Corporate ethics and corporate crimes

Several earlier posts focused on corporate responsibility for crimes against humanity during the period of the Holocaust (link, link, link). But we don't need to go to the period of World War II to find examples of crimes committed by corporations in support of their international business interests.

An especially egregious example was confirmed in 2018 when two former Ford Motor Company executives in Argentina were convicted of crimes against humanity for their cooperation with the military dictatorship in operations leading to the kidnapping and murder of twenty-four labor activists (link). The crimes occurred during the dictatorship of the 1970s, and the trial of executives and military officers culminated in 2018. Here is the summary of facts provided in the New York Times story:

A three-judge panel sentenced Pedro Müller, 87, then a manufacturing director at a Ford factory in Buenos Aires province, to 10 years, and Héctor Francisco Sibilla, 92, then the security manager at the plant, to 12 years for assisting in the kidnapping and torture of their colleagues.

The two executives “allowed a detention center to be set up inside the premises of that factory, in the recreational area, so that the abductees could be interrogated,” according to court papers.

These judicial findings establish the inexcusable behavior of Ford Motor Argentina. The question arises here, as it did in the case of Ford Werke during the Holocaust, the level of knowledge and control possessed by Ford Motor's parent corporation. This question is addressed in the New York Times article as well:

“It is clear that Ford Motor Company had control of the Argentinian subsidiary during the ’70s,” said Mr. Ojea Quintana. “Therefore, there is a direct responsibility of Ford Motor Company and that might give us the possibility to bring the case to the U.S. courts.”

Ford said in a statement the company was “aware of the verdict about the supposed participation of ex-employees of the firm in events related to human rights in the ’70s.” The company added that it “always had an open and collaborative attitude with judicial authorities supplying all the available information.”

It is evident that Ford's corporate position on its responsibility for these atrocities was ambivalent. The statement that the corporate headquarters is "aware of the verdict" is quite different from "FMC acknowledges and expresses remorse for these crimes that occurred in its Argentine subsidiary in the 1970s." 

Victoria Basualdo, Tomás Ojea Quintana, and Carolina Varsky address these issues of corporate responsibility in greater detail in "The Cases of Ford and Mercedes Benz", contained in The Economic Accomplices of the Argentine Dictatorship. In their very informative chapter they describe the background of the crimes committed at the Pacheco manufacturing plant in the 1970s:

Toward the mid-1970s, following a period of growth in the country’s automotive industry, workers at the Pacheco plant began mobilizing and organizing at the rank-and-file level, represented by some 200 factory delegates who not only stepped up their demands to management but also increasingly confronted their own national leadership at the Union of Automotive Transport Mechanics and Related Workers (Sindicato de Mecánicos y Afines del Transporte Automotor, SMATA). Pedro Troiani, a factory worker and delegate, and a member of the internal commission, was kidnapped and tortured inside the General Pacheco plant in April 1976. Later, when he testified in court, he talked about the implications and the impact of trade union activism on the way the company operated. In his testimony, he clearly explained that the internal commission received worker complaints that were not only about wages but also had to do with the working conditions and the pace at which they were forced to work, and that in 1975 the commission succeeded in signing an agreement that was highly beneficial to the workers. All of this, he said, had consolidated the commission’s position and the workers’ bargaining power in the company.

It was in that context that repressive policies were implemented, with increasing force after the March 24, 1976 military coup. Between March and May of that year, twenty-five workers in the plant were kidnapped, most of them members of the internal commission and the rest active unionists, who remained “disappeared” for thirty to sixty days. Some of them were kidnapped from their homes and taken to the Tigre police station, which operated as a clandestine detention center, while the rest were seized directly at the factory, where they were held for hours and then taken to the Tigre police station.

The relationship between company and armed forces in this process of repression of workers became apparent in different ways in the Ford case. First, the kidnapping victims have testified that they were picked up in F100 pickup trucks supplied by the company to the military. Second, there are numerous testimonies indicating that, as well as supporting the armed forces, the company asked the military to kidnap workers and trade union delegates. Arcelia Luján de Portillo, the wife of one of the victims, stated in her testimony that during a meeting she had with a military officer responsible for the kidnappings, whose last name was Molinari, the officer “opened a drawer and pulled out a list typed on a sheet of paper with the Ford logo, which he told me had ‘all the names that the company gave us of workers it wanted us to chupar,’” using the repression slang term for kidnapping and disappearing (literally, “suck up”). (159-160)

The authors make it clear that Ford's involvement was active and purposive, in support of business interests of the company:

Also, Ford personnel members participated in the interrogations of the kidnapped delegates, to extract information regarding trade union activities in the factory. One such interrogation was that of detainee Francisco Guillermo Perrotta, who was not a factory worker but one of the administrative employees, a category that until the mid-1970s had not been represented by a union. As an employee in the cost, material, and inventory analysis division, Perrotta had access to key information about the factory’s internal matters. He and another delegate from the financial area were tortured with an electric prod. During the torture session, in which his interrogators mentioned details and names that only very well-informed employees of the firm could know, Perrotta, who was wearing a hood, was able to identify the voice of the factory’s security chief, Héctor Francisco Sibilla, among the people present. Sibilla was a member of the armed forces and on July 26, 1978, after the kidnapping of workers, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After his time in the company, he was hired to work in security at the U.S. Embassy, a position he held until 2004. (162)

These sources make it plain that terrible crimes were committed in Argentina, not just by the military or a few rogue employees, but by the corporations themselves. Basualdo, Quintana, and Varsky quote the president of Ford Argentina in a speech given on May 13, 1980: 

As of March 1976 we were facing a challenge. In Argentina a process had begun, a change of system, a complete change in philosophy, which covered individual behaviors and the collective behavior of society as a whole. A change in mentality was necessary. In our case, we had to make a business decision and, with our actions and procedures, we showed what that decision was. Those representatives of destruction with no love of country and no God – whose eradication has cost the nation so much, and who still persist in small numbers – deserve only scorn from the decent men who work and study, day in and day out, to build this nation. (164)

This sounds very much like an unapologetic confession of a corporate decision to commit murder and other atrocities against "representatives of destruction" (labor organizers and activists).

What strategies exist to hold multinational corporations accountable for their subsidiary activities in many countries? One model that might be considered is a human rights analog to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The FCPA was enacted in 1977 to create significant legal penalties against bribery and other corrupt practices in the conduct of international business (link), and the legislation has had significant effect on the practice of international business. Could we imagine an analogous set of laws and regulations that held corporate officers in multinational corporations legally responsible for crimes against humanity committed by agents of their international subsidiaries? And could such an enactment also provide for reasonably direct civil suits in US courts by foreign individuals in compensation for the damages they have suffered? A legal framework like this would present a new and behaviorally significant constraint on corporate crimes against humanity in other countries.

Ford Motor Company opened its archives in 1998 in order to demonstrate its lack of control of Ford Werke and its non-culpability for Ford Werke's use of forced labor. A similar level of transparency should have been demanded with regard to Ford's conduct during Argentina's military dictatorship.

(Here is a revealing article by Rut Diamint in The Conversation about the involvement of the US government in the dirty war in Argentina; link.)

Democratic socialism in the 1930s

Is it still possible to think big in western democracies about social and economic change in a way that substantially improves the lives and freedoms of most of society? We see the deprivation and indifference of the economic system that has governed most industrialized countries for the past century and a half, leading to gross inequalities, inequities of human wellbeing, and poverty. And we have seen the terrible nightmares created by Leninist-Stalinist Communism. We value freedom, human equality, and human flourishing, and we value democracy. Is it possible to effect a transition to a different economic structure that complies with the values of democracy, individual freedom, and human flourishing?

This was the ambition shared by the socialist movements of the English socialist groups and parties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And many of those men and women had a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the complicated tensions that exist between the values of democracy and freedom, on the one side, and fairness and equality, on the side of economic life.

What might we want from a reformed progressive economy -- whether it is called social democracy or democratic socialism? Most generally, we would want a set of economic and political institutions that ensure that all members of society are in a position to develop their talents and aspirations, exercise their freedoms, and function as full citizens within a robust democracy. We would want secure protections of the rights of all persons, within a robust system of law. And we would want a public sector that actively works to address failures of the economic system to deliver the prerequisites of these values.

Several key issues stand out as highest priority.

1. tax policies that constrain wealth and income inequalities to some reasonable level
2. economic policies by government that work to ensure high employment rates at decent wages
3. a robust system for universal provision of the prerequisites of productive life in an advanced democracy -- education, healthcare, adequate nutrition
4. robust social arrangements for preventing and addressing poverty in children and adults
5. strong assurances that the least-well-off members of society are fully enabled to live decent lives, based on a reasonable income floor and provision of public services
6. strong assurances of equal opportunity for all members of society in employment, housing, healthcare, and access to social services
7. provisions for disability, unemployment, and retirement security
8. assurance of effective political equality, including constraints on the power of wealthy individuals, corporations, and foundations to determine the outcomes of policy-making and legislation

(It is striking how many of these issues find a place in Rawls's theory of justice, including his account of a property owning democracy; link.)

