Serbyn, Roman

Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Emeritus (Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

“Collision of State-consolidating Myths: ‘The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet People’ and ‘The Genocidal Famine of the Ukrainian Nation’”

The rise of the myth of the Great Patriotic War started from the very first day of the Wehrmacht’s attack against the USSR. On June 23, 1941, Pravda informed Soviet citizens that “The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union started.”  An article by ideologist Yaroslavskiy imposed the main ideas of the future political myth: a) patriotic rise of the Soviet people in defending their motherland, b) liberation of the country from the invaders, c) victory of the Red Army over the enemy. During the Soviet-German war, these ideas served as war cries, and after it was over they were embodied in the myth of the Great Patriotic War, concentrated in the meaning and celebrations of Victory Day.
The myth of the Great Patriotic War was neglected during Stalin's regime, which canceled Victory Day as a work-free holiday after three celebrations and displaced crippled veterans from major cities, so as not to remind people about the price of “their victory”, and was restored only in 1965 by Brezhnev. During his rule as the Communist party general secretary, Victory Day became the main state holiday, and new museums and war memorials emerged as indicators of the new political myth. The myth of the October Revolution, on which the Communists had been building their scattered empire, had to yield to the Great Patriotic War myth, which then was to be used to consolidate the empire and to transform it into the new nation. This myth did not prevent the collapse of the USSR in 1991, yet it still remains the consolidating idea for the new Russian Federation and a nostalgic event for those who did not accept the newly-forming competing myths in the emergent states. In Ukraine it remained Russian-centered, although there were some attempts to ”Ukrainize” it.
Ukrainian society is divided by the attitudes toward the Red Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Halychyna Division. For this reason the war cannot be turned into the consolidating myth for Ukrainian society. The myth aspiring for such a role is the politicized memory about the Holodomor. Kept by the Diaspora, in dissident circles, and in the depths of souls of the older generations of Ukrainians, memories of the Great Famine started to develop uncontrollably and suddenly came in conflict with the dominating myth of the Great Patriotic War supported by the government. Presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma showed pragmatic, i.e. indifferent, attitudes to the myths. President Yushchenko implemented the policy of using the Holodomor to preserve and consolidate the Ukrainian nation. To retain Russia’s influence over Ukrainians, Putin's regime supports the Great Patriotic War myth in Ukraine, and develops the issue of the famine in the spirit of having “one and the same famine for all in the Soviet Union,” thus implying there was no separate Holodomor famine for Ukrainians, much less “genocide”. The clash of the myths is continuing; it has started to involve many politicians and historians.