Revenge of the Himkas

Jews and Ukrainians honour the memories of those killed 

at Lonsky Street Prison, October, 2012. (lonckoho.lviv.ua)

John-Paul Himka is at it again. This time he's obfuscating the present AND the past.

In his latest assault, launched at the Harriman Institute in New York on April 22, Himka has taken aim at the Lonsky Street Museum in Lviv.

During his talk "The Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum. An Example of Postcommunist Holocaust Negationism," Himka charged that the museum is engaged in Holocaust denial and suffers from a case of “deflective negationism.”

Is Himka, who claims expertise in history and facial recognition, now a psychologist? No, “deflective negationism” is a term widely, and almost exclusively, used to help categorize the deniers, diminishers and distorters of the mass murder of millions of Jews in Europe during WW2. 

In his talk, Himka charged that the Lonsky Street Museum is a hotbed of Holocaust negation. But it appears that he hasn’t actually been there: the slide show accompanying his talk pictured a neighbouring building as the site of the prison. Close, but wrong.

Very wrong, according to Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, one of the museum’s founders. The Lonsky Street Museum has hosted a number of events and exhibits devoted to the Holocaust. A quick search of the museum’s website shows a number of them, including:

• The “Shoah in Lviv” exhibit that ran from January 27 to March 3, 2013;
• On January 28, 2013 Meylakh Sheykhet, director of the Lviv-based Faina Petryakova Scientific Center for Judaica and Jewish Art and member of the Lonsky Street Museum’s Supervisory Board, delivered a talk about the Shoah in Ukraine at the Lonsky Street Museum;
• On October 30, 2011, on the 70^th anniversary of the Babyn Yar executions in Kyiv, Sheykhet donated copies of materials from the German Bundesarchiv in Berlin about the Gestapo, during a screening of SerhiyBukovsky’s 2006 documentary film about the Holocaust “Spell Your Name.”

There are others, and more are planned to take place at the museum that has only been opened for three years.

There is only one permanent exhibit currently functioning at the young museum covering the Soviet NKVD executions that occurred in the prison and courtyard in June, 1941. Towards the end of the exhibit, the names of each of the 700+ victims are written out: Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Russians, and other nationalities.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Viatrovych, who was present at the Himka presentation, dared challenge the University of Alberta professor, but he was cut off by one of Himka’s protégés, Per Anders Rudling, one of the workshop’s organizers.

Rudling has his own bone to pick with the museum. When it was announced that the director of Lonsky Street Museum was coming to Canada on a lecture tour last year, Rudling attempted to discredit his “astonishingly modest [academic] credentials... only a master's degree” and wrote that “Jewish suffering is omitted” by the museum -- an outright lie.

A little more poking around the website, and you’ll find the possible and probable cause of why Himka is taking aim at the Lonsky Street Memorial Museum: posted is a damning 19,000-word review of Himka’s 2011 submission to the Canadian Slavonic Papers called  “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd.” 

Himka's issue with the museum appears to be that it dares to look at Ukraine’s nationalists as something other than “Jew-killers” and “Hitler-lovers” – monikers once assigned by Soviet propaganda and parroted by many in academia.

The history of the matter is that The Lonsky Street Museum is based around a prison that was used by Poles (1918-1939), Soviets (1939-1941), Nazis (1941-1944) and the Soviets again (1944-1991), and was closed in the mid-1990s.

And Ukrainian nationalists were prisoners there all those years, under all those regimes. The museum is doing nothing more, nothing less than telling the prison's history. But that's not enough for Himka et al.

Tabalov Tushki Tabachnyk

A picture to go with the photos in Katia Gorchinskaya's Fear and loathing at the Kyiv Post. Warning it has  bare-breasted Femen women braving the cold to make their political point on the first day of the new Ukrainian parliament. The Tabalovs are listed as members of the Rada on the website under the "Ts".

The two Tabalov tushki are followed by  former education minister Dmytro Tabachnyk in alphabetical order.

