June 22, 1941, marked the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Today, 84 years later, Ukrainian cities are again under bombardment—but now the aggressor is Russia. How has the war in Ukraine altered our understanding of that past conflict? What revelations about history does the present compel us to confront? T-invariant discussed these questions with Alexander Dmitriev, a historian and native of Kherson, now a visiting researcher at the European University Viadrina (Germany).
The Past No Longer Makes Sense
T-invariant: You were born in Kherson and have even said that you identify ethnically as a Khersonite. Kherson has been occupied and liberated twice. On August 19, 1941, it was seized by Nazi forces, then liberated by the Soviets on March 13, 1944. On March 3, 2022, Russian troops entered Kherson, and on November 11, 2022, the city was freed by Ukrainian forces. Before retreating, the Russian military destroyed critical infrastructure, blowing up the thermal power plant. In this war, Kherson was awarded the title of Hero City of Ukraine. On January 1, 2021, its population stood at 286,000; by January 4, 2024, it had dwindled to 67,000. What does it mean to you now to be a Khersonite?
Alexander Dmitriev: My brother and sister still live there, so they are among those 67,000. For me, the memory of war isn’t just books, photographs, or academic research—like that in Irina Savelyeva’s remarkable recent article. It’s also family memory: my mother’s and grandmother’s stories about 1941, when my grandfather, at the very last moment, managed to get them onto an evacuation train. They had less than an hour to gather their things, and that saved their lives. My grandfather went back to the military enlistment office and later was declared missing in action… Then there was my other grandfather, my father’s father, who drove trucks for the artillery throughout the entire war. But he never spoke about it —never wore his medals, never showed them to anyone.
Now, those memories of the past have been eclipsed by the last three years. My grandmother often took me to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Kherson—as if it were the grave of her missing husband. Today, that’s the most dangerous place in the city: the so-called Arestanka district, under constant shelling. Nearby is the main city library, where I used to go as a schoolboy, flipping through the works of Kherson-born historian Yevgeny Tarle—maybe that’s where I first decided to become a historian myself. Now, that library is half in ruins, half boarded up with plywood.
It’s clear that for me—and, more importantly, for the city’s residents, my former classmates, and my family—the conversation about war is entirely different now. It’s no longer about the past, but about the war that is still raging. It isn’t over, and so memory now operates through different registers and filters.
T-i: Ukraine has been at war for four years now. Just like 80 years ago, part of the Ukrainian population is under occupation. Which historical figures help us make sense of what is happening today?
AD: My perspective is perhaps somewhat specific: I’m primarily a historian of the humanities. For me, history is filtered through the experiences of people who were engaged in scholarship, teaching, sitting in libraries, or working in laboratories. The history of Kherson and Ukraine during World War II, of course, became fractured. There were those who left, like my family. And there were those who stayed and had to adapt to the new reality.
Even in the 1990s and 2000s, my mother would tell me about her friends, the women she knew. Some of them shared stories that were almost cinematic. Like how Jewish children were snatched from the columns being marched to their deaths. How a local Ukrainian family took in one of those boys, raised him under a different name. He later became a high-ranking military officer. It was only then that people began to speak about these things, uncovering what had been hidden for decades.
History is being rewritten. A person discovers another version of their own history—different parents, a different past. The narrative they grew up with no longer holds. A new one emerges. It feels like theirs, yet somehow alien, unfamiliar. Even though there is irrefutable evidence of its authenticity, it’s not about “deception.” It’s simply that a new layer of the past has been uncovered. And this history—the history of Ukrainian Kherson, intertwined with banned anti-Soviet activities, repression, and the Holodomor—never fit into the neat Pioneer-Komsomol framework. (It has been—and continues to be—unearthed by local enthusiasts and my colleagues: Mykola Gomanyuk, Dementiy Bily, Serhiy Dyachenko.) This is the history of a clash between two totalitarian regimes. The history of being forced to choose between Hitler and Stalin.
And this choice at the end of 1941 was not what it seemed to us, raised on Soviet films (even the good ones). These new discoveries, this alternate genealogy, these irreconcilable testimonies—they didn’t just contradict what we were taught in school; they were deeply personal wounds. The famine of the early 1920s, the repressions of the late 1920s… As a child, I perceived Ukraine as Soviet Ukraine. Back in the mid-1980s, “Soviet” seemed like a constant, almost neutral descriptor—if not a positive one. Red was the color of victory, of pride. We recited pompous war poems. But later, it turned out that the history I had learned in school, aced in exams, and even chose as my profession—wasn’t the real history. So much had been silenced. The revelations were unexpected and deeply bitter.
