| By Timothy Holtgrefe February 2024 For several years prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin had devoted much of his time and effort to promoting false narratives and a revisionist history of Ukraine as early as 2005. However, the rhetorical gaslighting and denial of Ukraine’s rich cultural heritage is actually nothing new. In fact for Russian autocrats it is an historical continuity going back several hundred years in an effort to subjugate a race of people. |  Image credit: Efrem Lukatsky/AP via The Independent |
What is surprising is not that the Russian Empire ‘russified’ their ethnic minorities, as all colonizers have performed similar practices, but that so many of these false narratives continue to persist into today’s political discourse regarding the current war in Ukraine; even in the West. This is part 6 of an HQ exclusive series to investigate Russia’s relentless attack on history. In this episode, we will explore Moscow’s distortive attempt to link ‘Nazism’ to Ukraine’s national movements since World War II.
Defending Russia from “Nazis”
When Vladimir Putin first announced his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 23, 2022 to a shocked global audience, one of the main goals for the operation listed by the autocrat was to “de-nazify” Ukraine. Although this line of rhetoric may puzzle many observers since Ukraine's current elected president is himself Jewish, it has been used before to justify Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. As citizens of the Donbas and Crimea witnessed Russian paramilitary forces entering their neighborhoods, they were assured they were being ‘rescued’ from a violent Nazi coup and genocide of Russian speakers.
Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to Putin in 2014, told the BBC after Ukraine’s signing of the EU Free Trade agreement, "They organized [a] military coup in Ukraine; they helped Nazis to come to power. This Nazi government is bombing the largest region in Ukraine" (cited by Walker, 2014). He was of course referring to the conflict between the separatist regions supported by Moscow against Kyiv. This and other accusations having to do with Ukrainians as “fascists” or “Nazis” have been routinely made by Putin and his state controlled media after the enormous protests at Maidan led to the exile of the pro-Russian President Yanukovych, and have since done their best to export the idea abroad through various means.
During Russia’s “Great Patriotic War” victory celebrations, numerous references of Nazi war crimes were made along with an upsurge of patriotic fervor among the Russian public following Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Russian media began drawing historical continuity to Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the SS during WWII. In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin claimed that Hilter’s ideology “lives on” in Ukraine (Putin, 2024).
While there were clearly far-right groups active in Ukraine, analysts predominately describe them as playing a limited role in the overall conflict (Likhachev, 2016). However, to what extent did Ukrainians collaborate with Hitler during the Second World War? Were neo-Nazis a significant political force in contemporary Ukraine to warrant a Russian invasion in 2014 or 2022?
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (1933-1945)
During the Second World War, the lands between Hitler and Stalin experienced the horrors of both regimes. More civilians and soldiers would die in this region than anywhere during the war. It was also where the majority of Holocaust victims lost their lives. Survivors not only experienced life under Nazi occupation but a 2nd Soviet occupation when the Nazis retreated.
Before the concentration camps of Hitler’s Holocaust, Stalin had already murdered an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians and Poles in the Holodomor (1933-34) and the Great Terror (1937-38) which disproportionately targeted national ethnic minorities, and murdered hundreds of thousands more (Snyder, 2012, p.435).
The Political Trap for Those Occupied
Just prior to the Second World War, European public opinion was so polarized that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler: such was the political climate of Europe and the backdrop of the Ukrainian nationalist movement at the time (p.60-1). Western Ukraine was occupied by the Polish state that emerged after the First World War. Although many Ukrainians were content with Polish rule in these regions, known as Galicia and Volhynia, those seeking independence began to look for outside assistance from either Germany or
When Vladimir Putin first announced his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 23, 2022 to a shocked global audience, one of the main goals for the operation listed by the autocrat was to “de-nazify” Ukraine. Although this line of rhetoric may puzzle many observers since Ukraine's current elected president is himself Jewish, it has been used before to justify Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. As citizens of the Donbas and Crimea witnessed Russian paramilitary forces entering their neighborhoods, they were assured they were being ‘rescued’ from a violent Nazi coup and genocide of Russian speakers.
Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to Putin in 2014, told the BBC after Ukraine’s signing of the EU Free Trade agreement, "They organized [a] military coup in Ukraine; they helped Nazis to come to power. This Nazi government is bombing the largest region in Ukraine" (cited by Walker, 2014). He was of course referring to the conflict between the separatist regions supported by Moscow against Kyiv. This and other accusations having to do with Ukrainians as “fascists” or “Nazis” have been routinely made by Putin and his state controlled media after the enormous protests at Maidan led to the exile of the pro-Russian President Yanukovych, and have since done their best to export the idea abroad through various means.
During Russia’s “Great Patriotic War” victory celebrations, numerous references of Nazi war crimes were made along with an upsurge of patriotic fervor among the Russian public following Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Russian media began drawing historical continuity to Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the SS during WWII. In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin claimed that Hilter’s ideology “lives on” in Ukraine (Putin, 2024).
While there were clearly far-right groups active in Ukraine, analysts predominately describe them as playing a limited role in the overall conflict (Likhachev, 2016). However, to what extent did Ukrainians collaborate with Hitler during the Second World War? Were neo-Nazis a significant political force in contemporary Ukraine to warrant a Russian invasion in 2014 or 2022?
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (1933-1945)
During the Second World War, the lands between Hitler and Stalin experienced the horrors of both regimes. More civilians and soldiers would die in this region than anywhere during the war. It was also where the majority of Holocaust victims lost their lives. Survivors not only experienced life under Nazi occupation but a 2nd Soviet occupation when the Nazis retreated.
Before the concentration camps of Hitler’s Holocaust, Stalin had already murdered an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians and Poles in the Holodomor (1933-34) and the Great Terror (1937-38) which disproportionately targeted national ethnic minorities, and murdered hundreds of thousands more (Snyder, 2012, p.435).
The Political Trap for Those Occupied
Just prior to the Second World War, European public opinion was so polarized that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler: such was the political climate of Europe and the backdrop of the Ukrainian nationalist movement at the time (p.60-1). Western Ukraine was occupied by the Polish state that emerged after the First World War. Although many Ukrainians were content with Polish rule in these regions, known as Galicia and Volhynia, those seeking independence began to look for outside assistance from either Germany or
| the Soviet Union. A Ukrainian wanting independence from Warsaw in the west or from Moscow in the east did not necessarily make one a communist nor a fascist, but rather just another group forced into the political trap of the 1930s. When the Nazis began invading states formerly occupied by Stalin in 1941, the Nazi occupation would become a political trap for Jews. The 2nd Soviet occupation that would arrive later; however, was a political trap for nationalist resistance. |  |
According to German propaganda, all Jews were communists and all communists were Jews. Like most ideas of the world, according to Hitler, communism was a Jewish invention created to harm Germany. Being communists themselves, Soviet citizens of course knew this to be untrue. Consequently, unlike other civilians living under occupation, it was clear that Jews were not going to receive a choice to side with German occupiers, so they naturally sided with the Soviets instead. This only confirmed German propaganda and promoted their formula for occupation in each eastern European nation they encountered: 1) Incorporate national partisans, police, and others who may resist Nazi occupation by promising them an independent state, 2) order them to commit genocide by portraying the Jews as responsible for Soviet cruelties all before finally, 3) arresting all national leaders once they’ve served their purpose to Hitler’s Third Reich. This recurring pattern can be observed in the nationalist movements of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine during the Holocaust.
When the Soviets re-occupied these lands from Hitler, just as Hitler saw all Jews as communists, Stalin would prefer everyone believe all nationalists were Nazis. The most extreme case were the Polish patriots who died seeking to liberate their capital during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Since they attempted to liberate their capital before the arrival of the Red Army, it is widely believed that Stalin delayed taking the city to ensure the Germans wiped them out. The Soviets would remember the Polish Home Army as fascists, little better than Hitler. The Red Army halt not only doomed the Polish fighters and civilians, but also the Jews of Lodz and Auschwitz where they were being gassed less than a hundred kilometers from the front (p.310). Although they had fought the Germans with much greater determination than the Polish communists, they would be gaslighted by their Soviet occupiers for decades after the war (p.356).