Elizabeth Durbin's New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism is an excellent and detailed examination of the economic thinking of British socialists in the 1930s and 1940s, including that of her father, Evan Durbin. And it is important reading for our own generation, when a major reshuffling of the economic relations of capitalism currently seems to be off the table. Two intellectual influences were especially important: a tradition of English trade union activism challenging the power and position of the owners of wealth, and the Keynesian revolution that suggested, among other things, that economic institutions could be modified and managed. Whereas neoclassical economics essentially maintained that only complete freedom of action by economic actors ("laissez-faire") would give rise to "efficient" economic outcomes, these two traditions suggested that regulation of economic activity could be both successful and beneficial for society as a whole -- including the working classes (31-32).

The advantage of this analysis was that it opened up the possibility of redistributing a much wider range of 'unearned' incomes (not just that from land as Henry George had suggested) without reducing the supply of the factors which received such 'rental' payments. The approach also stressed the importance of transferring to the state all those means of production which earned the 'surplus', so that it would benefit society as a whole, not just individual owners. (33)

The financial and unemployment crisis of the Great Depression posed intractable problems for Labour Party leaders. What policies could be designed that would both damp down the fiscal crisis facing the British state and reduce unemployment and provide meaningful unemployment insurance for workers? 

The continued and intensifying unemployment problem in Britain precipitated major policy controversies across a broad spectrum of political views. The contradictions between traditional market explanations of unemployment and daily reality were already spurring the exploration of new theoretical constructs to explain the apparent failure of the market system. (70)

The combination of economic depression and political crisis had a profound effect on the Labour party in the early 1930s. The experience stirred deep emotions among Labour supporters, which left no one unmarked. It also raised fundamental questions about the role of the Labour party, for it seemed as though the only choice was between capitulation to the market forces of capitalism or preparation for a drastic take-over of the economic system. (73)

The drastic choices included either communism along the Russian model or massive nationalization of banks and industry (73), combined with extensive economic planning conducted by government ministries. Piecemeal reform and adjustment of the political economy of Britain seemed impossible. The democratic socialist movement and Labour party engaged in substantial study and consultation through 1933, and in 1934 the Labour party endorsed a new plan for reform.

The new programme called for the central planning of key industries, to include the immediate nationalization of the banking system, transport, coal and power, water supply, iron and steel and land and the drastic reorganization of electricity, gas, agriculture, shipping, shipbuilding, engineering, textiles, chemicals and insurance. Plans were also promised to extend social services, to provide medical care, to clear slums, to raise the school-leaving age, to abolish the means test and to give adequate maintenance for the unemployed. (87)

In other words -- a fairly detailed plan for a social-democratic welfare state with central economic planning in key industries. Much of this programme formed the core of the Labour party manifesto, For Socialism and Peace.

The question of redistribution within Britain's contemporary capitalist economy in the 1930s was a central topic for socialist debate.

Cole's original research design addressed redistributional issues by posing the question 'How far is it an essential part of socialist policy to promote more equal distribution of incomes (a) by raising real wages, (b) by development of the social services?' (125)

What Elizabeth Durbin documents in New Jerusalems is essentially an unresolved struggle, conducted by economists and politicians on the left in Britain, to design institutions that might succeed in fundamentally altering the tendencies of a functioning capitalist system to create extensive inequalities, crises of unemployment, and chronically low standards of living and wellbeing for the majority of working class people. And they were adamant in seeking institutional reforms that were feasible within the constraints of a democratic polity -- with the implication that their policy recommendations needed to find support from durable electoral majorities. As she puts the point late in the book, "Concern with immediate practicality has always been a trade-mark of British democratic socialism" (186). And in the following paragraph, she reiterates the democratic principle: "Their belief in democratic methods is fundamental to understanding the kind of socialist economic policy which emerged from this process.... They repudiated all Marxist policies and systems which depended upon the dictatorship of the proletariat and were considered by definition undemocratic" (186). What distinguished this tradition from other reformers, she writes, is their ongoing allegiance to the idea of public ownership of major economic assets and subsequent redistribution of income and wellbeing towards the least-well-off. And she believes that by the mid-1930s, British socialist and Labour leaders had accomplished a great deal:

By 1935 the Labour party was far better prepared than ever before to manage the country's economic affairs, to take control of financial policy and to begin serious planning efforts. Legislation had been drafted to nationalize the banking system; important leaders such as Dalton, but also other NEC members, were well briefed on banking options and policy operations; a loyal group of trained young professionals were eager to make their contributions. (222)

And yet -- this program failed during the 1930s. Only after the end of World War II did significant nationalization of industry and banking take place; and these economic changes were not durable. Thatcher's government of the 1980s reversed almost all the gains of post-war Labour governments.

 

A valuable resource on the nature and effectiveness of social democracy is the 1992 review article by Gosta Esping-Andersen and Kees van Kersbergen, "Contemporary Research on Social Democracy" (link). The purpose of this paper is to review efforts to evaluate the performance of a range of social-democratic countries in terms of their goals of equity and efficiency, and to try to identify some of the factors that seem to be conducive to successful implementation of the policies of a social democracy. Here is an observation about the centrality of a strong working-class movement in support of social-democratic reforms that seems very relevant to our current time:

Using a variety of different measures of both social democratic strength, and of policy outcomes (from social spending and redistribution to various institutional characteristics), most of these studies had in common a theory of working class mobilization of political power, that is, the social democratization of capitalist societies depends on the degree to which the balance of political power favors labor; in most cases, the political parties were identified as the chief causal agents. (191)

The literature seems to be converging around a common model. Simply put, social democratic parties are more capable of altering the distribution system and maintaining growth with full employment when they are linked to powerful and centralized trade union movement. (202)

This observation is concerning for the prospects of significant progressive reform towards policies leading to greater equity and efficiency in the United States, because the labor movement is at a low point of power and influence, and the mainstream Democratic Party is preoccupied with other issues. The authors pose this problem directly:

Since social democracy's strength lay in its mobilization of the industrial working class masses, it is an open question whether it will have any capacity for power in a postindustrial society. (203)

(Here are several earlier discussions of the political economy of democratic socialism; link, link, link.)

River warfare in the US Civil War

The mental images that most Americans have of the American Civil War involve the scenes of major land battles -- Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. Armies marched dozens of miles, prepared encampments and defensive works, and either attacked the enemy in its own prepared defenses or awaited contact with the enemy. The picture is Napoleonic: an army marching across terrain to fight other slow-moving armies.

It is therefore highly interesting to realize that naval warfare on rivers -- especially the Mississippi River -- played a key role in the success of Union forces in 1862-1865, and that armored steamships were critical to victory. To an extent that is now hard to imagine, with modern transportation networks including dense highway networks, as well as air and rail systems, how important control and navigation of the Mississippi River was to both Union and Confederate war fighting. General Ulysses S. Grant's strategy for bringing the war to the South was dependent on the objective of gaining control of the Mississippi River; and the river was a key component in the movements of troops, supplies, and field headquarters around the contested territories.

maps: Feis, Grant's Secret Service, p. 12

The reason for this importance of control of the Mississippi has to do with speed of deployment and logistics. (There was also a major economic consideration: if the South could close the Mississippi, it would cause great hardship for the Northern population.) But consider the logistics and speed issues. The speed of advance of an army on the march through water-logged terrain with poor roads -- conditions that obtained during much of Grant's campaign in the west -- was minuscule in comparison to a steamship moving unhindered several hundred miles along the river. As a rough estimate, it would take an army 21 days to march from Cairo, Illinois to Vicksburg, Mississippi, whereas it would take a steam-powered riverboat about three days to travel the same distance. And steamships could carry all the materiel required for the campaign. (Travel up-river the same distance would take longer.) Maintaining a supply line for the mountains of food, horse fodder, ammunition, replacement equipment, and evacuation of the wounded required by an army in the field depended on heavy transport -- by rail or river boat. Rail transport was substantially faster than riverboat transport -- the average rail speed unhindered by sabotage of tracks, etc. was 25 mph, compared to 5-7 mph for river transport. So rail transport was preferable. However, controlling and maintaining rail networks in hostile territory was extremely difficult, since local sympathizers could sabotage tracks and bridges in dozens of remote places. As a result, naval operations were a key part of the Union's war fighting in the west of the country. The Mississippi River represented the great north-south highway along which the war in the west was fought.

