Some Holodomor news

Ukraine's security service (the SBU) has accused certain Holodomor perpetrators by name. These include Stalin and other high officials of the USSR. This is the latest development in Ukraine's criminal case - against whom, exactly? - which is attempting to prove that Holodomor was indeed a genocide against the Ukrainian people.

And I'm a bit late in the game on this one, but a statue of Hryhoriy Petrovsky, a former Communist head of Ukraine, no longer stands in Kyiv's Europe Square. It was removed in late November, in conjunction with Holodomor commemorative ceremonies in Ukraine. Yushchenko himself ordered this as a tribute to the memory of Holodomor victims, since Petrovsky was against Ukrainian nationalism and is considered to be one of the main perpetrators of the man-made famine, along with Lazar Kaganovich.

Antony and Cleopatra

As an armchair Egyptologist, I'm super excited that archaeologists may have found the mausoleum where Antony and Cleopatra spent their final hours together. Why? What accounts for my own fascination? Perhaps it's because although my own imagination can - and does - conjure images of such a dramatic scene, I know that those images would be a lot less blurry with the help of some physical evidence. It reminds me of how excited I was to see the first Harry Potter film, to see the characters I loved in my head come to life outside of it. I was also deeply curious to see how different Harry and his gang, and Hogwarts, would look from how I imagined them - I always relish conversations that start with, 'if you were casting this book as a film, who would you choose for...'?

But while seeing the place where it all happened can make the story come alive, I know I've experienced a strange sense of anticlimax in the past when I've been to historical sites - for instance, Bulgakov's house in Kyiv this past summer. It might be because when I'm actually confronted with these places, I realize all too well that they're devoid of the lives lived in them. The relics are there, the souvenirs of life, but the energy, the passion, the fear are things now merely suggested and symbolized. Historical sites at times feel like shells or like frameworks, waiting for us to come along and project our own visions onto them. But I wonder, if we all compared the images in our own heads, how many different narratives of the same event - how many different details - could we come up with?

But in spite of all this, I admit I'm desperate - show us pictures!!!

American St. Nick in wartime Europe

Every year, a little Luxembourg town remembers some holiday cheer amid the darkness of WWII.  In 1944 an American soldier named Dick Brookins dressed up as St. Nick to lighten the burden of suffering for the children of Wiltz, during a holiday party put on by the GIs.  This is such a heartwarming story, and I know that's very cliche to say at this time of year.  But what strikes me most is that this was a man fresh from battle, a man probably suffering himself, who made a choice (along with the other GIs who thought up the party idea) to transcend his own pain for the sake of restoring tradition.  Holiday details like Santa Claus and parties are things we take for granted, and it's nice to be reminded that we make a choice to be happy at this time of year, and to be together, and to celebrate.  I like the way that suffering seems to have met suffering here and come up with something bright and happy that has managed to create its own, lasting ritual of gratitude and compassion.

A little news roundup

Does French identity still rest on the ideals of the French Revolution?  Agnes Poirier comments in The Guardian on the controversy arising over Sarkozy's debate.  She argues that history is still the ultimate deciding factor in shaping our mindsets.  Nevertheless, how much room for maneuver do political entrepreneurs really have?

Pope Pius XII's role in the Holocaust is again a source of controversy, writes a blogger for CNN's Connect the World, as the Vatican recognizes his 'heroic virtues'.  This article's timing is good for me, since I'm just about to finish Peter Novick's fascinating The Holocaust in American Life.  With this book in mind, I want to ask - what purpose does this debate really serve, and for whom?  Who's got what to gain or lose?

Yesterday was Stalin's birthday, and lots of poll results are coming out of Russia about people's attitudes towards the Soviet past.  The Levada Center finds that 60% of Russians regret the fall of the Soviet Union, which marks only a slight decline from the peak in December 2000.  On Stalin himself, Lyudmila Alexandrova reports for ITAR-TASS that Russians remain ambivalent about his role - particularly how to balance his leadership to victory in WWII against his brutal repression at home.  Meanwhile, the lasting legacies of the gulag system are back in the news, as Maria Golovnina writes for the New York Times about how victims' and their descendants fears about the rehabilitation of Stalin and Russia's refusal to 'face up' to their past.  This is a really interesting piece, particularly the part about mass graves, which isn't much discussed in the Western press.  It's great to call attention to these issues and for that I appreciate the article, but I can't help but find much of this sort of writing on Russia repetitive, and even somewhat oversimplified.

