Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

The book most relevant to the concerns of this monograph is Prus’s Holocaust po banderowsku (Holocaust Banderite-Style), published in 1995. Among much else, the book included an account of a meeting Prus claimed he had in London with Karl Popper, whom he described as “undoubtedly one of the most outstanding Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.” According to Prus, Popper called him, i.e., Prus, “the most outstanding expert in this area [the history of UPA] in Poland, and not only in Poland.” Also, Popper supposedly expressed amazement that the president of Ukraine at that time, Leonid Kravchuk, had not condemned the murders perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists against Jews and Poles. “And he warned the Jews that they should stop playing together with Ukrainian nationalists at the expense of the Poles, because this fraternization with criminals under the flag of totalitarianism is a blind alley, a road to nowhere.”115 To me, this account sounds like a fantasy or at least a hearty embellishment. (Popper passed away shortly before Holocaust po banderowsku was published.)

I think there was also a strong dose of fantasy in the “evidence” he brought to bear. Much of what he had to say was based on personal communications in his possession and was therefore unverifiable. Sometimes he gave proper citations for material he quoted, but in other cases he offered no citations whatsoever. For example, Holocaust po banderowsku contained a long quotation very relevant to the theme of this study attributed to Mykhailo Stepaniak, a member of the central OUN leadership captured by the Soviets; the quotation concerned the Third Extraordinary Assembly of OUN (August 1943).116 Prus offered no citation, although presumably the text would have been taken from the record of one of Stepaniak’s interrogations. I have not, however, been able to find the passage Prus quoted in the archival record of Stepaniak’s interrogation of 25 August 1944117 nor in published versions of his interrogations.118 Moreover, the quoted passage refers to the presence of Ivan Mitrynga at the congress, which seems highly unlikely, given that Mitrynga had broken with the Banderites in September 1941 and had joined forces with their rival Taras Bulba-Borovets. I suspect that the passage was the product of a vivid imagination rather than an excerpt from a genuinely existing document.

Moreover, he wrote in a style that had more in common with biblical prophecy than with historical scholarship. Referring to Stella Krenzbach, an alleged Jewish veteran of UPA to whom is attributed a memoir praising the Ukrainian nationalists,119 Prus stated that she acted “undoubtedly from a whisper from Satan, because Satan directed the hand of the genocidaire of Polish and Jewish children,” and that she was guilty of “blaspheming against Yahweh.”120 He also speculated that the apocalypse predicted by St. John the Revelator was not a once and final confrontation between good and evil but would be arriving in installments, one of which was the era of UPA. It was a time “of three clearly apocalyptic figures, as Hitler, Stalin, and [UPA commander Roman] Shukhevych-’Chuprynka,’ and of three hells let loose in the cause of and with the active permission of those who supported them: Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Ukrainian chauvinists.”121 In sum, Prus’s texts are untrustworthy and will not be cited in the narrative that follows. To equate Polishchuk with him is, I feel, a serious error.

A Conceptual Turn: Jan Gross’s Neighbors

The publication of Jan Gross’s short but explosive book Neighbors in 2000-01122 transformed the historiography of the Holocaust as it transpired in Eastern Europe, including in Ukraine. The book described vividly, graphically how Poles in Jedwabne murdered the town’s Jewish inhabitants in July 1941. It generated immense commentary and controversy, but the primary matters of contention (the number of victims and the presence or absence of Germans) have little bearing on how it affected historiography. There were three aspects of Neighbors that were revolutionary, even if they were not without some antecedents. The first was the focus on non-German participation in the extermination of the Jewish population. One might say that this turned the spotlight on the “microbiota” of the world war and the Holocaust, that is, on non-state actors following their own agendas, which sometimes involved the murder of Jews. In particular, Gross directed attention to the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union but before the German leadership made the decision to kill all of European Jewry. One result of Gross’s work was that in the early twenty-first century a large literature on the pogroms and related anti-Jewish violence in Western Ukraine appeared.123 Particularly noteworthy was Kai Struve’s detailed historical account of the violence across Galicia, which brought many new sources to bear and revealed the important role of German actors in the pogroms, especially the soldiers of Waffen-SS Wiking.124 The interest in the pogroms also led to renewed research on one of their contextual factors, the mass murder of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD, which occurred at different sites in western areas of Ukraine between the launch of the German invasion and the evacuation of Soviet forces.125

