the tragic memory of the “border country”

March 17, 1917, the day after the February Revolution^I which overthrew the tsarist regime in Russia, the first political act of the Ukrainians was the foundation of the Central Rada, a parliament constituted in kyiv to govern the new Ukrainian People’s Republic, which despite its name is in no way communist. She claims in June the autonomy of the country, then its independence in November, at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The new state is recognized by France and the United Kingdom, but immediately contested by the Bolsheviks who install in Kharkiv a government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At the beginning of 1918, they bombed kyiv for twelve days and ended up seizing it. The Rada then turns towards the Central Powers. France and the United Kingdom abandon it.

Donbas separatism already present after the October Revolution

With the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks temporarily abandon Ukraine. The mining and steel region of Donbass, where from 1917 more than two thirds of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks were concentrated, attempted to join Russia under the name of the Soviet Republic of Donetsk-Krivoï Rog. But Lenin saw to it that this province remained within the framework of a Ukraine which he found too peasant in order to strengthen the working base there which was supposed to build the dictatorship of the proletariat. To the south, the Soviet Republics of Odessa and Tauride (Crimea) are subservient to Soviet power.

The Ukraine thus became until 1921 the heart of the civil war, between nationalists supported by the Central Powers (defeated in November 1918) or the allies, the Poles, the white armies (tsarists), the revolutionary leftist socialists and many sure the Bolsheviks. A special place must be given to peasant mobilization around the anarchist Nestor Makhno. He embodiesexplains historian Nicolas Werth, a real national and peasant revolution, anti-Russian. Peasant resistance was stronger than anywhere else in the years 1918-1920. »

” The Bolshevik power is interested in Ukraine, he continues, because it is the richest part (wheat, coal, iron ore). He can’t survive without it. » This explanation is also that of Antoine Germa, screenwriter of an ongoing documentary on the Holodomor, the great famine of 1932-1933 to which we will return: “ It is a place where you can help yourself without any relation to Ukrainians. We always forget that the Ukraine entered by violence and coercion into the bosom of the USSR. »

1918-1921: Civil war and famine

Civil war and Soviet requisitions lead to a first famine which kills between 1 and 2 million and leads to scenes of cannibalism. The United States then provided humanitarian aid. Yves Ternon writes: Whether in the space of its nine governments or in time from 1917 to 1921, the Ukraine appears exploded into a multitude of fragments, none of which has meaning if it is not related to the whole, and the whole is a mess… »ⁱⁱ

The memory of this period also forms, according to historian Éric Aunoble ” the echo chamber ofMaidan” (who challenges the Philo-Russian power in 2014, editor’s note) and the war in the Donbass »ⁱⁱⁱ. In December 1922, the territories controlled by the Bolsheviks who emerged victorious from this war were brought together in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). At its inception, it included Russia (with republics and autonomous regions), Ukraine amputated from its western territories annexed by Poland, Belarus and Transcaucasia. The Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimeacreated shortly before, in October 1921, remains in the bosom of Soviet Russia.

1931-1933: Holodomor, the “Great Famine”

” When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin first implemented a policy of detente “, explains Antoine Germa. Within the limited framework of the USSR, the Ukrainian identity takes shape. This golden age is short-lived. In 1928, the first five-year plan intended to make the Soviet Union a great industrial nation. Agricultural production is export-oriented to buy industrial machinery. After the peasants of the Volga and the Kazakh herders, the Ukrainians are sacrificed to the cause. This time, it is 4 million of them, largely during the first six months of 1933, who die of hunger in a region entirely under the control of the People’s Commissars.

