Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

Introduction

Historically, the emergence of nation-states was compounded with the establishment of national history-writing and school history education as means of nation and state-legitimization (Berger et al. 1999). Representations of the past play an important role in shaping social identities and intergroup relations. As distilled messages about the nation’s past, school textbooks and history teaching are fundamental in shaping such representations. School history education continues to play the state-legitimizing, national identity and citizenship education roles, especially in newly independent states in the situation of fragile or contested legitimacy (Carretero 2011; Carretero et al. 2012; Williams 2014).

There has been a growing body of research in several academic fields such as social psychology, education, conflict transformation, and memory studies that explores the connection between the social representations of the past in school curricula, textbooks, and history teaching, and conflict transformation and reconciliation in societies divided by a past or ongoing conflict (Carretero et al. 2012; Cole 2007; McCully 2010; McCully 2012; Zembylas et al. 2016; Bentrovato et al. 2016; Psaltis et al. 2017). It has been noted that the national framework of history-telling can reproduce intergroup prejudice and impede conflict transformation and reconciliation. National master narratives that propose a one-sided vision of the past politically defined by the dominant groups and homogenizing textbook narratives that promote an ethnic definition of a community, and ignore or obfuscate past conflicts, ingroup past wrongdoings, divisions, and grievances, can prolong conflict and obstruct reconciliation. Research in several academic fields has produced a better understanding of the approaches to the representation of the past and history teaching that can contribute to conflict transformation and reconciliation. In the case of Ukraine, the tendency towards instrumentalization of divisive topics related to the history of World War II has intensified as a result of the mobilizations during the Euromaidan protests and the violent conflict that escalated in April 2014 and is the focus of ongoing peacebuilding and conflict transformation projects.

Handling the topic of World War II, and above all the fighting on the fringes of the war by the nationalist underground movement based in Western Ukraine—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (which split into two rival factions in 1940—the OUN-B (banderivtsi) and the OUN-M (mel’nykivtsi)), the Poliska Sich of Taras Bul’ba-Borovets’ (bul’bivtsi) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—has been perhaps the most challenging task in school history education in post-Soviet Ukraine. Controversial issues related to the OUN and UPA include the OUN ideology inspired by extreme nationalist and fascist movements of the interwar period in Europe, collaboration with Nazi Germany, participation in the Holocaust, internal violent struggle between nationalist factions, and the murder and ethnic cleansing of the civilian population. Over the last decade, there has been a growing number of critical publications, mostly by scholars outside Ukraine, about these controversies (Rudling 2006; Marples 2006; Marples 2007; Rossoliński-Liebe 2010; Himka 2011; Rudling 2011; Motyka 2013). Given the centrality of World War II in the “memory wars” in Ukraine, the representation of the war, including of the nationalist underground movement, in school curricula and textbooks, and its handling in the classroom, has been studied by several scholars (Popson 2001; Rodgers 2006; Jilge 2006; Marples 2007: 241-256; Rodgers 2007; Korostelina 2010; Ostriitchouk 2013: 303-311; Klymenko 2014).

Among controversial and divisive issues, it is the conflict between the nationalist underground and the Soviet regime that is still the most painful for Ukrainian society. According to the Soviet estimates, between 1944 and 1956, 155,108 members of the UPA, the OUN, and other sympathizers of the underground movement were killed by the organs and military forces of the Soviet security services (from the Ukrainian initials, the NKVS, NKDB, MVS, MDB and KDB) and 103,866 were arrested and 87,756 of them indicted for their participation in the nationalist movement. The OUN and UPA carried out 14,424 actions including 4,904 terrorist acts, 195 diversions, 645 attacks on the party-soviet organs, collective farms, motor-technical stations (MTS), and other institutions. The overall number of casualties is estimated to be 30,676 (Kul’chyts’kyi 2005: 439).2

