Textbooks and the Holocaust in Independent Ukraine: An Uneasy Past

The article examines how Ukrainian history textbooks dealt with the Holocaust between independence and 2006. The analysis reveals two major, conflicting narratives about the Holocaust, though both externalize and relativize the Holocaust. As a template for understanding genocide, the Holocaust was applied to the Soviet-imposed 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor. The emphasis placed on the famine in both narratives partially obscures the Holocaust and in propagating the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, turns Jews into leading perpetrators of the Holodomor. In the Ukrainian case, the complex relationship among history, historical culture, and contemporary politics is compounded by the familiar tension between national history and the international reality of the Holocaust. The historical Sovietization of Holocaust victims was attacked by historians in the Ukrainian diaspora who resented the accusations that Ukrainians were collaborators and fascists. They sought to replace the Soviet historical narrative with one that made Ukrainians the central victims, not perpetrators. Ukraine's own nationalization of the Holocaust functioned in much the same way as the Sovietization of the Holocaust. Nationalization, obfuscation, and an implicit competition among victim narratives all contribute to the relatively complicated place of the Holocaust in Ukrainian historical narratives. (By the author)