COMMENTARY

History, its uses and its misuses, Prof. Himka and getting off our knees

by Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky

"Since the days of Bogdan Chelmenitzky [sic], the Jewish people has a long score to settle with the Ukrainian people ... To you and your friends, I suggest that you go to church not only on Sunday but also every day of the week, and that you kneel there until bleeding at the knees in asking forgiveness for what your people has done to ours." - Excerpt from a letter written in October 1986 by Dov B. Ben-Meir, the deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, to Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine [published in The Ukrainian Weekly, January 11, 1987].

In a letter to The Weekly (March 6), Prof. John Paul Himka suggested that anyone who makes mention of facts such as that Trotsky, Kaganovich and other Jews played an important role in the first decades of Soviet Communism is "grinding an axe against the Jews" and is guilty of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. He also advised that "this whole keeping of national scorecards - what the Russians, Poles, Jews, etc. did to the Ukrainians - is such a discredited and restrictive mode of thought, that we should really make an effort to abandon it altogether. It is a mental fixture of the 1930s and 1940s that that needs to be thrown out." He concludes by further suggesting that if Ukrainians don't stop talking about such subjects, we are doomed: "if we don't clean our house now, it will be impossible to hide the stink."

Prof. Himka acknowledges that Trotsky, Kaganovich and other Jews played an important role in creating Soviet rule and that Jews were over-represented in the Soviet secret police and related criminal organizations. But, he complains, why be selective in focusing on these facts? And, he explains, statements of facts are not made in a vacuum. They are objectionable, even if true, because "There's an ugly history in Ukrainian wartime journalism of identifying Jews and Bolsheviks to justify German policy towards Jews."

I realize that logic is not a required subject for historians, but where is it written that they can take a holiday from it altogether? Ukrainian Americans should not in 2005 make mention of the leadership role that individual Jews played in the first decades of the Soviet state because of something that some Ukrainian said a continent away 60-some years ago during World War II?

Prof. Himka's point about selectivity is equally puzzling. After doing research at Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University, Prof Himka authored a long article published in 1997 on the subject of "Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews During World War II." More recently, he has written "War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora." So, making mention of Jewish participation in the leadership or the secret police of the criminal Soviet state is being objectionably "selective," but writing about Ukrainian "collaboration" with the criminal Nazi state is laudably universal? Some more of that special logic?

Who has an axe to grind agains whom?

Leaving Prof. Himka's idiosyncratic sense of logic aside, his claim that it is Ukrainian Americans who have an axe to grind against Jews suggests that he has just recently returned from several decades of travel in a distant galaxy. Was it a Ukrainian parliamentarian who wrote that Ukrainian have a long score to settle with Jews and that Jews should kneel until they bleed to ask forgiveness, or was it a Jewish parliamentarian who wrote that to Ukrainians? No other member of the Knesset would criticize or repudiate the 1986 letter by Mr. Ben-Meir, even when asked to do so by the letter's recipients. Yet, our Prof. Himka thinks it is Ukrainians who have an axe to grind?

Was it a Ukrainian columnist who wrote recently that he wasn't sure whether Jews existed, but that if they did, they had the blood of Ukrainians on their hands, or was it a columnist in the Jerusalem Post who wrote in December 2004 that "whether or not a Ukrainian nation exists, insofar as Jewish history is concerned, it will live forever, since no other nation other than the Germans seems to have more Jewish blood on its hands"? And yet, our Prof. Himka thinks it is Ukrainians who have an axe to grind?

Was it a Ukrainian school that staged a play portraying Jews as the enemy or, as reported in the May 24, 2001, Bergen Record in New Jersey, was it a play staged by high school students at the Yavneh Academy in Paramus, titled "Faith, Rebellion and Fate", that injustly portrayed Ukrainians? As the paper reported: "The play begins in the early 1990s in Tomaszov, Poland, the home of a large Hasidic settlement, showing how Lerman, then only 7, got his first taste of anti-Semitism, when his family was attacked by Ukrainian soldiers who often preyed on Jews and wanted to annex the region." And yet, our Prof. Himka thinks it is Ukrainians who have an axe to grind?

When one goes to a college bookstore or to a Barnes & Noble-type bookstore today - not in the 1930s or 1940s - and looks through the books in the Jewish history section, one will repeatedly encounter the extraordinary libel that, purportedly, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the anti-Semitic precursor to Hitler. And when one looks up references to Simon Petliura, one also repeatedly finds the slanderous claim that, purportedly, Petliura, too, was an anti-Semite and pogromist. And yet, our Prof. Himka thinks it is Ukrainians who have an axe to grind?

In 1926, a man named Samuel Schwartzbard, who was in all likelihood a Soviet agent, assassinated Simon Petliura in Paris. The assassin, a Jew from Bessarabia, claimed in his defense that the murder was supposed retribution for Petliura's purported pogroms. The Jewish community took up the defense's cause and helped to assassinate Petliura a second time, this time via character assassination accomplished with the help of distorting the documentary evidence relating to what Petliura had and had not done. The first assassination was the work of an individual, culpability for which lay exclusively with that individual and those, if any, who sent him. But the second assassination was a community effort. Yet, no one has ever apologized for it nor for the concomitant demonization of "Ukrainian nationalism." And yet, our Prof. Himka thinks it is Ukrainians who have an axe to grind?

