Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe & Bastiaan Willems. The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Volume 35, Issue 1, 2022.
Introduction
On 24 February 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine from the north, east, and south. The weeks prior had seen Russia station more and more military troops along Ukraine’s borders and adopt language that prompted many security analysts to think back to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and historians to think of Hitler’s occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938. In both cases claims of discrimination and repression of local minorities were used as a pretext for invasion. Marked differences between the March 2014 annexation of Crimea and the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine were the size of the military operation and the lack of broad local support in the case of the latter. Whereas the invasion of Crimea was preceded by an illegitimate ‘referendum’, which ostensibly received over 95 percent of the vote, in 2022 Russia’s President Vladimir Putin went a distinctly different route to legitimize his actions. Preceding the Russian invasion of Ukraine were two speeches. His first, hour-long speech (21 February), which was widely panned by Western historians, brought together a number of themes and terms that have run through the recent Russian discourse. The second (24 February) gained infamy due to the centrality of Putin’s promise to ‘denazify’ Ukraine.
In his speeches Putin employed a historical narrative, stating that
the Ukrainian authorities—I would like to emphasize this—began by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us, trying to distort the mentality and historical memory of millions of people, of entire generations living in Ukraine.
The war was almost immediately dubbed ‘Putin’s war,’ but these statements represented the government’s official position, with Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, indicating shortly after the invasion that Russia seeks to ‘cleanse [Ukraine] of Nazis’. Putin’s speeches constituted a direct challenge to Ukraine’s statehood, and the following military intervention was actively presented as the undoing of a historical wrong. The vocabulary of the two speeches has been misused to mobilize Russian soldiers to fight against Ukrainians, and although many of the statements are either false, detached from their historical context, or oversimplified, they should nevertheless be taken seriously and analyzed as Putin’s politics of history. This research note seeks to clarify the origin, political instrumentalization of, as well as the uses and misuses of two central terms in the two war speeches—‘denazifying’ and ‘genocide’.
Denazifying Ukraine
Putin’s declaration of war (‘special military operation’) included the promise that Russian forces ‘will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians—including against citizens of the Russian Federation… ’ The wording led to sharp condemnation not only from renowned institutes such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Wiener Holocaust Library but also from Jews living in Ukraine and historians of the Holocaust and Eastern Europe such as Omer Bartov and Timothy Snyder. To Putin,
[i]t is not surprising that Ukrainian society was faced with the rise of far-right nationalism, which rapidly developed into aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism. This resulted in the participation of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis in the terrorist groups in the North Caucasus and the increasingly loud territorial claims to Russia.
Here Putin deliberately conflates ‘fascism’, ‘Nazism’, and ‘neo-Nazism’. Nazism was the German interpretation of fascism and constituted the most genocidal of the different fascisms that existed throughout Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Post-1945 efforts to rid Germany of its Nazi influences—the denazification of Germany—were considered vital for the country’s development (or more accurately, the development of Nazi-Germany’s three successor states) and for peace in Europe. A complete ‘denazification’ failed in Germany because it soon proved impossible and impractical to remove all former Nazi officials from positions of powers. Yet ‘denazification’ became an internationally recognized term and remained relevant since Nazism had permeated all layers of society and left entire sections of the population compromised. From the second half of the 1940s onwards, ‘denazification’, ‘defascization’, and ‘denationalization’ also took place in Ukraine and other Soviet republics and satellite states of the Soviet Union. In some parts of the Soviet territory, such as Belorussia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine, it was conducted even much more thoroughly and violently than in West Germany and Austria, and it was massively politicized and used to detain all kinds of political enemies. Fascist collaborators were actively targeted in the post-war era. Whether or not a person had committed war crimes often mattered less in the Soviet judicial system than membership in or support of an anti-Soviet movement.