In other words, the meaning of the term “Nazi” would extend to all resistance fighters who were not communists, even those actively fighting the Germans as such.
Civilian Collaboration Under Nazi Occupation
Every region touched by German power had collaborators, including the Soviet Union. No nationality had collaborators that were statistically unique from another, including Soviet Russia. Contrary to Stalin and Putin’s myths about the war, statistically everyone had a similar ratio of those who collaborated, resisted, and rescued in the Holocaust (Snyder, 2022). The double occupation, first
When the Soviets re-occupied these lands from Hitler, just as Hitler saw all Jews as communists, Stalin would prefer everyone believe all nationalists were Nazis. The most extreme case were the Polish patriots who died seeking to liberate their capital during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Since they attempted to liberate their capital before the arrival of the Red Army, it is widely believed that Stalin delayed taking the city to ensure the Germans wiped them out. The Soviets would remember the Polish Home Army as fascists, little better than Hitler. The Red Army halt not only doomed the Polish fighters and civilians, but also the Jews of Lodz and Auschwitz where they were being gassed less than a hundred kilometers from the front (p.310). Although they had fought the Germans with much greater determination than the Polish communists, they would be gaslighted by their Soviet occupiers for decades after the war (p.356).
In other words, the meaning of the term “Nazi” would extend to all resistance fighters who were not communists, even those actively fighting the Germans as such.
Civilian Collaboration Under Nazi Occupation
Every region touched by German power had collaborators, including the Soviet Union. No nationality had collaborators that were statistically unique from another, including Soviet Russia. Contrary to Stalin and Putin’s myths about the war, statistically everyone had a similar ratio of those who collaborated, resisted, and rescued in the Holocaust (Snyder, 2022). The double occupation, first
| Soviet, then German, made the experience of the inhabitants of these lands all the more complicated and dangerous. A single occupation can fracture a society for generations; double occupation is even more painful and divisive. Once a foreign army left, people had to deal with not peace but the consequences of their own previous commitments under one occupier when the next one came; or make choices under one occupation while anticipating another (Snyder, 2003, p.160). |  |
German deaths at the hands of nationalist resistance fighters would be blamed on Jews and Roma (Gypsies). Perhaps many collaborators found it much easier to carry out acts of violence against racial minorities than their own ethnic kin. Serbia, for instance, ordered that only Jews and Roma be killed as revenge for the deaths of Germans at the hands of their own partisans (Evans, 2010, p.237). Many locals seemingly believed, or pretended to believe, the Nazi delusion.
In Lithuania, the retreating NKVD shot Lithuanians in prisons just a few days before the Germans arrived (Arad, 2009, p.144). After the ruthless year of Soviet occupation, many Lithuanians welcomed this change. The Germans arrived in Lithuania with handpicked nationalist refugees who fled Soviet Russia’s invasion in 1939. The locals they encountered were willing to believe, or to act as if they believed, that Jews were responsible for the Soviet repressions (p.144).
In Lithuania, the retreating NKVD shot Lithuanians in prisons just a few days before the Germans arrived (Arad, 2009, p.144). After the ruthless year of Soviet occupation, many Lithuanians welcomed this change. The Germans arrived in Lithuania with handpicked nationalist refugees who fled Soviet Russia’s invasion in 1939. The locals they encountered were willing to believe, or to act as if they believed, that Jews were responsible for the Soviet repressions (p.144).
 | Being promised independence and blaming the Jews for the prison killings, some 2,500 Jews were killed by Lithuanians in bloody pogroms in early July 1941. Lithuanians were killing Jews under German supervision and orders. However, despite Skirpa’s wishes, their nationalist leader, none of this served any Lithuanian political purpose. After he tried to declare an independent Lithuanian state, he was placed under house arrest (p.147). |
The Germans’ main collaborator in Latvia was Vikro Arajs, a Latvian nationalist. He was allowed to form the Arajs Commando, which in early July 1941 burned Jews alive in a Riga synagogue. As the Germans organized mass killings, they took care to choose Latvian shooters from among those whose families had suffered under Soviet rule. With the assistance of such Latvians, the Germans were able to kill at least 69,750 of the nation's Jews by the end of 1941. Unlike Lithuania’s Skirpa, however, Vikro remained loyal to his new masters and rose through their ranks in the SS to kill more Jews in Belarus (Angrick et al., 2012, p.66-76).
In Estonia too, the Einsatzgruppe A found more than enough local collaborators. Estonians who had resisted the Soviets in the forests now joined the Self-Defense Commandos under the guidance of the Germans. Estonians who had collaborated with the Soviets also joined in an effort to restore their reputations. Estonians greeted the Germans as liberators. The Commandos killed all 963 Estonian Jews who could be found, at German orders (Weiss-Went, 2009, p.94-105).
In their occupation of Belarus, Germans forced the Jews to wear their best clothes, as though they were dressing up for a Soviet holiday, gave them Soviet flags, and ordered them to sing revolutionary songs. People had to smile for the cameras that were filming the scene. Made for public consumption, the staged parade was supposed to prove the Nazi claim that communists were Jews and Jews were communists. The purpose was to create organized “pogroms” for slavic locals to participate in (Braithwaite, 2007, p.252). On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian Empire (p.262).
In eastern Poland, Nazi propaganda made it not a shame to lose to the Soviet communists if they were indeed backed by a powerful worldwide Jewish conspiracy; but since the Jews were ultimately to blame for communism, it was right to kill them now. In the months that followed, local Poles took part in some thirty pogroms in the Bialystok region. They were instructed that Jews were to be treated as partisans. Having survived Stalin’s terror, many of the USSR’s ethnic minorities would defect to the German side. Azerbaijanis who had defected from the Red Army, defended Nazi occupied Warsaw against the Red Army (Synder, 2012, p.303).
Although Jewish collaboration was minimal, it can teach us a lot about collaboration. In the ghettos some Jews took on the task of policing the rest (p.342). The Germans selected a Jewish council, or Judenrat, usually from among people who had been prewar leaders of the local Jewish community, to carry out German policies of coercion (p.145). Jewish policemen were required to do the bulk of the actual work of assembling their fellow Jews for transports (p.259). Germans required that Jewish policemen each produce five Jews a day for deportation, or else see members of their own families deported (Kassow, 2009, p.268).
All across eastern Europe, the Germans arrived in summer 1941 to find NKVD prisons full of corpses of local dissidents. Nazi propaganda had a double appeal since it offered Soviet collaborators an opportunity to scapegoat Jews in communities with historic anti-semetism (Snyder, 2012, p.194). By the end of 1941, the Germans, lacking personnel, recruited tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Belorusians, Russians, and Tatars to local police forces. Himmler himself personally ordered them to murder Jews. Many of these locals had been communists before the war. When news of the Wehrmacht’s defeat reached Belarus in February 1943, as many as 12,000 policemen and militiamen left the German service and joined the Soviet partisans (Kay, 2011, p.107). This meant that some of those who had killed Jews in the service of Nazis in 1941-42 joined the Soviet partisans in 1943. Thus, political beliefs rarely influenced one’s choice, or lack of choice, to collaborate.
Ukrainian Collaboration
As part of the Final Solution, the first major shooting actions took place in occupied Soviet Ukraine (Snyder, 2012, p.161). Ukraine was at the heart of Hitler’s Lebensraum and it was where a majority of the Jews of Europe lived. As with all collaborators elsewhere, Soviet atrocities were the main motivation. Starving Ukrainians in 1933 wanted an outside country to invade the Soviet Union. When the Germans did invade in 1941, some Ukrainians welcomed them. Since Germany played a role in their brief liberation in 1918, many Ukrainians hoped a stronger Germany would liberate Ukraine once again from Polish and Russian colonization (p.420).
