Ukraine's Nationalism Problem

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

On June 29, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany embarrassed his government by referring to Stepan Bandera, a Second World War collaborator with Nazi Germany, as a Ukrainian patriot. Andriy Melnyk in an interview contended that nationalist Stepan Bandera “was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles.”

Naturally, the Russians took note of it to reiterate their claims that the country is run by Nazis, which is ridiculous. But Israel, Poland, and Jewish groups were also offended.

“The statement made by the Ukrainian ambassador is a distortion of the historical facts, belittles the Holocaust and is an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people,” stated the Israeli embassy in Kyiv. Polish deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz wrote that “such an opinion and such words are absolutely unacceptable.”

Days later, he posted a tweet saying he “DECIDEDLY rejects” the “absurd allegations” posted by the Israeli Embassy.

President Zelensky fired him on July 9. But the problem lies with Ukrainian nationalism itself.

CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE

Bandera is an extremely controversial figure in Ukraine, with some hailing him as a hero in his fight for Ukrainian statehood against the former Soviet Union, but with most acknowledging that he was a fascist who collaborated with Nazi Germany.

During that period large numbers of inhabitants of central, eastern and southern Europe joined the German armed forces.

Among them were around 250,000 soldiers who identified themselves as Ukrainian. They served in the Wehrmacht, as well as the Waffen SS; a considerable number also served in the auxiliary police.

The two groups Bandera led — the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) — engaged in atrocities against Jews as well as Poles, Russians and other Ukrainians in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during the Second World War.

Over the last several years, though, streets have been named and statues created after people like Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, a UPA general.

Polish authorities will seek to have Ukraine acknowledge the truth about the crimes, Polish President Andrzej Duda indicated July 11. “It was a dramatic event, which took lives of over 100,000 people.” On July 11, 1943, when OUN-UPA squads attacked about 100 Polish settlements in Volhynia, in eastern Poland.

As well, before 1939, the 1.5 million Jews living in the Soviet republic of Ukraine constituted the largest Jewish population within the Soviet Union, and one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Based on present-day borders, one in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine.

DECOMMUNIZATION

Following its 2014 revolution, Ukrainian lawmakers passed a series of bills known collectively as the Decommunization Laws, meant to sever the country’s ties to its Russian and Soviet past.

One of the bills prohibited what it called the “public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century.”

In practical terms, these bills paved the way for the rehabilitation of some Ukrainian ultranationalist leaders who had collaborated with the Nazis.

In their 1983 book The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger described how each nation must create for itself a national identity. It needs to have what they called a “usable past” – one recounting the glorious stories of its writers, statesmen, military heroes, and others who fought on its behalf.

It is essential to recognize the importance of history, tradition, and memory to successful nationalism. The purpose is to provide a national state with a set of homogenous myths to serve as “cultural glue.”

The French student of nationalism, Ernest Renan, in his famous 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” emphasized “the common memories, sacrifices, glories, afflictions, and regrets,” while John Stuart Mill in Considerations on Representative Government, published in 1861, contended that the “identity of political antecedents and the possession of a national history” are imperative.

But if a historical past and memory are indeed crucial ingredients for a viable nationalism, what was the new Ukrainian state to do? Where could the nation find the stuff for patriotism, for sentiment, pride, memory, or collective character? It had been subjugated by other powers for centuries.

NATIONALIST DILEMMA

For today’s Ukrainian nationalists, this also eliminated the entire period – most of the twentieth century — in which Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. That era is viewed in a completely negative light – these were the decades of the Holodomor mass starvation of the 1930s, the Stalinist repression, and so on.

We know that millions of Ukrainians supported the USSR and fought in the Red Army against Hitler. But they’re not usable, so to speak. They were Ukrainians, but not genuine Ukrainian nationalists.

Even when Ukraine became an independent state, in 1991, it was under the rule of longtime former Communist apparatchiks like Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, the first two presidents.

There had been no uprising against Moscow’s rule, as was the case in the Baltic states. The country became sovereign by default, so to speak. Only in 2014 did genuine anti-russian nationalists gain power.

So what past can they use? Unfortunately, most of the anti-russian/anti-soviet fighters in the 1941-45 period felt they were forced to ally with Nazi Germany, which they saw as their best hope to free themselves from Soviet Communist domination.

But these same people, like it or not, also were involved in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, and pro-soviet Ukrainians, or were at best indifferent to the slaughters. And therein lies the dilemma.

Even now, the slogan Slava Ukraini (glory to Ukraine), remains problematic, because it was popularized by those wartime Ukrainian paramilitary organizations.