Putin’s claim that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in order to “de-Nazify” the country is nonsense. But it is the continuation of a narrative developed over almost two decades. And one that sections of the left in Europe and America have bought into.
Party of the Regions
In the early 2000s the electoral base of the pro-Russian Party of the Regions (PoR) was predominantly in the Donbass: The PoR was a party of oligarchs who owned the major enterprises in the Donbass and presented themselves as the region’s defenders.
One way in which the PoR sought to consolidate that base was by counterposing the Donbass “work ethic” — it was no coincidence that Stakhanov came from the Donbass — to the “indiscipline” in the rest of Ukraine, especially Kiev and the West.
Thus, the PoR raised slogans such as “We work while they go to protest marches” and “Donbass ploughs while they wave their fists around.”
A second strategy to solidify electoral support was to attribute the economic decline of the Donbass — which had been underway since the 1970s, and had accelerated as the PoR oligarchs plundered the region’s wealth after Ukrainian independence — to “Ukrainian fascists”.
As early as 2004/2005, when the Orange Revolution forced a re-run of the rigged presidential election which had attributed victory to Yanukovich, Ukrainian media owned by PoR oligarchs denounced the protest movement as “a coup” carried out by “orange fascists”.
The PoR organised rallies in the Donbass which warned of the threat of an “orange plague” (an allusion to the Soviet-era expression “Nazi brown plague”) sweeping across the Donbass from the west of Ukraine.
Yanukovich’s opponents were denounced as “fanatical nationalists”, “Nazis” and “fascists”. Street posters in cities is the east and south of Ukraine showed Yanukovich’s opponent in the presidential elections, Victor Yushchenko, with a Nazi swastika imposed on him.
The PoR narrative of ‘Ukrainian fascists’ became increasingly important in subsequent years. “This myth was the primary material used by the Party of Regions in its struggle against its political opponents,” writes Alexandr Osipian in his chapter in Russian Media and the War in Ukraine.
In 2011 western regions of Ukraine refused to fly Soviet-era flags on Victory Day (anniversary of the end of the Second World War). The PoR siezed on this to contrast the “anti-fascist Donbass” with the west of Ukraine.
The west had been “accomplices of German fascists” during World War 2. And so now the west did not wish to celebrate Victory Day but preferred to commemorate “OUN-NPA Nazi accomplices”. Refusal to fly the flag by people in the west was further proof of “fascist tendencies” in Ukraine.
The PoR also bussed members of small Russian-nationalist organisations in Ukraine (Russian Unity and Motherland) into the western city of Lviv to provoke clashes with Ukrainian nationalists. The PoR oligarchs’ media then reported the clashes as “clashes between Ukrainian Nazis and anti-fascists”.
Later the same year Yanukovich’s ally Vadim Kolesnichenko launched the International Anti-Fascist Front (IAF) in Kiev and the Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch Boris Spiegel launched World Without Nazism (WWN) in the same city.
In the name of a spurious “anti-fascism” the WWN promoted the Putin version of twentieth-century history and Russian foreign policy. The IAF had a domestic agenda: it sought to discredit all domestic opposition to Yanukovich as “fascist”.
In 2013 the PoR staged a series of rallies under the slogan “Into Europe — Without Fascists”, including a 20,000 strong rally in Donetsk under the slogan “Donbass Against Neo-Fascism”.
Speaking at the Donetsk rally the local PoR chair, Nikolai Levchenko, declared: “Fascism was taken care of by our grandpas in faraway ‘45, but today we face a new threat, no less terrible. This is the threat of neo-fascism.”
At the same rally the local PoR deputy chair, Andrei Shishatskii, declared: “The politicos who are trying to change history force us to sound the alarm and say a decisive ‘No!’ to neo-fascism. Would we betray our memory, our glory and our victory (in 1945)? Long live our native Donbass — fascism will not pass!”
The immediate focus of the IAF and the PoR was Svoboda. This was indeed a far-right nationalist organisation which had previously used Nazi symbols. But this “anti-fascism” had a broader political purpose.
It equated all opposition to Yanukovich with fascism or neo-fascism, thereby making support for Yanukovich inherently “anti-fascist”. And it allowed the PoR to present itself as the only force standing between its core electorate and “the neo-fascist gang which has penetrated the Ukrainian Parliament.”
The Russian nationalist project
The “anti-fascist” narrative also dovetailed into Putin’s mythologising of the “Great Patriotic War of 1941-45”, which the PoR “imported” into Ukraine. (In fact, virtually all the PoR’s politics were a Russian import.)
This mythologising provided the basis for a new Russian identity (inherently anti-fascist) and a rewriting of history in which Russia had been the world’s leading anti-fascist force. According to the popular Russian historian Andrei Fursov:
“Today, we can say that the Great Patriotic War and our victory in it is the central event of not only Soviet but also Russian history. In 1941-1945, the Russian people, using the Soviet regime and the Stalinist system as a sword and shield, not only defended their right to historical existence, but also to greatness.”
