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"AGAINST THE VAMPIRES OF THE PAST"
The Day Weekly Digest
http://day.kiev.ua/261512/
Dec 9 2008
Ukraine
Holodomor and historical memory in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian
cultures
By Oxana PACHLOWSKA, University of Rome La Sapienza; Shevchenko
Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Photo by Kostiantyn HRYSHYN, The Day
(Continued from the previous issue)
Settling historical accounts and a guilt complex are Europe's constant
catharsis. In his Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc (The Tears of the White
Man, 1983), the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner says the feeling of
guilt is one of the main features of Western culture, and that it is
rooted in the biblical sense of guilt, the original sin committed by
European civilization. As a result, the West keeps criticizing itself
and is unable to love itself. Bruckner even says that the West hates
itself and this hatred is "the central dogma" of European culture. Of
course, this is a complicated thesis that requires an articulate
approach. Be that as it may, an ability to think critically is one of
the most distinct features of European civilization. At the same time,
it is one of the guarantees of its periodic moral regeneration. After
all, it is not only about theoretical self-analysis, as there is
now institutional protection against revanchist ideology, including
criminal prosecution for the denial of the Holocaust.
The death toll of Communist violence in the world stands at 85-100
million, including at least 20 million victims for which Russia
is responsible, reads The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror,
Repression (its Russian version was published in 1999). Com­mu­nist
Russia is second only to Communist China with its 65 million victims.
Does it make a difference that this ideology is "cushioned"
by the false ideologemes of "world revolutions" and
"internationalism"? Genealogically, it is an extreme
manifestation of Russian imperialism, just as Nazism is of German
imperialism. Therefore, the measure and the essence of responsibility
are the same. However, a divergence begins precisely when it comes to
the perception of this responsibility. This is a discrepancy between
history as the formation of critical memory in European culture and
history as the formation of apologetic memory in a culture that sets
itself in opposition to European values.
That is why what emerged in Europe was post-totalitarian historiography
with its absolute autonomy from the political system. In Russia,
history has been constantly rewritten, depending on the political
leadership's ideological orientation. Putin regards Stalin as a
"successful manager." Putin identifies himself with Stalin and the
public applauds. After the first elements of rudimentary democracy,
Russian history textbooks are once again written in the Kremlin.
It stands to logic that what is martyrology for other countries is
"bad image" for Russia. Let me quote a Russian political scientist:
"Image-building factors are important for us and that is why
recognition of the Holodomor is such a painful topic... It isn't just
that Ukrainians have explained history. It is a blow to Russia's image,
just as 'Soviet occupation' damages this image and is regarded as an
aggressive act." (http://www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-254370.html).
Indeed, this is almost like an image of the world turned upside
down: occupation, deportations, mass repressions, tortures, famine,
misery, and decades-long bans are not acts of aggression because
they concern other peoples (actually including the Russian people,
but this, apparently, is of no importance whatsoever). What counts
as aggression (directed against Russia's mythical inviolability in
the empyrean of its alleged holiness) is writing about the tragedy of
peoples that lost entire generations, their intellectual elites, and
historical prospects for long years, due to Russia's eschatological
projects of world supremacy, as well as paying homage and remembering
the sufferings of these people.
Image is a concept form the domain of advertising and
communications. Memory is a historical, moral, existential, and
philosophic category. Mercy is a Christian category.
Therefore, where other peoples see millions of victims-it is all
about image for Russia. In the case of the Holodomor, it is millions
of victims, people who died a horrible, even humiliating death because
there was no way they could defend themselves and were denied the right
to be [properly] buried, mourned for, and remembered. These innocent
victims are non-persons, just an existentialist void. Generations
that vanished without a trace, a black hole in a nation's memory -
all this is just insignificant "details" in the context of Russia's
providential mission.
An apologetic model of history leads to amnesia, to use a Freudian
term. Memory that turns into oblivion blocks the society's moral
progress. Tragic pages of history are reconsidered to prevent these
tragedies from happening again in our time. Keeping one's actions
under control is an essential component of cultivating responsibility
within a given society.
In Russia, past events have never been [critically] reconsidered;
on the contrary, this country is turning its eyes to the past in
order to project the forged images of its "grandeur" and justified
crimes on the future. So Russia's threats today are its old, barely
upgraded threats. Russia's occupation of Georgia in August 2008 is
a postmodernist remake of its bloodshedding campaigns in the 19th
century, with the same glorification of force and contempt for mercy.
In his Prisoner of the Caucasus, Pushkin eulogized a tsarist general
who "as though he were black plague, / Pursued, destroyed the tribes":
"I shall sing glory to the time / When, sensing bloody battle, / Our
double-headed eagle rose / To crush the belligerent Caucasus." The poet
sees, first and foremost, the figures of bloodthirsty Russian warriors
in the "grandeur" of imperial violence, whereas the people felled by
their swords are some obscure "tribes," whose life and culture were
nothing compared to the empire. This is the empire that moves around
generals like Yermolov yesterday and Nogovitsyn today in lands far
and near -- the countries it is bent on conquering. After when this
happens, it will be the end of these peoples, and no one to mourn
for them. The poet writes: "A horseman will ride up, unafraid, // To
the gorges, where you used to nestle, // Grim legends will recount //
Your death at hangman's hand." Why execute them? Because those were
different, separate people? Small wonder that in 2008 no one would
remember that the Caucasus had remained "belligerent" for several
centuries. Most humiliating of all is when this "execution" (as well
as others) is presented as the "friendship of the peoples," and when
Russia's Clio once again sweeps these peoples down into a common grave.
The age-old subjugation of the Russian Church by the political powers
that be and the latter's ability to manipulate religious ideas for
the sake of ideological speculations have obliterated in Russian
mentality the sense of guilt and the ethos of guilt as such. It would
seem that this assumption is at variance with the very nature of
Russian literature of the 19th century. After all, Dostoevsky created
the moral dimension of the guilt experienced by a person who assumes
responsibility for all the sins of humankind. According to Dostoevsky,
Russia has a mission of "service of humanity, of brotherly love and
the solidarity of mankind..." (The Karamazov Brothers). He refers to
Western Europe as a "graveyard" and to Russia as the emerging power;
he believes that the future of Europe belongs to Russia owing to this
kind of universal "morality" that the latter possesses.