Tragically, the formula for occupation in Ukraine unfolded quite consistently with every other German occupation. On September 24, 1941, a series of bombs and mines exploded in Kyiv, destroying the buildings where the Germans had established offices of their occupation regime. The Germans had a clear ideological line to follow: if they met partisan resistance, the Jews must be blamed. As a reprisal for the bombings, one of the worst mass shootings of the entire Holocaust took place within a 36 hour period over a ravine outside of Kyiv called Babi Yar.
In Estonia too, the Einsatzgruppe A found more than enough local collaborators. Estonians who had resisted the Soviets in the forests now joined the Self-Defense Commandos under the guidance of the Germans. Estonians who had collaborated with the Soviets also joined in an effort to restore their reputations. Estonians greeted the Germans as liberators. The Commandos killed all 963 Estonian Jews who could be found, at German orders (Weiss-Went, 2009, p.94-105).
In their occupation of Belarus, Germans forced the Jews to wear their best clothes, as though they were dressing up for a Soviet holiday, gave them Soviet flags, and ordered them to sing revolutionary songs. People had to smile for the cameras that were filming the scene. Made for public consumption, the staged parade was supposed to prove the Nazi claim that communists were Jews and Jews were communists. The purpose was to create organized “pogroms” for slavic locals to participate in (Braithwaite, 2007, p.252). On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian Empire (p.262).
In eastern Poland, Nazi propaganda made it not a shame to lose to the Soviet communists if they were indeed backed by a powerful worldwide Jewish conspiracy; but since the Jews were ultimately to blame for communism, it was right to kill them now. In the months that followed, local Poles took part in some thirty pogroms in the Bialystok region. They were instructed that Jews were to be treated as partisans. Having survived Stalin’s terror, many of the USSR’s ethnic minorities would defect to the German side. Azerbaijanis who had defected from the Red Army, defended Nazi occupied Warsaw against the Red Army (Synder, 2012, p.303).
Although Jewish collaboration was minimal, it can teach us a lot about collaboration. In the ghettos some Jews took on the task of policing the rest (p.342). The Germans selected a Jewish council, or Judenrat, usually from among people who had been prewar leaders of the local Jewish community, to carry out German policies of coercion (p.145). Jewish policemen were required to do the bulk of the actual work of assembling their fellow Jews for transports (p.259). Germans required that Jewish policemen each produce five Jews a day for deportation, or else see members of their own families deported (Kassow, 2009, p.268).
All across eastern Europe, the Germans arrived in summer 1941 to find NKVD prisons full of corpses of local dissidents. Nazi propaganda had a double appeal since it offered Soviet collaborators an opportunity to scapegoat Jews in communities with historic anti-semetism (Snyder, 2012, p.194). By the end of 1941, the Germans, lacking personnel, recruited tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Belorusians, Russians, and Tatars to local police forces. Himmler himself personally ordered them to murder Jews. Many of these locals had been communists before the war. When news of the Wehrmacht’s defeat reached Belarus in February 1943, as many as 12,000 policemen and militiamen left the German service and joined the Soviet partisans (Kay, 2011, p.107). This meant that some of those who had killed Jews in the service of Nazis in 1941-42 joined the Soviet partisans in 1943. Thus, political beliefs rarely influenced one’s choice, or lack of choice, to collaborate.
Ukrainian Collaboration
As part of the Final Solution, the first major shooting actions took place in occupied Soviet Ukraine (Snyder, 2012, p.161). Ukraine was at the heart of Hitler’s Lebensraum and it was where a majority of the Jews of Europe lived. As with all collaborators elsewhere, Soviet atrocities were the main motivation. Starving Ukrainians in 1933 wanted an outside country to invade the Soviet Union. When the Germans did invade in 1941, some Ukrainians welcomed them. Since Germany played a role in their brief liberation in 1918, many Ukrainians hoped a stronger Germany would liberate Ukraine once again from Polish and Russian colonization (p.420).
Tragically, the formula for occupation in Ukraine unfolded quite consistently with every other German occupation. On September 24, 1941, a series of bombs and mines exploded in Kyiv, destroying the buildings where the Germans had established offices of their occupation regime. The Germans had a clear ideological line to follow: if they met partisan resistance, the Jews must be blamed. As a reprisal for the bombings, one of the worst mass shootings of the entire Holocaust took place within a 36 hour period over a ravine outside of Kyiv called Babi Yar.
 | The local population, in Kyiv as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, was of course accustomed to denouncing “enemies of the people” (p.203). As elsewhere, the Germans were able to use the local administrations, established by themselves, to facilitate the work of gathering and then killing Jews (p.204). 33,771 Jews were shot over a two-day period. |
For Belarusians and Ukrainians in particular, Soviet rule and the Great Terror of 1937-38 had taught people not to take spontaneous action or resist authority. People who had distinguished themselves in the 1930s had been shot by the NKVD. For those living in Nazi occupied Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia, it was understood that resistance would not be enough to protect them from future persecution if the Soviets returned. Therefore, all hesitated to create any sort of organization, knowing that Stalinism opposed any sort of spontaneous action from below. Left to themselves, ironically many endured Hitler for fear of Stalin (Epstein, 2008, p.130).
Western Ukraine
Prior to the Second World War, in what were then Polish territories, Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia and Volhynia came from a wide spectrum of political backgrounds. Unlike Soviet Ukraine, some could be far-left and some far-right. As the Soviets invaded and destroyed Poland in 1939, many of the poor Ukrainian peasants believed the USSR when it promised them land from Polish elites. Instead, they experienced the same forced collectivized farms that starved their brethren in Soviet Ukraine. Politically, this made the far-right Ukrainian nationalists under the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) more attractive before the German occupation of 1941 (Snyder, 2012, p.150-1).
In regions of Poland where Ukrainians were the majority, Germans appealed to nationalism by promising them their long awaited statehood. The Germans discovered the massacred prisoners left behind by the retreating NKVD and blamed the Jews for this and other Soviet oppression of Ukrainians, even though some of the victims were Poles and Jews (p.195). With help by misled Ukrainian Nationalist fighters, the Germans killed 2,000 Jews, and called this revenge for the wrongs done to Ukrainians by Jewish communists. Einsatzgruppe C and a local militia organized a pogrom that lasted for days (p.195).
As the Germans began their retreat from Ukraine in 1943, complete chaos ensued. Volhynia was the battlefield of a multi-sided civil war, with Soviet Ukrainian partisans, Ukrainian nationalist partisans, Polish self-defense outposts, and the German police all engaged. Some Ukrainian policemen fled the German service to join nationalist partisan units. These men (having previously carried out killings for both the Nazis and the Soviets) then killed thousands of Poles and fellow Ukrainians as part of a national revolution (Weiss-Went, 2009, p.115-9). Other Ukrainian nationalists fought the German police and the Soviet Ukrainian partisans as well as the advancing Red Army (Brandon & Lower, 2010, p.102).
The impact of multiple continuous occupation was most dramatic in the lands that Hitler ceded to Stalin in the secret protocol to the nonaggression pact of 1939. It was here that ethnic Ukrainians experienced a quadruple occupation of Poland, Soviet, Nazi, then Soviet once more; and it was here that Ukrainian partisans ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 before Soviet forces ethnically cleansed both Ukrainians and Poles from 1944 onward.
In short, the Holocaust was a joint production of the Soviets and the Nazis. None of the mass killings would have taken place without the social conditions created by the two masterminds of the Second World War. The idea that only Jews obeyed communists was convenient for both the occupiers and some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been far more difficult without the tangible evidence of Soviet atrocities.
