Rhetoric is important. It can be formed not only on the basis of independent research but also as established stereotypes, depending on certain political intent. In this way, very often the actual essence of some social phenomena or events slips out of our understanding. Rhetoric will make you wise or stupid, a hero or a criminal. It all depends on what type of discourse you fall into. Especially when it comes to Ukraine’s struggle for its independence from Russia and finding its place in the modern geopolitical space. This primarily means fighting in the formation of rhetorical frameworks for understanding and interpretation.
In Ukraine, the word “patriotism” is more connected with the rhetoric of the Soviet period. Instead, the most common term in use throughout the country is “nationalism”, which is more understood as the fight against aggressive imperialism and chauvinism, in the present context – Russia. In Ukraine, “nationalism” and “patriotism” also are often used interchangeably. However, those discussions do not affect the global hybrid confrontation, in which Ukraine is forced to withstand numerous planned attacks and provocations.
On April 23 last year, over 50 members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan [1] requesting diplomatic pressure on Poland and Ukraine to reverse their alleged tolerance and even funding of Holocaust denial, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. Representatives of the Ukrainian government and civil society immediately refuted the letter and allegations. The Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine considers the “letter to be a part of anti-Ukrainian defamation which is already underway by the propaganda sector of Russian Federation’s hybrid war on Ukraine”.[2]
At its core, the letter reflects a total lack of awareness about Ukraine, its history, and current policies. For many Americans, Ukraine is a little-known land, located somewhere between Poland and Russia, but which causes unceasing petty problems that prevent US officials from engaging in important matters.
However, the letter also reflects that long implanted stereotypes may be responsible. Incessant and coordinated defamation, ineffectively challenged over time becomes fact. Hence, the stereotype that virulent anti-Semitism is inherent to Ukrainians is a part of popular culture, academic discourse, and journalism in the West.
The recent election of a Jewish President in Ukraine and simultaneously having a sitting Jewish Prime Minister seriously undermines some of the accusations in the letter, but not all. Many reporters and analysts have sought to temper the lifting of the cloud of anti-Semitism that has been implanted over Ukraine by routinely noting in their articles and studies Ukrainians’ inability to condemn their anti-Semitic past, especially during the liberation struggle in the 20th century. Hence, the story goes that despite Ukraine being one of the most tolerant countries in the world toward its Jewish minority, the specter of persecution and pogroms are literally just below the surface.
This narrative is pervasive in the West. One of many examples of such rhetoric is the article by Melinda Haring in the Washington Post, from May 13, 2019.[3] The reasons why Ms. Haring article is worthy of note is that she is a part of a program at the Atlantic Council that is so focused on contemporary Ukraine. Therefore, it is important to look at these issues from a perspective of the origins of the political rhetoric especially at this seeming turning point for Ukraine in its quest for mature nation-statehood.
Whence came Ukraine?
How to understand Ukraine, this strange nation, which seemed to appear on the map of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and exactly where the Western world was accustomed to seeing Russia? What is even more baffling for many is that the political culture of Ukrainian society dramatically differs from Russian society. For some reason, Ukrainians, unlike Russians, need freedom of speech and freedom of political choice. Moreover, they are ready to die for their freedom. Ukrainians are desperately fighting for their country against Russia, invoking Western values, and refusing with their blood and lives to join Putin’s Rusky Mir (Russian world).
Typically, we regard national interests that lead to conflicts and military confrontations as manifestations of “nationalism.” Many views on Ukrainian nationalism involve much misunderstanding and manipulation, something akin to equating (Kyivan) Rus’ with Russia. If Rus’ (10th-13th centuries) is the name of the first great state on the territory of modern Ukraine from the Middle Ages, then the concept of Russia doesn’t even appear until 1721 as a consequence of a political decision of Tsar Peter the Great. Until then Russia was known as “Moscow” or “Muscovy,” whereby by tradition sovereign territory carried the name of its capital.
Russian imperialist dogma claims Kyiv, (which is the capital of Ukraine), as its own. Kyiv is a critical component of the Russian imperial myth without which that state construct implodes. Hence, we are saddled with a fake political thesis about Kyiv as “the mother of Russian cities,” deliberately misrepresented from medieval chronicles, by deliberately misidentifying or equating “Rus’” and “Russian.” To be clear, this “misunderstanding” is not an esoteric exercise. On the contrary, it has a very specific and immediate real-world purpose: to validate the invasion, occupation and territorial absorption of Ukraine by Russia.
