Is there Nazism in Ukraine? Yes, there is — but in a very different dimension from what Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to sell in his speeches to the population and in bilateral dialogues, such as the one he recently had with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron.
As is the case in countries like Brazil, where extremist groups advance at a gallop, in the Eastern European nation there has been a proliferation of neo-Nazi groups in recent years. The period leading up to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula eight years ago was one of the main drivers for the growth of nationalism.
For academics who follow the region, there is something of a critical consensus about the local government’s tolerance of these groups. One of them, the Azov Battalion, even trained civilians who volunteered to fight the Russians, when Putin began to concentrate tens of thousands of troops on the border with his neighbor.
Still, there is also a consensus that the Ukrainian state is not Nazi — and, by far, it is not the one with the most extremist presence.
A historical leap is needed to understand Ukraine’s relationship with Nazism and extremist ideologies. Jeffrey Veidlinger, professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Michigan in the United States, lists at least three pre-World War II periods in which the Jewish population was persecuted within what are now considered Ukrainian national borders.
They are: in 1881, during the Russian Empire, when Jewish properties were attacked and dozens died; in the Revolution of 1905, when the population, instigated by Russian paramilitaries, persecuted and murdered 5,000 Jews in the region; and after the Bolshevik Revolution, when around 100,000 Jews died due to attacks perpetrated against them. The episodes are known as “pogroms”.
The reason behind this was the constant disputes on Ukrainian territory that fueled ethnic violence. “The Jews were persecuted in particular because they didn’t have any concentrated territory in which they could claim sovereignty,” he tells sheet Veidlinger, author of a book on the subject.
The situation escalated during World War II, when Ukraine was already attached to the Soviet bloc. The country was occupied by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944. Before the invasion, the capital, Kiev, had about 160,000 Jews — 20% of the local population — and more than 100,000 of them fled fearing violence. One of the greatest humanitarian crimes committed against the Jews dates from this time.
In the episode known as Babi Yar, more than 33,000 Jews were murdered. The crime was committed by a Nazi detachment, but historiography has amply documented the support of locals who, for a period, allied with Hitler’s troops in the hope of achieving independence from the Soviet Union.
When the current Russian president uses arguments about the persistence of Nazism in Ukraine, however, that is not what he is talking about. For historian Michel Gherman, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), “Putin uses a [Josef] Stalin, who saw Nazism in a specific way: as something that wants to destroy the Soviet Union [e, agora, a Rússia]”.
“The discourse is of the extreme right. It is a Stalinist, anti-Leninist and Russocentric narrative”, adds the researcher, also a member of the Observatory of the Extreme Right.
Here, once again, is the historical thread. The Jewish population in Ukraine lived through two distinct periods when the country was a Soviet republic, experts explain. During Lenin’s leadership, when a policy of nationalities was put in place, groups with defined characteristics, such as the Ukrainians, were able to maintain their identity, in a period of ebb of ethnic violence.
Under Stalin, things changed, and the persecution against this part of the population grew. “From the 1930s onwards, the Soviet Union became chauvinistic and began to punish the Jewish population. And it continued to do so even after World War II, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Jewish life was severely restricted,” he says. Veidlinger.
Putin, according to academics, would then be mobilizing Soviet identity and nationalism, making Nazism a symbol of what would threaten Russia — at least in the socio-political molds in which his government wants to keep the country in a cast.
Gherman says there is a decrease in neo-Nazi cells in Ukraine, mostly concentrated in the eastern part, which also includes the pro-Russian separatist regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, now recognized by Putin. Since it became independent in 1991, Ukraine can be described as a country that has advanced in the good coexistence among the multiethnicity it contemplates —there are 130 ethnicities, according to a 2001 census, which has not yet been updated—, say the professors.
It is common, however, for extremist groups to appropriate symbols of the country’s history, leading to episodes that cause confusion. An example is the use of the symbol trizub (“trident”, in Portuguese) by Pravi Sektor (right sector), an ultra-right organization.
Even used in some versions of the national flag, the symbol is the country’s coat of arms and represents the Holy Trinity since the 10th century, when Christianity was introduced to Ukraine. It has nothing to do with Nazism. “They appropriated the trizub because it symbolizes the independent Ukrainian state”, says Vitorio Sorotiuk, president of the Brazilian Central Ukrainian Representation.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish. The argument may be marginal to contradict Putin’s claims, but it gains weight if we take into account the fact that, during the election campaign that raised him to the Mariinski Palace, this fact was little or nothing addressed.
“Nobody cares. Nobody asks me about it,” Zelensky replied to The Times of Israel, in an interview given in January 2020 – the first year of his government –, when asked about the public relevance given to his ancestry.
The Ukrainian leader lost three Jewish uncles who fought in the Red Army. The paternal grandfather, also a soldier, survived, and the grandmother, who lived in Krivi Rih, a city in the southeast occupied by the Nazis, fled to Kazakhstan. There, she studied and became a teacher, until returning to Ukraine after the war.
“Of course, in Ukraine, as elsewhere, now and in the past, there is a portion that doesn’t care about anyone else but their own nation. The same happened in WWII and Germany’s fascist occupation of Ukraine.” , said Zelensky at that point. “This attitude was also used against the Jewish people during the Soviet era. We know all that. But at this point we also know perfectly well that we have the lowest levels of anti-Semitism in Ukraine.”
