New Eastern Europe Issue 1

The Ukrainian Stables of Augeas – A conversation with Oksana Zabuzhko
Great Famine. Leonid Plushch, a former
Ukrainian dissident, once wrote that for
the sake of the society’s ethical value
system, events of such magnitude as the
Great Famine needed an immediate reaction
of the society, which should fi nd
a symbolic meaning for it, as death by
starvation of millions of people is not in
accordance with human nature.
In Ukraine, this process has never occurred.
Th ree generations of Ukrainians
were not even allowed to seek such symbolic
meanings. Without understanding
of the scale and social consequences of
this phenomenon, there can be no settlement,
not only for Ukraine, but for
the whole world.
Th e approach to the Holocaust in the
Soviet Union was the same as that to the
Great Famine. It was offi cially silenced not
only because of the state’s anti-Semitism,
but also because the Soviet government
was afraid of the topic of genocide. Offi
cially, the authorities only talked of
“Nazi crimes against the Soviet people”.
Th e idea was not to distinguish the Jews
as a separate ethnic group.
This brings me to the story of Pavlo
Buchalas in the book, whose fate shows
both the mechanisms of Soviet-style anti-
Semitism and the spiritual mutilation of
people employed by the Soviets.
In Buchalas’ character, I wanted to
show an image of both a Soviet man and
the devastation which results from social
engineering, producing such a “new” man
as well as its consequences. In this context,
we have not deciphered the history
Interview 107
of the 20 th century. We cannot do this
without opening the Russian archives.
Th e fate of Buchalas is made up of stories
that have in fact taken place. In the
book, I have made him the son of a Jewish
girl, Rachel, who was saved from the
Przemyśl ghetto, and Adrian, an activist
of the Ukrainian underground. As
a nurse in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
(UPA), Rachel was tortured for refusing
to reveal her son’s father and was raped
by the investigators of the Ministry of
State Security (MGB). She hanged herself
in her cell by her own braid.
Th e two-month old Buchalas was
adopted by the MGB captain to be
brought up as an exemplary Chekist
(Cheka was a Soviet state security organisations
– editor’s note). Th e methods he
used to “treat” his soul were employed by
the NKVD, and later by the KGB, who
employed them on thousands of peasant
children taken after three or four years
of primary education from the poorest
families and “molded” into model Chekists.
And the role of such people, whom
Buchalas embodies, did not end with the
disintegration of the empire. To this day
they have access to archives of the Security
Service of Ukraine and have an
impact on life in Ukraine. Th ey decide
when and which archives to declassify,
including those on the UPA. Th ey use
them for their own political games.
Through Rachel’s character, you also
touched on the presence of Jews in the UPA…
Th e Jews in the UPA, with their tragic
Shakespearean fate, are a forgotten