This article adds to the existing research on the representation of the nationalist movement in curricula, textbooks, and in teaching in two important ways. First, it uses the history education and conflict transformation lens to study the representation of the nationalist underground in school curricula and textbooks during the period between 1991 and 2012. In particular, the article reviews the representation of the conflict between the nationalist organizations and the Soviet regime, a subject which has not been studied in detail to date. Second, it studies the role of history teachers as mediators of official curricula and textbook narratives about the nationalist movement in different regions of Ukraine on the basis of focus group discussions conducted with school teachers in the framework of the project “Stereotypes, Tolerance and Strategy of Teachers of History” implemented by the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe and funded by the Renaissance Foundation, and the international project “Region, Nation and Beyond. A Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Reconceptualization of Ukraine.” Focus group discussions with teachers of history at general secondary schools and schools teaching in minority languages were carried out in 13 cities of Ukraine (Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Simferopol, Zhytomyr, Lutsk, Uzhhorod, Chernivtsi, and Chernihiv). There were 14 focus groups of 7 to 13 participants each (132 participants in total) conducted in December 2011–January 2012. Discussions were conducted using a semi-structured approach: a combination of a set of questions on inter-ethnic tolerance, themes, and controversial issues in school textbooks and teaching practices with an open discussion.

First, the article provides an overview of research in the fields of social psychology, education, and conflict transformation in relation to history teaching and reconciliation. Then it studies the context and the representation of the conflicts involving the nationalist organizations and the main controversies related to them in seven editions of school curricula and fourteen textbooks for the tenth and eleventh grades published between 1994 and 2012 (the list of curricula and textbooks can be found in the list of references). It also analyzes the evolution of methodological approaches in these textbooks. Finally, the article studies the role teachers play as mediators of official curricula and textbooks.

History Teaching and Conflict Transformation

Research on history teaching and conflict transformation has focused, on the one hand, on the connections of groups to their past through narratives, memories, identities, emotions, and beliefs that can perpetuate intergroup divisions and distrust, and, on the other hand, on how social representation modes, teaching approaches, and pedagogies can contribute to conflict transformation and reconciliation. Psaltis et al. (2017: 2) define reconciliation as:

a process and outcome [that] entails the shift from an identity position in the representational field of mistrust, high prejudice, low quantity and quality contact, low perspective taking, low forgiveness and high threats (realistic and symbolic) into a position of high trust, low prejudice, high quantity and quality of contact, high perspective taking, high forgiveness and low threats (realistic and symbolic).

Essentially, the approach to conflict transformation and reconciliation in the area of history education studied by social psychologists and scholars of conflict resolution concerns the transformation of ethnocentric master narratives that reproduce essentialist and reified forms of identity and social representations of the past and the cultivation of “historical literacy” that promotes critical thinking, multiple perspectives, and reflective attitudes to historical representations (Seixas 2004). Studies in social psychology and conflict transformation point out that the teaching of history as heritage (Lowenthal 1996), essentialist representations of the past and identities, presentation of single, one-sided and dogmatic narratives of past conflicts that victimize and glorify the own group and delegitimize and vilify the “enemy group” can legitimize and protract past conflicts and limit the possibilities for conflict transformation and reconciliation (Carretero et al. 2012; Psaltis et al. 2017). Approaches that can contribute to conflict transformation and reconciliation include transformative history teaching that teaches students historical thinking skills, and promotes multiperspectival approaches to sensitive and controversial issues, critical understanding of the conflictual past, and regret for ingroup past wrongdoing (Wineburg 2001; Seixas 2004; Psaltis et al. 2017). Social psychologists also focus on the promotion through history education of processes of humanization, empathy, intergroup contact, and dialogue which can help groups become more inclusive, open-minded and accepting of the “other” (Psaltis et al. 2017: 5).

