Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine
The students were the first to protest against the regime of
President Viktor Yanukovych on the Maidan, the central square in Kiev,
last November. These were the Ukrainians with the most to lose, the
young people who unreflectively thought of themselves as Europeans and
who wished for themselves a life, and a Ukrainian homeland, that were
European. Many of them were politically on the left, some of them
radically so. After years of negotiation and months of promises, their
government, under President Yanukovych, had at the last moment failed to
sign a major trade agreement with the European Union.
When the
riot police came and beat the students in late November, a new group,
the Afghan veterans, came to the Maidan. These men of middle age, former
soldiers and officers of the Red Army, many of them bearing the scars
of battlefield wounds, came to protect “their children,” as they put it.
They didn’t mean their own sons and daughters: they meant the best of
the youth, the pride and future of the country. After the Afghan
veterans came many others, tens of thousands, then hundreds of
thousands, now not so much in favor of Europe but in defense of decency.
What
does it mean to come to the Maidan? The square is located close to some
of the major buildings of government, and is now a traditional site of
protest. Interestingly, the word maidan exists in Ukrainian but
not in Russian, but even people speaking Russian use it because of its
special implications. In origin it is just the Arabic word for “square,”
a public place. But a maidan now means in Ukrainian what the Greek word agora
means in English: not just a marketplace where people happen to meet,
but a place where they deliberately meet, precisely in order to
deliberate, to speak, and to create a political society. During the
protests the word maidan has come to mean the act of public
politics itself, so that for example people who use their cars to
organize public actions and protect other protestors are called the automaidan.
The protesters represent every group of Ukrainian citizens: Russian
speakers and Ukrainian speakers (although most Ukrainians are
bilingual), people from the cities and the countryside, people from all
regions of the country, members of all political parties, the young and
the old, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Every major Christian
denomination is represented by believers and most of them by clergy. The
Crimean Tatars march in impressive numbers, and Jewish leaders have
made a point of supporting the movement. The diversity of the Maidan is
impressive: the group that monitors hospitals so that the regime cannot
kidnap the wounded is run by young feminists. An important hotline that
protesters call when they need help is staffed by LGBT activists.
On
January 16, the Ukrainian government, headed by President Yanukovych,
tried to put an end to Ukrainian civil society. A series of laws passed
hastily and without following normal procedure did away with freedom of
speech and assembly, and removed the few remaining checks on executive
authority. This was intended to turn Ukraine into a dictatorship and to
make all participants in the Maidan, by then probably numbering in the
low millions, into criminals. The result was that the protests, until
then entirely peaceful, became violent. Yanukovych lost support, even in
his political base in the southeast, near the Russian border.
After
weeks of responding peacefully to arrests and beatings by the riot
police, many Ukrainians had had enough. A fraction of the protesters,
some but by no means all representatives of the political right and far
right, decided to take the fight to the police. Among them were members
of the far-right party Svoboda and a new conglomeration of nationalists
who call themselves the Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor). Young men, some of
them from right-wing groups and others not, tried to take by force the
public spaces claimed by the riot police. Young Jewish men formed their
own combat group, or sotnia, to take the fight to the authorities.
Although
Yanukovych rescinded most of the dictatorship laws, lawless violence by
the regime, which started in November, continued into February. Members
of the opposition were shot and killed, or hosed down in freezing
temperatures to die of hypothermia. Others were tortured and left in the
woods to die.
During the first two weeks of February, the
Yanukovych regime sought to restore some of the dictatorship laws
through decrees, bureaucratic shortcuts, and new legislation. On
February 18, an announced parliamentary debate on constitutional reform
was abruptly canceled. Instead, the government sent thousands of riot
police against the protesters of Kiev. Hundreds of people were wounded
by rubber bullets, tear gas, and truncheons. Dozens were killed.
The
future of this protest movement will be decided by Ukrainians. And yet
it began with the hope that Ukraine could one day join the European
Union, an aspiration that for many Ukrainians means something like the
rule of law, the absence of fear, the end of corruption, the social
welfare state, and free markets without intimidation from syndicates
controlled by the president.