The strategic importance of strong fortifications with heavy guns at locations along the river permitting control of traffic was plain to all sides; so major battles developed involving attempts to seize fortified places like Vicksburg, Mississippi. Grant's persistent effort to besiege and occupy Vicksburg was a mark of his strength as a general, and the eventual success of his plans represented a turning point in the Civil War. But key to success at Vicksburg (and Fort Henry a year earlier) was the availability of a growing force of river warships, from lightly armed gunboats to ironclad and timber-clad steamships with heavy armaments capable of assaulting land-based fortifications. And almost none of this range of river craft existed before the onset of war. The use armored river steamboats of the Civil War thus represented a major technological shift in warfare -- perhaps as dramatic in 1861 as high-precision artillery has been in Ukraine in 2022.

The high end of these armored vessels were the City-class gunboats ("turtles"). These were ironclad vessels designed for service in rivers rather than open seas. They had shallow draft of six feet, were armed with thirteen guns, and could cruise at eight knots. Seven boats were delivered by January, 1862, and they played a significant role in major battles along the Mississippi River, including Vicksburg. These ships included the USS Baron DeKalb, Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, and Pittsburgh.

Complementing these ironclads was a larger group of wooden vessels that also played a major role in river warfare during the Civil War. Angus Konstam's book Mississippi River Gunboats of the American Civil War 1861-65 provides a review of the rapid development of armored wooden gunboats as the war in the west heated up. These craft needed to be shallow-draft, and they needed to be maneuverable enough to manage the twisting courses of the midwestern rivers. They were steam-powered and relatively slow, but provided both heavy mobile armaments and heavy transport for the strategic thrusts of the army. They could be used to transport troops, and they therefore permitted rapid shifts in the location of land-based attacks.

A rapid effort at ship-building and conversion ensued by both Confederate and Union militaries after the outbreak of war, and within a year each side had a number of river-based warships. The earliest heavy gunboats in the Union arsenal were converted commercial vessels -- the Conestoga (572 tons), the Lexington (362 tons), and the Tyler (420 tons), launched in summer 1861 and shielded with thick timber. In addition to the heavy gunboats, the armies also needed a larger number of smaller river gunboats (150-250 tons) that could be used to patrol the river and serve as transport up and down the river (9). The flagship of the river navy, also converted from commercial use, was the USS Black Hawk (902 tons). (All these data are drawn from Konstam's table of ships operated by both sides.) These wooden river warships were immediately thrown into the struggle.

What emerged was a campaign involving the attack on these Confederate naval and riverside defenses by two fleets: One descending the river from Cairo, Illinois, and the other (after the fall of New Orleans in April 1862) working its way up from the Gulf of Mexico. After a brilliantly executed attack on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson [by forces commanded by Grant] on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, Union naval forces in the upper Mississippi faced a series of imposing fortifications. (Konstam, 5)

Fortifications and heavy guns at Vicksburg were the most significant of these Confederate capabilities on the Mississippi River, and it took great fortitude for army and naval forces to eventually take Vicksburg in July 1863. This represented a major turning point in the Civil War.

What is particularly interesting to me about this quick exposure to river warfare in the 1860s is the fact that there were several tempos of operations in the Civil War -- the movements of armies at 15-20 miles per day, the movements of troops, officers, and materiel by steamship at perhaps 100 miles per day and by rail when available at 400 miles per day, and the transmission of messages at Internet speed by telegraph. The faster pace of steamboat and rail warfare fundamentally changed the challenges and opportunities confronting the generals. It is plain, then, that the American Civil War was a high-tech war, with innovations and adaptations introduced into war fighting in real time. (Even the evolution of heavy weaponry and ammunition moved forward quickly during the five years of fighting.) Here again, the similarity to the Ukraine war is striking.

(Here is an interesting photo essay on the evolution of Civil War gunboats; link. And here is a National Parks historical video on the battle of Vicksburg; link.)

De-mythologizing Ukraine under Nazi occupation

Ukraine was quickly and violently occupied by the Nazi military in 1941 in the onset of Hitler's Barbarossa plan for defeat of the Soviet Union, and the most intense and extensive period of the campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe quickly ensued. Massacres of the Jewish populations of villages, towns, and cities throughout the Ukraine occurred within weeks and months, from Miropol (link) to Kiev and Babi Yar. The Ukrainian people suffered enormously during the years of fighting from 1941 to 1944. But it is also clear from history that Ukrainian people participated in Nazi atrocities and war goals in numerous ways. Since the 1990s there have been major efforts by Nationalist parties in Ukraine to sanitize its World War II history, and to provide a mythical and heroic narrative for nationalist Ukrainian military organizations and units including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). (OUN was a far-right, pro-fascist organization. The UPA was created in 1942 as the paramilitary arm of the OUN-B (the radical wing of OUN led by Stepan Bandera).)

Anna Wylegala is one of the historians who has made a serious effort to come to grips with the politics of memory in Ukraine since the 1990s. Her co-edited volume (Wylegala and Glowacka-Grajper, The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine), provides an important contribution to a better and more honest rendering of Ukraine's history during 1941-44. As the editors make clear in their introduction, Ukraine's history during World War II has been subject to two different kinds of lies and myth-making efforts: the Soviet effort to paint Ukraine as thoroughly pro-Nazi and fascist from 1941 to 1944, and the post-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist effort to paint Ukrainian militia and military formations as purely nationalist and defensive. And the memory of these events in different regions of Ukraine became indistinct following the end of the war: "After the war, the memory of some of these atrocities became hidden or even forbidden during the communist era, which itself has also generated a new set of tragic memories" (Wylegala and Glowacka-Graijper, p. 2). Further, the ultra-nationalist parties that have gained dominance in Ukraine, including Svoboda, have a very distinctive interest in securing their view of the facts in the public memory. What is difficult to reconstruct is the historical truth of the matter.

The situation in Ukraine during World War II was undeniably complex. As Snyder emphasizes frequently, it was subject to "double occupation", eventually triple occupation, under Stalin, Hitler, and Stalin again. It had been devastated by the effects of forced collectivization, mass starvation, and mass deportations by the Stalinist regime only a few years earlier. And -- again paraphrasing Snyder -- it was subject to "state smashing", with almost no functioning institutions of state by the time of the Nazi invasion. Serhii Plokhy notes the strategic alliance that was possible between the Nazis and the OUN nationalists in The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. "Many in Ukraine welcomed the German advance in the summer of 1941, hoping for the end of the terror unleashed by the Soviet occupation authorities in the years leading up to the war. This was true not only for the recently occupied regions of western Ukraine but also for central and eastern Ukraine, where the population never forgave the regime for the horrors of the famine and collectivization" (264). So there was an existing basis of potential support among Ukrainians for the invading Nazi forces, along the lines of the wisdom, "the enemy of our enemy is our friend". And OUN-B, soon after its split from the smaller and more moderate faction of OUN, quickly formed common cause with the Germans: “In February 1941, they [Bandera's faction] made a deal with the leaders of German military intelligence (Abwehr) to form two battalions of special operations forces from their supporters. One battalion, Nachtigall, was among the first German troops to enter Lviv on June 29. The next day it took part in the proclamation of Ukrainian independence by members of the Bandera faction of the OUN. This spelled the end of German cooperation with Bandera’s followers” (Plokhy, 264).

So it is true -- the history of Ukraine in 1940-44 is complicated. And yet it is crucial to confront the realities of Ukrainian actions during the war honestly. Honestly confronting its history, as Vasily Grossman insisted, is the only possible foundation for a nation's creating a better future for itself. Here are a few important contributions from several historians who have attempted to do exactly this.

Timothy Snyder was one of the earliest English-speaking historians to examine Ukrainian complicity in atrocities in 1943 in his 2003 "The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943" (link). This article was one of the earliest expressions of the line of argument that Snyder developed later in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

The ethnic cleansing carried out by the OUN-B against Poles in 1943 was a deliberate strategy aimed at securing an ethnically pure post-war Ukraine:

Yet by April 1943, after three and a half years of war, the Ukrainian nationalist Mykola Lebed' proposed 'to cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population'. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains'ka Povstans'ka Armiia, UPA) then cleansed the Polish population from Volhynia. Ukrainian partisans killed about fifty thousand Volhynian Poles and forced tens of thousands more to flee in 1943. (202)

The OUN-B, true as ever to its radicalism, interpreted the party programme in a more decisive fashion than OUN-M, and followed a more ruthless strategy. It meant to pre-empt the return of Polish statehood by expelling the Poles from west Ukraine before the war was over. (213)

Snyder describes the rapid process through which OUN-B formed the paramilitary UPA in March 1943 and initiated violent ethnic cleansing almost immediately. It is interesting to note that Plokhy expresses an agnostic position on the violence that occurred in Volhynia in 1943: “Ukrainian and Polish historians still argue over whether the OUN leadership sanctioned Ukrainian attacks on Polish villages and, if so, on what level. There is no doubt, however, that most victims of the ethnic cleansing were Poles. Estimates of Ukrainians killed as a result of Polish actions in Galicia and Volhynia vary between 15,000 and 30,000, whereas the estimates for Polish victims are between 60,000 and 90,000 -- two to three times as high” (276). Plokhy's book was published in 2015 -- twelve years later than Snyder's article. So his agnostic stance about the role of OUN is puzzling; does he disagree with Snyder's reasoning and historical scholarship?