Accordingly, Ukrainian political leaders have always been portrayed by Russia in demonic terms. Ukraine’s 18th century Hetman Ivan Mazepa even was officially anathematized by the Russian Orthodox Church. From the 18th to the 21st centuries the political and intellectual leaders who dared to insist on the separateness of the Ukrainian people, language, history, and political culture were persecuted. Depending on the period, they are labeled as “traitors,” “Mazepintsy,” “separatists,” “Petliurivtsy”, “fascists,” “Ukrainian-German bourgeois nationalists”, “Banderivtsy”, or simply “bourgeois nationalists,” and today again as “Banderivtsy” and “fascists.”
Different shades of nationalism
Similarly, the word “nationalism” has many connotations. Merriam-Webster offers positive and negative versions. Accordingly, nationalism is – “loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially: a sense of national consciousness.” It also is – “exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups; intense nationalism was one of the causes of the war.”
The use of nationalism in modern media discourse is indiscriminate and used in very different settings and definitions that are unrelated to each other and without appropriate context and clarification. This term can be used simultaneously to refer to the liberation “nationalism” of Ukrainians[4], which was one of the main internal factors that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union as an empire, which itself was based on Russian “nationalism”, with the Cold War as an external factor. It is also can be sustained that Ukrainian state-building “nationalism” resists the imperial “nationalism” of the Putin regime. The media also uses “nationalism” to denote various current marginal xenophobic movements in Western Europe.
Hence, the same word depending on its use by the author and or reader can incorrectly cast political phenomena in a positive or negative light. In this regard, the portrayal of the Ukrainian liberation movement during the twentieth century continues to be understood through the prism of Russian imperialism and communism as it relates to Nazism and fascism (both terms are also used as synonyms of nationalism). Some Western researchers that adhere to this Russian interpretation are from what can be considered the neo-Soviet historical school.
The pejorative “fascism” is so often used in the post-Soviet space interchangeably with nationalism that its true meaning has become obscured. In his classic discourse on this topic, historian Alexander Motyl from Rutgers University notes an important precondition of fascism: it’s already existing state. The key distinction among nationalisms and nationalists, – professor Motyl contends, – concerns not the goal, but the means.
“Whereas legally, democratically, and constitutionally inclined nationalists will employ legal, democratic, and constitutional means. Illegally, undemocratically, and unconstitutionally inclined nationalists will employ illegal, undemocratic, and unconstitutional means. That is to say, they will break laws, be conspiratorial, regimented, disciplined, hierarchical, and use violence. This is why sloppy scholars believe that nationalists “look like” fascists”.[5]
For Putin’s interpretation of history, the most important concept is the “Great Patriotic War” – the term, which was coined specifically to divert attention from cooperation of the USSR with Nazi Germany at the beginning of the World War II. That is, the period from September 1939 to June 1941 is simply ignored. Yet, it is that very period which really reveals the kinship of two totalitarian regimes in terms of imperialism and crimes against humanity.
However, “historical discourse” is taking place not only (conditionally) from pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian standpoints. A group of Western intellectuals, including professional historians, issued an open letter against the decommunization laws adopted by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on April 9, 2015[6]. They opposed the state allegedly interfering in the field of academic historical scientific discourse, since, according to them, the law falsifies “real” history, denies freedom of speech, and even criminalizes a “wrong” interpretation of history.
The latter statement is not true. According to the research conducted by the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information, thanks to them, Ukraine has provided the greatest openness and accessibility to all archival materials from the totalitarian period in the post-Communist space[7]. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance is working to shed all ideological stereotypes associated with the most difficult periods of Ukraine’s past: to omit nothing and to speak of everything, to prevent populist and demagogic abuses, and to move toward a substantive and documentary based open discussions of the past.
The decommunization laws aim to free Ukraine of the consequences of communist ideological indoctrination on a massive scale. They also prohibit the symbols of totalitarian regimes, equating the criminality of communism and Nazism. The decommunization of Ukraine should be compared with the de-Nazification of post-war Germany. Without these measures, deep social transformations and a decisive break away from the political culture of the post-Soviet world, dominated by Putin’s Russia, are impossible.
