When protesters in Kiev overthrew the regime of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia was quick to dismiss the entire revolution in Ukraine as "a fascist takeover reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's." The memory of the Second World War apparently still plays a major role here. Why is that?
Since the demonstrations started in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, Western media see the rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia mainly as a struggle between pro-European defenders of democracy on the one hand and an authoritarian Russia on the other. Since the beginning of the revolution, the Kremlin in Moscow has been talking about a fascist coup, “which most resembles the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in 1933.” When local pro-Russian administrators in Crimea called a referendum on March 16 on whether that peninsula had to join Russia or not, the placards left no room for ambiguity. A future under the new fascism of Kiev or a future under the mighty wings of Mother Russia.
Those swastikas and all the references to Nazism of World War II is, of course, partly Russian propaganda. If you want to put something or someone in Russia - but also in the rest of Eastern Europe - in a very bad light, you call that 'fascist'. It is a 'frame' that arose under communism and it has everything to do with the way the Second World War was fought in Ukraine, but also in countries such as Russia, Belarus and Poland.
Executions and starvation
“If you compare the Eastern Front to the Western Front during World War II, the Western Front is really peanuts, says Russia expert Marc Jansen of the University of Amsterdam. “At least 27 million people have died on the Eastern Front. The Holocaust has been the worst in Ukraine. One and a half million Jews have been murdered. Usually just shot on the spot. But there has also been a lot of murder among Ukrainians themselves.”
The battle between the Russian Red Army and the German Wehrmacht was also much more intense and longer than in Western Europe. In addition, the Germans set up their special Einstatzgruppen who, in the wake of the advancing army, had to deal with all kinds of 'undesirable elements':Jews, communists, intellectuals, but also with the thousands of Russian prisoners of war that the Wehrmacht made. Executions by bullet, but also large-scale starvation on a field surrounded by barbed wire were the order of the day.
Ultimately, the Red Army, along with allied forces in the west, managed to defeat Nazi Germany. But because of all the atrocities, fascists or Nazis remained public enemy number 1 among Russians. Moreover, due to the communist dictatorship that followed, the war past could never come to rest, as it did slowly in the West.
But in the current Ukrainian situation, that's not the whole story. “What matters is that Stepan Bandera, a leader of the OUN, the organization of Ukrainian nationalists during and after World War II, is still very popular, especially in the west of the country,” Marc Jansen continues. “That party mainly existed in what was then Poland, which is now Western Ukraine. The OUN stood for an independent, purely Ukrainian state. They were anti-Semitic and financed from Hitler's Berlin.”
“When the Germans advanced to the east in June 1941, a number of Ukrainian units marched along, in the battalions 'Nachtigall' and 'Roland'. In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, they then tried to form an independent Ukrainian state. Before the Red Army left the area, Soviet soldiers executed thousands of Ukrainian prisoners. The Germans blamed this on the Jews of Lviv and other cities. The Ukrainian nationalists then held a number of pogroms together with the Germans. A partisan branch of the OUN, the UPA ("Ukrainian Insurgent Army") later massacred tens of thousands of Poles in western Ukraine, so that Poland would not reclaim Ukrainian territory after the war."
Until the 1950s, the UPA waged a brutal partisan struggle against the Soviet domination of Ukraine. The situation now is that Bandera and the OUN are seen as national heroes. Former president Viktor Yushenko has even proclaimed Bandera a "hero of Ukraine". In Lviv and western Ukraine, streets and squares are named after Bandera and the OUN.
Pull apart
“During the revolution you saw that many parties, often still to the right of the extreme right-wing nationalist party Svoboda, see themselves as a kind of successor to Bandera and the OUN,” says Jansen. “From Svoboda there are indeed a number of people in the government. That is now being used by the Russians to say that the entire new government of Ukraine is made up of fascists and neo-Nazis.”
All those swastikas and fascists in the Russian media are therefore a 'frame', but there is indeed a clear historical reason for it. “This crisis was born from Putin's view that Ukraine should belong to Russia, as a sphere of influence. When that failed after the revolution and it became clear that he can no longer control Ukraine as a whole, Putin may now be trying to tear the country apart.”
“He may well be planning to undermine Ukraine to the point that it can no longer function as a state, by pitting people in the east against each other. Then of course he can make good use of the frame of Bandera and his fascist supporters.”