What is "Ukraine" the name of ?
To try to get a somewhat correct idea of the subject that all the press is talking about... We offer you this expanded version of the article Ukraine coveted and torn apart published by Jean-Marie Chauvier in the Aide-mémoire magazine n°69 ( July-August-September 2014) of the Territoires de la Mémoire association. Jean-Marie Chauvier is a Belgian journalist and political essayist, former press correspondent in Moscow, ex-journalist at RTBF and contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, probably one of the best specialists on the former USSR.
The little "political fiction" presented in the introduction is obviously primarily aimed at Belgian readers; our neighbors might not understand its nuances. If this doesn't speak to you, you can of course go straight to the body of the text.
(read the original article on Territoires de la Mémoire)
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A Belgian story as an appetizer…
Imagine yourself as a journalist arriving in Brussels. A gigantic demonstration takes place in the "neutral zone", this area of the Royal Palace, the parliament and the government prohibited to demonstrations. There is a vast square there – "Maïdan" in Arabic, Iranian or Ukrainian – the Maidan of palaces.
Now, there are a hundred thousand demonstrators occupying it, a hundredth of the country's population, nevertheless representative of its Flemish region. You try to find out what is happening, and colleagues on site, or demonstrators explain to you: the Belgian people demand the abdication of the King, guilty of mismanagement and corruption. Belgium, the Belgian people demand the signing of an agreement with the European Union of which Belgium is not a part. The people refuse any agreement with a neighboring country which is also not part of it, France. The Belgians have occupied the premises for several months, the police were unable to dislodge them, but pushed them back with violence when they tried to storm the parliament and the seat of government. A scandal in the eyes of the International Community! From the platform of the meeting, the leaders of the parties organizing the action spoke: NVA, CD&V, Vlaams Belang, in other words the great Flemish nationalist formation, the Christian democracy and the extreme right.
We will therefore say that these are the parties of the Belgian people. Maybe there are others, but it doesn't matter, we like these and that's the main thing. Representatives of the European Union and the United States also parade on the platform, denouncing France – it is in fact putting pressure on the Belgians so that they do not associate with Europe. Even a famous new Dutch philosopher spoke and declared to the people gathered at his feet: "You were a great civilization when France was nothing! ". And to call on people to face this neighboring evil power and its diabolical president without fear.
At one point, you engage in conversation with your hosts, you have some doubts about the composition of the Belgian people:
- - But isn't there another community in this country, French-speaking?
- - Yes, in fact, they even have the right to speak their language in their regions, while the only official state language is Dutch. But they are pro-French, hostile to Europe and Democracy. They are bad Belgians.
So you cable your editorial staff: "Pro-European Belgians are not alone. There are, in the southern regions, pro-French people who, for the moment, are silent, it is even said that some have come to the Maidan of the Palaces to express their protest against the King and his mafia methods. »
You soon notice in the crowd very sporty people, equipped with shields and clubs, who are leading muscular battles with police officers. A rumour-monger whispers to you that these are far-right militias.
- - But no, your Belgian colleagues tell you, it's French propaganda.
- - Maybe, but even some European newspapers are talking about it.
- - Yes, of course, there are some extremists, but we should not exaggerate. And especially not talking about "fascists" or "neo-Nazis", that's pure propaganda, they are quite simply nationalists, a little more right-wing than the others!
- - Certainly, but I was told that they claim to be part of the VNV, the movement engaged in 1940 in Nazi collaboration, of the SS Langemark Division also known as the "Flemish Legion".
- - Come on then! Pure pro-French propaganda! The Belgian people have nothing to do with all this. We are not here to reawaken those ghost stories from another era. So stop fantasizing!
- - Excuse me, I didn't want to shock you, and besides, I won't say anything about it, I was simply reporting the rumor that is circulating.
One day, the demonstration turns into a riot and an assault on the royal palace, first mysterious snipers, then the police fire live ammunition, there are dozens of victims, the King flees, a new government is promoted, of the NVA and Vlaams Belang – the CD&V (more moderate) remains on the sidelines.
"A government combining the right and the neo-Nazis, the rumour-monger tells you, it only represents a minority of the electorate, and of only one part of the country". But no, you know that this government is the very expression of Democracy, and moreover it is provisional, pending new elections.
