Overview

Following its declaration of independence in 1991, Ukraine has sought to produce a new national history. After the 2004 Orange Revolution, newly elected president Viktor Yushchenko embarked on an ambitious project to rehabilitate the most radical branch of the far-right interwar and wartime Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Their leaders were rehabilitated in an effort to affix them as central heroes in a thoroughly revised canon of Ukraine's past. This rewriting of history has required a highly selective rendering of those organizations' history, in particular with regard to their role in the Holocaust and murderous ethnic cleansing of Poles from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1944. Juxtaposing the Ukrainian government's official representation of the OUN's leaders-such as Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Mykola Lebed, and Iaroslav Stetsko-with the emerging international scholarly research that has come to light since the opening of the archives, Per A. Rudling illuminates the deliberate blind spots of Ukraine's new national memory. His book contextualizes the sharply divergent remembrance of these groups in Ukraine and its neighboring countries-not the least, against the backdrop of the current impasse in Polish-Ukrainian relations.

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9783838209999

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Reviews

“Tarnished Heroes is the most authoritative account to date of the rise, perversion, resurrection, and perils of Ukrainian nationalism. Starting with the origins and ambivalence of the nationalist ideology in nineteenth-century Ukraine, Rudling’s well-documented study exposes the fascist elements that proliferated in the interwar period and shows how leading figures of that era have come to be venerated by large parts of the population since Ukrainian independence. This is a balanced, forthright, and reliable study that will serve scholars for years to come.” - Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Brown University “Rudling’s book presents a comprehensive study Ukrainian radical nationalism, its main proponents and its distorted historiography. It reveals the fascist and highly compromised past of Yushchenko’s national heroes and the subsequent falsifications to whitewash their past. Using confounding evidence, the book constitutes a brilliant and uncompromising study of the history, politics, and legacy of Ukrainian nationalism. Intelligent, unbiased and scholarly irrefutable.” - Delphine Bechtel, Professor of Yiddish and Central European Studies, Sorbonne University

Author Information

Dr Per A. Rudling is an Associate Professor of History and 2019-24 Wallenberg Academy Fellow at Lund University. His book The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism (Pittsburgh UP 2014) won the 2015 Kulczycki Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His over 80 articles have appeared in, among other outlets, Canadian Slavonic Papers, East European Politics and Societies, Science in Context, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, The Carl Beck Papers, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Yad Vashem Studies, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, East European Jewish Affairs, and Nationalities Papers.

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