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Protesters wave the Ukrainian flag in front of the residence
of president Viktor Yanukovych. Photograph: Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA
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Former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko speaks
during a rally in Kiev after her release from prison. Photograph: Maxim
ShipenkovEPA
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Ukraine: 'The dictatorship has fallen.' But what will
take its place?
It was a day of incredible
drama throughout Ukraine. After a week of bloody protests the president finally
fled, the police melted away and the opposition seized control. Ex-prime
minister Yulia Tymoshenko was released and addressed huge crowds in Kiev. Shaun
Walker and Harriet Salem report
Shaun Walker and Harriet Salem in Kiev
The Observer, Saturday 22 February 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/22/ukraine-tymoshenko-president-protests
As one disgraced president fled Kiev in the early hours of
Saturday morning, so another aspiring one had landed in the city by evening.
Within a few hours of being released from her prison hospital in the eastern
city of Kharkiv, Yulia Tymoshenko had flown to Kiev and was being wheeled into
Independence Square to address the crowds.
Hunched in a wheelchair, needed because of back problems,
but with a resolute expression and her hair pulled into her trademark plait,
she yelled rousing words from the stage to the crowd, telling them they must
stay in central Kiev until their work was over, and those responsible for the
violence are punished.
"If we let those who shot bullets into the hearts of
our heroes escape responsibility, if we forgive them, it will be our shame for
ever," she said, in a voice cracked with emotion. She had earlier said she
plans to run for president, in elections that could now come as early as May.
"Our homeland will from today on be able to see the sun and sky as a
dictatorship has fallen," she added.
Not everyone in Ukraine likes Tymoshenko; indeed, far from
everyone on Independence Square likes her, as could be divined from the
lukewarm reaction she was given. Her words of support for the protest and of
grief for the dead were well received, but only a minority joined in the
chanting of her name.
Nonetheless, few would dispute her extraordinary political
acumen, something that has been acutely missing from the opposition leaders
since protests broke out in Ukraine, as they have uneasily surfed the waves of
discontent rather than directed events. Although she appears far more frail,
aged and incapacitated than she did when she was last in the public eye, she
clearly still retains her fiery political ambition.
"I am returning to work, she said. "I will not
miss a minute, in order to help you again feel happy in your own land."
In an extraordinary symmetry, as Tymoshenko's plane was
landing in Kiev, there were rumours that ousted leader Viktor Yanukovych's jet
was being denied permission to leave the country. In a stilted television
address earlier in the evening, he announced he was still the president, but
few others seemed to believe him. His exact location was unclear throughout the
day, but it could be said with certainly that he was not at home, and half of
Kiev turned up to his residence to see for themselves. With its pine pavilions,
covered tennis courts, bubbling fountains and palatial residences, the
Mezhyhirya compound provided Ukrainians with a striking picture of the bloated
corruption of Yanukovych and his clan.
Few had any doubts as to the level of wealth he had amassed
for himself, and the compound itself has been the subject of swirling rumours
for some time. But seeing the wealth of riches with their own eyes still took
their breath away.
Thousands streamed to his residence, a 40-minute drive from
central Kiev, to see the epicentre of the regime they have been protesting
against for three months. Yanukovych has only rarely appeared in public since
the crisis began in early December. He was presumably pacing the miles of paved
walkways amid the lakes, fountains and exotic pet collection, trying to weigh
up the pressure from Russia to crack down against the pressure from the west to
make concessions.
And then, suddenly, he was gone. His residence was
unguarded, the control booths dotted along the high, forest-green security
perimeter empty, and the police barracks at the back deserted. People streamed
past the x-ray machine at the entrance to the compound, making mockery of a
large sign warning that only those with official permission were allowed to
pass this point.
"Walking around here, I get the impression that Ukraine
should be a very rich country," said 22-year-old Anton, who was not part
of the protest movement but lives in a village near the compound and arrived
after reading online that it was possible to get in. "All of this, all of
it, is paid for with our money, with the people's taxes."
It was not only the president who had disappeared. Along
with him went the cordons of riot police in the centre of the capital, and
indeed all signs of central authority, as Kiev appeared fully under the control
of the protest movement. A few days ago the massed lines of police guarding
government buildings and the presidential residence appeared impenetrable. They
evaporated without a trace overnight.
