Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited a prison-turned-museum during his recent trip to Ukraine that, according to some historians, highlights atrocities committed by Soviet and German occupiers while ignoring those perpetrated by Ukrainians against Jews.

Harper toured the "Prison at Lonsky" museum -- dedicated to those detained and killed at the infamous prison in Lviv -- with director Ruslan Zabily in a gesture intended to send a message to Ukraine's increasingly authoritarian government under pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych's security service agents arrested Zabily in September and interrogated him extensively, allegedly for giving state secrets -- that is, archival records -- to foreigners.

Though he was released soon after, Zabily's case has become a rallying call among many global academics who have signed a petition condemning the attack on academic freedom.

"It is important that the terrible things here not be forgotten or repeated," Harper wrote in the museum's guest book.

While some historians praise Harper for defending academic freedom, they said the museum gave him an incomplete impression of events that took place there in 1941.

They are referring specifically to the beating, humiliation and murder of Jews in Lviv by Ukrainians -- with Nazi encouragement -- in the days after the Soviets were routed by Hitler's forces in the early summer of 1941. The Jews were also forced to exhume and to clean the mutilated, decomposing bodies in the prison.

"Visits such as Harper's make sense only if they confront the full truth of the past rather than half-truths and half-lies," said Brown University historian Omer Bartov, author of Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine.

"I am sure Harper had no idea that he was given only the half of the story that shows Ukrainians as victims, but not the half in which they were participating in the victimization of their Jewish neighbours."

Harper is being misled by leaders of the politically influential Ukrainian-Canadian groups and his "ethnic vote-handlers," according to University of Alberta historian John-Paul Himka, author of Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories.

Himka said the recent surge in political support for the far-right, anti-Semitic Svoboda party in Western Ukraine is perpetuated when nationalists present a "one-sided" version of Ukraine's history.

The Prison at Lonsky museum was established last year under former president Viktor Yushchenko. According to a statement from Harper's office, it is dedicated to the "memory of those detained and killed there during the Soviet and Nazi occupations during and after" the Second World War.

The statement also said 1,700 detainees were executed by the Soviet Secret Police in June 1941, just before they fled the Nazi offensive.

German scholar Kai Struve, who visited the museum last year, said the Soviet massacre of prisoners was a "horrible crime" that must be acknowledged and remembered. "But if it is done in such a one-sided, selective way, it does not do a good service even to the Ukrainian victims of this crime," he said in an email.

A number of academics, including Struve and Himka, have compiled evidence they said points to a "central role" by a militia organized by anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist fighters during the massacre in Lviv.

A Harper spokesman would only refer back to the original statement issued by his office when asked to comment on the criticisms.

Such criticism are vehemently rejected by Paul Grod, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, who instead cited arguments previously made by Askold Lozynskyj, past president of the Ukrainian World Congress.

"There is no credible evidence of Ukrainian nationalist systemic (organized) complicity in the Holocaust. There certainly may have been individual cases," Lozynskyj said in a statement send to Postmedia News.

Lozynskyj, a New York real-estate lawyer, said the Lviv pogrom was conducted by the Germans "and, certainly, aided by myriad locals."

But he noted that many of the locals who abused Jews -- Himka has obtained photographs of half-naked, bloodied Jewish women being chased and taunted by civilians in Lviv -- were Ukrainians who "lost loved ones" during the time when the Soviets occupied Lviv in the two years before the Germans arrived.

"Unfortunately, the bulk of the Soviet accomplices during those years had been Jews, and for that reason, Jews were not particularly liked by the locals," he stated.

In an essay in the Kyiv Post earlier this year, Lozynskyj also accused Himka -- who is of both Ukrainian and Italian ancestry -- of having an "agenda" to produce "demons" because some of his research was funded by the U.S.-based Holocaust Memorial Museum.

He also complained that Himka's research "naturally fails to mention the Jewish complicity which may have pointed to the motive of any number of oppressors."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited a prison-turned-museum during his recent trip to Ukraine that, according to some historians, highlights atrocities committed by Soviet and German occupiers while ignoring those perpetrated by Ukrainians against Jews.

Harper toured the Prison at Lonsky museum -dedicated to those detained and killed at the infamous prison in Lviv -with director Ruslan Zabily in a gesture intended to send a message to Ukraine's increasingly authoritarian government under pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych's security service arrested Zabily in September and interrogated him extensively, allegedly for giving state secrets -that is, archival records -to foreigners.

Though he was released soon after, Zabily's case has become a rallying call among

many global academics who have signed a petition condemning the attack on academic freedom.

"It is important that the terrible things here not be forgotten or repeated," Harper wrote in the museum's guest book.

While some historians praise Harper for defending academic freedom, they said the museum gave him an incomplete impression of events that took place there in 1941.

They are referring specifically to the beating, humiliation and murder of Jews in Lviv by Ukrainians -with Nazi encouragement -in the days after the Soviets were routed by Hitler's forces in the early summer of 1941. The Jews were also forced to exhume and to clean the mutilated, decomposing bodies in the prison.

"Visits such as Harper's make sense only if they confront the full truth of the past rather than half-truths and half-lies," said Brown University historian Omer Bartov, author of Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine.

"I am sure Harper had no idea that he was given only the half of the story that shows Ukrainians as victims, but not the half in which they were participating in the victimization of their Jewish neighbours."

Harper is being misled by leaders of influential Ukrainian-Canadian groups and his "ethnic vote-handlers," according to University of Alberta historian John-Paul Himka, author of Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories. Himka said the recent surge in political support for the far-right, anti-Semitic Svoboda party in Western Ukraine is perpetuated when nationalists present a "one-sided" version of Ukraine's history.

The Prison at Lonsky museum was established last year under former president Viktor Yushchenko. According to a statement from Harper's office, it is dedicated to the "memory of those detained and killed there during the Soviet and Nazi occupations during and after" the Second World War.

The statement also said 1,700 detainees were executed by the Soviet Secret Police in June 1941, just before they fled the Nazi offensive.