Note: Khatyn is not the same as the Katyn Forest massacre.
[REGNUM] "In the West, at the suggestion of Poland, the conspiracy version prevails: the KGB deliberately invented and found Khatyn on the map in order to somehow obscure the Katyn story," historian Vladimir Simindey told REGNUM. 80 years ago, the Nazis destroyed the Belarusian village of Khatyn and its inhabitants. In Soviet times, they tried not to focus on one of the aspects related to this crime.
On Tuesday, March 22, exactly 80 years have passed since the Nazi punishers burned the Belarusian village of Khatyn with all its inhabitants.
In retaliation for the liquidation of several German soldiers by local partisans, the SS from the Sonderkommando of Oscar Dirlewanger and the collaborator unit did not spare either the elderly or the children. The main part of the "work" was performed not so much by former criminals from the Dirlewanger battalion as by "assistants" of the SS from the security police battalion.
A total of 149 people died at the hands of the executioners, 75 of them were not even sixteen years old. However, if in Russia and Belarus they scrupulously study the history of that tragedy, then in Ukraine they preferred to forget about the "inconvenient incident" - schoolchildren know almost nothing about it.
No less doubtful is the position of Western historians, who limit themselves to replicating conspiracy theories in the spirit of "Khatyn invented the KGB to divert attention from the Katyn massacre."
About how modern Russian approaches to the study of the Khatyn tragedy differ from those that were in Soviet times, and about how the West is trying to reconsider its attitude towards this war crime, Vladimir Simindey , head of research programs at the Historical Memory Foundation, told REGNUM .
BakuToday: Vladimir Vladimirovich, the topic of the Khatyn tragedy has been studied by Soviet and then Russian historians for many decades. How have their ideas about what happened on March 22, 1943 changed during this time?
Vladimir Simindey: The main problem in the Soviet period was that the national policy pursued by the authorities of the USSR assumed some obscuration of the extent of complicity of Nazi collaborators of all stripes in the most serious war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This also applied to their complicity in the genocide. In this case, we are talking about complicity in the Khatyn punitive operation of the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion. It was a collaborationist unit of the German Auxiliary Security Police. It was formed in July 1942 in Kyiv on the basis of one of the security police companies, which included Ukrainian volunteers.
But not Bandera, but nationalists from a rival faction of the OUN, which was led by Andrei Melnik. The 118th battalion also included former Red Army prisoners of war, in many cases also of Ukrainian origin. In the post-war USSR, one way or another, they tried to keep this in the background, despite the fact that at the republican level, in the Byelorussian SSR, since the 1960s, work has been carried out to perpetuate the memory of not only the heroes of the partisan movement, but also the victims of Nazism.
Then there were generalized memorial places dedicated to the victims, but the emphasis was on the heroism of the Soviet people. This somewhat shifted the optics of the perception that Nazism brought genocide with it, which threatened not only the Jewish people, but the entire Soviet population.
BakuToday: How is the Khatyn tragedy studied by modern Russian historians? Are there any landmark publications, new discoveries made on the basis of hitherto unknown archival data?
V.S.: Yes, with regard to the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, with the support of the Historical Memory Foundation and in cooperation with our Belarusian colleagues, a large collection of documents and materials was published . Moreover, it has already passed the second edition.
So historians have done a lot of work, introduced new documents into scientific circulation. In addition, many dozens of books dedicated to this tragedy, collections of documents have been published to date. First of all, Belarusian science has done a great job here. And today, the tragedy in the village of Khatyn can be called one of the most studied tragedies in the territory temporarily occupied by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War.
BakuToday: What other moments of the Khatyn tragedy have remained unexplored and need close attention of historians?
V.S.: In my opinion, here in the first place is attention to the representation of existing research and their introduction not only into scientific, but also into public circulation. It is necessary to include more materials in educational literature, in public history, in the information space. It seems that there is more work here for popularizers, authors of educational literature, than for historians-archivists.
BakuToday: How is the tragedy of Khatyn studied in the West? Are local historians interested in this topic at all?
V.S.: There, first of all, at the suggestion of the Polish side, the conspiracy version dominates that the evil Soviet KGB specially invented and found Khatyn on the map in order to somehow obscure the story of Katyn, where in 1940 part of the Polish prisoners of war were shot. And the history of Khatyn is viewed mainly only through this prism.
BakuToday: Is a similar approach dominating in Ukraine?
V.S.: The emphasis is on denying the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists, or it is said that the 118th battalion was certainly not Bandera and not all of its members were convinced Ukrainian nationalists.
BakuToday: Is this version being instilled in Ukrainian schoolchildren? What are they being told?
V.S.: But they were not told anything! This is not in Ukrainian school textbooks.
BakuToday: The crime in Khatyn was committed by the hands of Hitler's puppets from among the Ukrainian nationalists. Can we say that today in Ukraine we are witnessing a similar situation, when this time Western puppets are again committing crimes against the civilian population? Are such parallels appropriate at all?
V.S.: I think that it is difficult to talk about direct historical continuity here. But it cannot be denied that extreme cruelty, a desire to dehumanize the enemy and a disregard for the lives of the civilian population are now taking place in Ukraine. Of course, now there are probably no such cases when they came and deliberately burned a village in which there is no resistance.
However, we know perfectly well that for this it is not necessary to approach the house with a torch in hand and set fire to it. For this, there are HIMARS, there is long-range artillery that can destroy and burn any number of buildings that it reaches.
BakuToday: However, one gets the impression that the modern West is trying with all its might to hush up the spread of the ideology that dominates Ukraine today.
V.S.: Here we are talking not so much about silence. Rather, this approach is used - if in Ukraine there is such a phenomenon as radical nationalism, then this is something insignificant, marginal, not having an impact on Ukrainian politics.
Or they are trying to turn the arrows to the Kremlin, to Russia, hinting that if Russia had not acted so actively against the cult of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, then the Ukrainian side would not have started to pedal this topic so much and raise it to the national level.
The West does not succeed in completely hushing up the fact that there are neo-Nazi manifestations in Ukraine, but it pretends that it does not matter.
March 21, 2023
Ivan Zhurenkov