On Saturday morning the parliament and the presidential
administration compound in central Kiev were guarded by the protesters. They
had also set up checkpoints at a number of key points on roads entering the
city.
The only visible presence of authority was a quartet of
traffic police, trying in vain to direct the huge flow of cars heading for the
presidential residence. "We are just here to try to avoid traffic jams –
we are working as usual," said one. Asked where the regular police were,
he merely shrugged.
Late in the evening, a few police were visible outside the
SBU security services building, with Ukrainian armbands tied to their arms to
denote loyalty to the protest. They said they were from a division that guards
foreign embassies, and were working in collaboration with the protesters.
Inside the SBU building, there was a meeting between protest leaders and
intelligence officials, in yet another sign that Yanukovych's grip on the
capital is well beyond salvation.
Throughout the day, funeral services were held on
Independence Square for the victims of last week, and in front of the main
stage, coffins were still laid out in the rain. In the Obolon district, people
paid their final respects to Sergey Shapoval. The 44-year-old, who was shot
twice in the chest by snipers, was just one of 77 people to die in the capital
during the bloodiest week in Ukraine's post-independence history. He was
returned to his family home in an open casket. Pink, red and yellow carnations,
brought by the mourners, covered his body.
A bearded Orthodox priest dressed in black robes performed
an open-air farewell ceremony to an audience of around 70 family members and
friends, who clutched at candles and crossed themselves. "It is the
highest quality of person who gives his life for his friends," he intoned,
splashing holy water across the body and performing religious rituals with
perfumed incense smoke. "God show mercy to his soul."
His elderly mother, Katerina, stooped over the coffin,
caressed her son's grey face and hair and wailed in grief. "Why did you
leave me? See how many people have come here to see you pass. There is no life
left in you. May the bastards that did this to you feel this on their own
children."
Shapoval's neighbours and friends described him as a kind,
generous and softly spoken man who had no radical views but felt it was his
duty to stand with the protest movement, even when things got violent. His
girlfriend, Olga Streltsova, is a volunteer medic helping with the protest
movement, and said she last saw him a few hours before he died. "I was
worried about him so I tried to get in contact, but he didn't answer his phone
any more, he was dead," she said, tears streaming down her face. "He
loved his country, he wanted the best for it. He died for this country – he
gave everything to it."
Back at Yanukovych's compound, the mood was one of joy mixed
with disbelief. A man wearing combat fatigues stood on top of a car and took to
a loudspeaker to announce: "This is the day we were waiting for – today
that day has come."
An advance group of protesters had entered the complex early
in the morning, finding it deserted, and kept everyone else out for several
hours, claiming they were checking the territory for mines.
Once the gates were opened, there were entreaties that
nothing should be looted or vandalised, which were met with enthusiastic
applause, and, at least in the first hours, nobody attempted to break into any
of the buildings. Instead they made do with peeks through the windows into
marbled reception rooms lined with malachite vases and chandeliers. The main
residence was a huge, five-storey wooden mansion, with twin balconies
overlooking the vast expanse of the Dnieper river and adorned with
faux-classical columns.
An MP from the nationalist Svoboda party, Eduard Leonov,
said that in future the complex should become a sanatorium for disabled
children and orphans. Astounded visitors gawped at riches on display as if they
were visitors on a tour of a historical site. They took selfies by the sauna
complex, the vintage car collection and the fountains.
The complex is so large that it took hours to walk around,
and new discoveries were made all the time. By the river was a dock, a wooden
boat decked out as a restaurant, an aviary filled with exotic birds and a
petting zoo complete with antelope and pigs. A golf course stretched as far as
the eye could see, and a smooth asphalted road led to a helipad.
A mirrored dome emerging from the ground turned out to be
the roof of an underground boxing ring, while a pagoda housed a giant barbecue,
complete with a grilling tray, skewers and stacks of firewood to create the
perfect presidential kebab.
The situation in Kiev remains as unpredictable as it has
been for most of the past three months, but one thing seems clear – Yanukovych
is unlikely ever to live in this vast compound again. Although on Saturday
evening he was still claiming to rule Ukraine, those touring the grounds said
it was impossible.