Ukraine, like other European countries, had a radical nationalist movement that throughout the 1930s and 1940s was fascisized and created its own form of fascism. It was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that in 1929 was established by Ukrainian veterans of the First World War. The OUN attempted to become a mass movement and to establish an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state. It viewed and used mass violence as a political aim and killed civilians en masse. In 1941, during the preparation of Operation Barbarossa, the OUN collaborated with the Wehrmacht and the Abwehr, and it developed plans to establish a Ukrainian state with a fascist regime. It also attempted to cleanse this country of Jews, Poles, and Russians. The leadership of the OUN wanted its state to become a part of the ‘New Europe’ governed by Hitler and Mussolini. Although the state was proclaimed in Lviv on 30 June 1941, Hitler did not accept it because he did not seek to establish any states in the territories formerly under Soviet rule. Hitler arrested the leader of the Ukrainian government, Stepan Bandera, his deputy Yaroslav Stetsko, and other OUN members. Most of them were detained in the German concentration camps by the fall of 1944. Despite this, the OUN played an active role in Germany’s genocidal policies and were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Both OUN and UPA were defeated by the forces of the Soviet Union, when they occupied western Ukraine in the summer of 1944. Solving the problem with the OUN and UPA, the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del—the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) used prolonged mass violence against civilians, especially against relatives of Ukrainian nationalists. Although the UPA had only mobilized some 100,000 Ukrainians during the war, the NKVD—according to its own sources—killed 153,000 people in western Ukraine. Moreover, it arrested a further 134,000 Ukrainians and deported 203,000 of them to the interior of the Soviet Union. The UPA killed 20,000 civilians in the brutal war with the Soviet forces, as well as 10,000 NKVD staff and employees of the Soviet administration. This short history of nationalism, fascism, insurgency, and antinationalist mass violence took place in western Ukraine, mainly in the historical regions of eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Only about 20 percent of all Ukrainians lived in this part of Ukraine. The other 80 percent of Ukrainians, which during the long 19th century lived in the Russian Empire and after the First World War in the Soviet Union, did not share this history. They were not exposed to the propaganda of the OUN and were in general skeptical—and many of them were even hostile—to the OUN and UPA. Many more Ukrainians served in the Red Army than in the UPA and in military units of Nazi Germany. The numbers of the Ukrainians serving in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War is estimated at 4.5 million. Many of them had a mixed Ukrainian-Soviet identity and served in mixed-nationality Red Army units.
A sad fact is that since 1990 historians and the Ukrainian state have failed to come to terms with the history of fascism, radical nationalism, and nationalist violence directed against Jews, Poles, non-nationalist Ukrainians, and Russians. Important reasons for this are the complex and divided history of Ukraine and the linguistic and cultural similarity between Ukrainians and Russians. Another one is the difficult political situation in Ukraine, which has been treated by Russia as a small brother country. Finally, we should mention the activities of the veterans of the OUN and Waffen SS division Galizien (which was composed of more than 8,000 western Ukrainians) who left Ukraine with the Nazis in 1944. These émigrés were rehabilitating the OUN, UPA, Waffen SS division Galizien, and different kinds of Ukrainian collaborators as anti-Soviet heroes throughout the entire Cold War in countries as far as Canada. The Bandera cult, which reappeared in western Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is one of the many examples of how discourses created by the veterans of the OUN, UPA, and the Waffen-SS division Galizien were adopted by Ukrainian historians during the last 30 years. Only recently have scholars such as Yuri Radchenko, Artem Kharchenko, Oleksandr Zaitsev, and Marta Havryshko started to rewrite the history of fascism and Holocaust in Ukraine. Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe’s first academic biography of Stepan Bandera, which was severely attacked by Ukrainian nationalists and rejected or not taken seriously by many Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian historians, was published in Ukrainian and Russian only two weeks before Putin attacked this country. That lack of self-criticism, the unwillingness to deal critically with ‘difficult’ aspects of the Ukrainian history, is now exploited by Putin.