However, this reference system has no place for specific guilt for
a specific sin. Instead, there is the abstract moral, dehistorized
Christian guilt placed outside historical time. At the same time,
Russian history, "sacralized" and alienated from profane time, is
exempt from verification by "secularized" methods; it always stands
above human judgment. In other words, this history is alienated from
the dimension of guilt.
Since, on this view, the past is held sacred, it cannot be disowned,
reconsidered, or regarded as a critical lesson for the future. The
past must always be an edifying, positive lesson (e.g., the cult of
Ivan the Terrible during the Stalin epoch and that of Stalin during
the Putin epoch). Hence there is the absence of a rational approach
to history and, consequently, of a rational design for the future. The
future is a value that is programmed by the consecrated past. That is
why the promised "bright future" will never come. To quote Lobodovsky,
"the vampires of the past" will devour it before it can even begin.
This peculiarity of the Russian cultural identity is turning Russia
into a hostage of its own past. Lacking the sense of its own guilt,
it is forced to look for culprits outside Russia. Hence the typical
enemies-of-Russia repertoire. This mythologeme has become a matter of
state concern- there is even a statistically verified list of Russia's
top five enemies (the US, the Baltic states, Georgia, Ukraine, and
Poland; remarkably, Ukraine "declassed" Poland for the first time in
history by moving ahead of it on Russia's enemies list).
This issue has been around for a long time. Starting with Ivan
the Terrible and for centuries onward, Russian culture has been
characterized by anti-Polish, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Caucasus, and
also anti-European texts. In actuality, Russia's worst enemy is its
messianism, the myth about its sanctity, which is above and outside
history, and its immunity to the laws of the real world. The more
this trait is deepened, the more de-Europeanized Russian culture
becomes. This has become especially noticeable over the past couple
of years.
Let us get back to the connection between the model of memory and the
dimension of Fatherland. With the fall of the Berlin Wall Russia lost
its (imaginary or real) "Russian space." It decided to rebuild this
space by way of "regaining territories" without ever trying to analyze
why it had lost them in the first place. The idea of reclaiming these
territories, termed "the sphere of Russia's legitimate interests"
by [Russian] political scientists, ignores man, peoples, their
cultures, and the problems of their national identity. Naturally,
the stronger Russia's imperial ambitions, the smaller the chance
of rapprochement with the peoples it previously dominated. Russia's
failure to comprehend this exacerbates conflicts that can easily turn
from ideological into military ones.
In contrast to Europe, there is no differentiation between the "small"
and "big" Fatherland in Russian cultural mentality. In Europe, small
Fatherland comes first. The big land of forefathers is made up of
small ones. Europe emerged from small fatherlands whose borders had,
above all, an emotional, ethic, aesthetic, and also legal (legislative)
meaning (Greek poleis, Italian city-communes, and militant duchies
and principalities that resisted centralization). Moreover, these
small fatherlands are, as a rule, not monoethnic-they show traces of
other cultures (for example, Arabs in Sicily or Spain; enclaves of
Jewish culture in various European countries, and so on).
Of course, political borders were also set by using military
force and reshaping territories. Yet the moral evolution of Europe
(and the rest of the democratic world) lies precisely in cultural
polycentricism, achieved through the gradual recognition of cultural
diversity as wealth and, thus, of minorities as a value. This gave
rise to the concept of preserving and protecting ethnic minorities,
their languages, and local cultures. The unity-through-diversity
principle makes this protection imperative.
In contrast to this, Russia emerged from conquests of foreign
territories and their unification. The existence of cultural
distinctions and specifics has always been regarded not as a value
that must be preserved, but as an encroachment on the integrity of
"single and undivided," monocentric Russia. Therefore, the homeland of
each of the conquered people has long been regarded only as political
territory-or as business territory, to use modern terminology. By
this logic, a people that has been destroyed or oppressed on such
a territory has no right to independent existence, which is a
priori valueless and senseless. There are just the concepts of the
Center and the Periphery, or Province. This gigantic Periphery is
controlled by the all-consuming Center. Territories can only be lost
or gained. All other peoples are dust to be sucked in by the vacuum
cleaner of the empire. They are just "a senseless handful of evil
spaces," to quote from the nationalist newspaper Zavtra (http://
www.zavtra.ru/cgi/veil/data/zavtra/06/654 /11.html). Their existence
makes no sense outside the Imperium.
Chechnya is the penultimate example of this approach. Chechens as
a people alien to Russia, and their culture, traditions, and love
for their fatherland have no value whatsoever for the Russian in
the street. It is impossible to picture the Spanish government
ordering bomb raids against Basque towns. No matter how acute the
problem of Basque terrorism is in Spain, the Basque land has cultural
value and the Basque separatists have inalienable civil rights. In
the case of Chechnya, the entire people was destroyed, along with
everything it owned and held dear. The journalist Anna Polikovskaya
was assassinated. Hers was one of few Russian voices raised in
defense of Chechnya. However, the territory of this people is an
inalienable part of Russia and is regarded as an integral part of the
empire. The first sign of the physical destruction of this people was
not the assassination of its three presidents, the mutilated bodies of
militants, or countless civilian victims, but a youth choir singing
Russia's anthem after the almost unanimous Soviet-style election of
the Kremlin-appointed "Governor General" Kadyrov in 2003. Terror,
demoralization, and corruption of memory have combined to lay a solid
foundation for divorcing the coming generations from the history of
their fathers and brothers, who wanted to achieve freedom for their
fatherland. If Russians succeed in lobotomizing this battle-weary
Chechen society, its people will turn into population used by Russia
to service this much-needed territory.
The latest example is Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008 and
the de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The situation
was exactly the opposite to that in Chechnya, with Russia posing as
a defender of the separatist peoples, knowing that their separation
would cut off a chunk of Georgia's territory and attach it to
Russia. Chechen separatism is qualified as terrorism, while Abkhaz and
Ossetian separatism is justified as a reaction to an act of genocide
on the part of Georgia. These are mirror-inverted contexts. In fact,
a list of countries and organizations that expressed solidarity with
Russia's invasion characterizes it best: Nicaragua, Hamas, Hezbollah,
etc. In a word, our Party of Regions is in good company, especially
considering what Somalia, the country of pirates, and the democratic
republic of Western Sahara are considering extending recognition to
South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Historical thinking is "shorted" in Russian culture by mythologizing
Russia as the Fatherland and reducing the fatherlands of other
peoples to their utilitarian value. Everything that "undermines"
the idea of the great, universal, abstract Fatherland is edited out
of history. That is why Russia is doomed to periodically reiterate
its own history and re-enter the same authoritarian and ideological
paradigms. As a result, little has changed over the centuries while
Russia-Europe dyscrasia is worsening.