"I work in construction, I know how much it must have
cost to build something like this," said 41-year-old Alexander Mironyuk,
shaking his head as he recorded a video of the grounds on his mobile phone.
"Once everyone sees how he lived, there will be no way back for him. This is
just disgusting."
In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion
are at the heart of the crisis
The story we're told about
the protests gripping Kiev bears only the sketchiest relationship with reality
Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Wednesday 29 January 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/29/ukraine-fascists-oligarchs-eu-nato-expansion
We've been here before. For the past couple of months street
protests in Ukraine have been played out through the western media according to
a well-rehearsed script. Pro-democracy campaigners are battling an
authoritarian government. The demonstrators are demanding the right to be part
of the European Union. But Russia's president Vladimir Putin has vetoed their
chance of freedom and prosperity.
It's a story we've heard in one form or another again and
again – not least in Ukraine's western-backed Orange revolution a decade ago.
But it bears only the sketchiest relationship to reality. EU membership has
never been – and very likely never will be – on offer to Ukraine. As in Egypt
last year, the president that the protesters want to force out was elected in a
poll judged fair by international observers. And many of those on the streets
aren't very keen on democracy at all.
You'd never know from most of the reporting that far-right
nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on
government buildings. One of the three main opposition parties heading the
campaign is the hard-right antisemitic Svoboda, whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok
claims that a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" controls Ukraine. But US senator
John McCain was happy to share a platform with him in Kiev last month. The
party, now running the city of Lviv, led a 15,000-strong torchlit march earlier
this month in memory of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose
forces fought with the Nazis in the second world war and took part in massacres
of Jews.
So in the week that the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red
Army was commemorated as Holocaust Memorial Day, supporters of those who helped
carry out the genocide are hailed by western politicians on the streets of
Ukraine. But Svoboda has now been outflanked in the protests by even more
extreme groups, such as "Right Sector", who demand a "national
revolution" and threaten "prolonged guerrilla warfare".
Not that they have much time for the EU, which has been
pushing Ukraine to sign an association agreement, offering loans for austerity,
as part of a German-led drive to open up Ukraine for western companies. It was
Viktor Yanukovych's abandonment of the EU option – after which Putin offered a
$15bn bailout – that triggered the protests.
But Ukrainians are deeply divided about both European
integration and the protests – largely along an axis between the largely
Russian-speaking east and south (where the Communist party still commands
significant support), and traditionally nationalist western Ukraine. Industry
in the east is dependent on Russian markets, and would be crushed by EU
competition.
It's that historic faultline at the heart of Ukraine that
the west has been trying to exploit to roll back Russian influence since the
1990s, including a concerted attempt to draw Ukraine into Nato. The Orange
revolution leaders were encouraged to send Ukrainian troops into Iraq and
Afghanistan as a sweetener.
Nato's eastward expansion was halted by the Georgian war of
2008 and Yanukovych's later election on a platform of non-alignment. But any
doubt that the EU's effort to woo Ukraine is closely connected with western
military strategy was dispelled today by Nato's secretary general, Anders Fogh
Rasmussen, who declared that the abortive pact with Ukraine would have been
"a major boost to Euro-Atlantic security".
Which helps to explain why politicians like John Kerry and
William Hague have been so fierce in their condemnation of Ukrainian police
violence – which has already left several dead – while maintaining such studied
restraint over the killing of thousands of protesters in Egypt since last
year's coup.
Not that Yanukovych could be mistaken for any kind of
progressive. He has been backed to the hilt by billionaire oligarchs who seized
control of resources and privatised companies after the collapse of the Soviet
Union – and fund opposition politicians and protesters at the same time.
Indeed, one interpretation of the Ukrainian president's problems is that the
established oligarchs have had enough of favours granted to an upstart group
known as "the family".
It's anger at this grotesque corruption and inequality,
Ukraine's economic stagnation and poverty that has brought many ordinary
Ukrainians to join the protests – as well as outrage at police brutality. Like
Russia, Ukraine was beggared by the neoliberal shock therapy and mass
privatisation of the post-Soviet years. More than half the country's national
income was lost in five years and it has yet fully to recover.
But nor do the main opposition and protest leaders offer any
kind of genuine alternative, let alone a challenge to the oligarchy that has Ukraine
in its grip. Yanukovych has now made sweeping concessions to the protesters:
sacking the prime minister, inviting opposition leaders to join the government
and ditching anti-protest laws passed earlier this month.
