Integral Nationalism

First it is necessary to clarify a point of semantics. In English, the term nationalism is used to designate any conscious striving toward national self-expression. In this broad sense Ukrainian patriots of all ideological hues- -democrats, conservatives, and even “national” communists — may be described as nationalists.

The nationalist trend originated in the 1920s as a reaction to the defeat of the struggle for Ukrainian national independence. The nucleus of the movement consisted of veterans of the Ukrainian army, especially young officers, who refused to accept the fact of defeat and decided to continue the armed struggle for national liberation by revolutionary, underground means. For this purpose they created, as early as 1920, a secret Ukrainian Military Organization (Ukrainska viiskova Orhanizatsiia, UVO), whose commander was Colonel Ievhen Konovalets (1891-1938). The UVO was originally intended to be non-partisan and included men of various political convictions.

The second root of integral nationalism is to be found in the circles of young intellectuals, mostly students, in Lviv, Prague and Vienna. In the two latter cities, large Ukrainian communities existed in the 1920s. The problem passionately debated in these groups was the assessment of the causes of the recent failure of Ukrainian statehood. The leaders of the Ukrainian People’s Republic were indicted for their “softness” and the humanitarian and cosmopolitan ideas by which they allegedly had deflected popular energies from the supreme goal of national indepen­dence.

The publicist whose impact was decisive in the formation of the ideol­ogy of Ukrainian integral nationalism was Dmytro Dontsov (1883­1973). A native of Dnieper Ukraine, educated in St. Petersburg, Dontsov settled in Lviv, where he became the editor of an influential monthly journal, Literaturno-Kiaukovyi vistnyk (Literary and Scientific Herald). A brilliant controversialist, he advocated in his treatise, Natsionalizm (Na­tionalism, 1926), and in numerous articles and pamphlets a philosophy of “national voluntarism” partly derived from Nietzsche. Dontsov was mainly responsible for giving the ideology of Ukrainian integral national­ism a deliberately irrationalist, anti-intellectual, and voluntarist bias. A peculiar trait of Dontsov’s thought was his implacable execration of Rus­sia, not just of the tsarist or Soviet state but of the Russian people and culture. (It is to be noted that for western Ukrainians, among whom Dontsov worked, the primary national adversary was not Russia, with which they had had only limited experience, but Poland.) At an early date Dontsov began a determined campaign against the pro-Soviet sympathies which were widespread in Galicia and Volhynia at that time. Later tragic developments in Soviet Ukraine were to confirm Dontsov’s predictions, thus enhancing his prestige. He also devoted much of his labour to literary criticism, for which he had a real gift. He assembled around his journal a group of noted poets and writers who left a durable mark on the evolution of modem Ukrainian literature.

Nationalist ideological groups and the UVO, from which members of other political leanings gradually withdrew, moved closer together. They merged at the First Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists held in Vienna in 1929. At the Congress the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Or- hanizatsiia Ukrainskykh natsionalistiv, OUN) was created and Konovalets was proclaimed its leader.

According to the program of the OUN, the supreme goal, national independence, was to be achieved by revolutionary means. The Ukrain­ian masses were to be kept in a state of permanent unrest, thus preventing the consolidation of the power of the “occupiers.” The chain of acts of terrorism, civil disobedience, and local riots and uprisings was to cul­minate in a great future conflagration, out of which an independent Ukrainian state was to be born. The nationalists scornfully rejected any accommodation of Ukrainian policies to the existing order of things, which they condemned as shameful opportunism and a betrayal of the na­tional ideal. They refused in principle to co-operate with other Ukrainian parties and political movements, which were all, according to them, tainted with opportunism. The OUN’s vision of a future independent Ukraine was that of a dictatorial, one-party state. The nationalists were not very specific on social and economic questions, but, in general terms, they advocated “national solidarity,” i.e., a social order in which competition among classes and economic interest groups would be per­manently eliminated. There were several causes for the Ukrainian in­tegral nationalists’ rejection of democracy: the conviction that demo­cracy was mainly responsible for the downfall of Ukrainian statehood in 1917—21; resentment against Western democratic powers which had denied recognition and support to the Ukrainian nation; the desire to emulate the successes of the Russian Bolsheviks and the dictatorial Pilsudski regime in Poland; and the notion that the cruelty and cynicism of these foreign oppressors could be resisted only by equally ruthless means.

While Ukrainian integral nationalism was an indigenous growth, it un­doubtedly modelled itself on contemporary fascist movements and regimes in the West.

The decade from 1929 to 1939 was a time of rapid expansion of the integral-nationalist movement. The headquarters of the OUN were abroad, but its primary operational field was Ukrainian ethnic territory in Poland. According to nationalist doctrine, the revolutionary struggle was to be conducted against all “occupiers” simultaneously, but in practice the terrorist activities of the OUN were directed almost exclusively against Poland. The nationalists’ anti-Russian stand was, at that time, ex­pressed by occasional assassination attempts against Soviet diplomats and by a vigorous struggle against any surviving communist sympathies within Ukrainian society outside the USSR. The nationalists were able to capture much of the revolutionary ferment among the population of Galicia and Volhynia, which the Communist Party of Western Ukraine had previously tried to exploit. A particular success of the OUN was its solid support among the young. Integral nationalism had the character of a youth movement, and the antagonism between the OUN and the tradi­tional democratic parties assumed the psychological dimension of a con­flict of generations.

The rise of the integral-nationalist trend must be seen against the his­torical background of the 1930s. For the Ukrainian people this was an ex­ceptionally tragic era: the time of the Stalinist purges and massacres in Soviet Ukraine and of the ever-increasing chauvinism and oppressive­ness of Polish rule in Western Ukraine. In such circumstances, the na­tionalist movement appeared as the embodiment of the Ukrainian people’s defiant will to survive. The aura of heroism and self-sacrifice which surrounded the OUN attracted thousands of idealistic young men and women. Neither the half-hearted opposition of the older democratic parties nor the repressive measures of the Polish administration were able to stem the tide. The gaps created in the ranks of the organization by ar­rests were easily filled by new recruits. In Polish prisons and concentra­tion camps, raw youths underwent a transformation into hardened profes­sional revolutionaries—a human category previously unknown in west­ern Ukraine. There was a saying during those years in Galicia and Vol- hynia that “prison is the Ukrainian university.” But this transformation took a heavy toll in human lives and broken existences. To concerned ob­servers, even within the movement, it was becoming increasingly evi­dent that Ukrainian integral nationalism was contaminated by serious in­trinsic ills. This led to a blunting of moral sensibility, as demonstrated by the use of physical and moral terror against Ukrainian political op­ponents. The voluntaristic character of nationalist ideology, and its reli­ance on “myth” rather than knowledge, interfered with the ability to perceive reality objectively and therefore with rational and responsible decision-making. While integral nationalism enhanced the militancy and resilience of the Ukrainian people in times of great stress, it also lowered the level of their civic maturity.