"Oleksandr Tabalov and his son, Andriy, were both elected as Batkivshchyna party representatives, but refused to join the party's faction the day before the parliament was due to convene. The opposition interpreted as treason and demanded that they renounce their seats. Oleksandr Tabalov told reporters that he and his son “are not going [to join] any faction.” Andriy Tabalov, in one of his interviews to the Ukrainian media, said they were “pressured” by the government.

There is no legal mechanism to force the two tushkis – the nickname for those who desert their party and join someone else’s -- to give up their seats, though. So the opposition decided to apply psychological pressure, pinning their portraits to the podium, with the word “traitors” spelled out underneath. Iryna Herashchenko, a member of Vitali Klitschko's Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms faction, said the duo will be prevented from entering the session hall for all five years by the opposition.

Oleh Tiahnybok, leader of the Svoboda party, called the incident “a blow not only to Batkivshchyna, but to all of the opposition.” Perhaps, to compensate for the blow, his brother Andriy and several accomplices used one of the many breaks in sessions to cut down a metal fence surrounding the Rada. Then they broke a door to get back into the building because it was blocked by a special police unit."

Full article:
http://www.kyivpost.com/content/politics/fear-and-loathing-in-ukraines-new-parliament-317544.html

Unnatural selection of crimes

National memory debate distorted 

by extrusive approach 

to 20th century crimes and criminals

Graph: Years in action (1900-1999)

University of Alberta’s John Paul Himka recently invoked Oxana Shevel’s tripartite framework for dividing up the various sides in the debate over national memory, as follows:


"a) those who focus on Soviet crimes and downplay the crimes of the “national socialists and the nationalists”;*


b) those who focus on the crimes of the “national socialists and nationalists” and downplay the crimes of the Soviets; and


c) those who attempt to treat all such crimes evenhandedly, using the same criteria and practices of investigation and interpretation. "


Himka claims that he represents the c) position (one he claims to share with historiography’s latest darling Timothy Snyder). 


Even a cursory review of the titles of the 22 papers Himka has posted on academia.edu suggest they all fall into the b) category. (The dozen papers I have actually read through are far from being evenhanded.)
Let’s first take a look at the framework reportedly proposed by Shevel at the 2011 convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities. Don't take my word for it: judge for yourself.


Upon quick review, Shevel’s approach (as described by Himka) appears somewhat reasonable. Presented in such a way, the third way seems the most rational -- even elegant -- and one to which any sober-minded historic investigator would subscribe to.


But the Shevel-Himka approach* is fundamentally flawed in grouping all the crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine into two groups, namely crimes committed by: 


a)   Soviets, and 
b)   Nazis and nationalists. 


(Unfortunately, Himka does not specify the time period covered by the proposed framework, so let’s assume Shevel meant the years the Soviet, Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists were active in the last century. See Graph above.)


The flaws lie in oversimplification and arbitrary assignment of allegiances: Why are the crimes of the national socialists and nationalists grouped into one category? Why not separate the crimes into multiple separate categories according to perpetrators, and talk about the crimes committed by:


a) Soviets
b) Nazis, and
c) Nationalists


That’s because there was overlap between categories b) and c), a Himka might say. But was there not overlap between a) and b) as well? What about a) and c)? In other words, why aren’t the following categories valid?


d) Crimes perpetrated by the Soviets and Nazis
e) Crimes perpetrated by the Soviets and nationalists


While the latter category seems improbable, it certainly deserves investigation, for the purity of the scientific approach. The former category, however, deserves greater scrutiny, given what we now know about the causes, effects and details of the 1939-1941 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact and accompanying agreements that allowed Hitler to get started in the first place. Talk about something that's been downplayed!


What about the crimes Hitler and Stalin committed together? Does John Demjanjuk fall into this category? He was sent to war by Stalin and ended it, supposedly, doing Hitler's dirty work.


In terms of investigating the “who is downplaying what” component, it gets even more complicated. But there are those in who focus, for example, on nationalist crimes and downplay Soviet and Nazi crimes – a category omitted in the Shevel-Himka framework – particularly when it comes to events that transpired between Ukrainians and Poles in Volyn during the Second World War. 


