Memorial Daze
Notions of injury or exclusion are often based on shifting cultural sensitivities and political pressures, rather than on any permanent, universal measure of good and evil.
After many delays, Canada’s Memorial to the Victims of Communism was officially opened at Wellington and Bay Streets in the nation’s capital on 12 December 2024. The memorial was originally meant to include a display of names honouring individuals who had fought against Soviet oppression, but it attracted controversy and protests when it emerged that some of the honourees might have fought for the Nazis during the Second World War. “At the time of the unveiling, there will be no names on the monument’s wall,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Canadian Heritage equivocated.
Like many other countries, Canada is home to a number of public buildings, plaques, and shrines marking tragic episodes from history. Of course, war memorials in big cities and small towns have long commemorated soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought and died in armed conflicts, but a crop of newer structures have arisen to recognise not warriors but victims. There’s a National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa and Holocaust museums in Toronto and Montreal; a Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre in British Columbia remembers the citizens of Japanese origin forcibly relocated during World War II; a Residential School Memorial in Saskatchewan preserves the memory of vulnerable Native children sent to state- or church-run institutions; the Africville National Historic Site in Halifax, Nova Scotia pays tribute to the province’s community of escaped American slaves and their descendants; and a planned “2SLGBTQ+” memorial in Ottawa will mark the career-ending discrimination once faced by Canada’s gay civil servants, military personnel, and others. The imposing Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba incorporates all these histories and more under a single, environmentally sustainable roof.
The Memorial to the Victims of Communism was first proposed by an earlier national government in consultation with Tribute to Liberty, a private group that includes Ukrainian, Polish, Korean, Latvian, and Vietnamese Canadian members. They no doubt looked to international examples for inspiration, such as the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington DC, and other cenotaphs in Eastern Europe. More compelling, obviously, was the evidence of communist atrocities that finally became irrefutable upon the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes. These crimes were catalogued in works like 1997’s essay collection The Black Book of Communism and 1986’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest, which opened with the grim sentence, “[I]n the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”
But like others before them, the sponsors of Canada’s Memorial to the Victims of Communism have found that history is messy. Just as statues of long-dead prime ministers have been re-evaluated—and, in some places, dismantled—when the achievements they celebrate come under present-day critical scrutiny, so various local commemorations of victimhood are now subject to similar consideration. There is certainly widespread consensus that communist policies during the 20th century led to the deaths of tens of millions under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and their emulators: people starved on farms, were executed in prisons, massacred in killing fields, and left to die in gulags. Surely their suffering, and the courage of those who resisted, should never be forgotten? The problem is that some of these men and women resisted communism in the name of an ideology that was itself culpable in a separate swath of brutality that tallied up its own hecatombs.
This kind of historical complication can cause mortifying international embarrassment, as when the Canadian parliament extended a warm welcome to the elderly Ukrainian Canadian Yaroslav Hunka in 2023. Too late, it dawned on the applauding legislators that Hunka and other Ukrainian “heroes” who fought Russian invaders in the early 1940s had a different agenda (and answered to a different authority) than Ukrainians fighting Russian invaders eighty years later. Hunka, it turned out, had worn the uniform of the 14th SS Galician unit, a force comprised of Ukrainian volunteers and linked with war crimes on the Eastern Front.
Other Ukrainian names were to be inscribed on the new memorial before cursory research found that they too had taken the Germans’ side when the Wehrmacht swept through—and were sometimes welcomed as liberators in—the USSR. Even now, as Canada continues to support Ukrainian opposition to Vladimir Putin, an unredacted 1986 investigation of possible Ukrainian war criminals now living in Canada is still withheld by the government’s Library and Archives Canada, on the grounds that the revelations might become propaganda fodder for Putin today. Sometimes, one man’s heroic anti-communist is another’s Nazi stooge, and one man’s victim is another’s villain.