John-Paul Himka provides additional historical detail concerning the murderous ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews conducted by the UPA / OUN during 1943 in "Former Ukrainian Policemen in the Ukrainian National Insurgency: Continuing the Holocaust outside German Service" (link). Himka demonstrates that a significant portion of the paramilitary forces involved in these actions were Ukrainian policemen who had deserted en masse from German police units within the preceding months, and had already had extensive training and experience in annihilating villages. UPA and its political leadership in OUN-B pursued strategies of murderous ethnic cleansing against Poles and Jews using these and other paramilitary forces. Himka reports testimony from a Ukrainian prisoner: "In addition to continuing to murder Poles while ostensibly tolerating national minorities, OUN and UPA remained largely antisemitic. Responding to Soviet interrogators, Ukrainian prisoner Volodymyr Porendovsky stated that in 1941-1942, OUN openly preached a racist ideology, called for the annihilation of the Jews, and took part in their murder" (144).

Himka provides extensive evidence of the killings of Jews and Poles by UPA forces in the forests of Volhynia. Here is testimony from a Jewish survivor from the forests of Volhynia: "Vera Shchetinkova recalled how she hid with about eighty-five other Jews in the general vicinity ofSarny, a raion capital in Rivne oblast, in mid-January 1944. The Banderites discovered their bunkers and decided to destroy all the Jews who lived in them. In her view, the Banderites wanted no witnesses left when the Soviets came" (145). And another account of witness testimony: "Many Jews found refuge in the houses abandoned by the Poles, while others hid in the nearby forest. Jasphy estimated that there were several hundred Jewish refugees in the vicinity in the fall of 1943. They made contact with the Banderites, who said that they would not kill Jews, so the surviving Jews of the area went to work for them. This lasted until early January 1944. On the 4th of the month, she learned that all the Jews living near the former Polish houses had been killed by the Ukrainians (she in the meantime had moved to another part of the forest). She and a few others hid in the hay in a barn. The next day, some Ukrainians came searching for them with pitchforks, but missed them by a meter. She stayed in that barn for eight days. In her opinion, the Banderites had deliberately gathered the Jews together to kill them" (145).

Here is a very interesting piece of historiographic reasoning by Himka to rebut the Ukrainian nationalist claim that it was the Germans who committed these acts of murder against the Jews in the forest:

However, overriding Friedman's doubts and Shankovsky's defensive explanation are at least two key arguments: the testimonies generally refer to a time after the summer of 1943, when the German offensive was said to have occurred; and more testimonies of the liquidation of the labor camps and the luring of Jews from hiding have come to light, indicating a pattern of activity. We do not have testimonies, on the other hand, from Jews who survived the UPA labor camps and witnessed no attempt at liquidation; nor do we have any survivor testimonies indicating that the Germans liquidated UPA camps in the crucial period of winter 1943-1944. (150)

Here is Himka's assessment of the survivor testimony evidence: "Considering the context, the number of testimonies that are extant is impressive and indicates that these systematic murders of Jews must have been a widespread feature of the Holocaust in Volhynia. I see no reason to doubt the essential story that these testimonies tell" (149). Himka acknowledges that there is a wide range of uncertainty concerning the number of Jewish victims of these campaigns, ranging from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands. But the intentions and willingness of UPA-M were clear: to continue a campaign of mass murder against Jews and Poles even after the Germans had lost their military foothold in Ukraine.

Swedish historian Per Anders Rudling addresses a different part of Ukraine's troubled history: the collaboration of Ukrainian military and paramilitary forces with the Nazi occupiers of Ukraine. In particular, Rudling focuses on the military goals and activities of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galizien unit. Rudling elucidates the historical realities that are concealed by current attempts by nationalist politicians in Ukraine to sanitize the Waffen-SS Galician. His account, "‘They Defended Ukraine’: The 14.Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS(Galizische Nr. 1) Revisited", is published in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies (link). (Here is a short account of Rudling's findings about new efforts at mythologizing the Waffen-SS in Ukraine and Estonia, posted in Defending History; link.) Nationalists have tried to represent the Waffen-SS Galician as a Ukrainian self-defense force. However, Rudling demonstrates in great detail that it was fully incorporated into (and loyally committed to) Nazi war aims and plans. (Snyder also refers briefly to the formation of a Galician Waffen-SS division (link; 214).) Rudling goes into substantial detail about the history and behavior of this unit. He documents several crucial and historically well established facts: The Ukrainian Waffen-SS division was recruited specifically in support of Hitler and his war goals agains the USSR; the unit actively conveyed Nazi ideology, ethnic cleansing, and anti-Semitism through training of its soldiers and officers; and the Ukrainian Waffen-SS committed mass killings and atrocities against Ukrainian Jews and Poles.

The organizers of the Waffen-SS Galizien emphasized the importance of the unit for Hitler’s New Europe and a Nazi victory: ‘All call-ups to Ukrainians for the Division have been geared towards their planned deployment, not for Ukraine or Ukrainian culture, but rather as the contribution of the Ukrainian ethnic group in the battle to defend against Bolshevism and for a new Europe.’ (338-339)

Rudling makes it clear that the effort to romanticize the Ukrainian Waffen-SS as a purely nationalist military organization devoted to securing the independence of Ukraine is simply unsupportable. Here is just one well-documented atrocity committed by the Ukrainian Waffen-SS: the massacre of Poles and Jews at the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, near Lviv:

A 2003 investigation by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance into the massacre concluded that:

"the crime was committed by the 4th battalion of the 14th division on February 28. On that day, early in the morning, soldiers of this division, dressed in white, masking outfits, surrounded the village. The village was cross-fired by artillery. SS-men of the 14th Division of the SS “Galizien” entered the village, shooting the civilians rounded up at a church. The civilians, mostly women and children, were divided and locked in barns that were set on fire. Those who tried to run away were killed. Witnesses interrogated by the prosecutors of the Head Commission described the morbid details of the act. The crime was committed against women, children, and newborn babies."

In 2005, the Institute of History at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences arrived at the same conclusion—that the 4th SS Police regiment indeed killed the civilian inhabitants in Huta Pieniacka. (347)

In addition to the atrocities committed by the Waffen-SS Galizien troops, Rudling provides evidence showing that UPA bands participated in the murders that took place during those two days of wanton killing:

The participants from the UPA bands, who at that time had arrived in the village . . . together with the commander of the Volhynian band also surrounded the village and did that, what the Germans did, that is burned houses and various buildings, and drove the residents into the Roman Catholic Church. Those who tried to hide were shot on the spot, and shots were fired at those running. After that, as the ring that encircled the village was dissolved and the operation came to an end, the residents were being convoyed to the barn and the houses, locked up, and burned. There were four or five barns, filled with the residents of Huta Pieniacka, about 700–750 people, all of whom were burned. The above mentioned pogrom continued from eight in the morning until two or three in the afternoon. (351-352)

Rudling provides documentation of other atrocities committed by the Waffen-SS Galician in eastern Poland, including the burning of villages and murder of all inhabitants. And he documents the engagement of the division in Slovakia, conducting similar "pacification" campaigns against Slovak nationalist activism, including repression of the Slovak National Uprising.

Rudling summarizes his findings and recommendations in these terms:

While not claiming to provide a full and complete account of the unit’s history, this essay sets out some of the problems associated with the partial rehabilitation of the unit. Issues such as the unit’s institutionalized racism and anti-Semitism, its commitment to Adolf Hitler and the victory of Nazi Germany, and the involvement of officers, soldiers, and affiliated police regiments in atrocities call for more research and further inquiry into the unit’s past. The problem it raises are not only historical, but also political and ethical. (368)

Here again it is interesting to consider Plokhy's treatment of the Waffen-SS Galician division of Ukrainians in The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. Here too he takes a less critical view than one might expect (as was noted above with respect to the responsibility of OUN-B for murderous Polish ethnic cleansing). Plokhy does not emphasize the Nazi ideology of the division or the atrocities in which it was involved. “Backed by mainstream Ukrainian politicians and presented to Ukrainian youth as an alternative to going to the forest to join the Bandera insurgents or staying under imminent Soviet occupation, enrollment in the division seemed a lesser evil to parents who sent their sons to join its ranks. Most would soon have reason to regret their choice. Trained and commanded by German officers, the division got its baptism by fire in July 1944 near the Galician town of Brody” (279). This interpretation seems to line up more closely with the "rehabilitationist" line than the "face the dark facts of history" line.