T-i: As a historian of science, you must understand particularly well that the relationship between scholars and power is no less profound or tragic than that between poets and power—a theme we know well from Russian literature. What striking examples from the lives of Ukrainian scholars could you highlight in this context?
AD: It wasn’t until the 21st century, when I was already in my thirties, that I discovered two remarkable Ukrainian humanists. One was a brilliant linguist and philologist, for a time a colleague and coworker of Roman Jakobson. The other could have been hailed as a hero even in Soviet times: a war veteran, archaeologist, folklorist, and finally, an intelligence officer buried at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv. These were Yurii Shevelyov and Viktor Petrov. In the spring of 2022, I carried their books in my luggage across borders and checkpoints, from Moscow to Europe. Among them were two thick volumes of Petrov’s essays and novels, written between 1945 and 1949 (under the literary pseudonyms Domontovych and Bær)—texts composed during those difficult, terrifying postwar years. In Kyiv, these works couldn’t be published until after 1991. I’m deeply grateful to the scholars in Kyiv and Kharkiv who rediscovered and published them: Andrii Portnov, Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi, and Serhii Vakulenko. Both men were well-known in the diaspora. Shevelyov—a linguist, associate professor, a promising Soviet scholar—chose to remain in Kharkiv in 1942. Petrov’s story is more complicated. Though he, too, had been slated for evacuation, he worked in occupied Kyiv.
There are even legends that he wore a German military uniform. Both men were shadowed in Soviet memory—and even, to some extent, in the memory of the Russian diaspora—by accusations of collaboration with the Germans. In the 21st century, Kharkiv scholars (Kateryna Karunik foremost among them) published Shevelyov’s articles that had appeared in the German press at the time. These articles contained no overt antisemitism but expressed sharp anti-Bolshevism. This wasn’t a choice for Hitler, but rather against Stalinist totalitarianism. Much depended on nearly accidental circumstances too: Shevelyov was ethnically German.
Both Shevelyov and Petrov survived. But at what cost? The terrifying years of 1942-1943—as in Poland and other Eastern and Central European countries—suddenly became a period of strange, explosive creative activity that defied their surroundings. Works by recently repressed writers like Mykola Zerov were published. Then came another, little-known period of cultural flourishing from 1945 to 1948, scarcely recognized in Russia. The Ukrainian diaspora of that time was arguably more vibrant and intellectually rich than its Russian counterpart.
But in 1949, on Easter night, Petrov—by then living in Munich—vanished. Rumors swirled: he had been killed, either by his own people or by Soviet agents. Four years later, he “resurfaced” in Kyiv. He returned to his former workplace, the Institute of Archaeology, presenting documents claiming he had fought in a partisan unit named after Lavrentiy Beria during the war before being assigned to Germany as part of a foreign trade delegation. For the next 16 years, he lived in Kyiv, publishing his work. He rarely spoke of what had happened during those “missing” years. His return was almost certainly not voluntary. Despite the opening of Ukrainian special archives, much of this story remains shrouded in secrets.
The Second World War reshaped both waves of emigration from Ukraine—first in the 1920s-30s, then again after 1945. Today, there is a significant—and justified—interest in Shevelyov in Kharkiv and across Ukraine. His books are being republished, his scattered journal articles collected. His former apartment in Kharkiv has become a residency for contemporary writers, like Serhiy Zhadan. Yet, in the 2010s, the memorial plaque on his home was vandalized as that of a “collaborator.”
Memory of him remains volatile. It remains incompletely unpacked—by both Ukrainian and Russian academia. Even within the diaspora, his legacy is recalled with reservations, with pain (Could he have acted differently after 1956? What did he truly believe?).
Not a Black-and-White History
T-i: This brings to mind the question of collaborationism among Russian émigrés during WWII. Most stood against fascism—though there were exceptions, like Gippius, Merezhkovsky, and Berberova. From the window of a 1990s Moscow library (when émigré literature first reappeared in bookstores), it seemed everyone had been “on the right side of history.” But recent scholarship and declassified archives reveal a far more morally fraught reality. Take the brilliant émigré novelist Gaito Gazdanov: he joined the French Resistance, saved Soviet POWs, and documented it in his remarkable “On French Soil”. Yet after the war, he severed ties with all Soviet-aligned organizations, refusing any association with Stalin’s Russia. That was a profound ethical stance. Which other figures from the Russian emigration do you find compelling in this regard?
