Ukrainians and the Holocaust

If you do not know the work of John Paul Himka, you should, not least for such books as Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians. Himka has been a well respected historian of Galician realities for decades now, as seen in such important books as Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine and then The Greek Catholic Church and Ukrainian Society in Austrian Galicia.

He has a new book published this fall on a topic whose controversies and debates have raged for some time now, and are regular features in anti-Ukrainian propaganda coming out of Russia: Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944 (Ibidem/Columbia University Press, 2021). About this book the publisher tells us this:

One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. This book delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish population of Ukraine under German occupation in 1941–44. The extent of OUN’s and UPA’s culpability in the Holocaust has been a controversial issue in Ukraine and within the Ukrainian diaspora as well as in Jewish communities and Israel. Occasionally, the controversy has broken into the press of North America, the EU, and Israel.

Triangulating sources from Jewish survivors, Soviet investigations, German documentation, documents produced by OUN itself, and memoirs of OUN activists, it has been possible to establish that: OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans' mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.

Habsburg History

Eastern Christians, especially some of those we today call, or who call themselves, Ukrainians, were for a very long time bound up with the fortunes of the Habsburgs, not least in Austrian Galicia. Galician history, as I indicate at the link, is itself fascinating, not least as told by Larry Wolff, and Robert Magosci and Christopher Hann. 

Habsburg history takes place on a much wider front, of course--indeed, a global one, and is even more interesting. It is an area I have long wanted to read more of, and now I have new incentive to do so thanks to the wonderful London Review of Books, in its 24 September 2020 edition, where we find a laudatory review of a new book: Martin Rady, The Habsburgs: to Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), 416pp.

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

In The Habsburgs, Martyn Rady tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium. From modest origins, the Habsburgs gained control of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe, stretching from Hungary to Spain, and parts of the New World and the Far East. The Habsburgs continued to dominate Central Europe through the First World War.

Historians often depict the Habsburgs as leaders of a ramshackle empire. But Rady reveals their enduring power, driven by the belief that they were destined to rule the world as defenders of the Roman Catholic Church, guarantors of peace, and patrons of learning. The Habsburgs is the definitive history of a remarkable dynasty that forever changed Europe and the world.

Uniates in a Partitioned Poland

If this new book by Larry Wolff is half as fascinating as his The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture, it will be very good indeed. Just out last month is Larry Wolff, Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland (Harvard University Press, 2020), 156pp.

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria concluded agreements to annexand finally eradicate the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. As a result of the partitions of Poland, the members of the Uniate Church (later known as the Greek Catholic Church) found their dioceses fractured by the borders of three regional hegemons.

Larry Wolff’s deeply engaging study of these events delves into the politics of the episcopal elite, the Vatican, and the three rulers behind the partitions: Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria (with their successors). Wolff uses correspondence with bishops in the Uniate Church and ministerial communiques to reveal the nature of state policy as it unfolded.

This detailed study of the responses of common Uniate parishioners, as well as of their bishops and hierarchs, to the pressure of the partitions paints a vivid portrait of conflict, accommodation, and survival in a Church subject to the grand designs of the late eighteenth century’s premier absolutist powers.

Additionally, Wolff adopts methodologies from the history of popular culture pioneered by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre) and Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms) to explore religious experience on a popular level, especially questions of confessional identity and practices of piety.

“Ukraine has been blessed and damned as a land between the East and the West, as has been the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church, an institution poised between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West. Larry Wolff provides an erudite and fascinating insight into the late eighteenth century, when the Uniates, facing attempts by imperial Russia to destroy them, were able to survive thanks to the enlightened if self-serving policies of Austria’s Habsburg monarchs” (Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto).

The City with Five Names

Lviv/Lwow/Lemberg/Leopolis/Lvov is the major city in Western Ukraine of which I have the fondest memories from my time there in the summer of 2001. It is a fascinating combination of Habsburg influence (see, e.g., the opera house) smack in the middle of what was, 15 years ago, still incredibly underdeveloped and impoverished areas both in the city and especially in the countryside whose sorry state--thanks to Soviet influence--reminded me of nothing so much as 19th century rural America bereft of all the modern amenities we take for granted today. The city has long been a crossroads, and given changing borders in the past century alone, has been part of Austrian Galicia, Poland, the USSR, and since 1991 a free and independent Ukraine.

