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Russia and Ukraine: the tragic memory of the "border country"
Tomb of Nestor Makhno (detail), columbarium of the Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris, March 2022. © Olivier Favier
Text by: Olivier Favier Follow
9 mins
Kievan Rus' was the cradle of modern Russia and a major European power in the 11th century.
Towards the end of the 19th century, a national feeling took root there around a name brought up to date, Oukraïna (the march in Russian), a border country, which appeared in the wake of the Russian Revolution before become for at least 15 years its absolute victim.
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On March 17, 1917, the day after the Februaryi Revolution which overthrew the Tsarist regime in Russia, the first political act of the Ukrainians was the founding of the Central Rada, a parliament constituted in kyiv to govern the new Ukrainian People's Republic, which despite his name is in no way communist.
She claims in June the autonomy of the country, then its independence in November, at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The new state was recognized by France and the United Kingdom, but immediately contested by the Bolsheviks who installed a government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in Kharkiv.
At the beginning of 1918, they bombed kyiv for twelve days and ended up seizing it.
The Rada then turns towards the Central Powers.
France and the United Kingdom abandon it.
Donbas separatism already present after the October Revolution
With the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks temporarily abandon Ukraine.
The mining and steel region of
Donbass
, where from 1917 more than two thirds of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks were concentrated, tried to join Russia under the name of the Soviet Republic of Donetsk-Krivoï Rog.
But Lenin saw to it that this province remained within the framework of a Ukraine which he found too peasant in order to strengthen the working base there which was supposed to build the dictatorship of the proletariat.
To the south, the Soviet Republics of Odessa and Tauride (
Crimea
) are subservient to Soviet power.
The Ukraine thus became until 1921 the heart of the civil war, between nationalists supported by the Central Powers (defeated in November 1918) or the allies, the Poles, the white armies (tsarists), the revolutionary leftist socialists and many sure the Bolsheviks.
A special place must be given to peasant mobilization around the anarchist Nestor Makhno. “
He embodies
, explains the historian Nicolas Werth,
a real national and peasant revolution, anti-Russian.
Peasant resistance was stronger than anywhere else in the years 1918-1920.
»
“
The Bolshevik power is interested in Ukraine,
he continues,
because it is the richest part (wheat, coal, iron ore).
He can't survive without it.
»
This explanation is also that of Antoine Germa, scriptwriter of an ongoing documentary on the Holodomor, the great famine of 1932-1933 to which we will return: "
It's a place where you can help yourself without any to Ukrainians.
We always forget that the Ukraine entered by violence and coercion into the bosom of the USSR.
»
Nestor Makhno (center) and his group in 1919. © Wikicommons
1918-1921: Civil war and famine
Civil war and Soviet requisitions lead to a first famine which caused between 1 and 2 million deaths and led to scenes of cannibalism.
The United States then provided humanitarian aid.
Yves Ternon writes: “
Whether in the space of its nine governments or in time from 1917 to 1921, Ukraine appears to have exploded into a multitude of fragments, none of which has meaning if it is not related to the everything, and the whole thing is chaos…
”ii
The memory of this period also forms, according to the historian Éric Aunoble “
the echo chamber of the “
Maidan
”
(which contests the Philo-Russian power in 2014, editor's note)
and of the war in the Donbass
”iii.
In December 1922, the territories controlled by the Bolsheviks who emerged victorious from this war were brought together in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
At its inception, it included Russia (with republics and autonomous regions), Ukraine amputated from its western territories annexed by Poland, Belarus and Transcaucasia.
The Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of
Crimea
, created shortly before, in October 1921, remains in the bosom of Soviet Russia.
A teenager from the village of Blahovishchenka (Zaporizhzhia gubernia, Ukraine) named Ilarion Nyshchenko killed his three-year-old little brother and ate him due to starvation (1921-1922).
This image is part of the documents transmitted in 1922 by the Ukrainian Red Cross.
© Wikicommons
1931-1933: Holodomor, the "Great Famine"
“
When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin first implemented a policy of relaxation
,” explains Antoine Germa.
Within the limited framework of the USSR, the Ukrainian identity takes shape.
This golden age is short-lived.
In 1928, the first five-year plan intended to make the Soviet Union a great industrial nation.
Agricultural production is export-oriented to buy industrial machinery.
After the peasants of the Volga and the Kazakh herders, the Ukrainians are sacrificed to the cause.
This time, it is 4 million of them, largely during the first six months of 1933, who die of hunger in a region entirely under the control of the People's Commissars.
It was the acme of a war against the Ukrainian peasants, accused of being kulaks, owners hostile to collectivization, which lasted 15 years.
Stalin manages to impose in the USSR and elsewhere a total silence on the question.
Many, like the deputy Édouard Herriot, on returning from the USSR, lie not out of ideology, but out of economic interest.
“
The primary objective of Stalinism,
summarizes Antoine Germa,
is the elimination of truth.
»
During the Second World War, Ukraine became a martyred republic, at the heart of clashes between Nazis and Soviets.
For these former, “
Ukrainians are described as 'white niggers'
”, recalls Antoine Germa.
This colonial vision does not prevent a part of the Ukrainian nationalists from changing into auxiliaries or collaborators of the Germans, by memory of an Austria-Hungary more open than the Russian dominator, by opportunism against the Soviet Union but also by anti-Semitism.
“
You can be a martyr and look for a scapegoat,
” commented political scientist Lisa Vapné.
This image is part of a series of photographs taken by Austrian Alexander Wienerberger in Kharkov in 1933 and later published in the book "Muss Russland Hungern?"
[Should Russia Starve?], published in Vienna in 1935. © Wikicommons
1941-1944: Ukrainian nationalism, both martyr and accomplice of the executioners
The Babi Yar massacre, where on September 20 and 21, 1941, some 36,000 kyiv Jews were executed by the Nazis, has long been described in the USSR as a massacre of "peaceful Soviet citizens".
".
From 1941 to 1944, an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered, some of them by the Ukrainians themselves.
Despite everything, a nationalist leader like Stefan Bandera, an intelligence agent for the Nazis from 1934, could be erected as a "hero of Ukraine
in 2010, among other things because he died of poisoning by the KGB in 1959. After the reconquest of Ukraine by the Red Army, everything is done to erase the memory of Babi Yar, while new pogroms break out , including that of September 7, 1945 which caused a hundred deaths in kyiv.
“
The absolutely criminal role played by Ukrainian nationalists during the Holocaust,
” comments Nicolas Werth, “
is brandished today like a scarecrow by Putin.
This is to forget that the extreme right now accounts for between 3 and 4% in elections, which is much lower than in Poland, Belgium, Italy or of course France.
In September 2021, under the presidency of
Volodymyr Zelinsky
, part of whose family was murdered during the Holocaust, a law was passed to "prohibit anti-Semitism
".
On March 2, 2022, Russian bombs targeting the TV tower in kyiv fell very close to the Babi Yar memorial, sparking outrage.
“
This memorial
, recalls Lisa Vapné,
is not a national monument like the one dedicated to the memory of the famine.
It was erected thanks to alternative funds.
»
kyiv's television tower is targeted by a Russian strike on March 1, 2022, during Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
© Carlos Barria / Reuters
In 1986, the collapse of the USSR begins in Chernobyl
In 1944, it was the turn of 250,000
Crimean Tatars
, Muslims accused of collaboration, to experience oppression and deportation, many to Uzbekistan.
100,000 will die before 1947. Crimea is returned to Ukraine in 1954, before becoming an autonomous republic in 1991. The gradual return of the Tatars will have no weight in the later ambitions of Vladimir Putin.
"
During the events of 2014, the Russian authorities explicitly associated the
'
return of Crimea to Russia
'
with the
'
liberation of Crimea from fascist aggressors
'
in 1944
", writes Korine Amacheriv.
Moreover, the end of the Second World War and its aftermath caused the death or deportation to the gulag of 500,000 Ukrainians, particularly in the west of the country, which had passed through this period of pre-war Polish domination on Soviet territory.
It was still in Ukraine that, symbolically, appeared the first sign of the collapse of the USSR.
On April 26, 1986, a Russian engineer, Anatoli Diatlov, supervised tests on reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl power plant, on the border with Belarus.
These experiments will be at the origin of the most terrible nuclear accident in history, managed with opacity and at the cost of many human lives by the Soviet authorities.
On February 24, 2022, Chernobyl was the site of the first battle of the war in Ukraine, immediately registering this conflict under the sign of a nuclear threat which operates far beyond the field of operations.
"
We have not yet taken the full measure of this tragedy
" already declared in 2011
Mikhail Gorbachev
, the last president of the USSR, about the disaster of 1986. The sentence would undoubtedly apply to all the suffering endured by the Ukrainians under the Soviet yoke, whether Christians, Jews or Muslims.
Their magnitude remains largely unknown in France.
i The difference between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar means that the so-called February Revolution took place largely in March 1917 and that of October in November of the same year.
iiYves Ternon
,
Makhno
: the anarchist revolt;
1917-1921,
editions
Complex, 1981.
iii Korine Amacher, Eric Aunoble and Andrii Portnov,
Shared History, Divided Memories, Ukraine
, Russia, Poland
, Antipodes editions, 2021, page 109.
iv Ibid, page 80
Our selection on the subject:
•
To read:
→ The Babi Yar massacre memorial project at the center of a controversy
→ Berlinale: "Mr Jones" or who knows the Holodomor?
→ The remains of thousands of victims of the Stalinist purges discovered near Odessa
→ Nicolas Werth,
Back to the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933
, in Vingtième Siècle.
History Review 2014/1 (No. 121).
(online)
→ Tymothy Snyder, Bloodlands,
Europe between Hitler and Stalin
, Gallimard, Folio Histoire, 2019.
→ Lisa Vapné,
Babi-Yar Context
, a film by Serguei Lozsnitsa, Revue Alarmer, 2022. (online )
•
To listen:
→ Chernobyl, 30 years later: the impact on health
→ Memorial, transmitting the memory of repressions
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