It was the acme of a war against the Ukrainian peasants, accused of being kulaks, owners hostile to collectivization, which lasted 15 years. Stalin manages to impose in the USSR and elsewhere a total silence on the question. Many, like the deputy Édouard Herriot, on returning from the USSR, lie not out of ideology, but out of economic interest. ” The primary objective of Stalinism, summarizes Antoine Germa, it is the elimination of truth. »

During the Second World War, Ukraine became a martyred republic, at the heart of clashes between Nazis and Soviets. For these first, Ukrainians are described as “white niggers” “recalls Antoine Germa. This colonial vision does not prevent a part of the Ukrainian nationalists from changing into auxiliaries or collaborators of the Germans, by memory of an Austria-Hungary more open than the Russian dominator, by opportunism against the Soviet Union but also by anti-Semitism. ” You can be a martyr and look for a scapegoat »comments the political scientist Lisa Vapne.

1941-1944: Ukrainian nationalism, both martyr and accomplice of the executioners

The Babi Yar massacre, where on September 20 and 21, 1941, some 36,000 kyiv Jews were executed by the Nazis, has long been described in the USSR as a massacre of “peaceful Soviet citizens”. “. From 1941 to 1944, an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered, some of them by the Ukrainians themselves.

Despite everything, a nationalist leader like Stefan Bandera, an intelligence agent for the Nazis from 1934, could be erected as a “hero of Ukraine in 2010, among other things because he died of poisoning by the KGB in 1959. After the reconquest of Ukraine by the Red Army, everything is done to erase the memory of Babi Yar, while new pogroms break out , including that of September 7, 1945 which caused a hundred deaths in kyiv.

” The Absolutely Criminal Role During the Holocaust Played by Ukrainian Nationalistscomments Nicolas Werth, is now held up like a scarecrow by Putin. This is to forget that the extreme right now accounts for between 3 and 4% in elections, which is much lower than in Poland, Belgium, Italy or of course France. » In September 2021, under the chairmanship of Volodymyr Zelinskypart of whose family was murdered during the Holocaust, a law was passed to “prohibit anti-Semitism “.

On March 2, 2022, Russian bombs targeting the TV tower in kyiv fell very close to the Babi Yar memorial, sparking outrage. ” This memorialrecalls Lisa Vapné, is not a national monument like the one dedicated to the memory of the famine. It was erected thanks to alternative funds. »

In 1986, the collapse of the USSR begins in Chernobyl

In 1944, it was the turn of 250,000 Crimean Tatars, Muslims accused of collaboration, experiencing oppression and deportation, many in Uzbekistan. 100,000 will die before 1947. Crimea is returned to Ukraine in 1954, before becoming an autonomous republic in 1991. The gradual return of the Tatars will have no weight in the later ambitions of Vladimir Putin.

” During the events of 2014, the Russian authorities explicitly associated the “return from Crimea to Russia“ to the “liberation of Crimea from fascist aggressors“ in 1944 “, writes Korine Amacher^iv. Moreover, the end of the Second World War and its aftermath caused the death or deportation to the gulag of 500,000 Ukrainians, particularly in the west of the country, which had passed through this period of pre-war Polish domination on Soviet territory.

It was still in Ukraine that, symbolically, appeared the first sign of the collapse of the USSR. On April 26, 1986, a Russian engineer, Anatoli Diatlov, supervised tests on reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl power plant, on the border with Belarus. These experiments will be at the origin of the most terrible nuclear accident in history, managed with opacity and at the cost of many human lives by the Soviet authorities.

On February 24, 2022, Chernobyl was the site of the first battle of the war in Ukraine, immediately registering this conflict under the sign of a nuclear threat which operates far beyond the field of operations. ” We have not yet taken the full measure of this tragedy » declared already in 2011 Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, about the disaster of 1986. The sentence would no doubt apply to all the suffering endured by Ukrainians under the Soviet yoke, whether they were Christians, Jews or Muslims. Their magnitude remains largely unknown in France.

I The difference between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar means that the so-called February Revolution took place largely in March 1917 and that of October in November of the same year.

iiYves Ternon, Makhno : the anarchist revolt; 1917-1921, editions Complex, 1981.

iii Korine Amacher, Eric Aunoble and Andrii Portnov, Shared history, Divided memories, Ukraine, Russia, PolandAntipodes editions, 2021, page 109.

iv Ibid, page 80