In his article "New Europe, Old Russia" (The Washington Post,
Feb. 6, 2008), US political scientist Robert Kagan comments on the
lack of communication between Europe and Russia resulting from the
fact that they live in different epochs: "Russia and the European
Union are neighbors geographically. But geopolitically they live
in different centuries. A 21st-century European Union, with its
noble ambition to transcend power politics and build an order
based on laws and institutions, confronts a Russia that behaves
like a traditional 19th-century power. Both are shaped by their
histories. The supranational, legalistic EU spirit is a response to
the conflicts of the 20th century, when nationalism and power politics
twice destroyed the continent... Europe's nightmares are the 1930s;
Russia's nightmares are the 1990s. Europe sees the answer to its
problems in transcending the nation-state and power. For Russians,
the solution is in restoring them."
These features of Russian identity determine also the controversial
aspects in restoring the identity (and historical memory) of Russia's
neighbors. This is what makes the situation with the Holodomor in
Ukraine the most complicated and, at the same time, most telling
one. The geographical spread of the Holodomor recognition coincides
with the map of Russification and Sovietization of Ukraine.
Russia has succeeded in dividing Ukraine into the fatherland and
non-fatherland. People in Western Ukraine, which was not affected
by the Holodomor, remember this tragedy best and are more concerned
about preserving this memory than others. It was easier to terrorize,
Russify, and eventually lobotomize the populace of the areas that
had suffered the famine's direct impact. Kharkiv, Donetsk, and
Luhansk oblasts sustained hair-raising losses (in Kharkiv oblast,
over 600,000 people died in three months in 1933, and the overall
death toll in this region reached two million, or one-third of the
peasants of Slobozhanshchyna).
On Nov. 28, 2006, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed the Holodomor
bill. Only two MPs from the Party of Regions, whose electorate is
mainly in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, voted in favor. In November
that same year none of the local authorities in Kharkiv oblast
attended the ceremonies commemorating the Holodomor at the Ukrainian
and Polish Memorial and at the Cross for Holodomor Victims. Kharkiv,
known as the "capital of despair" in the 1930s, is now one of the
biggest anti-Ukrainian cities. Here and in other cities in Eastern
and Southern Ukraine Holodomor memorial signs are destroyed with
certain periodicity. Streets in eastern Ukrainian cities are named
after those who destroyed millions of Ukrainians.
Unrestored memory is a source of society's moral
degradation. Un­la­mented victims and impunity generate cruelty,
indifference to human life, and lack of love for one's native land. In
the Christian system of values violence is repaid with mercy to the
conquered. The absence of memory permits violence to triumph. In the
morally perverted world violence results in disregard for the dead,
annihilation of the memory of generations, an amputated sense of
mercy and solidarity. In this sense the Holodomor was also an act of
blotting out fatherland from the Ukrainian society's memory.
This issue does not relate only to the past or present. Destroying
the dimension of Fatherland has a dramatic effect on the future,
specifically on Ukraine's European integration strategy. Two aspects,
the internal and the external one, can be singled out here.
For Europe the recognition of the Shoah is part of its identity as a
democratic entity. Less consolidated but sufficiently imperative is the
demand that each country wishing to join the EU settle its historical
accounts. This specifically relates to Serbia. Its road to Europe,
despite Europe's ambivalent behavior during the Balkan tragedy, lies
through the recognition of Serbia's guilt for the genocide against
Bosnians and the extradition of war criminals to the Hague Tribunal.
What regards countries that are not included by the EU in its cultural
space, the imperativeness of these demands drops dramatically,
as the moral-legal plane is reduced and that of Realpolitik is
expanded. Europe regards as valid the latent thesis: those wishing
to be well-off and live in peace embark on the road of European
integration. Those who choose a different model of civilization subject
themselves to its laws. Such is the case with the Armenian genocide,
which is of "minor" importance compared to the relations between
the West and Turkey. The latter resolutely denies its historical
guilt. (Nevertheless, recognition of the Armenian genocide is on the
list of EU requirements if the European integration plan for Turkey
comes to a point at which it will have to be made more specific.)
We are witness to a similar situation with the Holodomor. What the
West wants in the first place is to maintain the cooperation balance
with Russia because it serves its interests, and so its attitude to
the Holodomor is consistently cautious, if not equivocal. However,
this equivocality is mainly rooted in Ukraine's ambiguous identity
parameters, its image in the West, and its inconsistency in defending
its own interests.
This is a great cultural problem. In 2008 Israel was gripped by a
debate on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel has the right to
address the Knesset in German, the language used by the murderers of
the Jewish people. In the end, Merkel was allowed to use her native
language -- and Germany and the rest of Europe accepted this debate
with understanding.
In the context of the Shoah there is a universal recognition of the
value of every human life. That is why at the Yad Vashem museum the
announcer pronounces the name of every perished child and the place
and year of his or her death.
In each of the former Nazi concentration camps scattered across Europe
there is a meticulous collection of the victims' photos and names,
along with any other evidence, however scanty. In Majdanek, near
Lublin, you can see glass cases with Jewish children's dolls trampled
under SS boots and every surviving fragment of Jewish tombstones,
which the Nazis used to pave the road to their inferno.
In Ukraine, one's has to struggle for the right to have even the
smallest signs commemorating millions of nameless victims. Yet even
this moral and scholarly need of Ukrainian society may be interpreted
as "aggression" act against Russia. Hence Ukrainians have to fight for
the right to have the tragedy of the Holodomor recognized in the West,
especially in Europe. They often encounter a lack of understanding
and/or acceptance, express reluctance to acknowledge this fact, and
even obstruction. This means that there are two categories of victims:
recognized and unrecognized, those that deserve respect and memory and
those destined to vanish without a trace, i.e., first- and second-rate
victims. Therefore, the moral aspect of the matter concerns Ukraine,
Russia, and all of Europe.
