largest in the Soviet Union, was devastated ... No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry, its farmland and its humanity."

With losses like that, it's easy to cast Ukrainians as victims of World War II, but that's only half the story. Ukrainians were the heroes, as well. Without their courage and sacrifice the Allies would not have won the war. Consider this: When Germany invaded Ukraine in 1941, Stalin's terror was a daily reality. The artificial famine, which claimed more than 7 million victims in the winter of 1932-1933, had ended only eight years before. Ukrainians had no reason to fight for the Soviet Union and every reason to oppose it. Little wonder then, that the Red Army in Kyiv and elsewhere surrendered en masse to the Germans with little resistance; Ukrainians, Russians - it made little difference - they felt no loyalty to the Soviet Union or to Stalin. The USSR was an artificial state held together by fear.

That's when Stalin proved what an evil genius he really was. He gave the people what they wanted and that ultimately won the war. What was suppressed and punished in the 1930s was now encouraged and celebrated. Posters appeared with Taras Shevchenko pointing his fingers at a cowering member of the Wehrmacht, admonishing Ukrainians to sprinkle liberty with the Nazis' vile, evil blood. In Moscow the Supreme Soviet approved the Medal of Khmelnytskyi to reward Ukrainians for valor. The Southern Front was renamed the Ukrainian Front and the armies operating there became Ukrainian Armies. Soviet Ukraine got its own ministries of military and foreign affairs.

Ukrainian authors who had feared for their lives with every word they wrote in the 1930s were ordered to compose patriotic Ukrainian poetry. "Love Ukraine, love her like the sun itself," Volodymyr Sosiura wrote, and pocket booklets of his verse were distributed to Ukrainian troops to read in their bunkers and trenches. Inspired by lyrical words and the vision of Ukraine defined by Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian soldiers marched all the way to Berlin. In all, 4.5 million Ukrainians served in the Red Army in World War II. You're not likely to read it in the history books, but let it be noted that it was a Ukrainian Army that liberated Auschwitz.

After the war, of course, Stalin changed direction. In his speech on the Kremlin Wall at the Victory Parade on May 24, 1945, Stalin singled out the Russian people as "the most outstanding nation of all the nations forming the Soviet Union," elevating them to the leading role in World War II and minimizing the role of other peoples, including Ukrainians. Writers like Sosiura who had written the poems that inspired Ukrainians to fight the Nazis were suddenly made to answer for their verse. "I was just following orders," wasn't good enough. This was the era that inspired George Orwell to write "1984." Ukrainian patriotism had been needed to win the war. Now it was a crime.

As most readers of The Ukrainian weekly know, the Red Army was not the only Ukrainian formation to fight the Nazis in World War II. Most people in Western Ukraine saw little difference between the Nazis and the Communists, and refused to join one form of evil to fight another. Less than a year after the Nazi invasion, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army - an indigenous guerrilla operation - took on the Nazis, then in 1944, in the rugged foothills and mountains in the Carpathians, continued the battle against the Communists. The struggle was hopeless, and by 1950 it was over. Stalin was firmly in control, an Iron Curtain divided Europe, and the world was locked into a Cold War that lasted until 1991.

History, though, has a way of bursting through the most elaborate barriers that mere mortals like Joseph Stalin might erect. In the early 1950s the Soviet Union still had its vast network of concentration camps, where millions of Soviet citizens were sent to die - but not before they had provided the state with a few years of labor in frozen gold mines or timber zones. That's where thousands of captured guerrillas from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army were sent, joining the millions of wretched prisoners who were already there. Only these prisoners were different.

Road how Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes it in "Gulag Archipelago III": "These sturdy young fellows, fresh from the guerrilla trials, looked around themselves in Dubovka (one of the camps), were horrified by the apathy and slavery they saw, and reached for their knives." Under their leadership, revolts rippled through the Gulag and the camps were largely dismantled. Soviet society remained totalitarian, but the mass murder of the 1930s and 1940s was gone, leaving an opening that a generation of dissidents exploited starting in the 1960s.

As for the millions of Ukrainians who served in the Red Army, their numbers came into play a lot later, in December 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing and the question of Ukrainian independence was put to the people. Many wondered whether independence even had a chance after generations of Russification and Soviet role. The results, of course, were stunning. More than 90 percent of Ukrainian citizens voted for independence. How did this miracle happen? Go back to those monuments in every village and town in Ukraine, where wreaths are laid on June 22. The people whose names are inscribed on the tablets died for a cause. Stalin knew instinctively that no Ukrainian was willing to die for his vision of a Soviet Union. That's why he told the poets to compose love songs to Ukraine. The Ukrainian soldiers who liberated Auschwitz and marched to Berlin were reading Shevchenko and Sosiura - not Lenin.

Ukraine's experience in World War II is subtle and complex. People are still sorting out what happened and what it all means, and we're still waiting for that history to be written.

In the meantime, take a moment to remember those who died in World War II fighting for Ukraine, whatever uniform they wore.