Abstract

Words are key elements in thinking, understanding and modeling past and future. Words can create artificial realities. And then artificial realities can have destructive effects for people and for their countries. The main focus of this article is searching of the correct discourse for describing and understanding of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. The main task of this article is to choose correct optics for understanding people’s behavior in the conditions of the occupation. Approach. Although extensive investigation of the WW2 was conducted by his-torians and although numerous post-war trials against the perpetrators took place in Europe and beyond, for a long time the history of ordinary people who lived under Nazi occupation did not play a significant role in the understanding of the national histories of the countries where the actual events took place. It might be one but not alone reason for European blindness in Russian-Ukrainian war. Europeans have seen the situation in Ukraine through the lenses of Russian propaganda but not through their own past, their own histories of occupations by Nazi’s troops. That is why our main approach is the comparative socio-anthropological analyze that is based on new historical narratives emerged that dealt with the behaviour and role of concrete perpetrators, groups of perpetrators, victims, resistors as well as so called ordinary members of society. Our documentary base are the Soviet laws, orders and regula-tions of the local authorities, materials of the criminal cases, occupational press, tes-timonies of eyewitnesses, oral histories.

Authors and Affiliations