Phenomenon of Ukrainian nationalism

By Vestnik Kavkaza

After the regime change in Kiev, the negative emotions of the Ukrainians could turn against the new authorities. There are too many factors which confirm that the Maidan leaders have contacts with neo-Nazis and extremists, and Ukraine is becoming a hostage of fascist groups. The tendencies are not new for the country.

Bogdan Bezpalko, the deputy director of the Center for Ukraine and Belarus Studies of the MSU, told Vestnik Kavkaza that “the first concentration camps in Europe were built in Thalerhof and Terezin in Austria. Russophiles from modern Galicia were kept there. They were native Galician residents who were thought to be Russians, a part of the big Russian nation, but they didn’t deny that they were from Galicia and that they represented a unique identity within the framework of the Russian nation. A big part of the intelligentsia of the population was represented by Uniate (not Orthodox) priests. These people remembered about their roots after the 500-year period of suppression; they remembered that they are Russians. At the beginning of the First World War a party which represented Ukrainophiles, together with the Austrian authorities, physically exterminated them in concentration camps.”

According to Bezpalko, “Ukrainophiles were the main informers; they wrote lists and sent people to concentration camps or killed them. Many residents of Lvov don’t know that there is a memorial to the victims of Terezin and Theresienstadt in the Lychakovskoe graveyard. A big literary monument of victims of the massacre, the genocide, is a book by Vasily Vavrik, a resident of Galicia, which is headlined “Terezin and Theresienstadt.” It was published several years ago and can be found on the Internet.”

Bezpalko thinks the genocide was “the first fruit”: “At that period there was no such strong nationalist consciousness. There was no ideology of radical Ukrainian nationalism. It was developed later in the 1920-1903s by natives from Western Ukraine. It was implemented during the Great Patriotic War, when about 200 thousand Poles were slaughtered by Ukrainian nationalists. There were ethnic cleansings in Western Ukraine, Jews were murdered in Kiev and other cities of Ukraine. The Russians and the Ukrainians who were thought not to be ideologically-correct people were slaughtered. Ordinary people were killed – agriculturists, teachers, chairmen of collective households, who were sent to the villages of Western Ukraine. But initially it started from a group of intelligentsia, which set the task of establishing a separate country, a separate nation.”

Bezpalko says that the phenomenon of Ukrainian nationalism lies in its artificial character: “Usually nationalism comes from the peculiarities of a people, an ethnic group which has its own territory, self-administration, intelligentsia. This time it is the opposite. A group of intelligentsia decided to have a nation for themselves and detached a territory from the general space of the Russian Empire. It means nationalism is forming the Ukrainian nation.”

However, according to Bezpalko, the current events in Ukraine confirm that the attempts have failed: “The whole Southeast doesn’t want to be a part of the Ukrainian nation with their ideals, heroes, and values which are imposed on them. These people remembered that they are Russians. It’s not an accident that the process is called the Russian Spring.”

The expert believes that Victory Day is “a symbolic holiday, as it correlates with the values which unite Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, the expert says that the current stance of the Belarusan authorities is ambiguous toward the Ukrainian events: “Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko behaves sometimes a little strangely for a third-party viewer, but substantially it is explained by his personal qualities; secondly, he seeks to maintain friendly relations even with representatives of the Kiev putschists for the sake of economic feasibility. Trade turnover between Russia and Belarus is $3 billion, and this, for such a small country as Belarus, consisting of just 6 regions, is very important. At the same time, Belarus voted against this resolution, during the adoption of the resolution of the UN condemning Russia. It was one of the countries which not just didn't support this resolution, but also spoke against it. So in reality Belarus is our ally, our partner. We will move together in our future and to ensure the sovereignty of Belarus, both political and economic, and military potential. In this situation, given the fate of Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq and Syria, we see that Western civilization aggressively protects its own interests and does not hesitate at anything.”