NEW – August 6, 2022
The coup d’état in February 2014 became the trigger not for the initial, but for the final stage of the nazification of Ukraine, which started at the beginning of the 20th century, and has been on the rise since 1991.
The nazi essence of the Kiev regime is now obvious to anyone who is even slightly interested in what is happening in Ukraine. However, the Russian authorities [the liberal bloc – SZ] and the media in the last eight years, and especially after the signing of the Minsk Agreements, did not focus on nazism flourishing on the banks of the Dnieper, hoping to the last for the implementation of “Minsk 2”.
Therefore, many Russians have a natural question: how could it be possible to “reflash” the minds of millions of people in just eight years, who in February-March 2014 went to mass rallies under Russian flags and raised them above administrative buildings?
Therefore, we must honestly say: firstly, even then people with pro-Russian views and sentiments were a minority in Ukraine, albeit a tangible one. And secondly – and this is the main thing – Maidan in 2014 became the trigger not for the initial, but for the final stage of the nazification of Ukraine, which started at the beginning of the 20th century. But first things first.
As the Kiev historian Daniil Yanevsky, who still retained clarity of thought, rightly noted in 2013, people on the territory of present-day Ukraine had never called themselves Ukrainians before, this term appeared in the second half of the 19th century. “In Dnieper Ukraine – in the circle of people who brought Taras Shevchenko – in order to dissociate themselves from Great Moscow political and ideological practices, like saying – we are a separate ethnic group. The very name ‘Ukrainians’ since the time of Kotlyarevsky was peddled by the intellectual elite of Malorossiya, which was almost all in Masonic lodges,” wrote Yanevsky.
It is noteworthy that many of the Malorossiyan landowners (and there was no other elite at that time in Malorossiya) were ethnic Poles, while their serfs felt themselves to be part of the Russian nation.
Thus, the attempt to artificially create a “Ukrainian national identity” pursued primarily a mercantile goal: if the peasant considers themselves and the Polish landowner as part of the same nation, then the likelihood of social protests will be less. However, when during the uprising of the Poles in 1863-1864 some of these landlords, who were called “clappers”, indeed “went among the people”, urging the peasants to join the rebels, the Malorossiyan peasants caught the rebels and handed them over to the police.
After the suppression of the aforementioned uprising, the situation in Malorossiya calmed down for several decades, but at that time an external player, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became more active. In Vienna, they dreamed of expansion to the East, and the Rusyns, the westernmost branch of the Russian nation, which had been under the rule of the Danubian monarchy since the end of the 18th century, were chosen as its instrument.
At first, the Viennese authorities used the Rusyns to contain the Poles in Galicia and the Romanians in Bukovina, but by the end of the 19th century it was decided to rename them “Ukrainians” and declare them as the same nation as Malorossiyans.
After that, subversive activities began already in Malorossiya itself, from where the local intelligentsia and students were invited first of all to Lvov – to study, teach, perform, publish books, etc., and all this was paid from Vienna. For example, it was after a trip to the capital of Galicia in 1897 that a native of Poltava region, ethnic Pole Nikolay Mikhnovsky became an inveterate “Ukrainophile”.
In 1900, he wrote the pamphlet “Independent Ukraine”, which was also published for the first time in Lvov as a program of the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, one of the founders of which was Mikhnovsky.
In the same year, Nikolai Mikhnovsky wrote an open letter to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire, a native of Kiev, Dmitry Sipyagin, which contained the following words:
“The Ukrainian nation must overthrow the domination of foreigners, because they defile the very soul of the nation. It must get its freedom, even if the whole of Russia is shaken! It must get itself emancipation from national and political slavery, even if rivers of blood were spilled! And the blood that will be shed will fall as a national curse on your head, Mr. Minister, and on the heads of all the oppressors of our nation!”
If one did not know the author, the text may well be mistaken for a proclamation of “Azov” or “Aidar“.
Although Mikhnovsky was under police supervision, he did not suffer any punishment for the letter to the minister. In 1902, he created the even more radical Ukrainian People’s Party (UPP) and two years later published its manifesto, the Ten Commandments of the UPP.
Several “commandments”, which to a large extent became the basis of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism, which eventually grew into hardcore nazism, are worth quoting in full.