One thing is clear: a people that does not know how to protect the
memory of its victims allows them to be murdered again. If so, who
is there to protect a people that does not protect itself?
In view of this, for Ukraine, awareness of and knowledge about the
Holodomor are part of its historical, cultural, and moral memory,
as well as remembrance about its state-building, political, and
civilizational experience. It is precisely in this sense that the
Holodomor has the same catastrophic symbolic dimension as the Shoah
has for Israel and for the whole Jewish people.
Certain Ukrainian historians believe that the hidden memory of the
Holodomor was one of the reasons behind the referendum against the
USSR in 1991. Today, the memory of the Holodomor is also one of the
ways out of the trap of the totalitarian past from whose hold we have
yet to free ourselves completely. Without awareness of the Holodomor
it is impossible to unite this society and achieve solidarity. In
the long run, without this Ukraine will have no European prospects.
The noted Polish historian Maria Janion titled her book in a prophetic
way: Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi umarlymi (To Europe -- Yes,
But Together With Our Dead, 2000). Entering Europe without memory
would mean losing one's identity and one's positions. A country
that is incapable of discarding its memory has the willpower to be
actively present in modern history. Poland today, as a country with
an excellent memory of its identity, with its presence in the EU and
its unwavering stand, is slowly but surely altering the geocultural
and geopolitical balance of the Old Continent.
The situation in the Ukrainian-Russian context in which Ukraine is
struggling so hard for its right to memory is exactly the opposite
to that in the Polish-Ukrainian context. The relations between Poland
and Ukraine are following a long, at times painful yet constructive,
course aimed at accepting and understanding each other. It is a long
process, indeed -- it started in the time of Romanticism when Poland
and Ukraine discovered each other as "sister nations" and victims of
the same tyrants. However, this awareness was born with a sense of
guilt before the Other-the guilt that has to atoned for. This catharsis
of mutual discovery brought forth a new ethos in the relations between
the two peoples.
Another aspect has to do with the rational concept of Fatherland. As
stated above, for Russia the idea of Fatherland is a sacred space
without boundaries or borders, or with constantly shifting borders
that are preserved by means of military and other expansion. In the
Polish and Ukrainian context, the concept of Fatherland means, above
all, a struggle for stable and clearly defined frontiers. Within
their fixed borders the concept of the Other causes both nations to
put their historical and moral space in order. This is the source of
Giedroyc's formula about Ukraine's Lviv and Lithuania's Vilnius cited
at the beginning of this article. Jerzy Hoffman said in an interview
to Ukrainian television this summer that peoples that live and evolve
well are no threat to each other. That is to say, you have to step
away from each other before you embrace. Stepping away in a civilized
manner means finding a new form of unity later. Being forced to unite
means division forever.
This sophisticated knot of moral and political problems is reflected
in all aspects of Polish-Ukrainian relationships, from literature to
historiography to politics. The tragedy of Volyn (UPA's massacre of
peaceful Polish residents in 1943) and Operation Vistula (deportation
of Ukrainians for the purpose of scattering them on Polish territory
in 1947) are the pages of mutual, or even common, tragedies rather
than separate subjective ones. The memory of Volyn is also a Ukrainian
drama and the memory of Operation Vistula is also a Polish drama.
A lot of books have been written on the subject and debates
have never been calm. Is it possible to say that the subject
is closed? No. However, all mutual offences and hurt feelings
notwithstanding, it is necessary to learn to recognize the other
side's truth. For example, the Armia Krajowa was heroic for Poland,
just as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was for Ukraine. The most
important thing is that today it is a matter of the historical domain,
considering that neither official Poland nor official Ukraine has any
territorial claims or expansionist plans regarding each other. This is
precisely why the room for speculations using these facts is inevitably
shrinking, while the room for historical studies is expanding. And so
"the vampires of the past" no longer have power over the future of
these peoples.
In Polish-Ukrainian relations, the European memory model has helped
frame historical analysis in concrete and factual terms. At the
same time, recognizing the Other as a victim and acknowledging human
sufferings on both sides produce a cathartic moral effect and become
a guarantee that such tragedies will not happen again. This approach
is an indication that Polish and Ukrainian cultures have matured as
instances of European culture, regardless of the current political
frontiers.
In the case of the Holodomor and Russia, the situation is the
exact opposite: there is still plenty of room for speculations and
ideological propaganda with very little opportunity for professional
understanding. And "the vampires of the past" sit side by side with
scholars even during conferences and press the aye/nay buttons in
the Verkhovna Rada. You cannot kill them by driving an aspen stake
in their heart because, unlike regular vampires, they have no heart.
One last point. After the fall of the Russian empire, not only the
"proletarian poets" like Vladimir Mayakovsky, but even aristocrats like
Aleksandr Blok wrote that the old world had to be ruined. Ukrainian-and
Polish-poets wrote that it was necessary to revive the old world
in order to build a new one, because their past, the "old world"
they were referring to, had been destroyed by violence, vandalism,
persecutions, and bans on the part of Russia.
In his foreword to Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia (Executed Renaissance,
an anthology published by Giedroyc in Paris in 1959), the literary
critic Yurii Lavrinenko wrote about writers and artists annihilated
by the Soviet regime as a generation that had no sense of revenge
and lived in the cosmic light of Tychyna's "clarinets." This light
emanated from newly acquired freedom that would be soon thereafter
snuffed out by the "red nightmare" of Bolshevism. The result of the
Ukrainian intellectuals' Christian approach to history was a cemetery
of millions of the living dead. At this cemetery Ukrainians were
forbidden to weep and keep memories. And so this cemetery turned into
an abyss between Ukraine and Russia. This abyss also separates Russia
from Europe. The only way Russia can achieve its European identity
is by confronting its own history. If this process begins, it will
be a long and dramatic one, but the important thing is for it to begin.
This is the only way to overcome the syndrome of history repeating
itself and stop any "iron hand" that can, today and tomorrow, once
again try to force humankind to be happy, the way Georgia was forced
into peace. It happened precisely on a dramatic day -- the 40th
anniversary of Soviet troops' deployment in Prague.
History, when not sufficiently studied, or discarded, or falsified,
repeats itself and murders. Studying and learning from history --
through the discovery of the Other, with mercy and solidarity-is the
only catharsis that will keep "the vampires of the past" from robbing
humankind of its future.
