Roman Kabachiy: Latest on Ukraine’s History Wars: Orange Fighter Down
[Roman Kabachiy is History and Science Department Editor at the “Ukrainian Week” magazine in Kiev.]
Marina Ostapenko, press secretary of the Ukrainian Security Service, has a difficult job. Just six months ago she had to take part in Security Service initiatives aimed at reviving Ukrainian historical memory. Unknown documents on the Holodomor [Ukr. famine, ed] were published, which resulted in genocide charges against a dozen former heads of the Ukrainian SSR and an exhibition of the Security Service archive, called “Ukrainian Insurgent Army [Ukr. UPA, ed]: the Army of the Unconquered” was mounted in regional centres in south and east Ukraine. Under the new regime, Marina is having to come up with arguments to justify the Security Service rolling back these initiatives, and even to justify measures taken against historians who wish to tear Ukraine away from the post-Soviet vision of the historical process.
A striking example of the retrograde initiatives by the regime of the “people from Donetsk”, and their protégé Valery Khoroshkovsky, the head of the Security Service, was the arrest by plainclothes officers at Kiev Station on the morning of 8 September of Lvov historian Ruslan Zabily, who is also the director of the National memorial museum “Lonsky Street Prison”. He was taken to Security Service headquarters at 33 Vladimirsky Street (in Soviet times 33 Korolenko Street, an ominous address for many citizens facing repression). Here the academic was held for 14 hours for questioning about “a possible leak of state secrets”. The officers forced Zabily to give them his laptop computer and two hard disks containing historical information – declassified documents concerning the history of the Ukrainian liberation movement during WWII (which is widely known as the “Bandera” movement). They advised him to change his profession to schoolteacher, and “think about his family”.
After he was released without his computer, Zabily and his colleagues from the Centre of the Liberation (headed by the former director of the Security Service archive Volodomir Vyatrovich) held a press conference. Zabily said that a study of UPA strategy and tactics now seems to be possible only with permission “from the top”. The Security Service immediately opened a criminal case relating to a leakage of state secrets. They confiscated two computers in Lvov at the “Lonsky Street Prison” museum, and kept museum employees out of the building. Ruslan Zabily found out about the case from a news report....
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Marina Ostapenko, press secretary of the Ukrainian Security Service, has a difficult job. Just six months ago she had to take part in Security Service initiatives aimed at reviving Ukrainian historical memory. Unknown documents on the Holodomor [Ukr. famine, ed] were published, which resulted in genocide charges against a dozen former heads of the Ukrainian SSR and an exhibition of the Security Service archive, called “Ukrainian Insurgent Army [Ukr. UPA, ed]: the Army of the Unconquered” was mounted in regional centres in south and east Ukraine. Under the new regime, Marina is having to come up with arguments to justify the Security Service rolling back these initiatives, and even to justify measures taken against historians who wish to tear Ukraine away from the post-Soviet vision of the historical process.
A striking example of the retrograde initiatives by the regime of the “people from Donetsk”, and their protégé Valery Khoroshkovsky, the head of the Security Service, was the arrest by plainclothes officers at Kiev Station on the morning of 8 September of Lvov historian Ruslan Zabily, who is also the director of the National memorial museum “Lonsky Street Prison”. He was taken to Security Service headquarters at 33 Vladimirsky Street (in Soviet times 33 Korolenko Street, an ominous address for many citizens facing repression). Here the academic was held for 14 hours for questioning about “a possible leak of state secrets”. The officers forced Zabily to give them his laptop computer and two hard disks containing historical information – declassified documents concerning the history of the Ukrainian liberation movement during WWII (which is widely known as the “Bandera” movement). They advised him to change his profession to schoolteacher, and “think about his family”.
After he was released without his computer, Zabily and his colleagues from the Centre of the Liberation (headed by the former director of the Security Service archive Volodomir Vyatrovich) held a press conference. Zabily said that a study of UPA strategy and tactics now seems to be possible only with permission “from the top”. The Security Service immediately opened a criminal case relating to a leakage of state secrets. They confiscated two computers in Lvov at the “Lonsky Street Prison” museum, and kept museum employees out of the building. Ruslan Zabily found out about the case from a news report....