Only one illustrative example. After the EuroMaidan Revolution that ended President Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency in 2014, all Lenin monuments were removed in Ukraine. Similarly, in Kharkiv, the plaza around the monuments to Lenin and to the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in the city center were symbolic spaces for rallying pro-Putin and pro-Ukrainian forces, which then resulted in clashes between them. After the removal of the Lenin monument on September 28, 2014, the communist and Russian chauvinists lost their symbolic space in Kharkiv, became demoralized, and ceased organizing regular street protests and violence.
Neo-Soviet historiography
The roots of neo-Soviet historiography in the American academic tradition stem from the protests against the Vietnam War and similar processes that took place in Western European universities in the 1960s. During those years, there was a “leftward” transformation of American universities. This shift involved a progressive critique of an imperial capitalist discourse, including imperialism, militarism, and the remnants of McCarthyism.
Importantly, it also heralded the democratization of university life with a special progressive focus on human rights, in the spirit of the coryphaei of the Frankfurt School. However, along with criticism of various Western reactionary circles and their political practices, the shift in academic life, openly or hidden, also brought with it a corresponding positive stance toward the Soviet Union and international “communist experiments.”
As a result of the academic leftward shift of American universities in the 1960s, some scholars regard at the Ukrainian liberation movement as a deeply reactionary phenomenon. The problem was that such interpretative traditions did not make a clear distinction between critical theory (neo-Marxism) and Russian communism as an imperial project. Both of have common sources. However, they pursue different goals.
Such academic discourse is more reminiscent of media trolling, including cherry picking historical facts and events, imposing current political correctness without regard for objectivity and verification, and avoiding creating a complete picture. Today, in particular, the discourse is characterized by a denial of the postcolonial status of Ukraine whereby democratic values are being advocated without acceptance of the restoration of the Ukrainian state as an expression of such values, and even depicting Russia’s military invasion in 2014 as an internecine civil war.
To illustrate, one need only look to the activities of a group of scholars focused on an American/Canadian professor John-Paul Himka. This group mostly consists of his former postgraduate students. It is akin to a political mission rather than historiography.
Taras Kuzio, British and Canadian academic and expert, described a situation at a seminar in Columbia University in April 2013[8]. After Himka’s presentation “The Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum an Example of Postcommunist Holocaust Negationism”, a Swedish researcher Per Anders Rudling, who was moderating the meeting, interrupted Volodymyr Viatrovych (one of the founders and a member of the Supervisory Board of the Lontsky Museum) and deprived him of the right to speak. The seminar moderator prevented Viatrovych from communicating his arguments that Himka not only had never been to the Museum, but also was not even familiar with the Museum’s website. Taras Kuzio considers this case as unacceptable for an academic environment, as it showed a biased approach of the event organizers and contradicts the principles of freedom of speech.
Perhaps a few more examples are warranted of the neo-Soviet approach to understanding contemporary political reality, resulting from ideological intrusions into historiography. Of course, here we are talking about a wrong understanding of tectonic changes in Ukrainian society related to the value-based and geopolitical shifts of Ukraine towards the West. An activist and researcher Volodymyr Ishchenko was consistently promoting the notion that the on-going war in Donbas is a “civil war”[9]. That is, he regards the hostilities in Donbas area as an internal Ukrainian conflict.
In September 2015 in San Francisco, a Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski presented his “study” on how the Maidan activists themselves shot the “Heavenly Hundred” [10]. The study became a part of the judicial defense of Viktor Yanukovych. In March 2017, a German expert, Andreas Umland, on live TV Channel 5 sought to dissuade Ukrainians from regarding members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as fighters for Ukraine’s independence (or advised Ukrainians to somehow hide this fact), arguing that the difficult circumstances of Ukraine’s international position requires this[11]. At the same time, in his opinion, the Poles, Lithuanians, and Belarusians should not take similar steps regarding their liberation movements, as their present political situation is different.
A bloody 20th century
In the interwar period, the West tried to engage with both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Initially, Mussolini and Hitler were favored due to their anticommunist orientation. Subsequently, the West settled on Stalin in a war that he and Hitler began. Ukrainian nationalists between the two world wars viewed the USSR as the greatest existential threat to Ukraine: the communist system wrapped around Russian imperialism and manifest in policies of genocide and mass terror placed in question the physical survival of Ukrainians.
