UBC: Harvest of Despair

[truepenny]

Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.

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This is a very difficult and painful book to read because, to put it vulgarly, the people of Ukraine could not catch a fucking break. They go from Stalin and the Terror-Famine to the Nazis, who quite deliberately starved the urban population and generally behaved like, well, Nazis, and at the end of the war, of course, they are doomed to go right back to Stalin; in post-WWII Soviet Ukraine, people were persecuted for having survived the occupation:

Red Army veterans, former partisans, and Soviet ideologists lost no time in developing their mythical interpretation of Ukraine under the "German fascist occupants." Like many historians of western European countries, they claimed that resistance had been massive. Official interpreters also, as during the war but in contrast to their Western peers, declared passivity under the Germans a virtual criminal offense. The myth reflected an apparent view that the people in Nazi-ruled Ukraine had been traitors, as a former Soviet partisan recalls being told in Moscow as early as 1942. In 1946, when Petro Vershyhora, a former partisan under Sydir Kovpak, defended those who had lived their lives under the Nazis against people who attacked them merely for that reason, official critics denounced him and censors modified subsequent editions of his book. The survivors of the Nazi regime received little understanding. Well into the 1980s, they had to mention on job applications and other forms whether they had "been in occupied territory" and a positive response resulted in discrimination. Only the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the survivors of the Holocaust and of forced labor the chance to accept a decades-old German offer of compensation; yet post-Soviet bureaucrats illegally appropriated part of the funds and kept applicants waiting for years.
(306)

Solzhenitsyn also has things to say about the treatment of survivors in the post-WWII USSR, none of them good.

And what makes the whole mess even worse, the part of the book where I kept wanting to shake something to make reality realign, is that the Ukrainian partisans were just as bad as the Nazis and the Stalinists. They started their own genocide against the Poles, and they followed exactly the same pattern of mass murder against civilians for helping "the enemy" (whoever "the enemy" was defined as by the murderers) or for being suspected of helping "the enemy" or because someone else helped "the enemy" or for not helping the murderers or not helping them enough or any other reason that came to them. Ukrainian partisans murdered people they suspected of supporting Soviet partisans and vice versa. It's like everyone in this patch of Europe suffered homicidal psychosis at the same time, and it is ghastly.

Berkoff's English is sometimes awkward; he is a native of the Netherlands, and by my best reckoning must read Russian, German, Ukrainian, and possibly Polish as well, so this is not in any way a denigration, just a fact about reading the book. One of the things I think is particularly useful about it is that Berkoff has chosen to present the experiences of the people who lived in Ukraine, rather than the Jews or the ethnic Germans or the Poles or the Russians or the Ukrainians (it's also very clear from what he writes that "Ukrainian" was a slippery term and not necessarily a useful one in talking about the people who lived in Ukraine). He's looking at what happened to people who lived in this particular place at this particular time and the suffering they went through for other people's ideologies.

Comments

[irishkathy52.livejournal.com]

Today I opened a magazine in supermarket and the hate from this time is STILL alive!

In Estonia things had been better that we had had an independent state for 20 years, so escaping the repressions before 1940(BTW, the Ukrainians themselves consider Russians worst than Germans on the genocide against Ukrainians front: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor ), but after the WW II it was tough. Many people went to the forests to hide. And some of them DID kill communist supporters and their families.

Anyway - there was a story about a man who was hiding in forest till 1952 and was then killed by Russian soldiers. Someone betrayed him. His son - an old man himself - suspects a woman. And he keeps asking this woman even NOW. There was transcription and even if the woman denied being the informer, she also attacked the son of the killed "forest brother" as those hiding in forests were known: "Your father was a killer and you also want to kill, only you cannot now!"

What is so depressing about it is that for so many people the WW II is still not over, it still keeps hurting and fanning hate.

I sometimes wonder - is it mentally easier for victims of Nazi repressions, as they have the Nurnberg and the laws to assure them that it was not THEIR fault they got repressed. The victims of communists still hear: "Well, Stalin helped to fight against Hitler (even if Stalin WAS an ally of Hitler for a while and the most bitter irony is that some people got sent to prison for being critical against Hitler - who was Soviet ally after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - and when the war started those people remained in prisons and were not allowed to fight against Hitler, as they were jailed as traitors!), hence the victims of Stalin must have done something to cause the repressions." In case of Ukrainians it is pften pointed out that they were anti-Semites (you may check out the scandal of helen Demidenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Darville . I have read the book and what baffles me is that for me it seemed to be an anti-Ukrainian book)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I've come to think that one of the defining characteristics of fascism in particular, and of totalitarianisms in general, is its utter disregard for human life in favor of its ideology, because ideology/ideological purity justifies homocidal psychosis on any scale.

Ugh.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

See also la Terreur, which I am having to explain to my high-school juniors this week. I'm having about as much fun as you'd expect.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Oh, good point. I'm reading a book about Abraham Lincoln at the moment, and the author quoted said President to the effect that the French revolutionaries made the mistake of thinking "the People" a unified body, when the whole point of the People is that they are various.

We're slow to learn, as a species.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Not to mention their fabulous invention called "all accused persons are guilty."

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You're better at this than I am. I took this back to the library unfinished. I found the combination of the prose style and the information impossible to take.

echoes of starvation in the Ukraine

[(Anonymous)]

We have an intern where I work who's Ukrainian by birth, though she's been living in the US for 12 years. Her American husband signed up for Nutrisystem or some similiar diet thing and then found the food inedible. Since he won't eat it, she brings servings from his 30-day supply to work everyday to eat for lunch. She's already very slender, and she admits the food is disgusting, but she eats it anyway. I asked her about it, and she said it was impossible for her to throw away food. She'd spent part of her childhood living with her grandmother, who had survived WWII in the Ukraine. It amazes her the way Americans can throw food away just because they don't like it. It's fascinating - and awful - the way the habits born of starvation are so deeply ingrained that they still hold sway three generations out and half a world away. Given that, it doesn't surprise me that there's still a lot of resentment and hatred surrounding the war.

Re: echoes of starvation in the Ukraine

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

the habits born of starvation are so deeply ingrained that they still hold sway three generations out

Well, the same is true to some extent here in post-Depression America. There are a lot of recipes my grandma and mom make that have some (to me) weird ingredients (ones that don't have much of a use except as filler, or meat replacement, or somesuch) that originated as Depression-era dishes. My grandma, who was a child during the Depression, never let us leave her table if we had any food on our plates.

After a while, habits become tradition. How many of those Depression-era dishes are still made the same way, with meat substitutes and fillers, because that's how the children and grandchildren were taught to make it?