The course of the protest has very
much been influenced by the presence of a rival project, based in
Moscow, called the Eurasian Union. This is an international commercial
and political union that does not yet exist but that is to come into
being in January 2015. The Eurasian Union, unlike the European Union, is
not based on the principles of the equality and democracy of member
states, the rule of law, or human rights.
On the contrary, it is a
hierarchical organization, which by its nature seems unlikely to admit
any members that are democracies with the rule of law and human rights.
Any democracy within the Eurasian Union would pose a threat to Putin’s
rule in Russia. Putin wants Ukraine in his Eurasian Union, which means
that Ukraine must be authoritarian, which means that the Maidan must be
crushed.
The dictatorship laws of January 16 were obviously based
on Russian models, and were proposed by Ukrainian legislators with close
ties to Moscow. They seem to have been Russia’s condition for financial
support of the Yanukovych regime. Before they were announced, Putin
offered Ukraine a large loan and promised reductions in the price of
Russian natural gas. But in January the result was not a capitulation to
Russia. The people of the Maidan defended themselves, and the protests
continue. Where this will lead is anyone’s guess; only the Kremlin
expresses certainty about what it all means.
The protests in the
Maidan, we are told again and again by Russian propaganda and by the
Kremlin’s friends in Ukraine, mean the return of National Socialism to
Europe. The Russian foreign minister, in Munich, lectured the Germans
about their support of people who salute Hitler. The Russian media
continually make the claim that the Ukrainians who protest are Nazis.
Naturally, it is important to be attentive to the far right in Ukrainian
politics and history. It is still a serious presence today, although
less important than the far right in France, Austria, or the
Netherlands. Yet it is the Ukrainian regime rather than its opponents
that resorts to anti-Semitism, instructing its riot police that the
opposition is led by Jews. In other words, the Ukrainian government is
telling itself that its opponents are Jews and us that its opponents are
Nazis.
The strange thing about the claim from Moscow is the
political ideology of those who make it. The Eurasian Union is the enemy
of the European Union, not just in strategy but in ideology. The
European Union is based on a historical lesson: that the wars of the
twentieth century were based on false and dangerous ideas, National
Socialism and Stalinism, which must be rejected and indeed overcome in a
system guaranteeing free markets, free movement of people, and the
welfare state. Eurasianism, by contrast, is presented by its advocates
as the opposite of liberal democracy.
The Eurasian ideology draws
an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around
2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the
realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian
ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first
century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s
major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997,
follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political
theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian
Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin
administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right
Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the
division and colonization of Ukraine.
The point man for Eurasian
and Ukrainian policy in the Kremlin is Sergei Glazyev, an economist who
like Dugin tends to combine radical nationalism with nostalgia for
Bolshevism. He was a member of the Communist Party and a Communist
deputy in the Russian parliament before cofounding a far-right party
called Rodina, or Motherland. In 2005 some of its deputies signed a
petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish
organizations be banned from Russia.
Later that year Motherland
was banned from taking part in further elections after complaints that
its advertisements incited racial hatred. The most notorious showed
dark-skinned people eating watermelon and throwing the rinds to the
ground, then called for Russians to clean up their cities. Glazyev’s
book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order claims that the
sinister forces of the “new world order” conspired against Russia in the
1990s to bring about economic policies that amounted to “genocide.”
This book was published in English by Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine Executive Intelligence Review with a preface by LaRouche. Today Executive Intelligence Review
echoes Kremlin propaganda, spreading the word in English that Ukrainian
protesters have carried out a Nazi coup and started a civil war.
The
populist media campaign for the Eurasian Union is now in the hands of
Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the most important talk show in Russia, and
since December also the director of the state-run Russian media
conglomerate designed to form national public opinion. Best known for
saying that gays who die in car accidents should have their hearts cut
from their bodies and incinerated, Kiselyov has taken Putin’s campaign
against gay rights and transformed it into a weapon against European
integration. Thus when the then German foreign minister, who is gay,
visited Kiev in December and met with Vitali Klitschko, the heavyweight
champion and opposition politician, Kiselyov dismissed Klitschko as a
gay icon. According to the Russian foreign minister, the exploitation of
sexual politics is now to be an open weapon in the struggle against the
“decadence” of the European Union.