The rumour-monger also tells you that unidentified snipers posted on roofs caused the bloodbath. You don't listen to this French propaganda nonsense. Democracy has triumphed, it's celebration, you are overwhelmed with emotion, like all the foreigners who came here to participate and bear witness to this magnificent revolution. In the process, the new government removed the status of French as the official language of the Walloon provinces. It doesn't take much to trigger the discontent of French speakers, who use it as a pretext to trigger violent actions. The government is backtracking, but it refuses any negotiations with these violent rebels who have outlawed themselves.
But France is unhappy and describes this victory for Belgian democracy as a coup d'état. She took advantage of this to occupy and annex Gaume, under the pretext that it was Lorraine. The international community is outraged. Sanctions are taken against France. Close collaborators of President Hollande are deprived of visas and their accounts are blocked. Even Mr. Bernard-Henri Levy is a victim of these measures. But the situation is deteriorating: anti-government demonstrations take place in Liège, Charleroi, Mons. They are, you are told, pro-French separatists, armed by France. The Belgian army is sent to defend the integrity of the territory against French aggression. The rebels sow chaos, the army responds with heavy weapons. You pass on the information... you avoid specifying that the "Belgian army" is mainly made up of a National Guard recruited from the extreme right. And so on.
This "Belgium" and its Maidan strangely resembles the Ukraine and the Maidan that our media have told us about. Bias, selective information, lies by omission, all the ingredients of our "single thought" on the Ukrainian crisis are found there. End of this hors d'oeuvre.
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Some trails to discover Ukraine in its diversity
I discovered Ukraine for the first time in 1966. The charms of kyiv, Odessa and Crimea convinced me, and also a few fun visits to the kolkhozes. Very favorable impressions, but also very superficial. The chromos of Soviet propaganda still suited me.
I had to stay there again in 1991-1992, at the time of the dislocation of the USSR, to perceive the existence of a serious national question and also, the diversity of this country. The old fantasy of the indivisible Soviet people was not opposed to the new cliché of the country in rebellion, driven by a univocal national or independence movement. It was much more complicated!
To the West, in formerly Polish Galicia, I see a region agitated by national, ethnic, linguistic, religious questions and mostly in favor of leaving the Soviet Union. There I discovered a gathering of veterans of the army of supporters of Stepan Bandera. I will also see on sale, here and in kyiv, another surprise, Nazi and anti-Semitic brochures. The USSR had not yet given up the ghost, they were already back! I would later learn that these former Banderists, returning in the mid-fifties from the Gulag where they had been locked up a few years earlier, had passed the torch of the cause to the new dissidents, joined after 1991 by the survivors of the Canadian Diaspora , former members of the Nazi collaboration and the Waffen SS Galitchina.
Still to the West, further south, in Transcarpathia, a reverse image, a region largely indifferent to nationalism, I note the good understanding, among the people met, between Ukrainians, Hungarians and Russians, there is indeed a small church war mobilizing several hundred people. There is the amused surprise of the Uzhgorod students when I mention the CIA report which, at the time, published in the German Spiegel, predicted a war between Ukraine and Russia. It was simply unimaginable. But all the same, the idea was already germinating at the CIA!
In the South, in Odessa, the atmosphere is no less peaceful and wait-and-see. It's strange. This period will be said to be a collapse, a geopolitical catastrophe or, in the case of Ukraine, a great national uprising. There is nothing like it, visibly. Daily life is almost normal, were it not for the growing shortages. People are perplexed, incredulous. It is the foreign traveler who is asked the question: "do you really believe that the Soviet Union will disappear?" ". My indecisive response leads to this other reflection: "In any case, it's decided at the top, we have nothing to say." Passivity, resignation.
In the center, in kyiv, the capital, political agitation is there, dominated not by nationalist passions, but by the concern of local Soviet elites to build a new state. A government, an army, an administration, embassies, lots of new cheeses, not to mention the factories to be privatized. There I met a government economic advisor whose contact details had been given to me by a left-wing friend in Paris. The advisor explained to me that he was working for the Soros foundation. I had already seen the employees of this financier and reform expert in Moscow, and I will see them again more than once in Ukraine. I still knew nothing about the famous US "soft power".