Whether that calms or feeds the unrest will be clear soon
enough. But the risk of the conflict spreading – leading political figures have
warned of civil war – is serious. There are other steps that could help defuse
the crisis: the creation of a broad coalition government, a referendum on EU
relations, a shift from a presidential to a parliamentary system and greater
regional autonomy.
The breakup of Ukraine would not be a purely Ukrainian
affair. Along with China's emerging challenge to US domination of east Asia,
the Ukrainian faultine has the potential to draw in outside powers and lead to
a strategic clash. Only Ukrainians can overcome this crisis. Continuing outside
interference is both provocative and dangerous.
Twitter: @SeumasMilne
Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine
Timothy Snyder /
This article will appear in the coming March 20, 2014 issue
of The New York Review./ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/?fb_action_ids=10202250971413355&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B413616652105754%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D
The students were the first to protest against the regime of
President Viktor Yanukovych on the Maidan, the central square in Kiev, last
November. These were the Ukrainians with the most to lose, the young people who
unreflectively thought of themselves as Europeans and who wished for themselves
a life, and a Ukrainian homeland, that were European. Many of them were politically
on the left, some of them radically so. After years of negotiation and months
of promises, their government, under President Yanukovych, had at the last
moment failed to sign a major trade agreement with the European Union.
When the riot police came and beat the students in late
November, a new group, the Afghan veterans, came to the Maidan. These men of
middle age, former soldiers and officers of the Red Army, many of them bearing
the scars of battlefield wounds, came to protect “their children,” as they put
it. They didn’t mean their own sons and daughters: they meant the best of the
youth, the pride and future of the country. After the Afghan veterans came many
others, tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, now not so much in favor
of Europe but in defense of decency.
What does it mean to come to the Maidan? The square is
located close to some of the major buildings of government, and is now a
traditional site of protest. Interestingly, the word maidan exists in Ukrainian
but not in Russian, but even people speaking Russian use it because of its
special implications. In origin it is just the Arabic word for “square,” a
public place. But a maidan now means in Ukrainian what the Greek word agora
means in English: not just a marketplace where people happen to meet, but a
place where they deliberately meet, precisely in order to deliberate, to speak,
and to create a political society. During the protests the word maidan has come
to mean the act of public politics itself, so that for example people who use
their cars to organize public actions and protect other protestors are called
the automaidan.
The protesters represent every group of Ukrainian citizens:
Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers (although most Ukrainians are
bilingual), people from the cities and the countryside, people from all regions
of the country, members of all political parties, the young and the old,
Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Every major Christian denomination is
represented by believers and most of them by clergy. The Crimean Tatars march
in impressive numbers, and Jewish leaders have made a point of supporting the
movement. The diversity of the Maidan is impressive: the group that monitors
hospitals so that the regime cannot kidnap the wounded is run by young
feminists. An important hotline that protesters call when they need help is
staffed by LGBT activists.
On January 16, the Ukrainian government, headed by President
Yanukovych, tried to put an end to Ukrainian civil society. A series of laws
passed hastily and without following normal procedure did away with freedom of
speech and assembly, and removed the few remaining checks on executive
authority. This was intended to turn Ukraine into a dictatorship and to make
all participants in the Maidan, by then probably numbering in the low millions,
into criminals. The result was that the protests, until then entirely peaceful,
became violent. Yanukovych lost support, even in his political base in the
southeast, near the Russian border.
After weeks of responding peacefully to arrests and beatings
by the riot police, many Ukrainians had had enough. A fraction of the
protesters, some but by no means all representatives of the political right and
far right, decided to take the fight to the police. Among them were members of
the far-right party Svoboda and a new conglomeration of nationalists who call
themselves the Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor). Young men, some of them from
right-wing groups and others not, tried to take by force the public spaces claimed
by the riot police. Young Jewish men formed their own combat group, or sotnia,
to take the fight to the authorities.
Although Yanukovych rescinded most of the dictatorship laws,
lawless violence by the regime, which started in November, continued into
February. Members of the opposition were shot and killed, or hosed down in
freezing temperatures to die of hypothermia. Others were tortured and left in
the woods to die.