Oh yeah, then there is the issue of Polish crimes omitted from the proposed framework. So what about Soviet-Polish crimes? Polish-Nazi crimes? Polish-Ukrainian nationalist crimes?


The other important piece of information omitted from the Shevel-Himka framework is the identification of victims. Presumably they are referring to crimes against humanity in general terms, but the wording of the suggested framework betrays a bias towards a focus on the Holodomor and Holocaust only, i.e. they’re talking about Soviet crimes against Ukrainians, and the Nazi crimes against Jews.


What about Soviet crimes against Jews? What about Jewish involvement in Soviet crimes? (Delve into that topic and earn yourself the unshakable labels of “anti-Semite,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” which, thanks to the sustained efforts of the likes of Himka, our family is stuck with. And he’s kvetching about getting nasty emails!)


Himka claims he is for “complicated, messy, honest history” and that “ever since the time of the scientific revolution, it has been a principle of science and scholarship that arguments, not authorities, are required to settle disputes.” It seems to me that if you’re going to be scientific about history then all the “complicated” and “messy” permutations deserve investigation and argumentation. Honestly.


=====
* Himka capitalizes the word “Soviets” yet writes “national socialist” in lower case.
** I’m taking Himka’s word that Shevel said what she said at the 2011 Association for the Studies of Nationalities convention, but adding the “Himka-“ qualifier just in case the proffessor got it wrong (mistakes do happen).

Putin's face lift turns back time...

... but will he still look that good a dozen years later? Leonid Brezhnev certainly did not. This autocrat's rhytidectomy and designs for the future does not bode well for the Russian Federation's democratic credentials, managed or not. But who's kidding whoskoff? Democracy is so passé for really modern men. 

Here's how one artist envisions Vlad will look like in 2024 when he's 71 years old.

Item: Former Russian President Vladimir Putin to regain presidency for the next twelve years.

... or "Rumors of the Soviet Union's demise have been greatly exaggerated."

Hat tip to Dmytro Potiekin who's blogging at Ukrainska Pravda

Lviv, Donetsk agree: Nazism = Communism

East and West Together!

Two men in Donetsk, reportedly miners, burn the Soviet hammer-and-sickle and Nazi swastika flags on June 22, 2011, the anniversary of Hitler's attack on Stalin (Hitler attacked after a a nearly two year lovefest known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact when Stalin let the Nazis conquer most of Western Europe).

(pravda.com.ua)

Meanwhile, Lviv city council commissioned four billboards to mark the same anniversary. They show Nazi and Soviet atrocities in that western Ukrainian city. "Communism = Nazism" read the bold, red letters. The caption under the image of victims executed by the Soviets (left) reads "Lonsky Street Prison, Lviv, June 30, 1941." Victims of the Nazis (right) with caption: "Square in front of the Opera Theatre, Lviv, March 1942."

Bridging the east-west divide that's been artificially imposed on the people of Ukraine, local governments and individual citizens agree: standards bearing Hitler's swastika and Stalin's sickle were essentially cut from the same cloth.

Putin angers commies, vets in Ukraine

"Surgeon" helps Put foot in mouth

Vladimir Putin has once again angered Ukrainians, but this time around it’s not only the nationalists and euroatlantacists who’re upset.

The cocksure future president of Russia managed to rattle Ukraine’s communists and war veterans on Dec. 16 when he claimed that Russia didn’t need Ukraine’s help to win WW2.

(Russian language original. "Offending" Putin quote at 3:20)

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1yiaQ-Z-84 

Ukraine’s communists and war veterans – usually diehard proponents of closer ties (and in some cases union) with Russia –expressed indignation at Putin’s words as politicians called for Ukraine’s foreign ministry to respond to the Russian leader’s outrageous statement.

The Ukrainians have the leader of a Russian bike club to thank for exposing what Putin really thinks about Ukraine’s formidable contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis forces in the “The Great Patriotic War.”