In the East, in the industrial basin of Donbass, there are completely different concerns, economic and social, the fear of unemployment and the consequences of a disintegration of the Union. It should be noted that in addition to coal and steel, Ukraine supplies essential segments of Soviet and, today, Russian and Kazakh arms production, aeronautical and space industries. The miners from Donbass do not speak to me about language or nation, they come "from all corners of the Union" and are especially worried about disruptions in minewood deliveries. They remember with emotion the big strikes of 1989, when they still demanded wage increases and better working conditions. There is hardly any question of this "best future" – everyone now wonders how far the country will deteriorate. We talk about possible closures, hunger riots which could stir up Donbass. Anger is expressed towards "the communist party", but there is no question of wishing for a break with the other Soviet republics, nor the erection of "new borders".
In the referendum of March 17, 1991, the overwhelming majority of people from the East and South voted for Gorbachev's Reformed Union project - the votes from the West went in the opposite direction. The independence acclaimed everywhere at the end of the year, after the changes of power in Moscow, takes on different meanings from one region or even from one person to another: it is a time of hope and disarray.
Twenty years have passed and have not denied this diversity, this East-West divide which is verified upstream in history and in social differences (rurality in the West, industrial cities in the East) downstream during the legislative and presidential elections and at this very moment, in the opposition between the power resulting from the Maidan insurrection and the populations of the South-East, followers either of increased autonomy, or of federalism, or, for a minority of between them, separatism or attachment to Russia. The election of President Poroshenko on May 25, 2014 did not deny this divide. Even if, as the only truly presidential candidate, and in the absence of any political representation from the East, Poroshenko also obtained votes in the south-eastern regions, from voters who, very probably, were hoping for calming initiatives, allowing to avoid a civil war.
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What is "Ukraine" the name of?
The first big question asked would be, to use a Bourdieusian(*) formula: "What is Ukraine the name of ?"
The fifteen new national states resulting from the fifteen so-called "Union" republics of the former Soviet Union were confronted with identity crises, namely the questions: who are we? within what borders and in what territories? in what languages? what religions and ideologies? in what relations with the old republics, with the outside world, mainly the so-called West whose influences, products, armies are involved in our territories or at our borders?
For the people of Russia, it is mainly a question of defining themselves as a nation within a multi-ethnic and multi-faith federation. The "Rossiiskaya" federation in the citizen sense is not the "Russkoye" state in the ethnic sense that the ethnonationalists, but not the state patriots or the Eurasianists, want.
For Belarusians, the question is to promote themselves as a nation in an ethnically homogeneous but bilingual country, with Russian dominant in urban areas.
The country underlines its identity in a new (and old) name: Belarus, and no longer Bielorussia, which sounds too Russian.
For the citizens of Ukraine, it is a question of organizing themselves in a unitary state while the diversity of historical heritages, languages, and relationships with the Russian world is evident. In 1991, the desire prevailed, at the level of power, to consolidate national unity, starting with language and Ukrainianization. There will only be one official language, Ukrainian, while half the country speaks Russian.
Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have common origins which can be located in the Rus' of kyiv in the 9th-12th centuries. La Rous' translated as "Ruthenia" or "Russia" (Rossia in Latin). Russians may consider kyiv as "the mother of Russian cities", Rus' as the cradle of all Russias. And Ukrainians respond: "how can you locate your birthplace in a foreign country? ". The problem is that at that time there was neither Ukraine – the word did not exist – nor Russia in the sense that this word would take on later. There was Rous', and its inhabitants the Roussiny. We should learn not to attribute to ancient countries the names of current countries which have inherited certain traits but with great historical discontinuity.
After the destruction of Rous' by the Tatar-Mongol invasions, the paths of the ancient Roussiny were very differentiated. Roughly speaking, the western territories were successively integrated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish kingdoms, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (thus, Ruthenian or Ukrainian Galicia was never part of Russia). The eastern lands were linked or integrated into Russia, which involved intermingling with the Turko-Tatar, Finno-Ugric, Siberian and other peoples assimilated by the Empire. Hence the theories on the Asianness of Russia and the Europeanness of Ukraine and Belarus, a subject of inexhaustible controversy, we can at least say that we are at the crossroads of several civilizations, in border countries, which can be translated as "Ukraïna" (0'kraïna)
The territory called "Ukraine" was formed during the Soviet era but the western part was only integrated into the USSR in 1939 and especially after the end of the war in 1945 and under particularly dramatic conditions. of Stalinist terror. The repressions and deportations which hit these western regions just before and immediately after the war certainly contributed to the hostility, more acute in these regions than elsewhere, towards communism, the Soviet Union and the Russians. They explain the favorable reception given to German troops, in these same regions, during Hitler's invasion of June 1941 and the spontaneous popular initiative of the first pogroms against the Jews, associated with the NKVD, even before the Einsatzgruppen took charge. of the killing.
