Leading international academics have protested the detention of Ukrainian historian Ruslan Zabiliy by the State Security Services.
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LVIV, Ukraine – Leading international academics have protested the detention of Ukrainian historian Ruslan Zabiliy, saying the use of the security services to control access to information is a politicized throwback to Ukraine’s repressive Soviet past.
More than 100 leading historians from around the globe issued an open letter to Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) on Sept. 15, decrying their colleague’s detention on Sept. 8 and calling on the government in Kyiv not tor restrict access to archives.
“Whether we share Ruslan Zabiliy’s views or not, we consider it absolutely impermissible for a security service to harass researchers and obstruct intellectual activities,” reads the petition, signed by academics from the United States, Europe, Canada, Israel and Ukraine.
“Even while we abhor the politicization of history that has become so evident in the recent years of Orange versus anti-Orange debates, we believe that the resolution of scholarly disputes depends upon the free flow of ideas, and free access to historical sources no matter how controversial they may be.”
In a statement issued by its press department on Sept. 15, the SBU said it remained committed to renewing historic truths and any discussions about “rolling back work in this direction and ‘harassment’ of historians deceive Ukrainian citizens and the international community.”
Tarik Cyril Amar, a leading scholar on Ukraine who headed Lviv’s Center for Urban History of East Central Europe and is now an assistant professor at Columbia University in New York, said historians were compelled to defend Zabiliy, even if they did not agree with his conclusions.
“A general consensus among the signatories is that this is a matter of academic freedom and, in my personal opinion, also strongly implies issues of freedom of speech,” he said.
Zabiliy, a historian who heads Lviv’s National Memorial Museum of Victims of the Occupation Regimes (“Tyurma na Lonskoho”), was detained in Kyiv on the morning of Sept. 8 in Kyiv by six SBU officers. He was held for 14 hours and his computer and two external hard drives were confiscated. The SBU claimed the historian had illegally gathered materials containing state secrets and was planning to pass it on to other people.
The following day the service opened a criminal probe against Zabiliy; on Sept. 13-14, SBU officers in Lviv searched the museum, which is located on the secret service’s premises, and removed other computers to determine if secret information was stored there.
Zabiliy told the Kyiv Post the only information he had related to his research on the guerilla Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known as UPA, and Ukraine’s independence movement in the 1940s and 1950s. “These are documents that have been open to historians since 1991, and those that became public in 2008-2009,” he said.
It remains unclear what the SBU wants to achieve by detaining Zabiliy, but colleagues said it is the manifestation of the debate over Ukrainian history that ignited under former President Victor Yushchenko.
In the last years of his presidency, Yushchenko decreed that secret documents in Ukraine’s archives be declassified.
“The interference of the SBU in humanitarian sciences transforms it into a secret police, which determines what is a correct and what is a wrong interpretation of these or those historical events.”
– Vasyl Rasevych, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies.
Scholars were granted access to decades-old documents that fell under the jurisdiction of the security services, whose predecessor was the Soviet KGB.
Many of these archives dealt with Ukraine’s 1932-1933 Holodomor, the Stalin-ordered famine that killed millions of Ukraine, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a political group which accepted using violence as a means of achieving its goal of an independent Ukrainian state, and UPA, its military wing.
While scholars said they welcomed the opening of the archives under Yushchenko, they also said the SBU shouldn’t play a central role in this academic research.
“The interference of the SBU in humanitarian sciences transforms it into a secret police, which determines what is a correct and what is a wrong interpretation of these or those historical events,” Vasyl Rasevych, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, wrote on Zaxid.net, a western Ukrainian website.
President Viktor Yanukovych has already signalled that he has a different view of Ukrainian history – one that more closely resembles the Kremlin’s view that UPA members were Nazi collaborators and that the Holodomor was not a genocide.
“The Yanukovych government does something that the Yushchenko government never did – it uses intimidation to enforce its historical politics. This is qualitatively different, a violation of democracy, a descent into authoritarianism,” said John-Paul Himka, a professor from the University of Alberta.
Historians said Ukraine needs to keep the doors to its archives open, a process which has ground to a halt under the new government.
“A free society requires an honest conversation about its past, which is only possible when access to archives is allowed,” said Timothy Snyder, a renowned history professor from Yale University whose has written extensively on Eastern Europe. “To present Soviet history as a matter of state secrets is to repeat Soviet practices rather than allowing the learning from the past that will help Ukrainians decide their own future.”
If anything, the Yanukovych government hurts itself internationally by detaining historians and closing archives.
“Arresting Zabiliy or any scholar on the basis of their beliefs is not only wrong, it is also a serious tactical error of a government desperately in need of European and international support,” said Jeffrey Burds, Associate Professor of Russian and Soviet History at Boston’s Northeastern University.
“Impeding systematic and unfettered access to Ukrainian archives will only serve to bolster the opposition and undermine Ukrainian interests internationally.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