The second way in which Gross’s little volume was revolutionary was that it placed the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe firmly within East European studies. Gross was an East Europeanist. Until Neighbors he was best known for two studies of Polish territories under German and Soviet occupation. He knew the languages, historical context, social relations, and culture of Poland before he embarked on his studies of the Holocaust and postwar antisemitism. He had earned his doctorate at Yale in 1975, and his book on Polish society under German occupation appeared four years later. He had behind him a quarter century of publications on Polish sociology and modern history before he published Neighbors. He had not dealt with the Holocaust in his earlier work, and when he finally came to that theme he brought a wealth of training and scholarly experience to it. Until Neighbors, East European studies and Holocaust studies had been on separate tracks. Friedman and Spector were Holocaust specialists; they came from Eastern Europe and so knew the languages and cultures, but their scholarly interests did not extend beyond Jewish history. Armstrong was an East Europeanist, but he avoided dealing with the Holocaust. Hilberg wrote his great work without much knowledge of Eastern Europe and sometimes operated with stereotypes.126 After Neighbors a number of persons trained in East European studies undertook work on the Holocaust. Aside from myself, examples include Kai Struve, who wrote an excellent study of peasant and nation in late nineteenth-century Galicia before he turned to an examination of the pogroms of 1941, and Per Anders Rudling, whose doctoral dissertation concerned the development of Belarusian nationalism but who has also worked on OUN-UPA and the Holocaust. What had occurred as a result of Gross’s intervention was that the Holocaust in Eastern Europe had begun to be treated as a part of East European history. One could no longer just parachute intellectually into an East European locality and follow what the Germans did there—one had to have deeper contextual knowledge. In 1992 Christopher Browning published his pathbreaking study of Holocaust perpetrators, Ordinary Men. It followed a German reserve police battalion as it murdered its way through Poland but did not cite any sources in Polish. No scholar in the West in the 1990s thought this unusual. But when, at the end of the 1990s, Omer Bartov decided to write a history of interethnic relations and the Holocaust in the small Galician town of Buchach, the demands of scholarship were different. The immersion in the languages and cultures and physical space of Galicia required a large investment of time. In the end, it took this prolific author two decades to write his microhistory, Anatomy of a Genocide.

The third revolutionary feature of Gross’s book was that it reintegrated victims’ testimony into mainstream Holocaust scholarship, after decades of marginalization. His particular views on survivors’ testimony will be discussed in the next chapter, on sources, but the overall point is that he demonstrated the crucial importance of moving beyond what perpetrators had to say and listening also to the victims. Christopher Browning exemplifies the change of attitude. When he wrote Ordinary Men back in the early 1990s, he did not use any testimonies or other first-person documents other than those of the perpetrators, except to establish chronology.127 But in the twenty-first century he has become an advocate of reintegrating victim narratives into Holocaust studies. In a lecture he delivered at the USC Shoah Foundation in March 2018, he said:

Using survivor testimony has difficulties....It is problematic evidence. But all historical evidence is problematic in one way or another. Anybody who relies on uncomplicated evidence isn’t going to be able to write history. But the issue is not do we use it, but how do we use it. To not use survivor memories is to lose whole areas of the Holocaust that we have no other set of evidence for.128