1. One, united, indivisible from the Carpathians all the way to the Caucasus, independent, free, democratic Ukraine – the republic of working people – this is the national Ukrainian ideal;
2. All people are your brothers, but Moskals, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and Jews are the enemies of our people as long as they rule over us and exploit us;
3. Ukraine is for Ukrainians. So, drive out from everywhere from Ukraine foreign oppressors.
4. Everywhere and always use the Ukrainian language. Let neither your wife nor your children defile your house with the language of foreign oppressors.
…
10. Do not take a wife from strangers, because your children will be your enemies, do not be friends with the enemies of our people, because you add strength and courage to them.
Where there is nationalism, there is terrorism. In 1904, during the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the reunification of Malorossiya with Russia, UPP activists planned to blow up monuments dedicated to Russian emperors in Kiev and Odessa and a monument to Pushkin in Kharkov. Only the latter was partially successful, but only the pedestal was damaged by the explosion.
At the same time, Mikhnovsky’s ideas were not popular in Malorossiya. Even after the revolutionary events of 1917, he could not find a common language with either Simon Petliura or Pavel Skoropadsky. The latter later recalled that Nikolay Mikhnovsky was a representative of the “extremely chauvinistic Ukrainian trend”. In 1920, Mikhnovsky left for Novorossiysk and even tried to evacuate with the Volunteer Army, but he, as a “known enemy of Russia”, was simply not allowed on the ship. After working for four years as a teacher in the Kuban, Mikhnovsky returned to Kiev, where he committed suicide.
However, Nikolay Mikhnovsky still had a certain number of followers, among whom Dmitry Dontsov stands out. This native of Melitopol left for Lvov back in 1908, after the outbreak of the First World War he moved first to Vienna and then to Berlin. Here he published a pamphlet in German called “The Ukrainian State and the War against Russia”, in which he argued that Russia cannot be stopped on the path to world domination except by dividing it, while the territories separated from the Russian Empire should be sufficiently strong autonomous units capable of holding back Russian expansion.
Ukraine, with a population of 30 million, according to Dontsov, was the most suitable territory for this purpose, as it had the necessary historical traditions, and for Germany and Austria this is the only way to get rid of the pan-Slavist threat once and for all.
Dontsov urged Vienna and Berlin “to restore the former freedom of Ukraine and provide patronage to this new state, and thereby finally ensure the political balance in Europe”. By the way, if we replace the capitals with Washington and London, this passage could well appear in Vladimir Zelensky’s fresh video.
In 1917, Dmitry Dontsov came to Kiev, where he met Nikolay Mikhnovsky, with whom he worked together for a time in the government of Hetman Skoropadsky. But the Hetman turned out to be too pro-Russian for Dontsov, he chose Petliura and Konovalets, at whose suggestion he went to the well-known Vienna on a diplomatic mission.
After the liquidation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and its embassies, Dontsov moved to Lvov, where in 1922, at the suggestion of Evgeny Konovalets (by that time already the leader of the Ukrainian Military Organisation, UMO), he became the editor-in-chief of the Literary and Scientific Bulletin, the ideological mouthpiece of the UMO.
It was in this position that Dmitry Dontsov wrote the book “Nationalism”, which was first published in 1926 by the publishing house of the Uniate Order of the Basilian Fathers in Zhovkva near Lvov. It outlined the doctrine of “Ukrainian integral nationalism”, in fact, totalitarianism on a Ukrainian ethno-national basis.
This doctrine was adopted as an official ideology, first in the UMO, and then in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) created in 1929. The Ukrainian population of Galicia and Volyn until 1939 was largely indoctrinated by this ideology, and terrorist attacks were often used to popularise it.
It is worth noting that the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists has been closely cooperating with Germany since its inception, and after Hitler came to power, this cooperation only intensified – after all, OUN was actually a nazi organisation, just not German, but Ukrainian. Therefore, after September 1939, when Volyn and Galicia became part of the USSR, the Soviet authorities began an intensified struggle against the nationalist underground.
However, with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War and the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis, members of both wings of OUN (by that time the organisation had split into supporters of Andrey Melnik and Stepan Bandera) became the basis of various collaborationist structures, in particular punitive auxiliary police battalions and the SS “Galicia” division. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war and “wrong” Ukrainians is on the hands of Ukrainian nationalists.
