Ukraine paid an enormous price for the defeat of Nazism — including its Jewish population — yet Moscow keeps turning a multiethnic tragedy into a Russian political myth.

There is a dangerous habit in the way World War II is remembered in today’s Russia. The victory over Nazism is presented almost as if it belonged to Moscow alone — as if Russia were the sole heir, sole guardian, and sole “rights holder” of that victory.

The victory over Nazi Germany was paid for by many peoples. Among those who paid one of the heaviest prices was Ukraine — not only ethnic Ukrainians, but also the many communities that lived on Ukrainian soil before and during the war: Jews, Poles, Russians, Crimean Tatars, Roma, Belarusians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians and others.

For Israeli readers, this history is not distant. Ukraine was not only a battlefield. It was also one of the great landscapes of Jewish life in Eastern Europe — and then one of the central killing grounds of the Holocaust.

At NAnews – Nikk.Agency Israel News, we look at this history not as a distant Soviet chapter, but as a question of honest memory for Israelis, Ukrainians and Jews whose family stories often meet on the same map.

Already in January 1945, the American journalist Edgar Snow, after returning from the Soviet Union, published an article in The Saturday Evening Post titled “The Ukraine Pays the Bill.” It was not a book, but a magazine report, published on January 27, 1945.

In that article, Snow presented a shocking estimate: at least 10 million lives lost in Ukraine — soldiers and civilians — and material damage of 30 to 40 billion dollars. These figures, according to the account discussed in the NAnews article, were given to him by Ukrainian Soviet officials, including Vasyl Starchenko, deputy head of the government of the Ukrainian SSR for agriculture, and Volodymyr Valuyev, head of the republic’s planning body. They knew the real condition of the liberated territories and the scale of destruction.

Snow understood something that later Soviet memory tried to blur. The territory of the Russian SFSR was only partly occupied by Nazi Germany, while much of Ukraine passed through the full machinery of war: front lines, occupation, looting, destruction, mass death and demographic collapse.

Soviet statistics, however, minimized the Ukrainian tragedy. In 1946, the Soviet journal Bolshevik spoke of 7 million total Soviet losses. In May 1945, Stalin raised his famous toast to the “Russian people” as the leading force of the Soviet Union.

This helped build the myth that Snow’s report challenged: the titanic struggle was not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)