In light of the real and documented history of the Waffen-SS Galician division, its loyalty to the war aims and person of Adolph Hitler, and its involvement in multiple atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, Poland, and Slovakia, the "rehabilitation" of the organization is roughly as repellent as the rehabilitation of the Nazi Party itself. These were not "freedom fighters"; they were willing auxiliaries within Hitler's unrestrained campaigns of murder and extinction. This history needs to be remembered in its painful details.

None of these sources have shed light on another form of Ukrainian responsibility during the Holocaust, the role of Ukrainian Auxiliary Police to carry out the transport, confinement, and murder of Jews. Gabriel Finder and Alexander Prusin address this question in "Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian police and the Holocaust" (link). Finder and Prusin look at the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP) as the "institutional epicentre of Ukrainian collusion with the Nazis in this region in the destruction of the Jews" (95). They believe that the readiness of Ukrainians to enter the UAP and to serve as facilitators of mass murder of Jews derived from the nationalist ideology demanding ethnic purity in Ukraine, and (like Jan Gross) an economic impulse to take advantage of the sacking of Jewish property and lives, on the other hand. "An intended consequence of this partnership was the eradication of the region’s Jews, in which the Ukrainian police actively took part" (96). "When Germans expelled Jews from their apartments and shops in Lwów in conjunction with the Ukrainian auxiliary police, Ukrainians as well Germans moved into them" (97).

Here is the description of UAP roles in the execution of mass killings of Jews in Ukraine, as described by Finder and Prusin:

From its inception, the Ukrainian police played an integral part in the German destruction of the Jews in eastern Galicia, especially in ghetto clearances (Aktionen). They would form a cordon around ghettos on the threshold of mass deportations to discourage and impede escape. They apprehended and herded Jews to the edge of town for mass executions or to the tracks of railway stations, which they guarded while Jews were being killed or loaded into trains. During these operations they did not recoil from acts of violence, including killing. On a number of occasions Ukrainian policemen often implored their German superiors to allow them to kill Jews during Aktionen. Their role in the destruction of east Galician Jewry was not, however, limited to Aktionen. They maintained surveillance in Jewish neighbourhoods. They demanded their share of spoils from defenceless Jews. They kidnapped Jews off the streets for shipment to labour camps, which they helped guard. They pursued Jews in hiding, including those hidden by fellow Ukrainians. They combed the surroundings of labour camps for Jewish escapees from the camps. They joined raids into the forests in pursuit of Jewish partisans. They frequently killed Jews on their own initiative. (106-107)

Several fundamental facts about Ukraine's World War II history today seem undeniable. (1) There was substantial collaboration between Ukrainian nationalist parties in 1941 and the Nazi occupation, and Ukrainian nationalists regarded the Red Army as being as much of a threat to Ukrainian interests as the Nazi armies. (2) The OUN was committed to violent ethnic cleansing and anti-Semitism throughout its history. This included the explicit intention of expelling the Polish population from the region. (3) The formation of the Waffen-SS Galizische division represented a full engagement between volunteer Ukrainian forces and Nazi military and genocidal aims. (4) Ukrainian nationalist parties -- the OUN -- were strongly engaged in the goal of driving Poles out of western Ukraine, and in 1943 OUN-B forces engaged in a merciless campaign of ethnic cleansing in Volhynia to that end. These efforts included organized attempts to kill the surviving Jews taking refuge in the forests of Volhynia. (5) The "triple occupation" of Ukraine created surprising configurations and alliances, and as Snyder documents, many Ukrainian police and administrators who had served the Soviet system prior to the German invasion, also served the German military administration.

Telling the truth about genocide and totalitarian terror

A central question in the past year or so in Understanding Society is how historians and philosophers should confront the evils of the twentieth century. It seems clear that studying these processes fully and honestly is a key part of the answer, both for scholars and for ordinary citizens. We need to confront the truth about ugly facts about our history. In his documentary article "Treblinka as Hell" Vasily Grossman tries to express why it is important to speak honestly about the facts of mass murder and genocide.

It is the duty of a writer to tell the truth however gruelling, and the duty of the reader to learn the truth. To turn aside, or to close one's eyes to the truth is to insult the memory of the dead. The person who does not learn the whole truth will never understand what kind of enemy, what sort of monster, our great Red Army is waging battle against to the death. (399)

But telling the truth about acts of genocide, atrocities, and state crimes is not easy. This is partly true for reasons of psychology and identity -- as LaCapra has argued, the horrors of the Holocaust are locations of trauma, and trauma is difficult to confront (link). But there is a more material barrier to truth-telling when it comes to genocide and state repression: the states and groups that commit or collaborate in these atrocities are very interested in preventing knowledge of their crimes to become public. And they are generally very willing to use coercion, violence, and massive deception against those who attempt to learn the truth and make it public. Truth-telling, therefore, can be career-ending or life-ending.

This situation was especially acute during the years of Soviet dictatorship in the USSR and its dependent states in Eastern Europe, and most pointedly for writers. Anyone who lived in these countries in the 1930s through the 1980s knew a great deal about the facts of dictatorship, arbitrary arrest, state lies, and the prison camps in the Gulag. But writing openly and honestly about these facts -- or even whispering about them to trusted friends -- could lead to arrest and imprisonment or death. So how could gifted and principled authors deal with this contradiction during Soviet times? 

A substantial number of writers during the Soviet era became willing accomplices in the ideology, propaganda, and crimes of Stalinism (and the Leninist regime that preceded). But some did not. And many who did not, did not survive the purges of 1938 and later years. 

There were a few noteworthy exceptions -- writers who maintained a degree of independence and honesty, but whom good fortune permitted to survive. Consider for example Mikhail Sholokhov, a highly prominent writer from the Cossack region of the Ukraine whose Don novels became among the most popular fiction throughout the period; who became a close confidant of Stalin; and yet who persisted in expressing the suffering of the peasants of the Ukraine (his neighbors) during the 1930s collectivization and the war of starvation that Stalin waged against them. Sholokhov maintained a degree of independence and integrity, even as he navigated censorship and the NKVD. (Brian Boeck's biography of Sholokhov, Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov, is an excellent source on Sholokhov's life and writing. Sholokhov won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965.) Sholokhov was not entirely admirable -- he is accused of sharing the anti-Semitism of the Stalinist period more generally (including sometimes his comments about Vasily Grossman). And he never wrote or spoke publicly against the genocide of the Jews during World War II, the mass exterminations that occurred across the Ukraine, or the resurgence of Soviet anti-Semitism following the end of the war. For example, his 1943 short story about Nazis at war, "The Science of Hatred," does not mention atrocities against the Jews and other innocent people; link. But he was willing to speak some of the truth of the failures and criminality of Soviet persecution of the peasants of the Ukraine -- and that was a considerable political risk. 

But consider another singular and important case in point: the life and writings of Vasily Grossman (link). (Alexandra Popoff's biography of Grossman, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, is an excellent treatment of his life and work.) Grossman was born as a Jew in the Ukraine in 1905 (the same year as Sholokhov), and in early adulthood he became a writer. He gained a degree in chemistry and worked for several years in a coal mine and a factory. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 he attempted to volunteer for military service, but was rejected for health reasons. He was accepted as a war journalist, and he traveled with the Red Army through its most desperate fighting, culminating in the siege of Stalingrad. His journalism from the front was among the most highly respected in the Soviet Union. It was honest, penetrating, and very sensitive to the conditions of life for the average Soviet soldier in combat. 

Grossman was personally aware of the program of extermination that the invading German army was waging in the western territories of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries through his active combat experience with the Red Army. Grossman's mother had remained in their home city, Berdichev, and in 1941 the Jews of Berdichev were rounded up and massacred. Here is Grossman's account from about 1944 about the massacre of Berdichev (link), included in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. In a period of only two days over 20,000 Jewish children, women, and men were killed by gunfire, rifle butt, and brutal beatings -- including Grossman's mother. (Estimates range from 20,000 to 38,536 Jewish victims during the summer of 1941.) The Communist Party and the Stalinist government of the USSR were unwilling to provide an honest account of the campaign of murder and extermination against the Jews of Eastern Europe during 1941 and subsequent years, and Grossman's directness and honesty in his journalism and in Life and Fate are exceptional. As noted in the earlier post, Grossman was the first journalist to provide extensive details about the workings of any Nazi death camp, as a result of his arrival at the site of Treblinka with the Soviet 62nd Army in 1944. His essay, "Ukraine without Jews," is an enormously important contribution to the effort to understand the true significance of the extermination of Europe's Jews. 