Steven D. Hales
The uncomfortable implications don’t end there. Ottawa’s National Holocaust Monument, adjacent to the National War Museum, commemorates the millions murdered by Adolf Hitler’s regime between 1933 and 1945. Is it tactless to note that the trainloads of ordinary people slaughtered by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa likely included some Soviet commissars who had been carrying out orders for Joseph Stalin? Just as the nearby Memorial to the Victims of Communism might inadvertently celebrate a handful of fascists, might the Holocaust Monument inadvertently celebrate a handful of communists? Given the horrific toll of totalitarianism back and forth across Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Russia through the middle decades of the last century (a history of which is supplied by Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands), it’s probable that at least a few casualties of genocide were also, at some level, perpetrators of it.
Consider, too, Canada’s Mackenzie-Papineau battalion of 1937–39, the volunteers of which joined the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Republican forces in opposition to the Mussolini- and Hitler-backed Loyalists. But the Republicans were backed by the USSR, and with the fluctuating alliances of World War II and the Cold War, the Mac-Paps were subsequently denounced as “premature anti-fascists” by anti-communist authorities. Indirectly fighting against Hitler was fine, but indirectly fighting for Stalin was not. They were on the right side, but at the wrong time. Is the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion monument in Ottawa likewise tarnished?
In September 2024, Canadian MP Leah Gazan of the left-leaning New Democratic Party introduced a private member’s bill that would make it illegal to “downplay” the experience of Indigenous students in Canadian Native residential schools, after her earlier parliamentary motion to recognise residential schools as a form of genocide was passed in 2023. Even if we grant the highly dubious proposition that the residential-school system constituted a genocidal policy, the verified number of Native pupils who died or were abused under the program is dwarfed by the numbers of Jews exterminated at Auschwitz, the Ukrainians who perished during the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, the Chinese lost to Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the African populations decimated by slavery, and so on down through the ages. Yet under Gazan’s proposed law, pointing out these disparities—noticing that the residential-school “genocide” was significantly less catastrophic than others—might be a crime.
At issue is not just the final design of one particular installation, but our broader understanding of memory and victimhood. If the trend of erecting solemn edifices to acknowledge past episodes of cruelty or injustice is taken to its logical conclusion, Ottawa might one day put up memorials to the Victims of Capitalism (countless exploited workers and consumers), Victims of Colonialism (countless displaced or immiserated people in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas), Victims of Islamophobia (scores of Canadian Muslims harassed, assaulted, or even killed for their faith), Victims of Size-ism (ignored or insulted overweight people), Victims of Sexism (half the human race), and numerous other groups with claims to have once been, in some way, hurt or excluded for being who they are.
The trouble is that notions of injury or exclusion are often based on shifting cultural sensitivities and political pressures, rather than on any permanent, universal measure of good and evil. It’s not that the injury and exclusion didn’t happen; it’s that the mandated observances—like, for instance, Canada’s ubiquitous aboriginal land acknowledgements recited before lectures, performances, and other public events—eventually become rote gestures that people parrot out of obligation (or fear of appearing bigoted if they don’t) rather than sincere occasions of mourning or reflection. Over them all hovers a suspicion that the observance or acknowledgment represents not historical awareness but vote-grubbing, meant less to enlighten than to court some ethnic or partisan constituency. As chronicled events, the horrors of the Holocaust and communism are indeed staggering. As routine destinations for school field-trips or flattering backgrounds for politicians’ photo ops, monuments and memorials to events that occurred in other continents aren’t nearly as meaningful.
Sometimes people who were victimised in one way turn out themselves to have been victimisers in another, leaving us to balance two or more lobbies in a theoretical competition of suffering. While a higher score of historic loss can earn a higher reward of contemporary moral or financial credit, there are crucial asterisks: Africans, Asians, and aboriginals who suffered under white racism may well have rigidly enforced female subservience to males. Gay enclaves subject to homophobic laws and customs may have traded racist jokes and stereotypes. Married women denied the rights to vote or own property may have regarded lesbians as criminal deviants. Some Jews persecuted by Nazis may have been committed communists. Some Ukrainians persecuted by the Soviets may well have been vicious antisemites.
Few people who have ever lived were totally innocent or totally guilty. Most of us may qualify for victim status, but most of us would also get points deducted for the transgressions we have committed. With the formal opening of Canada’s Memorial to the Victims of Communism, we’ll be repeating the standard injunctions to “never forget.” But, now that the inevitable complexities have emerged and the inevitable backlash has ensued, we might begin the process of asking if there are better ways to remember.