Alexander Zaldostanov, president of the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club was in the audience for the live, televised Q+A session with Putin last Thursday, when the microphone lady gave him a chance to ask the Russian leader a question.

Zaldostanov and Putin had met before and rode their Harleys together in Crimea during the summer before last when Putin traveled to Sevastopol for one of his macho PR stunts. (And to gloat over Ukraine’s extension of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s lease in that port city.)

Speaking from the studio audience last Thursday, the leather-clad, bearded leader of the Night Wolves’ pack known by his handle “Khirurg” (Surgeon) reminded Putin of the rally of 5,000 bikers in the preface to his question that saw Putin put a foot in his mouth in a way that no spin doctors could help get out.

Sporting tattoos and a thick gold chain around his neck, Zaldostanov reminded Putin that the bike rally in Crimea was dedicated to the “65th anniversary of Victory” and “the idea that we probably would not have won the war if we [Russia and Ukraine] were separate states.”

Khirurg proceeded to paraphrase Putin, claiming the Russian leader once lamented “he who doesn’t want Ukraine and Russia to be together doesn’t have a heart but he who wants Ukraine and Russia together doesn’t have a mind.”

Speaking straight from his own heart and with hope in his eyes, Zaldostanov asked “Would you agree that the heart can sometimes replace the mind but that the mind can never replace the heart?”

“Sash,” Putin said, speaking to the biker like to a good buddy, “that’s a very deep question, one that I’m not sure I understand.”

First, Putin clarified the quote Zaldostanov attributed to him.

“I was talking about the demise of the Soviet Union... He who isn’t sorry that the Soviet Union fell apart has no heart, but he who wants to recreate the USSR, as it was, has no head.”

“Concerning our relations with Ukraine... I will allow myself to disagree with you when you say 'if we were divided, then we wouldn’t have won the war.'”

“We would have won either way,” Putin said in a lecturing tone.

Awkward pause. Scattered applause.

“That’s because we’re a country of winners,” Putin said in a victorious tone as the clapping continued.

He proceeded to back up his claim with “facts” such as 70 percent of the losses suffered by the Soviet Union were incurred by the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.

“That war was won – I do not want to offend anyone – but primarily on account of the resources, human and industrial resources of the Russian Federation. That’s a historical fact, it’s all in the documents,” Putin said.

The communists and war veterans of Ukraine reacted to the news of Putin’s statements with disbelief and indignation. But some, displaying the slave mentality that has been instilled in them by centuries of imperial domination, tried to make apologies for their masters in Moscow explaining Putin’s statements away as a mistake made in haste ahead of the 2012 presidential elections in Russia.

Communist MP Oleksandr Holub called Putin’s statement “very controversial” but speculated that the Russian may have uttered it “without appropriate preparation.” He said that “Putin’s concept helps the cause of Ukrainian nationalists who assert that Red Army soldier ‘fought for a foreign country.’”

“Germany waged war with the Soviet Union, not with Russia, Ukraine or other republics,” said Yuli Korotkin, chairman of the Committee of War Veterans. “I consider such thoughts and answers to be primitive. To divide our victory like a pie is sacrilege! It’s desecration of the memory of 27 million Soviet people who died in the GPW and 1.9 million veterans still alive from the Great Patriotic.”

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said it will not officially react to Putin’s words, adding that Ukraine’s position is that all the peoples of the former USSR can consider themselves winners of the Great Patriotic War.

At least Ukrainians now have further proof of what Putin, the man likely to be Russia’s next president, really thinks about their country(in addition to his claim that Ukraine “is not really a country.”) And we have the straight-shooting bikers of MC Night Wolves to thank for it.

Two presidents: Alexander Zaldostanov (taller, left), president of MC Night Wolves and Vladimir Putin, president-wannabe (2012-2017) in Moscow. (daylife.com)

Holodomor Wikileaks and Russia's Single Historical Space

The Holodomor won’t go away. This past weekend, we marked the sad anniversary of the terror-famine that occurred nearly eighty years ago. And just when the Kremlin thought it was over for another year, the Holodomor has surfaced in the wikileaked US embassy cables.