In the first year of its independence, the Ukrainian capital city presented a city-wide commemoration to the specifically Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Babyn Yar. In addition to commemorative ceremonies, there were huge glass-encased photo-montages along Kyiv's main street viewed by thousands of pedestrians. A specifically Jewish monument was added at Babyn Yar to the unspecific Soviet one that had been erected years before. In Israel, a small monument to the Ukrainian victims of the Holodomor, the genocidal Famine of 1932-1933, was quickly vandalized and destroyed. And yet, our Prof. Himka thinks it is Ukrainians who have an axe to grind?

When in 1988 John Demjanjuk was erroneously convicted of being "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, Israelis in the courtroom chanted "death to Demjanjuk, death to Ukrainians." And yet, our Prof. Himka thinks it is Ukrainians who have an axe to grind?

Moral positioning

There sometimes appears to be a tendency in the Jewish community to presume and to portray itself as morally superior. On a general level, one encounters claims about how the Jews invented ethics, how Judaism is essentially the religion of social justice and so on. In many Jewish accounts of history, Jews portray themselves principally as heroes or martyrs. But one cannot be morally superior in a vacuum; one has to be morally superior to others, and Ukrainians, in this distortion of history into a false morality play, are among those cast in the role of such others: the morally inferior.

Various Jewish leaders and writers portray Ukrainians as stupid,_1_ vicious_2_ and evil,_3_ people who need to kneel until they bleed seeking forgiveness. Remarkably, in this era of heightened sensitivities, there is a kind of unself-conscious open season on Ukraine and Ukrainians, no matter how preposterous given statements may be. In the cover feature story in the July 14, 2002, issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine titled "Before the Holocaust Fades Away," Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that his grandfather used to tell him: "The Germans were bad, the Poles were worse. But the Ukrainians were the worst of all." Then, he added, "A month before our journey, I waited for a visa in the stifling lobby of the Ukrainian Consulate on East 49th Street, and as I looked around at the people standing next to me, the line the Ukrainians were the worst went through my mind, again and again." My letter to the Times pointed out that it would be inconceivable for that paper to print an article in which a Gentile ruminated about how "Jews were the worst" and then I asked, why the double standard? Although the Times printed a series of letters in response to its article, it did not see fit to print my letter nor any other that may have raised this obvious point. Apparently, prejudice against Ukrainians seems so normal to some that it never even registers on their mental radar screens.

Two of the strangest encounters I have ever had involved the inability or unwillingness of Jews to contemplate revising their prejudices in the face of facts that could contradict those prejudices. In February 1987 I spoke at an international conference at the State Department hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council on the topic of the non-Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. During a breakout session, the Jews in the room refused to admit it possible that a Ukrainian who sat before them and explained that he had been in Auschwitz for his membership in a Ukrainian nationalist organization was telling the truth. He rolled up his sleeve and showed everyone his concentration camp number. They still didn't believe him. Finally someone said that any Ukrainians who had been in Auschwitz must have been there on vacation. Apparently, Stepan Bandera's two brothers and the other Ukrainians who died there must have perished from too much vacationing there.

The second encounter occurred in New York at an informal meeting with some members of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The four or five gentlemen from the AJC were all lawyers or investment bankers. They were very highly intelligent and sophisticated people. I spoke about problems related to Jewish prejudices against Ukrainians. I showed them specific, obvious examples, such as Elie Wiesel's writings in "Jews of Silence." It was as though I were speaking in a foreign tongue. Remarkably, no one seemed to understand what I was talking about.

The same moral posturing arises when Jews ask accusatorily why there were not more "righteous Gentiles" in Ukraine, or elsewhere, during the Nazi Holocaust. Perhaps a fair question, but at least there were some Ukrainian righteous Gentiles. How many righteous Ukrainian Jews were there during the Holodomor?

Context

Prof. Himka is right about one thing: context is important. What, then, is the context in which in the last decade some discussion about the role that individual Jews played in the first decades of the Soviet regime has arisen? It has arisen exclusively as a defensive reflex to the repeated attacks, intensified over the last two and a half decades, by some Jewish writers and spokespersons against Ukrainians and against the efforts by some in the Jewish community to portray Ukrainians as morally inferior, as supposedly "historically," "traditionally" or "genetically" anti-Semitic. Why has the reaction taken place only within the last decade or less? Because it is only recently that specific documentation of who did what during the first decades of Soviet rule has become available.

