2 years ago
As Russian President Vladimir Putin prepared to invade Ukraine, he claimed to be doing so to achieve “demilitarization and denazification” of the neighboring nation.
“Denazification” is a coded historical term, familiar to Ukrainians, other Eastern Europeans and certainly to Putin’s domestic audience. Putin is using it to justify his war against his neighbor, evoking the memory of the Soviet Union’s defense against Nazi Germany — one of the few episodes in the past 100 years in which Russia held anything close to the moral high ground. But when the Soviet Army rolled into Eastern Europe in 1944-45, liberation from Nazism was accompanied by imposition of Communist rule, usually by violence, and oppression that lasted decades. Today, in practice, the term means the replacement (probably killing or arresting) of Ukraine’s pro-Western, democratically elected leaders with a Kremlin puppet. Russian troops are trying to achieve that goal as I write.
The Kremlin has long argued that Ukrainians don’t really exist as a people, a point Putin himself has made – but if they do, they’re Nazis. Even by Putin’s standards, that’s grotesque. Ukraine’s leaders have committed themselves to democracy and evoke the values of the European Union. There are right-wing extremists in Ukraine, as in all European countries, but they are not major factors in Ukraine’s broader political culture. In fact, that culture, as the country struggles for its independence from Putin’s Russia, is crystalizing in a distinctly democratic fashion, following the path of other European countries that since 1945 and 1989 have acted in accordance with their better angels to put aside their nationalist and autocratic traditions.
The Kremlin propaganda machine cherry-picks Ukrainian history to amplify its nationalist side — which has at times been anti-Polish and antisemitic — conflate it with the whole of the country’s history, and then claim that Ukraine’s pro-European governments channel this narrative. From there follows the Kremlin propaganda line that Ukrainians are repressing Russians and Russian speakers, committing atrocities and genocide against them, and that Russia needs to “liberate” the victims of this supposed Ukrainian nationalism. It’s an attempt to apply the old Soviet and now Putinesque trope of Russia vs. Nazis because the Kremlin has no case against Ukraine.
Most European nations have a nationalist, extremist history (think Vichy France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany); so does the U.S.: the white slave republic of the Confederacy and its legacy today. They have liberal sides too, in which national patriotism is linked with universal, transnational values like democracy, inclusivity and human rights. Ukraine is no different. During World War II, some Ukrainians fought with Germans; so did a lot of Russians. So did soldiers from many countries occupied by Germany, in Western as well as Eastern Europe.
Though the historical background may be complex, Ukraine has clearly indicated which version of nationhood it has chosen. The 2014 Revolution of Dignity, the mass protests in Kyiv that overthrew the authoritarian, pro-Kremlin leader Viktor Yanukovych and led to Putin’s first invasion, was a national movement. But it wasn’t nationalist. There were Ukrainian nationalists in the effort, but they did not define it or even dominate its culture. Instead, the demonstrators in downtown Kyiv flew EU flags as well as Ukrainian ones, reflecting their aspiration that Ukraine should achieve European standards of clean governance, democracy and therefore prosperity. The movement’s leaders called for patriotism and, at the same time, democracy and universal values — hardly the agenda of Nazis. Ukraine’s subsequent democratically elected governments reflected this aspiration, however imperfectly they have translated it into policy.
At the time, Kremlin propaganda tried to paint the Revolution of Dignity as Ukrainian nationalist and antisemitic. But Ukraine’s Jewish community sent an open letter essentially telling the Kremlin to buzz off, expressing support for Ukrainian democracy and independence from Moscow. In 2019, Ukrainian voters elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Ukrainian comedian and businessperson of Jewish origin who campaigned on the promise of cleaning up corruption. They voted out of office another Ukrainian patriot, then-sitting President Petro Poroshenko, who had run a more traditionally patriotic, conservative campaign.
In 2016, a popular Ukrainian singer named Jamala won the Eurovision song contest and showed just how distant modern Ukraine is from Putin’s distorted narrative. Jamala is an ethnic Tatar, a Muslim from Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula now under Russian occupation. Her winning song was about Stalin’s persecution of the Crimean Tatars during WWII. When she won, I was in Kyiv as State Department Sanctions Coordinator for talks with the Ukrainian government. Ukrainians in the capital cheered Jamala as a Ukrainian cultural hero; “our” Jamala, as I heard from both my delighted government interlocutors and many ordinary Ukrainians in Kyiv. The praise for Jamala fit the democratically rooted sense of Ukrainian national identity that had been emerging for years.
Ukraine’s national culture, like all cultures, could have gone to the dark side, similar to Serbia under the dictator Slobodan Milosevic or Putin’s Russia itself, with its militaristic propaganda, culture of violent language and practice of assassination. But it hasn’t. Instead, it is taking shape in democratic, pluralist, form, in which Ukrainian patriotism is defined not in narrow ethnic terms but broadly enough to embrace Ukrainians of Tatar, Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic and ethnic-Russian origin.
Ukrainian identity is further evolving in the crucible of war with Russia. That war pits Putin’s tyranny against Ukraine’s democracy. And Ukrainians know it. They have elections that can replace one president with another. The Russians do not. The image of a Jewish president of Ukraine leading his country’s defense, refusing to leave the capital, risking his murder at the hands of the Russian invaders, will remain in Ukrainian political culture as it deals with the aftermath of Putin’s war of conquest.
The Nazi analogy has a place in the current conflict, but not the one the Kremlin would have us believe. Putin’s aggression against Ukraine resembles Adolf Hitler’s attack against Poland in September 1939: The Nazi narrative of grievance, the false claims of persecution of co-nationals, the false-flag attempts at providing a pretext for attack, are all present in Putin’s war. Ukraine now, like Poland then, fought with courage against a numerically and technologically superior army that surrounded it on three sides. The defense of Kyiv recalls the defense of Warsaw.
I don’t make this comparison lightly. But it fits. And some Russians seem to understand this as well. Putin’s claim that he is denazifying Ukraine is offensive to an entire country, absurd on the facts, and ironic because of the strong parallels to that terrible time he himself has evoked. But perhaps most importantly, the canard flies directly in the face of the better future Ukrainians have chosen for themselves — a future that Putin’s own actions have helped to accelerate.
English (US)