In 1943, on the eve of the arrival of the Red Army, the Banderist wing of OUN, with the support of the German occupation administration, formed the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA), the purpose of which was to fight against Soviet partisans, and in the future – sabotage in the rear of Soviet troops. But UPA first of all massacred the Polish population in Volyn and Galicia, killing about 100,000 peaceful Poles. Banderists also tried to fight the returned Soviet power – in 1944 alone they carried out almost 3,000 armed attacks, sabotage and terrorist acts against the Soviet troops and administration.
But this could change little in the general course of events. In the autumn of 1944, the Soviet government began to conduct large-scale operations against UPA with the participation of regular troops and units of the NKVD. In January 1946, the NKVD of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic summed up the preliminary results of the fight against OUN-UPA since February 1944: 39,778 operations, 103,313 militants were killed, 50,058 people turned themselves in. 83,000 people who evaded conscription were detained. 7,393 families of UPA accomplices (17,497 people) were evicted.
And in the documents of UPA itself it is noted: the most severe blow was dealt to OUN and UPA in the period from 11.01.1946 to 10.04.1946, when the detachments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs blocked all the villages of the western regions of Ukraine. During this period, UPA suffered its main losses, and from this moment ceased to exist as a combat unit. Although individual clashes with Banderists continued until the early 1950s, the problem was resolved militarily earlier.
However, among the citizens of Soviet Ukraine there were hundreds of thousands of people connected in one way or another with Ukrainian nationalists – primarily their families and relatives. Moreover, these people (often against their will) ended up in other regions of Ukraine, and not in their native Volyn or Galicia, spreading nationalist ideology there.
Well, in Western Ukraine, it remained dominant, despite the adoption by the local population of Soviet practices and communist ideology. This was also facilitated by the fact that for the sake of building the “Soviet nation” the party leadership ordered too much to be forgotten, including the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the executions at Babi Yar in Kiev and the burning of Khatyn in Belarus.
And now, the native of Volyn and former member of the “youth of OUN” Leonid Kravchuk begins to make a party career, and the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) Pyotr Shelest, who came to power on the wave of post-war Ukrainisation of the party-state apparatus of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, encourages the growth of nationalist sentiments in the republic…
Although in 1972 Shelest was removed for “localism and manifestations of nationalism”, however, most of the cadres he fostered remained in office. Thus, the aforementioned Kravchuk by 1988 became the head of the ideological department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and in this position he oversaw the creation of … the Ukrainian Language Society and the People’s Rukh of Ukraine. By the way, it was then that the Ukrainian language in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed the state language, and Russian – the language of interethnic communication.
So by 1991 in Ukraine, almost the entire nomenklatura advocated the independence of the republic, and the former communists willingly used Ukrainian nationalism as a new ideology – although this ideology was close only to the population of Western Ukraine and partly Kiev.
However, the first president of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, gave the entire humanitarian sphere of the country at the mercy of real nationalists. They were mostly immigrants from Western Ukraine, often with experience of staying in Soviet camps, where they were given experience by old members of OUN and UPA. It was then that all those nazi ideas and formulations that have now become everyday in Ukraine officially began to sound in the government offices.
In 1994, it seemed that Ukraine might take a different path when Leonid Kuchma, who publicly advocated friendship with Russia, won the presidential election. However, he quickly betrayed his constituents, leaving the humanitarian sphere in the hands of nationalists, who continued the creeping nazification of the country. In the new Constitution of Ukraine, forced by Kuchma through the Verkhovna Rada, Russian even lost the status of the language of interethnic communication, becoming only one of the languages of national minorities. It can be said with certainty that Leonid Kuchma in the administrative sense created the state, about which he later wrote the book “Ukraine is not Russia”.
Moreover, Kuchma contributed to the first “Maidan” in 2004 and the coming to power of his former prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko.
The 2004 Maidan can be considered a turning point in the process of the nazification of Ukraine – under Yushchenko it became clear. It was during the reign of the third president of Ukraine that the mass installation of memorial plaques and monuments to nazi collaborators, primarily Stepan Bandera, and their glorification began, terms like “Soviet occupation of Ukraine” sounded publicly, the Soviet Union was compared with the Third Reich, etc.