According to his 21 February address, the plight of the ‘Russian Ukrainians’ exists only ‘because these people did not agree with the West-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014 and opposed the transition towards the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism which have been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy.’ Putin styles the people of Lugansk and Donetsk as fighting against (neo-) Nazism and is most likely referring to the so-called ‘Asov battalion’, a paramilitary militia consisting of Ukrainian right-wing volunteers that uses Nazi rhetoric and symbolism. This militia has fought in the Donbass region since 2014 and has been accused of torture, kidnappings, and summary executions but has not been reprimanded (let alone disbanded) by subsequent Ukrainian governments. Yet presenting Ukraine as a Nazi country with a fascist government is a deliberate distortion and a political instrumentalization of history. It has nothing to do with Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s government—which was re-elected in the summer of 2019, after ‘early parliamentary elections in Ukraine [during which] fundamental rights and freedoms were overall respected’, and where ‘no particular obstacles to the participation of national minorities in the electoral process’ were observed by the OCSE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe). When during Ukraine’s 2019 parliamentary elections the major far-right parties formed a ‘one Party list’ to increase their chances, they still only received just over 2 percent of the vote, as such failing to meet the 5 percent threshold needed to gain a parliamentary seat.
The OUN and Bandera are not used as symbols by the current government in Kyiv, nor does the president Volodymyr Zelenskyi portray Bandera or Ukrainian collaborators and war criminals such as Roman Shukhevych or anti-Semites such as Yaroslav Stetsko as national heroes. Bandera is, however, present in Kyiv. In 2016, Kyiv’s city council voted to rename Moscow Avenue to Bandera Avenue, which, although it was not officially sanctioned by the government of Zelenskyi’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, was part of its country-wide ‘decommunization’ campaign. Given that almost all members of Zelenskyi’s Jewish family were murdered during the German occupation of Ukraine, the rehabilitation of Ukrainian fascists, anti-Semites, and war criminals would contradict his self-understanding as a Ukrainian of Jewish descent and a president of a democratic country. Although he has worked as a comedian and did not study the Ukrainian past, his family’s wartime ordeal makes him adhere to a more accurate historical narrative than many ‘professional’ historians in Ukraine.
Genocide
In the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Putin introduced the term ‘genocide’ into the vocabulary of the ‘Russian intervention’ in Ukraine. Meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on 15 February, he stated that a genocide was taking place in Eastern Ukraine, bringing the term to the table of international diplomacy. The declaration followed recent Russian reporting from the Donbass that spoke of atrocities committed by the Ukrainian army that had left thousands of children ‘without arms and legs’. Although both the OSCE and the UN considered these claims to be baseless, the term would inform Russian policy going forward. The internationally recognized term ‘genocide’ is deeply tied to Russia’s history of war but did more than merely offer a pretext to invade.
In 1999 the United States cited concerns of genocide to convince its NATO partners to bomb Yugoslavia, a campaign that over the course of three months cost the lives of around 500 civilians. Many suspected ulterior motives, with the philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky stating that it was ‘because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe that had not subordinated itself to the US-led neoliberal programs. Therefore, it had to be eliminated’. Putin pre-emptively countered the anticipated outrage that would follow the commencement of operations in Ukraine by presenting it as hypocritical, claiming to do the same in Ukraine as what NATO did in Yugoslavia, with similar (military) means.
Russian authorities have not indicated what type of genocide they are accusing the Ukrainians of but emphasize that they seek to ‘bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians—including against citizens of the Russian Federation’. The case for genocide seems to be built on a firm accusation of ‘cultural genocide’, which was indeed an important part of Raphael Lemkin’s concept of genocide but was not included in the Genocide Convention established by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. Ukraine, according to Putin’s 21 February speech, adopted a ‘policy to root out the Russian language and culture and promote assimilation’. This is presented as a harbinger for worse things to come. ‘A monument to Alexander Suvorov was recently demolished in Poltava. What is there to say? Are you renouncing your own past? The so-called colonial heritage of the Russian Empire? Well, in this case, be consistent.’ These assertions build up to Putin’s use of genocide, which he ties to ideas of self-determination and ethnic cleansing:
the so-called civilized world, which our Western colleagues proclaimed themselves the only representatives of, prefers not to see this, as if this horror and genocide, which almost 4 million people are facing, do not exist. (…) They are fighting for their elementary right to live on their own land, to speak their own language, and to preserve their culture and traditions.