During the first two weeks of February, the Yanukovych
regime sought to restore some of the dictatorship laws through decrees,
bureaucratic shortcuts, and new legislation. On February 18, an announced
parliamentary debate on constitutional reform was abruptly canceled. Instead,
the government sent thousands of riot police against the protesters of Kiev.
Hundreds of people were wounded by rubber bullets, tear gas, and truncheons.
Dozens were killed.
The future of this protest movement will be decided by
Ukrainians. And yet it began with the hope that Ukraine could one day join the
European Union, an aspiration that for many Ukrainians means something like the
rule of law, the absence of fear, the end of corruption, the social welfare
state, and free markets without intimidation from syndicates controlled by the
president.
The course of the protest has very much been influenced by
the presence of a rival project, based in Moscow, called the Eurasian Union.
This is an international commercial and political union that does not yet exist
but that is to come into being in January 2015. The Eurasian Union, unlike the
European Union, is not based on the principles of the equality and democracy of
member states, the rule of law, or human rights.
On the contrary, it is a hierarchical organization, which by
its nature seems unlikely to admit any members that are democracies with the
rule of law and human rights. Any democracy within the Eurasian Union would
pose a threat to Putin’s rule in Russia. Putin wants Ukraine in his Eurasian
Union, which means that Ukraine must be authoritarian, which means that the
Maidan must be crushed.
The dictatorship laws of January 16 were obviously based on
Russian models, and were proposed by Ukrainian legislators with close ties to
Moscow. They seem to have been Russia’s condition for financial support of the
Yanukovych regime. Before they were announced, Putin offered Ukraine a large
loan and promised reductions in the price of Russian natural gas. But in
January the result was not a capitulation to Russia. The people of the Maidan
defended themselves, and the protests continue. Where this will lead is
anyone’s guess; only the Kremlin expresses certainty about what it all means.
The protests in the Maidan, we are told again and again by
Russian propaganda and by the Kremlin’s friends in Ukraine, mean the return of National
Socialism to Europe. The Russian foreign minister, in Munich, lectured the
Germans about their support of people who salute Hitler. The Russian media
continually make the claim that the Ukrainians who protest are Nazis.
Naturally, it is important to be attentive to the far right in Ukrainian
politics and history. It is still a serious presence today, although less
important than the far right in France, Austria, or the Netherlands. Yet it is
the Ukrainian regime rather than its opponents that resorts to anti-Semitism,
instructing its riot police that the opposition is led by Jews. In other words,
the Ukrainian government is telling itself that its opponents are Jews and us
that its opponents are Nazis.
The strange thing about the claim from Moscow is the
political ideology of those who make it. The Eurasian Union is the enemy of the
European Union, not just in strategy but in ideology. The European Union is
based on a historical lesson: that the wars of the twentieth century were based
on false and dangerous ideas, National Socialism and Stalinism, which must be
rejected and indeed overcome in a system guaranteeing free markets, free
movement of people, and the welfare state. Eurasianism, by contrast, is
presented by its advocates as the opposite of liberal democracy.
The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson
from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political
scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism.
Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon
politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both
fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics,
published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi
political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the
Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin
administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth
movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of
Ukraine.
The point man for Eurasian and Ukrainian policy in the
Kremlin is Sergei Glazyev, an economist who like Dugin tends to combine radical
nationalism with nostalgia for Bolshevism. He was a member of the Communist
Party and a Communist deputy in the Russian parliament before cofounding a
far-right party called Rodina, or Motherland. In 2005 some of its deputies
signed a petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish
organizations be banned from Russia.
Later that year Motherland was banned from taking part in
further elections after complaints that its advertisements incited racial
hatred. The most notorious showed dark-skinned people eating watermelon and
throwing the rinds to the ground, then called for Russians to clean up their
cities. Glazyev’s book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order claims that the
sinister forces of the “new world order” conspired against Russia in the 1990s
to bring about economic policies that amounted to “genocide.” This book was
published in English by Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine Executive Intelligence
Review with a preface by LaRouche. Today Executive Intelligence Review echoes
Kremlin propaganda, spreading the word in English that Ukrainian protesters
have carried out a Nazi coup and started a civil war.