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Galicia: at the sources of "integral nationalism"
The East-West divide was confirmed in the engagements during the Second World War. It was mainly in ex-Polish Galicia, the cradle of radical Ukrainian nationalism in the fight against the Polish regime, that the armies and structures of collaboration with Nazi Germany were formed. This so-called"integral" nationalism, breaking with the democratic and socialist traditions of the Ukrainian national movement, was concentrated within the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, formed in 1929, nourished by fascist and national-socialist inspirations. It is from it that the structures of collaboration and armed struggle against the Soviets and the Poles came: the Ukrainian Central Committee, the Ukrainian battalions of the Wehrmacht (Nachtigall and Roland) several punitive battalions of specialized Schutzmannshaften in the repression of partisans in Belarus, the Galitchina Division (Galizien) of the Waffen SS, the Insurgent Army (UPA) which, involved in the genocide of Jews, gypsies and the extermination of Poles in Volhynia, also rebelled against the German occupier, in the name of independence promises that the Germans did not keep. These conflicts with the Germans make it possible to present the Banderists today, particularly in certain press here, including on the left of the left, as an anti-German or even anti-Nazi resistance or, more pleasant to our ears, "anti-totalitarian".
A presentation which involves subtle camouflage, to which many new propagandists, as well as Western authors and journalists sympathetic to "orange" Ukraine, lend themselves. This type of rehabilitation of banderists comes from a quadruple camouflage, encountered in numerous publications by Ukrainian and French authors and in recent press articles:
The first consists of never mentioning the ideology of the OUN, based on the canons of ethnicity, of the people-race, which recalls the Nazi "völkish" ideology, of social Darwinism dividing nations into nations- lords and slave nations, of "Ukraine above all" – in this case the theories of OUN ideologue Dmitro Dontsov, also translator into Ukrainian of "Mein Kampf". This ideology is well known, very present on far-right websites, but is no longer mentioned in the mainstream media and is completely ignored in Western Europe. No French work seems to have been devoted to Ukrainian fascism.
The second camouflage evokes the "Ukrainian Legion" without specifying that these were battalions of the Wehrmacht, of the Galitchina Division without specifying that they were Waffen SS, of the UPA Insurgent Army without specifying that it was recruited into Schutzmannshaft 201 which Roman Choukhevitch commanded after having commanded the Nachtigall battalion and before leading the UPA. The war crimes of these armies are also covered up or denied.
The third disguise proudly evokes the proclamation of the independent Ukrainian state on June 30, 1941, without specifying that the declaration swore loyalty to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler in the common struggle against Bolshevism. It is true that this independence was not approved in Berlin and that Bandera was interned in Sachsenhausen where the Nazis released him in 1944. From then on, frictions between the nationalists of the OUN and their German promoters increased. causing victims in the nationalist ranks. From there to making them "resisters of Nazism" there is a step that rewritings of history take without difficulty as long as they avoid mentioning the context of the frictions.
Finally, last but not least, the fourth camouflage concerns the participation of the Banderists and other components of the OUN in the punitive expeditions of the Nazi police, in the pogroms, in Judeocide and in the genocide of the gypsies, and above all, the UPA acting for its own account, to the extermination of the Polish civilian populations of Volhynia.
I would not insist on these historical facts if they were not systematically obscured in current revisionist literature, including in France and... on the left.
However, this story, that of the collaboration and mass crimes of the banderists, if it is studied carefully by historians, particularly German and Ukrainian, is not the subject of any examination of conscience in Ukraine where it is so question of "restore memory". At most there has been a recognition of the "Jewish holocaust" and tributes to Baby Yar, under the patronage of the Israeli authorities, who are careful not to recall the role of Ukrainian fascists in the Judeocide, this which would undermine good relations and the "strategic alliance" between Israel and Ukraine.