Grossman's experience in the Ukraine before the war and with the Red Army gave him a dramatic view of the crimes committed by the Soviet state. He witnessed the forced collectivization of agriculture and campaign of starvation in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, the crushing terror of the late 1930s, and the creation of the Gulag in the 1940s. He thus witnessed the massive totalitarian atrocities committed by Stalin’s apparatus in the name of communism and the total power of the Communist Party, resulting in the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens and hundreds of thousands of writers, engineers, functionaries, and other “enemies of the people”.

During his years as a war correspondent Grossman continued to have great respect and admiration for ordinary Red Army soldiers, but the command staff and political officers soon became contemptible to him.

Grossman wrote two important novels based on his experience at Stalingrad. Both were massively long -- well over 1,000 pages. The first, Stalingrad, was published in the USSR under the title For a Just Cause in 1943 but was quickly withdrawn from the public by Soviet censors. The second, a masterpiece of world literature, was Life and Fate, and had a much more grim view of the Soviet state and of Stalinism. In 1961 the manuscript was seized ("arrested") and Grossman was told that it could not be published for 250 years. He was expelled from the Writers Union -- his primary source of income -- and his health began to decline. He wrote several other novels, but died of stomach cancer in 1964 at the age of 59.

There were several themes which drew Grossman into conflict with the Stalinist censors, and with Stalin himself. First was the fact that Grossman understood very well that Hitler's genocidal plans of extermination were directed primarily against the Jews of Europe -- not random victims of war. But the Soviet party line was to refrain completely from "separating" Jewish victims from other "Soviet citizens" who died at the hands of the Nazis. This was an ideological principle, but it also derived from resurgent anti-Semitism in the USSR as well. This accounts for the Soviet, and later Ukrainian, refusal to place a memorial at Babi Yar in honor of the tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children killed there in 1941.

Second, Grossman wrote honestly about ordinary workers and soldiers, including their shortcomings. He was not primarily interested in making heroes of coal miners or infantrymen, and was very explicit about alcohol and other forms of "anti-socialist behavior" among workers. The censors, in contrast, wanted to see novels and stories in which workers were portrayed heroically.

The third line of conflict had to do with the totalitarian and murderous grip of Soviet rule itself. Grossman was especially aware of the massive harms created by Stalin's decimation of the Red Army officer corps through purges before the war and his pig-headed interference with military strategy in the conduct of the war, leading to several million unnecessary casualties and prisoners of war. Grossman was revolted at the behavior and abuses of the state and its functionaries during the conduct of World War II, and he found ways of expressing these views in his writings -- most clearly in Life and Fate. Grossman was a critic of Stalinism before it was either fashionable or safe to do so. Here is a passage from Life and Fate on the Gulag and the political prisons:

In other times, before the war, Krimov often walked past the Lubyanka at night and wondered what was happening behind the windows of that sleepless building. Those arrested were locked up in prison for eight months, a year, a year and a half, while the investigation was ongoing. Then his relatives received letters from the fields, they discovered new names: Komi, Salekhard. Norilsk, Kotlas, Magadan, Vorkutá, Kolymá, Kuznetsk, Krasnoyarsk, Karaganda, Nagayevo Bay ... But thousands of people who were imprisoned in the inner Lubyanka prison disappeared forever. The prosecution informed the relatives that they had been sentenced to "ten years without the right to correspondence", but there were no such sentences in the camps. Ten years without the right to correspond almost certainly meant that they had been shot. (853)

Consider finally the case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago exposed in great detail the horrendous crimes and scope of suffering created by Stalin's reign of terror through secret police and prison camps. Born in 1918 near Stavropol in the North Caucasus, Solzhenitsyn's experience of the Soviet Union came a decade or more later than that of Grossman and Sholokhov. He served in the Red Army as an artillery captain, and was arrested by Stalin's NKVD in 1945 for critical comments about Stalin that he had included in a private letter to a friend. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years of labor in the Gulag. He was cleared of charges in 1956. 

Solzhenitsyn's Gulag is a massive documentation of the experience of life in a labor camp in the extreme north, the tundra and the forest, of the USSR. It begins with the arrest and progresses through the many hardships and deprivations created for the prisoners by the state. The aftermath of the arrest:

For those left behind after the arrest there is the long tail end of a wrecked and devastated life. And the attempts to go and deliver food parcels. But from all the windows the answer comes in barking voices: “Nobody here by that name!” “Never heard of him!” Yes, and in the worst days in Leningrad it took five days of standing in crowded lines just to get to that window. And it may be only after half a year or a year that the arrested person responds at all. Or else the answer is tossed out: “Deprived of the right to correspond.” And that means once and for all. “No right to correspondence”—and that almost for certain means: “Has been shot.”

And the helpless desire that it might have been possible to resist:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. (Gulag Archipelago)

Telling the truth -- as Grossman and Solzhenitsyn did remarkably well throughout their careers, and Sholokhov did in a partial way -- is enormously hard in a totalitarian society. When the state is willing to send its critics to deadly labor camps, or to shoot them out of hand, it is virtually impossible to imagine many writers striving to tell the truths that they know. And in any case, since the state controls the means of publication, the critical writer cannot publish his or her work in any case. During the Soviet period, many writers wrote "for the desk drawer" -- manuscripts that could only be published in the distant future. And, knowing the likelihood of hidden manuscripts, the NKVD was very careful in its searches of the apartments of suspected critics and its other victims; correspondence, files, and unpublished manuscripts were routinely burned. In the somewhat less repressive period of post-Stalinist USSR there was a period of Samizdat (self-publishing) -- writings that were distributed as typescripts, hand-written documents, mimeographed documents, and eventually photocopies. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was published as Samizdat to a limited readership. But truthful description, diagnosis, and criticism -- these forms of expression were almost entirely impossible within the Stalinist regime. And yet it is impossible for a society to repair its most dehumanizing features if it is impossible to speak openly about those crimes.

Ludwik Fleck and "thought styles" in science

Let's think about the intellectual influences that have shaped philosophers of science over the past one hundred years or so: Vienna Circle empiricism, logical positivism, the deductive-nomological method, the Kuhn-Lakatos revolution, incorporation of the sociology of science into philosophy of science, a surge of interest in scientific realism, and an increasing focus on specific areas of science as objects of philosophy of science investigations. And along these waypoints it would be fairly easy to place a few road signs indicating the major philosophers associated with each phase in the story -- Ayer, Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Nagel, Hanson, Hesse, Kuhn, Lakatos, Putnam, Boyd, Quine, Sellars, Bhaskar, Sober, Rosenberg, Hausman, Epstein ...

So we might get the idea that we've got a pretty good idea of the "space" in which philosophy of science questions should be posed, along with a sense of the direction of change and progress that has occurred in the field since 1930. The philosophy of science is a "tradition" within philosophy, and we who practice in the field have a sense of understanding its geography.

But now I suggest that readers examine Wojciech Sady's excellent article on Ludwik Fleck in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link). Fleck (1896-1961) was a Polish-Jewish scientist and medical researcher who wrote extensively in the 1930s about "social cognition" and what we would now call the sociology of science. His biography is fascinating and harrowing; he and his family survived life in Lvov under the Soviet Union (1939-1941) after the simultaneous invasion of Poland by Germany and the USSR; occupation, pogroms, and capture by the Germans in Lvov; resettlement in the Lvov ghetto; transport to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald; and survival throughout, largely because of his scientific expertise on typhus vaccination. Fleck survived to serve as a senior academic scientist in Lublin. In 1957 Fleck and his wife emigrated to Israel, where their son had settled.

Fleck is not entirely unknown to philosophers today, but it's a close call. A search for articles on Fleck in a research university search engine produces about 2,500 academic articles; by comparison, the same search results in 183,000 articles on Thomas Kuhn. And I suspect that virtually no philosopher with a PhD from a US department of philosophy since 1970 and with a concentration in the philosophy of science has ever heard of Fleck. 100% of those philosophers, of course, will have a pretty good idea of Kuhn's central ideas. And yet Fleck has a great deal in common with Kuhn -- some three decades earlier. More importantly, many of Fleck's lines of thought about the history of concepts of disease in medicine are still enormously stimulating, and they represent potential sources of innovation in the field today. Fleck asked very original and challenging questions about the nature of scientific concepts and knowledge. Thomas Kuhn was one of the few historians of science who were aware of Fleck's work, and he wrote a very generous introduction to the English translation of Fleck's major book in the sociology and history of science, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979/1935).