As I am getting read to go to a conference in June on the pseudo-synod of Lviv of 1946, the city has again much been on my mind.

Two recent books look at the competing influences on this city, which has long been the strong-hold of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, and a place of encounter between Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox--to say nothing of Latin Catholics, Jews, and others: Tarik Cyril Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Cornell University Press, 2015), 368pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:

In The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv, Tarik Cyril Amar reveals the local and transnational forces behind the twentieth-century transformation of one of East Central Europe's most important multiethnic borderland cities into a Soviet and Ukrainian urban center. Today, Lviv is the modern metropole of the western part of independent Ukraine and a center and symbol of Ukrainian national identity as well as nationalism. Over the last three centuries it has also been part of the Habsburg Empire, interwar Poland, a World War I Russian occupation regime, the Nazi Generalgouvernement, and, until 1991, the Soviet Union.

Lviv's twentieth-century history was marked by great violence, massive population changes, and fundamental transformation. Under Habsburg and Polish rule up to World War II, Lviv was a predominantly Polish city as well as one of the major centers of European Jewish life. Immediately after World War II, Lviv underwent rapid Soviet modernization, bringing further extensive change. Over the postwar period, the city became preponderantly Ukrainian—ethnically, linguistically, and in terms of its residents’ self-perception. Against this background, Amar explains a striking paradox: Soviet rule, which came to Lviv in its most ruthless Stalinist shape and lasted for half a century, left behind the most Ukrainian version of the city in history. In reconstructing this dramatic and profound change, Amar also illuminates the historical background to present-day identities and tensions within Ukraine.

A second book, also released late last year, takes a similar approach: Christoph Mick,  Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914-1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City (Purdue U Press, 2015), 480pp.

About this book we are told:

Known as Lemberg in German and Lwów in Polish, the city of L’viv in modern Ukraine was in the crosshairs of imperial and national aspirations for much of the twentieth century. This book tells the compelling story of how its inhabitants (Roman Catholic Poles, Greek Catholic Ukrainians, and Jews) reacted to the sweeping political changes during and after World Wars I and II. The Eastern Front shifted back and forth, and the city changed hands seven times. At the end of each war, L'viv found itself in the hands of a different state. While serious tensions had existed among Poles, Ukrainians/Ruthenians, and Jews in the city, before 1914 eruptions of violence were still infrequent. The changes of political control over the city during World War I led to increased intergroup frictions, new power relations, and episodes of shocking violence, particularly against Jews. The city’s incorporation into the independent Polish Republic in November 1918 after a brief period of Ukrainian rule sparked intensified conflict. Ukrainians faced discrimination and political repression under the new government, and Ukrainian nationalists attacked the Polish state. In the 1930s, anti-Semitism increased sharply. During World War II, the city experienced first Soviet rule, then Nazi occupation, and finally Soviet conquest. The Nazis deported and murdered nearly all of the city’s large Jewish population, and at the end of the war the Soviet forces expelled the city’s Polish inhabitants. Based on archival research conducted in L’viv, Kiev, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, and Moscow, as well as an array of contemporary printed sources and scholarly studies, this book examines how the inhabitants of the city reacted to the changes in political control, and how ethnic and national ideologies shaped their dealings with each other. 

For those who want a wider context for understanding the city of Lviv and its regional place and significance, including its central place in Galicia, now is the time to bring to your attention again a book that has been out for more than a decade, but is still a wonderful and fascinating read: Christopher Hann and Paul Robert Magocsi, eds., Galicia: A Multicultured land.

The First Ukrainian Catholic Bishop in Canada

The history of Eastern Christianity in Canada, and even more widely the history of the socioeconomic development of the prairie provinces (and much of the rest of the country), is inseparable from the immigration to those parts of Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians from the tsarist empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the largest groups to come to Canada to take advantage of its promise of free land were those we today call Ukrainians, most of whom were in fact Galicians. (My favorite book about Galicia remains that edited by Christopher Hann and Paul Robert Magocsi, Galicia: A Multicultured Land.) The old Habsburg province of Galicia was the stronghold of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, and many who came to Canada were thus Eastern/Byzantine Catholics. In time their numbers would swell to such an extent that petitions were made to the primate, Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, for a bishop, and in time that bishop, Nykyta Budka, would be sent. His would not be an uneventful life either in Canada or back in the Soviet Union, where he was eventually martyred.

