The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society: A Comparison of Post-Franco Spain and Post-Soviet Ukraine Oxana Shevel Both Spain and Ukraine embarked on transition from authoritarian rule divided by the memory of the recent past. The divisive memory of the past in Ukraine pertains to the legacy of World War II, and in particular to what became known as the “OUN-UPA problem”—the possibility of reevaluating the unambiguously negative Soviet-era assessment of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an extremist underground political organization founded in 1929 in Vienna with the goal of establishing an independent Ukrainian state that was active on the territories of today’s western Ukraine in the interwar period, and of the nationalist resistance movement associated with it, the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA), which operated in western Ukraine in the 1940s and the 1950s and fought both the Nazi and Soviet forces.1 In Spain, the divisive historical memory concerns the Spanish civil war (1936 –1939) and the subsequent Francoist dictatorship (1939 –1975). When Spain embarked on a transition to democracy following Francisco Franco’s death, it too faced the dilemma of reevaluating the past regime’s designation of “heroes” and “villains.” According to the dominant historical narrative propagated during Franco’s rule, Franco’s coup and subsequent Francoist victory in the civil war saved the country from the chaos and destruction of the republican period. The villains were thus “godless” Republicans, communists, anarchists, and other leftists. The heroes were God and Spain-loving Francoists.2 Even though neither the previous regimes’ villains (the OUN and the UPA, and the Spanish Republicans, respectively) nor heroes (Francoists and Soviet communists, respectively), had much in common, a comparison of Spain and Ukraine is instructive because at the time of transition each country faced the question of whether to reclassify old villains as heI would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Mark D. Steinberg, Mario Carretero, Marie-Christine Doran, Lubomyr Hajda, Oleksandr Mel⬘nyk, and Harris Mylonas for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. 1. For analysis of the OUN, its ideology, the geography of its operations, and its subsequent split into two factions and the complex nature of the link between the “original” OUN, its two successors, and the UPA, see Alexander J. Motyl, The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919 –1929 (Boulder, Colo., 1980); John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism (New York, 1963); L. A. Hrechyna and L. V. Dubych, eds., Problema OUN-UPA: Zvit robochoï hrupy istorykiv pry UriadoviÐ komisiï z vyvchennia diial⬘nosti OUN i UPA. Osnovni tezy z problemy OUN-UPA (IstorychnyÐ vysnovok) (Kiev, 2004). 2. Omar G. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization: Coping with the Past in Spain,” Political Science Quarterly 123, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 445; Xosé-Manoel Núñez, “New Interpretations of the Spanish Civil War,” Contemporary European History 13, no. 4 (November 2004): 520. Slavic Review 70, no. 1 (Spring 2011) S5493.indb 137 1/31/11 12:40:09 PM 138 Slavic Review roes and visa versa, and the society and political elites in both states were divided on the issue. Spain and Ukraine dealt with divided historical memory very differently, however. The Spanish state did not engage with the issue of divided historical memory for more than a quarter of a century after Franco, and when it did, the proposed solution reflected in the 2007 Law on Historical Memory was “democratization of memory” rather than the replacement of the previously dominant paradigm with its “other.” The Spanish state refused to define a common historical memory for all Spaniards, recognizing instead citizens’ right to “personal and family memory.” 3 The Ukrainian experience was different from the Spanish one. First, in Ukraine the question of whether and how to reassess the labeling of the former heroes and villains was not postponed until democratic consolidation was achieved but emerged even before independence and from then on remained on the political agenda unresolved. Second, the Ukrainian state’s response to the challenge of divided historical memory was not the promotion of a democratic memory but oscillation between competing ideologically charged narratives of the past. This article analyzes the reasons for these divergences and considers the potential applicability of the Spanish solution to Ukraine in light of both social realities and theories of nation building, in particular the debate over whether national unity necessitates a cultural nation and shared collective memory, or whether unity in a democracy can be built on other foundations. Comparing and contrasting Spanish and Ukrainian state responses to the challenge posed by divided historical memory illuminates the complex relationship between collective memory, national unity, and democracy in modern states. The comparison also raises a theoretically and empirically intriguing possibility that nation building oriented toward a traditional goal (a united nation underpinning a sovereign state) can be achieved by nontraditional nation-building methods. The Politics of Memory in Spain: From the Pact of Forgetting to “Democratic Memory” One of the defining features of post-Franco Spain’s experience with divisive historical memory is the much-delayed start of the process of historical reconciliation. Following Franco’s death in November 1975, the transition to democracy was initiated by the pro-Franco reformers who had to reach a compromise with the moderates in the opposition to move forward with democratic reforms, given that the extreme right and left would have preferred some form of violent confrontation to prevent the establishment of a liberal democracy.4 A central element of this compromise was the informal pacto de olvido, or pact of forgetting, which was instituted during 3. The 2007 Spanish law, quoted after Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 452. 4. Paloma Aguilar, “Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” in Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen González Enríquez, and Paloma Aguilar Fernández, eds., The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford, 2001), 95. S5493.indb 138 1/31/11 12:40:09 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 139 the transition and remained in place until just a few years ago. The pact of forgetting was an informal agreement between post-Franco reformers and the democratic anti-Franco opposition to “forget” past political excesses, including the mass killings that occurred during the civil war and the repression of the Francoist era, in order to avoid a repetition of bloody civil conflict.5 The pact of forgetting was consolidated with the 1977 broad amnesty law, which guaranteed that perpetrators of institutional violence committed under the dictatorship would not be punished.6 The pact of forgetting has inarguably aided the process of institutional democratization in Spain—and by doing so has challenged transitional justice theories that believe successful democratization is conditional on reckoning with a painful historical past.7 In Spain, precisely because the elites agreed to avoid arguing about the past, they were able to launch a successful democratization process. In return for the left’s assenting to a comprehensive amnesty for all Francoist perpetrators of institutional violence, post-Franco reformers accepted the liberation of all political prisoners, the legalization of the Communist Party, and the first truly free elections in June 1977.8 A compromise was also achieved on the institutional and administrative structuring of the country, with the left giving up on its dream of restoring Spain’s republican tradition and agreeing to a parliamentary monarchy, and the right giving up on the notion of Spain as a culturally monolithic nation and consenting to autonomous rule for ethnic minorities.9 The pact of forgetting was not a form of reconciliation, however. By drawing a curtain over the past in the name of national reconciliation, the pact left the historical narrative created under Franco relatively undisturbed and thus suppressed the memory of the Republican side.10 The Francoist legitimization narrative evolved over time, from the initial emphasis on the 1936 Francoist uprising as an act of national salvation from the social disorder, separatism, and communism of the Second Republic to the subsequent emphasis on the regime’s achievements in terms of peace, stability, and economic development.11 In the 1960s and 1970s, generalized tacit agreement developed that the civil war had 5. Ibid.; Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization”; Sebastiaan Faber, “The Price of Peace: Historical Memory in Post-Franco Spain. A Review Article,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 58, nos. 1–2 ( June–December 2005): 205–19; Judith Keene, “Review Article: Turning Memories into History in the Spanish Year of Historical Memory,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 4 (October 2007): 661–71. 6. Aguilar, “Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” 102 –5. 7. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 435–36. 8. Aguilar, “Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” 96. 9. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 439. 10. Aguilar, “Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” 96; Faber, “Price of Peace,” 214; Madeleine Davis, “Is Spain Recovering Its Memory? Breaking the Pacto del Olvido,” Human Rights Quarterly 27, no. 3 (August 2005): 867; Rafael Valls, “The Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship: The Challenges of Representing a Conflictive Past in Secondary Schools,” in Elizabeth A. Cole, ed., Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation (Lanham, Md., 2007), 170. 11. Faber, “Price of Peace,” 213 –14; Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 458 –59. S5493.indb 139 1/31/11 12:40:09 PM 140 Slavic Review been “a tragic act of collective madness” for which all Spaniards share the blame.12 “A logical corollary to this,” Michael Richard writes, was the myth that “Spaniards are innately bad”—unable to enjoy democratic freedoms because their very nature made them ungovernable.13 Francoist narrative cultivated this “myth of the ungovernable Spaniards,” insisting on the Spaniards’ intrinsic incapacity to live in democracy without resorting to polarization and violence.14 These socialization efforts had an effect, and by the time of the democratic transition, political elites “reworked or reinvented their painful past to produce shared blame for the brutality of the [civil war] conflict.” 