Stepan Bandera
The nationalist fighter who gets the most attention from this historical period is Stepan Bandera. The term “Banderites” has been used by Russian media to demonize EuroMaidan protesters in 2014 and is now used to draw some kind of historical continuity between the far-right extremists that collaborated with the Nazis and the current administration of Volodomyr Zelenskyy. Although the far-right played a crucial role in the violence that escalated in the 2014 protests, they were an extreme minority and Bandera remains a controversial figure for Ukrainians comparable to such American heroes as Andrew Jackson: a checkered past muddled by heroic acts followed by racist ideology and other acts that admirers wish to forget. To further complicate his legacy, Bandera’s true role in Ukraine’s history is purposely confused by his supporters who whitewash his violence and a Kremlin that exaggerates them. So who was Bandera and to what extent did he collaborate and participate in the Holocaust?
Western Ukraine
Prior to the Second World War, in what were then Polish territories, Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia and Volhynia came from a wide spectrum of political backgrounds. Unlike Soviet Ukraine, some could be far-left and some far-right. As the Soviets invaded and destroyed Poland in 1939, many of the poor Ukrainian peasants believed the USSR when it promised them land from Polish elites. Instead, they experienced the same forced collectivized farms that starved their brethren in Soviet Ukraine. Politically, this made the far-right Ukrainian nationalists under the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) more attractive before the German occupation of 1941 (Snyder, 2012, p.150-1).
In regions of Poland where Ukrainians were the majority, Germans appealed to nationalism by promising them their long awaited statehood. The Germans discovered the massacred prisoners left behind by the retreating NKVD and blamed the Jews for this and other Soviet oppression of Ukrainians, even though some of the victims were Poles and Jews (p.195). With help by misled Ukrainian Nationalist fighters, the Germans killed 2,000 Jews, and called this revenge for the wrongs done to Ukrainians by Jewish communists. Einsatzgruppe C and a local militia organized a pogrom that lasted for days (p.195).
As the Germans began their retreat from Ukraine in 1943, complete chaos ensued. Volhynia was the battlefield of a multi-sided civil war, with Soviet Ukrainian partisans, Ukrainian nationalist partisans, Polish self-defense outposts, and the German police all engaged. Some Ukrainian policemen fled the German service to join nationalist partisan units. These men (having previously carried out killings for both the Nazis and the Soviets) then killed thousands of Poles and fellow Ukrainians as part of a national revolution (Weiss-Went, 2009, p.115-9). Other Ukrainian nationalists fought the German police and the Soviet Ukrainian partisans as well as the advancing Red Army (Brandon & Lower, 2010, p.102).
The impact of multiple continuous occupation was most dramatic in the lands that Hitler ceded to Stalin in the secret protocol to the nonaggression pact of 1939. It was here that ethnic Ukrainians experienced a quadruple occupation of Poland, Soviet, Nazi, then Soviet once more; and it was here that Ukrainian partisans ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 before Soviet forces ethnically cleansed both Ukrainians and Poles from 1944 onward.
In short, the Holocaust was a joint production of the Soviets and the Nazis. None of the mass killings would have taken place without the social conditions created by the two masterminds of the Second World War. The idea that only Jews obeyed communists was convenient for both the occupiers and some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been far more difficult without the tangible evidence of Soviet atrocities.
Stepan Bandera
The nationalist fighter who gets the most attention from this historical period is Stepan Bandera. The term “Banderites” has been used by Russian media to demonize EuroMaidan protesters in 2014 and is now used to draw some kind of historical continuity between the far-right extremists that collaborated with the Nazis and the current administration of Volodomyr Zelenskyy. Although the far-right played a crucial role in the violence that escalated in the 2014 protests, they were an extreme minority and Bandera remains a controversial figure for Ukrainians comparable to such American heroes as Andrew Jackson: a checkered past muddled by heroic acts followed by racist ideology and other acts that admirers wish to forget. To further complicate his legacy, Bandera’s true role in Ukraine’s history is purposely confused by his supporters who whitewash his violence and a Kremlin that exaggerates them. So who was Bandera and to what extent did he collaborate and participate in the Holocaust?
| Stepan Bandera was one of the far-right nationalists that the Germans reached out to gain favor by promising an independent state. He had been the leader of the OUN in Polish occupied western Ukraine before 1939 which had already imprisoned him for his role in various assassinations against Polish leaders. When the Nazis freed him, they used his influence over the OUN to win public favor in western Ukraine. However, he quickly fell out of favor when he declared an independent Ukrainian state. Although there is much fixation on Bandera’s anti-semetism and initial collaboration with Nazis, he spent the majority of the Second World War in a Nazi concentration camp after acting outside Nazi interests (Snyder, 2022). |  |
As the Germans arrested nearly all the OUN and Ukrainian Insurgent Army’s (UPA’s) leadership, which were already radical organizations, very young people were suddenly in charge of an already unpredictably violent group. Although many argue that he inspired his followers to commit mass killings, Bandera himself was imprisoned while his followers committed the killings in question, and there is no evidence he gave any direct orders for the murders of ethnic Poles or Jews (Snyder, 2022). Despite all of this, Bandera is the Kremlin’s Ukrainian Nazi strawman precisely because of his controversy. Without a clear connection to Nazism, it is all the more tempting for Ukrainians to rebuff the outlandish claims and fall into the Kremlin’s political trap of defending Bandera.
Complicit in Bandera and his OUN’s mischaracterization are the academics who find it safer to attack alleged Nazis than to provide historical context. It is much easier for some authors to debate whether Bandera and his OUN were fascists, racists, and organizers of mass killings of civilians. However, the obvious problem with labeling the OUN as fascist, writes Zaitsev (2015), is that..
"…fascism would have to construct a subcategory of ‘national liberationist fascism’, which would seem to be a contradiction in terms. An internal typology of nationalism should be taken into account, in particular the division of nationalisms into those of stateless nations and nations with a state" (p.413).
The fact that the OUN never referred to themselves as fascists, and even officially objected to this term, does not prevent some authors from labeling them as such (p.416). Furthermore, they did not advocate external expansion, imperialism, and national messianism that prerequisite fascism.
Movements such as the Croatian Ustaša (prior to 1941), the radical wing of Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (before 1939), and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization; all had certain features in common with fascism. However, like the OUN their primary aim was not reorganization of an existing state according to totalitarian principles, but rather the creation of a new state using all available means, including terror. As Zaitsev et al. points out, “Such practices were more often the rule than the exception in the history of twentieth-century national liberation movements, and in this respect the OUN was fairly typical” (p.414).
Furthermore, regardless of the degree of anti-semetism of various nationalists, it is clear by the primary sources that the mass killings of Jews were a result of direct orders from Heinrich Himmler himself. When the Germans invaded Soviet territories in July 1941, Himmler had to travel to areas of the western Soviet Ukraine to personally inspect the killings. Einsatzgruppe C, which oversaw the organized shootings in western Ukraine, openly complained of locals unwilling to participate in the planned pogroms. The killing of women and children was a psychological barrier that Himmler made sure to break (Kay, 2011, p.106).
The OUN, although it differed from fascism, was not more humane or less prone to violence. This is evidenced by Rossoliński-Liebe (2014), who describes in detail the mass violence the OUN and the UPA perpetrated in relation to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians during the war. However, this had no direct relation to Bandera. Violence was viewed as a means-to-an-end against the even more inhumane and totalitarian Soviet regime, which for most participants was a struggle for freedom (Zaitsev et al., 2015, p.418).
Consciously or unconsciously, these academics are adjusting the facts to fit into a schema of “fascism”, “racism” and “genocidal nationalism”. They rightly point to the elements of racism in certain brochures written by OUN members, yet often ignore the criticism of Nazi racism which appears in a number of other texts, in particular, in the official OUN publication, Rozbudova Natsii. Rossoliński-Liebe, in particular, sees fascism everywhere, even in the greeting “Glory to Ukraine!”, groundlessly attributing its invention to a small and little-known Ukrainian Union of Fascists (Rossoliński-Liebe, 2014, p.34 & 563), when in actual fact it had been widespread back in the time of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–20. This bias is further evidenced in his complete denial of the presence of liberationist and democratic elements within the OUN (Ziatsev, 2015, p.420).