Update

The Auschwitz sign has been recovered, cut into 3 pieces - each containing one of the 3 infamous words, 'Arbeit Macht Frei'.  Polish authorities arrested 5 men in connection with the theft.  Who are these men and what motivated them?  Was the mutilation of the sign symbolic, or just a way to make its removal easier?

Trotsky, the literary critic

I'm always interested in the relationship between tradition and innovation.  It's especially interesting in Russia, where people still struggle to decide what they can take from their past and how they can use it to define their future.  Against this backdrop, the following quote from a Boston College Magazine article on Trotsky's fight to save Russian literature inevitably caught my eye...  Although it didn't exactly work in the early Soviet framework, perhaps it should be revived in a new independent Russian one?

Trotsky’s major contribution to this battle over the future course of Soviet culture was Literature and Revolution, a volume of literary criticism published in 1924. The book’s principal theme was the indispensability of tradition, even in the homeland of communism. “We Marxists have always lived in tradition,” Trotsky argued, “and we have not ceased to be revolutionaries because of it.” He opposed the notion that art and literature of past epochs reflected merely the economic interests of now-vanquished social classes. Great art, he declared, was timeless and classless. The proletariat’s rule, too, he said, would be brief and transitory, giving way to a classless socialist society and a universal culture.

At the moment, however, the Russian worker was a cultural pauper, in Trotsky's estimation.  The proletariat's immediate challenge was not to break with literary tradition but rather to absorb and assimilate it, starting with the classics.  "What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky," he wrote, "will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious...In the final analysis the worker will become richer.

Meanwhile, stated Trotsky, the central task of the Bolshevik Party was to exercise "watchful revolutionary censorship" against any artistic movement openly opposed to the revolution.  In the absence of such a threat, however, the Party should assume no leadership role.  Art, Trotsky insisted, "must make its own way and by its own means."

A Spanish quest

The Guardian reports that Spanish authorities are trying to identify a black American soldier who fought against fascism in the Spanish civil war.  He appears in a single black-and-white picture among a collection of civil war photography recently bought by the Spanish state.  Of note here is the little-known fact that more than 90 African-Americans volunteered to defend the Spanish Republican government in the 1930s.  But we also have to ask: why are Spanish authorities so interested in identifying this one black man?  Why is this historical detail worthy of international attention, and indeed, transnational investigation?  

The article claims that

Spanish authorities want to put a name to him so they can present his picture to President Barack Obama when he visits Spain next year.  

Although vague, this suggests the strategic use of history, the instrumentalization of memory - neither of which is new or surprising in international relations.  The implicit emphasis on racial unity, particularly in support of a 'just war' such as that against fascism (and perhaps, by analogy, against terrorism?), is intriguing from a foreign affairs perspective.  But I also wonder what role this quest plays in Spanish approaches to their own past, especially in light of the increasingly fragile 'pact of forgetting'?

The 'real' Auschwitz

Polish authorities are searching for the infamous 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign, stolen from above the gates to Auschwitz in the early morning hours of December 18.  The theft, presumed to be an organized action by neo-Nazis, has been called 'an act of war' and a 'desecration'.  It is also a great irony, given the German government's recent pledge of 60m euros to help restore and preserve the decaying site, a state museum since 1947.  A cash reward has been offered for any information leading to the recovery of the sign, and both Polish and Jewish leaders have pleaded for the return of this universal symbol of death and defiance.

But what if the sign is never found?  What if the perpetrators destroy it?  For now, it has been replaced with a replica.  But in a BBC 'Viewpoint' piece, Rabbi Andrew Baker claims that 

There can be no copies or reproductions; visitors must see only what was real.  In that way they will bear witness to the very objects and structures which in turn remain the mute eyewitness to what happened there.  Perhaps that is what makes the theft of this sign so shocking and essentially irreplaceable. 

Baker makes a good point.  But to what extent can any historical site be preserved as a 'real' entity, unadorned by narrative and allowed to speak the facts for itself?  In truth, the passage of time and the centrality of the Holocaust in public consciousness means that visitors can never 'see only what was real'.  This is an ideal, but we inevitably fall short of it because we cannot hope to bring total objectivity to this site.  Instead, we bring preexisting knowledge and imagery.  As a result,  Auschwitz becomes as much representation as reality - much as memory is itself a construction rather than an historical fact in its own right.

This doesn't answer the question of what will happen - or indeed, what should happen - if the sign is never found.  And I certainly don't disagree with Baker that the sign is irreplaceable.  But I do wonder what exactly makes a piece of the past 'real' in the first place.