Here are Fleck's central ideas, as summarized by Sady. Understanding the world around us (cognition) is a collective project. Individuals interacting with each other about some aspect of the world constitute a "thought collective" -- "a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction" (Sady, sect. 3). A thought collective forms a vocabulary and crafts a set of concepts that are mutually understood within the group, but misunderstood by persons outside the group. A "thought collective" forms a "collective bond" -- a set of emotions of loyalty and solidarity which Fleck describes as a "collective mood". There are no "objective facts"; rather, facts are defined by the terms and constructs of the "thought collective". And the perceptions, beliefs, and representations of different "thought collectives" concerned with ostensibly the same subject matter are incommensurable.

So it is not possible to compare a theory with “reality in itself”. It is true that those who use a thought style give arguments for their views, but those arguments are of restricted value. Any attempt to legitimize a particular view is inextricably bound to standards developed within a given style, and those who accept those standards accept also the style. (Sady, sect. 7)

And scientific knowledge is entirely conditional upon the background structure of the "thought collective" or conceptual framework of the research community:

As Fleck states in the last sentence of (1935b), “'To see’ means: to recreate, at a suitable moment, a picture created by the mental collective to which one belongs”. (Sady, sect. 5)

Thus, it is impossible to see something radically new “simply and immediately”: first the constrains of an old thought style must be removed and a new style must emerge, a collective's thought mood must change— and this takes time and work with others. (Sady, sect. 5)

These ideas plainly correspond closely to Imre Lakatos's idea of a research community and Thomas Kuhn's idea of a paradigm. They stand in striking contrast to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle being developed at roughly the same time. (And yet Sady notes that Moritz Schlick offered to recommend publication of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact in 1934.)

Upon first exposure to Fleck's ideas from the Sady article I initially assumed that Fleck was influenced by Communist ideas about science and knowledge (as were Polish sociologists and philosophers in the 1950s). The "collective thoughts" that are central to Fleck's account of the history of science sound a lot like Engels or Lenin. And yet this turns out not to be the case. Nothing in Sady's article suggests that Fleck was influenced by Polish Communist theory in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, his ideas about social cognition seem to develop out of a largely central European tradition of thinking about thinking. According to Sady, Fleck's own "thought collectives" (research traditions) included: (1) medical research; (2) the emerging field in Poland of history of medicine (Władysław Szumowski, Włodzimierz Sieradzki, and Witold Ziembicki); (3) the Polish "philosophical branch" of mathematical-philosophical school (minor); (4) sociology of knowledge (Levy-Bruhl, Wilhelm Jerusalem; but not Max Scheler or Karl Mannheim; also minor). Sady also emphasizes Fleck's interest in the debates that were arising in physics around the puzzles of quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

So there is a major irony here: one of Fleck's central ideas is that individual thinkers can achieve nothing by themselves as individuals. And yet Fleck's ideas as developed in his history of the medical concept of syphilis appear to be largely self-generated -- the results of his own knowledge and reflection. The advocate of the necessity of "thought collectives" was himself not deeply integrated into any coherent thought collective.

This story has an important moral. Most importantly, it confirms to me that there are always important perspectives on a given philosophical topic that have fallen outside the mainstream and may be forever forgotten. This suggests the value, for philosophers and other scholars interested in arriving at valuable insights into difficult problems, of paying attention to the paths not taken in previous generations. There is nothing in the nature of academic research that guarantees that "the best ideas of a generation will become part of the canon for the next generation"; instead, many good and original ideas have been lost to the disciplines through bad luck. This is largely true of Fleck.

But here is another, more singular fact that is of interest. How did Sady's article, and therefore Fleck himself, come to my attention? The answer is that in the past year I've been reading a lot about Polish and Jewish intellectuals from the 1930s with growing fascination because of a growing interest in the Holocaust and the Holodomor. That means a lot of searches on people like Janina Bauman, Leszek Kołakowski, and Vasily Grossman. I've searched for the histories of places like Lvov, Galicia, and Berdichev. And in the serendipity of casting a wide net, I've arrived at the happy experience of reading Sady's fascinating article, along with some of Fleck's important work.

Here is the prologue to Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. It expresses very concisely Fleck's perspective on science, concepts, and facts.

What is a fact?

A fact is supposed to be distinguished from transient theories as something definite, permanent, and independent of any subjective interpretation by the scientist. It is that which the various scientific disciplines aim at. The critique of the methods used to establish it constitutes the subject matter of epistemology.

Epistemology often commits a fundamental error: almost exclusively it regards well-established facts of everyday life, or those of classical physics, as the only ones that are reliable and worthy of investigation. Valuation based upon such an investigation is inherently naive, with the result that only superficial data are obtained.

Moreover, we have even lost any critical insight we may once have had into the organic basis of perception, taking for granted the basic fact that a normal person has two eyes. We have nearly ceased to consider this as even knowledge at all and are no longer conscious of our own participation in perception. Instead, we feel a complete passivity in the face of a power that is independent of us; a power we call “existence” or “reality.” In this respect we behave like someone who daily performs ritual or habitual actions mechanically. These are no longer voluntary activities, but ones which we feel compelled to perform to the exclusion of others. A better analogy perhaps is the behavior of a person taking part in a mass movement. Consider, for instance, a casual visitor to the Stock Exchange, who feels the panic selling in a bear market as only an external force existing in reality. He is completely unaware of his own excitement in the throng and hence does not realize how much he may be contributing to the general state. Long-established facts of everyday life, then, do not lend themselves to epistemological investigation.

As for the facts of classical physics, here too we are handicapped by being accustomed to them in practice and by the facts themselves being well worn theoretically. I therefore believe that a “more recent fact,” discovered not in the remote past and not yet exhausted for epistemological purposes, will conform best to the principles of unbiased investigation. A medical fact, the importance and applicability of which cannot be denied, is particularly suitable, because it also appears to be very rewarding historically and phenomenologically. I have therefore selected one of the best established medical facts: the fact that the so-called Wassermann reaction is related to syphilis.

HOW, THEN, DID THIS EMPIRICAL FACT ORIGINATE AND IN WHAT DOES IT CONSIST?

Lvov, Poland, summer 1934

The Warsaw experience of Janina Bauman

Janina Bauman, along with her sister Sophie and her mother Alina, miraculously survived the slaughter of the Jews of Warsaw and the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April, 1943. Born in 1926, Janina was only thirteen when the German army invaded Poland and besieged Warsaw. Her remarkable 1986 memoir, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl's Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond 1939-1945, conveys both the circumstances and some of the emotional consequences of this horrific experience. (The book is also available on the Open Library; link.) Janina had managed to preserve many of her diaries from those years, so the text is grounded in her own contemporaneous observations and thoughts. Her father and her uncle Josef were among the 14,500 victims of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers and prisoners of war at Katyn Forest in 1940. And most of her friends and family members were murdered during the Nazi terror and waves of Aktion in the Warsaw ghetto. Her family suffered from both Nazi genocide and Soviet atrocity, both arising from merciless totalitarian regimes. The survival of Janina, Sophie, and their mother Alina was the result of their own courage and resourcefulness, the aid they received from their extended family and non-Jewish friends from before the war (Auntie Maria), the willingness of a number of non-Jewish strangers to shelter them at critical moments, and a few moments of monumental good luck. (For example, Janina's mother's ability to speak German fluently saves their lives during transport to an extermination camp.)

Much of the book is factual and autobiographical in tone, sometimes even laconic. The text conveys a good deal of the texture of life in the ghetto -- struggling to find food, to avoid capture and execution on the streets, to find secret ways of continuing school, and occasionally having friendships, even boyfriends. Here is a passage from fifteen-year-old Janina's diary, from a time shortly after Janina's family has been forced into the Warsaw ghetto (April 18, 1941). Their conditions are tolerable, but severe suffering and deprivation are all around them.

'Don't you think the way we live is highly immoral?' I asked. 'We eat our breakfast, lunch and supper, we occupy our minds with the French Revolution or Polish poetry, or just which one of us L. fancies the most; then we go to bed with a good novel and peacefully fall asleep. At the same time they are starving and dying.' 'There's nothing we can do for them,' said Zula sadly, 'for the hundreds and thousands of them.' 'Of course not. But for some of them perhaps? Each of us for somebody?' 'Would you and your family be willing to take home these two begging boys?' asked Hanka very seriously. 'To share not only food but also beds with them, live with them for better or worse?' I had no ready answer to her question, and the more I think about it now, the clearer I see the answer is 'No'. (42)

But Janina does find ways of helping others in these desperate conditions. She helps to organize a collective effort to grow vegetables for the destitute in the ghetto (she turns out to be very good at cultivating the garden), and she writes of her efforts to join the armed Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. (She was excluded from the Home Army resistance group because she was Jewish.) (Zula and Hanka were her closest friends. Zula was later raped and murdered by German soldiers, while Hanka survived the war.)