--Boundary_(ID_gAbr0NQbMO/Vpo+gdkbyWg)--
The Day Weekly Digest
http://day.kiev.ua/261512/
Dec 9 2008
Ukraine
Holodomor and historical memory in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian
cultures
By Oxana PACHLOWSKA, University of Rome La Sapienza; Shevchenko
Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Photo by Kostiantyn HRYSHYN, The Day
(Continued from the previous issue)
Settling historical accounts and a guilt complex are Europe's constant
catharsis. In his Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc (The Tears of the White
Man, 1983), the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner says the feeling of
guilt is one of the main features of Western culture, and that it is
rooted in the biblical sense of guilt, the original sin committed by
European civilization. As a result, the West keeps criticizing itself
and is unable to love itself. Bruckner even says that the West hates
itself and this hatred is "the central dogma" of European culture. Of
course, this is a complicated thesis that requires an articulate
approach. Be that as it may, an ability to think critically is one of
the most distinct features of European civilization. At the same time,
it is one of the guarantees of its periodic moral regeneration. After
all, it is not only about theoretical self-analysis, as there is
now institutional protection against revanchist ideology, including
criminal prosecution for the denial of the Holocaust.
The death toll of Communist violence in the world stands at 85-100
million, including at least 20 million victims for which Russia
is responsible, reads The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror,
Repression (its Russian version was published in 1999). Com­mu­nist
Russia is second only to Communist China with its 65 million victims.
Does it make a difference that this ideology is "cushioned"
by the false ideologemes of "world revolutions" and
"internationalism"? Genealogically, it is an extreme
manifestation of Russian imperialism, just as Nazism is of German
imperialism. Therefore, the measure and the essence of responsibility
are the same. However, a divergence begins precisely when it comes to
the perception of this responsibility. This is a discrepancy between
history as the formation of critical memory in European culture and
history as the formation of apologetic memory in a culture that sets
itself in opposition to European values.
That is why what emerged in Europe was post-totalitarian historiography
with its absolute autonomy from the political system. In Russia,
history has been constantly rewritten, depending on the political
leadership's ideological orientation. Putin regards Stalin as a
"successful manager." Putin identifies himself with Stalin and the
public applauds. After the first elements of rudimentary democracy,
Russian history textbooks are once again written in the Kremlin.
It stands to logic that what is martyrology for other countries is
"bad image" for Russia. Let me quote a Russian political scientist:
"Image-building factors are important for us and that is why
recognition of the Holodomor is such a painful topic... It isn't just
that Ukrainians have explained history. It is a blow to Russia's image,
just as 'Soviet occupation' damages this image and is regarded as an
aggressive act." (http://www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-254370.html).
Indeed, this is almost like an image of the world turned upside
down: occupation, deportations, mass repressions, tortures, famine,
misery, and decades-long bans are not acts of aggression because
they concern other peoples (actually including the Russian people,
but this, apparently, is of no importance whatsoever). What counts
as aggression (directed against Russia's mythical inviolability in
the empyrean of its alleged holiness) is writing about the tragedy of
peoples that lost entire generations, their intellectual elites, and
historical prospects for long years, due to Russia's eschatological
projects of world supremacy, as well as paying homage and remembering
the sufferings of these people.
Image is a concept form the domain of advertising and
communications. Memory is a historical, moral, existential, and
philosophic category. Mercy is a Christian category.
Therefore, where other peoples see millions of victims-it is all
about image for Russia. In the case of the Holodomor, it is millions
of victims, people who died a horrible, even humiliating death because
there was no way they could defend themselves and were denied the right
to be [properly] buried, mourned for, and remembered. These innocent
victims are non-persons, just an existentialist void. Generations
that vanished without a trace, a black hole in a nation's memory -
all this is just insignificant "details" in the context of Russia's
providential mission.
An apologetic model of history leads to amnesia, to use a Freudian
term. Memory that turns into oblivion blocks the society's moral
progress. Tragic pages of history are reconsidered to prevent these
tragedies from happening again in our time. Keeping one's actions
under control is an essential component of cultivating responsibility
within a given society.
In Russia, past events have never been [critically] reconsidered;
on the contrary, this country is turning its eyes to the past in
order to project the forged images of its "grandeur" and justified
crimes on the future. So Russia's threats today are its old, barely
upgraded threats. Russia's occupation of Georgia in August 2008 is
a postmodernist remake of its bloodshedding campaigns in the 19th
century, with the same glorification of force and contempt for mercy.
In his Prisoner of the Caucasus, Pushkin eulogized a tsarist general
who "as though he were black plague, / Pursued, destroyed the tribes":
"I shall sing glory to the time / When, sensing bloody battle, / Our
double-headed eagle rose / To crush the belligerent Caucasus." The poet
sees, first and foremost, the figures of bloodthirsty Russian warriors
in the "grandeur" of imperial violence, whereas the people felled by
their swords are some obscure "tribes," whose life and culture were
nothing compared to the empire. This is the empire that moves around
generals like Yermolov yesterday and Nogovitsyn today in lands far
and near -- the countries it is bent on conquering. After when this
happens, it will be the end of these peoples, and no one to mourn
for them. The poet writes: "A horseman will ride up, unafraid, // To
the gorges, where you used to nestle, // Grim legends will recount //
Your death at hangman's hand." Why execute them? Because those were
different, separate people? Small wonder that in 2008 no one would
remember that the Caucasus had remained "belligerent" for several
centuries. Most humiliating of all is when this "execution" (as well
as others) is presented as the "friendship of the peoples," and when
Russia's Clio once again sweeps these peoples down into a common grave.
The age-old subjugation of the Russian Church by the political powers
that be and the latter's ability to manipulate religious ideas for
the sake of ideological speculations have obliterated in Russian
mentality the sense of guilt and the ethos of guilt as such. It would
seem that this assumption is at variance with the very nature of
Russian literature of the 19th century. After all, Dostoevsky created
the moral dimension of the guilt experienced by a person who assumes
responsibility for all the sins of humankind. According to Dostoevsky,
Russia has a mission of "service of humanity, of brotherly love and
the solidarity of mankind..." (The Karamazov Brothers). He refers to
Western Europe as a "graveyard" and to Russia as the emerging power;
he believes that the future of Europe belongs to Russia owing to this
kind of universal "morality" that the latter possesses.
