The April 6 rally in Cherkasy,
a city 100 miles southeast of Kiev, turned violent after six men took
off their jackets to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Beat the
Kikes” and “Svoboda,” the name of the Ukrainian ultranationalist
movement and the Ukrainian word for “freedom."
– Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 12, 2013
While most of the Western media describe the current crisis in
Ukraine as a confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy, many
of the shock troops who have manned barricades in Kiev and the western
city of Lviv these past months represent a dark page in the country’s
history and have little interest in either democracy or the liberalism
of Western Europe and the United States.
“You’d never know from most of the reporting that far-right
nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and
attacks on government buildings,” reports Seumas Milne of the British
Guardian. The most prominent of the groups has been the ultra-right-wing Svoboda or “Freedom” Party.
The demand for integration with Western Europe appears to be more a
tactic than a strategy: “The participation of Ukrainian nationalism and
Svoboda in the process of EU [European Union] integration,” admits
Svoboda political council member
Yury Noyevy, “is a means to break our ties with Russia.”
And lest one think that Svoboda, and parties even further to the right, will strike their tents and disappear,
Ukrainian News
reported on February 26 that Svoboda party members have temporarily
been appointed to the posts of vice prime minister, minister of
education, minister of agrarian policy and food supplies, and minister
of ecology and natural resources.
Svoboda is hardly a fringe organization. In the 2012 election won by
the now deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych, the party took 10.45
percent of the vote and over 40 percent in parts of the western Ukraine.
While the west voted overwhelmingly for the Fatherland Party’s Yulia
Tymoshenko, the more populous east went overwhelmingly for the Party of
Regions’ Yanukovych. The latter won the election handily, 48.8 percent
to 45.7 percent.
Svoboda—which currently has thirty-six deputies in the 450-member
Ukrainian parliament—began life in the mid-1990s as the Social National
Party of the Ukraine, but its roots lie in World War II, when Ukrainian
nationalists and Nazis found common ground in the ideology of
anti-communism and anti-Semitism. In April 1943, Dr. Otto von Wachter,
the Nazi commander of Galicia—the name for western Ukraine—turned the
First Division of the Ukrainian National Army into the 14 Grenadier
Division of the Waffen SS, the so-called “
Galicia Division.”
The Waffen SS was the armed wing of the Nazi Party, and while serving
alongside the regular army, or Wehrmacht, the party controlled the SS’s
thirty-eight-plus divisions. While all Nazi forces took part in
massacres and atrocities, the Waffen SS did so with particular
efficiency. The postwar Nuremberg trials designated it a “criminal
organization.”
Svoboda has always had a soft spot for the Galicia Division, and one
of its parliament members, Oleg Pankevich, took part in a ceremony last
April honoring the unit. Pankevich joined with a priest of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church near Lviv to celebrate the unit’s seventieth
anniversary and rebury some of the division’s dead.
“I was horrified to see photographs…of young Ukrainians wearing the
dreaded SS uniform with swastikas clearly visible on their helmets as
they carried caskets of members of this Nazi unit, lowered them into the
ground, and fired gun salutes in their honor,” World Jewish Congress
president Ronald Lauder wrote in a
letter
to the Patriarch of the Ukrainian church. He asked Patriarch, Filret,
to “prevent any further rehabilitation of Nazism or the SS."
Some 800,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine during the German
occupation, many of them by Ukrainian auxiliaries and units like the
Galicia Division.
Three months after the April ceremony, Ukrainians re-enacted the
battle of Brody between the Galicia Division and Soviet troops, where
the German XIII Army Corps was trying to hold off the Russians commanded
by Marshall Ivan Konev. In general, going up against Konev meant a
quick trip to Valhalla. In six days of fighting the Galicians lost
two-thirds of their division and the XIII Corps was sent reeling back to
Poland. The Galicia Division survivors were shipped off to fight
anti-Nazi partisans in Yugoslavia. In 1945, remnants of the unit
surrendered to the Americans in Italy, and in 1947 many of them were
allowed to emigrate to Britain and Canada.
The US press has downplayed the role of Svoboda, and even more
far-right groups like Right Sector and Common Cause, but Britain’s
Channel 4 News reports that such quasi-fascist groups “played a leading
role” in organizing the demonstrations and keeping them going.
In the intercepted phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine
Geoffrey Pyatt, the two were, as Russian expert
Stephen Cohen put it to Democracy Now, “plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.”
At one point in the call, Nuland endorsed “Yat” as the head of a new
government, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party, who
indeed is now acting prime minister. But she went on to say that Svoboda
leader Oleh Tyahnybok should be kept “on the outside.”