AD: The question of collaboration isn’t confined to the past. It resurfaces today in debates over mobilization and political agency. In the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn was denounced from official podiums as a “literary Vlasovite.” Now, he’s nearly a patriotic icon. Yet even for him—a war veteran—the choices of his elders and peers during the war were far from clear in hindsight.
Thus, Shevelov and Petrov were touched by the shadow of collaboration (Roman Jakobson began boycotting Shevelov after learning details of his past from Soviet representatives). The Vlasov movement remains a history that is still interpreted in sharply divergent ways today. The Vlasovites were simultaneously enemies, “anti-communists,” and former Soviet citizens simply trying to escape the NKVD. Among them was Fedir Bohatyrchuk, a physician and chess master from Kyiv, whose works were published in Russia in the 2010s. He lived a long life and even met with Viktor Korchnoi.
Many Soviet scholars who found themselves in the West by the late 1940s contributed to the free world during the early Cold War—working for the Americans or Western intelligence agencies. Today, this history is often weaponized to categorize people as “pure” or “impure.” I’m reminded of the outstanding Ukrainian philologist Dmytro Chyzhevskyi, a friend of both Shevelov and Petrov. He spent most of the 1940s in Germany, only moving to the United States at the decade’s end to join Jakobson. While he presented himself as an anti-fascist—perhaps sincerely—he had worked at a university in the Third Reich.
How responsible were those who “simply kept working”? This is a question demanding an answer. Similar figures exist among natural scientists, often more prominent ones. Take Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky, the geneticist who bridged biology and physics. He remained in Germany during the 1930s (despite receiving offers to move to America), and his son—an anti-fascist—later perished in a concentration camp. Timofeev-Resovsky’s reputation in the USSR was tarnished. After 1945, he endured the sharashka system, labor camps, and ultimately worked for Soviet science. The history of science and culture intertwined with emigration, the USSR, and Germany is not black-and-white. It’s a web of difficult compromises. Some made conscious choices; others believed they were “going with the flow.” And certainly, these choices were not always free.
T-i: This web of difficult compromises is explored in detail in Natalia Supyan’s article “Serving a Criminal Regime”, which examines German science under Nazism.
AD: Thank you so much for mentioning that article. Years ago, I helped publish a translation of Fritz Ringer’s seminal—and still relevant—half-century-old book “The Decline of the German Mandarins“, which delves into the longstanding tradition of German academia’s service to the Reich and the state. It shows how German science sought to mitigate social contradictions and carve out a “truly German“ path between liberalism and “socialism,“ whether of the left or right. Back when I worked on that book, it never occurred to me that within just 10–15 years, these themes would become painfully relevant again. At the time, the 1940s seemed unequivocally black-and-white—where shadows and light were clearly distinct. Now, it’s obvious they weren’t.
I’m reminded of Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet and future Nobel laureate, who, even during Stalin’s lifetime, wrote his remarkable “The Captive Mind“—about how his fellow writers, brilliant, ironic, and sardonic, could at some point cross over into Stalinist faith. It happened to him, too, as he tried until 1949 to reconcile himself with the new regime, even to serve it. That book became my model for understanding not just poets but scientists as well. In the lab, you’re consumed by brains, tissues, formulas—lost in your work. But outside its walls, there’s a regime of coercion. Some even work with brain samples obtained in the bloodiest ways. Yet the scientist clings to the prospect of discovery. And that Faustian temptation—the allure of omnipotent science, of knowledge itself—is overpowering. It creates an illusion of detachment. This isn’t justification; it’s observation. The lessons of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War are vital. We’re still staring into the depths of the 20th century.
It seems crucial to remember not just 1945, but also 1914. The confrontation between Kaiser’s Germany and the Russian Empire—between liberalism and militarism, authoritarianism and modernization—all these conflicts were seeded back then. They were replayed during the Cold War. In science, too: science for the state, science for intelligence, science in sharashkas, science in emigration. Our great-grandfathers lived through all of this.