However, this reference system has no place for specific guilt for
a specific sin. Instead, there is the abstract moral, dehistorized
Christian guilt placed outside historical time. At the same time,
Russian history, "sacralized" and alienated from profane time, is
exempt from verification by "secularized" methods; it always stands
above human judgment. In other words, this history is alienated from
the dimension of guilt.
Since, on this view, the past is held sacred, it cannot be disowned,
reconsidered, or regarded as a critical lesson for the future. The
past must always be an edifying, positive lesson (e.g., the cult of
Ivan the Terrible during the Stalin epoch and that of Stalin during
the Putin epoch). Hence there is the absence of a rational approach
to history and, consequently, of a rational design for the future. The
future is a value that is programmed by the consecrated past. That is
why the promised "bright future" will never come. To quote Lobodovsky,
"the vampires of the past" will devour it before it can even begin.
This peculiarity of the Russian cultural identity is turning Russia
into a hostage of its own past. Lacking the sense of its own guilt,
it is forced to look for culprits outside Russia. Hence the typical
enemies-of-Russia repertoire. This mythologeme has become a matter of
state concern- there is even a statistically verified list of Russia's
top five enemies (the US, the Baltic states, Georgia, Ukraine, and
Poland; remarkably, Ukraine "declassed" Poland for the first time in
history by moving ahead of it on Russia's enemies list).
This issue has been around for a long time. Starting with Ivan
the Terrible and for centuries onward, Russian culture has been
characterized by anti-Polish, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Caucasus, and
also anti-European texts. In actuality, Russia's worst enemy is its
messianism, the myth about its sanctity, which is above and outside
history, and its immunity to the laws of the real world. The more
this trait is deepened, the more de-Europeanized Russian culture
becomes. This has become especially noticeable over the past couple
of years.
Let us get back to the connection between the model of memory and the
dimension of Fatherland. With the fall of the Berlin Wall Russia lost
its (imaginary or real) "Russian space." It decided to rebuild this
space by way of "regaining territories" without ever trying to analyze
why it had lost them in the first place. The idea of reclaiming these
territories, termed "the sphere of Russia's legitimate interests"
by [Russian] political scientists, ignores man, peoples, their
cultures, and the problems of their national identity. Naturally,
the stronger Russia's imperial ambitions, the smaller the chance
of rapprochement with the peoples it previously dominated. Russia's
failure to comprehend this exacerbates conflicts that can easily turn
from ideological into military ones.
In contrast to Europe, there is no differentiation between the "small"
and "big" Fatherland in Russian cultural mentality. In Europe, small
Fatherland comes first. The big land of forefathers is made up of
small ones. Europe emerged from small fatherlands whose borders had,
above all, an emotional, ethic, aesthetic, and also legal (legislative)
meaning (Greek poleis, Italian city-communes, and militant duchies
and principalities that resisted centralization). Moreover, these
small fatherlands are, as a rule, not monoethnic-they show traces of
other cultures (for example, Arabs in Sicily or Spain; enclaves of
Jewish culture in various European countries, and so on).
Of course, political borders were also set by using military
force and reshaping territories. Yet the moral evolution of Europe
(and the rest of the democratic world) lies precisely in cultural
polycentricism, achieved through the gradual recognition of cultural
diversity as wealth and, thus, of minorities as a value. This gave
rise to the concept of preserving and protecting ethnic minorities,
their languages, and local cultures. The unity-through-diversity
principle makes this protection imperative.
In contrast to this, Russia emerged from conquests of foreign
territories and their unification. The existence of cultural
distinctions and specifics has always been regarded not as a value
that must be preserved, but as an encroachment on the integrity of
"single and undivided," monocentric Russia. Therefore, the homeland of
each of the conquered people has long been regarded only as political
territory-or as business territory, to use modern terminology. By
this logic, a people that has been destroyed or oppressed on such
a territory has no right to independent existence, which is a
priori valueless and senseless. There are just the concepts of the
Center and the Periphery, or Province. This gigantic Periphery is
controlled by the all-consuming Center. Territories can only be lost
or gained. All other peoples are dust to be sucked in by the vacuum
cleaner of the empire. They are just "a senseless handful of evil
spaces," to quote from the nationalist newspaper Zavtra (http://
www.zavtra.ru/cgi/veil/data/zavtra/06/654 /11.html). Their existence
makes no sense outside the Imperium.
Chechnya is the penultimate example of this approach. Chechens as
a people alien to Russia, and their culture, traditions, and love
for their fatherland have no value whatsoever for the Russian in
the street. It is impossible to picture the Spanish government
ordering bomb raids against Basque towns. No matter how acute the
problem of Basque terrorism is in Spain, the Basque land has cultural
value and the Basque separatists have inalienable civil rights. In
the case of Chechnya, the entire people was destroyed, along with
everything it owned and held dear. The journalist Anna Polikovskaya
was assassinated. Hers was one of few Russian voices raised in
defense of Chechnya. However, the territory of this people is an
inalienable part of Russia and is regarded as an integral part of the
empire. The first sign of the physical destruction of this people was
not the assassination of its three presidents, the mutilated bodies of
militants, or countless civilian victims, but a youth choir singing
Russia's anthem after the almost unanimous Soviet-style election of
the Kremlin-appointed "Governor General" Kadyrov in 2003. Terror,
demoralization, and corruption of memory have combined to lay a solid
foundation for divorcing the coming generations from the history of
their fathers and brothers, who wanted to achieve freedom for their
fatherland. If Russians succeed in lobotomizing this battle-weary
Chechen society, its people will turn into population used by Russia
to service this much-needed territory.
The latest example is Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008 and
the de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The situation
was exactly the opposite to that in Chechnya, with Russia posing as
a defender of the separatist peoples, knowing that their separation
would cut off a chunk of Georgia's territory and attach it to
Russia. Chechen separatism is qualified as terrorism, while Abkhaz and
Ossetian separatism is justified as a reaction to an act of genocide
on the part of Georgia. These are mirror-inverted contexts. In fact,
a list of countries and organizations that expressed solidarity with
Russia's invasion characterizes it best: Nicaragua, Hamas, Hezbollah,
etc. In a word, our Party of Regions is in good company, especially
considering what Somalia, the country of pirates, and the democratic
republic of Western Sahara are considering extending recognition to
South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Historical thinking is "shorted" in Russian culture by mythologizing
Russia as the Fatherland and reducing the fatherlands of other
peoples to their utilitarian value. Everything that "undermines"
the idea of the great, universal, abstract Fatherland is edited out
of history. That is why Russia is doomed to periodically reiterate
its own history and re-enter the same authoritarian and ideological
paradigms. As a result, little has changed over the centuries while
Russia-Europe dyscrasia is worsening.