Here is a passage describing the Aktion (mass removal of Jews from the ghetto to death camps) on July 22, 1942. 

The first three days of the Aktion I spent in the flat, following Julian's firm instructions not to set foot in the street.... On the fourth day I could wait no longer, and, ignoring Mother's pleas, set out to the 'little ghetto'. At first the streets seemed uncannily quiet, almost deserted. I walked fast, not looking around, quick, quick along Leszno Street, until I plunged into the tangle of narrow lanes leading to Roman's flat. There, all of a sudden, I found myself in the middle of a panic-stricken crowd. In a little square a score of men -- both Jewish policemen and civilian helpers -- tried to hold a swarm of screaming people inside a ring of tightly locked hands. Other policemen ran up and down the back alleys searching for more victims, pulling them violently along, pushing them by force into the ring. Just concealed behind a large building, two lorries waited for their human load. A couple of Nazi soldiers leant leisurely against them. Their guns ready to fire, they watched the round-up lazily, talking and laughing in the bright sunshine of the mid-summer day. 

I hardly had time to be frightened when one of the men forming the deadly enclosure broke away from the ring, rushed at me, seized my arm, and began to pull me, as if intending to force me into the ring. He was just pretending. I recognised him at once: he was Mr. N., Stefan's friend. As an employee of the Jewish Council he had evidently been ordered to take an active part in the round-up. His face was white, twisted with fear and agony, his hands trembling. With feigned brutality he pushed me into a dark gate and whispered imploringly, 'Run away, child, run back home as fast as you can!' He showed me a narrow passage between two buildings. Terrified, I darted away without another word. (66-67)

The book is primarily a narrative account of the young Janina's own experiences. But the author sometimes offers general observations about the experience as well. Several passages are especially meaningful --

During the war I learned the truth we usually choose to leave unsaid: that the cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanises its victims before it destroys them. And that the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions. (preface)

And here is an expression of shame, or survivor guilt, at having escaped the ghetto to a temporary refuge with strangers on the Aryan side of the wall:

A torrent of bitter thoughts washed away the last trace of ecstasy. I was in an unknown place, facing an unknown future among strangers. My own cruel but familiar world where I belonged remained behind the walls. I had deserted it, running for my safety, for the luxuries of a fragrant bath and a soft bed. I had deserted my people, leaving them to their terrible fate. In the early hours of the night, flooded with tears of agony and guilt, I crept out of bed and stretched myself out on the carpet. There, cold and miserable, I finally fell asleep. (100-101)

It is very interesting that Zygmunt Bauman, the husband of Janina, writes that his own willingness to write about the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s was triggered by reading his wife's personal experience through this book. Janina is explicit in saying that she had never previously shared her experience with him. Zygmunt too had never addressed the experiences of anti-Semitism, genocide, and totalitarianism that he had witnessed, until the 1980s. (It is interesting to note that Bauman directly addresses the question of "shame" in his discussion of the Holocaust in Modernity and the Holocaust (205).)

Several issues arise in Winter in the Morning that are important points of debate today: the role of Polish Catholics in supporting the Nazi extermination of Polish Jews, on the one hand, and their role in sheltering Jews, on the other; the role played by Ukrainian police and soldiers in enforcing Nazi commandments in the ghetto, including murder; and the role played by the Jewish Council and the men who served as Jewish policemen in the ghetto in carrying out the mandates of the Nazi regime. (Hannah Arendt raises the issue of the possible culpability of the Jewish Councils in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.) On the whole, Bauman's stance towards the Jewish Council and the Jewish policemen is a measured one, and she mentions life-saving efforts by the Jewish Council and by individual Jewish policemen in the ghetto -- as well as their collaboration in several waves of Aktion leading to the deaths of the majority of the Jews living in the ghetto. As an adolescent observer, she was not in a position to know about the activities of these organizations at a higher level; she saw only their local activities in the streets and urban destruction of the ghetto -- including in the scene of terror during the July Aktion described above.

Janina Bauman's memoir is an important contribution to later generations' ability to address the Holocaust in a human way, with compassion and a degree of understanding of the horrific human experience it embodied for many millions of men, women, and children. Her narrative is part of our collective memory of that trauma.

Another important document about the Warsaw ghetto is Hanna Krall's interview with Dr. Marek Edelman, published as Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation With Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Polish 1977; English translation 1986); available on Open Library (link). Edelman was a leader in the armed Jewish resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and survived to become a leading cardiologist. Edelman's recollections are stark and unblinking in his testimony to murder, rape, humiliation, and unmeasured cruelty to the Jews of the ghetto; and he is informative about the efforts made by the Jewish Combat Organization to gather arms and resist the final round of extermination undertaken by the Nazi regime.

Edelman demonstrates courage in his account. But his life also displays a significant and important level of understanding of the evil of the Holocaust. In their afterword to Shielding the Flame the translators quote an important set of comments by Edelman at the time of the Polish martial-law government's 1983 commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:

Forty years ago we fought not only for our lives. We fought for life in dignity and freedom. To celebrate our anniversary here where social life is dominated throughout by humiliation and coercion would be to deny our fight. It would mean participating in something contrary to its ideals. It would be an act of cynicism and contempt. I shall not participate in such arrangements or accept the participation of others who do so, regardless of where they come from or whom they represent. Far from these manipulated celebrations, in the silence of the graves and in people's hearts, there shall live the true memory of the victims and the heroes, the memory of the eternal human striving for freedom and truth. (122)

Here Edelman makes an important point about history and memory, and the political use to which commemoration is all too often put. And his point is broad enough to encompass both the crimes of the Nazi occupation of Poland and the subsequent Soviet-backed dictatorship of Poland. Timothy Garton Ash makes a similar point about memory in his preface to the book:

The gulf between Poles and Jews today is not just a matter of physical separation. There has also been an extraordinary divorce of Polish and Jewish memory. A Polish child growing up in the 1970s learned next to nothing about the immense Jewish part in Polish history, let alone about the Polish part in Jewish history. (viii)

Again -- memory, its importance, and its suppression.

A key question for me in the past year has been how historians should confront the evils of the twentieth century. Tim Snyder answers the question in one way, painting a very large canvas over the "bloodlands" of Central Europe. But -- as Snyder insists -- it is crucial to have a basis for empathy and compassion for the human beings who were tormented, humiliated, and destroyed by these massive and numbing atrocities. It is crucial to confront the personal memoirs of genocide and atrocity, like Bauman's or Edelman's, if we are to put a human face on the cold historical facts of the Holocaust, and to have a more acute understanding of the human realities of children, adults, and old people as they confronted cruelty, violence, humiliation, and extinction.

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Literary theorist Julia Hell provides a fascinating treatment of the relationship between Janina Bauman's memoir and Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, along with writings by W. G. Sebald and Peter Weiss, through the lens of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice ("Modernity and the Holocaust, or, Listening to Eurydice"; link). It is a very interesting piece. Here is a brief summary of Hell's approach:

Seen through this particular lens, Bauman’s texts, especially Modernity and the Holocaust (2000 [1989]) and related essays and lectures, emerge as deeply entangled in a cultural imagination that is obsessed with issues of representation, acts of looking, and the nature of human bonds in the wake of the Holocaust, a cultural imagination that tried to capture these topics by returning to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. (126)

And Hell attempts to identify traces of the Orpheus/Eurydice story in Janina's narrative as well:

Let me gather the bits and pieces of the Orphic story that have surfaced so far: with respect to the Orphic topography, we have the frequent use of the inferno on the one hand; on the other hand, we have a river dividing the almost-dead from the living. That is, Janina Bauman’s story situates Eurydice in hell. And then we have the different figurations of Eurydice -- the woman being led from the inferno by her mother and aunt or the woman waiting to be rescued ^ the Orphic topography of love and death, the underworld of the ghetto, the river dividing world and underworld, and the woman, who was doomed to die, the man who might or might not save her. What I want to draw attention to is the fact that Janina Bauman takes hold of particular moments in Eurydice’s story: the moment of danger when Eurydice is about to die, the moment of being about-to-be rescued, the moment of being rescued. (140)

This is an intriguing effort at explaining the narrative structure and language of Janina Bauman's memoir. It gains plausibility when we recall from the text of Winter in Morning that Janina was a passionate reader of literature during the years of her adolescence in the terrors of Warsaw. She mentions reading most of Russian literature in one of the sanctuary apartments she and her sister and mother were able to find. It is entirely possible that Janina had read and absorbed The Divine Comedy in one half-illuminated cellar or another.