Her plan to sideline Tyahnybok as a post-coup player, however, may be
wishful thinking, given the importance of the party in the
demonstrations.
Tyahnybok is an anti-Semite who says “organized Jewry” controls the
Ukraine’s media and government, and is planning “genocide” against
Christians. He has turned Svoboda into the fourth-largest party in the
country, and, this past December, US Senator John McCain shared a
platform and an embrace with Tyahnybok at a rally in Kiev.
Svoboda has links with other ultra-right parties in Europe through
the Alliance of European National Movements. Founded in 2009 in
Budapest, the alliance includes Svoboda, Hungary’s violently racist
Jobbik, the British National Party, Italy’s Tricolor Flame, Sweden’s
National Democrats and Belgium’s National Front. The party also has
close ties to France’s xenophobic National Front. The Front’s
anti-Semitic former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was honored at Svoboda’s
2004 congress.
Svoboda would stop immigration and reserve civil service jobs for
“ethnic Ukrainians.” It would end abortion and gun control, “ban the
Communist Ideology” and list
religious affiliation
and ethnicity on identity documents. It claims as its mentor the
Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose Ukrainian Insurgent Army
massacred Jews and Poles during World War II. The party’s demand that
all official business be conducted in Ukrainian was recently endorsed by
the parliament, disenfranchising thirty percent of the country’s
population that speaks Russian. Russian speakers are generally
concentrated in the Ukraine’s east and south, and particularly in the
Crimean Peninsula.
The US and the EU have hailed the resignation of President Yanukovych
and the triumph of “people power” over the elected government—
Ambassador Pyatt called it “a day for the history books”—but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Before the deployment of Russian troops this past week, anti-coup, pro-Russian
crowds massed
in the streets in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol, and seized government
buildings. While there was little support for the ousted president—who
most Ukrainians believe is corrupt—there was deep anger at the
de-recognition of the Russian language and contempt for what many said
were “fascists” in Kiev and Lviv.
Until 1954, Crimea was always part of Russia until, for
administrative and bureaucratic reasons, it was made part of Ukraine. At
the time, Ukraine was one of fifteen Soviet republics.
Ukraine is in deep economic trouble, and for the past year the
government has been casting about for a way out. Bailout negotiations
were opened with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union,
but the loan would have required onerous austerity measures that,
according to
Citibank analyst Ivan Tchakarov, would “most probably mean a recession in 2014.”
It was at this juncture that Yanukovych abandoned talks with the EU
and opened negotiations with the Russians. That turnaround was the spark
for last November’s demonstrations.
But as
Ben Aris,
editor of Business News Europe, says, “Under the terms of the EU offer
of last year—which virtually nobody in the Western media has seriously
examined—the EU was offering $160 million per year for the next five
years, while just the bond payments to the IMF were greater than that.”
Russia, on the other hand, “offered $15 billion in cash and
immediately paid $3 billion.… Had Yanukovych accepted the EU deal, the
country would have collapsed,” says Aris.
The current situation is dangerous precisely because it touches a
Russian security nerve. The Soviet Union lost some twenty-five to
twenty-seven million people in World War II, and Russians to this day
are touchy about their borders. They also know who inflicted those
casualties, and those who celebrate a Waffen SS division are not likely
to be well thought of in the south or the east of Ukraine.
Border security is hardly ancient history for the Kremlin. As Russian
expert Cohen points out, “Since the Clinton administration in the
1990s, the US-led West has been on a steady march toward post-Soviet
Russia, beginning with the expansion of NATO…all the way to the Russian
border.”
NATO now includes Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and
former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact members Albania, Slovakia, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s comment that the
IMF-EU package for Ukraine would have been “a major boost for
Euro-Atlantic security” suggests that NATO had set its sights on
bringing Ukraine into the military alliance.
The massive demonstrations over the past three months reflected
widespread outrage at the corruption of the Yanukovych regime, but they
have also unleashed a dark side of Ukraine’s politics. That dark side
was on display at last year’s rally in Cherkasy. Victor Smal, a lawyer
and human rights activist, said he told “the men in the T-shirts they
were promoting hatred. They beat me to the ground until I lost
consciousness.”
Svoboda and its allies do not make up a majority of the
demonstrators, but as Cohen points out, “Five percent of a population
that’s tough, resolute, ruthless, armed and well funded, and knows what
it wants, can make history.”
It is not the kind of history most would like to repeat.
Read Next:
John Feffer and Foreign Policy in Focus on the clash of partnerships in Ukraine.
