The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml´ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.
On the night of July, 6, 1941, under the cover of darkness, a group of Ukrainian assailants armed with bats, shovels, and other weapons attacked their Jewish neighbors in Tuchyn, a small town just outside of Rivne, killing dozens and wounding more. Through the testimony of perpetrators, victims, and local witnesses, this article not only reestablishes the events leading up to, during, and following the pogrom against Tuchyn’s Jews, but also provides biographical sketches of the local perpetrators and those in the community who enabled it. While there has been increasingly sophisticated work on the summer 1941 pogroms in Eastern Europe, scholars have yet to identify and thoroughly analyze local participants. From a deeper probe into local perpetrators’ organizational affiliations, social networks, and their place in the quickly changing and dynamic political situation, this article questions the analytical categories we use to frame local perpetrators, as well as the pogroms. In doing so it offers new insights on the participants, while demonstrating the possibilities for new more dynamic avenues for future research on pogrom violence.
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