Can Europe afford to ignore the danger of the neo-Nazi virus spreading?

By Vestnik Kavkaza

Yesterday, at a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Normandy Quartet in Paris, they reaffirmed that there must be practical consideration of other matters referred to in the documents of Minsk on February 12 as soon as possible. 
"First of all, this is a political process: the preparations for elections, considerations of the problems of constitutional reform. As a special priority, we stressed the need for dialogue on the restoration of socio-economic relations, providing banking services to the public areas, which are now under the control of militias," the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry Sergei Lavrov said. 
"I hope that after the withdrawal of heavy weapons, there are no excuses about the fact that there is a need to wait for the decision of the political issues raised in the statements of February 12."

However, differences remain in the approaches of Moscow and European countries on what is happening in Ukraine. In early February at the Munich Security Conference, Sergei Lavrov complained that "Western colleagues tend to turn a blind eye to everything that is said and done by the Kiev authorities, including incitement of xenophobic attitudes ... I do not think that today's Europe can afford to ignore the danger of the spread of the neo-Nazi virus."

Explaining the phenomenon of how "Ukrainian citizens suddenly became committed to the ideology of radical Ukrainian nationalism," the deputy director of the Center for Ukrainian and Belarusian Studies of MSU, chairman of the NCFA "Ukrainians of Russia" Bogdan Bezpalko, said that this was due to several factors.

According to the expert: “Ukraine was established for the first time not even in 1917, but in 1922, when the Soviet Union was created, when Ukraine territory was created and, in general, almost in its present form, when there were included those same territories, where war is now happening - the industrial Donbass region, the south-east, Novorossiya, the northern Black Sea region. And then there was the doctrine of building national republics. In the 20s and 30s a policy of Ukrainianization was conducted. This policy was conducted in all regions of the Soviet Union and its purpose was not to inure people to the created national language, but the creation of national intellectuals, a national consciousness. It was successful. In Soviet times, there was already the Ukrainian nation, but in a Soviet way, a semi-frozen state.” 

According to Bogdan Bezpalko, that is how the doctrine of the two brotherly peoples was explained, which by inertia was sometimes translated by the Ukrainian side, sometimes by the Russian. In fact, we are not two different nations, we are one nation, which has a large variety. If we take, for example, dialects of northern Russia, somewhere in Arkhangelsk and compare them with how they talk, not even in the south or in Siberia, but in the Nizhny Novgorod region, we will see a lot of differences. Based on these differences, it is already possible to artificially create new national groups, ethnic features, make them create and adjust the language and so on. All of that has been created in Ukraine.

“So when in 1991 the elite, the top, the representatives of the Soviet Union, destroyed the Soviet Union themselves, Ukrainian citizens were faced with a choice: if the communist ideology that holds two different nations created, in fact, two different ethnic groups, if this ideology collapsed, the only ideology that was more or less close to this turned out to be Ukrainian nationalism. A former ideologist of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, has adopted this ideology. All the presidents of Ukraine developed this ideology, to varying degrees of radicality, to varying degrees of Russophobia. Everyone knows the book by Leonid Leonidovich Kuchma "Ukraine is not Russia." In fact, it is, of course, a gently expressed idea of Ukrainian nationalism, which consists of the fact that Ukraine is not just not Russia, but is also anti-Russian. And, of course, in 23 years a new generation that has grown up on new textbooks has grown into a new geopolitical reality, it has grown with new characters, it has grown up with the pressure of new media, which have all asserted that the old dream of the Ukrainian people of autonomy and independence, which was created for centuries, has come true. That means that they created a number of myths and feed them to population, and part of the population has quite naturally evolved these myths to such a radical state,” Bezpalko believes.

According to sociologists, 10% of active minorities can win over the majority, brainwash it, indoctrinate it, roughly speaking. Do not underestimate the role of the media. I had to personally deal with people who are already represented by no means young men and, accordingly, who did not grow up in the independent Ukraine. These people, through television and radio, broadcast these Russophobic nationalist myths to a much greater degree of harshness than the young people allow themselves. For many representatives of young people, the main entertainment was travelling abroad, and the main ideology was the ideology of consumption. And for the older generation it was very easy to change one ideology for another. Of course, under certain conditions, all the active population, which shared in varying degrees either ideas of nationalist beliefs or some ideas of social protest, was able to mobilize to a certain point, organize logistics, finance, to create a group of militants, cover and so on. Carry on the same coup, which we've all seen in the fall of 2013 - winter of 2014," the deputy director of the Center for Ukrainian and Belarusian Studies claims.