The present monograph comes out of the post-Neighbors consensus: it examines non-German perpetrators, it proceeds from immersion in regional history and culture, and it makes copious use of testimonies and related ego documents. This is now becoming, at least in the West, the main stream of scholarship on the Holocaust in Ukraine and is represented by many, and diverse, practitioners, including Tarik Cyril Amar, Omer Bartov, Delphine Bechtel, Franziska Bruder, Jeffrey Burds, Marco Carynnyk, Simon Geissbühler, Taras Kurylo, Jared McBride, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe,129 Per Anders Rudling, and Kai Struve. Scholars sharing the same consensus have also been studying the Holocaust on territories adjacent to Ukraine, notably Diana Dumitru, Jan Grabowski, and Vladimir Solonari. A few other traits of this scholarly trend need to be mentioned. One is that it is in constant dialogue with Western scholarship on the Holocaust as well as with the historiography on twentieth-century Ukraine—in Western academia, the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Ukraine itself. The main languages of its publications are English and German, but many of its texts have been translated into Ukrainian as well as Polish and Russian. The representatives of this historiographical tendency are critical of both the nationalists and their interpretation of the past.

Close to the group described above are other Western historians who have made important contributions to the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Wendy Lower has written on German perpetrators, co-edited a collective monograph on the Shoah in Ukraine as well as edited an English translation of one of the few diaries of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust in Galicia; she has also written on the bloody summer of 1941 in Ukraine. Vladimir Melamed, originally from Lviv and the author of a Russian-language history of Lviv’s Jewish community, has written an original study of Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust based on the oral histories collected by the USC Shoah Foundation. Frank Golczewski has published a number of important studies that relate to OUN and to the Holocaust in Ukraine.

In the past few decades Polish historiography on OUN and UPA has been extensive and has been mainly concerned, of course, with the nationalists’ slaughter of the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943-44. One of the most important Polish historians working in this area is Grzegorz Motyka. His major study Ukraińska partyzantka (The Ukrainian Partisan Movement) contains a chapter on UPA and the Holocaust, but like Dieter Pohl a decade earlier he was unable to arrive at clear conclusions.

Contemporary Polish historiography remains divided over the scholarly contributions of Jan Gross. Neighbors has had, and continues to have, a controversial reception in Poland. Some prominent Polish historians and intellectuals reject Gross’s work,130 but mostly in consideration of what it says or implies about Polish society. Worth singling out is Bogdan Musial’s “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen,” an informative study of the violence—Soviet, Nazi, and Ukrainian nationalist—in the summer of 1941. It originally appeared in August 2000 and was less antagonistic to Gross’s scholarship than Musial’s later texts and those of other Polish historians in his camp (such as Marek Jan Chodakiewicz). But “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen” has been criticized by Western scholars for exaggerating the role of Jews in the Soviet apparatus in Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine in 1939-41 and thus implying a certain justification for the pogroms that broke out in the wake of the German invasion.131

The Rehabilitation of OUN and UPA in Ukraine

An even more important division has been created by the recrudescence of a pro-OUN historiography, this time in Ukraine rather than in the diaspora. It is a historiography that takes little notice of Western scholarship, except occasionally as an irritant. It also neglects or rejects the use of contemporary testimony by persons of non-Ukrainian ethnicity, particularly Poles and Jews. It does not conceal its political purpose, the exposition of a heroic national myth. Although it is not without genuine achievements, from the point of view of historical scholarship it is a historiographical silo.

As mentioned earlier, in the 1990s, as a response to calls to rehabilitate OUN-UPA as well as to protests of Red Army veterans and others against such rehabilitation, the Ukrainian parliament looked to Ukraine’s historians to investigate the historical role of the nationalists and to provide information on which a decision could be based. In 1997 a working group was set up, headed by Stanislav Kulchytsky. In the mid-1980s Kulchytsky had been part of a Soviet Ukrainian commission to refute allegations that there had been a manmade famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. Later, when Ukraine became independent, and especially when President Viktor Yushchenko (2005-10) made the famine, the “Holodomor,” a central component of his historical and identity politics, Kulchytsky changed his views and became the chief historian of the famine and a strong proponent of the idea that the Holodomor was a genocide.132