15 According to Paloma Aguilar, this “feeling of collective guilt for the atrocities of the war,” as well as the “obsession with peace and stability” during the transition, explains the absence of transitional justice and the passage of a reciprocal amnesty.16 The overwhelming desire for peace and stability and the fear of violent conflict that discouraged exploration of the past was shared by the public: at the time of transition, 61 percent of the Spanish public approved of the blanket amnesty.17 Yet, even though consensus existed over the mutual responsibility of the left and the right for the brutality of the war, and over their incapacity to coexist peacefully during the Second Republic, there was no consensus “concerning who [was] to blame for starting the civil war, nor around the significance of forty years of dictatorship,” and the pact of silence prevented the discussion and reconciliation of these issues.18 Furthermore, the neutral reading of the civil war in which both sides were equally to blame masked the fact that Franco’s coup was an attack by a reactionary minority upon a popularly elected government and implied that the suffering of the defeated Republicans was the same as that of the victorious Nationalists and that all sectors of society were similarly affected by the Franco dictatorship. In fact, the cost of the war and the Franco dictatorship disproportionably affected the working class and the left.19 12. Michael Richards, “From War Culture to Civil Society: Francoism, Social Change and Memories of the Spanish Civil War,” History and Memory 14, no. 1–2 (Fall 2002): 111; Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 446. 13. Richards, “From War Culture to Civil Society,” 111. 14. Paloma Aguilar Fernández and Carsten Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity in the Spanish Democracy: The Legacies of Francoism and the Civil War,” History and Memory 14, no. 1–2 (Fall 2002): 151; Carsten Humlebæk, “Creating a New Cohesive National Discourse in Spain after Franco,” in Luis Martín-Estudillo and Roberto Ampuero, eds., Post-Authoritarian Cultures: Spain and Latin America’s Southern Cone (Nashville, 2008), 196 –217. 15. Paloma Aguilar and Katherine Hite, “Historical Memory and Authoritarian Legacies in Processes of Political Change: Spain and Chile,” in Katherine Hite and Paola Cesarini, eds., Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe (Notre Dame, 2004), 195. 16. Aguilar, “Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” 98; Paloma Aguilar Fernández, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (New York, 2002), xviii. 17. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 442. 18. Aguilar and Hite, “Historical Memory and Authoritarian Legacies,” 195. 19. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 446. Of some 580,000 people killed during the civil war, 120,000 were civilians killed behind the front lines, S5493.indb 140 1/31/11 12:40:10 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 141 In sum, the pact of forgetting forced the Republican victims of the Franco regime to keep silent about the injustices they suffered under Franco for the sake of consolidating the new democracy and avoiding a repetition of the civil war. As Madelaine Davis observed, “it is clear that, whether or not one views Spain’s pacto del olvido as necessary or legitimate, its effect was in many ways to perpetuate the historical injustice suffered by the victims of Francoism.” 20 The collective memory of the Republicans was not incorporated into the Spanish transition, and “no formal and explicit reconciliation had ever taken place within the Spanish society.” 21 This remained the case at the level of state policies for the next quarter of a century.22 The socialist government that came to power in Spain in 1982 and remained in office for four terms, until 1996, did not attempt to break the pact of forgetting and to officially condemn the Franco regime. The main aim of the socialists’ cultural policies was, to quote one analyst, “to reinforce an ‘optimistic’ interpretation of the Spanish past and to insist on forgetfulness for the sake of political stability.” 23 Scholars have referred to this era of socialist rule as “the years of silence and of no memory.” 24 A 2002 study of the politics of national commemoration in Spain concluded that in post-Franco Spain “there are many more continuities with the Francoist period than with the Second Republic or any other previous period. There is no attempt to link the first Spanish democratic experience with the second one.” 25 Only in 2004 did the Thirty-sixth Congress of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) include in its electoral platform the recovery of Spain’s historical memory as a means of addressing the injustices of the past committed against fellow socialists.26 Upon entering office after the March 2004 election, the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the grandson of a Republican major shot during the civil war for refusing to join the Franco-led rebellion, made the recovery of Spain’s historical memory a legislative priority, arguing that the democratic transition was marked by “much agreement and little memory.” 27 The government and the left was responsible for only some 20,000 of these deaths. Aguilar, “Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” 106n36. After the Francoist victory, about 200,000 “red” prisoners died of execution, disease, and hunger in the prisons, concentration camps, and forced labor battalions established by the Franco regime between 1939 and 1943. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 439, 442. 20. Davis, “Is Spain Recovering Its Memory?” 867. 21. Aguilar Fernández, Memory and Amnesia, xx. 22. At the level of civil society, on the other hand, the recovery of officially suppressed memory was actively taking place, as reflected in the appearance of scores of best-selling novels, memoirs, feature films, television programs, and exhibits about the less-publicized aspects of the civil war and Francoism. Faber, “Price of Peace”; also Aguilar Fernández, Memory and Amnesia. 23. Núñez, “New Interpretations of the Spanish Civil War,” 518. Also Aguilar Fernández and Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity,” 132. 24. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 441. 25. Aguilar Fernández and Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity,” 152. 26. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 441. 27. Ibid., 452. S5493.indb 141 1/31/11 12:40:10 PM 142 Slavic Review appointed an interministerial commission “to study the situation of the victims of the civil war and Francoism.” 28 After more than two years of deliberation, the commission presented the Spanish Congress of Deputies with recommendations that eventually became the basis of the Law on Historical Memory approved on 31 October 2007. At first glance, the memory law could be construed as taking the Republican side on the issue of historical memory—and this is how the Spanish right characterized it—but this would be a simplification.29 On the one hand, the law describes the Franco regime as a “dictatorship”; provides for financial reparations to be paid to those orphaned by the war and imprisoned by Franco; extends Spanish citizenship to the children and grandchildren of Republican exiles; prohibits “acts of a political nature” at the Valley of the Fallen, a monumental memorial near Madrid built with slave labor and housing Franco’s mausoleum; and requires local governments to finance the exhumation and reburial of the civil war graves that hold an estimated 30,000 victims of the Francoist forces and to introduce procedures to overturn sentences delivered at the summary trials of Franco’s opponents.30 On the other hand, the left and international and local human rights groups criticized the law for not going far enough. Emilio Silva, leader of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, a nongovernmental organization that works to locate and exhume mass graves, said the law was “light” and “a drop in the bucket compared to the enormous injustices it tries to address.” 31 The left was especially critical of the law for its failure to automatically nullify sentences handed down under the dictatorship. Also, because the law did not invalidate the amnesty declared during the transition, it made it virtually impossible for anyone to ever be prosecuted for past blood crimes.32 For this, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists criticized the memory law as “disappointing” and as falling short of established standards of international transitional justice.33 But this was precisely the point of the law—to “privilege historical reconstruction over accountability” or, as another scholar put it, “truth rather than justice.” 34 If the pacto del olvido allowed the official historical narrative created under Franco to remain relatively undisturbed, the 2007 memory law redressed this imbalance, but explicitly prohibited the state from designating any single version of memory as correct for the nation as a whole. The law’s stated purpose was “to recognize and expand the rights of 28. Faber, “Price of Peace,” 206. 29. For example, Spain’s former prime minister from the conservative Partido Popular, José María Aznar, criticized the law and accused Zapatero of trying to rewrite history. Keene, “Review Article: Turning Memories into History,” 664. 30. The main provisions of the law are summarized in Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 452. 31. Victoria Burnett, “Bill in Spanish Parliament Aims to End ‘Amnesia’ about Civil War Victims,” New York Times, 28 October 2007. 32. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 458. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid.; Davis, “Is Spain Recovering Its Memory?” 879. S5493.indb 142 1/31/11 12:40:10 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 143 those victimized by the prosecution or violence of the Civil War and the Dictatorship, for political or ideological reasons; to promote the recuperation of personal and family memory; and to adopt measures destined to suppress elements of division among the citizenry with the goal of promoting cohesion and solidarity across the different generations of Spaniards around constitutional principles, values, and liberties.” 35 The law thus recognized the right of each individual or group to remember the past in their own way; emphasized the rights of the victims; and refrained from glorifying any side of the conflict by mandating “the retirement of shields, plaques and statues and other commemorations to the Spanish Civil War that exalt one of the warring bands or that can be identified with the regime installed in Spain after the end of the war.” 36 As for the role of the government, the law saw it in the search for “knowledge of our history and the promotion of democratic memory,” which, as one scholar put it, is “presumably a public sphere open to competing ‘memories.’” 37 Because there is no broad consensus on what exactly is to be remembered, scholars of Spain expect the collective memory of the past to remain contested “for many years to come, maybe forever.” 38 Yet, it is hard to disagree with Omar Encarnación’s conclusion that “a contested interpretation of history is a preferable alternative to the one-sided version of history constructed by Franco and allowed to persist by the silence imposed by the pact to forget.” 39 A reconciliation of competing historical memories in Spain is thus just beginning to take place. As for the content of Spanish reconciliation, it can be characterized as having two dimensions. The first is political, manifested in the memory law’s departure from the previously dominant historical narrative. The law made a political statement by acknowledging the victims of Francoism and restoring “the image of the Second Republic as a forerunner to Spain’s modern democracy”— even though the democracy of the Second Republic, with its history of uncompromising attitudes, polarization, and violence, is a far cry from the democracy of today, and even though the Francoist period is viewed positively by more Spaniards than the period of the Second Republic.40 The second dimension of the law, which can be termed democratic, is equally if not more important. The memory law refrained from glorifying any one side of the past conflict and from designating any one version of memory as the correct one for the nation as a whole. Instead, the law explicitly acknowledged the multiplic35. Translation of the preamble of the law, quoted after Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 452. 