Oleksandr Melnyk’s monograph, World War II as an Identity Project, broadly explores the “relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence” in the destruction and creation of political communities in Ukraine during and after the Second World War (25). Published as part of ibidem-Verlag's “Ukrainian Voices” series, books like this one have never been more timely given Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. Indeed, as the preface notes, Melnyk was living in a Russian-occupied village in southern Ukraine at the time of the book's completion, showing there is presently little safety from the horrors he surveys in the book.
By title alone, the monograph's goals are ambitious. Melnyk is interested in how various actors, in light of the brutal Nazi occupation of Ukraine and its accompanying layers of violence, sought to delimit the parameters of knowledge and discourse about the war, define new civic and political identities in a post-war Soviet Ukraine, and shape conceptions of a newly formulated Soviet Ukrainian state. Among these actors, the focus remains the Soviet state and its historicist endeavors, but the discussion is neither top-down nor one-dimensional, as Melnyk shows how various atypical actors (archivists, nationalists, partisans) interacted with the state, and he demonstrates how the state's policies could be “manipulated, reconfigured, and occasionally even thwarted” by these actors (26).
World War II as an Identity Project comprises six “thematic chapters and case studies,” each guided by an investigation into how these distinct topics “played out in different social domains over several decades” (68). The first two chapters provide an occupation overview and an examination of the Ukrainian nationalist movement's challenge to Soviet legitimacy in Ukraine. The remainder consider the aftermath of occupation, discussing Soviet efforts for control and legitimization during reconquest, archival practices and information politics, post-occupation trials, and partisan memory and identity. Finally, Melnyk provides a lengthy epilogue that summarizes the book's contributions and brings the discussion to 1991. This patchwork approach is successful, though the chapters on archives and partisans feel underserved.
The book's strengths are a close reading and integration of new archival sources, a mastery of the historiographical landscape, and nuanced analytical interventions, all of which are highlighted in two case studies. The Ch. 2 case study, for example, unpacks Ukrainian nationalist (OUN-B) activities outside of Kyiv in the early months of the war in a region mostly overlooked in existing scholarship. Melnyk's dissection of participants’ biographies shows how participation in the nationalist uprising was motivated less by “ideological proclivities” than political opportunism, social networks, and situational dynamics (132, 158–59). In the process, he captures how many “nationalists” were in fact willing to craft new identities when the tide of the war turned. This chapter therefore reveals the peculiar conjecture of nationalist and Soviet historicist claims. While nationalists sought to re-code the region's recent past (the civil war and famine) on their own terms to build legitimacy, the Soviets accepted these frames during their subsequent efforts to reestablish power post-war.
The next case study, in Ch. 5, probes a post-occupation trial against three Ukrainians in Kyiv for their participation in anti-Jewish violence. Beyond a reading for empirical claims about the Holocaust, Melnyk uses the case to make two points about the new Soviet order. Rather than a “figure of absence,” he argues that the Holocaust was openly discussed after the war, and as such, the Soviet policy of downplaying Jewish victimhood was not necessarily “coterminous with everyday mnemonic practices in the formerly occupied territories” (296–97). In addition, his painstaking cross-referencing of testimonies shows how Kyvians protected some community members likely involved in the violence. Instead of pushing back with wider repressive tactics, the Soviet state seized the opportunity to limit the parameters of the investigation to just three people, minimizing its need to deal more explicitly with Jewish victimhood and consequently, the uncomfortable fact of extensive local collaboration and complicity in interethnic violence.
One of several paradoxical conclusions presented by Melnyk is that the repressive Soviet state realized that mass violence alone could not rebuild society anew, nor could it punish everyone even if it so desired, in the face of a war in which millions lived under occupation and many collaborated with the occupiers. Conversely, by means of its interpretation of the war, the Soviet state constructed novel modes of legitimacy and affiliation (placing emphasis on the “friendship of the peoples,” promoting “moral-political unity of the Soviet people,” denouncing Nazi atrocities, fostering national identities, and elevating wartime sacrifice and allegiance to the state) (59). Complementing emerging scholarship on post-war justice, memory of the conflict, and the experiences of previously overlooked groups, the argument is convincing.
An area of further evaluation remains the relationship between the state's broad “strategic silence” about problematic aspects like collaboration and the relitigation of the war beginning in the 1960s, replete with sprawling investigations, new show trials, and an internationally coordinated propaganda campaign (387). Melnyk mostly insulates this later development from internal politics, noting the trials were for international consumption. However, considering the sheer scale of the investigations, that trials were held publicly, and that the accompanying literature was published in multiple languages and disseminated internally, one may question how they complicated the official narrative. This small criticism notwithstanding, the book ought to be read widely and will serve as an essential resource for future research on these subjects.