It is precisely this militant revisionism which, for twenty years, has changed, in the Western regions, the image of fascist bandits which stuck to the reputation of the Banderists under the Soviet regime into a romantic mythology of patriotic resistance who would have fought against the three occupiers: Soviets, Germans and Poles or, in a version more suited to our Western expectations, in an epic story of an "anti-Nazi resistance" of which no one had ever perceived the existence until recently.
Another way of doctoring history is to present Ukraine as generally rallied to Germany, in reaction to the famine and other Stalinist repressions it had suffered. This is undoubtedly the explanation for part of the rallying to the invader, especially since in Galicia, the Soviet annexation of 1939 was also perceived as an invasion. Galicia, which was Polish in the 1930s, did not experience famine or the Soviet regime.
It is in the former Polish West that collaboration is most pronounced, and in the Soviet Center and East that anti-fascist resistance is most active.
Around seven million Ukrainians are believed to have fought in the Red Army, around 200,000 are believed to have been part of the various German armies and organizations under occupation or in autonomous nationalist organizations. This difference in commitments weighs heavily in the current "war of memories" whose excesses we saw during the Maidan, with the destruction of around forty statues of Lenin and the desecration of monuments to soldiers who fell in the anti-Nazi struggle by the nationalist commandos who, moreover, venerate the heroes of Nazi collaboration and resistance to Sovietization. Memory in the West is partially nationalist, memory in the East is massively anti-fascist.
On May 9, 2007, traditional celebration of Victory over fascism, in Kyiv, I saw the Maidan as we have never seen it on our TVs: flooded with red flags, decorated with Soviet stars, an official military parade , chaired by President Yushchenko, preceding a popular demonstration of several tens of thousands of participants. In 2014, this celebration was banned in Galicia and converted to Kyiv, officially, in commemoration of the victims of the war, but the celebration still takes place in the cities of the East, the South, Crimea with cries of "Fascism does not will not pass."
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The role of the far right in Maidan
This is one of the identity and symbolic dimensions of the Ukrainian crisis, willingly obscured or minimized here for an understandable reason: radical nationalists and neo-Nazis are our allies against Russia and against the so-called "pro- Russian," and we're not too proud of it. Hence sometimes denial.
Who and what are we talking about? First of all, this Galician social-national party renamed "Svovoda" ("Freedom") led by Oleh Tiahnibok, with more than 30% of the votes in this region during the 2012 legislative elections, and 10% in the entire country – it is practically non-existent in the East.
Secondly, the constellation of neo-Nazi groups such as "Patriot Ukrainy", seasoned militias such as UNA-UNSO, in training and at the front for around twenty years, the Trizoub movement and others which constitute the "Pravy Sektor" ("Right Sector"), by Dmitro Iarosh.
Thirdly, radical nationalists dispersed in other political groups such as Viktor Yushchenko's "Nasha Ukraïna" and Yulia Tymoshenko's "Baktivshchina", or even Liashko's Radical Party.
However, these forces, very influential in the West but in the minority throughout the country, played an important role from the start in the paramilitary supervision of Maidan – those in the know were immediately able to spot, on video, their distinctive signs, their emblems, their flags, not even to mention the swastikas or Celtics drawn in the premises of the occupied Town Hall or the tattoos of the activists. They play an important and decisive role in the insurrectional uprising of February 18-22: we noticed, on the night of the 18th to the 19th, after several days of calm and while a compromise was in sight, that the radical forces were set in motion, setting out to attack official buildings, with the Pravy Sektor calling on its members to come to Maidan with weapons. On the 20th, there was a bloodbath, inaugurated by sniper fire whose origin remains a mystery and prolonged by live ammunition from the Berkut and the insurgents. There are between 80 and 100 dead. President Yanukovych fled, he was dismissed by a majority obtained in parliament thanks to the reversal of several deputies from the majority, and this allowed the formation of the new alliance government between the national-liberal right and the extreme right. This one plays a no less crucial role in the organization and recruitment of the National Guard, the spearhead of the war of repression waged in the East. I'm not just talking about the Svoboda party in government, but about far-right ministers from Baktivshchina and, of course, Pravy Sektor, fighting on the Eastern Front. These regularized irregular forces partially compensate for the unreliability of Ukrainian soldiers in the regular Ukrainian army.