36. Exceptions were made for buildings of “historical or cultural significance.” 37. Carolyn P. Boyd, “The Politics of History and Memory in Democratic Spain,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617 (May 2008): 146. 38. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 459. 39. Ibid., 459. 40. Ibid., 458. According to a 1990 poll, just 3 percent of Spaniards said that they considered Spain better off during the Republican years. Nearly three times as many (8 percent) preferred the Francoist period, while the overwhelming majority (76 percent) favored the current democracy. Poll results in Aguilar Fernández and Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity,” 145. S5493.indb 143 1/31/11 12:40:10 PM 144 Slavic Review ity of historical memories held by individuals, families, and groups, the legitimacy of these memories, and the state’s commitment to giving space to these memories in the public domain. History, Memory, Nation, State, and Democracy: Implications of the Spanish Experience Several broad lessons about the complex interdependence of collective memory, national unity, and social and political stability in a democratic polity can be drawn from the Spanish experience. First, the Spanish case challenges a common belief that collective historical memory is a precondition for national unity by showing that national unity can be built on a foundation other than shared collective memory. Spain has been called “one of the most politically and regionally divided nations in Europe.” 41 The sources of this division are not only the “peripheral nationalism” of Basques and Catalans but also the depths of the divisions created by the civil war and the Franco era that resulted in attempts “to appropriate national identity from the opposing side.” 42 As scholars of Spain have noted, because the discourse of national affirmation was monopolized during the Francoist period and opponents of Franco were portrayed as “anti-Spain,” expressions such as “Spain,” the “Spanish nation,” and cheers of “Viva España” immediately evoked Francoist discourse, leading to the situation where the very phrase “national identity” was considered too problematic, and the left and peripheral nationalists avoided the very name of the country during the transition, using the phrases “this country” or “the Spanish state” instead.43 Yet, despite being a “divided nation,” Spain’s score on national pride has consistently been among the highest in Europe.44 “The most important source of national pride in today’s Spain,” write Aguilar and Carsten Humlebæk, “is the image Spaniards have of the way in which they behaved during transition.” 45 They pride themselves and the king for ensuring the peaceful and successful consolidation of democracy. Studies of the Spanish experience emphasize that the success of the democratic transformation destroyed the “myth of ungovernable Spaniards” and created a new basis for national unity.46 As Humlebæk put it, “the success of the peaceful 41. Faber, “Price of Peace,” 214 –15. 42. Aguilar Fernández and Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity,” 135. 43. Núñez, “New Interpretations of the Spanish Civil War,” 520; Valls, “Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship,” 169; Aguilar Fernández and Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity,” 133 –34, 139. 44. In the World Values Surveys conducted between 1981 and 2000, 88.9 percent of Spaniards report feeling either very or quite proud of being Spanish. The survey data are available at www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ (last accessed 3 December 2010). Also see Aguilar Fernández and Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity,” 140. 45. Aguilar Fernández and Humlebæk, “Collective Memory and National Identity,” 141. 46. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 447; also Boyd, “Politics of History and Memory in Democratic Spain”; Davis, “Is Spain Recovering Its Memory?”; Keene, “Review Article: Turning Memories into History.” S5493.indb 144 1/31/11 12:40:10 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 145 transition became the foundational narrative of the democratic regime and the Constitution was converted into a symbol of consensus.” 47 The Spanish example thus suggests that successful democratic consolidation may become the basis for national unity even when the population remains divided in its interpretation of the nation’s past. This evidence bears on the debate among theorists of nationalism over whether unity in a democratic polity can be achieved without a common nationalcultural identity, including without shared historical memory. The belief that social unity requires a “shared identity,” a “communality of history, language, and maybe religion,” is shared by many theoreticians of nationalism (as well as policymakers and citizens), and so is the belief that national unity necessitates a common historical memory.48 To quote Anthony Smith, “identification with a past is the key to creating the nation, because only by ‘remembering the past’ can a collective identity come into being. . . . One might almost say: no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation.” 49 A particularistic identity based on a shared memory is a necessary condition for social unity because of the unique motivational power it possesses. National stories of identity are “best equipped to help support commitment to our imagined political communities” (better than “economic or political power stories”), Rogers M. Smith argues, because they are infused with the meaning of “intrinsic propriety and goodness of our particular membership.” 50 A critique of this line of theorizing comes from the tradition of political liberalism grounded in a conception of the person as autonomous and of the state as neutral between competing conceptions of the good that exist in any society. These critics advance what has become known as a postnationalist theory, which posits that a liberal state can derive social unity only from an “overlapping consensus” on principles of justice—a consensus on the rights that accrue to each individual—and not from the “good” of any nonpolitical principle, including any particularistic ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural nationalist agenda.51 Nations and nationalism, postnationalists posit, cannot integrate a liberal society due to the fundamental incompatibility between political liberalism, which requires a state to remain neutral about competing conceptions of collective good, and nationalism, which by definition holds certain particularistic features supreme.52 Instead of a common national-cultural identity, postnationalists propose the doctrine of “constitutional patriotism” which divorces culture from politics and holds that social integration within a society can be achieved if citizens form attachments to the liberal democratic insti47. Humlebæk, “Creating a New Cohesive National Discourse in Spain after Franco,” 211. 48. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York, 1995), 188. 49. Anthony D. Smith, “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (November 1996): 383. 50. Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York, 2003), 102. 51. John Rawl’s idea of political liberalism as summarized in Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration (Cambridge, Eng., 2010), 114 –15. 52. Ibid. S5493.indb 145 1/31/11 12:40:10 PM 146 Slavic Review tutions of the state that embody rationally defensible principles, without reference to any additional nonpolitical factors, such as common identity, ethnicity, culture, and other qualities.53 The Spanish example shows how, in practice—and under specific conditions (a high level of national pride in a successful democratic consolidation, for example)—a degree of social unity can be achieved despite a divided memory of the past. At the same time, the evidence from Spain does not resolve the larger theoretical issue at stake in the debate between postnationalists and liberal nationalists given political theorists’ focus on the theoretical coherence and normative defensibility of pro and contra arguments and explicitly not on whether a particular relationship exists as a matter of social practice.54 Indeed, many postnationalists admit that procedural liberalism constitutes “frustrating advice for contemporary states attempting to foster integration and unity in diverse societies” because of its “incapacity to motivate a preference for ‘this’ over ‘that’ collectivity” and grant that “to say that ethnicity is burdened by normative problems is obviously not to say that functional interpretation of it . . . is descriptively implausible. That ethnicity is empirically required for social integration may be deplorable, but it may nonetheless be true.” 55 Cultural-national concerns have not become irrelevant in the Spanish case either. The Spanish elites, including the Spanish left, which rejects nationalism and favors constitutional patriotism, fear “that the constitutional State will be unable to survive if deprived of its ‘emotional,’ cultural or historical appeals to a common citizen identity, and based solely on the citizens’ will,” and continue to search for a discourse on the nation that can provide such an emotional appeal.56 Second, the Spanish case also highlights another way in which historical memory and national unity can be interdependent in practice: once national unity is secured on a basis other than common historical memory, delving into contested historical memory in order to foster reconciliation becomes affordable, as it were, as it no longer threatens national unity since this unity now has a different foundation. The dismantling of 53. The concept of constitutional patriotism is taken from Jurgen Habermas. The essence of this principle is discussed in Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration 115–16, and in Arash Abizadeh, “Liberal Nationalism versus Postnational Social Integration: On the Nation’s Ethno-Cultural Particularity and ‘Concreteness,’” Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 3 ( July 2004): 231–50. 54. On the fallacy of “reproducing at the level of social theory [what] routinely occurs at the level of social practice,” see Abizadeh, “Liberal Nationalism versus Postnational Social Integration,” 242 (emphasis in the original). 55. Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration, 117; Abizadeh, “Liberal Nationalism versus Postnational Social Integration,” 241– 42 (emphasis in the original). 