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![]() Timothy SnyderFascism, Russia, and UkraineThis article will appear
in the coming March 20, 2014 issue of The New York Review. The
opposition leader Vitali Klitschko attending a protest rally in Maidan square,
Kiev, December 16, 2013 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
wordagora 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, orsotnia, 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 http://www.nybooks.com/ Feb 02 2014 |