“THE CURRENT STATE OF ARCHIVES, MUSEUMS, AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN UKRAINE”
Lecture by Ruslan Zabily
October, 2012
University of Manitoba, University of Saskatchewan, University of Alberta University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, Harvard University
Following the collapse of the Communist system in Central and Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine and other countries of the former socialist camp ended up in identical starting positions with respect to the creation of a democratic society.
However, in each of these countries this process evolved according to a particular scenario. Above all, the need emerged to find a path toward the reconciliation of two different groups in society: those who had waged a struggle against Soviet totalitarianism and those who had served it.
On the whole, the process of overcoming the consequences of Soviet totalitarianism in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe is taking place according to the following scenario: condemnation of the Soviet (Communist) regime, the creation of special bodies to deal with questions of national memory, the publication of socially significant information on the activities of the Communist punitive-repressive system (considered a state secret until recently), political lustration, the popularization of liberation movements, the creation of a new European identity, and the implementation of the reconciliation process.
The countries that have achieved the greatest success in this respect are Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Germany, and to a lesser degree—the Baltic republics. In Ukraine, however, government leaders have not paid adequate attention to these processes. It is not the place here to recall the efforts that have been made to restore Ukraine’s historical memory. I will note, however, that, in the majority of cases, initiatives regarding museology and access to archives have always been put forward by community members. Public interest provided the impetus for the authorities’ efforts in these spheres. The turning-point in the question of access to Soviet secret police archives and of museological work connected with issues of historical memory took place in the period between 2005 and 2010.
At the beginning of 2009 President Viktor Yushchenko issued a decree “On the Declassification, Publication, and Study of Archival Documents Connected with the Ukrainian Liberation Movement, Political Repressions, and the Holodomors in Ukraine.” The decree obliged structures in possession of documents generated by Soviet punitive and repressive agencies to carry out their declassification and publication. However, the only institution that reacted conscientiously to the president’s decree was the Branch State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (HDA SBU). Yet, for various reasons, this process was never even completed in that archive. In particular, the scope of this type of painstaking work requires much time, inasmuch as this archive holds more than 800,000 cases. In the wake of the last presidential election in 2010, declassification ground to a complete halt.
Despite the fact that during this period the SBU archives offered full access to the previously classified documents of the Soviet secret police agencies, nothing of the kind ever took place in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Foreign Intelligence Service.
The year 2009 marked the start of a large-scale project to gather the archival holdings of the former secret police, which are scattered among various archives of the Ukrainian power structures, into a single, central archive of national memory. This idea was never implemented—for political reasons. Neither the Ukrainian parliament nor the government mustered themselves to approve a law that would regulate work with such documents.
Today there is little point in discussing the need to create such an archive because the Institute of National Memory as a special body of the executive branch of government, to which such an archive would have been subordinated, was abolished in late 2010. The current government has transformed this institute from a state government body with mandated functions into an ordinary consultative institution attached to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.
After Viktor Yanukovych became president in February 2010, the situation in the archival sphere changed radically for the worse. The then new head of the SBU, Valerii Khoroshkovsky, declared in one of his first interviews that Ukraine’s security service must wrap up the work with Ukrainian archives because the task of bringing the truth to the public’s notice had already been completed.
Volodymyr Viatrovych, the former director of the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement in Lviv, was immediately dismissed from his position as director of the HDA SBU. His dismissal was followed by those of other young archival staffers who were working on declassification and championing the right to ensure public access to documents portraying the crimes of totalitarianism.
August 2010 marked the end of efforts to expand the digitized collection of declassified documents in the Open Electronic Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine. Work in the archives became more difficult for researchers. The Ukrainian secret service began to take an interest in historians and their research on the Ukrainians’ struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. On 8 September 2010 SBU personnel, in direct violation of established procedures, illegally detained me on suspicion of “publicizing information comprising a state secret” and opened a criminal case against me. On 7 December 2010 Hennadii Ivanushchenko was unjustifiably dismissed from his post as director of one of the state archives. Under his direction, this archive was the only one in the country that was digitizing the 57,000 death records of people who had perished during the Ukrainian famine—the Holodomor—which work served as the very pretext for his dismissal. The restrictions against researchers who work with archival documents sparked protests both in Ukraine and abroad.
Monitoring the situation closely, in October 2011 the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) uniting researchers studying the Ukrainian liberation movement that resisted both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms, conducted a survey to determine the possibility of using documented eyewitness testimonies on the history of the twentieth century. Among the surveyed were historians, journalists, human rights defenders, and information access specialists. The survey results revealed that 86.2 percent of respondents had encountered restrictions while trying to access information in Ukrainian archives.
The greatest obstacles arise in accessing archived criminal cases on individuals who were repressed by the Soviet regime, and personal copying of documents is restricted, unlike earlier. Archival personnel and state bureaucrats take advantage of researchers’ imperfect knowledge of the legalities that govern access to information and which regulate archival work. However, the main impediment in obtaining access to documents is the fact that they are held in the archives of Ukrainian law enforcement structures, which they inherited from the former Soviet secret police agencies.
In order to change this situation, it is vitally important to transfer the documents of the former Soviet secret police agencies to a single, centralized archive. This idea is supported wholeheartedly by scholars and civic activists. According to the above-mentioned survey, 56.7 percent of all respondents were in favor of this.
However, the Ukrainian government is still turning a deaf ear to this problem. Therefore, the only solution is for Ukrainians to demand their rights, as guaranteed by the Constitution of Ukraine, through the courts. This was the path that was taken successfully in September of this year by one researcher, whose case was monitored by the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement.
The current government of Ukraine refuses to grasp that its concerted efforts to conceal information on the crimes of totalitarianism makes it a co-conspirator of those crimes. The government is unflaggingly restoring and seeking to consolidate Soviet stereotypes of the perception of history.
These efforts are also manifest in the sphere of museology, especially in recently created history museums that bring to life ignored and concealed pages of the past and make them more accessible to the public. In the last two years pressure has been exerted on such institutions.
In September 2010, in connection with my detention in the “Lonsky Street Prison” National Museum and Memorial to the Victims of Occupational Regimes, which is located in a building that once housed a Gestapo prison and the KGB, SBU personnel carried out an illegal search and confiscated copies of historical documents and computers. They were particularly interested in video recordings of former dissidents, which are now irretrievably lost because many of the dissidents in these recordings are no longer alive. The museum is now faced with the entirely real threat of closure. Thus far, it has remained open only thanks to the efforts of important civic figures and the determined stance of community activists. Nearly a year later, in July 2011, all the museum staffers were questioned by SBU investigators. This harassment impeded their work and created an atmosphere of dread in the museum.
Similar pressure is being put on other museums that are devoted to the history of totalitarianism and the Ukrainian liberation movement. In the spring of 2011 Kyiv city officials began paying visits to the Museum of the Soviet Occupation, carrying out inspections, implementing repressive measures, and generally obstructing the work of the museum. This institution is also under the scrutiny of the SBU, which not so long ago launched a campaign against the museum using a fabricated letter written by a woman who had died two years earlier. Roman Krutsyk, the director of this museum, is subjected to harassment and intimidation.
In January 2011 the Museum of the History of the Ukrainian National Republic was closed. The pretext for its closure was President Yanukovych’s decree liquidating the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, to which that museum was subordinated. The sealing of the museum premises and the suspension of its work meant only one thing: the government’s intention to liquidate this institution. Nevertheless, thanks to media and public attention, the museum was saved and it has resumed operations.
In January 2012 steps taken by Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture sparked another noisy scandal, which was portrayed in the media as a “pogrom of a museum” on a scale that the field of Ukrainian museology has never heretofore experienced. The largest and most well-known museums and preserves (especially financially attractive ones, with priceless collections) were turned inside out: professional, experienced directors were dismissed and replaced by new, mostly less qualified individuals or those who have absolutely no experience of museum work; but the point here is that they are malleable and through them it will be easy to control the work of museums. The concepts behind these drastic and pernicious changes were never discussed or made known to the public. Ukrainian museum experts are convinced that the Ministry of Culture is trying to get rid of independent-minded museum directors in order to take control of revenues generated by these institutions.
There is every reason to believe that these changes conceal a plan to implement the monetization of property shares and museum treasures, for which various interested parties have been lobbying. This plan stipulates the introduction of a system for registering and appraising museum items that may be used, when the need arises, to provide collateral for loans and change of ownership. Such actions also spell the possibility that entire museum collections and individual collections may be sold off. According to a survey conducted by the Ukrainian Center for the Development of Museology, museum specialists in some European countries cannot recall a single case of such scandalous treatment of a country’s cultural heritage.
In order to illustrate the extent to which the Ukrainian state is neglecting museology, I will cite the following example. Until recently, all museums in Ukraine had to regulate their work in keeping with a special document of 1984 vintage entitled “Museum Instruction”: this document has not once been amended in twenty-eight years.
In recent years, the attack on academic freedoms has become conspicuous. To a large degree, education and scholarship in Ukraine are still marked by Soviet-era attitudes. In keeping with Soviet tradition, universities are not centers of scholarship and have been transformed into purely educational establishments; meanwhile, scholarship and science are concentrated in the system of the National Academy of Sciences (NAN). And even though in recent years leading universities have corrected this situation, in 2010–2012 the Ministry of Education and Science took steps to deprive universities of the possibility of undertaking high-caliber scholarly work. The government has stripped universities of their autonomous rights in the organization of the learning process and finances, which were granted to them by the former education minister Ivan Vakarchuk. Today universities can no longer finance projects that have not undergone scrutiny and confirmation by the ministry, even if they enlist private rather than state funds. At issue here is academic censorship. In 2011 the Ministry of Education tried to forbid universities to hold scholarly conferences and seminars by pleading the need to economize. A ministry letter even mentioned academic conferences that are financed by other sources. As a result of considerable public pressure, the letter was recalled. Nevertheless, the ministry suspended funding for programs that provide access to full-text versions of international scientific and scholarly journals.
All these repressive measures are depriving Ukrainian scholars and educators of opportunities to advance their professional careers and engage in academic discussions and scholarly quests, and are eliminating healthy competition with their colleagues abroad.
The current Ukrainian government is seeking to establish control over rectors of higher educational institutions in order to attain control over student bodies. In May 2010 SBU agents held a so-called “prophylactic” talk with the rector of the Lviv-based Ukrainian Catholic University, Rev. Dr. Borys Gudziak, demanding that the university administration caution students against taking part in protest actions. One cannot exclude the possibility that similar talks were held with other Ukrainian rectors.
Similar pressure is being put on academics. When I was detained by the SBU, its agents were interested in finding out about Ukrainian and foreign scholars who are doing research on the Ukrainian liberation movement and Soviet totalitarianism, and they wanted me to provide their names.
In September of this year the Prosecutor’s Office of Lviv oblast decided to take another look at a Ukrainian history textbook that is used by senior elementary grades because one of its authors is a scholar who has sharply criticized the government.
On President Yanukovych’s watch, the process aimed at integrating Ukraine into the European educational space has been suspended. Instead, the Ukrainian education system is synchronized with Russian standards, a situation that will put the brakes on Ukraine’s entry into the European and world educational and scholarly spaces for many years.
The democratization of a society that has suffered so long at the hands of a totalitarian regime, like Ukraine has, is measured by its openness, readiness to engage in dialog, willingness to condemn crimes, and commemoration of its heroes. However, the current Ukrainian government is not prepared to move from its declared intentions of promoting European values to their concrete implementation. On the contrary: instead of taking one step forward on the path to overcoming the consequences of totalitarianism, it is taking two steps back— into the Soviet past.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk
Ruslan Zabily is General Director of the National Memorial to the Victims of Occupation Regimes “Lonsky Street Prison” Museum in Lviv, Ukraine
