On the Russian Claim
of Ukrainian Nazism
Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has
repeatedly claimed that the sovereign nation of Ukraine is a fascist state. He
accuses the Ukrainians of being Nazis. I have never understood how he could say
these things about Ukraine, which is a democratic country with a constitution
and the rule of law. Of course the Ukrainians don’t do democracy and the rule
of law perfectly. It’s not surprising that they don’t given Ukraine’s
tumultuous history and centuries of rule by the Russian Empire and the Soviet
Union. Still, Ukrainian President Zelensky is not a Nazi. He is, in fact, at
least ethnically Jewish. I have always thought that Putin’s claim that the
Ukrainian government was Nazi was total hogwash. However, I just finished
reading The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes.[1]
Putin’s claims are still hogwash, but I have learned that there are some things
going in Ukraine that feed into Putin’s claims.
Those things have to do with someone named Stepan Bandera
(1909-1959). I knew a little bit about Bandera before I read Figes’ book. I do,
after all, have a PhD in Russian history, but I learned more from the book and
from some follow up research I did online.. Bandera was a Ukrainian fascist. He
was born in what was at the time part of Poland, but he was a Ukrainian by
nationality. He had a complicated, on and off relationship with the Nazis after
1941, but he is primarily known as a Ukrainian fascist who fought with the
Germans against the Soviets. His aim was to create an independent, sovereign,
fascist Ukrainian. Like all fascists of his time, he was violently antisemitic.
He believed that only military force could create the independent Ukrainian
state of which he dreamed. He was indeed an anti-Soviet, anti-Russian Ukrainian
fascist. His efforts to create a Ukrainian state connected with the Germans
failed at least in large part because the Germans were never going to let the
Ukrainians, people they believed to be subhuman, create an independent nation.
In recent years there has been something of a Bandera
revival in Ukraine. To understand that revival, however, we must understand
once crucial fact of Ukrainian history. Until the Soviets invaded Poland from
the east as the Nazis invaded from the west in 1941, much of what is now the
western part of Ukraine belonged to Poland and a couple of other central
European countries. The city of Lviv was in Poland. The Soviets invaded those
Ukrainian lands and made them part of the preexisting Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic. Because of this history, and because of an older history
when western Ukraine was ruled by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, western
Ukraine is largely orientated toward the west and considers itself to be a western
nation. Most of those Ukrainians by far want no part of being ruled by Russia.
The same is not true in eastern Ukraine. There, and in
Crimea, native Russian speakers are a substantial minority. In places they are
a majority. At least many of those Russian-speaking Ukrainians are more
oriented toward Moscow than western Ukrainians are. Many of those Russian
speakers actually consider themselves to be Ukrainians not Russians, but the
presence of a significant Russian-speaking population in parts of Ukraine makes
it possible for Putin to claim that he invaded Ukraine to protect native
Russians from genocide by the Ukrainians.
Among Ukrainians who look toward the west and want nothing
to do with Russia, Stepan Bandera has emerged as a Ukrainian national hero. He
was a fascist. He was antisemitic. But those aren’t the things that matter to
Ukrainians who see him as a hero. To them, he is a Ukrainian national hero
because he fought for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state, albeit
one under the protection and no doubt control of the Nazis. In recent years
Ukrainians in many towns and cities have changed the names of streets to
Bandera Street. They have erected monuments to him. For many western
Ukrainians, Bandera has become a symbol of their desire for the Ukrainian
nation to be free from the Russians.
Ukraine’s relationship to Bandera is complicated. He is much
less popular in the eastern part of the country than he is in the western part.
At one point the Ukrainian government declared Bandera to be a “Hero of Ukraine,”
but that honor was later rescinded. Ukrainians are actually quite divided in
their view of Bandera, which doesn’t make the appearance of a Bandera cult
insignificant.
As much as Bandera may be a hero to many Ukrainians, most
Russians despise him because he fought against them and for the Nazis during
World War II. Bandera lived mostly in West Germany after the war. It was there
that a KGB agent assassinated him in 1959, apparently with the approval of
Nikita Khrushchev, who was Soviet leader at the time and who had spent a lot of
time in Ukraine. For the Russians, anything and anyone in any way associated
with the Nazis is still anathema.
That a significant number of Ukrainians see the fascist
Stepan Bandera as a national hero gives Putin a narrow platform from which to
launch his attacks on Ukraine as fascist. Ukraine is not fascist, but to this
day essentially all Russian people hate anyone labeled as fascist. That they do
is not hard to understand. The suffering of the Russian people during World War
II is beyond the ability of most Americans even to imagine. Here’s just one
statistic from Figes’ book. Of the eighteen year olds drafted into the Red Army
in 1941, by 1945 only 3% of them were still alive. The currently accepted
number of Soviet people killed in the war is twenty-eight million.[2]
Yes, Soviet military tactics led to more casualties than western military
tactics do. That’s because for centuries the only advantage the Russians have
had over western militaries has been large numbers of soldiers to throw into a
battle. Putin calling Zelensky and his government Nazi or fascist is a surefire
way to stir up Russian public opinion against them.
So no, today’s Ukrainians are not fascists. Sure, there may
be a small number of them who hold fascist views, but their country is not
fascist. The Germans hit Ukraine particularly hard in World War II because it
was an important agricultural, mining, and industrial part of the Soviet Union.
Surely most Ukrainians have learned that the Nazis considered them to be
subhuman and intended to kill all of them, which the Nazis indeed did intend to
do. Ukraine has no more of a democratic history than Russia does, or it didn’t
until Putin destroyed post-Soviet Russian democracy while Ukraine remained
democratic at least in form. But they are making a better effort at being democratic
than Putin ever did in Russia.
If anyone in this story is fascist, it’s Putin. Figes makes
the point that authoritarian regimes collapsed twice in modern Russian history.
The first time was the collapse of Imperial Russia in 1917. The second was the
collapse of the USSR in 1991. Both times, authoritarianism reasserted itself in
Russia. The Communists did it after 1917. Putin has done it after 1991. Russia
may (or may not) be doomed to authoritarian government for a very long time. Most
Russians want a strong, authoritarian state. To them, a strong, authoritarian
state means order and security while democracy means chaos and risk. Russia may
be content to live with Putin’s sort of Orthodox Christian Russian nationalist fascism
indefinitely. Most Ukrainians are not. Putin is in many ways a Russian fascist.
When he calls Ukraine fascist he’s mostly projecting himself onto them. He can call
the Ukrainians fascists all he wants. The truth is, they aren’t.
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