The working group produced two key texts in 2000-05 that were meant to clarify the history of OUN and UPA and provide expert guidance on the evaluation of the nationalists.133 The first of these texts, Problema OUN-UPA, was produced in 2000 and intended as a preliminary outline of the issues.134 A not unsimilar document was produced in 2005, which bore the subtitle “expert conclusion” (fakhovyi vysnovok) but actually made no overt recommendations.135 In addition to these more programmatic documents, the working group published a collective monograph on the history of OUN and UPA.136 Much of the text of the two shorter, programmatic publications was drawn word for word from the collective monograph. The collective monograph in turn was drawn from more extensive studies by working-group members that preceded the collective monograph. Particularly useful for this book were the substantive treatments of OUN and UPA by Anatolii Kentii and Ivan Patryliak. Although the oeuvre of members of the working group tended to have a generally positive attitude toward the nationalists and played down their dark sides, it harvested much rich material from post-Soviet Ukrainian archives.

The working group did not explicitly call for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA, but that was clearly the direction in which their endeavors pointed. They were academics drafted to provide historical answers to a political question that has divided Ukrainian public discourse ever since it became possible to freely discuss the nationalist heritage. Their work had nothing at all to say about antisemitism as a component of OUN ideology or about OUN-UPA participation in the Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust itself is scarcely mentioned in their texts, although these texts all focus on World War II and on Ukraine, where a million and a half Jewish people were murdered. This omission can partly be explained by the working group’s overall tendency to whitewash the nationalists’ record. For example, it treated UPA’s mass murder of the Polish population as a tragedy rather than a crime. It saw both Poles and Ukrainian nationalists as culpable in the violence, denying that the mass murder had anything to do with a nationalist ethnic cleansing project.137

But perhaps at least equally important was another factor, namely the terms of the political debate into which the historians were asked to intervene. The “expert conclusion” divided the parties privy to the dispute into “adherents to and opponents of the nationalists, veterans of OUN and the CPSU, of UPA and the Soviet army.”138 European norms, including European concerns about the Holocaust, were absent from the context. The working group was responding to the critique of the nationalists developed by the Soviets, who were not concerned with the Holocaust at all, nor with antisemitism, nor even—considering Stalinism’s own record—with mass murder and ethnic cleansing. The working group was simply not thinking in a wider context. Most of the members of the working group were themselves products of the Soviet educational system and socialization. Kulchytsky and Kentii, perhaps the most influential individuals within the group, were both born in 1937. Four other historians who contributed to the collective monograph were born between 1955 and 1967, and thus were products of the Soviet higher educational system (Volodymyr Dziobak, Ihor Iliushyn, Heorhii Kasianov, Oleksandr Lysenko). The only member whose formative period was post-Soviet was Patryliak, who was born in 1976. Thus, the questions with which the working group wrestled were mainly those previosuly posed within Soviet discourse. As a result, issues of treason to the motherland and collaboration with the enemy were much more important for them at that time than whether OUN and UPA participated in the destruction of Ukraine’s Jewish population.

Political developments in Ukraine affirmed the working group’s attitude to OUN and UPA. The Orange Revolution of November 2004 brought Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency of Ukraine. He bestowed the honorific title “Heroes of Ukraine” upon both Roman Shukhevych, the commander of UPA, and Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most important faction of OUN. As he was leaving office in 2010, Yushchenko urged Ukrainians to name streets and public places after the heroes of OUN-UPA.139 His successor as president, Viktor Yanukovych, rolled back the cult of OUN, but it returned with new energy after the Euromaidan in 2014.140

The working group was based in the Institute of the History of Ukraine in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. Another, younger group of historians, based in the academy’s Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Lviv, embraced OUN and UPA even more forthrightly. The leader of the Lviv group was Volodymyr Viatrovych, who was just twenty-five when he founded the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement in 2002. Viatrovych remained director of the Center until 2008 when he was appointed head of the archive section of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, established by President Yushchenko. Shortly thereafter Viatrovych was also appointed head of the SBU archives. He became even more influential after the Euromaidan and headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory from 2014 to 2019. He consistently promoted the cult of OUN and UPA, downplaying their wartime crimes.141 He and his associate Ruslan Zabily, who directs the pro-OUN Lontsky prison museum in Lviv,142 have excellent connections with the Ukrainian diaspora in North America. They have spoken a number of times at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; both of these institutes have partnerships with the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement.143