56. Xosé-Manoel Núñez, “What Is Spanish Nationalism Today? From Legitimacy Crisis to Unfulfilled Renovation (1975–2000),” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 5 (2001): 738. According to Núñez, two parallel and overlapping tendencies have emerged within Spanish nationalist discourse: “One is towards emphasizing universal values (individual rights, etc.) as a new basis of legitimizing Spanish patriotism. The other strategy . . . is to look back in history for respectable forerunners of Spanish progressive liberal nationalism, preferably in the period prior to 1931” (725). S5493.indb 146 1/31/11 12:40:11 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 147 the pact of forgetting in Spain clearly demonstrates this sequencing. Approving legislation to designate 2006 as the Year of Historical Memory, the Spanish king stated that after twenty-five years of democratic existence, the people of Spain were ready “openly and with maturity” to confront the complex question of Spain’s historical memory.57 As of November 2007, two-thirds of Spaniards approve of taking a fresh look at the violence of the civil war, believing that the nation is strong enough to undertake this task.58 Third, the Spanish case illustrates how the state can deal with contested historical memory in a way that bridges rather than deepens divisions within society. The 2007 memory law sought reconciliation by recognizing all victims of political violence and creating legitimacy and a public place for competing memories of the past, rather than by the state establishing or designating one version of historical memory for the country overall. The same approach was reflected in Spanish history textbooks even before the adoption of the 2007 memory law, echoing Europeanwide changes in history teaching pedagogy that placed the emphasis on historical facts and primary documentation over normative judgments; fostering democratic values; and rejecting dictatorship and violent behavior in general.59 In sum, the evidence from Spain shows how divided collective memory may not be detrimental to national unity and social stability as long as the state recognizes all competing memories as legitimate, their carriers are given voice in the public domain, and some other basis for national unity exists. The Ukrainian experience of dealing with divided historical memory differed from the Spanish one in virtually every respect. Ukraine has taken on the challenges of regime change and of historical remembrance simultaneously, and, although this simultaneity was unavoidable, the factors that made it unavoidable are also among the key impediments to a reconciliation of multiple historical memories along the lines of the Spanish model. The Politics of Memory in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Between Ideological Extremes The Spanish sequencing could not be replicated in Ukraine—that is to say, the question of historical memory could not be postponed until after the new democratic regime was consolidated—for several reasons. First, the issue of historical memory was thrust on the political agenda in Ukraine even before Ukraine became an independent state as a result of the perestroika-era policies of Mikhail Gorbachev.60 Within the Ukrainian 57. As quoted in Keene, “Review Article: Turning Memories into History,” 661. 58. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 455. 59. Valls, “Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship,” 161, 168. See also Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration, chap. 4. 60. In 1989 –1990, Gorbachev restarted the rehabilitation process for those who had undergone Stalinist repression that had begun under Nikita Krushchev but had stalled under Leonid Brezhnev. For a review of these late Soviet-era policies, see Nanci Adler, S5493.indb 147 1/31/11 12:40:11 PM 148 Slavic Review SSR, the question of rehabilitating the OUN and the UPA was first raised at the official level after the pro-independence popular movement Rukh won in three western regions of Ukraine in the March 1990 legislative elections, obtaining about a quarter of the seats in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet. In April 1991, while the Soviet Union was still in existence, the Ukrainian parliament adopted the law “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions in Ukraine.” This Ukrainian law, adopted within the larger union-wide context of renewed attention to the crimes committed under the Soviet regime, rehabilitated various categories of people sentenced on political grounds during the Soviet period, including “the so-called bandposobnyky and their families.” Soviet authorities used the term bandposobnyky (those who aid bandits) in reference to those west Ukrainian civilians accused of aiding and abetting the UPA.61 Yet the UPA as a group were not included in the list of groups to be rehabilitated. In addition, Article 2 of the law explicitly prohibited the rehabilitation of those sentenced for “betraying the motherland, spying, diversions, sabotage, and other terrorist activities.” Given that between 1946 and 1953 in the Ukrainian SSR over 317,000 citizens were sentenced for precisely such crimes, many of whom were likely UPA members, this article effectively excluded UPA members from rehabilitation.62 Finally, former members of the OUN, regardless of whether or not they were also in the UPA, did not fall under the rubric of the rehabilitation law either because membership in the OUN was qualified as “treason” under Article 54-1a of the criminal code of the Ukrainian SSR, and the law on rehabilitation uses Soviet criminal codes as its frame of reference. Thus, when Ukraine became independent in December 1991, the OUN-UPA problem and the issue of historical memory had already been publicly discussed for some time. An additional reason why nothing resembling a pact of forgetting materialized in Ukraine was the lack of agreement between the main political camps in Ukraine on many if not most key policy issues. In post-Franco Spain, the former Francoists and the moderate leftist opposition who came together during the transition agreed on “the superior goal of reconciling the nation and establishing democracy.” 63 In Ukraine, no comparable consensus emerged on key issues such as regime type, economic model, or foreign policy direction among the three main Ukrainian political camps: the left, dominated by “In Search of Identity: The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Recreation of Russia,” in Brito, Enríquez, and Fernández, eds., The Politics of Memory, 275–302. 61. Hrechyna and Dubych, eds., Problema OUN-UPA, 82. 62. Statistics as given in an explanatory note to the draft law “On amending the law of Ukraine ‘On the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions in Ukraine’ (about giving UPA fighters status as victims of political repressions).” The Ukrainian National Institute of Strategic Studies, Center for Legislative Support of the Activity of the President of Ukraine, undated 2008 document, available at www.niss.gov.ua/centr_npz/ Work/zapis1 .htm (last accessed 3 December 2010). 63. Carsten Humlebæk, “Revisiting the So-Called ‘Pacto de Olvido’” (paper presented at the conference, “New Perspectives on the Spanish Transition,” King’s College, London, 18 –19 May 2007), 5. S5493.indb 148 1/31/11 12:40:11 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 149 the unreformed communists; the nationalist and national-democratic right; and the amorphous center dominated by former apparatchiks.64 The orthodox Ukrainian communists opposed market capitalism and western-oriented foreign policy and remained “in essence still Soviet nationalists,” embracing the Soviet-era conception of Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians as three branches of the same nation and advocating the restoration of a joint state with Russia.65 In their view, the OUN and the UPA, who opposed communist rule and wanted Ukraine to be separate from Russia, were unambiguously the enemy. The nationalist and national-democratic right favored market reforms and a foreign policy oriented toward the west rather than toward Russia, whom it saw as Ukraine’s main “other.” These groups emphasized the “national liberation struggle” of the Ukrainian nation throughout history and, in contrast to the communists, saw the OUN and the UPA as the key positive protagonists in this struggle. The center was notoriously amorphous ideologically, lacking “much of an identity of its own.” 66 Its main concern was to stay in power, and it pursued this goal through administrative control of economic resources, machine politics, and a degree of coercion. At the same time, the kaleidoscope of parties that occupied the political center was dominated by the former Soviet elites schooled in, and by and large accepting of, the Soviet version of historical memory, including of the World War II period. A pact of forgetting did not materialize in Ukraine because the two main ideological protagonists on the battleground of historical memory—the nationalists and the unreformed communists—were decisively not interested in such a pact, instead considering the issue of historical memory as a battlefield where the all-important struggle for the future of the nation and the state was being waged. For its part, the center had neither a strategic vision for such a pact nor any pragmatic interest in it, instead readily taking advantage of divisive issues during elections. Memory politics in general, and the memory politics of World War II and the OUN and the UPA in particular, has thus largely been a battle between the two “correct” interpretations of the past advanced by the nationalists and the communists. The history of legislative measures and initiatives on the OUN-UPA problem illustrate this clash. The first—and so far the only— explicit mention of the OUN and UPA members in Ukrainian legislation came in 1993 in the law “On the status of war veterans and guarantees of their social protection.” Article 5 paragraph 16 of this law classified as war veterans eligible for benefits under the law those UPA fighters “who took part in the armed struggle against the German occupiers in 1941–1944, and who did not commit crimes against peace and humanity, and who were rehabilitated under the 64. On this three-fold division of the political spectrum in Ukraine, see Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (New Haven, 2000), chap. 9. 65. Ibid., 191. 66. Ibid., 185. S5493.indb 149 1/31/11 12:40:11 PM 150 Slavic Review 1991 law on the victims of political repression.” This formulation did not solve the OUN-UPA problem for several reasons. First, as noted above, the need to have been rehabilitated under the 1991 law in order to be considered a war veteran meant that all former OUN members considered guilty of treason by the very fact of membership in the OUN, former UPA members who were sentenced for betraying the motherland and for “terrorist activities,” as well as those who were never repressed and thus never formally rehabilitated, were excluded. Second, the veterans’ law made a person’s attitude toward Soviet power the cornerstone of eligibility and treated potential pro- and anti-Soviet war criminals differently.67 The law explicitly excluded from veteran status those UPA members who did not lay down arms in 1944, when the Soviet army pushed the Germans out of western Ukraine but continued fighting against the Soviet forces. Fighting against the Soviet state was by itself sufficient to disqualify a person from veteran status, even if that person did not commit war crimes. At the same time, fighting for the Soviet state made a person eligible, even if that person did commit war crimes. The law (Articles 5 and 6) conferred veteran status on all former Soviet combatants, including members of the Ministry of Interior and the Committee on State Security (KGB) troops (Article 6 paragraph 3), and of the notorious “destruction battalions” that took part in the liquidation of “unlawful formations and groups” on the territory of the former USSR (Article 6 paragraph 5). Former members of the Soviet forces did not need to produce evidence that they did not commit crimes against the civilian population in order to be recognized as veterans, while former UPA members did (in the form of having been rehabilitated under Article 2 of the 1991 law on the victims of political repression).68 Thus neither the 1991 rehabilitation law nor the 1993 veterans’ law solved the OUN-UPA problem. 