Following the same strategy,
Yanukovych’s government claimed, entirely falsely, that the price of
closer relations with the European Union was the recognition of gay
marriage in Ukraine. Kiselyov is quite open about the Russian media
strategy toward the Maidan: to “apply the correct political technology,”
then “bring it to the point of overheating” and bring to bear “the
magnifying glass of TV and the Internet.”
Why
exactly do people with such views think they can call other people
fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously?
One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War
II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with
this. World War II on the eastern front was fought chiefly in what was
then Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, not in Soviet Russia. Five
percent of Russia was occupied by the Germans; all of Ukraine was
occupied by the Germans. Apart from the Jews, whose suffering was by far
the worst, the main victims of Nazi policies were not Russians but
Ukrainians and Belarusians. There was no Russian army fighting in World
War II, but rather a Soviet Red Army. Its soldiers were
disproportionately Ukrainian, since it took so many losses in Ukraine
and recruited from the local population. The army group that liberated
Auschwitz was called the First Ukrainian Front.
The other source
of purported Eurasian moral legitimacy seems to be this: since the
representatives of the Putin regime only very selectively distanced
themselves from Stalinism, they are therefore reliable inheritors of
Soviet history, and should be seen as the automatic opposite of Nazis,
and therefore to be trusted to oppose the far right.
Again, much
is wrong about this. World War II began with an alliance between Hitler
and Stalin in 1939. It ended with the Soviet Union expelling surviving
Jews across its own border into Poland. After the founding of the State
of Israel, Stalin began associating Soviet Jews with a world capitalist
conspiracy, and undertook a campaign of arrests, deportations, and
murders of leading Jewish writers. When he died in 1953 he was preparing
a larger campaign against Jews.
After Stalin’s death communism
took on a more and more ethnic coloration, with people who wished to
revive its glories claiming that its problem was that it had been
spoiled by Jews. The ethnic purification of the communist legacy is
precisely the logic of National Bolshevism, which is the foundational
ideology of Eurasianism today. Putin himself is an admirer of the
philosopher Ivan Ilin, who wanted Russia to be a nationalist
dictatorship.
What does it mean when the wolf
cries wolf? Most obviously, propagandists in Moscow and Kiev take us for
fools—which by many indications is quite justified.
More subtly,
what this campaign does is attempt to reduce the social tensions in a
complex country to a battle of symbols about the past. Ukraine is not a
theater for the historical propaganda of others or a puzzle from which
pieces can be removed. It is a major European country whose citizens
have important cultural and economic ties with both the European Union
and Russia. To set its own course, Ukraine needs normal public debate,
the restoration of parliamentary democracy, and workable relations with
all of its neighbors. Ukraine is full of sophisticated and ambitious
people. If people in the West become caught up in the question of
whether they are largely Nazis or not, then they may miss the central
issues in the present crisis.
In fact, Ukrainians are in a
struggle against both the concentration of wealth and the concentration
of armed force in the hands of Viktor Yanukovych and his close allies.
The protesters might be seen as setting an example of courage for
Americans of both the left and the right. Ukrainians make real
sacrifices for the hope of joining the European Union. Might there be
something to be learned from that among Euroskeptics in London or
elsewhere? This is a dialogue that is not taking place.
The history of the Holocaust is part of our own public discourse, our agora, or maidan.
The current Russian attempt to manipulate the memory of the Holocaust
is so blatant and cynical that those who are so foolish to fall for it
will one day have to ask themselves just how, and in the service of
what, they have been taken in. If fascists take over the mantle of
antifascism, the memory of the Holocaust will itself be altered. It will
be more difficult in the future to refer to the Holocaust in the
service of any good cause, be it the particular one of Jewish history or
the general one of human rights.
—February 19, 2014