The cult of the Great Patriotic War was used by Putin to boost Russian nationalism and his own authoritarian rule. “Russia — My History”, a network of museums throughout Russia with identical displays, praises Putin for restoring the centrality of the War to Russian identity:
“The memory of the Second World War is a means of uniting the Russian people. There has been a high degree of consolidation of society’s rejection of attempts to revise the history and outcomes of the war, de-heroising the feat of the people. The formation in Russian society of genuine historical memory and a return to national values (under Putin) has become a mass phenomenon, dedicated to the popular memory of the war.”
Thus it was no coincidence that PoR speakers at the Donetsk rally of 2013 coupled their “anti-fascism” with “our grandpas in faraway ‘45” and “our memory, our glory and our victory” in 1945.
2014
Putin’s response to the Maidan protests of 2014 was therefore nothing new. His denunciations of the protests as a fascist coup were a direct continuation of the bogus “anti-fascist” narrative which had been developed over the proceeding decade.
Russian media referred to “a fascist coup” and a seizure of power by “the Kiev junta”. The latter “continued to wage its fascist ideology” and had despatched “fascists armed with NATO weapons” to the east of Ukraine to crush opposition to the coup. It had also created “fascist concentration camps.”
Putin himself claimed that the Maidan had resulted in “an orgy of banditism and neo-Nazism”. Russia’s seizure of the Crimea was justified because it protected its Russian population from “the rampancy of neo-Nazis, nationalists and antisemites in some parts of Ukraine, including Kiev.”
Russian media also portrayed the Maidan protests as a joint US-Nazi endeavour directed against Russian interests:
“The American-Nazi [i.e. American-Banderites] coup in Kiev and the aggression of the Ukrainian junta was egged on by the USA against Novorossiya [“New Russia”, an old Tsarist term for most of the territory of Ukraine]. This is, in fact, the first direct aggression of the West against the Russian world since 1941, against historical Russia.”
After Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, government spokespersons appealed to Western leaders to “stop the co-operation with neo-Nazi actors.” “In the year when we celebrated 75 years since the start of the Second World War, we should remember the consequences, which are the result of playing with Nazis.”
If the Maidan protests were “a fascist coup”, then its opponents were automatically anti-fascist, standing in the tradition of the other limb of the already established bogus “anti-fascist” narrative: Russia’s heroic participation in the Great Patriotic War.
This was how the anti-Maidan separatist movements defined themselves and were portrayed in Russian media, symbolised above all by the pervasive wearing of the St. George Ribbon, a Tsarist military decoration revived by Stalin during the war, and then revived again by Putin in 2005.
The British left
Denunciations of the Maidan as “a fascist coup” or “the American-Nazi coup” bore no relation to reality. But that did not prevent sections of the left in Britain, and elsewhere, adopting Putin’s narrative.
Socialist Appeal was probably the worst offender, with the smaller Workers Power and Socialist Fight groups not far behind. In Britain, the most abject expression of this embrace of the Putin narrative was the self-styled Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine campaign.
Now, in 2022, Putin has invoked the same bogus “anti-fascism” and the same cult of the Great Patriotic War as a “justification” for his invasion of Ukraine:
“The leading NATO countries support extreme nationalists and Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, who, in turn, will never forgive the Crimeans and Sevastopol residents for choosing reunification with Russia. They, of course, will crawl into the Crimea, just like in the Donbass, in order to kill, just as the gangs of Ukrainian nationalists, Hitler’s accomplices, killed defenceless people during the Great Patriotic War. Its (the invasion’s) goal is to protect people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kiev for eight years. And for this we will pursue the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine.”
“I also need to address the military personnel of the Ukrainian armed forces. Your fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazis and defend our common Motherland, so that today’s Neo-Nazis can seize power in Ukraine. …”
Continuing the same “anti-fascist” theme, only days after the invasion Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that Russia would be hosting an International Anti-Fascist Congress in August.
This would “unite the efforts of the international community in the fight against the ideology of Nazism and neo-Nazism in any form of its manifestations in the modern world.”
In 2014 the “anti-fascist” narrative was designed to cut off the Maidan provoking a similar popular uprising in Russia — anyone who supported the Maidan was necessarily a fascist who would have backed the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War.
Today it serves as a “justification’ for full-scale war on Ukraine. And yet sections of the left continue to give degrees of credence to it.
Virtually on the eve of the invasion the Morning Star uncritically reported — instead of pouring scorn on — the call by the nationalist and antisemitic Russian Communist Party (CPRF) for the “denazification” of Ukraine:
“Russian communists have called for a united anti-fascist front against the Nato-led ‘nazification of Ukraine’. The CPRF warned that capitalist powers in the US and Europe were ‘ready to contribute bloodshed and aggression’ in the region as they promote fascism in Ukraine. It said there is no point in dialogue with ‘the heirs of Bandera and Shukhevych’ — former fascist leaders celebrated by the Ukrainian government. It also called for ‘a decisive political offensive’ against the rehabilitation of fascism and for support from global anti-fascist and anti-war movements. ‘The task of denazification of Ukraine should become the most important concern of the world community’.”