67. Some of the UPA members committed crimes against civilians during the war. In particular, future UPA members who had previously been in the auxiliary Ukrainian police participated in the German-led extermination of the Jews in 1941–1942, and in 1943 the UPA murdered tens of thousands of ethnic Poles in Volyhn. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569 –1999 (New Haven, 2003), chap. 8. In the postwar period, when the UPA fought with the Soviet forces, it also victimized civilians, but the brutality against civilians in western Ukraine committed by the Soviet side was on a much larger scale. Soviet losses during 1944 –1953 in west Ukraine totaled 30,676, of which half (15,355) were peasants; 678 NKVD-KGB staff; 1,864 Ministry of Interior staff; 3,199 armed forces and border guards servicemen; 2,590 extermination squad fighters; 2,732 officials of Soviet government organs; 207 Communist Party officials; 314 heads of collective farms; 676 workers; 1,931 intelligentsia members; 860 children, housewives, and elderly. April 1973 KGB report to the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, as cited in Hrechyna and Dubych, eds., Problema OUN-UPA, 87. During the same period, up to 500,000 people in western Ukraine were repressed by the Soviet side; of them over 153,000 were killed, 134,000 arrested, and 203,000 deported from Ukraine. 26 May 1953 resolution of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, “On the political and economic situation in western oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR,” cited after Hrechyna and Dubych, eds., Problema OUN-UPA, 86. 68. The 1944 cutoff for laying down arms contained in the veterans’ law is not a mechanism for excluding OUN and UPA members guilty of war crimes from status. Both future UPA members’ participation in the German-led extermination of the Jews, and the UPA-orchestrated killing and ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians took place largely before S5493.indb 150 1/31/11 12:40:11 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 151 In the 1990s, several unsuccessful attempts were made to settle this problem through the creation of commissions at the parliamentary and governmental level.69 In late 1997, in accordance with instructions (doruchennia) provided by President Leonid Kuchma, a government commission to study the activities of the OUN and the UPA was created, which in turn formed a working group of historians.70 In late fall 2004 the working group produced its final report, “The expert opinion of the historians’ working group studying the activities of OUN and UPA,” a ninety-fivepage document summarizing key factual findings of the working group that did not recommend any particular policy.71 On 14 October 2005, the government commission approved this document, and the government initiated a draft law amending the 1993 veterans’ law to extend social benefits to UPA members who fought for the freedom and independence of Ukraine from 1939 to 1956.72 As table 1 shows, this was not the first legislative initiative on the OUNUPA problem, although it was the first one initiated by the government. Between 2000 and May 2010, twenty-three legislative attempts were made in the Rada to recognize the OUN and the UPA as participants on the warring side (voiouioucha storona) in World War II and to grant the OUN and the UPA fighters status as veterans and recognize their activity as contributing to the “national liberation struggle.” Seven of these attempts were made in 2005 alone. This is not surprising, given that in January 2005 President Viktor Iushchenko took office following the Orange Revolution, and he has been a strong supporter of granting recognition to the OUN and UPA as fighters for the independence of Ukraine. None of the proposals in table 1 were adopted or even included in the 1944 cutoff date established in the veterans’ law. OUN and UPA members sentenced for war crimes were not eligible for rehabilitation under the 1991 rehabilitation law and thus were already barred from veterans’ status. In the unlikely event that some OUN and UPA war criminal could slip through the nets of the Soviet repressive apparatus, the 1944 cutoff in the 1993 veterans’ law in fact left a pathway to veterans’ status open to them if they joined the Soviet side by 1944. By contrast, those who joined the UPA after 1943 and fought the Soviet forces after 1944 but did not participate in the killings of civilians during 1941–1943 were to be excluded automatically. 69. These initiatives were undermined by uncompromising attitudes and a lack of financing. Failed initiatives are detailed in Hrechyna and Dubych, eds., Problema OUN-UPA, 3 –9. Another useful reference is David R. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest, 2007). 70. The government commission was formed by a Cabinet of Ministers’ decree dated 12 September 1997. This decree, No. 1004, defined the commission’s goals as “[to] study questions related to the activities of the OUN and the UPA and prepare historically and legally grounded conclusions on their activities.” 71. The historians researched fourteen of the most controversial questions pertaining to the OUN-UPA (including the history of its founding and its relations with Nazi Germany, the Ukrainian-Polish conflict, the struggle against the Soviet forces after 1944, and the OUN ideology), and produced three documents: the expert opinion, a collection of archival materials on which the opinion was based, and a collection of scholarly articles by the members of the working group on the fourteen topics. 72. “Uriadova komisia skhvalyla fakhovyi vysnovok robochoi hrupy istorykiv z vyvchennia dial⬘nosti OUN i UPA,” 14 October 2005, at www.kmu.gov.ua/control/uk/publish/ news_article?art_id=22511532&cat_id=35883 (last accessed 3 December 2010). S5493.indb 151 1/31/11 12:40:11 PM Table 1 Legislative Initiatives Aimed at Giving Formal Status to the OUN and the UPA, 2000 –2009 Year Draft # 2000 5089 2002 4076-3 2050 3124 2003 2050-1 2050-2 3732 3589 2005 2050-3 2050-4 2050-5 2050-6 1324-1 7255 7255-1 2006 1171 2487 2007 S5493.indb 152 3395 Title On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On amending the law on the status of veterans On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On restoring historical justice in the struggle for the freedom and independence of Ukraine On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On recognizing the armed struggle of the OUN and UPA as a national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people for the independence of Ukraine On civil reconciliation between participants of WWII On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On recognizing OUN and UPA activities as a national liberation struggle On restoring historical justice concerning fighters for Ukraine’s independence during 1917-1991 On amending the law on the status of veterans On amending the law on the status of veterans On social protection of participants in the national-liberation movement of 1939-1956 for Ukrainian independence On recognizing members of OUN and UPA as participants in the resistance movement On social protection for participants in the national-liberation movement for Ukrainian independence, 1939 –1956 Status Distributed Submitted to committee Not included in the agenda Not included on the agenda Not included in the agenda Not included in the agenda Distributed Sent to the government for an opinion Not included in the agenda Recalled by author Not included in the agenda Not included in the agenda Distributed Distributed Distributed Recalled by author Recalled by author Recalled by author 1/31/11 12:40:12 PM Year Draft # 2860 2008 1404 1319 2009 4180 5373-1 Title On amending the law on the status of veterans On recognizing OUN and UPA as a warring side in WWII On the legal status of participants in the struggle for the independence of Ukraine, 1920-1990s On recognizing the OUN and the UPA as a warring side in the struggle for the freedom and independence of the Ukrainian state On the status of the veterans of the resistance movement – members of the OUN and UPA Status Not included in the agenda Not included in the agenda Not included in the agenda Not included in the agenda Not included in the agenda Source: Analysis by the author from the Web site of the Verkhovna Rada, completed 24 May 2010. For the Web site, see www.rada.gov.ua (last accessed 10 November 2010). the parliamentary agenda, however. This can be explained by a combination of factors. The first is the division within the “orange” coalition of Our Ukraine, Iulia Tymoshenko’s Block, and the Socialist Party on the issue. In 2005 the coalition could have mustered the 226 votes necessary to pass a pro-OUN-UPA law, but the last two members of the coalition were hardly committed supporters of OUN-UPA recognition.73 Second, the expert report of the working group was not published until late 2004 and not formally approved by the government commission until October 2005, and the absence of the governmental working group’s conclusion was regularly cited by the Scientific Expertise Directorate of the Rada, the body that issues expert opinions on draft legislation, as a reason to postpone considering any legislation on the OUN-UPA.74 By the time the 73. The electoral support base for Tymoshenko and especially for the socialists was in central Ukraine, where the attitude toward the OUN and the UPA ranges from negative to ambivalent. According to a 2007 opinion poll, while 70 percent of Our Ukraine voters supported official recognition of the OUN-UPA as fighters for Ukrainian independence, only 57 percent of the Tymoshenko Block voters did. According to the same poll, voters in central Ukraine were divided on the issue (38 percent opposed recognition while 38 percent supported it partly or fully). Central Ukraine was also the region with the largest share of undecided voters on this question (25 percent, compared to 18 percent in Ukraine as a whole). The 5–18 December 2007 poll was conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Ukrainian Sociology Service. “Stavlennia naselennia Ukraïny do nadannia voiakam UPA statusu uchasnykiv natsional⬘no-vyzvol⬘nykh zmahan,’” at dif.org. ua/ua/press/8 (last accessed 3 December 2010). The importance of region as a predictor of attitudes towards the OUN and the UPA has been shown to be statistically significant and more significant than ethnicity, language, or age. See Ivan Katchanovski, “Terrorists or National Heroes? Politics of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine” (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, 1–3 June 2010). 