Zero Point Ukraine: Four Essays on World War II

by Olena Stiazhkina

Overview

The Western understanding of what happened in Ukraine during World War II has been shaped by historical and ideological constructs created in the Kremlin. The Ukrainian specificity has been dissolved in the concept of the “great victorious Russian people” and distorted by attempts to equate Ukrainian nationalists to German Nazis, while the occupation and colonization of Ukraine by Russian Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 1930s has widely been ignored or artificially silenced.

In her Four Essays on World War II, Olena Stiazhkina inscribes the Ukrainian history of the war into a wider European and world context.

The Soviet and contemporary Russian narratives about World War II have been used to justify the Kremlin’s policies towards democratic countries. Today, Russia re-mains deeply engaged in the falsification of the past, which underpins the claims of the so-called “Russian World” and the ongoing war against Ukraine.

Olena Stiazhkina’s book promotes a new, historically adequate understanding of what happened in Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783838215501
Publisher:	ibidem Press
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Series:	Ukrainian Voices
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Prof. Dr. Olena Stiazhkina is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Ukrainian History in the second half of the XX. century at the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. She is a member of the Ukrainian Oral History Association, the Ukrainian Association of Research in Women's History, and the PEN Club Ukraine. Her previous books include Women in the history of Ukrainian Culture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (Donetsk: Skhidny Vydavnychy Dim, 2002), Gender Relations in a Modern Society (Donetsk: Skhidny Vydavnychy Dim, 2006), A Person in the Soviet Province: Evolution of Failure (Donetsk: Noulidzh, 2013), Stigma of Occupation: Soviet Women of the 1940s in Self-Vision (Kyiv, Dukh I Litera)

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Essay I World War II in the Life and Death of Ukrainians: An Attempt to Adjust the Methodological Framework 15

Essay II The Regime of Continuous War: Mobilization, Militarization, and Practices of Maintaining an Undeclared State of Emergency in Soviet Ukraine From the 1920s to the 1940s 47

Essay III Occupation Regimes in Ukrainian Lands: Establishment and Fall/Stabilization, Similarities and Differences 95

Essay IV Ukraine in 1943-1953: Re-Sovietization and an Unexpected Turn of the Unfinished War 173

Abbreviations 275

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

Olena Stiazhkina knows how to put historical processes under a microscope. How did the Soviet Union militarize everyday life in Ukraine since the early 1920s? Here you get answers that will change your knowledge both of Ukrainian history and of how the “building of a new society” by a totalitarian regime affected everyone, even children. This fascinating book reinforces interest not only in the history of Ukraine but in the history of whole Eastern Europe.

Andriy Kurkov

Each essay is written in elegant yet precise, clear manner. This is not a trite account of the past but a profound reflection of a historian, an attempt to overcome the limitations of the national history. The book allows to see the other war, to capture and feel the things that are usually left ‘behind the scenes’: the permanent state of emergency prevailing over the Soviet mode of living, the analysis of occupation regimes and the end of the war for Ukraine—the war, which, as Stiazhkina demonstrates, was not only a ground zero for emergence of the Soviet empire but also a ground zero in the countdown of its fall. Olena Stiazhkina is among those who put in motion the tombstone of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ myth, under which, within the concept of the ‘Great Russian People’, Ukrainians were immured.

Tamara Vronska

Olena Stiazhkina knows how to put historical processes under a microscope. How did the Soviet Union militarize everyday life in Ukraine since the early 1920s? Here you get answers that will change your knowledge both of Ukrainian history and of how the “building of a new society” by a totalitarian regime affected everyone, even children. This fascinating book reinforces interest not only in the history of Ukraine but in the history of whole Eastern Europe.

Each essay is written in elegant yet precise, clear manner. This is not a trite account of the past but a profound reflection of a historian, an attempt to overcome the limitations of the national history. The book allows to see the other war, to capture and feel the things that are usually left ‘behind the scenes’: the permanent state of emergency prevailing over the Soviet mode of living, the analysis of occupation regimes and the end of the war for Ukraine—the war, which, as Stiazhkina demonstrates, was not only a ground zero for emergence of the Soviet empire but also a ground zero in the countdown of its fall. Olena Stiazhkina is among those who put in motion the tombstone of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ myth, under which, within the concept of the ‘Great Russian People’, Ukrainians were immured.

From the Publisher