Ukraine is mentioned in eight of the 278 embassy cables leaked thus far, and it’s not just in connection with Muammar al-Qadhafi’s “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse. 

(The US Embassy in Kyiv is not (yet?) among the embassies listed as sources for the cables.)

The Holodomor is referenced twice in cables from the past two years.

At the end of October 2008, the US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Gfoeller attended a lunch briefing in Bishkek with Prince Andrew of the British crown ahead of his royal highness’ meeting with the Kyrgyz government. Many issues were discussed, and the Prince “pounced” when the topic of Russia came up:

"[Prince Andrew] stated the following story related to him recently by Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev. Aliyev had received a letter from President Medvedev telling him that if Azerbaijan supported the designation of the Bolshevik artificial famine in Ukraine as 'genocide' at the United Nations, 'then you can forget about seeing Nagorno-Karabakh ever again.' Prince Andrew added that every single other regional President had told him of receiving similar 'directive' letters from Medvedev except for Bakiyev. He asked the Ambassador if Bakiyev had received something similar as well. The Ambassador answered that she was not aware of any such letter."

More recently, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov raised the Holodomor with Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman when the two met in Moscow at the beginning of June 2009, according to a US Moscow embassy cable:

"Lavrov raised Russian concern with ‘historical revisionism’ regarding the Soviet Era and Second World War, which, he said, was particularly acute in Eastern Europe but was also present in Israel. He cited Israel's official recognition of the Holodomor, the 1930s famine that occurred in Ukraine. Lieberman explained that by recognizing this tragedy, Israel had not said Russia was guilty of causing it, nor that it was an act of genocide."

Lieberman has probably not read Raphael Lemkin’s assessment of the Soviet genocide in Ukraine. Lemkin was a Jewish lawyer who lived in Poland near border with Soviet Ukraine during the years of Holodomor; he was also the man who is credited with coining the term genocide.

Then again, Israel is no longer all that interested in history. At least that’s the message Israel’s President Shimon Peres recently delivered in Ukraine when, during a public lecture on “political and economic challenges in the epoch of globalization,” he said:

“If I was asked what advice to give Ukraine, I’d say: forget history, history isn’t important... you won’t be able to avoid the mistakes of the past, you’ll simply repeat them,” according to the BBC.

Wow is right. Anyway, back to wikileaks and Holodomor: Why would the President of Russia threaten the leaders of former Soviet states with dire consequences if they recognize the Holodomor as genocide? Why would the Russian foreign minister raise the same issue with his Israeli counterpart?

Ukraine never blamed Russia as a state for anything; in fact a Ukrainian court established the guilt of seven organizers of the famine led by Josyf Stalin: two Russians, two Jews, a Georgian, Pole and Ukrainian.

So what exactly irked Russia about former President Yushchenko’s campaign surrounding the Holodomor?

Some would argue that reparations could be demanded from the Russian Federation, as the legal successor state of the USSR, if the international community recognizes genocide (kinda like the Germans paying for the Holocaust).

Others would argue that Russia is not afraid of paying, it’s more afraid of losing face.

Others would argue that Ukraine’s Holodomor narrative – and any historical narrative that’s independent of Russia’s – is unacceptable, because it will undermine Russia’s plans to re-establish hegemony.

Not only does Russia want Ukraine to be part of the Single Economic Space, it also wants all the Soviet republics to be part of the Single Historic Space. (The Single Religious Space and Patriarch Kiril’s Russian world Orthodox Church is part of that plan, too, but that’s another issue altogether).

There can be no room for Ukraine’s unique Holodomor in the common, shared experience of the Soviet Union. Collectivization can only be a common tragedy shared by all the people united by a Great Fatherland (as in Great Patriotic War instead of WWII).

Ask Education Minister Dmytri Tabachnyk: he can give you a copy of the new history text book he's writing for Ukrainian schoolchildren -- it'll all be in there.

Moscow just won’t have it any other way, as the wikileaks have shown. And that makes the Holodomor and other events from the past more than just far off history: it’s about the geopolitics of the very near future.