Of the publications of the Lviv group, the most relevant to our topic is Viatrovych’s book on OUN’s attitude toward Jews, which came out in 2006.144 It sought to exonerate OUN and UPA from accusations of antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust, but it had serious flaws as a scholarly monograph. It handled sources in a one-sided manner, rejecting the authenticity or relevance of those that confirmed OUN’s hostility to Jews while accepting as valid a fabricated memoir by an alleged Jewish member of UPA.145 The latter was the only alleged Jewish survivor testimony that the book cited. It cited no sources or scholarly literature in German or English, nor did it take into account contextual or comparative factors that would have helped illuminate the issues. Also, it was apparent that Viatrovych could not recognize antisemitism when it appeared in OUN texts.146 Viatrovych’s book did, however, contribute to initiating a larger discussion about OUN and the Jews, and it published as an appendix two OUN texts on the subject.

Other historians working within a generally nationalist paradigm were more careful scholars than Viatrovych. In particular, Andrii Bolianovsky, also based in Lviv, published a number of useful, well researched articles on Galicia under German occupation and—most important—two detailed monographs on Ukrainian military and police units in German service.147 Moreover, other Lviv-based historians have written quite critically of OUN, including Marta Havryshko, who has published on the situation of women in UPA, and the prominent historians, essayists, and bloggers Yaroslav Hrytsak148 and Vasyl Rasevych.149 Oleksandr Zaitsev, at this writing head of the history department at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, has done particularly valuable work on OUN prior to 1941, including a detailed survey of integral nationalist ideology150 and the publication of a text by a leading member of OUN advocating the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine.151

At present, some of the best researched and frankest discussion of OUN and Holocaust perpetration is being conducted in Ukraine by scholars younger than all the other Ukrainian scholars mentioned so far. An outstanding figure is Yuri Radchenko of Kharkiv, who knows all the languages necessary for Holocaust research, not only Slavic and Western languages but Hebrew and Yiddish as well. He has researched the Holocaust in Kharkiv and the Donbas and the memory politics surrounding the nationalists and their collaboration in the Holocaust, and he has broken new ground by working on the Melnyk wing of OUN in relation to the Holocaust.152 Other younger, up-and-coming scholars are doing exciting work too, though much of what they have discovered has so far been presented only in unpublished papers. Andrii Usach started his scholarly career in the pro-OUN Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement in Lviv, but left that organization and now is assembling the most intimate portraits yet of Ukrainian Holocaust perpetrators.153 Roman Shliakhtych of Kryvyi Rih has also been working on local perpetrators, particularly Ukrainian policemen in German service.154 These excellent young historians—and I am sure there are more of whom I am unaware—are certain to redefine the contours of Ukrainian historiography on OUN and UPA and their relation to the Holocaust. But it is not just young historians who are making breakthroughs. Two older historians from Ternopil, Oleh Klymenko and Serhii Tkachov, have done tremendous work in the archives of their city, producing two detailed monographs on the Ukrainian police in the Ternopil and Kremenets regions; both monographs treat both police involvement in the Holocaust and OUN involvement with the police in an open and balanced manner.

Finally, it is necessary to mention that the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA attracted criticism from political circles in Ukraine that took a more positive view of Russia and the Soviet past, notably the former Party of Regions. One of that party’s deputies to the Ukrainian parliament, Vadym Kolesnichenko, proposed a law in May 2013 to ban the glorification and rehabilitation of the nationalists, whom he identified as fascists and Nazis.155 Kolesnichenko and his “International Antifascist Front” contributed nothing to the scholarship on OUN and UPA, but in 2012 and 2013 they published Russian and Ukrainian translations of articles written by Western historians John-Paul Himka (i.e., this author), Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Per Anders Rudling, and Timothy Snyder. None of these scholars had agreed to have their articles published by Kolesnichenko and had in fact specifically declined to be published by him.156 This was a clear case of the political instrumentalization of critical scholarship on the Ukrainian nationalists.