Where Bandera was guilty was in his moral and ethical responsibility to condemn or regret the violence of the OUN, which he never did (Rossoliński-Liebe, 2014, p.239). There is plenty of temptation to portray Bandera as a martyr in his Warsaw and Lviv trials and in the narrative of Bandera’s “suffering for the national liberation” in prisons abroad (Härtel et al., 2015, p.423). In anycase, the multi-ethnic and democratic Ukrainian state that exists today is not what Stepan Bandera was advocating for. By surviving overlapping genocidal plans of Hitler and Stalin, the Ukrainian experience becomes more explicable if one considers the specific context of the 1930s: the famine caused by Stalin’s collectivization, Polish discrimination, and the NKVD terror and deportations. It is also an established fact that the Western Ukrainian lands are where reciprocal ethnic cleansing and genocide led to almost entire de-humanization on all sides during the Second World War (p.425). In short, one cannot excuse the murders nor the murderers in Ukraine’s nationalist movement in any sort of way simply because they were occupied. However, it would be also inappropriate to judge the movement as a whole outside the climate created by the double occupation.
Defending Russia from “Nazis” (Revisited)
When Bukharin threatened to call Stalin an organizer of famine in the 1930s, he was killed. Trotsky, who was also killed, was allegedly a ring leader of a fascist conspiracy. In 1936, the party newspaper, Pravda, made the connection clear in a headline titled: “Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Gestapo” (Kuromiya, 2014, p.83). Could the three Bolsheviks in question, men of Jewish origin who had built the Soviet Union, truly be agents of Nazi Germany? This was the power of Stalinist thought.
As the Red Army advanced in 1943, all national movements were considered Nazi collaborators and treated as such, even when they had been openly fighting Germans. As the Red Army returned to Eastern Europe, civilians were massacred by Soviet partisans when nationalist forces did not subordinate themselves to Moscow. The Polish Home Army officers, who spent the majority of the conflict fighting Nazis, were invited by the Red Army officers to negotiate in summer 1943. These heroes were then murdered by their fellow “allies” on the way to the rendezvous points (Snyder, 2012, p.247). The Soviet Union supported communists whom it could control, and opposed noncommunist fighters whom it could not (p.309).
Stalin undertook punitive measures that targeted entire ethnic groups for their alleged association with Nazi Germany. About 89,000 Finns were deported in 1941 and 1942. For the most part, these were the Muslim nations of the Caucasus and Crimea . Many ethnic Tatars returning home from the heroic siege of Berlin in 1945 found their entire towns deported to Siberia or Uzbekistan (Polian, 2003, p.134).
Soviet citizens who showed signs of Belarusian nationalism or cultural symbols were accused of being “Belarusian national fascists”. The mass killings in Soviet Belarus included the deliberate destruction of the educated representatives of Belarusian national culture. 17,772 were sentenced to death in a killing field outside Minsk (Snyder, 2012, p.98-9). Belarusian nationalists who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied their fellow Soviet partisans were labeled as ‘tools of Hitler’ (p.239). In a sense, the war became a second wave of Stalinist repressions of national movements.
After the war, these massive deportations accelerated under Soviet rule. Although every nationality had the same ratio of collaborators, all ethnic Russians who collaborated were spared, along with Georgians (Stalin’s own nationality). By 1949, Stalin deported some 200,000 people from the three small Baltic States. Soviet rule had become ethnic cleansing—cleansed of the alleged collaboration with ethnic cleansers (p.331).
In his response to Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain Speech” in which he called attention to Stalin’s broken promises to hold free elections in eastern Europe, Stalin replied with a comparison of Great Britain and the United States with Nazis and Hitler:
"In this respect, one is reminded remarkably of Hitler and his friends….Mr. Churchill begins to set war loose, also be a racial theory, maintaining that only nations speaking the English language are fully valuable nations, called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world" (Stalin, 1946).
In effect, Stalin had already begun his gaslighting to the whole world of how the Second World War began with him as the only true Nazi collaborator and original ethnic cleanser.
When the Cold War began, he blamed the Jews for the vulnerabilities of the Soviet Union (Snyder, 2012, p.389). Antisemitism allowed leaders to revise the history of wartime suffering recalled as the suffering only of Slavs. Stalin’s Holocaust denial was followed by his persecution of Jews that only ended with his sudden death in 1953. In December 1952, Stalin said that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence” (cited by Rubenstein et al., 2001, p.62). January 1953, the party newspaper Pravda revealed an American plot to murder the Soviet leadership by medical means using Jewish doctors, characterizing Jews as “monsters in human form.” Phrases that might have come straight from Nazi propaganda (cited by Synder, 2012, p.367). The Jewish people as such would have been subject to forced removal or even mass shootings (p.368). However, Stalin only killed a few dozen Jews in these last years of his life. Only his death prevented this outcome.
The Azov Regiment
When Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Ukrainian military was completely unprepared and ill equipped to handle the seizure of the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine at the hands of Russian commandos and the collaborators they found. To prevent disaster, irregular militias were formed by volunteers who received funding from various oligarchs. The most prepared and effective of these volunteer militias was the Azov regiment. The unit had its roots in aggressive fan clubs that support regional soccer teams, known as "ultras," but as the fighting ramped up, they attracted various far-right activists, who often made no secret of their neo-Nazi sympathies (McCallum, 2022).
When it became additionally known that its founder, Andriy Biletsky, previously gave open support to the neo-Nazi Social-National Assembly (SNA), the Kremlin seized on the Azov’s origins to push its narrative that Ukrainian forces are all neo-Nazi sympathizers. The fact that some of Azov’s wealthy donors came from Jewish backgrounds would become invisible in the foreground of the enormous disinformation campaign to come.
Since some volunteers replicated the lawlessness and abuses that prevailed in areas previously held by separatists, the radical elements of the Azov regiment were disbanded in 2015 and reduced to a street militia with fewer than a thousand members. The regiment was then integrated into the Ukrainian army and the perpetrators of various war crimes were brought to court (Bordas & Tomolya, 2022, p.67). However, after taking the bait of Russian disinformation, western media began to cover extremists in Ukraine disproportionately to their numbers.
Thanks to this free advertising, white supremesists from around the world began to join Ukraine’s neo-Nazis as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. An exaggerated minority turned into an actual problem (Al Jazeera, 2022). Nonetheless, since the beginning of Russia’s full scale invasion till the writing
Complicit in Bandera and his OUN’s mischaracterization are the academics who find it safer to attack alleged Nazis than to provide historical context. It is much easier for some authors to debate whether Bandera and his OUN were fascists, racists, and organizers of mass killings of civilians. However, the obvious problem with labeling the OUN as fascist, writes Zaitsev (2015), is that..
"…fascism would have to construct a subcategory of ‘national liberationist fascism’, which would seem to be a contradiction in terms. An internal typology of nationalism should be taken into account, in particular the division of nationalisms into those of stateless nations and nations with a state" (p.413).
The fact that the OUN never referred to themselves as fascists, and even officially objected to this term, does not prevent some authors from labeling them as such (p.416). Furthermore, they did not advocate external expansion, imperialism, and national messianism that prerequisite fascism.
Movements such as the Croatian Ustaša (prior to 1941), the radical wing of Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (before 1939), and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization; all had certain features in common with fascism. However, like the OUN their primary aim was not reorganization of an existing state according to totalitarian principles, but rather the creation of a new state using all available means, including terror. As Zaitsev et al. points out, “Such practices were more often the rule than the exception in the history of twentieth-century national liberation movements, and in this respect the OUN was fairly typical” (p.414).