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Socio-economic changes
There are other dimensions to this crisis, socio-economic and geopolitical. Between 1989 and 2013, the country's population decreased from 52 to 45 million. High mortality, deterioration of public health, emigration are to blame. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have gone to look for work, those from the East more to Russia, those from the West more to Europe, where they can be found on construction sites in Portugal, in the greenhouses of Andalusia and , for young women, prostitution networks. Production has collapsed, more than a third of the population has fallen below the poverty line. Only education, of good quality, was able to resist the great regression. Western reports on the crisis in Ukraine place a lot of emphasis on "the corruption of the regime" or the so-called "Yanukovych dictatorship", forgetting the effects of wild capitalism where good…Western advice would be called into question. It is not "post-Soviet authoritarianism" that has thrown millions of Ukrainians into impoverishment and doomed a country to such a state of disrepair that, during the Soviet decades, and despite all their faults, had torn itself away from ancestral poverty and illiteracy, had built a powerful industry, dozens of new cities, and had trained generations of engineers, technicians, doctors, researchers, freeing Ukraine of its situation as a "third world of Europe".
The new social crisis is due to the transformations accomplished since the end of the Soviet era. As in Russia and everywhere else, shock capitalism, of a particularly parasitic and corrupt type, has characterized privatizations, the growth of inequalities, the enrichment of a small number and the impoverishment of the popular masses. Like several other ex-Soviet countries, Ukraine experienced a decade of collapse and another of recovery in growth allowing the emergence of a so-called "middle class" aspiring for more areas of autonomy and freedoms. . But unlike Russia and a few others, Ukraine did not have exportable energy resources; on the contrary, it was and remains very dependent on Russian supplies, which a Ukrainian minister said, a few years ago, were had moved "from the regime of friendship of peoples to that of market laws". This country has therefore become more impoverished than neighboring Russia or Belarus. Another notable difference with Russia: the privatizations were not organized by the federal power, nor the oligarchy which benefited from them brought into line by Vladimir Putin. Things in Ukraine happened in a more chaotic manner, in a fierce clan struggle, which is not over, and under increasing pressure from the IMF. These living conditions, the corruption, which the reign of Viktor Yanukovych seems to have worsened, are undoubtedly the main ingredient of the anger which was expressed at Maidan. The "European dream" was grafted onto it, which allowed us to speak of "Euromaidan".
We know that the trigger for this Maidan was the suspension – not the refusal but the suspension, by President Yanukovych, of the procedure for signing the association agreement with the European Union. In fact a free trade agreement accompanied by a sanitation and privatization program dictated by the IMF. Both open the way to foreign products and investments but raise fears for local industries and the social system. Announced on March 27, in the wake of the Maidan victory, an IMF loan of between 14 and 18 billion dollars should unlock other international credits of around 27 billion. The loan is conditional on strict austerity measures: the price of gas for consumers must be increased by 50%, 10% of the number of state civil servants reduced, salaries and pensions frozen, the age of retirement age increases, for women, from 55 to 60 years, for men from 60 to 62 years – this is probably only the beginning of a break with Soviet norms.
In December 2013, Russia proposed to Ukraine a purchase of its debt of around 15 billion, a 30% discount on gas prices, and a relaunch of industrial cooperation. But this possible alternative, towards which Yanukovych turned after hesitation, was swept away by the insurrection, whose anti-Russian turn became evident, as also demonstrated by the visits to Maidan and the contacts established in kyiv by envoys from the United States. and the European Union, mobilized with the international media in support of Maidan.
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Geopolitics and "revision of history"
Hence the third dimension of the crisis, geopolitical, where the recasting of future perspectives is closely linked to the revision of the national past.
For twenty years, it is no mystery, a US strategy has been at work, very explicitly described by the strategist Zbiegniew Brzezinski of mastery of Eurasia (1), considered as the main chessboard on which the future is played out. of American supremacy, a moral obligation for the United States in a world doomed to chaos. Ukraine has been defined as one of the essential pivots of this strategy. I will only evoke here the vision from the inside. An immense network of influence has been developed by American foundations, financing a multitude of more or less oppositional NGOs, forming a clientele of thousands of agents of influence at all levels of state and society (2 ). At the same time, nationalist forces based in Galicia occupied the ideological sphere that the Soviet nomenklatura had abandoned. These forces have the enormous moral and financial support of the Diaspora of the Americas, largely originating from the West and Galicia, partly also resulting from collaboration and who also have a sort of monopoly on the speech on Ukraine in the West.
