Nationalism as a Renewal of Second World War Mythmaking

By casting the present events as a replay of the Second World War, Putin is attempting to impose Soviet wartime mythmaking on contemporary politics. This, of course, is the major reason why Ukrainian citizens are described in his propaganda as Banderites.

How do contemporary Ukrainians see the issue? It should be said that there is a gulf between popular perceptions of the OUN(B), or Bander­ites, and the historical reality. For example, Svoboda and the groups that make up the Right Sector view the OUN, and Bandera’s wing in par­ticular, as heroic freedom fighters, and celebrate the history of the UPA, which until the 1950s was still fighting in the underground against the imposition of Soviet rule. The memory of this struggle for independence has been described with admiration in films and in novels like Oksana Zabuzhko’s Muzei pokynutykh sekretiv (Museum of Forgotten Secrets, 2009). In recent years, many individuals have embraced the term Bander­ite in much the same way as some Russian liberals in 1918 embraced the Western view of themselves as barbarians. In that year, Aleksandr Blok wrote his poem “The Scythians,” in which he famously and threateningly intoned: “Yes, we are Scythians, we are slit-eyed Asians.” The important point is that the term “Banderite” has been adopted by many Ukrainians as an act of defiance, a way of demonstrating resistance to Putin. The Second World War slogan “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!”— also associated with the OUN and UPA—was adopted after 20 February 2014, when on the streets of Kyiv over a hundred people were killed by

Living With Ambiguities 169 government forces. The population appropriated this slogan as an expres­sion of commitment to the current struggle. At this time some insignia of the wartime UPA guerillas, such as the red-and-black flag, were also appropriated as symbols of the struggle for independent statehood and the resistance to the imposition of foreign, Kremlin-directed rule.

In this sense, the present-day context shares two things with the OUN’s nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s: a belief in militant struggle as a necessity for independent statehood to be won and maintained, and a commitment to an anti-Kremlin orientation. However, identification with the partisan movement of the 1940s does not translate into admi­ration for the interwar OUN’s ideology, which was contemptuous of democracy and parliamentary rule; nor does it signify an attraction to a totalitarian model in which civil society, the press, and the judiciary are subordinated to the authoritarian state. Still less does it translate into sympathy for those who helped round up and murder Jews in the weeks following the outbreak of the German-Soviet war on 22 June 1941. Quite the opposite: the vast majority of contemporary citizens reject the views held by the OUN(B) in the 1930s and early 1940s, and are appalled by the actions of those who participated in the machinery of the Holocaust. Even Serhii Kvit and the Right Sector are not prepared to recall these views and actions. They prefer to reinterpret the OUN and UPA exclu­sively according to later, post-1943, pronouncements by these groups, which were anti-imperialist and—among reformist sections like the OUN(Z)—pro-democratic.

This has not stopped Putin’s propaganda machine from trying to replay the Second World War in a scenario that casts Russia as the victim of an aggressive and simultaneously degenerate West. The war and the politics of fascism/anti-fascism are used, as Snyder has pointed out, to portray Moscow as a defender of all that is good, and its critics as evil. As Snyder explains when commenting on 1939-41:

This very effective rhetorical pose did not preclude an actual Soviet alliance with the actual Nazis. Given the return of Russian propa­ganda today to anti-fascism, this is an important point to remember: the whole grand moral Manichaeism was meant to serve the state, and as such did not limit it in any way.

(Snyder 2014)

In fact, it is Putin’s Russia that today represents the aggressive, quasi­fascist state. As were Germans in the 1930s, contemporary Russians are being taught to resent the loss of their superpower status and to view their post-Soviet condition as humiliating. They are encouraged to iden­tify with a strong leader and a powerful state, to admire an aggressive masculinity that expresses itself in violence and war, and to despise the

weakness that is associated with liberalism, femininity, homosexuality, and a decaying Europe.³ The aggressive Russian state is paradoxically portrayed as a victim whose majesty and power have been reduced or go unrecognized. A first step toward recovering self-respect, Russians are told, is to regain the satellites they once controlled. The Russian fascist, as Mikhail Yampolskii calls him, today feels simultaneously “omnipo­tent and persecuted,” and is therefore prone to believe invented stories of martyrdom, such as that of the boy crucified by Ukrainian troops (Iampolski 2015).

Some collectives have been described by Yampolskii as “basic assump­tion” groups. Their unity, he argues, is based on illusions and a denial of individual differentiation:

Their primary task is the rejection of the ego in order to merge with some narcissistic primordial unity and become part of a homogenous and undifferentiated mass. Such groups are homogenous on prin­ciple; their members are utterly intolerant of any deviation from their single style of thought and behavior.

(ibid.)

This kind of consciousness is described by Yampolskii as paranoid and quasi-fascist. In his view, it dominated Hitler’s Germany and is now prev­alent in Putin’s Russia.

The way history is told in today’s Russia increasingly requires the framing of conquest and use of brute force in positive terms. The vic­tory against Germany in 1945 is appropriated as a national—exclusively Russian—achievement, and today’s events are cast as a repetition of the fight against Nazi Germany. However, the dominant message to be learned from this narrative is the need to recover lost greatness through reconquest. The question of what the fight is for appears to have only one answer: a strong Russia. No mention is made of a tolerant and strong civil society, and the pro-state rhetoric allows almost no investment in the vision of a democratic order, freedom of the press and association, an independent judiciary, and the application of the rule of law to gov­ernment officials. If democracy, media freedoms, and the accountability of rulers to judicial oversight are mentioned, these references are often made in order to illustrate the internal divisions in Western society, and to suggest that authoritarianism is preferable to chaos, weakness, and decadence.