Furthermore, regardless of the degree of anti-semetism of various nationalists, it is clear by the primary sources that the mass killings of Jews were a result of direct orders from Heinrich Himmler himself. When the Germans invaded Soviet territories in July 1941, Himmler had to travel to areas of the western Soviet Ukraine to personally inspect the killings. Einsatzgruppe C, which oversaw the organized shootings in western Ukraine, openly complained of locals unwilling to participate in the planned pogroms. The killing of women and children was a psychological barrier that Himmler made sure to break (Kay, 2011, p.106).
The OUN, although it differed from fascism, was not more humane or less prone to violence. This is evidenced by Rossoliński-Liebe (2014), who describes in detail the mass violence the OUN and the UPA perpetrated in relation to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians during the war. However, this had no direct relation to Bandera. Violence was viewed as a means-to-an-end against the even more inhumane and totalitarian Soviet regime, which for most participants was a struggle for freedom (Zaitsev et al., 2015, p.418).
Consciously or unconsciously, these academics are adjusting the facts to fit into a schema of “fascism”, “racism” and “genocidal nationalism”. They rightly point to the elements of racism in certain brochures written by OUN members, yet often ignore the criticism of Nazi racism which appears in a number of other texts, in particular, in the official OUN publication, Rozbudova Natsii. Rossoliński-Liebe, in particular, sees fascism everywhere, even in the greeting “Glory to Ukraine!”, groundlessly attributing its invention to a small and little-known Ukrainian Union of Fascists (Rossoliński-Liebe, 2014, p.34 & 563), when in actual fact it had been widespread back in the time of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–20. This bias is further evidenced in his complete denial of the presence of liberationist and democratic elements within the OUN (Ziatsev, 2015, p.420).
Where Bandera was guilty was in his moral and ethical responsibility to condemn or regret the violence of the OUN, which he never did (Rossoliński-Liebe, 2014, p.239). There is plenty of temptation to portray Bandera as a martyr in his Warsaw and Lviv trials and in the narrative of Bandera’s “suffering for the national liberation” in prisons abroad (Härtel et al., 2015, p.423). In anycase, the multi-ethnic and democratic Ukrainian state that exists today is not what Stepan Bandera was advocating for. By surviving overlapping genocidal plans of Hitler and Stalin, the Ukrainian experience becomes more explicable if one considers the specific context of the 1930s: the famine caused by Stalin’s collectivization, Polish discrimination, and the NKVD terror and deportations. It is also an established fact that the Western Ukrainian lands are where reciprocal ethnic cleansing and genocide led to almost entire de-humanization on all sides during the Second World War (p.425). In short, one cannot excuse the murders nor the murderers in Ukraine’s nationalist movement in any sort of way simply because they were occupied. However, it would be also inappropriate to judge the movement as a whole outside the climate created by the double occupation.
Defending Russia from “Nazis” (Revisited)
When Bukharin threatened to call Stalin an organizer of famine in the 1930s, he was killed. Trotsky, who was also killed, was allegedly a ring leader of a fascist conspiracy. In 1936, the party newspaper, Pravda, made the connection clear in a headline titled: “Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Gestapo” (Kuromiya, 2014, p.83). Could the three Bolsheviks in question, men of Jewish origin who had built the Soviet Union, truly be agents of Nazi Germany? This was the power of Stalinist thought.
As the Red Army advanced in 1943, all national movements were considered Nazi collaborators and treated as such, even when they had been openly fighting Germans. As the Red Army returned to Eastern Europe, civilians were massacred by Soviet partisans when nationalist forces did not subordinate themselves to Moscow. The Polish Home Army officers, who spent the majority of the conflict fighting Nazis, were invited by the Red Army officers to negotiate in summer 1943. These heroes were then murdered by their fellow “allies” on the way to the rendezvous points (Snyder, 2012, p.247). The Soviet Union supported communists whom it could control, and opposed noncommunist fighters whom it could not (p.309).
Stalin undertook punitive measures that targeted entire ethnic groups for their alleged association with Nazi Germany. About 89,000 Finns were deported in 1941 and 1942. For the most part, these were the Muslim nations of the Caucasus and Crimea . Many ethnic Tatars returning home from the heroic siege of Berlin in 1945 found their entire towns deported to Siberia or Uzbekistan (Polian, 2003, p.134).
Soviet citizens who showed signs of Belarusian nationalism or cultural symbols were accused of being “Belarusian national fascists”. The mass killings in Soviet Belarus included the deliberate destruction of the educated representatives of Belarusian national culture. 17,772 were sentenced to death in a killing field outside Minsk (Snyder, 2012, p.98-9). Belarusian nationalists who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied their fellow Soviet partisans were labeled as ‘tools of Hitler’ (p.239). In a sense, the war became a second wave of Stalinist repressions of national movements.
After the war, these massive deportations accelerated under Soviet rule. Although every nationality had the same ratio of collaborators, all ethnic Russians who collaborated were spared, along with Georgians (Stalin’s own nationality). By 1949, Stalin deported some 200,000 people from the three small Baltic States. Soviet rule had become ethnic cleansing—cleansed of the alleged collaboration with ethnic cleansers (p.331).
In his response to Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain Speech” in which he called attention to Stalin’s broken promises to hold free elections in eastern Europe, Stalin replied with a comparison of Great Britain and the United States with Nazis and Hitler:
"In this respect, one is reminded remarkably of Hitler and his friends….Mr. Churchill begins to set war loose, also be a racial theory, maintaining that only nations speaking the English language are fully valuable nations, called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world" (Stalin, 1946).
In effect, Stalin had already begun his gaslighting to the whole world of how the Second World War began with him as the only true Nazi collaborator and original ethnic cleanser.
When the Cold War began, he blamed the Jews for the vulnerabilities of the Soviet Union (Snyder, 2012, p.389). Antisemitism allowed leaders to revise the history of wartime suffering recalled as the suffering only of Slavs. Stalin’s Holocaust denial was followed by his persecution of Jews that only ended with his sudden death in 1953. In December 1952, Stalin said that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence” (cited by Rubenstein et al., 2001, p.62). January 1953, the party newspaper Pravda revealed an American plot to murder the Soviet leadership by medical means using Jewish doctors, characterizing Jews as “monsters in human form.” Phrases that might have come straight from Nazi propaganda (cited by Synder, 2012, p.367). The Jewish people as such would have been subject to forced removal or even mass shootings (p.368). However, Stalin only killed a few dozen Jews in these last years of his life. Only his death prevented this outcome.
The Azov Regiment
When Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Ukrainian military was completely unprepared and ill equipped to handle the seizure of the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine at the hands of Russian commandos and the collaborators they found. To prevent disaster, irregular militias were formed by volunteers who received funding from various oligarchs. The most prepared and effective of these volunteer militias was the Azov regiment. The unit had its roots in aggressive fan clubs that support regional soccer teams, known as "ultras," but as the fighting ramped up, they attracted various far-right activists, who often made no secret of their neo-Nazi sympathies (McCallum, 2022).
When it became additionally known that its founder, Andriy Biletsky, previously gave open support to the neo-Nazi Social-National Assembly (SNA), the Kremlin seized on the Azov’s origins to push its narrative that Ukrainian forces are all neo-Nazi sympathizers. The fact that some of Azov’s wealthy donors came from Jewish backgrounds would become invisible in the foreground of the enormous disinformation campaign to come.
Since some volunteers replicated the lawlessness and abuses that prevailed in areas previously held by separatists, the radical elements of the Azov regiment were disbanded in 2015 and reduced to a street militia with fewer than a thousand members. The regiment was then integrated into the Ukrainian army and the perpetrators of various war crimes were brought to court (Bordas & Tomolya, 2022, p.67). However, after taking the bait of Russian disinformation, western media began to cover extremists in Ukraine disproportionately to their numbers.