In his article "New Europe, Old Russia" (The Washington Post,
Feb. 6, 2008), US political scientist Robert Kagan comments on the
lack of communication between Europe and Russia resulting from the
fact that they live in different epochs: "Russia and the European
Union are neighbors geographically. But geopolitically they live
in different centuries. A 21st-century European Union, with its
noble ambition to transcend power politics and build an order
based on laws and institutions, confronts a Russia that behaves
like a traditional 19th-century power. Both are shaped by their
histories. The supranational, legalistic EU spirit is a response to
the conflicts of the 20th century, when nationalism and power politics
twice destroyed the continent... Europe's nightmares are the 1930s;
Russia's nightmares are the 1990s. Europe sees the answer to its
problems in transcending the nation-state and power. For Russians,
the solution is in restoring them."
These features of Russian identity determine also the controversial
aspects in restoring the identity (and historical memory) of Russia's
neighbors. This is what makes the situation with the Holodomor in
Ukraine the most complicated and, at the same time, most telling
one. The geographical spread of the Holodomor recognition coincides
with the map of Russification and Sovietization of Ukraine.
Russia has succeeded in dividing Ukraine into the fatherland and
non-fatherland. People in Western Ukraine, which was not affected
by the Holodomor, remember this tragedy best and are more concerned
about preserving this memory than others. It was easier to terrorize,
Russify, and eventually lobotomize the populace of the areas that
had suffered the famine's direct impact. Kharkiv, Donetsk, and
Luhansk oblasts sustained hair-raising losses (in Kharkiv oblast,
over 600,000 people died in three months in 1933, and the overall
death toll in this region reached two million, or one-third of the
peasants of Slobozhanshchyna).
On Nov. 28, 2006, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed the Holodomor
bill. Only two MPs from the Party of Regions, whose electorate is
mainly in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, voted in favor. In November
that same year none of the local authorities in Kharkiv oblast
attended the ceremonies commemorating the Holodomor at the Ukrainian
and Polish Memorial and at the Cross for Holodomor Victims. Kharkiv,
known as the "capital of despair" in the 1930s, is now one of the
biggest anti-Ukrainian cities. Here and in other cities in Eastern
and Southern Ukraine Holodomor memorial signs are destroyed with
certain periodicity. Streets in eastern Ukrainian cities are named
after those who destroyed millions of Ukrainians.
Unrestored memory is a source of society's moral
degradation. Un­la­mented victims and impunity generate cruelty,
indifference to human life, and lack of love for one's native land. In
the Christian system of values violence is repaid with mercy to the
conquered. The absence of memory permits violence to triumph. In the
morally perverted world violence results in disregard for the dead,
annihilation of the memory of generations, an amputated sense of
mercy and solidarity. In this sense the Holodomor was also an act of
blotting out fatherland from the Ukrainian society's memory.
This issue does not relate only to the past or present. Destroying
the dimension of Fatherland has a dramatic effect on the future,
specifically on Ukraine's European integration strategy. Two aspects,
the internal and the external one, can be singled out here.
For Europe the recognition of the Shoah is part of its identity as a
democratic entity. Less consolidated but sufficiently imperative is the
demand that each country wishing to join the EU settle its historical
accounts. This specifically relates to Serbia. Its road to Europe,
despite Europe's ambivalent behavior during the Balkan tragedy, lies
through the recognition of Serbia's guilt for the genocide against
Bosnians and the extradition of war criminals to the Hague Tribunal.
What regards countries that are not included by the EU in its cultural
space, the imperativeness of these demands drops dramatically,
as the moral-legal plane is reduced and that of Realpolitik is
expanded. Europe regards as valid the latent thesis: those wishing
to be well-off and live in peace embark on the road of European
integration. Those who choose a different model of civilization subject
themselves to its laws. Such is the case with the Armenian genocide,
which is of "minor" importance compared to the relations between
the West and Turkey. The latter resolutely denies its historical
guilt. (Nevertheless, recognition of the Armenian genocide is on the
list of EU requirements if the European integration plan for Turkey
comes to a point at which it will have to be made more specific.)
We are witness to a similar situation with the Holodomor. What the
West wants in the first place is to maintain the cooperation balance
with Russia because it serves its interests, and so its attitude to
the Holodomor is consistently cautious, if not equivocal. However,
this equivocality is mainly rooted in Ukraine's ambiguous identity
parameters, its image in the West, and its inconsistency in defending
its own interests.
This is a great cultural problem. In 2008 Israel was gripped by a
debate on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel has the right to
address the Knesset in German, the language used by the murderers of
the Jewish people. In the end, Merkel was allowed to use her native
language -- and Germany and the rest of Europe accepted this debate
with understanding.
In the context of the Shoah there is a universal recognition of the
value of every human life. That is why at the Yad Vashem museum the
announcer pronounces the name of every perished child and the place
and year of his or her death.
In each of the former Nazi concentration camps scattered across Europe
there is a meticulous collection of the victims' photos and names,
along with any other evidence, however scanty. In Majdanek, near
Lublin, you can see glass cases with Jewish children's dolls trampled
under SS boots and every surviving fragment of Jewish tombstones,
which the Nazis used to pave the road to their inferno.
In Ukraine, one's has to struggle for the right to have even the
smallest signs commemorating millions of nameless victims. Yet even
this moral and scholarly need of Ukrainian society may be interpreted
as "aggression" act against Russia. Hence Ukrainians have to fight for
the right to have the tragedy of the Holodomor recognized in the West,
especially in Europe. They often encounter a lack of understanding
and/or acceptance, express reluctance to acknowledge this fact, and
even obstruction. This means that there are two categories of victims:
recognized and unrecognized, those that deserve respect and memory and
those destined to vanish without a trace, i.e., first- and second-rate
victims. Therefore, the moral aspect of the matter concerns Ukraine,
Russia, and all of Europe.
One thing is clear: a people that does not know how to protect the
memory of its victims allows them to be murdered again. If so, who
is there to protect a people that does not protect itself?
