Recent discourse around monuments venerating Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, such as the monuments in Edmonton and in Oakville, Ontario, is bringing new attention to Canada’s messy entanglement with a burgeoning Ukrainian nationalist movement that historians warn is whitewashing the crimes of Nazi collaborators.
Canada’s newly-minted Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who is widely rumoured to be the successor to an increasingly scandal-plagued Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has a familial connection. Her Ukrainian grandfather Michael Chomiak edited a pro-Nazi Ukrainian paper called Krakivski Visti in Krakow and then Vienna.
In a 2015 essay for the Brookings Institute entitled “My Ukraine,” Freeland writes, “My maternal grandparents fled western Ukraine after Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact in 1939. They never dared to go back, but they stayed in close touch with their brothers and sisters and their families, who remained behind.” But this is a highly oversimplified, airbrushed presentation of her grandparents’ history, one which she has repeatedly offered.
Chrystia Freeland is not responsible for the actions of her grandfather, but her continual praise of Chomiak is a microcosm of a broader whitewashing of the history of the movement to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state that often downplays Nazi collaboration.
This story isn’t so much about Freeland, or even Ukraine, but a larger tendency towards historical revisionism in the leadership of many eastern European diaspora communities, whose leadership refuse to accept responsibility for their national heroes’ dark pasts. (more...)
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