Ćwiczenia z polityki wobec pamięci

Abstrakt

This essay contains a description and critical appraisal of the contemporary Ukrainian state’s policy in regard to memory of the Volhynian and Galician massacres of 1943–1945. The author engages in polemics with Tomasz Stryjek, who recently published a book on this and other issues: Ukraina przed końcem Historii. Szkice o polityce państw wobec pamięci [Ukraine Before the End of History: Essays on State Policy in Regard to Memory]. In the author’s opinion, Stryjek one-sidedly, or even naively, places hope in the idea that the EU, in the not-too-distant future, will exert effective pressure on the government in Kiev to make it adapt its narrative about the activities of the OUN and UIA against Poles and Jews to European standards of memory about the Second World War. In the author’s opinion, the Ukrainian narrative about the activities of the OUN and UIA is based on the erroneous conviction—which is comfortable for the Ukrainian side—of equal guilt in the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of 1939–1947. He argues that there should be no cessation of efforts to remind Ukrainian historians and authorities about the responsibility to condemn, unambiguously, the mass crimes committed by national independence groups.