Indifference or Radicalization?: Revisiting Ukrainian Peasants’ Role in Nationalist Violence During World War II

• In Event: Memory, Violence, and Political Identity: Competing Narratives in Ukrainian and Jewish History and Literature

Abstract

This presentation examines how narratives about Ukrainian peasant radicalization during World War II have evolved, challenging the assumption that the masses actively embraced the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists' (OUN) ideology. By exploring how historiography has essentialized Ukrainian peasants as either perpetrators or passive bystanders, this study complicates binary understandings of memory, violence, and political identity in Ukrainian history. Within the broader context of competing national and transnational narratives, this presentation reassesses how the history of nationalist mobilization has been written and remembered.

Author

• Anastasiya Novatorskaya, Northwestern U