UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS’ LONG ASCENT TO NEW HEIGHTS OF POWER
[ Part 2.2: “Attached Text” ]
Topic: Situation in the South-East of Ukraine
A representative of the Ukrainian Nationalists’ Congress, with a
portrait of Stepan Bandera.
(C) RIA Novosti. Petr Zadorozhny 02:32 14/10/2014
ent-to-New-Heights-of-Power.html
OSCOW, October 13 (RIA Novosti), Ekaterina Blinova – From the
western Ukrainian city of Lviv to the front lines of the civil war,
far-right neo-fascist groups have made their presence felt on and
off the battlefield; these groups started to influence the country’s
national consciousness following the country’s “Orange Revolution”,
and gained an unprecedented level of political and military amid the
Euromaidan coup of February 2014.
As radicals, who sided with the Nazis against Poland and organized
the active purging of the Polish community in the part of Poland,
which was to become western Ukraine, Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav
Stetsko seem like unlikely heroes in the 21st century. However,
this is how they are perceived in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv,
which started the 20th century as a vibrant, Austro-Hungarian melting
pot of Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian and Armenian culture and ended it
as a solidly Ukrainian hotbed of ultra-nationalist and anti-Russian
sentiment. One of the city’s most influential residents is Oleh
Tyahnibok, leader of the right-wing Svoboda Party.
In his 2013 article, “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right. The
Case of VO Svoboda,” Per Anders Rudling, an Associate Professor
of the Department of History at Lund University (Sweden), wrote:
“Political rituals, processions, re-enactments and sacralization
of memory are characteristic features of the intellectual life
in contemporary Lviv… The 70th anniversary of the German
invasion and [OUN leader] Stetsko’s ‘renewal of Ukrainian statehood’
was re-enacted in Lviv as a popular festival, where parents with
small children waved flags to re-enactors in SS uniforms…
Ultra-nationalist ideologues have found both effective and lucrative
ways to work with entrepreneurs to popularize and disseminate their
narrative to the youth.”
Rudling emphasizes that Tyahnibok’s Svoboda party as well as the
National Socialist parties which banded together to become the Right
Sector claim to be the “heirs” of Bandera’s Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists-Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN-UPA). Along with
the Ukrainian trident and the colors red and black, the organization
uses “a mirror image of the so-called Wolfsangel, or Wolf’s hook,
which was used by several SS divisions and, after the war, by neo-Nazi
organizations,” the professor points out. Rudling explains that the
roots of OUN-UPA lie in “indigenous Ukrainian fascism” which was
“based upon Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras”
as well as the translated works of Hitler and Mussolini.
Ukrainian nationalist organizations, such as the Svoboda party,
have always put an emphasis on cultivating the younger generation,
recruiting new members and involving them in nationalist activities.
Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who Ukrainians voted
out after he’d served his single term in 2005-2010, facilitated
such efforts by altering the Ukrainian school curriculum. Under
his presidency’s educational reforms, OUN-UPA was glorified;
he declared Stepan Bandera, its leader, a national hero of Ukraine.
Rudling underscores that the state went about actively “emphasizing
the OUN-UPA’s ‘patriotism, national solidarity, self-sacrifice, and
idealistic commitment to common goals and values’,” while turning a
blind eye to its involvement in the holocaust and collaboration with
Nazi Germany.
Between 2006 and 2010, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the director of
the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), played an important role in
disseminating “the historical truth of the past of the Ukrainian
people,” presenting the mythological conceptions of OUN-UPA’s
“self-sacrificial heroism” and a large-scale Soviet genocide of
Ukrainians, the professor notes. Following the events of February 2014,
Valentin Nalyvaichenko reassumed the post of SBU chief.
In his article, written in 2012-2013, Rudling notes that Svoboda
party facilitated the emergence of its radical wing, headed by Yurii
Mykhalchyshyn – Tyahnibok’s adviser on ideological matters. According
to the professor, Mykhalchyshyn served as a link between Svoboda
and the so-called autonomous nationalists. The key component of the
Ukrainian ultra-nationalism subculture was street violence and the
cult of force. According to Rudling, in 2011, three years before the
Euromaidan coup, Mykhalchyshyn said: “Our Banderite army will cross
the Dnipro and throw that blue-ass gang [Party of Regions], which
today usurps the power, out of Ukraine. That will make those Asiatic
dogs shut their ugly mouths.” In three short years, Mykhalchyshyn
would get his chance.
During the Euromaidan coup of February 2014, young Ukrainians were used
as the main fighting force of the Ukrainian nationalist movement,
and this continues to be the case. The Right Sector, a radical
paramilitary organization headed by Dmitro Yarosh, unified the
ultra-nationalist groups. When Donetsk and Lugansk voted to secede
from an increasingly hostile Ukraine, many Right Sector supporters
joined nationalist volunteer squads such as the Azov Battalion and the
Ukrainian Volunteer Corps (DUK), all-volunteer far-right paramilitary
detachments, whose battle insignia is the Social-National Assembly
logo, the altered Wolfsangel. While millions in Ukraine, Russia, and
throughout the world pray quietly for peace following the September
ceasefire talks, Azov Battalion commander Andriy Biletskiy stated that
any “attempt to reach an agreement concerning Ukrainian soil with
separatists [is] obviously…a betrayal,” according to the BBC.
Since ultra-nationalists have become a heavy armed military force,
the question remains if the Ukrainian policy-makers will be able to
maintain control over the ugly genie they let out of the bottle.