Chrystia Freeland isn’t her grandfather
Russia milks a complicated truth for its own purposes, Paula Simons says.
Was Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather a Nazi collaborator?
If so, does that undercut her moral authority as one of Canada’s most senior politicians?
Or are we all being manipulated by Russia’s propaganda machine?
Those seem like crazy questions. But Freeland is under a microscope in the wake of efforts by Russian-linked bloggers to tie her to her deceased grandfather’s past as the editor of a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper, published in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War.
Freeland initially dismissed the reports as Russian propaganda. But this week, she was under new scrutiny with Canadian papers picking up the story and commentators complaining she’d been less than forthcoming.
Mykhailo Khomiak, or Michael Chomiak, to use his Anglicized name, was Freeland’s grandfather and spent his postwar years in Alberta. Before the war, he was a young journalist in Lviv. Today, it’s a city in western Ukraine. But in the 1920s, it was a part of Poland. Chomiak was a reporter for a Ukrainian-language Lviv newspaper called Dilo, or Deed.
“It was one of the most famous Ukrainian newspapers,” says Ernest Gyidel, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, who is studying this period. “It was quite a high intellectual product. But Chomiak was not an intellectual. He never wrote anything that was like political analysis. He was a journalist who just reported the facts.”
In 1939, the Nazi Germans and the Soviet Russians marched on Poland and split the country between themselves. Lviv fell to the Soviets. Much of the staff of Dilo fled Lviv for Krakow, in the German zone of occupation. There, they were encouraged by the nationalist Ukrainian Central Committee to start a Ukrainian-language paper, the News of Krakow, or Krakivski Visti. The Germans gave them printing presses, confiscated from a Jewish-owned paper. And soon Chomiak found himself named chief editor — even though, says Gyidel, Chomiak protested he didn’t want the job.
“Calling him chief editor is a bit of a misnomer. He managed the technical aspects of the paper — the printing, the type set, the distribution, the logistics. Throughout the whole of the war, he never wrote a single article,” said Gyidel.
As part of his dissertation research, Gyidel is analyzing the paper’s articles. About 25 per cent, he says, were Nazi propaganda — anti-Semitic, but also anti-Polish and antiRussian.
“The Germans wanted to put the occupied population through a school of hate, so that the Poles and Ukrainians would never unite against them. And of course, they published anti-Semitic articles, as all the press did under German occupation.”
Yet the paper, he argues, also published important articles about culture and language and philosophy.
Nothing he’s found in Chomiak’s letters or articles expressed pro-Nazi or antiSemitic views. But, he says, Chomiak made the choice to continuing working at the paper.
“He was in no way an intellectual collaborator. But you could definitely see him as a situational collaborator.”
Plenty of Ukrainian nationalists, who loathed Stalin, were happy to collaborate on the false assumption that cooperating with Hitler would somehow win them their own country.
Chomiak may have been naive. Or a coward. Or an amoral pragmatist. He may even have been, as some in his family have suggested (albeit without much evidence), a secret part of the anti-Nazi resistance, printing false papers for the Polish underground. Just labelling him a collaborator oversimplifies a horrifically complicated time. But it certainly suits Vladimir Putin and his allies now to insinuate that Freeland’s credibility is tainted by her grandfather’s past.
Freeland might have been clearer about his complicated legacy.
But Chomiak isn’t our foreign minister. Freeland is. And she’s smart, articulate and a potent critic of Putin, so potent she’s banned from Russia. Let’s judge her on her merit — not what her grandfather did, or didn’t, do.