Thanks to this free advertising, white supremesists from around the world began to join Ukraine’s neo-Nazis as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. An exaggerated minority turned into an actual problem (Al Jazeera, 2022). Nonetheless, since the beginning of Russia’s full scale invasion till the writing
| of this article, there has been no credible evidence that neo-Nazis have had any significant presence in the Ukrainian military or are receiving any weapons from the US aid packages sent to Ukraine. However, thanks to digitally altered photos of Ukrainians wearing Nazi symbols, the public perception has been altered just enough to divert global attention from Russia’s own Neo-Nazis and terror in occupied territories of Ukraine. |  |
Likhachev (2022) notes that from 2014-2022 there were exactly zero reports of anti-Semitic incidents committed by Azov in Mariupol, despite the city’s sizable Jewish community. Anti-Semitism has little resonance even among more extreme Ukrainian nationalist elements, while polling demonstrates that Ukraine is among the least anti-Semitic and xenophobic countries in central-east Europe (Wike et al., 2019).
Ironically, neo-Nazi military units with thousands of soldiers under arms operate openly among the invading Russian forces. Dmitry Utkin, the founder and commander of Wagner Group, the largest and most infamous Russian mercenary unit, is covered in Nazi tattoos that didn’t preclude him from being awarded Hero of the Russian Federation in 2016, including a photo op alongside Putin himself. The commander of
Ironically, neo-Nazi military units with thousands of soldiers under arms operate openly among the invading Russian forces. Dmitry Utkin, the founder and commander of Wagner Group, the largest and most infamous Russian mercenary unit, is covered in Nazi tattoos that didn’t preclude him from being awarded Hero of the Russian Federation in 2016, including a photo op alongside Putin himself. The commander of
| the affiliated “Rusich” brigade, Aleksei Milchakov, answered, “I’ll tell you straight up, I’m a Nazi”, when asked in an interview about his political convictions (Kozhurin, 2022). Furthermore, Horvath (2022) has recorded how the Kremlin has actively built ties with neo-Nazi groups inside Russia to police internal dissent. Shekhovtsov (2018) documents Russia’s role as the key sponsor of the Western far-right for decades. |  |
As for claims of genocide against ethnic Russians, individual crimes have taken place. However, such cases were not (and are not) systemic at all. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, which was present in Mariupol until the end of February 2022 (and continues to work in Donetsk), did not record such cases. Even the Russian side did not provide convincing evidence of alleged ethnic cleansings (McCallum, 2022). Yet, any hypothetical violations by Azov, which protects civilians from the aggressor, cannot be compared to airstrikes on the maternity hospital or the drama theater where women and children hid. Against the background of a city with 400,000 pre-war population wiped off the face of the earth, no Russian accusations against the defenders of Mariupol deserve to be even mentioned.
Western Accomplices
Throughout both of Russia’s invasions in 2014 and 2022 (though somewhat less so in the later case), western media has fallen for the ‘Ukrainian neo-Nazi’ canard. The threat of “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” has attracted considerable Western press coverage and has found its way in America’s divided political discourse regarding US aid to Ukraine—as intended. The fiasco overall represents a failure to engage with Ukrainian sources, and the Jewish community in Ukraine, in a climate of viral sensationalism.
House Representative Margorie Taylor Greene has on several occasions referred to the Ukrainian army as “Nazis” and is committed to “not another penny” to their cause (Greene, 2022). Many more American conservatives are tempted to embrace Putin’s false narratives if it means they can politicize Ukrainian aid to attack Biden's foreign policy (Ahmari, 2022).
Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and former lawyer who once faced criticism for defending neo-Nazis, has made excited claims about the “neo-Nazi menace” of the Azov Regiment. Ironically, his only response to reports of Russian atrocities in Bucha has been to warn about the dangers of falling for “war propaganda” and “social media’s manipulations.” A former colleague of his, Cathy Young, revealed, “In his world, it seems America can do nothing right and Vladimir Putin can do nothing wrong” (Young, 2022).
Conclusion
Some may fear that pointing out the falsehoods of the Ukrainian Nazi narrative is a political trap that raises suspicion of Nazi sympathy or diminishes the holocaust in some way. However, when these very accusations are used to justify the actual genocide that is taking place, one must have courage to speak up. What Vladimir Putin does not want the world to remember is that more Ukrainians died or were wounded fighting Hitler than the combined losses of the United States, Great Britain and France. Like many national minorities after the war, their contribution was watered down and gaslighted. Only a more educated populace can resist this new but very old Soviet form of warfare.
Just as every nation touched by German power had collaborators during WWII, every European nation today has a neo-Nazis problem, with no significant difference in statistical numbers by population. The half-truths of collaborators and fairytales of Nazi threats are meant to confuse what we plainly see right in front of us. This form of gaslighting worked extremely well for Stalin.
Although Stalin himself was the only true Nazi collaborator and later Holocaust denier, he could conveniently portray himself as a victim and victor in the war that he help initiate while allied with Hitler, then persecute millions of his own citizens under the logic that the entire race of inhabitants in Crimea and the Caucuses collaborated with Nazis. Simultaneously, he was able to discredit a nationalist insurgency from spreading by telling Ukrainians in the east that all Ukrainian nationalists fighters in the west were Nazis. These heroes were able to hold out until the 1950s before finally disappearing into Soviet Society. Although it is tempting for Ukrainians to over romanticize the UPA and OUN as martyrs, their glamorization can alienate Polish and Jewish communities and strengthen Russian propaganda.
In Putin’s Russia it is currently illegal to compare the reigns of Hitler and Stalin, and anti-Nazi laws are used to arrest people who tell you who the real Nazis are. Putin can invade a nation roughly the size of Texas unprovoked under familiar pretexts used by Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland, all while claiming he’s defending Russia from fascists and western conspiracies. He can continue to claim he is de-nazifying Ukraine while using real neo-Nazis in Russia to fight his war and intimidate his citizens. (Horvath, 2022).
Today, Ukraine is once again under occupation by a regime that tortures its people, kidnaps its children, and persecutes its culture. To distract the world from this obvious fact, the Kremlin has reached into familiar language from Soviet times for asymmetrical warfare. Putin’s only hope for prevailing in his disastrous war in Ukraine is to disrupt US aid to Ukraine by all means. For many Americans, it is far more convenient to believe that Ukraine is not a real country, that this conflict is somehow our fault, or that Ukraine is somehow unworthy of American aid. It relieves us of all responsibility to act. At the very least, it delays our resolve to the advantage of the aggressor.
Western Accomplices
Throughout both of Russia’s invasions in 2014 and 2022 (though somewhat less so in the later case), western media has fallen for the ‘Ukrainian neo-Nazi’ canard. The threat of “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” has attracted considerable Western press coverage and has found its way in America’s divided political discourse regarding US aid to Ukraine—as intended. The fiasco overall represents a failure to engage with Ukrainian sources, and the Jewish community in Ukraine, in a climate of viral sensationalism.
House Representative Margorie Taylor Greene has on several occasions referred to the Ukrainian army as “Nazis” and is committed to “not another penny” to their cause (Greene, 2022). Many more American conservatives are tempted to embrace Putin’s false narratives if it means they can politicize Ukrainian aid to attack Biden's foreign policy (Ahmari, 2022).
Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and former lawyer who once faced criticism for defending neo-Nazis, has made excited claims about the “neo-Nazi menace” of the Azov Regiment. Ironically, his only response to reports of Russian atrocities in Bucha has been to warn about the dangers of falling for “war propaganda” and “social media’s manipulations.” A former colleague of his, Cathy Young, revealed, “In his world, it seems America can do nothing right and Vladimir Putin can do nothing wrong” (Young, 2022).
Conclusion
Some may fear that pointing out the falsehoods of the Ukrainian Nazi narrative is a political trap that raises suspicion of Nazi sympathy or diminishes the holocaust in some way. However, when these very accusations are used to justify the actual genocide that is taking place, one must have courage to speak up. What Vladimir Putin does not want the world to remember is that more Ukrainians died or were wounded fighting Hitler than the combined losses of the United States, Great Britain and France. Like many national minorities after the war, their contribution was watered down and gaslighted. Only a more educated populace can resist this new but very old Soviet form of warfare.