In addition, restrictions and bans on the use of the Russian language in educational institutions, state bodies and courts, on television and in cinemas began to be introduced. Relations between Kiev and Moscow became openly hostile, which harmed Ukraine, as it led to a sharp rise in gas prices. Moreover, all these processes were openly supported from the West, primarily from the United States, including due to the fact that Yushchenko’s wife was an American and a former employee of the State Department.
The people of Ukraine once again tried to resist all this by voting in the presidential elections in 2010 for Viktor Yanukovych, a native of Donbass. But he turned out to be a faithful student of Leonid Kuchma, for whom Yanukovych worked as prime minister in 2002-2004.
Despite some steps towards Russia and the Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine, the fourth president of this country fawned over both the West and local nationalists, hoping to use them as a convenient sparring partner in elections. However, for Ukrainian nationalists, the West, and primarily the United States, turned out to be both closer and more profitable.
Various neo-nazi organisations in Ukraine became the basis for the preparation of a new “Maidan”, in which Washington, according to Victoria Nuland, invested five billion dollars.
The armed coup d’état that followed this “Maidan” in February 2014 marked the beginning of the final stage of the nazification of Ukraine. In the very first days of the coup, the law on languages, which made it possible to grant Russian the status of an official language, at least in certain regions, was repealed and Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine were actually declared second-class citizens. Actually, this was the impetus for the withdrawal of Crimea to Russia and mass protests in all regions of the South-East of Ukraine. They were brutally suppressed everywhere except Donbass, where armed resistance to the Kiev regime began and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) were proclaimed.
In response, in June 2014, Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk called the DPR and LPR militias “subhuman” – this is the term used by the German Nazis in relation to the Jews.
And although the Kiev authorities did not allow such blunders in official statements and documents anymore, the policy of post-Maidan Ukraine became more and more nazi. In 2015, a law was adopted on the glorification of OUN-UPA, later the slogan of this organisation became the official greeting of the Ukrainian armed formations.
At the same time, the latter openly used the symbols of the SS units, and the notorious “Azov” regiment is far from alone in this. By the way, “Azov” even attracted the attention of American researchers, since this structure recruited nazi mercenaries from all over the world into its ranks, but this did not lead to any real consequences.
Nazism has actually become the state ideology in Ukraine, which has been hammered into the heads of the inhabitants of this country for the ninth year, from kindergarten and school to entertainment programs on radio and television.
At the same time, the Russian language is legally prohibited not only in all the areas mentioned, but also in trade and public catering, and from July 2022, a seller or waiter can be fined more than 100 euros if they contact a client in a language other than Ukrainian.
It is noteworthy that the tightening of the nazification of Ukraine has occurred over the past two and a half years, when the president of the country is Vladimir Zelensky, who came to power under the slogans of peace in Donbass.
However, three days before the second round of the election, Zelensky said that “Stepan Bandera is a hero for a certain percentage of Ukrainians, and this is normal and cool, this is one of those people who defended the freedom of Ukraine”.
Many citizens of Ukraine then either did not notice this, or considered it a meaningless nod to the nationalist-minded voters.
But the artist Vladimir Zelensky in the summer of 2014 came to the front to entertain the Ukrainian military, who massively shelled residential areas of Donbass and killed civilians, and called the DPR and LPR militias “creatures”.
Now, President Zelensky calls all Russians “slaves”, and the terms that high-ranking Ukrainian politicians and propagandists use in relation to Russia and Russians would be envied by Goebbels and Rosenberg.
Therefore, Joe Biden’s argument that there is no Nazism in Ukraine because Zelensky is a Jew and his grandfather fought Nazi Germany does not stand up to scrutiny.
Firstly, for the use of symbols under which the lieutenant of the Red Army Semyon Zelensky expelled the Nazis from Ukraine, in today’s Ukraine you can get 5 years in prison. Secondly, the Ukrainian military has long been fighting with Nazi “totenkopf” on their sleeves and “wolf hook” on their flags. Well, remembering the Jews after a synagogue in Uman was used by the Ukrainian nazis as a transshipment base for weapons and ammunition is clearly not worth anything for Western politicians.
Oleg Khavich
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