Historically and ideologically, Moscow not Kiev represents the future

When Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union in 1922, the country’s vast agricultural resources were husbanded in large-scale collective farms. The famines which swept through the vast rural plains of the Soviet Union in 1932–33 were a direct consequence of the social convulsion caused by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization and grain requisitioning, undertaken in a panicked response to the disruption of the food supply to Soviet cities in the wake of the disastrous harvest of 1927–28. The proximate cause of the poor harvest was the severe drought which afflicted the land in the summer of 1927, leading to a poor winter tillage.

The resulting inability to feed the cities threatened the very survival of the Soviet system, especially with the emphasis that had been placed on hyper-industrialization, fueled by Stalin’s obsession with catching up to the West. It was the driving force behind the formulation of the Soviet five year plans and, with it, the locus of Stalin’s policy of collectivization — a policy tantamount to the unleashing of a war against the peasantry.

The resulting famine decimated Ukraine, leading to a death toll of anywhere between 2.5–10 million. Anti-Russian Ukrainians refer to this tragic period as Holodomor (extermination by hunger), and consider it to have been an act of genocide.

Others dispute this, however, asserting that while undoubtedly the cause of huge suffering and death, the famine was not engineered with the purpose of mass extermination, but instead was the result of an economic policy implemented by a government whose ideological blinkers endowed it with a megalomaniacal belief in its historic mission to reshape society according to Marxist texts that had assumed the status of religious canon.

This said, even prior to the famine of 1932 Soviet policy towards Ukraine had been harsh, confronted as Moscow found itself with a determined and popular nationalist movement for Ukrainian independence and self-determination immediately after the October revolution of 1917.

In December of that year Lenin issued a proclamation to the Ukrainian parliament (Central Rada) in Kiev, guaranteeing the right of self-determination to the Ukrainian people but threatening war if the Rada continued to: i) support and provide sanctuary to anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary troops: ii) disarm and treat pro-Soviet Red Guards and workers with aggression: iii) refuse to aid the revolution against the aforesaid counterrevolutionary forces.

Soviet forces — both Ukrainian and Russian — toppled the Rada soon thereafter, after which Ukraine briefly came under German control as part of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March 1918, which ended Russia’s involvement in WWI. Ukraine reverted back to the Soviet Union in 1919 when the Central Powers lost the First World War and support for Ukrainian nationalism dissipated. Regardless, anti-Soviet and Russian sentiment remained strong in western Ukraine, illustrated by the welcome that invading Nazi forces received there in 1941.

In fact, more than just welcome the Nazis, thousands of Ukrainians actively collaborated with them, organized into a specially-formed Waffen SS battalion (The First Galicia) and participating in war crimes and atrocities against civilians — particularly Jewish civilians.

The most infamous of those atrocities in Nazi-occupied Ukraine occurred at Babi Yar just outside in Kiev in September of 1941, where 34,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered over a one week period by members of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP) and German SS troops. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police had been established by Heinrich Himmler in August 1941, not long after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and consisted of over 35,000 men at full strength.

Babi Yar was the largest mass killing committed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In total around 100,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered there during the course of the entire Nazi occupation.

Over seven decades on and across Ukraine the issue of support or opposition to the Nazis during the war continues to be deeply divisive. Upon the country’s independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, commemorations celebrating Ukrainian Nazi battalions have and continue to be held on a near annual basis, and were met with angry counter demonstrations. The veneration in which Ukrainian nationalist icon, Stepan Bandera, was and continues to be held in the western half of the country has proved particularly polarising.

Bandera’s detractors consider him a fascist who up until WWII engaged in atrocities and mass murder as a leading figure within the Organiation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Bandera was in prison serving a life sentence. This was after the death sentence he received in 1934 for the attempted assassination of a Polish government official in the disputed territory of Galicia was commuted.

Bandera was subsequently released by the Nazis on a pledge to support and cooperate with them, which he subsequently did as head of the new organisation he formed, the OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Fascists — Bandera). He and his supporters were intent on using the invasion of Ukraine by the Nazis as a catalyst for the formation of an independent Ukrainian state to be established on fascist lines.

Nonetheless, in western Ukraine today Stepan Bandera is widely considered to have been a patriot who waged a heroic struggle for his country’s freedom, which is where we have the essential split between the eastern and western halves of the country, a political and ideological fissure that erupted into civil conflict in 2014.

In the wake of the 2014 coup that succeeded in deposing then President Viktor Yanukovych, two specially formed neo-Nazi battalions, the Azov and Aidar, were incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces. This is akin to the KKK having its own uniformed and armed battalion as part of the US armed forces.

Though it would be false to assert that the entire population of western Ukraine harbors Nazi sympathies, Russian President Vladimir Putin does have a point in claiming that this is a part of the world where Nazi and fascist ideology retains deep cultural roots. It is simply the fact that no other state in Europe legitimozes Nazi ideology by having avowed neo-Nazis incorporated into its armed forces in specially formed battalions and regiments.

Ultimately, what is unfolding in Ukraine today as these words are being written is the poisonous residue of an ugly history of hatred and enmity between two antithetical ideologies of world-historical importance — Soviet communism and Nazi fascism. It is a hatred and enmity that was responsible for millions of deaths, with the current conflict now raging in many respects a continuation of WWII in microcosm in which on one side Moscow has been reimagined as the Soviet Union and Putin as Stalin, while on the other Kiev the heir to Nazi Berlin.

Though it may have suited London, Brussels and Washington to go along with this reincarnation and reimagining for geostrategic reasons — the conflict unfolding now merely confirms that in so doing they have sown dragon’s teeth.

It is a grim picture, one that calls to mind the sentiments of Friedrich Nietzsche: namely that ‘To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering.’

History confirms that whenever said ‘meaning’ amounts to ideological, ethnic and national hatred of the ‘other’, what ensues is a conflict near total in its bitterness and brutality.

End.