If the American network works to spread Western values, the nationalist network works to revise history and school textbooks. Both benefited from tremendous support from the leader of the Orange Revolution and President of Ukraine Vikor Yushchenko, from 2004 to 2010.
It was under his reign that the two foundations of a new national ideology were laid: one is that of the martyr nation, of the famine of 1932-33, known as "Holodomor", extermination by hunger, and defined as "genocide", legally in 2006, any negationism being punishable. The other pillar is the resistant nation, embodied by the aforementioned nationalist organizations and armies, including two leaders, Stepan Bandera and Roman Choukhevitch, consecrated national heroes in 2010. The cult of the Waffen SS remains localized in Galicia.
This controversial double construction widened the East-West divide.
The very real famine, the Ukrainians of the East and Center who experienced it remember it, their parents or grandparents transmitted to them this memory tabooed during the Soviet era, the regime seeking to hide the overwhelming responsibilities Stalinist leaders – both Ukrainian and Russian and others – in the catastrophe that occurred following forced collectivization, the violent conflicts it generated, the deportation of "kulaks" which disorganized the villages, and finally and above all the requisitions of seeds (zagatovki ). But the notion of "genocide" supposes an intentional dimension (Stalin wanted the death of the Ukrainian people), even an ethnic dimension (the Russians, the Jews sought it) which raises controversy, particularly in the Russian-speaking regions where the tragedy took place. Neighboring Russia, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan and to a lesser extent the rest of the USSR also suffered this famine. Significantly, the most ardent to denounce "the genocide" and "the Russians" are the nationalist activists from the western regions who, at the time under Polish rule, did not experience this famine - although extreme poverty and undernourishment also reigned there. The ethnicization of the Holodomor theme can therefore be felt, in the East and in Russia, as a form of symbolic aggression. However, the "taboo" of famine is entirely lifted in Russia, but the thesis of "genocide", felt to be hostile to the Russians, is not accepted there. It is, on the other hand, officially, in the United States.
The other pillar of the new nationalist mythology, the "resistance" of the OUN, the UPA, the fight of the Galician SS, are nothing less than acceptable in the Eastern and Central regions.
One should know that the Nazi occupation regimes were not the same everywhere. In the West, Galicia, integrated into the "general government" of Poland, enjoyed a relatively favorable regime, to the extent that pro-German collaboration was the most massive and best organized there. This did not prevent, but on the contrary facilitated, the task of the occupier in terms of the genocide of Jews and Gypsies, the extermination of prisoners of war and communists.
A second regime, much more violent, that of the "Reichskomissariat", covering part of the West (Volhynia) and the Center of the country. The Nazi abuses did not spare the nationalist rebels, the collaborators who, after having rallied the Germans, wanted to continue non-compliant independence activity. Finally, the third regime, that of military occupation "at the front", was practically that of mass extermination.
The populations of these central and eastern regions particularly have the memory of Nazi barbarity and the massacres perpetrated by the Banderists. Those in the West also have it, to a lesser extent, but their memory of the war is more marked by NKVD reprisals, Stalinist deportations, and some of the villages and towns (Lwow, Ternopol, Stanislawow, which became Ivano -Frankivsk) largely supported the cause of the OUN.
After 1991, the USSR imposed its version of History – first Stalinist, then "revised" or even more tolerant towards nationalism. After a period of violent repression, at the end of the 1940s, Soviet leaders took care to "calm things down", to pull the rug out from under nationalism. Perhaps we should attribute to this concern for appeasement "the gift of Crimea to Ukraine", made by Nikita Krushchev in 1954. At the time when the Banderists were returning en masse from the Siberian camps where they had led revolts in early 1950s. Trials of war criminals became rarer. The mention of the Nazi genocide (against the Jews but also against others) was tabooed, including local nationalist complicity. The tragedy of villages burned with their inhabitants in Belarus and Ukraine – by German troops and their local auxiliaries – only resurfaced in the late 1970s.