There is an emerging body of empirical research that evaluates the impact of history teaching on intergroup attitudes and relations. Tsafrir Goldberg (2017) has studied the effects of teaching the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict using a comparative empirical method (involving groups of self-selected Jewish and Arab-Israeli high school students following three different approaches to the study of history) on intergroup attitudes, perception of in-group responsibility, and intergroup interaction. His research confirms the findings of other studies that have established that official single narratives reduce interest in the other’s perspective which can replicate glorification and victimization of the own group and justification of its role in the conflict. By contrast, the dual-narrative approach, which stresses mutual acknowledgement and affirmation for both sides’ narratives, nonjudgmental listening and perspective-taking, empathy for the other’s suffering, and humanizing the views of the other, increased interest in the other’s perspective, especially among Arab Israelis. This approach can reduce competitive victimhood and enhance empathy for the out-group perspectives, and critical thinking can decrease biases and the influence of political affiliation on in-group responsibility and increase critical reflection on self-legitimizing narratives (Goldberg 2017: 280). Goldberg (2017: 293) concludes that teaching multiple perspectives has a potential to serve the goals of increasing intergroup perspective-taking motivation and improving intergroup deliberation on conflict, and that the outcome does not risk learners’ national identification and esteem. The limitations of the study were the sample of students, its voluntary nature, the duration of the research, and the application in an extracurricular setting. These limitations, however, do not invalidate the findings.

Goldberg’s (2017) study also produced evidence that confirmed the assumptions concerning the effect of the stronger party’s acknowledgment of responsibility on the weaker party’s reconciliatory attitudes. This finding is important for the context of asymmetric power relations in relation to past conflicts in Ukraine. To date neither Ukraine nor Russia nor their respective successor communist and other leftist parties or veteran organizations have accepted responsibility for the violent acts committed during the Soviet period, and the transitional justice process that started in the late 1980s has mostly concerned the rehabilitation of victims of past wrongdoing.

Teachers play an important role as mediators of official curricula and school textbook narratives and conciliators of different social memories and narratives in the classroom. Their own values, mapping of in- and out-groups, and definitions of community are reflected in the teaching of history and shape the meaning of national identity transmitted in the classroom and the reproduction of intergroup prejudice (Korostelina 2015). A classroom can be seen as a communicative space where teachers can choose between commutative styles and teaching strategies, from a traditional patriotic approach based on factual knowledge to a critical and multiperspectival one that contests national myths and involves critical self-reflection and learning to respect other positions, rights, and values (Kello and Wagner 2017: 206–7).

Some of the studies that have covered the topic of the Ukrainian nationalist underground (Popson 2001; Jilge 2006; Marples 2007: 241–56; Korostelina 2010; Ostriitchouk 2013: 303–11; Klymenko 2014) have also discussed some controversial issues related to the OUN and UPA but have not systematically reviewed the evolution of their representation in school curricula and textbooks, and none of the studies has examined in detail the narratives and interpretations of the conflict between the OUN and UPA and the Soviet regime in school history education. There are only a few studies that have examined how teachers perceive their role and how they deal with divisive and controversial historical issues in different regions in Ukraine. Research has found that teachers have been adapting official messages to the regional and local linguistic and historical particularities or have been altogether ignoring the official discourse (Rodgers 2006 and 2007; Korostelina 2015). This article aims to examine to what extent various approaches to history education in Ukraine have been informed by the mechanisms which can contribute to conflict transformation and reconciliation.

Representation of Controversial Issues and Conflicts in School Curricula and Textbooks
The Context

In the late 1980s, the era of glasnost and perestroika foregrounded the restoration of justice, condemnation of the Stalinist crimes, rehabilitation of the victims of mass repressions, the restoration of historical truth, and the investigation of the “blank spots” of history. At a republican level, amid these processes, the history of the Ukrainian SSR was established as a separate subject. Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi, a leading historian focusing on the interwar period at the Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, noted that during the period of general disorientation in the late 1980s the Communist Party delegated considerable responsibility for the development of a new concept of republican history studies to the Institute of History (Kul’chyts’kyi 2016). For Kul’chyts’kyi (2016: 329, 336), the early 1990s was a period in which the Ukrainian people was liberated from the “simulacra of the Deformed world,” the Communist phraseology and ideological clichés, and discovered their “own,” “real” history “that played an exceptional role in the creation of ideological preconditions for the national-liberation struggle at the beginning of the 20th century.” With the introduction of the subject of history of the Ukrainian SSR, one of the immediate tasks for historians during that period was, according to Kul’chyts’kyi (2016: 339), “the healing of the historical memory of society by creating textbooks and auxiliary manuals for pupils and students and all those who wanted to know the unfalsified [nespotvorene] distant and recent past of their own people.”

