By Vestnik Kavkaza
A Kiev session of the radical grouping of Ukrainian nationalists, “Right Sector”, decided to transform into a political party and present its leader Dmitry Yarosh as a candidate for the presidency. Yarosh will fight the election as an independent candidate.
Meanwhile, Moscow sent documents to Interpol, putting Dmitry Yarosh on the international wanted list for his anti-Russian statements and a plea to terrorist Doku Umarov (who is thought to be dead) to support him. Simultaneously, the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs is beginning to collect instances of outrages committed by nationalists in Ukraine. Historians are involved in the process of debunking as well.
Igor Shishkin, Deputy Director of the CIS Institute, states that “Right Sector includes not only Western Ukrainians or followers of Bandera, but many Russian guys who sincerely went there to fight against the Moscow Asiatic Horde. We need to understand the roots and the causes of this. This is our own fault. Since the 1990s there have been constant official declarations of "let's leave history to the historians". This is a completely defeatist idea. The elites in post-Soviet space use history as an effective political instrument, while we don't interfere. It started in 1991 when the USSR broke down. Let's call things by their own names. In 1991 separatists came to power in Ukraine and in the Baltic states. It was not they who destroyed the USSR, they did not have such possibilities, but the power went to the separatists, and their main problem was how to preserve the piece that they suddenly got. One way was to get an overlord - NATO, the EU, Washington and so on. But it was necessary also to create a basis for the separatist movement, those who would oppose any integration.
Speaking about people who became “heroes,” Shishkin noted: “There was also another cunning thing. They wore German uniforms, but the Germans were fighting not only the evil empire, the USSR, but also against the US. And this is how the argument about a third power was born. It is claimed that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Bandera were fighting not only the reds from Moscow, but also the Germans. They were a third power and were waiting for the moment when they could join the free countries of the world to liberate Moscow and Berlin from totalitarians. And what was our answer? Silence. There were some films like "Strafbat" or "Bestards". Let's admit that noone made a bigger contribution to the falsification of history than the Russian mass-media, Russian writers and journalists. Not all but a considerable number of them.”
Professor Mikhail Myagkov, head of the Center for the History of Warfare and Geopolitics at the Institute of General History, says that in Ukraine there were textbooks, which after reading them made you either misunderstand the material or falsify the events that took place in the past, but especially in the 20th century. As a result of such textbooks, such an education, Ukraine has largely lost its identification with the victory, the common victory in the Great Patriotic War. The same happened with Bandera. He is represented in Ukraine as a man who fought against the Muscovites, i.e. against Moscow and the Germans. But this is absolutely not true. After all, historical research, archival documents clearly show that this was, in fact, a Nazi ideology which was propagated by a person with a Nazi mindset on the eve of the Second World War. And Bandera's supporters came to Ukraine with the help of German troops. Later, these same people committed atrocities in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. It is a historical fact. There are documents of the Nuremberg trials which speak clearly and directly about it.”
According to Fyodor Sinitsyn, Doctoral candidate of Institute of the Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the propaganda myth says: “On the Russian territory occupied by the Germans an anti-Stalin revolution took place, and that the national liberation movement in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states was aimed both against Bolshevik Russia and Hitler's Germany… In the last 25 years this myth did not encounter proper resistance and historians don't deal with the numbers that destroy this myth. I would like to mention some numbers that are telling. During the Great Patriotic War 31 million were drafted into the Red Army. According to the most generous evaluation, 1.5 million of our compatriots wore a German uniform. So 31 million against 1.5 million. This is the first thing. Secondly, there were 2 million Soviet partisans. So those who were fighting on the Soviet side were many times more numerous than those in German uniform. 1.5 million is too high a number, German historians say that there were 500 thousand, mostly horse keepers, cooks, assistants - some volunteers who helped the German army in the rear, because the Germans did not allow them on the frontline because they were afraid that they would change sides. So one can't speak of any war of our compatriots against the USSR.”
However, in Western Ukraine they try to make national history out of this myth. According to Sinitsyn, “they want to turn it into their national idea. It is a big problem in the West, as the majority of the Ukrainian population does not support those ideas. This ideology mostly has supporters in Galicia, in the regions of Lvov, Ivano-Frankovsk and Ternopol. But now they are trying to replant this ideology into the entire population. We see that this does not find support, that people resist, that this is not their history or their heroes. These are their anti-heroes.”