The discovery of massacres and mass graves that were ignored or "forgotten" only took place recently, during the expeditions of Father Desbois and the documentary by Michaël Prazan, giving the last witnesses the opportunity to express themselves in life (participants or spectators) of mass exterminations. Knowledge of these facts is still far from being recorded in the "collective memory" and the history books in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus where these facts occurred. Each "nation-state" seeks to "unite", and these evocations can only "divide".
Independence in 1991 was the starting point for an exaltation of anti-Soviet memory, activated during the "Orange Revolution" and encouraged by the Western "allies" of this political and symbolic "revanchism". An alliance facilitated by the fact that at the end of the war, the OUN-UPA received support from the German (Gehlen), British and American services, while former SS and collaborators fleeing to the West were well welcomed, exfiltrated to the Americas and recycled, also in Western Germany, in the works of the Cold War.
What does the geopolitical aspect of this dual Westernist and nationalist campaign consist of? Obviously, the convergent objective of its actors is to pit Ukraine against Russia, to stir up hostilities that were still unimaginable a few years ago. Hence the resistance of the populations of the East and South opposed, not to Europe nor even to the West as a civilization, but to this rehabilitation of Galician nationalism in which they see "the return of the Nazis" , resistance also to the attempt to break economic, cultural and linguistic ties with Russia, to which these populations remain attached.
The promotion of ethnic nationalism responded to Galician aspirations, and the binary pattern of "pro-Europeans" versus "pro-Russians" results from the new Cold War choices made in Washington, Brussels and in our media. But these choices prevent the evolution towards a viable Ukraine: a federal state and political rather than ethnic patriotism, neutralization rather than the shift into a political-military bloc, a destiny of a bridge rather than an East-West divide. The initiative for the confrontation has long come from the West. Russia was caught off guard. The European Union (and the United States) imposing an Association Agreement ignoring Russian interests has played a dangerous poker game.
Moscow's response is, logically, inspired by a desire for revenge and control over territories threatened by Atlanticist expansion, starting with Crimea, ceded to Ukraine in 1954 and recaptured in March 2014, then by support logistics of separatist resistance groups in the East. The secret services add their "spices" of dirty tricks. In May and early June 2014, clashes between these groups and Kiev forces left hundreds dead. We do not know if these lives lost are for a war that will not take place, or are only a first glimpse of the butchery to come.
Russia can go further, if it embraces neo-Eurasianist theories offering Russia the arsenal of a new anti-Atlanticist, militarist and conservative messianism, this time involving the military conquest of eastern Ukraine, renamed Novorossiia, the name that it existed before the territorial rearrangements of the Soviet era, and with which Russia intends to at least maintain close ties. In this case, two solutions can be found which would be in the direction of Russian interests: a federalization of Ukraine, allowing "à la carte" relations between the Russian-speaking regions and Russia, or an integration of the "New Russia ", in other words a military conquest.
In any case, the logic of force leads to civil war and the partition of Ukraine.
Plan A for Ukraine, that of the national liberals of kyiv and the Western bloc, gradually leads it towards the European Union and NATO, and will probably eventually bring American troops to Russia's borders. What the latter could not accept, unless it were to resign itself to the promised "repression" (rollback).
Plan B, that of Moscow and the Russian-speakers of the South-East, wants to rule out this perspective, one way or another. The peaceful way would be for all parties involved to come to the table to reconcile Western, Russian and Ukrainian interests, so that Ukraine maintains its territorial integrity. The other way would lead to war, which could spill over into Ukrainian territory and cause tensions elsewhere, between Russia on the one hand and Poland and the Baltic states on the other. Especially since the United States seems to have decided to deploy troops and their "anti-missile" installations there.
At stake is the great corridor that runs from Central Europe to the heart of Russia and the borders of the Caucasus, as well as the industries to be modernized, the rich black soils, the logging, the labor to be exported. Ukraine is therefore highly coveted but also, barring compromise, inevitably torn apart.
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Photo : "Ki, Chtchek, Khoriv and their sister Lybid - Founders (according to the legend) of the city Kyiv"... Monument on Maidan square, Kyiv, the 4th of november 2011
© Henri-Jean Moxhet / Atelier du Snark
(*) With reference to the famous French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
(1) Dans son ouvrage Le grand échiquier (Ndlr).
(2) À ce sujet, voir les articles d'Adrien Lespagnard : « Les ONG américaines pour la démocratie » dans les n°63 et 64 d'Aide-mémoire (Ndlr).
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