However, the Entente at that time decided to ignore the Ukrainian question. Newly created states following the First World War, Poland, Romania, and Hungary, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, pursued an aggressive policy of denationalizing the Ukrainian lands now under their control. They diverted the attention of the Entente countries by engaging in cynical reasoning: since there is no Ukrainian state – there is no nation – hence there is no problem. Therefore, the Ukrainian liberation movement had little choice, but to cooperate during the interwar period with anti-communist military and intelligence services in Lithuania, Finland, Italy, and Germany.
Later, when the Western Allies united with the Soviet Union against Hitler, Ukrainians were once again in a fateful predicament. According to British historian Norman Davies, the problem is that the Ukrainian nationalists fought not only against Hitler but also against Stalin,[12] many of whom in the West continue to regard not as a necessary evil in the fight against another evil but as a “great ally” of the West in the Second World War.[13]
From the very first days of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, mass arrests of OUN members began, including the top leaders. Transcripts of interrogations of Stepan Bandera (incarcerated from 1941 to 1944 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp) confirm that there was no common ground between the OUN and the Nazi regime.[14]
“If you really want to understand what made such Ukrainian nationalists as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, — Alexander Motyl says, (…) — don’t compare them to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or Francisco Franco, but to George Washington, Jefferson Davis, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Menachem Begin, Vladimir Jabotynsky, Theodor Herzl, Ahmed Ben Bella, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito, Simón Bolívar, and Emiliano Zapata. Personally, if I were doing comparative biographies, I’d do one on Bandera and Begin as political leaders and another on Shukhevych and Tito as military leaders. And then I’d compare the Ukrainian nationalist theorist Dmytro Dontsov with the Zionist theorist Jabotynsky”.[15]
The Ukrainian liberation movement envisaged the overthrow of the Soviet Union as a “prison of nations” and the establishment in its place independent nation-states, which is what happened in 1991. The armed resistance by Ukrainians lasted until the end of the 1950s. Later, Ukrainians became the most numerous and active political prisoners in the Gulag.
Among political prisoners of all nationalities in the Gulag, the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement Mykhailo Soroka and Zinovii Krasivskyj held tremendous and undeniable respect. Thanks to the published correspondence between Krasivskyj and the American Amnesty International activist Iris Akahoshi,[16] he was known in the West as a civic and political activist, poet and humanist and as a leader of the international human rights movement. Again, in the 1960s and 1970s, political correctness in the West focused on the universal human rights credentials of Krasivskyj and his fellow political prisoners, rather than on their credentials as activists on behalf of freedom for their nations.
This generation of Ukrainian nationalist resistance includes the prominent figure of Yaroslav Dashkevych, a long-term political prisoner, a prominent historian and a respected intellectual. He points to the fact that nationalism need not be opposed to democracy, since the former concept belongs to an ideological range, and the latter – to the theory of the state[17]. According to Dashkevych, to be a nationalist means working for one’s people, or nation. Under conditions of statelessness, this means participating in the national liberation struggle.
Alongside the transformation of Ukrainian society as it fights for its own state independence, approaches to the study of Ukrainian intellectual history are changing. This is llustrated by Myroslav Shkandrij, a Canadian scholar, in his book which is dedicated to the history, ideology, and politics of Ukrainian nationalism.[18]
The author acknowledges the heroism of OUN leaders who refused to succumb to the German invaders after unilaterally declaring the independence of Ukraine in Lviv on June 30, 1941: “The Germans reacted by immediately arresting the organization’s leaders. Bandera, Stetsko, and others were transported to Berlin. They refused to retract the declaration or to curtail their activities, insisting that that they were speaking in the name of the Ukrainian people, who desired independence” (p. 59). Shkandrij concluded “neither pursuit of ethnic purity, nor racism, nor acceptance of Nazi doctrine were central to the OUN’s ideology, nor were they officially endorsed” (p. 268).
Hence, the EuroMaidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity (2013-2014), [19] initiated a transition from the concept of Dmytro Dontsov: “from nation to state” to the concept of conservative thinker Vyacheslav Lypynsky: “from state to nation”, signaling the creation of a consolidated and forward-looking Ukrainian political nation and a modern civil society.
