Memory politics – a tragic military strategy in Ukraine

I came across the views of Marta Havryshko in a YouTube video on June 15th, in a lengthy audio essay.

What struck me about this speech, was that it comes from a Jewish Ukrainian woman, who is describing her own observations, living in Ukraine today. I also found the title of her speech very interesting – The tragedy of Memory Politics in Ukraine, Israel & the West. That’s because I cannot help noticing that in the prevailing commentaries on Ukraine, the commentators seem to have forgotten the complexity in Ukraine’s recent modern history.

Marta Havryshko is aware of this complex history. She has been living through the most recent part of it. She sees it from a Jewish perspective, and she is no fan of Putin’s Russia. But – she also brings her awareness of history to current affairs in Ukraine, and she is no fan of Volodymyr Zelensky either.

I tried to transcribe the entire 95 minutes of her speech. It is too long for an article, but I will include excerpts here, to illustrate her themes. She discusses Ukraine’s troubled history of anti-semitism, and the Nazi period in Ukraine. She focusses on Zelensky and the current accepted views on Ukraine’s history – the apparent forgetting of the facts in that history, as Ukrainian extreme nationalism now flourishes.

Marta describes her childhood, and education in Ukraine. She learned at school the history of Soviet Russia’s oppression of Ukrainians, and of the heroic freedom fighters who resisted the Russians:

“I was was raised on this nationalistic myth about glorious fighters, members of the Ukraine underground movement the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the organisation of Ukraine nationalists. We learned all these patriotic songs. Our family gatherings involved histories about Soviet repressions and actually, the house that my parents built was on the territory on the land that was seized by Soviets in 1939. Some of my family were involved on the ground in the Ukrainian nationalist movement and they were oppressed. Some of them were booted in prison and some of them were sent to Siberia. So I was raised in this highly nationalistic environment.

When I became a student at Lviv National University actually I met almost the same atmosphere. Lviv is a very nationalistic city with the biggest monument to Stepan Bandera (leader of the UPA). My home was close to Bandera street, and many streets had these partisan names.”

Marta explains how the memories of wartime events have now become confused, enmeshed into present day views and anti-Russian fervour.

“After 2014 this very western Ukraine nationalistic historical myth started to move eastward. After 2022 it became really the national myth promoted on the very national level. That’s why for example under President Zelensky we nowadays have streets named Bandera and Shukhevych (another UPA leader) in Kirik, home town of our president Zelensky.

This myth is cultivated in Ukraine in war time. Another dimension of this very troubling development in is that Nazi apologism is flourishing because many members of the Ukraine nationalists on the ground during the second world war were members of auxiliary police under German occupation and some of them occupied chief positions, so they were not just ordinary rank and file policemen – they were chiefs of police. Vasyl Levkovych, for example, is a very glorious figure in this nationalist pantheon. Those people nowadays are celebrated as freedom fighters and their direct participation in the holocaust is obscured, is marginalised and silenced and even denied.

At the holocaust memorial I was really shocked. I saw these fancy souvenir magazines with Daddy Bandera socks and Daddy Bandera bags. In one day I spent almost three hours in the city center and I saw an amount of different hate symbols like SS bolts, like black sun like Nazi eagles, like swastikas. I never saw in my life. in Western Europe, this concentration of these Nazi hate symbols. and the amount of different hate symbols – SS bolts, black sun, Nazi eagle, different combinations of swastikas. In Ukraine it’s so normalised – why? Because it’s a part of military culture nowadays. Those symbols are adopted primarily by military actors and by soldiers. The trust in Ukraine military is so high in Ukraine society – approximately more than 90% of Ukrainians nowadays trust Ukraine military. That’s why they just accept this.

Ukraine military nowadays is full of different far right groups. They are sponsored and they are celebrated as freedom fighters. In the Ukraine military we have overt Nazi apologists. For example we have the Niga named after the Nachtigall Battalion formed by the Germans and this battalion participated in the Nazi Barbarossa plan against Russia in 1941. From the documents of some participants of this unit we know that they participated in anti-Jewish pogroms.

Especially after 2022 so many neo-Nazis and far right groups neo-Nazis and far right groups were empowered and they openly promote their agenda. They openly celebrate Nazi units. Why? Because their ideology is.” Those guys are lesser evil because they fought our eternal enemy, meaning Russia. And they compare themselves with Nazis.So it’s not only Putin who compares them with Nazis, but that they themselves compare themselves with Nazis, and it’s ridiculous, it’s just crazy.”

Marta explains “memory politics” as a strategy, a weapon of war:

Those who are against military mobilisation are not a minority any more, Those who want to have peace with Russia, those who want to build a relationship with Russia on good terms, who don’t want to be engaged in eternal war with Russia, they are “bad Ukrainians” – you need to view Russia as the eternal enemy. For our children, this means only permanent war. With the anti-Russian project and narrative we will be in constant war with the superior angry and very powerful aggressor., in constant destruction.

We don’t want to spend our lives, sacrificing our life for what? – for our political elites. Ukraine is now a colonial client of the West, The West is deciding what money will go where, what laws will be adopted. In our fight against the Russian imperial state we are becoming a colony of Western imperialism. No-one is talking about this, because it’s a “good” empire.

We still have enormous casualties, and those casualties are hidden.

Memory politics is the main issue. They make movies etc about Russian atrocities but never about Ukrainian atrocities. Ukraine killed Ukrainian students in occupied Donbass, in Spring 2022. It was painful to see how many people denied it, and then justified it, blaming those students for “collaboration with Russia,” some were trying to present this as collateral damage.

The state is pouring so much money into commemorating this war. It’s about producing, inflicting emotions. First of all it’s always in both Ukrainian and English language, It’s for Western audiences, to inflict emotion, to inflict empathy, to present Ukraine as poor victim, to present a black and white picture when Ukraine is of course presented as the forces of good, and Russia as the forces of evil. Nothing of course about what happened to the people of Donbass in 2014, 2015, 2016 – always about guilt of Russia, bad Russia, crazy Putin, imperialism in Russian blood, and angels Ukraine.

So memory politics is a part of Ukraine war propaganda. Many intellectuals are engaged in this propaganda, and many receive grants from abroad. And it supports the Western agenda: Many many Western people – who discovered Ukraine only in February 2022 – see Ukraine as this angel, who was unjustifiably attacked, and is bleeding, and needs support to continue resistance. Nobody is asking those people kidnapped in the vans. Nobody asking those women, their sisters, their mothers, their wives – “Do they want to fight, to be sent to the meat-grinder against their will?” This myth of resilience, of this nation, who would rather die than live under Russian occupation. But this myth is produced by Zelensky propaganda. I must admit they’re doing a very good job in this, because Zelensky is very good at entertainment – it’s his profession.

Some background on the Ukrainian nazi partisans of World War 2:

Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists

Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia