Dramatic and vividly colorful, the exhibition highlighted works that had for decades been hidden from public view. Stored in special storage known as “Spetsfond,” the works on display were deemed by Soviet authorities to have been created by “enemies of the people” – a designation that included formalists, Ukrainian patriots and those who “distorted” reality.
Although also belonging to the Soviet era, in both context and color, Special Fund was the exact opposite of a show I had seen only a week before.
On my way to Ukraine, I’d dropped by London’s Tate Museum. As I was leaving, I stumbled on a room filled floor to ceiling with Soviet propaganda posters. Taken with the dramatic heft of the prints, I paid the 20 pounds for the show’s catalogue.
Flipping through it on the plane to Kyiv, I marveled that many of these posters were published in the languages of the peoples – Ukrainians, Jews and Tatars – exactly at the times Soviet authorities were carrying out atrocities against them.
As a Soviet studies major, normally, I would have visited both exhibitions with great interest. In recent months, however, my interest in the period has peaked.
For the last several months, my colleagues at Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (www.ukrainianjewishencounter.org) and Holodomor Ukrainian Research Center (www.history.org.ua) have been planning for a conference titled “The Seduction of Propaganda: Mass Violence in Ukraine in the 20th and 21st Centuries”. (http://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/images/pdf/Pro…)
To be held in Kyiv and Lviv over four days, the conference will focus on three similar, yet different, tragedies that took place on the territory of modern-day Ukraine: Stalin’s Holodomor and deportation of the Crimean Tatars, and Hitler’s Holocaust.
At the heart of the discussions will be how the mechanisms, impact, and consequences of propaganda disseminated by totalitarian imperial regimes provoked and legitimized the liquidation of peoples. The conference will investigate how our knowledge of each of these three tragedies supplements our grasp and understanding of them as a whole. We’ll look at how 20th century propaganda of totalitarian regimes – so evident in the posters I viewed at the Tate – are still relevant as a tool for fuelling inter-ethnic hate. And we’ll look at propaganda in our time and Putin’s war in Donbas.
Crimea and the war in the east have forced an unprecedented dialogue about the lingering effect of totalitarian regimes. That dialogue is everywhere.
I write these words on a languid Kyiv night at a café where Ukrainians are tasting Italian food and sipping Italian wine. They are neither Nazis, Communists, nor Stalinists. Yet the discussions I hear around me revolve around those periods – and the reality they live in today.
From their conversations I understand some of those at the restaurant stood on the Maidan during Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity. Others had friends who perished there, or on the fields in eastern Ukraine’s anti-terrorist operation. All in their own way have been traumatized by a contemporary war not of their making. The past is present at their table. As conference organizers, it is our hope that by taking a hard look at the evils of hate speech, imperialism, and totalitarianism, Ukraine will be one step closer to understanding and coming to terms with its past.
Natalia A. Feduschak, a former Kyiv Post staff writer, is director of communications for Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (ukrainianjewishencounter.org), a Canada-based charitable organization.
