History is as much about amnesia as it is about memory in Eastern Europe. With the passage of time and shifts of power, history is retroactively re-written in the countries of the region.
As the Russian military onslaught into Ukraine continues and the Ukrainian population suffers, we will find more and more historical narratives coming our way from the region. Some already have – Putin has claimed his invasion is an operation to ‘de-Nazify’ (and de-militarize) Ukraine. Both sides are flinging accusations of ‘fascism’ and ‘Nazism’.
These narratives often serve as foils for geopolitical goals. It is a messy history, but it is necessary to put matters into perspective the best we can.
A History of Carnage
We remember the Second World War (1939-1945) as a humanitarian catastrophe of tragic proportions. The cost was especially high in Eastern Europe. However, the recollections of the perpetrators and victims are not quite the same in the region. (The Jewish population was, of course, the worst affected).
The Nazis considered the Slavs to be an inferior race, too; they had a plan for ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe called the Generalplan Ost. However, they recognised the need for collaborators and friendly regimes in their eastward expansion towards the heart of the Soviet Union.
Some countries, like Croatia in the Balkans, already had fascist regimes in place. Others, such as Romania, had significant fascist political movements. They were united with the Nazis in blood-and-soil ultra-nationalism founded upon a hatred of Jewish populations as ‘polluting’ the purity of their national race and conspiring to defraud the local Christian populations of their land, wealth, and culture.
Russia was no exception to this, especially in pre-Bolshevik Revolution times.
The Bolshevik Revolution managed to temper antisemitism to some extent, but it continued in other, subtle forms (in communist Poland, a satellite state of the Soviet Union, anti-Semitic attacks led to the exodus of tens of thousands of Jews in the 1960s).
In the many regions in Eastern Europe subsumed into the Soviet Bloc (willingly or otherwise), the Nazis found nationalists enthusiastic to work with them, ostensibly to establish their distinct, sovereign countries free from the Soviet yoke.
Such collaborators, however, had little to no compunction in slaughtering their Jewish compatriots, or hunting them and rounding them up to be transported to concentration camps.
Ukraine is perhaps the most glaring example of this. Some of the worst massacres of the Holocaust happened here with active collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists, such as Babi Yar (50,000 people, mostly Jewish, killed in one October) and Odessa (35,000 people shot dead within a span of two days). They also slaughtered around 50,000 minority Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1945.
Post-Soviet Whitewashed Histories
It is easy to understand the anger of Ukrainians towards the Soviet regime centered in Moscow. Stalin’s disastrous agrarian policies had precipitated in the Holodomor, a man-made famine that took the lives of at least 5 million Ukrainians between 1930 and 1935.
Ukrainian nationalist icons (foremost among them Stephan Bandera), however, merged the Ukrainian desire for self-determination with xenophobic and ethno-nationalist goals in line with Nazism. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the various nationalities previously subjugated under Moscow gained independence and established themselves as sovereign states with multi-party, democratic elections (except Belarus).
The governments and civil society went about the process of writing their own histories, free from the diktats of Moscow. Soviet-era official history obviously omitted their own atrocities, such as the suppression of civil-political liberties, the Katyn massacre (1943), and large-scale sexual assaults in liberated Berlin (1945).
However, the post-Soviet histories being written in these new countries latched onto Nazi collaborators as brave patriots. In Ukraine, Bandera and his comrades were glorified, with no mention of the ghastly massacres in which they participated. Ukraine was hardly an exception.
In the Baltic nation of Lithuania, which borders Russia, monuments have been erected to nationalist ‘patriotic heroes’ who had collaborated in the extermination of Lithuanian Jews (95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population was wiped out during the Holocaust).
The politics of writing histories in Ukraine also depended on the ups and downs of elections and ethnic-linguistic divides – the glorification intensified under presidents such as Petro Poroshenko who were from Western Ukraine and abated under Viktor Yanukovych, Poroshenko’s predecessor from Eastern Ukraine (which has closer cultural-religious ties with Russia).
Yanukovych, who was quite close to Putin and Moscow oligarchs, was ousted from power by street protests in 2014 for corruption and misgovernance.
Ukrainian xenophobic, far-right organisations, such as Svoboda and Right Sector (which also has a paramilitary wing and is openly neo-Nazi), were key participants in the protests.
This was the period when Russia invaded and occupied the Crimea region, and the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk fell to pro-Russia separatists. Poroshenko allowed voluntary militias to join the conflict. ≈
Ukrainian xenophobic, far-right organisations, such as Svoboda and Right Sector (which also has a paramilitary wing and is openly neo-Nazi), were key participants in the protests.
Russian Propaganda and Reality
Russian news media, which plays a propagandistic role for the Putin regime, have grossly exaggerated the influence of these organisations on Ukrainian politics and society as a justification for military intervention.
The 2019 Ukrainian elections saw a drastic fall in the vote share of Svoboda and the Right Sector. They could secure only one parliamentary seat. This is hardly different from the situation in countries such as Germany, France, etc.
Russia is no stranger to whitewashing history and far-right politics either. Putin’s government has had secret ties to xenophobic, anti-immigrant political outfits across Europe, providing support and funding.
Russian far-right groups, such as Russian National Unity, have membership in the hundreds of thousands, and are quite cosy with the political establishment. Aleksandr Dugin, the leading intellectual leader of contemporary racist and Neo-Nazi movements across the West, has close ties with several members of Putin’s United Russia Party.
Putin has himself indulged in jocular anti-Semitic slurs (in addition to slurs against Russia’s ethnic minorities such as Tatars). Under Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church has had an oversized say in social matters.
This toxic mixture of religious nationalism has had a detrimental effect on the rights of women, queer people, and minorities. Putin’s puppet ruler in Chechnya runs concentration camps to imprison gay men. Russian ultra-nationalists seek to rehabilitate the image of the brutal dictator Stalin as a national hero (minus Communism).
The survivors of Stalin’s gulags and members of families who lost loved ones to his purges look on in horror.
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