Matters of interpretation
It is necessary to take into account the difference between academic discourse and public media based discussion. Historical issues can and are a formidable weapon in Russia’s post-truth, hybrid war against Ukraine, for confronting the West around the world, and in Russia itself.
During his lecture at Stanford University on Nov. 3, 2017 Wim Coudenys,[20] a Belgian specialist in Russian history, noted that Ukrainians having been deprived of their history for centuries must also be allowed to access their past through popular, mass media based, non-academic formats. This approach cannot and should not be considered as restrictions or ideological pressure on professional researchers. As already noted, “historical politics,” are a main component of Putin’s imperial mythology and part and parcel of Russia’s information warfare against Ukraine.
Yaroslav Trofimov in his essay with a distinctive title “Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past” [21] tracks Russia’s radical geopolitical re-orientation taking place via history. Unable to offer an understandable future to his own society, Putin’s regime is offering an interpretation based on a longing for a seeming better past. Trofimov notes that Russian “GDP is roughly the size of South Korea’s or of the Guandong province of China.
Russia’s political class naturally looks with nostalgia to the time of its youth, when Moscow was the feared and respected capital of one of the world’s only two superpowers”. Accordingly, in search of Russian “greatness”, Putin himself moved backward into the depths of previous centuries: from nostalgia for the Soviet Union to delusions of the Mongol Golden Horde.[22] The historical issues are becoming part of the Russian propaganda concepts and largely shape the field of modern hybrid warfare.
Questions for a world order in transition
Dramatic changes in international political realities, further exacerbated by ever more dramatic technological innovations in communication and social media, require new approaches, including understanding history and current political reality. In addition to direct chauvinist attacks by the Kremlin, different pro-Russian lobbyists acting against Ukraine.
It is worth mentioning the situation at the Kennan Institute[23] and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[24] Graduates, scholars and experts of these institutions tried variously to caution their leaderships from engaging in blatantly pro-Russian politics that portray Ukraine as seemingly falling into the abyss of “ethnic nationalism”, freedom of speech under siege, and even political prisoners behind bars. Of course, none of this is true.
We even can speak about Russia’s targeted policy of corrupting Western think tanks. In her study, “Hybrid Analytica: Pro-Kremlin Expert Propaganda in Moscow, Europe, and the U.S.”, Kateryna Smagliy claims that: “To a significant degree, Russia is testing the Western intellectual community and its ability to resist the Kremlin’s many temptations and co-optation strategies”.[25] The Ukrainian question is not the only one, but one of the main issues in the agenda of Putin’s propaganda machine.
The Revolution of Dignity heralded the consolidation of Ukrainians as a political nation, encompassing all social, ethnic, and religious groups. For all strata, Ukraine must be protected by all available means. Importantly, the culmination of this collective aspiration inherently adopted the historical heritage, rhetoric, and symbols of the Ukrainian liberation movement. Before 2014, no one would even consider that in Ukraine one will once again see Jewish volunteer fighters, this time even under the red-and-black banner of the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 20th century.[26]
Moreover, the Revolution of Dignity assembled a strong and demanding civil society, serving as the engine for essential right liberal reforms, including freedom of speech, freedom of political choice, equal rights and opportunities for all, as well as a free market economic development. Ukrainian civil society is universal in its attitude to deep systemic reforms, including conservative approaches (in particular, restoration of the national identity after the long and devastating imposed process of denationalization), simultaneously seeking national unity and individual liberty. Co-equal left-liberal components include demand for social justice, in particular, equal access to quality education and employment and an adequate socioeconomic safety-net.
Ukrainian society seeks justice in the broadest sense of its meaning. The main threats to Ukrainian democracy are not some mythical fascism. The real threat is irresponsible populism, hybrid wars and the geographic proximity of Russia, where a fake reality created by Putin has been implanted by a controlled media and academic community. Putin’s greatest worry isn’t war with the West. His nightmare is “infecting” Russia with Ukrainian democracy, which he sees as “fascism” and “anarchy.”
