Petrol posted:

funny thing, until fairly recently the banderites used to claim loudly that the UPA & OUN defended ukraine from both sides and just glossed over the whole nazi collaboration aspect or pretended it didn't happen. now they are more likely to focus entirely on the fight against the soviets and if the nazis come up its just "oh yeah well we had to do whatever was necessary against the commies"

yeah. and as i had finland in there as an example, we too have also pretty much same exact thing, but with finland the fact of collaboration with germany is in no way contestable. finnish collaboration with germany during the continuation war is just brushed aside as a strategic necessity against the soviets. even though finland had plans with germany to annex huge territories that were inhabited by 'brotherly nations' (Heim ins Reich?) and to 'empty' them from russians and other 'non-finns'. while the finnish leadership, mannerheim, ryti & co., are similarly portrayed as being at the same time defiant to nazis: "they were just protecting national sovereignty and wanted to return to the pre-winter war borders, none of that nazi-ish stuff ever happened" etc.

it is very interesting how these nationalist influenced readings and gross distortions of history are pretty much the norm in europe. history is truly a very powerful political tool.

Petrol posted:

It's extremely worrying that these revisionist accounts, which position European nations in line with Germany and against Russia in way that is almost outside of history (as though it is an eternal struggle), simultaneously reposition Nazism as a flawed but vital ally against Communism

finally, socialism being rehabilitated!

The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past
Volodymyr Viatrovych is erasing the country’s racist and bloody history — stripping pogroms and ethnic cleansing from the official archives.
(...)
While Ukrainian political parties try to push the country toward Europe or Russia, a young, rising Ukrainian historian named Volodymyr Viatrovych has placed himself at the center of that fight. Advocating a nationalist, revisionist history that glorifies the country’s move to independence — and purges bloody and opportunistic chapters — Viatrovych has attempted to redraft the country’s modern history to whitewash Ukrainian nationalist groups’ involvement in the Holocaust and mass ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War II. And right now, he’s winning.

In May 2015, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a law that mandated the transfer of the country’s complete set of archives, from the “Soviet organs of repression,” such as the KGB and its decedent, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), to a government organization called the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. Run by the young scholar — and charged with “implementation of state policy in the field of restoration and preservation of national memory of the Ukrainian people” — the institute received millions of documents, including information on political dissidents, propaganda campaigns against religion, the activities of Ukrainian nationalist organizations, KGB espionage and counter-espionage activities, and criminal cases connected to the Stalinist purges. Under the archives law, one of four “memory laws” written by Viatrovych, the institute’s anodyne-sounding mandate is merely a cover to present a biased and one-sided view of modern Ukrainian history — and one that could shape the country’s path forward.

The controversy centers on a telling of World War II history that amplifies Soviet crimes and glorifies Ukrainian nationalist fighters while dismissing the vital part they played in ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews from 1941 to 1945 after the Nazi invasion of the former Soviet Union. Viatrovych’s vision of history instead tells the story of partisan guerrillas who waged a brave battle for Ukrainian independence against overwhelming Soviet power. It also sends a message to those who do not identify with the country’s ethno-nationalist mythmakers — such as the many Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who still celebrate the heroism of the Red Army during World War II — that they’re on the outside. And more pointedly, scholars now fear that they risk reprisal for not toeing the official line — or calling Viatrovych on his historical distortions. Under Viatrovych’s reign, the country could be headed for a new, and frightening, era of censorship.
(...)

grain of salt warning since the article is written by a "former U.S. State Department project officer who worked on managing economic reform projects in the former Soviet Union" and the article contains such absurd passages as "Ukrainian nationalists are providing the Kremlin’s propaganda machine fodder to support the claim that post-revolutionary Ukraine is overrun by fascists and neo-Nazis."

still, it does show once again that ex-State Department technocrats are aware of Kiev's embrace of Banderists, just not enough to state the logical conclusions.