https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4672-711X
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Abstract
Based on an analysis of history textbooks and commemorative declarations on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the paper argues that the leadership of the unrecognized republics of Transnistria and Donbas has instrumentalized Holocaust remembrance to legitimize their regimes internally and externally. The use of the Holocaust in historical politics allowed the secessionist regimes to portray themselves as opponents of radical nationalism and representatives of the multi-ethnic population of Transnistria and Donbas. In external relations, the secessionist leaders have used Holocaust commemorations as a tool for self-positioning within international ‘memory wars,’ and as a channel for the consolidation of the ‘civilized’ image of unrecognized republics and the extension of international contacts. Despite a quite similar discourse on the Holocaust, the aims of the instrumentalization of the Holocaust in historical politics have differed in certain respects due to the dissimilar challenges faced by the Transnistrian and Donbas unrecognized republics.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. Vladimir Pavlov, MGIMO IIS research fellow, for his assistance in the preparation of this article, as well as anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier iterations of the manuscript. The author is deeply grateful to the journal editors for their patience and understanding.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Existing literature on de facto states uses different terminology: ‘de facto states,’ ‘unrecognized states,’ ‘contested states,’ ‘self-proclaimed states,’ ‘parastates,’ etc. In the article, I use these terms interchangeably, as basically the authors mean the same phenomenon. I also use these categories descriptively, without applying any positive or negative judgement. The same applies to the other politically loaded concept used in the text: ‘separatist’ or ‘separatism.’ In the same vein, the instrumentalization of the past is analysed here as a political tool, that is omnipresent and employed by the political actors both in the recognized and unrecognized states. It almost always presupposes certain simplification, generalization, omissions, and not rarely (un)conscious distortion of history. In that sense, the historical veracity is not at the centre of the analysis of this paper. It focuses on the strategies, aims, and addressees of the political use of the Holocaust commemoration.
2 In Transnistria, the discussion of the Holocaust was one of the components of the narrative on the dangers coming from the pan-Romanian tendencies in Moldova. Nevertheless, the scale of the public involvement of the highest Transnistrian officials has changed significantly in the second half of the 2010s.
3 For instance, the ‘Russian Donbas’ doctrine, that was presented in early 2021 in Donetsk, utilizes exactly that ambiguity of the word ‘Russian.’ The term simultaneously has an ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and supra-ethnic meaning in the document (Russkiy Tsentr, Citation2021).
4 For the LNR, new textbooks on Second World War were just published at the moment of writing this paper. Therefore, they are not included in the analysis.
5 The dangers of the Romanian ‘aggression’ and ‘expansionism’ is a recurring issue in the historiography of the PMR (see, for instance Babilunga, Citation2011).
6 While occasionally the leaders of the Donbas unrecognized republics pronounced even more ambitious goals, their minimal declared territorial goal is the ‘reunification’ with the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk administrative regions that remained under the control of the Ukrainian government.
7 To what extent the identity-building project in Donbas is coherent is an issue of debate (Malyarenko & Wolff, Citation2019, pp. 36–38).
8 It should me mentioned, though, that the rhetoric and framing of the separatist conflicts by the central governments in Kyiv and Chișinău was also not totally devoid of the elements of the Great Patriotic War narrative.
9 International Holocaust Remembrance Day coincides with the lifting of the Siege of the Leningrad, a connection that the Russian authorities, including Vladimir Putin, began recently to emphasize (President of Russia Webpage, Citation2020).
10 That was recurring formulation, see for instance in the words of the PMR President Vadim Krasnosel’skiy (Novosti Pridnestrov’a, Citation2017a).
11 The references to genocide, and the Holocaust was a prominent feature of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the second half of the 2010s (Dreyer, Citation2018).
12 In 2017 in the PMR, International Holocaust Remembrance Day became an official memorial day (Novosti Pridnestrov’a, Citation2017b).
13 For instance, see the open letter by members of the US Congress to Deputy Secretary of State, in which they voice ‘dismay’ over both Polish and Ukrainian government moves to ‘glorify Nazi collaborators’ and rising anti-Semitism (US Congress Members, Citation2018).
14 Importantly, in this framework the Kyiv government becomes responsible for any ‘nationalist’ and ‘neo-Nazi’ manifestations in Ukraine, whether these had any relation to the state bureaucracy and ruling political forces or not.
15 The Israeli politicians and diplomats have recurrently expressed concern over the glorification of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine, for instance in a joint statement by the Polish and Israeli ambassadors to Ukraine (Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Ukraine, Citation2020).