Local press in research of the WWII memory

Here I would like to share some findings from the local Kharkiv press related to the official Soviet politics of WWII memory.

In order to study the politics of WWII memory on the local level, our project team decided among other things to look through the local press from 1944-1965. These are official editions of the party and administrative organs (in my case these are “Sotsialistychna Kharkivshchyna” – the regional party committee organ, “Krasnoe znamia” – the city party committee organ, and “Prapor” – literary journal edited in Kharkiv). Special attention is to be paid to publications dedicated to commemorative dates and celebrations, but we also have to look through all the issues of the newspapers from the first postwar years, and from the jubilee years 1951, 1955, 1961, and 1965.

Kharkiv newspapers of the period usually reflect the general Soviet framework of WWII representation (which is a separate thing to speak about), but still there are some interesting peculiarities related to Ukrainian or local (Kharkiv) context:

-          Mostly the Day of the Liberation was celebrated more widely than the Victory Day (which was intensively mythologized mostly after 1965); the Liberation of the Kharkiv (23d of August) was celebrated in specific forms very often similar to “Harvest Feast” representing the “abundance”, happiness of the toiling people, and success in rebuilding of the economy after the war;

-          More attention is paid to the question of the fate of intellectuals who stayed under occupation, because the image of the Kharkiv as a city of science and technology was quite important for the Soviet presentation of the city;

-          In the case of Kharkiv the usage of the WWII theme for the strengthening of the international authority of the USSR was frequently performed in the cultivation of the “friendship of the brotherly peoples” of the Ukrainian SSR and Czechoslovak SSR. It was rooted in the mythologized heroic deeds of the troops formed in the USSR from the Czechs and Slovaks which took part in the liberation of Kharkiv region in 1943. In the postwar period USSR tried to use this war past in order to justify its dominance over the Eastern European countries, to stimulate their “gratitude” to Soviet liberators, and to present its international politics as peace-making. In the case of Kharkiv region there were loud celebrations of the Day of Liberation of the Czechoslovak SSR, numerous commemorations of the Czech and Slovak contribution into common struggle with fascism (in the names of the streets, in museums, in speeches on occasion of the visits of international delegations, common auto rallies, tourism, exchanges of some symbolical objects related to war past, such as the soil from the tombs of the fallen heroes, etc.);

-          One of the most interesting uses of the WWII theme is closely related to specific Ukrainian pre-war history. Even in the period under study the official press usually gave some space for the less official publications built upon the letters of the private persons, mostly related to the searching of the relatives lost in the war, with the journalists’ comments and small sentimental stories about the re-uniting of the families made possible by the selfless help of the numerous Soviet comrades. But in the Kharkiv press these publications beginning with pathetic journalistic phrases about the terrible effects of WWII and “fascism” for the most part or exclusively were comprised of letters of the people who lost their parents or relatives in 1932-1934 (man-made famine caused by Stalinist collectivization of the village) or in 1946-1947 (postwar famine caused by drought and by the politics of priority of the heavy industry reconstruction). Of course, in these articles the circumstances of death were not mentioned at all, but the reader of that time clearly understood what it was going about. Many of these senders were children from the Kharkiv region brought to Kharkiv by desperate parents dying of hunger and left on the city streets. As for me, this is one of the good examples of the usage of the WWII theme as a certain kind of cloak covering some practical goals (in this case the goal was to speak about the unspeakable, tabooed theme in order to achieve some personal end) with the “patriotic” (anti-fascist) glitter. Another example of this usage is universal for the Soviet Union – to describe some heroic wartime deeds of the certain city or village, collective or community for lobbying their interests and receiving some additional resources or benefits. (Sklokina Iryna)