It is important to note that the political agenda set out for themselves by the Ukrainian people does not have any extremist, xenophobic, racist or anti-Semitic elements. On the contrary, according to a study by the American Pew Research Center, Ukraine is the most tolerant of all countries in Eastern and Southern Europe, and with the lowest level of anti-Semitism.[27] In Russia, conversely, according to the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, there are menacing and growing levels of xenophobia and, in particular, anti-Semitism.[28] These processes are grounded in many historical traditions associated with appealing to the “greatness” of the Russian Empire, including during the Soviet era.
Conclusion
The confrontation between Ukraine and Russia has not only military but also a value and civilizational character. In addition, historical issues are important. Disagreement with the tendency to withdraw from genuine ideological discussions in favor of post-truth, which offers only populism and public trust in fake news, does not necessarily mean that we need to turn back to the ideological wars of the 2oth century.
On the contrary, it may be the right time for bringing up the fundamental issue: the state as a set of values that are to be safeguarded and promoted through the rule of law. Including liberal, left, and conservative views in the discourse on setting priorities for the national agenda is the sine qua non for strengthening social concord and for growth and effective functioning of the state. For, only an independent state can be a genuine guarantor of national freedom and individual liberty for its people.
[1] Congressmen’s Letter (April 23, 2018): https://khanna.house.gov/sites/khanna.house.gov/files/Combat%20Anti-Semitism%20Letter.pdf
[2] Statement of the Presidium of the Vaad of Ukraine in Response to the Letter of US Congressmen Concerning Anti-Semitism in Poland and Ukraine: http://www.vaadua.org/statement-presidium-vaad-ukraine-response-letter-us-congressmen-concerning-anti-semitism-poland-and
[3] Melinda Haring. Putin calls Ukrainians ‘fascists.’ They’re about to swear in a Jewish president // Washington Post. – May 13, 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/13/putin-calls-ukrainians-fascists-theyre-about-swear-jewish-president/?utm_term=.4d2ddbe8d053
[4] The term “nationalists” gradually began to be applied not only to representatives of the Ukrainian resistance movement against Soviet power and Russian imperialism but also to all Ukrainians who, as a matter of principle, did not shift to communicating in Russian even under total Russification.
[5] Alexander Motyl. On Nationalism and Fascism, Part 2 // World Affairs. – 14 June, 2013: http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/nationalism-and-fascism-part-2
[6] David Marples. Open Letter from Scholars and Experts on Ukraine Re. the So-Called “Anti-Communist Law” // Krytyka. – April, 2017: https://krytyka.com/en/articles/open-letter-scholars-and-experts-ukraine-re-so-called-anti-communist-law
[7] Open Archives. Rating 2018: http://www.open-archives.org/en/rating?fbclid=IwAR0jwibBrSktQDOWBCDzRJXL8k0YRUqNLXCMy94Fbz1YcQDtxT441tphna4
[8] Taras Kuzio. This is not how Ukrainian History should be Debated (at Columbia or Elsewhere) // The Ukrainian Weekly, 19 May 2013.
[9] Volodymyr Ishchenko. Ukraine’s Fractures // New Left Review 87, May-June 2014: https://newleftreview.org/II/87/volodymyr-ishchenko-ukraine-s-fractures; Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger // The Guardian. – 13 Nov, 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/13/ukraine-far-right-fascism-mps
[10] Ivan Katchanovski. The “Snipers’ Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine // Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association in San Francisco, September 3-6, 2015: https://yadi.sk/i/4u4vSXi4jLDEF. Interestingly, but earlier this researcher was never associated with criminology. He positioned himself as an economist, historian, and political scientist.
[11] Andreas Umland. ЗА ЧАЙ.СОМ // TV Channel 5, March 8, 2018: https://www.5.ua/polityka/za-chaycom-ekspert-z-henezy-putinizmu-andreas-umland-u-efiri-5-kanalu-o-2310-140324.html
[12] Norman Davies. (1996) Europe: A History. – Oxford University Press, p. 1032.
[13] Norman Davies said this on April 30, 2012 in his open lecture at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia): Serhiy Kvit. Norman Davies about the subjectivity and objectivity of a historian // Personal Blog of Serhiy Kvit. – 9 May, 2012: https://goo.gl/mLuohA
In a similar way, Alexander Motyl asks: “Why it is possible to open a “KGB Bar” in New York, but in no case is a “SS Bar” possible?” – And he finds an answer in the double standard morals when considering the history of the GULAG and the Holocaust (Why is the “KGB Bar” Possible? Binary Morality and Its Consequences // Nationalities Papers. The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity. – Vol. 38, 2010).