It was stunning for me to learn within the last five or so years that in the 1920s and 1930s, the period in Ukrainian history during which the Soviet war against the Ukrainian population was the most destructive, a majority of the leadership of the Soviet secret police in Ukraine was Jewish. Specifically, of the total of 550, the ethnicity of 69 could not be determined. Of the remaining 481, 261, or 54 percent, were Jewish, 106 were Russian, 48 were Ukrainian, etc._4_ It was equally stunning for me when in the late 1990s my cousin's wife managed to research the details of the Soviet state murder of her father in 1930 and found that a majority of the Soviet secret police, "prosecutors" and "judges" who participated in that murder was also Jewish.

These discoveries bring at least two issues to mind. First, if, for example, the co-founder of Nazism happened to have been a Ukrainian, and if the second in command during Nazism's reign of terror happened to have been a Ukrainian, and if 54 percent of the Gestapo's leadership happened to have been Ukrainian etc., it would, to put it mildly, be disingenuous to pretend that these facts would not have been trumpeted endlessly and have been the subjects of innumerable books, articles and movies. Yet, the co-founder of the Soviet state happened to have been a Jew; Stalin's second in command in the 1930s was a Jew; and 54 percent of the identifiable leadership of the Soviet secret police in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s was Jewish. But, according to Prof. Himka, it is "improper" even to mention this?

Second, why in 2005 should any of this be of any interest to anyone? In most contexts, it should not be to anyone. For example, since I first moved to the New York area in 1971 to attend Columbia, most of my teachers, students, graduate school friends and colleagues have been Jewish. We have spent thousands of hours discussing Aristotle, Kant and Marx, foreign movies, college football, politics, legal issues and so on. It has never once occurred to me to ask any of my friends or colleagues why there were so many Jews involved with the Soviets in Ukraine in the '20s and '30s. Why? Because whatever happened then and there has absolutely nothing to do with our relationships or our shared interests.

I do not anticipate anything changing in that respect. Why and when then, if ever, might I be prompted to speak or write about that topic? Answer: if and when, and I again emphasize the if, I am yet again confronted by yet another attempt to distort history for the purpose of promoting the construction of a false morality play to elevate the self-esteem of others, then for that purpose and in the context of that discourse, and that purpose alone, the Trotskys and Kaganoviches and all those leaders of the Soviet secret police in Ukraine start becoming relevant.

Conclusion

No one in his right mind wants to grind any axes or pick any fights with the Jewish or any other community. To begin, it makes no sense to speak of grinding an axe against a community of people. Second, some or many of us have close professional, personal and social relationships with men and women who happen to be Jewish. And, for example, most of my many colleagues and friends who are Jewish simply have no particularly strong views about Ukraine or Ukrainians one way or the other.

I know of no instances during the last 40 or 50 years of any diaspora Ukrainian writer or organization taking a public position adverse to Israel. Of several thousand Ukrainians before whom I have lectured, whom I interviewed or with whom I had discussions, I have never met anyone who lived in Ukraine during World War II who in any way minimized the Nazi depredations against the Jews._5_ So where is the putative conflict?

If it arises, it arises exclusively in reaction against the attempt by some in the Jewish community to bully Ukrainians into accepting with equanimity the status of historically moral inferiors. For reasons that should be obvious, that is an outrageous attempt at group libel, outrageous principally because it is historically dishonest, but also because it is politically racist insofar as it is premised on the assumption that Ukrainians are second-class.

Happily, during the recent Orange Revolution even the most obtuse have been given a vivid opportunity to realize that in fact Ukrainians are as first-class as anyone in the world. Will they now avail themselves of that opportunity?

Bohdan Vivitsky is an attorney, writer and lecturer who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy.

1. "[T]he Germans and their local collaborators here did not bother with statistics. . .perhaps because Ukrainians have no head for figures." - Elie Wiesel, "The Jews of Silence," p. 35. [Back to Text]

2. For Robert Kaplan, Ukrainian "Cossacks" represent the forces of mindless and unparalleled savagery. Thus in his essay titled "Euphoria of Hatred," he reflects upon Gogol's (Hohol's) Taras Bulba and writes that, supposedly, the world of the Ukrainian "Cossacks" was a world in which "a fury burns that is beyond the cultivated bourgeois imagination," a world in which "violence is a way of life, an expression of joy and belief, unlinked to any strategic or tactical necessity," where the "rare breaks in the fighting are given over to 'spellbinding,' prolonged drunken orgies." Robert D. Kaplan, Atlantic Monthly, May 2003, pp. 44-45. [Back to Text]

3. "Babi Yar is not in Kiev, no. Babi Yar is Kiev. It is the entire Ukraine. And that is all one needs to see there." "Jews of Silence," p. 43. [Back to Text]

4. Summarized in Taras Hunczak's "Problems of Historiography: History and its Sources," Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. XXV, pp. 134-135; the original research has been conducted and published by Yuri Shapoval, Volodymyr Prystaiko and Vadim Zolotariov. [Back to Text]

5. I have met one Ukrainian American born in the U.S. after the war who was a Holocaust denier. Unfortunately, I have also met many Jews who have either denied, minimized or trivialized the victimization of Ukrainians during the Holodomor and/or the Nazi Holocaust. [Back to Text]

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 24, 2005, No. 17, Vol. LXXIII

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