Take Vernadsky, for example. He worked extensively in Ukraine, left, returned. In 1936, already aware of what had happened to his friends, he wrote to his son: “The state gives me more than the old Tsarist regime did. Despite everything, the country is rebuilding itself.” These letters, uncovered in the 1990s by Marina Sorokina, were deeply instructive. Because this is the allure of evil—unrecognized, unseen as such. It’s not about malice. It’s about decisions and their motivations.
T-i: Back in the Third Reich, a myth took hold in scientific circles: “We were only doing fundamental science. We were victims. We were coerced. We didn’t serve the regime.”
AD: Yes, and that myth persisted for a long time, especially in the 1950s and ’60s. But in the 1990s, when previously inaccessible archives opened, it became clear that German scientists played a massive role in legitimizing Nazism.
i: Natalia Supyan’s article also noted that starting in 1935, all applicants for DFG grants (the precursor to today’s German Research Foundation) had to prove both their “Aryan” ancestry and political reliability. Over 600 scientists from universities across Germany actively contributed to “scientifically” justifying the idea of a “new European order” under the slogan “The world’s best soldier deserves the world’s best scientist.” Doesn’t this rhetoric echo today’s Russian talk of “import substitution” and “sovereign science”?
AD: Absolutely. In the early 1930s, Hitler promised: “We’ll become independent of imports, we’ll replace everything with our own resources.” The German Chemical Society collaborated closely with the Wehrmacht. The Reich’s chemists were on the payroll. Everything we hear now in Russia—about import substitution, “inner strength,” “sovereign technologies”—has terrifying historical rhymes, including with Stalin’s era.
T-i: Why do you think Germany clung to the notion that only mediocre scientists served Nazism, while “real science” was a “victim of the regime”?
AD: It was convenient. This myth was part of postwar denazification. Reputations had to be salvaged. But after the 1968 protests and the opening of archives, the truth emerged: science wasn’t a victim; it actively helped reshape society. The temptation was too great. The regime offered resources—grants, construction projects, labs. And this is the terrifying part. Because today, it’s happening again. Scientists get grants, new centers open, but in exchange, you must be loyal. You can no longer claim to be “just doing formulas.” “Pure science” becomes impossible…
Outside, the regime; inside, the theory
T-i: After 1945, Western occupiers classified German scientists into four groups: regime fanatics, conservatives, opportunists, and those who resisted internally but stayed. How universal is this typology? What does it tell us in the 2020s?
AD: These categories weren’t just academic—they helped Western authorities decide who could be rehabilitated. German scientists learned to perform these roles. Turns out, only a few percent were fanatics. The rest were ambiguous. Some resisted; others just survived. These classifications need rethinking, especially now. We face similar attempts to sort everything neatly, but history is messier. Being enchanted by 1913 Russia isn’t the same as planning the destruction of Eastern Europe. We must be careful. A historian or sociologist shouldn’t become just a prosecutor. That’s dangerous.
Take Martin Heidegger. In 1933, he became rector, joined the Nazi Party, then distanced himself. After the war, he was quietly reinstated. Meanwhile, Carl Schmitt, a jurist far more entangled with the Reich, was banned for life. The lines aren’t clear-cut.
When I was still teaching in Russia—after 2014—I would ask my students to imagine themselves as young French graduate students in 1945, tasked with evaluating Heidegger’s case. They’d read his speeches, his philosophical works, and then vote: should he be allowed back into academia? The results were always revealing. It was an ethical experiment. But now I realize: even as I posed that question to them, I hadn’t fully grasped the abyss we were peering into.
T-i: Nowadays, we’re seeing many texts about Germany in the 1930s–40s. Sometimes it’s an attempt to peer into a mirror—though there’s no guarantee we’ll like what we see.
AD: Yes, it’s a dark mirror. You might glimpse something utterly unexpected—and unsettling. One must be very careful with it. It’s painful. Philosophers would call it a subversive practice—one that shatters self-assurance. And it always leaves wounds.
T-i: In this regard, the fate of philosopher Karl Jaspers seems telling. He remained in Germany during the war, married to a Jewish woman, barred from teaching. After 1945, he returned to the university, expecting at least some apology, some remorse from his colleagues. He genuinely believed they’d been cowed, that they were merely surviving. But he realized they’d known—and stayed silent. The regime hadn’t forced them. They’d willingly upheld it. So he left Germany for Switzerland.