Just as every nation touched by German power had collaborators during WWII, every European nation today has a neo-Nazis problem, with no significant difference in statistical numbers by population. The half-truths of collaborators and fairytales of Nazi threats are meant to confuse what we plainly see right in front of us. This form of gaslighting worked extremely well for Stalin.
Although Stalin himself was the only true Nazi collaborator and later Holocaust denier, he could conveniently portray himself as a victim and victor in the war that he help initiate while allied with Hitler, then persecute millions of his own citizens under the logic that the entire race of inhabitants in Crimea and the Caucuses collaborated with Nazis. Simultaneously, he was able to discredit a nationalist insurgency from spreading by telling Ukrainians in the east that all Ukrainian nationalists fighters in the west were Nazis. These heroes were able to hold out until the 1950s before finally disappearing into Soviet Society. Although it is tempting for Ukrainians to over romanticize the UPA and OUN as martyrs, their glamorization can alienate Polish and Jewish communities and strengthen Russian propaganda.
In Putin’s Russia it is currently illegal to compare the reigns of Hitler and Stalin, and anti-Nazi laws are used to arrest people who tell you who the real Nazis are. Putin can invade a nation roughly the size of Texas unprovoked under familiar pretexts used by Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland, all while claiming he’s defending Russia from fascists and western conspiracies. He can continue to claim he is de-nazifying Ukraine while using real neo-Nazis in Russia to fight his war and intimidate his citizens. (Horvath, 2022).
Today, Ukraine is once again under occupation by a regime that tortures its people, kidnaps its children, and persecutes its culture. To distract the world from this obvious fact, the Kremlin has reached into familiar language from Soviet times for asymmetrical warfare. Putin’s only hope for prevailing in his disastrous war in Ukraine is to disrupt US aid to Ukraine by all means. For many Americans, it is far more convenient to believe that Ukraine is not a real country, that this conflict is somehow our fault, or that Ukraine is somehow unworthy of American aid. It relieves us of all responsibility to act. At the very least, it delays our resolve to the advantage of the aggressor.
References
Ahmari, S. (February, 2022). The Nazis Globalist Liberals Prefer to Ignore. The American Conservative. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-nazis-globalist-liberals-prefer-to-ignore/?ref=quillette.com
Al Jazeera. (March, 2022). Profile: Who are Ukraine’s far-right azov regiment? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1/who-are-the-azov-regiment
Amnesty International. (September, 2014). Ukraine must stop ongoing abuses and war crimes by pro-Ukrainian volunteer forces.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/09/ukraine-must-stop-ongoing-abuses-and-war-crimes-pro-ukrainian-volunteer-forces/
Angrick, A., Klein, P., and Brandon, R. (2012). The “Final Solution” in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941-1944. Berghahn Books.
Arad, Y. (2009). The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. University of Nebraska Press.
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Braithwaite, R. (2007). Moscow 1941: A City and Its People At War. Vintage.
Brandon, R. and Lower, W. (2010). The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization. Indiana University Press.
Epstein, B. (2008). The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism. University of California Press.
Evans, R. J. (2010). The Third Reich at War. Penguin Books.
Greene, M.T. [@RepMTC]. (2022, March 15). And to top it all off, NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them. What the hell is going with these #NATONazis? X. https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1503858442892627974
Horvath, R. (March, 2022). Putin's fascists: the Russian state's long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/putins-fascists-the-russian-states-long-history-of-cultivating-homegrown-neo-nazis-178535
Kassow, S. D. (2009). Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto. Vintage.
Kay, A. J. (2011). Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941. Berghahn Books.
Kozhurin, D. (May, 2022). Who Are The Neo-Nazis Fighting For Russia In Ukraine? Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty. https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-neo-nazis-fighting-ukraine/31871760.html
Kuromiya, H. (2014). Stalin's Great Terror and the Asian Nexus, Europe-Asia Studies, 66:5, 775-793, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2014.910940
Likhachev, V. (March, 2022). Euromaidan SOS: honest answers to the most common questions about AZOV in the West. Center for Civil Liberties. https://ccl.org.ua/en/claims/euromaidan-sos-honest-answers-to-the-most-common-questions-about-azov-in-the-west/
Likhachev, V. (2016). The far right in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Ifri. https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/rnv95_uk_likhachev_far-right_radicals_final.pdf
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Polian, P. (2003). Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR. Central European University Press.
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Rubenstein, J., Naumov, V. P., and Wolfson, L. E. (2001). Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Yale University Press.
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Young, C. (2022). The Long History of Glenn Greenwald’s Kissing Up to the Kremlin. The Bulwark. https://www.thebulwark.com/the-long-history-of-glenn-greenwalds-kissing-up-to-the-kremlin/
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Greene, M.T. [@RepMTC]. (2022, March 15). And to top it all off, NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them. What the hell is going with these #NATONazis? X. https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1503858442892627974
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Likhachev, V. (March, 2022). Euromaidan SOS: honest answers to the most common questions about AZOV in the West. Center for Civil Liberties. https://ccl.org.ua/en/claims/euromaidan-sos-honest-answers-to-the-most-common-questions-about-azov-in-the-west/
Likhachev, V. (2016). The far right in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Ifri. https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/rnv95_uk_likhachev_far-right_radicals_final.pdf
McCallum, A. (August, 2022). Much Azov about nothing: How the ‘Ukrainian neo-Nazis’ canard fooled the world. Lens. Monash University. https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/08/19/1384992/much-azov-about-nothing-how-the-ukrainian-neo-nazis-canard-fooled-the-world
Polian, P. (2003). Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR. Central European University Press.
Rossoliński-Liebe, G. (2016). Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. Ibidem.
Rubenstein, J., Naumov, V. P., and Wolfson, L. E. (2001). Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Yale University Press.
Shekhovtsov, A. (2018). Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir. Routledge.
Snyder, T. (2003). The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. Yale University Press.
Snyder, T. (2012). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books.
Snyder, T. (2022, November 9). The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 17. Reforms, Recentralization, Dissidence:1950s-1970s. Yale Courses. [video] YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRdNxx295r8&list=LL&index=38
Stalin, J. V. (1946). Interview to “Pravda” Correspondent Concerning Mr. Winston Churchill’s Speech at Fulton. Pravda. Marxists Internet Archive (2008). https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1946/03/x01.htm
Times Radio. (2024, February 9). Putin’s most insane moments in Tucker Carlson Interview. [video] YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd9qktZnVJQ
Walker, S. (2014). Vladimir Putin's adviser calls Ukrainian president a 'Nazi' as EU deal signed. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/vladimir-putin-adviser-ukrainian-president-nazi-eu-deal-signed
Weiss-Went, A. (2009). Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust. Syracuse University Press.
Wesolowski, K. (2022). Is there any truth to Russia's 'Ukrainian Nazis' propaganda? Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-there-any-truth-to-russias-ukrainian-nazis-propaganda/a-63970461
Wike, R., Poushter, J., Silver, L., Devlin, K., Fetterolf, J., Castillo, A. & Huang, C. (2019). European public opinion three decades after the fall of communism. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/14/minority-groups/
Young, C. (2022). The Long History of Glenn Greenwald’s Kissing Up to the Kremlin. The Bulwark. https://www.thebulwark.com/the-long-history-of-glenn-greenwalds-kissing-up-to-the-kremlin/
Zaitsev, O., Härtel, A. & Radchenko, Y. (2015). Review Essays: De-Mythologizing Bandera: Towards a Scholarly History of the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement. Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society: 2015/2, 411. https://er.ucu.edu.ua/bitstream/handle/1/1068/14-reviewessays.pdf?sequence=1
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