Russian propaganda has also instrumentalized the scholarship of what I have termed the post-Neighbors consensus. Even before, but particularly since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, seized Crimea, and began a hybrid war in the eastern Donbas, the Russian state under Putin has tried to link contemporary Ukrainian aspirations for independence from Russian tutelage with fascism. Yet serious scholarly monographs relevant to our theme have appeared in Russia within the framework of Russian historical politics, notably Aleksandr Diukov’s study of OUN’s attitude to Jews, its “second-rank enemy,”157 and Aleksei Bakanov’s more nuanced study of the national question in OUN ideology.158

1 Friedman, Die galizischen Juden.

2 Aleksiun, “Invisible Web.” Aleksiun, “Philip Friedman.”

3 I have used the second, expanded edition of 1947 (Friedman, Zagłada) as well as the English translation of the 1956 Hebrew version (Friedman, “Destruction”).

4 He noted correctly at one point that the Ukrainian militia was disbanded “and in its place was organized the Ukrainian auxiliary police under German direction,” but otherwise used the terms militia and auxiliary police interchangeably. Quotation from Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181.

5 Friedman, Zagłada, 7.

6 Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181.

7 “In letters exchanged with fellow Jewish historians, Friedman expressed particular interest in exploring the attitudes of the Ukrainian leadership and military organisations, especially The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, UPA) and their collaboration in the mass murder of the Jews.” Aleksiun, “Invisible Web,” 158. Aleksiun specifically cites a letter of Friedman to Szymon Datner, 30 April 1958.

8 Ibid., 152.

9 Hilberg, Destruction, xiii (quotation from the preface to the revised edition, written in 1984). “Neumann said yes [to Hilberg’s proposal to write a dissertation on “The Destruction of the European Jews”], but he knew that at this moment I was separating myself from the mainstream of academic research to tread in territory that had been avoided by the academic world and the public alike. What he said to me in three words was, ‘It’s your funeral.’“ Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 66.

10 They formed the basis for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

11 For example, Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance, and Krakowski, War of the Doomed.

12 Trunk, Judenrat.

13 “In fact the behavior of the population during the killing operations was characterized by a tendency toward passivity. This inertness was the product of conflicting emotions and opposing restraints. The Slavs had no particular liking for their Jewish neighbors, and they felt no overpowering urge to help the Jews in their hour of need. In so far as there were such inclinations, they were effectively curbed by fear of reprisals from the Germans.” Hilberg, Destruction, 316.

14 Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 110.

15 Hilberg, Destruction, 312 n. 79.

16 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 4-5.

17 Ibid., 233-38.

18 Weiss, “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations.” I should disclose that in 1983 I thought quite differently and accused Weiss of a “nationalist view of history.” “Roundtable,” 493.

19 His very moving story is captured in an excellent documentary by Sarah Farhat and Olha Onyshko, Three Stories of Galicia (2010).

20 Weiss, “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” 413.

21 Weiss presented his paper at the conference on Ukrainian-Jewish relations held at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, from 17 to 20 October 1983. It is not recorded in the proceedings of that conference (Potichnyj and Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations), but I recall a dramatic moment when Weiss was challenged by a man who claimed to have served in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and denied that the police had been involved in anti-Jewish actions during the war. Weiss countered by reading aloud from authentic police documents in the Ukrainian language that recorded how many Jews policemen had killed during an action.

22 See below, 431.

23 Weiss, “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” 418.

24 Yones, Evrei L’vova. Other translations I consulted: Yones, Smoke in the Sand; Yones, Die Strasse nach Lemberg; Yones, Die Juden in Lemberg. In some earlier writings, I mistakenly stated that Yones first wrote and published his book in the 1950s.

25 He also mistakenly identified Taras Bulba-Borovets as an OUN leader. Yones, Evrei L’vova, 383 n. 6.