74. The status of the drafts is included in table 1. S5493.indb 153 1/31/11 12:40:12 PM 154 Slavic Review expert report was approved in October 2005, March 2006 legislative elections were just a few months away, which may explain why no legislation on this easily politicized issue was submitted in the period from the approval of the expert report to the elections. Finally, the historians’ report was hardly a definitive argument for or against OUN-UPA recognition. The report did not provide any policy recommendations, acknowledging that “in determining their attitude to the OUN-UPA, the Ukrainian state authorities will face protest from a part of the society no matter what position they take.” 75 The report’s factual coverage of the OUN and the UPA was also quite balanced, meaning that both supporters and opponents of OUN-UPA recognition could cite elements of the report that supported their political position— or they could ignore it all together. Iushchenko himself ignored the report when in January 2008 he submitted draft law no. 1319, “On the legal status of participants in the struggle for independence of Ukraine, 1920 –1990s.” 76 Passions over the OUN-UPA problem reached a new high following the January 2010 decision by outgoing President Iushchenko to bestow the Hero of Ukraine Order on Stepan Bandera, the deceased leader of the OUN-B faction. President-elect Viktor Ianukovych promised to rescind this decision, although he has not yet done so.77 In April 2010, a court in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donets⬘k ruled that Iushchenko’s decree was illegal since Bandera was not a citizen of Ukraine (given that he was assassinated in 1959, before the Ukrainian citizenship law entered into force in 1991).78 The legal issue is hardly settled, though, given that over a dozen other holders of the Hero of Ukraine status also died before 1991.79 The OUN-UPA problem remains outstanding, and no compromise solution is in sight. The latest legislative initiatives on the OUN-UPA submitted to the Rada in March and January 2009, respectively, testify to the gulf between the competing camps. Draft law no. 4180, “On recognizing the OUN and the UPA as a warring side in the struggle for the freedom and independence of the Ukrainian state,” submitted by a group of members of parliament from Iushchenko’s Our Ukraine party characterizes members of the OUN and the UPA as “fighters for the freedom and independence of Ukraine.” Draft law no. 3618, “On forbidding rehabilitation 75. Hrechyna and Dubych, eds., Problema OUN-UPA, 27. 76. The Expertise Directorate noted this in its opinion on the presidents’ draft and recommended sending it back for improvement. 77. “Ianukovych zabere u Bandery ‘heroia’ do Dnia Peremohy,” Ukraïns⬘ka pravda, 5 March 2010, at www.pravda.com.ua/news/2010/03/5/4835668 (last accessed 3 December 2010). 78. “Donets⬘kyi sud vidibrav u Bandery zvannia heroia,” Ukraïns⬘ka pravda, 2 April 2010, at www.pravda.com.ua/news/2010/04/2/4906504/ (last accessed 3 December 2010). 79. Dmytro Hudyma, “‘Syndrom Bandery’: Nepolitychni koreni vidomoï problemy,” Ukraïns⬘ka pravda, 25 April 2010, at www.pravda.com.ua/columns/2010/04/25/4961778/ (last accessed 3 December 2010). The Constitutional Court refused to rule on the constitutionality of Iushchenko’s decree. Constitutional Court decision No. 19-y/2010 from 6 April 2010. S5493.indb 154 1/31/11 12:40:12 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 155 and glorification of fascist collaborators of 1933 –1945,” submitted by a representative from the Party of Regions characterizes them as “fascist collaborators.” Given the tenacity of this conflict over the OUN-UPA issue in Ukraine, what are the chances and the possible consequences of the Spanish solution being implemented in Ukraine? The Spanish Solution for Ukraine? The Spanish state’s solution to the problem of divided historical memory was for the government to refuse to define a common historical memory for all Spaniards, but instead to recognize and aid in the recuperation of “individual and family memories” and to promote a “democratic memory”—a public sphere open to competing memories. Such a policy has so far not been attempted, or even proposed, by any political actor or group in Ukraine due to two interrelated factors. The first is the belief shared by all Ukrainian political actors, regardless of their ideological orientation, that a shared memory is necessary for the unity of the nation, which in turn is necessary for the stability and viability of the state. The second is the peculiar nature of the dominant Russian historical narrative, which sees Ukrainians and Russians as essentially belonging to one panSlavic nationality and thus denies the legitimacy and normalcy of Ukrainian state independence, and the reaction to this narrative in Ukraine. Ukrainian political leaders of all persuasions accept the idea that national unity necessitates a common historical memory and that a united nation is in turn necessary to sustain the state, although this idea is not at all unique to Ukrainian statesmen. In his 1999 inaugural address, former President Leonid Kuchma argued that “historical memory, an understanding of who we are and where we came from, will help to strengthen the state and cement the nation.” 80 Former President Iushchenko expressed similar beliefs, having once asked rhetorically, “So what is Ukraine if it has different views even on history?” 81 Adopting the Spanish solution requires official recognition of the multiplicity of personal and family memories concerning the same historical events, and accepting the legitimacy of these memories would involve abandoning the idea that there can be only one correct memory of the nation as a whole and that the very survival of the nation and the state depends on the nation sharing a common memory.82 This would be a tall order indeed for all parties to the OUN-UPA debate, as the nation-state logic is shared by the majority of post-Soviet elites who were educated in the Soviet period, as well as by their ideo80. Inaugural speech of the President of Ukraine L. D. Kuchma, National Palace “Ukraine,” 30 November 1999, at www.brama.com/news/press/991130kuchmainaugural .html (last accessed 3 December 2010). 81. Iushchenko’s comments during his appearance on the 8 May 2008 television program, Second World War: Lessons for Ukraine. Transcript at www.president.gov.ua/news/ ?cat=28 (accessed 5 April 2009; no longer accessible). 82. In other words, it would involve abandoning the logic of the nation-state and an essentially primordial understanding of the nation as an organic entity persisting through time and justifying the existence of “its” state in a modern era. S5493.indb 155 1/31/11 12:40:12 PM 156 Slavic Review logical opponents whose intellectual basis is the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism developed outside Soviet Ukraine. The “Russian factor” creates an additional obstacle to this already monumental challenge of reconceptualizing the relationship between the nation, the state, and the historical past. A historical narrative dominant in today’s Russia (and in southern and eastern Ukraine) holds that Russians and Ukrainians “shared common historical origins and in effect belonged to one pan-Russian nationality.” 83 This myth, which Vera Tolz characterized as “one of the key myths of Russian national consciousness,” is perceived by many in Ukraine as threatening the very existence of Ukraine as an independent state, for if Russians and Ukrainians (and Belarusians) belong to one nationality, they are destined to live in a common political home, which makes the independence of the Ukrainian state an anomaly.84 The uniqueness of the Russian factor for Ukraine is recognized by scholars such as Alfred Stepan who observed that, unlike other multinational societies such as Belgium, Canada, India, Spain, or Switzerland, Ukraine “has a potentially hostile irredentist relationship with a powerful neighboring country.” 85 On the nation-state logic grounded in a primordial understanding of the nation as an organic entity persisting thorough time and culminating in the establishment of “its” state in modern times, the only effective defense against the Russian/Soviet historical narrative that “proves” the existent unity of Ukrainians and Russians lies in constructing an alternative historical narrative that would “prove” that the Ukrainian nation has always been separate. Generating and popularizing a historical narrative that proves the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation (or a united East Slavic nation) thus becomes nothing less than a matter of defending what is believed to be the existentially correct order of things. The uncompromising attitude of each side in this debate is arguably further hardened by what Mark von Hagen has called “one of the most enduring legacies of Marxism-Leninism”—“a faith in one true history, furthermore, one that is edifying (morally or otherwise).” 86 Each side in the OUN-UPA debate believes that there is only one “true” version of history (naturally, the one propagated by their side), that the nation as a whole must share this correct version of collective memory, and that the state is responsible for educating its citizens about the “correct” interpretation. 83. Vera Tolz, “Rethinking Russian-Ukrainian Relations: A New Trend in NationBuilding in Post-Communist Russia?” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 2 (April 2002): 237. 84. Ibid., 246. For an example of the expression of the fear connected to this myth, see remarks by Iulia Zernii, deputy director of the Ukrainian Institute of Strategic Studies, in Iu. O. Zernii, ed., Istorychna pamiat⬘ iak pole zmahan⬘ za identychnist⬘: Materialy “kruhlogo stolu” (Kiev, 2008), 29 –30. The Russian/Soviet historical narrative ultimately “denies the authenticity of Ukrainian and Byelorussian claims to separate nationhood.” Taras Kuzio, “Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs: Towards a New Framework,” National Identities 3, no. 2 ( July 2001): 28. 85. Alfred Stepan, “Ukraine: Improbable Democratic ‘Nation-State’ but Possible Democratic ‘State-Nation’?” Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no. 4 (October–December 2005): 278. 86. Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 665. S5493.indb 156 1/31/11 12:40:12 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 157 If the Ukrainian state were to follow the Spanish model and officially recognize the multiplicity of memories of the nation’s past, two diametrically opposed hypotheses about the likely consequences could be suggested. On the one hand, one could argue that Ukraine at present just cannot afford this paradigmatic shift. In Spain, the pact of forgetting was dismantled and competing historical memories legitimized only after contested memory no longer threatened national unity, which was achieved on a different foundation—successful democratization. The democratic and economic reforms undertaken in Ukraine to date have not been nearly as successful as in Spain, so the success of these reforms cannot provide a new foundational narrative in Ukraine. Ukraine thus has to confront the potentially destabilizing Russian/Soviet historical narrative in the absence of reform achievements or other realities that could serve as a basis for national unity. Under such conditions, promoting a democratic memory is just too dangerous, and constructing a convincing Ukrainian counternarrative to the Russian one is all the more imperative, this line of reasoning would go. The problem here is that attempts to replace the crude Soviet/Russian historical narrative with an equally crude “pro-Ukrainian” narrative would most likely not be successful on the national level. Hence an alternative hypothesis arises: that democratic memory itself can become the basis for the national unity that Ukraine needs. This, however, would require engaging with the historical past, and with the Russian/Soviet historical narrative, on fundamentally different terms. Professional Ukrainian historians recently elaborated just what these terms might be. Ukrainian Historians’ “Spanish” Proposal From 2007 to 2009, twelve professional historians from different regions of Ukraine held a series of meetings in which they discussed the results of their review of twelve textbooks approved by the Ministry of Culture for teaching history in grades seven through twelve and proposed the content of a future basic history textbook. The historians’ work was carried out under the auspices of the Ukrainian National Memory Institute, a government institution created in May 2006. Already at the initial meeting, the historians concluded that the content of all textbooks “falls short of the standards of current historiography, of European standards of historical teaching, as well as of the current needs of Ukrainian society.” 