A statement issued by Socialist Appeal on the day of the invasion gave credence to Putin’s claim that he would ‘denazify’ Ukraine:
“It is self-evident that the Russian occupying forces will want to rid themselves of actual or potential enemies, and this will certainly include the fascist and ultra-nationalist armed militias.”
In an otherwise bland statement (capitalism is bad, wars are bad, but socialism is good) the Socialist Party found it necessary to refer to “a bloody coup” (i.e. the Maidan) which “brought a pro-Western regime to power”, since when “Ukraine has been ruled by right-wing, authoritarian governments, involving far-right nationalists and fascistic elements.”
According to a statement issued by Workers Power — which has clearly learnt nothing since it hit political bankruptcy in 2014 — on the day of Russia’s invasion:
“The current conflict started in 2014 when the UK, EU and US connived to turn popular protests against corruption and repression into a violent coup, spearheaded by neoliberal politicians and openly fascist militias which overthrew the unpopular, but elected, pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. A government of rival oligarchs with an anti-Russian and ultra-nationalist ideology was installed by a parliament purged of opposition parties.”
The current issue of the newspaper of the Scottish Socialist Party carries a short statement referring to “the nationalist right-wing regime in Kiev” (did they miss the elections of 2019?) and “the desire for peace and security on all sides” (did they miss the invasion?).
But its main article on Ukraine (“Invasions and Military Action Won’t Solve the Crisis in Ukraine”) is penned by the SSP’s in-house Stalinist Bill Bonnar.
Bonnar condemns the Russian invasion. But then promptly moves to “challenge the narratives” which have developed around “the crisis”.
One such narrative is “this is all to do with Russian aggression and expansionism”. But this narrative fails to take account of the importance of the Great Patriotic War for Russians:
“Anyone who has visited Russia will quickly become aware of all the references to the Second World War. For Russians these are not events from the distant past but rather real living history. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, … it largely invaded through Ukraine. The same route was used when Germany occupied large parts of Russia during the First World War. After 1945 Soviet foreign policy towards western Europe was based on one single principle: never again.”
Another narrative, continues Bonnar, which needs to be challenged is “the presentation of the Ukrainian government as an innocent victim.” Not so: “This government was and is, right wing, nationalist, pro-American and anti-Russian.”
It caused “an insurgency in the Russian-speaking east of the country and a violent military campaign by Ukrainian forces in which 14,000 mainly Russian people have been killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes. Again, mostly Russians.”
For anyone who fails to understand what Bonnar is really arguing, the picture accompanying the article has the caption:
“Ukraine 2014: Ukraine’s former President (until 2019) Petro Poroshenko awards Ukrainian citizenship to Belarusian neo-Nazi, Serhiy Korotkykh, for defending a Donetsk airport from Russian-backed separatists. Korotkykh was a member of the far-right Russian National Unity party and also a founding member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Society in Russia, whose main goal ‘is to prepare for a race war’.”
The importance of the Great Patriotic War for Russians? Mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Russians by the Kiev government? Glorification of fascists by Kiev? Where have we heard that before?
The real issues
Russia’s invasion is not a reason to shut down discussion about Ukraine’s domestic politics.
There are fascists in Ukraine and the Ukrainian armed forces — as is the case in every other country in the world. In fact, in some, maybe most, western European countries parties of the far right enjoy far greater electoral support than they do in Ukraine (2.15%).
And successive Ukrainian governments (since 2014, and equally, before) have been right-wing — carrying out programmes of privatisation, failing to challenge the oligarchs (because they were the government) and dismantling workers’ rights.
But the extracts quoted above are not contributions to a serious discussion about Ukraine’s domestic politics. Like the political equivalent of a Pavlovian conditioned reflex, once Ukraine is on the political agenda the response from sections of the left is: fascists in Kiev!
This is what Ukrainian anarchist Dmitry Mrachnik rightly complains of in an article on the Nigilist website:
“It’s quite fucked up how Western leftist discussion on Ukraine quickly devolves into mentions of far-right groups like Right Sector or Azov. … The very mention of Ukraine as the victim of Russian aggression makes people lose their minds: ‘They have Right Sector! Azov!! Bandera!!!’”
The same left organisations who recycle and adapt Putin’s “anti-fascist” narrative make no mention of the well-established links between Putin’s puppet “People’s Republics” in Donetsk and Lugansk and parties of the European far right.
Nor do they make any mention of the prevalence of fascist organisations in Russia — or the star treatment given to Tommy Robinson when he visited Russia in early 2020.
The fake “anti-fascist” narrative dates back to 2004. In 2014 it was ramped up to the level of fever pitch. Sections of the left endorsed and propagandised that narrative.
Now the same “anti-fascist” narrative is being used by Putin to justify his invasion of Ukraine and his war on its people. Those who got drawn into it in previous years should reassess.
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