The populist media campaign for the Eurasian Union is now in
the hands of Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the most important talk show in
Russia, and since December also the director of the state-run Russian media
conglomerate designed to form national public opinion. Best known for saying
that gays who die in car accidents should have their hearts cut from their
bodies and incinerated, Kiselyov has taken Putin’s campaign against gay rights
and transformed it into a weapon against European integration. Thus when the
then German foreign minister, who is gay, visited Kiev in December and met with
Vitali Klitschko, the heavyweight champion and opposition politician, Kiselyov
dismissed Klitschko as a gay icon. According to the Russian foreign minister,
the exploitation of sexual politics is now to be an open weapon in the struggle
against the “decadence” of the European Union.
Following the same strategy, Yanukovych’s government
claimed, entirely falsely, that the price of closer relations with the European
Union was the recognition of gay marriage in Ukraine. Kiselyov is quite open
about the Russian media strategy toward the Maidan: to “apply the correct
political technology,” then “bring it to the point of overheating” and bring to
bear “the magnifying glass of TV and the Internet.”
Why exactly do people with such views think they can call
other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them
seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World
War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this.
World War II on the eastern front was fought chiefly in what was then Soviet
Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, not in Soviet Russia. Five percent of Russia was
occupied by the Germans; all of Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. Apart from
the Jews, whose suffering was by far the worst, the main victims of Nazi
policies were not Russians but Ukrainians and Belarusians. There was no Russian
army fighting in World War II, but rather a Soviet Red Army. Its soldiers were
disproportionately Ukrainian, since it took so many losses in Ukraine and
recruited from the local population. The army group that liberated Auschwitz
was called the First Ukrainian Front.
The other source of purported Eurasian moral legitimacy
seems to be this: since the representatives of the Putin regime only very
selectively distanced themselves from Stalinism, they are therefore reliable
inheritors of Soviet history, and should be seen as the automatic opposite of
Nazis, and therefore to be trusted to oppose the far right.
Again, much is wrong about this. World War II began with an
alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. It ended with the Soviet Union
expelling surviving Jews across its own border into Poland. After the founding
of the State of Israel, Stalin began associating Soviet Jews with a world
capitalist conspiracy, and undertook a campaign of arrests, deportations, and
murders of leading Jewish writers. When he died in 1953 he was preparing a
larger campaign against Jews.
After Stalin’s death communism took on a more and more
ethnic coloration, with people who wished to revive its glories claiming that
its problem was that it had been spoiled by Jews. The ethnic purification of
the communist legacy is precisely the logic of National Bolshevism, which is
the foundational ideology of Eurasianism today. Putin himself is an admirer of
the philosopher Ivan Ilin, who wanted Russia to be a nationalist dictatorship.
What does it mean when the wolf cries wolf? Most obviously,
propagandists in Moscow and Kiev take us for fools—which by many indications is
quite justified.
More subtly, what this campaign does is attempt to reduce
the social tensions in a complex country to a battle of symbols about the past.
Ukraine is not a theater for the historical propaganda of others or a puzzle
from which pieces can be removed. It is a major European country whose citizens
have important cultural and economic ties with both the European Union and
Russia. To set its own course, Ukraine needs normal public debate, the
restoration of parliamentary democracy, and workable relations with all of its
neighbors. Ukraine is full of sophisticated and ambitious people. If people in
the West become caught up in the question of whether they are largely Nazis or
not, then they may miss the central issues in the present crisis.
In fact, Ukrainians are in a struggle against both the
concentration of wealth and the concentration of armed force in the hands of
Viktor Yanukovych and his close allies. The protesters might be seen as setting
an example of courage for Americans of both the left and the right. Ukrainians
make real sacrifices for the hope of joining the European Union. Might there be
something to be learned from that among Euroskeptics in London or elsewhere?
This is a dialogue that is not taking place.
The history of the Holocaust is part of our own public
discourse, our agora, or maidan. The current Russian attempt to manipulate the
memory of the Holocaust is so blatant and cynical that those who are so foolish
to fall for it will one day have to ask themselves just how, and in the service
of what, they have been taken in. If fascists take over the mantle of
antifascism, the memory of the Holocaust will itself be altered. It will be
more difficult in the future to refer to the Holocaust in the service of any
good cause, be it the particular one of Jewish history or the general one of
human rights.
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