87 According to Natalia Iakovenko, the head of the working group and the leading Ukrainian historian of the early modern period, all existing textbooks depict Ukrainian society of the past “in anachronistic categories—as an ethnic, linguistic, and confessional whole with shared goals and common ideals” that is collectively engaged in the ongoing struggles—for “national” or “class” liberation, against “Polonization,” “Russification, etc.” 88 Iakovenko and her colleagues identified many prob87. Natalia Iakovenko, ed., Shkil⬘na istoria ochyma istorykiv-naukovtsiv: Materialy Robochoii narady z monitoringu shkil⬘nykh pidruchnyniv istorii Ukrainy (Kiev, 2008), 6. 88. Natalia Iakovenko, “‘Obraz sebe’—‘obraz inshoho’ u shkil⬘nykh pidruchnykah istorii,” in Iakovenko, ed., Shkil⬘na istoria ochyma istorykiv-naukovtsiv, 114. S5493.indb 157 1/31/11 12:40:12 PM 158 Slavic Review lems with this self-image, but for the goal of fostering national unity, the key problem with this self-image is that it simply does not resonate with contemporary Ukrainian students (and, one might add, with adult citizens).89 This is not because the Russian/Soviet “Slavic unity” narrative is somehow more convincing or historically accurate, for it suffers from the same methodological and epistemological pitfall of conceptualizing the nation as an organic whole with shared goals and common ideas and of “transmitting the modern conception of the nation and its liberation ideologies onto times when neither modern nation, nor its collective ideology existed.” 90 The nonacceptance of the collective self-image presented in the Ukrainian textbooks stems, according to the historians, from the fact that contemporary students who live in a socially complex patchwork of overlapping interests, small communities, and so forth cannot relate to “the internally contradictory and outdated sociocultural image of Ukrainian society” presented in the textbooks, and therefore this image “does not evoke feelings of emotional connectedness and is perceived instead as a ‘remote,’ ‘not ours’ or even ‘untrue’ history.” 91 The historians concluded that in order to present a version of historical memory that can form the basis of national unity, the textbook needs to take a fundamentally different approach to history—not through the prism of historic ethnic nations but through the prism of individuals and groups inhabiting the territory of today’s states. Instead of presenting the nation as an organic entity that formed at the dawn of time and persisted through history, moving “in a unidirectional and uninterrupted manner toward a predetermined goal,” the textbook would “treat the social life of all communities on Ukrainian territories . . . as an inseparable part of the Ukrainian history.” 92 In addition, it would focus “on explaining the motives and mechanisms of behavior of different segments of Ukrainian society in different historical situations.” 93 Engaging in what Iakovenko called “a maximum detailization [multyplikatsia] of the society” and focusing history teaching on illuminating the motivations and mechanisms of actions of different groups in society, would de facto be pursuing the Spanish solution to the problem of divisive 89. Among the many problems with self-image, the historians particularly pointed out the anachronistic image of a collective self presented in all the textbooks creates an inferiority complex; promotes acceptance of antisocial behavior and violence by the collective “us”; creates a bipolar worldview of “us” surrounded by “enemy” neighbors; presents an individual as a passive element in a state-political system rather than as an autonomous actor capable of influencing the system; and continues the Soviet educational tradition of transmitting a single correct version of knowledge rather than fostering critical thinking skills. Key criticisms of the working group are summarized in Ukrains⬘kyi instytut natsional⬘noi pamiati, Propozytsii do kontseptsii istorychnoi osvity v Ukraini: Materialy III Robochoi narady z monytorynhu shkil⬘nykh pidruchnykiv istorii Ukrainy (Kyiv, 18 October 2008) (Kiev, 2009). Also see Iakovenko, “‘Obraz sebe’—‘obraz inshoho.’” 90. Iakovenko, “‘Obraz sebe’—‘obraz inshoho,’” 118. 91. Ibid., 114. 92. Ukrains⬘kyi instytut natsional⬘noi pamiati, Propozytsii do kontseptsii istorychnoi osvity v Ukraini, 11. 93. Mari⬘an Mudryi, “Tema ‘kolonial⬘nogo statusu’ Ukrainy u pidruchnykah z istorii,” in Iakovenko, ed., Shkil⬘na istoria ochyma istorykiv-naukovtsiv, 39. S5493.indb 158 1/31/11 12:40:13 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 159 historical memory.94 The goal of history teaching—and of state policies— would be to introduce the actors involved in a particular historical event, provide full information about the interests, motivations, constraints, and decision-making mechanisms underlying the choices they made, while allowing the students—and the citizens—to decide whether they approve of these choices. Such a democratization of historical memory would allow for a different assessment of past historical events by individuals and groups today without “surrendering” to the official Russian/Soviet historical narrative. This official narrative is crudely simplistic, and a detailed examination of the motivations and decision-making pathways of different actors involved in a given historical event would easily poke many holes into, and thus weaken the persuasiveness of, this narrative. The detailed examination Iakovenko and her colleagues advocate would be equally detrimental to the persuasiveness of any crude “pro-Ukrainian” narrative, however. Because Iakovenko’s conception effectively deconstructs both of the main competing narratives of the Ukrainian past in general and of World War II in particular, the acceptance of this conception at the state level appears problematic under any government. How the Iushchenko government would have responded to this conception will never be known for sure, for the working group did not complete its work before the 2010 presidential elections that Iushchenko lost.95 Given Iushchenko’s preference for the historiographic tradition emphasizing the Ukrainian national liberation narrative, governmental approval of the historians’ conception was by no means certain. Yet, given that the historians’ work was carried out under the aegis of a government organ during Iushchenko’s presidency, official approval was plausible.96 The actions and statements of government officials to date make the approval of this proposal on President Ianukovych’s watch at best uncer94. Iakoveno, “‘Obraz sebe’—‘obraz inshoho,’” 115–16. 95. The historians completed their work on the conception of history teaching in early March 2010. In addition to a 7-page summary of recommended principles of history teaching, the working group also prepared grade-by-grade proposals for the content of history lessons, including the list of topics, their suggested content, and the number of hours for each topic, for history classes in grades 5 though 12. All documents produced by the working group are available at the Web site of the National Memory Institute at www .memory.gov.ua/ua/announce/detail/91.htm (last accessed 3 December 2010). 96. The history of the working group’s creation suggests how such an approval could have been secured, likely not by the government itself taking the initiative, but by the government going along with the historians’ proposal. The idea of revising history textbooks came not from the government but from the historians themselves back in 2006, shortly after the National Memory Institute was created. The Iushchenko-appointed head of the institute, respected academician Ihor Iukhnovskyi, unsuccessfully tried to persuade Natalia Iakovenko to become his deputy. Having failed, Iukhnovskyi asked Iakovenko what she would be willing to do instead, and she proposed organizing a group of historians to collaborate on conceptualizing history teaching. Iukhnovskyi used his connections in government circles to secure backing for the historians’ work from the deputy prime minister for humanitarian affairs. Natalia Iakovenko, interview, Kiev, 22 June 2010, and Vladyslav Verstiuk, deputy director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, interview, Kiev, 21 June 2010. S5493.indb 159 1/31/11 12:40:13 PM 160 Slavic Review tain and at worst unlikely. On the one hand, the historians’ conception would significantly depart from the approach to history favored by Iushchenko’s government, and this by itself makes it potentially appealing to the Ianukovych government, which has, since his election, quickly guided Ukraine’s domestic and foreign policy into a more Russia-centered direction. Dmytro Tabachnyk, the new education minister, announced his intention to change history teaching in schools, and on one occasion said that he is “in full solidarity” with Iakovenko with regard to the principles of the new conception, such as a territorial rather than an ethnocentric approach to history teaching and a society- rather than state-centered approach.97 Yet, a closer look at a range of Tabachnyk’s statements on the reform of history teaching indicates that the changes he favors are quite different from what Iakovenko and her colleagues advocate. The main difference is that while Tabachnyk favors changing certain key political and ideological characterizations of particular historical events and actors, in particular of the Great Famine (Holodomor) and aspects of World War II, historians advocate an ideologically neutral approach centered on the presentation of facts about historical events and on open discussion of how these facts can be interpreted and characterized politically and ideologically. To illustrate, Tabachnyk has insisted that history textbooks must “clearly indicate” that Holodomor is “a joint tragedy of the people of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.” 98 This would be an obvious departure from the previous government’s position that characterized Holodomor as the genocide of the Ukrainian people, but this is a change in political labeling rather than a conceptual change in approach. The historians, by contrast, do not label Holodomor either as definitely genocide or definitely not, but instead recommend that the lesson time devoted to Holodomor be spent on discussing the social and political reasons that led to the famine, the mechanisms by which it was carried out, stories of the personal tragedies it inflicted, and the silence about it in the Soviet period and the associated difficulty in determining the exact number of victims and that the lesson conclude by discussing “contemporary interpretations of human losses at the time of Holodomor and commemoration of the memory of the victims.” 99 The reassessment of World War II in general and the role of the OUN and the UPA favored by Tabachnyk and that recommended by the histori97. “Tabachnyk pro novu kontseptsiiu pidrychnykiv istorïï,” BBC Ukrainian Service, 10 April 2010, at www.bbc.co.uk/ukrainian/ukraine/2010/04/100410_tabachnyk_ie _is.shtml (last accessed 3 December 2010). 98. Andrei Khrustalev, Oksana Bogdanova, Taras Kozub, Valerii Zhevachevskii, and Aleksei Zakharov, “Ministr obrazovaniia Dmitrii Tabachnik: ‘Vse ukrainskie studenty mogut poluchit⬘ diplom evropeiskogo obraztsa,’” Komsomol⬘skaia pravda—Ukraina, 28 May 2010. 