On Feb. 18, Lev Golinkin – also an occasional
contributor to the Kyiv Post – published a review of the Ukrainian
Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for
Freedom” in the U.S.’s most important left-wing journal The Nation.
This manifestly political critique of the celebrated documentary
– a product of cinematographic art rather than political science – would by
itself not be worth further attention.
Yet, Golinkin’s text is in so far of
interest as his argument is symptomatic for a recently emerged, more common
Western approach to Ukraine that has become widespread among intellectuals on
both sides of the Atlantic, and that understands itself as being left-wing. On
closer inspection, the structural pattern of many of these interpretations of
Ukraine, including Golinkin’s, reveals a style of argument whose stereotyping of
a nation – in this case, of Ukraine – is characteristic of right- rather
left-wing thought.
To be sure, Golinkin makes, in his review of “Winter on
Fire,” a valid point about the absence of Ukraine’s far right in the
documentary on the Euromaidan. Even if the film was not made by a political
analyst, but by a film director, it should have mentioned Ukraine’s far right –
if only because that topic played a crucial role for the Kremlin’s
propagandistic preparation of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.
Golinkin
goes, with this review, much further than commenting on the film, and provides
a comprehensive interpretation of the entire Euromaidan and its aftermath
focusing on Ukraine’s far right (as well as allegedly decisive US mingling
which I will not deal with here). He repeatedly mentions all the usual suspects
– the “Svoboda” party, the Right Sector, Bandera etc. While displaying some
knowledge of this particular part of Ukrainian politics, Golinkin provides a
distinctly revisionist portrayal of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, and
ignores most of the findings of the already published scholarly research on the
course and aftermath of Ukraine’s Euromaidan.
Golinkin either is unaware of, or (worse) does purposefully
not mention, the widespread belief of most Ukrainians that the war-time Organization
of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera was only a liberationist and
not a fascist party.
To be sure, Bandera’s movement was, at least temporarily,
revolutionary and ultra-nationalist, at the same time. It could thus, according
to the conceptualization of the world’s most eminent theoretician of fascism
Roger Griffin, be labelled fascist. Yet, one cannot simply ignore the fact that
popular memory and historical theory are not one and the same. Some national
heroes of most nations have dark pages in their biographies, and/or even committed
disgusting crimes which are not remembered in the general population. While
Ukraine’s current Bandera cult is more problematic than the whitewashing of
dubious historical figures in other countries, Golinkin’s unwillingness to
contextualize the recently rising popularity of the OUN is also a problem.
Golinkin furthermore avoids indicating membership numbers
for the then miniscule Right Sector and Social-National Assembly in late 2013
and early 2014 – altogether not more than 500 men then. He also avoids to
mention the country-wide electoral support – between 0.7 percent and 4.7 percent – that the
Right Sector and “Svoboda” received, in Ukraine’s two 2014 national
polls. While speaking of ironies of the documentary he criticizes, Golinkin’s
text itself raises eyebrows when it compares Ukraine’s loudly emancipatory Revolution
of Dignity to the US’s ultra-conservative National Rifle Association:
“[I]magine a foreign filmmaker creating a glowing documentary about the
NRA called America’s Fight for Freedom
while ignoring the alternative viewpoints of millions of Americans who strongly
oppose the NRA.”
The text ascribes a special salience to Ukraine’s far right
in current Ukrainian history ignoring that far right groups play larger or far
larger roles, in several other countries in- and outside the EU. These European
states with more developed far right scenes are, moreover, in a much better
socio-economic condition and safer national security situation than Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Golinkin elevates, again and again, the numerically, electorally
and politically weak Ukrainian far right to an allegedly central actor in
Ukraine’s Euromaidan and her, within the post-Soviet regional context,
relatively pluralistic post-Maidan politics. The mantra-like repetition of
partly incorrect information about Ukraine’s comparatively insignificant contemporary
far right makes his article an expression of Ukrainophobia.
The author ascribes to the Ukrainian polity a degree of
ultra-nationalist presence that is not supported by data. He scorns with
vehemence the myth making of the documentary he criticizes. Yet, his own
picture of revolutionary Ukraine is purposefully one-sided. The moderate rise
of Ukraine’s far right is, in The Nation’s
portrayal, detached from both its complicated national historic and the larger all-European
context where much stronger far right parties have recently appeared to both the
East and the West of Ukraine. Golinkin – like surprisingly many other
supposedly left-wing authors – provides, in The
Nation, a biased and Orientalized depiction of recent Ukrainian political
life as allegedly subverted by an omnipresent ultra-nationalist scene. By doing
so, this seemingly anti-nationalistic critique paradoxically constitutes itself
a manifestation of non-empirical, xenophobic and thus right-wing thinking.
Andreas Umland is senior research fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv and general editor of the book series “Soviet and
Post-Soviet Politics and Society” published by ibidem Press in Stuttgart, Germany, and distributed by Columbia University
Press outside Europe.