Putin also indicated that Ukraine was covertly preparing for war with Russia, which ties into the Russian legal tradition established by the Soviet jurist Aron Trainin (born in Vitebsk in 1883), who in 1944 coined the term ‘crimes against peace’. However, there do not seem to have been further efforts to make use that term. Other accusations might have been more measured and germane (notably ‘crimes against humanity’), but the use of ‘genocide’ serves to do more than to introduce an indictment; rather it is meant as a reminder that Ukraine had a problematic and genocidal past, which, if we were to follow Putin’s assertions, continues to this day. What the audiences of the two speeches were to take away was that Russia has to stop a genocide of the Russians in Ukraine committed by a ‘Nazi’ government.
During the Second World War, Ukraine witnessed numerous acts of genocide, and Ukrainians were actively involved in it. The OUN adopted a policy similar to the Croatian Ustasha, which, like the OUN, had been a terrorist, underground organization before the war and which in April 1941 were given control over a part of axis-occupied Yugoslavia. This puppet state, the ‘Independent State of Croatia’, could be maintained only with extreme nationalist violence, and Ukrainian nationalists shared the hope that a similar approach would result in recognition of an independent Ukrainian state.
Members of the OUN as well as other Ukrainians joined the Ukrainian police and supported the Germans in the deportations from the District Galizien to the extermination camp Bełżec and by the mass shootings in eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Altogether, they supported the German occupiers in the murder of 800,000 Jews in western Ukraine, which was the half of all Jews murdered in Ukraine. Another major group of the victims of the OUN were Poles. As many as 100,000 Poles were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943 and 1944, which had been established by the OUN in late 1942. These crimes, however, have little to do with current Ukrainian policy. Putin’s claims of ‘genocide’ rest for a large part on word association with ‘Nazis’, as over the last decades the two terms have become intrinsically linked and elicit similar emotional responses. This might also help explain Putin’s departure from the use of the word ‘fascists’, which was favored in Russia from 2014 until very recently. Finally, Putin’s continuing unwillingness to recognize the Holodomor, the Stalinist man-made famine that in 1932 and 1933 that cost the lives of at least three million Ukrainians, shows how concerns about ‘genocide’ are entirely hollow and merely serve to push an agenda.
Ukraine, in turn, has adopted similar language since the beginning of the Russian invasion. It has accused Russian forces of committing genocide, with Vadym Boychenko, the mayor of the city of Mariupol, stating in a reaction to the Russian shelling of his city that ‘Russian Nazis seek the genocide of the Ukrainian nation’. On 7 March Ukraine appeared before the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the hope that it would recognize Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a genocide, while at the same time rejecting Moscow’s claims that Ukraine was committing genocide. From the very beginning of the conflict, Ukrainians changed roads signs to read Гаага (The Hague), as such literally indicating that all roads Russian soldiers take in Ukraine end in a trial at the International Criminal Court. These incidences show that the term ‘genocide’ is understood by both sides as the highest form of international ‘wrongdoing’.
Conclusion
The complex and complicated history of Ukraine is a troubled one and has been marked by war, genocide, and mass violence—especially during the first half of the 20th century. Ukrainian fascism and radical nationalism are a part of this history as well as collaboration in the Holocaust and the mass murder of the Poles in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. However, Putin’s equation of all Ukrainians with ‘Nazis’ or ‘fascists’ is ahistorical and cynical. Neither was fascism a major component of Ukrainian history, nor can Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s current Ukrainian government or the Ukrainian people as such be characterized as ‘Nazis’ or ‘fascists’. Ukraine has a similar problem with neofascist and right-wing movements as other European countries. ‘Nazis’ and ‘fascists’ do not govern Ukraine, and it is irresponsible to claim this, even if the cult of Bandera and the OUN-UPA in western Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora remain a real political problem and is an offense to the victims of the Ukrainian nationalists. The claim that Russia has to liberate Ukraine from a ‘fascist government’ or a ‘Nazi occupation’ is a crude pretext for invasion and serves as a ready excuse to escalate violence to the level of 80 years ago, when every bit of strength was required to rid Ukraine of its Nazis. This line of argument also lowers the threshold for committing war crimes, tragically laying bare how a lack of critical assessment of Ukraine’s history shapes the manner in which today’s conflict is being fought out.