A new book by the church historian and priest Athanasius McVay, whom I interviewed previously about his work on the Holodomor in Ukraine, tells Budka's story:

The author has more details about this forthcoming book on his blog, and you may read that here.

Slavic Iconographical History and Developments

Just yesterday I finally received from Penn State Press a book which I noted at the beginning of the year: Jefferson Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield, eds., Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity (Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University), x+276pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Passage into the modern world left the Russian icon profoundly altered. It fell into new hands, migrated to new homes, and acquired new forms and meanings. Icons were made in the factories of foreign industrialists and destroyed by iconoclasts of the proletariat. Even the icon s traditional functions whether in the feast days of the church or the pageantry of state power were susceptible to the transformative forces of modernization. In Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great s Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of Orthodoxy. Alter Icons shows how the twin pressures of secular scholarship and secular art transformed the Russian icon from a sacred image in the church to a masterpiece in the museum, from a parochial craftwork to a template for the avant-garde, and from a medieval interface with the divine to a modernist prism for seeing the world anew.

With many plates, in both colour and black and white, this handsome book opens up absorbing areas of exploration. It begins with an introduction by Gatrall, and ends with an afterword by the well-known historian of the Russian Church, Vera Shevzov. In between, we have eleven articles by some well-known scholars, including Shevzov, Robert Bird, John McGuckin, and John-Paul Himka. Those articles are in four sections: (1) Empire of Icons; (2) Curators and Commissars; (3) Intermedial Icon; (4) Projections.

Those interested in Pavel Florensky (about whom Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies will be publishing an article in our upcoming fall issue) will find two articles of note: "Florensky and the Binocular Body" by Douglas Greenfield; and "Florensky and Iconic Dreaming" by McGuckin.

I have so far read with great interest two chapters. The first is "How America Discovered Russian Icons: the Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930-1932" by Wendy Salmond. Though many of us in the US today take access to, and understanding of, icons for granted, in the opening decades of the twentieth century almost nobody here had any idea of what icons were, and the tiny handful who did--art historians, anthropologists, and the rest--almost invariably sneered at them as the primitive totems of backwards and stupid peasants, unfit for study or any serious consideration. The traveling exhibition of 1930-32 helped to raise awareness of icons in Russia especially, but it was also a very clever piece of Soviet propaganda. Interest in the Soviet Union was at an all-time high around 1930, and there were many articles constantly in the media. The exhibit was able to play into this interest, showing credulous Americans that an atheistic and iconoclastic regime ostensibly had a high aesthetic and religio-cultural sensibility. In reality this exhibit was used to deflect criticism of the Soviet persecution of the Orthodox Church (and the various Catholic and other Christian churches), and also used to drum up money by showing the world what fascinating artistic wares existed in the USSR and could be purchased. The Soviets undertook a mass "dumping" of icons and other cultural artifacts onto the international markets in order to raise desperately needed Western dollars to finance the campaigns of collectivization, dekulakization, terror-famine, and other crimes.

An even more fascinating article for me was "Moments in the History of an Icon Collection: the National Museum in Lviv, 1905-2005" by John-Paul Himka, author of the recent and related volume Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians.

As I have noted before, I visited the museum whose history Himka describes in lucid and crisp prose. (More recently I attended an exhibition in New York that had many icons from the museum, now recorded in the lovely companion volume, The Glory of Ukraine: Sacred Images from the 11th to the 19th Centuries.) The museum, as Himka illustrates, was at the cross-roads of all the various major events of the twentieth century: the First World War, during and as a result of which its host city of Lviv passed from being Hapsburg crown-land and capital of Galicia to Russian-occupied territory; the abortive West Ukrainian National Republic, declared on 1 November 1918 and leading to the Ukrainian-Polish war of 1918-19; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 followed weeks later by the Red Army; the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union; and the 1991 independence of Ukraine and emergence of the hitherto suppressed Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, then headquartered in at St. George's in Lviv. In most of these conflicts, the premises of the museum suffered only minor damage from shelling.

The central figure in the establishment of the museum was, of course, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, primate of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church from 1900 until his death on 1 November 1944. As Himka succinctly puts it, Sheptytsky was a "scion of the upper elite [who] had toured Western Europe and studied its art firsthand. He had a finely educated aesthetic sense, a love of the visual arts, and great wealth." Sheptytsky's family patrimony, in fact, would be widely spent not only on buying icons about to be destroyed--whether by unknowing peasants convinced that wooden churches had to be torn down and replaced with modern brick ones, or hostile iconoclasts in the employ of the communists--but also on the land and buildings in which to house this ever-expanding collection.