[14] Prof. Taras Hunczak (Rutgers University) and prof. Volodymyr Kosyk (Sorbonne University, Paris and Ukrainian Free University, Munich) cite these documents in their publications.
[15] Alexander Motyl. On Nationalism and Fascism, Part 3 // World Affairs. – 25 June, 2013: http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/nationalism-and-fascism-part-3
[16] “Two Worlds, One Idea: Ten Years of Correspondence between Amnesty International Group 11 and a Ukrainian Political Prisoner, Zinovii Krasivskyj.” – Anna Procyk, editor and translator. – New York and Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2013.
[17] Yaroslav Dashkevych. «… Teach to tell the truth with a truthful mouth»: Historical essays (1989—2008). — “Tempora” Publishing House, Kyiv. – 2011.
[18] Myroslav Shkandrij. Ukrainian Nationalism. Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929-1956. – Yale University Press, New Haven and London. – 2015.
[19] Serhiy Kvit. The Euromaidan Revolution and the Struggle for Ukraine’s Place in Europe // Jews, Ukrainians, and the Euromaidan. – University of Toronto, 2014. – P. I-XVI.
[20] Wim Coudenys. Crimea has always been Russian. Or has it? Historical Arguments in Russian Political Discourse // Stanford. Global Issues: https://sgs.stanford.edu/events/crimea-has-always-been-russian-or-has-it-historical-arguments-russian-political-discourse
[21] Yaroslav Trofimov. Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past. As nostalgia surges for the eastern conquest of Genghis Khan, Putin maps out his own empire // The Wall Street Journal. – July, 8, 2018: https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-turn-to-its-asian-past-1530889247
[22] Ibid.
[23] “Our disagreement with leadership’s pro-Kremlin tendencies ignored”: Ukrainian Scholars on closure of Kennan Institute Kyiv Office: http://euromaidanpress.com/2018/04/15/statement-of-ukrainian-scholars-on-the-closure-of-the-kennan-institute-kyiv-office/
[24] Yuriy Dzhygyr and Kateryna Maynzyuk “kindly requested” to exclude them from the list of experts and to remove their names from the Carnegie website “because of irreconcilable methodological and worldview differences”: https://www.facebook.com/kateryna.maynzyuk/posts/10213834366685856
[25] Smagliy K. Hybrid Analytica: Pro-Kremlin Expert Propaganda in Moscow, Europe, and the U.S. // Institute of Modern Russia, Project “Underminers,” Free Speech LLC. Research Paper. – October, 2018: https://imrussia.org/en/news/2997-hybrid-analytica-pro-kremlin-expert-propaganda-in-moscow,-europe-and-the-u-s-a-case-study-on-think-tanks-and-universities%20
[26]Bohdana Kostiuk. Ukraine-Israel: from the Jewish subdivision (Ukr. – “kuren'”) of the UGA and detachments of “Hagan” – to the Jewish unit (Ukr. – “chota”) UDA // Radio “Liberty”. – 5 May, 2018: https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/29208755.html
[27] In some countries in Central and Eastern Europe, roughly one-in-five adults or more say they would not accept Jews as fellow citizens // Pew Research Center, March 27, 2018: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/28/most-poles-accept-jews-as-fellow-citizens-and-neighbors-but-a-minority-do-not/ft_18-03-26_polandholocaustlaws_map/
[28] About the new report the Moscow Human Rights Bureau “Nonlinear radicalism. Aggressive xenophobia and intolerance in the Russian Federation // Moscow Human Rights Bureau, September, 26: http://pravorf.org/index.php/news/2897–novom-doklade-mbpch-nelinejnyj-radikalizm-agressivnaya-ksenofobiya%20-i-neterpimost-v-rossijskoj-federatsii%20and%20nazaccent.ru/content/28300-experty-nacionalisticheskie-%D1%96ekstremistskie-techeniya-prisposablivayutsya.html
Serhiy Kvit is a professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and was a visiting scholar at the European Center of Stanford University in 2017-2018. http://fsi.stanford.edu/people/sergiy-kvit