99. Ukrains⬘kyi instytut natsional⬘noi pamiati and Ministerstvo osvity i nauky Ukrainy, Kontseptsia ta prohramy vykladannia istorii Ukrainy v shkoli (proekt): Materialy IV ta V Robochykh narad z monytorynhu shkil⬘nykh pidruchnykiv istorii Ukrainy (Kiev, 2009), 70 –71. S5493.indb 160 1/31/11 12:40:13 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 161 ans are also markedly different. Tabachnyk promised that “World War II” will be removed from history textbooks and replaced with the Soviet-era wording, “the Great Patriotic War,” because “during the Great Patriotic War there was no third force, there was the anti-Hitler coalition and there was Hitler’s Reich and its allies-satellites. And military formations created by local citizens on occupied territories were collaborators.” 100 The characterization of the OUN and the UPA as nothing more than German collaborators reasserts the Soviet ideological stamp and reverses the view of these groups as fighters for Ukrainian liberation and statehood favored by Iushchenko. Again, however, this is simply a change in ideology rather than in the approach to teaching about a complex and divisive historical past. The approach to teaching about the OUN and the UPA recommended by the historians places emphasis on facts about these organizations and recommends a “discussion of points of disagreement in the historical memory of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, commemoration of the memory of heroes and victims of the war, recuperation of the previously suppressed memory of the Holocaust and the Volyn tragedy, and discussion of contemporary interpretations of the war.” 101 In addition to political obstacles to the implementation of the Ukrainian historians’ proposal, there are also theoretical and methodological challenges. As one prominent western historian of Ukraine has observed, the methodological revisionism of national history advocated by Iakovenko was “constructed in the West in opposition to or in defiance of national history and the methods used to narrate it. Adopting them for the purposes of renewing a national narrative presents a challenge and creates a tension.” 102 The recommendations of the working group are not free from this tension. For example, while coming out strongly against the “ethnocentric vision of history,” the working group at the same time concludes that “without a doubt, the Ukrainian ethnos, as the center of the future nation and state, has to be at the center of the narrative in Ukrainian history textbooks.” 103 How exactly this can be accomplished is not immediately obvious, given that when taken to its logical conclu100. “Tabachnik predlagaet ne nazyvat⬘ Vtoruiu Mirovuiu voinu ‘mirovoi,’” Polit.ru, 12 April 2010, at www.polit.ru/news/2010/04/12/tabachnik.html (last accessed 3 December 2010). 101. Ukrains⬘kyi instytut natsional⬘noi pamiati and Ministerstvo osvity i nauky Ukrainy, Kontseptsia ta prohramy vykladannia istorii Ukrainy v shkoli, 75–78. Overall, the proposed textbook devotes eleven lessons to World War II, of which one full lesson and parts of two other lessons are devoted to the OUN and the UPA. The last of the eleven war-related lessons is meant as a discussion of contentious issues as noted above. With respect to the facts, the historians recommend, in particular, the history of their founding, the origins of the OUN ideology in the context of trends in interwar eastern Europe, various forms of collaboration and resistance in the occupied territories, the causes and consequences of Ukrainian-Polish conflict during the war, and UPA underground activities in the postwar period. 102. Serhii Plokhy, Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto, 2008), 255. 103. Ukrains⬘kyi instytut natsional⬘noi pamiati, Propozytsii do kontseptsii istorychnoi osvity v Ukraini, 21. S5493.indb 161 1/31/11 12:40:13 PM 162 Slavic Review sion, an approach which looks at history through the lens of individuals and small groups precludes any systematic description, since any such description amounts to simplification, and therefore precludes national history all together, let alone national history that places one ethnos at the center of the narrative. Yet, if one thinks of ethnic history and the detailed examination and individualization that Iakovenko and her colleagues advocate, not in binary but in continuous terms when it comes to state policies, then much space is left for a historiography that would be less ethnic-nation-centered without ceasing to be a historical narrative of the modern nation’s past. The working group clearly did not think it an impossible task to produce such a narrative of Ukrainian history.104 As for fostering national unity, the approach advocated by the working group would allow the state to take a political stand on contested historical events without alienating large segments of society. The Spanish memory law made a controversial political statement by recognizing the Second Republic as a forerunner to Spain’s modern democracy, given that the democracy of the Second Republic was highly imperfect and Spaniards continue to view it more negatively than the Francoist period. The politically controversial decision was mitigated, however, by consensus-building policy measures that were also part of the memory law, such as a ban on glorification of either of the two warring sides, condemnation of all past political violence against civilians, and the state’s commitment to allowing conflicting memories of the past to be expressed in the public domain. If the Ukrainian state were to follow the Spanish model and the detailed examination of history advocated by the historians, policies that depart from the Soviet-era narrative and thus serve the goal of legitimizing Ukrainian state independence could be pursued without alienating large segments of society. For example, the 1991 rehabilitation law and the 1993 veterans’ law could be amended by removing, respectively, the Soviet-era equation of OUN membership with treason and the 1944 cutoff for former UPA members’ eligibility for veterans’ status, and by extending the requirement of nonparticipation in blood crimes against civilians to the veterans on both sides. This would be a departure from the Sovietera designation of all fighters against Soviet rule as enemies, and as such would be a form of rehabilitation and recognition of the OUN and the UPA and a political change. At the same time, this decision would not constitute a simple reversal of ideological labels since an integral element of this policy would be the principle that victimization of civilians, regardless of the political purpose for which it was carried out, is unacceptable, and individuals who perpetrated it cannot be honored as veterans and heroes, regardless of which flags they fought under. This policy would be more defensible both morally and politically than either of the two cur104. In fact, Iakovenko argues that the approach to history teaching developed by the working group could highlight the Ukrainianness of the state more effectively than the current approach since it could explain how in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Ukrainian idea was attractive to, and the Ukrainian political nation was formed from, people of different ethnic backgrounds. Natalia Iakovenko, interview, Kiev, 22 June 2010. S5493.indb 162 1/31/11 12:40:13 PM The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society 163 rent dominant paradigms that assign labels of heroes and villains largely on the basis of political and ideological criteria and, by being sufficiently distinct from both paradigms, could become the basis for consensus building in the middle, and thus for national unity. Three broad conclusions can be drawn on the basis of the evidence presented above. First, the Spanish-Ukrainian comparison underscores the contingent rather than the universal nature of the relationship between national and social unity in a democratic polity and collective national-cultural identity based on shared historical memory. While a degree of national unity can sometimes be achieved on the basis of factors other than common collective memory, broad theoretical generalizations or policy recommendations on the basis of particularistic findings may not be appropriate given the often unique and contingent nation-building experiences of individual states. Second, the Spanish-Ukrainian comparison also highlights an interesting difference between contemporary western and eastern nation building. It is not that western nation building is “civic” and eastern “ethnic,” as has long been argued by many scholars, but that documentary evidence on historical events is used differently by nation builders in the west and the east today.105 Historians of eastern Europe have noted that “the availability of documents has, paradoxically, enforced the domination of national history. All too often . . . documentation is used to argue for or against positions that were formulated well before 1989.” 106 The same can be said about Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the former Soviet space where political elites use (or, rather, manipulate) historical facts to bolster the historical myth they seek to propagate. By contrast, in Spain and elsewhere in established European democracies, the state has been pulling away from interpreting historical facts from one or another political-ideological perspective, instead reducing its role to providing an arena where competing historical interpretations can be advanced and to facilitating historical research into previously blank (or black) spots in the nation’s past. This difference might be indicative of a more fundamental difference in state-society relations. Nondemocratic or recently democratic states do not quite trust society to form itself into the nation, and thus guiding the society toward the “correct” self-image may seem necessary. By contrast, established democracies let society guide itself, trusting citizens to be independently capable of constituting themselves into a national community. Finally, the Ukrainian case raises a theoretically and empirically intriguing possibility that nation building oriented toward a traditional goal (a united nation underpinning a sovereign state) can be achieved by nontraditional nation-building methods. Given Ukrainian realities, democ105. The characterization of western nationalism as civic and eastern as ethnic is drawn from Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, a Study in Its Origins and Background (New York, 1944). 106. Timothy Snyder, “Introduction,” East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 1 (February 2010): 4. S5493.indb 163 1/31/11 12:40:13 PM 164 Slavic Review ratization of memory along the Spanish model is the only strategy that can realistically succeed in removing the main threat to Ukrainian nation building because it can deconstruct the Russian/Soviet historical narrative in a way that is more objective, truer to the actual facts, and therefore more likely to be accepted both by professional historians and by the citizenry. The narrative of Ukrainian national history that would result if the historians’ recommendations are followed would decidedly not be the narrative currently favored by the political forces on the right for it would not be a traditional narrative of an organic nation moving through history toward the ultimate goal of sovereign statehood. Nevertheless, it would advance the key goals of the right—national unity within an independent Ukrainian state and a European trajectory—a goal that, given Ukrainian realities, simply cannot be achieved by means of a traditional narrative of national history. S5493.indb 164 1/31/11 12:40:14 PM