The other figure to whom Himka pays careful attention is Vira Svientsitska, who worked for the museum under her father, the director, prior to being sent to the gulag from November 1948 to August 1956. After her release, she worked for the museum until her death in May 1991. She showed great cleverness in persuading the authorities to hang onto the icons, and amass others, by persuading them that far from being of religious significance, these icons were in fact "productions that expressed the Ukrainian people's longing for national and social liberation" (120).


For these and other fascinating stories and scholarly studies, I recommend Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, which will be reviewed at greater length by an iconologist in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2012.

New Works on Galicia

Many Eastern Christians in North America, both Catholic and Orthodox, trace their roots to the Hapsburg province of Galicia. Several recent books have come out to look at the fascinating history of this area, and several more have appeared this year.

William Jay Risch has just authored The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Harvard UP, 2011), 374pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

Lviv’s borderlands identity was defined by complicated relationships with its Polish neighbor, its imperial Soviet occupier, and the real and imagined West. The city’s intellectuals—working through compromise rather than overt opposition—strained the limits of censorship in order to achieve greater public use of Ukrainian language and literary expression, and challenged state-sanctioned histories with their collective memory of the recent past. Lviv’s post–Stalin-generation youth, to which Risch pays particular attention, forged alternative social spaces where their enthusiasm for high culture, politics, soccer, music, and film could be shared.

The Ukrainian West enriches our understanding not only of the Soviet Union’s postwar evolution but also of the role urban spaces, cosmopolitan identities, and border regions play in the development of nations and empires. And it calls into question many of our assumptions about the regional divisions that have characterized politics in Ukraine. Risch shines a bright light on the political, social, and cultural history that turned this once-peripheral city into a Soviet window on the West.

The question of the Holocaust in Ukraine, as I noted previously, continues to merit scholarly attention, including in Wendy Lower's book, set for release in October: The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (Altamira, 2011), 198pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

This in-depth study of a Jewish man's diary from Nazi-occupied Poland provides an unfiltered view of the struggles of Samuel Golfard, who tried to make sense of and resist the Holocaust that ultimately destroyed him. The diary is complemented by an array of wartime and postwar photographs, newspaper articles, documents, and testimonies that create a fuller picture of Jewish resistance and the perpetration of mass murder in eastern Galicia.

The noted Ukrainian historian John-Paul Himka has said of this work:

It is a miracle that this diary survived and has now become an invaluable source on the Holocaust in a small town in western Ukraine. It provides a glimpse into the state of mind of those destined for annihilation on the very eve of their destruction. The diarist is insightful and thoughtful. The introduction and commentary provided by Wendy Lower are nuanced and intelligent. One will learn a lot about the Holocaust from reading this book.

Inventing a Russian Past

The great historian Robert Taft, in many places, has talked about the uses and abuses of the past, noting that few people read the past on its own terms, but instead plunder it for present felt purposes--or invent a past that never was, again for present purposes. (As he's said, he's often tempted to write a book "Inventing Eastern Orthodoxy," one chapter of which would be "inventing Eastern liturgy." See, inter alia, his "Eastern Presuppositions and Western Liturgical Renewal" in Antiphon 5 [2000].) The past is very convenient to justify a new course of action in the present on which one has already decided, and history is therefore often subject to all kinds of tendentious abuse today--the Crusades being a prime example of this. Margaret Macmillan has recently denounced these abuses of history and historiography in her Dangerous Games: the Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library, 2010), 208pp. 

Brill has just alerted me to a new book they are publishing on these themes:

Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past (Brill, 2010), 184pp.


This approach to history is increasingly common today. The Wolff book on Galicia, noted yesterday, is one species. I have seen many others about Armenian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and other histories.

Galician Realities

Many if not most Ukrainian Catholics who came to North America, and many who came out of the Ukrainian Catholic Church to found the OCA and ACROD, were immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. Galicia has increasingly come in for scholarly study lately. E.g., in December 2005, Christopher Hann and Paul Robert Magocsi edited a wonderful book, Galicia: A Multicultured Land. This was reviewed in Logos in 2007.

Now today I have received a new book by Larry Wolff, a professor of history at New York University: The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford U Press, 2010, xi+486pp.