AD: Every scholarly community faces its “after.“ After dictatorship, after war, after regime. Everything then hinges on what colleagues say under new circumstances—who dredges up the past, and why. It’s a terrifying moment of truth.
T-i: Before the war, German science was the best in the world. And every scientist faced a choice: leave or stay. To leave meant losing access to institutions, funding, and their linguistic environment. To stay meant collaborating with the regime. A scientist isn’t a doctor or an entrepreneur—they can’t just be uprooted. Their labs, archives, colleagues—everything is tied to place. Then there’s the temptation of “inner emigration”: doing pure science while ignoring the surrounding reality. What did their experience show? Is that even possible? Or is it self-delusion?
AD: It’s not an easy question to answer. I’d suggest looking beyond Germany—to Spain, for example. They, too, had a civil war. People fled, losing their students and laboratories. In Madrid, bullet marks from 1936 are still visible on university walls—I’ve seen them myself on campus. That’s where the city’s defense line once stood. Then came 40 years of Franco’s regime. In Prague, at Charles University, portraits of professors expelled in 1949 and again in 1969 now hang—only possible after 1989. Every Eastern European country has gone through its own version of “purges” and “returns.” And all these processes were painful.
The Soviet Union, too, grappled with these questions. In the 1960s, Yulian Oksman—literary scholar, friend of Tynyanov, and associate of the Formalists—actively participated in the de-Stalinization of academia. He exposed informers, including prominent philologists like Yakov Elsberg (who, during the Thaw, paradoxically became a patron to younger scholars like Sergei Bocharov and Georgy Gachev). But the process was cut short. Oksman himself was punished for his ties abroad—to Gleb Struve and anti-Soviet émigrés. And this was during the relatively “vegetarian” 1960s.
By the 1990s, Russia and other post-Soviet states had yet to reckon with their past as thoroughly as Eastern Europe or the Baltics (though even there, not all “skeletons were pulled from the closet” at once). Still, elsewhere, archive openings and acknowledgments of crimes were more systematic, while in Russia, they remained selective.
We stand before a vast panorama—the reckoning with the past is far from over; perhaps it has only just begun. Fortunately, we now have valuable Russian-language scholarship on this theme, like Nikolai Epple’s work examining how Germany, Japan, and the U.S. confronted their historical legacies. But accountability in science unfolds differently. It’s rarely straightforward, especially for natural scientists. Take mathematicians or physicists. Their discipline operates like a spacesuit: outside, the regime; inside, theory—a sealed environment with its own temperature and pressure. At times, the seal seems nearly airtight. What of those who sought to preserve their departments, students, or labs? If you study math, chemistry, or ancient manuscripts, you might feel “outside” politics. Yet state grants flow in. Compromised colleagues surround you. Are you part of the system? There’s no simple answer.
Can such scientists continue collaborating with the global academic community? Or are they already ostracized? Where do we draw the line? What constitutes collaboration? This question didn’t emerge in 2022—it arose earlier, in 2014, with Crimea. Even in seemingly neutral fields like archaeology or art history, the dilemma persists. On one hand, there are clear red lines—actions that are indefensible. On the other, there remains (or at least should remain) a space for “pure science,” for intellectual pursuit untainted by politics. I want to believe this space exists, though many would disagree. But it must endure—if not as reality, then as an ideal we refuse to abandon.
That’s why I avoid rigid judgments—and justifications alike. I refuse to gaze piously at the ceiling and declare, “True science transcends politics.” No. What we see is a murky amalgam. And we must grapple with it. Historians of science, archivists, linguists, archaeologists, and cultural scholars are now forced to reinvent themselves. Many have severed decades-old ties with archives and departments. They’re searching for new frameworks, a new language.
T-i: Is there a figure in Russian scientific history that gives you hope? Or at least helps you glimpse a horizon?
AD: It may sound banal, but for me, it’s Andrei Sakharov. Yes, he was vilified, persecuted. Yet his office at the Lebedev Institute remained open. His nameplate stayed on the door. Sakharov Square near the burned ruins of the Academy of Sciences Library—where I spent so much time in the 1990s—still stands. (Let’s not forget: Kyiv’s Scientific Library also burned in May 1964.) Such places aren’t named by decree, but by conscience. They’re markers. Sakharov and his wife were exiled to Gorky, yet he was never expelled from the Academy. As long as even one person refuses to remove Sakharov’s nameplate, it’s not over.