In 1989–90, at the request of the editorial house “Radyans’ka shkola,” Kul’chyts’kyi together with his colleague from the Institute of History (from 1990, the Institute of History of Ukraine (IHU)) Yurii Kurnosov prepared a brochure with materials for the study of history in the ninth and tenth grades. In 1990, at the request of the Ministry of Education, the IHU developed a series of new history school textbooks. Kul’chyts’kyi mentions that after harsh criticism by the “national-democratic forces” of the first history textbook for the tenth and eleventh grades (which covers World War II), a conceptually new textbook was produced in 1992. Later on, the Ministry of Education resisted pressure from the communist and socialist fractions in the parliament to “restore the concept of Soviet textbooks” (Kul’chyts’kyi 2016: 340) and refused to modify the new approach proposed by the IHU that equated the UPA soldiers with Soviet partisans as two branches of the resistance movement (Kul’chyts’kyi 2016: 347). Kul’chyts’kyi (2016: 340) hoped that the exceptional role the IHU played in the formulation of the textbook policy and in the “formation of the historical consciousness of teachers and the next generation” would be adequately recognized one day.

Since the early 1990s, there have vibrant discussions among scholars, educators, and state officials about approaches to school history curricula, textbooks, and teaching. A renowned Ukrainian historian Natalia Yakovenko (2002 and 2005) launched a discussion about the need to reconsider approaches to school history textbooks adopted in the early 1990s. According to Yakovenko, the textbooks of the first decade of independence played an important role in the de-sovietization and the formation of new values, the most important of which concerned the nation state. The priority after the first decade was to reconsider the “state-creating” and nation-centered version of the past which was given the status of the only true one and clashed with a variety of “historical memories” surrounding schoolchildren outside school. A Working Group on the Monitoring of Textbooks of History of Ukraine was initiated by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory in 2007. The group was chaired by Yakovenko and consisted of historians from different regions of Ukraine. It analyzed twelve Ukrainian history textbooks from the fifth to the eleventh grade level. The first report published by the group in 2008 highlighted that textbooks confused ethnic and political definitions of the nation, adopted an ethnocentric vision of history that disregarded the diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious character of the Ukrainian nation, and focused predominantly on political and military history (Shkil’na 2008). The solutions to these issues proposed by Yakovenko (2009) and the monitoring group (Shkil’na 2008) were to present society as a totality of many social groups with their own antagonistic or common interests and behaviors based on the ideas and symbols of their time; to cover a variety of behavioral motivations of various groups without placing them on opposing sides but looking for common values; and to reconsider the primacy of the focus on state interests in history narratives over individual stories and institutions beyond the state. In the second report, the group expanded its recommendations on how to deal with conflicts in which Ukrainians fought against each other (World War I, the 1917–20 period, and World War II). According to the group report, a textbook needed to explain the positions of opposed groups, look for common values for the representatives of different worldviews, and explain diverse understandings of patriotic duties, different beliefs, and motives, all of which deserve to be understood (Propozytsii 2009: 14). The working group developed a draft school curriculum on the basis of its own recommendations in 2009. This article analyzes the content of this curriculum and compares it with the official versions approved by the Ministry of Education. Another important initiative to promote tolerance and multiperspectivity in school history education was undertaken by the Association of History Teachers “Nova Doba” in cooperation with the European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO). However, neither the Working Group nor the Nova Doba reform efforts led to fundamental restructuring of the curricula and textbooks during the period considered in the article. Petro Kenzior, a member of the board of Nova Doba, noted that the feedback that the organization received from the government was that while Nova Doba’s proposals were interesting, they were for the textbooks of the future (Interview with Petro Kenzior, 22 July 2019, Lviv).