In view of this, for Ukraine, awareness of and knowledge about the
Holodomor are part of its historical, cultural, and moral memory,
as well as remembrance about its state-building, political, and
civilizational experience. It is precisely in this sense that the
Holodomor has the same catastrophic symbolic dimension as the Shoah
has for Israel and for the whole Jewish people.
Certain Ukrainian historians believe that the hidden memory of the
Holodomor was one of the reasons behind the referendum against the
USSR in 1991. Today, the memory of the Holodomor is also one of the
ways out of the trap of the totalitarian past from whose hold we have
yet to free ourselves completely. Without awareness of the Holodomor
it is impossible to unite this society and achieve solidarity. In
the long run, without this Ukraine will have no European prospects.
The noted Polish historian Maria Janion titled her book in a prophetic
way: Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi umarlymi (To Europe -- Yes,
But Together With Our Dead, 2000). Entering Europe without memory
would mean losing one's identity and one's positions. A country
that is incapable of discarding its memory has the willpower to be
actively present in modern history. Poland today, as a country with
an excellent memory of its identity, with its presence in the EU and
its unwavering stand, is slowly but surely altering the geocultural
and geopolitical balance of the Old Continent.
The situation in the Ukrainian-Russian context in which Ukraine is
struggling so hard for its right to memory is exactly the opposite
to that in the Polish-Ukrainian context. The relations between Poland
and Ukraine are following a long, at times painful yet constructive,
course aimed at accepting and understanding each other. It is a long
process, indeed -- it started in the time of Romanticism when Poland
and Ukraine discovered each other as "sister nations" and victims of
the same tyrants. However, this awareness was born with a sense of
guilt before the Other-the guilt that has to atoned for. This catharsis
of mutual discovery brought forth a new ethos in the relations between
the two peoples.
Another aspect has to do with the rational concept of Fatherland. As
stated above, for Russia the idea of Fatherland is a sacred space
without boundaries or borders, or with constantly shifting borders
that are preserved by means of military and other expansion. In the
Polish and Ukrainian context, the concept of Fatherland means, above
all, a struggle for stable and clearly defined frontiers. Within
their fixed borders the concept of the Other causes both nations to
put their historical and moral space in order. This is the source of
Giedroyc's formula about Ukraine's Lviv and Lithuania's Vilnius cited
at the beginning of this article. Jerzy Hoffman said in an interview
to Ukrainian television this summer that peoples that live and evolve
well are no threat to each other. That is to say, you have to step
away from each other before you embrace. Stepping away in a civilized
manner means finding a new form of unity later. Being forced to unite
means division forever.
This sophisticated knot of moral and political problems is reflected
in all aspects of Polish-Ukrainian relationships, from literature to
historiography to politics. The tragedy of Volyn (UPA's massacre of
peaceful Polish residents in 1943) and Operation Vistula (deportation
of Ukrainians for the purpose of scattering them on Polish territory
in 1947) are the pages of mutual, or even common, tragedies rather
than separate subjective ones. The memory of Volyn is also a Ukrainian
drama and the memory of Operation Vistula is also a Polish drama.
A lot of books have been written on the subject and debates
have never been calm. Is it possible to say that the subject
is closed? No. However, all mutual offences and hurt feelings
notwithstanding, it is necessary to learn to recognize the other
side's truth. For example, the Armia Krajowa was heroic for Poland,
just as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was for Ukraine. The most
important thing is that today it is a matter of the historical domain,
considering that neither official Poland nor official Ukraine has any
territorial claims or expansionist plans regarding each other. This is
precisely why the room for speculations using these facts is inevitably
shrinking, while the room for historical studies is expanding. And so
"the vampires of the past" no longer have power over the future of
these peoples.
In Polish-Ukrainian relations, the European memory model has helped
frame historical analysis in concrete and factual terms. At the
same time, recognizing the Other as a victim and acknowledging human
sufferings on both sides produce a cathartic moral effect and become
a guarantee that such tragedies will not happen again. This approach
is an indication that Polish and Ukrainian cultures have matured as
instances of European culture, regardless of the current political
frontiers.
In the case of the Holodomor and Russia, the situation is the
exact opposite: there is still plenty of room for speculations and
ideological propaganda with very little opportunity for professional
understanding. And "the vampires of the past" sit side by side with
scholars even during conferences and press the aye/nay buttons in
the Verkhovna Rada. You cannot kill them by driving an aspen stake
in their heart because, unlike regular vampires, they have no heart.
One last point. After the fall of the Russian empire, not only the
"proletarian poets" like Vladimir Mayakovsky, but even aristocrats like
Aleksandr Blok wrote that the old world had to be ruined. Ukrainian-and
Polish-poets wrote that it was necessary to revive the old world
in order to build a new one, because their past, the "old world"
they were referring to, had been destroyed by violence, vandalism,
persecutions, and bans on the part of Russia.
In his foreword to Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia (Executed Renaissance,
an anthology published by Giedroyc in Paris in 1959), the literary
critic Yurii Lavrinenko wrote about writers and artists annihilated
by the Soviet regime as a generation that had no sense of revenge
and lived in the cosmic light of Tychyna's "clarinets." This light
emanated from newly acquired freedom that would be soon thereafter
snuffed out by the "red nightmare" of Bolshevism. The result of the
Ukrainian intellectuals' Christian approach to history was a cemetery
of millions of the living dead. At this cemetery Ukrainians were
forbidden to weep and keep memories. And so this cemetery turned into
an abyss between Ukraine and Russia. This abyss also separates Russia
from Europe. The only way Russia can achieve its European identity
is by confronting its own history. If this process begins, it will
be a long and dramatic one, but the important thing is for it to begin.
This is the only way to overcome the syndrome of history repeating
itself and stop any "iron hand" that can, today and tomorrow, once
again try to force humankind to be happy, the way Georgia was forced
into peace. It happened precisely on a dramatic day -- the 40th
anniversary of Soviet troops' deployment in Prague.
History, when not sufficiently studied, or discarded, or falsified,
repeats itself and murders. Studying and learning from history --
through the discovery of the Other, with mercy and solidarity-is the
only catharsis that will keep "the vampires of the past" from robbing
humankind of its future.
--Boundary_(ID_gAbr0NQbMO/Vpo+gdkbyWg)--