Svoboda’s rise inspires some, frightens many others

Using a wench and steel
cable, the group of a few hundred athletic young men, some masked, toppled the
red granite statue, decapitating it and then smashing it apart with a
sledgehammer.

“(President Viktor)
Yanukovych, you’ll be next!” the group chanted as some mounted the fallen
monument in triumph.

While those that pulled
down Lenin gave no clear indication as to which political party they supported,
the Communist Party of Ukraine was quick to point the finger at the far-right
Svoboda Party.

“This act is testimony to
what’s happening in the country… that it is not a revolution or a democratic
(process), but a neo-Nazi revolt designed to seize power in the country,”
Oleksandr Holub, a Communist Party lawmaker, told the Kyiv Post on Dec. 8.

But Yuriy Syrotiuk, a
Svoboda spokesperson, told the Kyiv Post on the same day that it would be
unfair to place the sole blame on the nationalist party. “Participants of
EuroMaidan altogether toppled the monument, which was standing there illegally.
There was a presidential decree (by former President Viktor Yushchenko in 2009)
about its abolition,” he said.

Mass public
demonstrations on Independence Square over the past eight weeks have at times
numbered in the hundreds of thousands of protesters and elevated the status of
opposition parties of Vitali Klitschko’s UDAR, Arseniy Yatseniuk’s
Batkivshchyna and Svoboda. However, Svoboda (Freedom) seems to have benefited
most of all.

Lucan Way, a political
scientist at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on democratic
transitions and Ukraine in particular, told The Washington Post recently that
Svoboda activists have been the protests’ most “fearsome demonstrators.”

The party’s activists
played a major role in seizing the Kyiv city hall and trade unions buildings,
which protesters have occupied since Dec. 1, and in fortifying Independence
Square, the nerve center of the protests. Often wearing helmets and gas masks,
armed with clubs and even fire hoses, they have also been prominent in
repelling raids on the occupied buildings and square by riot police.

These actions, experts
say, have given prominence to the party.

Svoboda says it is the
torch bearer of the World War II era Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a self-organized
guerilla army that fought against both Nazi and Soviet forces with an aim to
establish an independent Ukrainian nation. It ceased activity in the mid-1950s,
well after the war ended. Also during that tumultuous period, some Ukrainians
joined the Nazi army in a futile attempt to stop the re-occupation of western
Ukraine by Soviet forces.

By 1991, ideological
descendants of these nationalists founded the Social-National Party. In 2004,
it became Svoboda. That same year, a controversial new member of parliament by
the name of Oleh Tiahnybok was expelled following a speech in which he spoke of
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the 1940s fighting against “scum,” including
Russians and Jews, and particularly the “Jewish-Russian mafia” controlling
Ukraine.

Today that same stout,
boisterous man, who often dons a traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt, again
is a member of parliament, but now also is the leader of Svoboda and one of the
most influential voices at the EuroMaidan demonstrations.

A skilled orator, he
often begins his speeches with the same phrases as those nationalists of
decades past: “Glory to Ukraine!”

“Glory to its heroes!”
the crowd answers back without fail.

Many at the protests are
Svoboda backers, but most of the tens of thousands are from opposition parties
Batkivschyna and UDAR, which have the two largest opposition factions in
parliament, with 90 and 42 seats, respectively, compared to Svoboda’s 36
places. Some are independent or simply against President Viktor Yanukovych and
his ruling Party of Regions. Despite that, they’ve fallen in line with Svoboda
rhetoric in the crowd, answering with the nationalist slogan whenever prompted.

The type of rhetoric
spouted by Tiahnybok and the ease with which pro-European protesters on
Independence Square have adopted and repurposed nationalist slogans has
unnerved many, including Ukrainian Jewish leaders such as Oleksandr Feldman,
president of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee who is also a Party of Regions
member of parliament.

In a scathing op-ed first
published with The Huffington Post and reprinted in the Kyiv Post, Feldman
alleged that EuroMaidan has devolved from a movement about democracy and rule
of law to one of ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism, due to Svoboda’s
involvement.

“Activists of the
ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic and grotesquely misnamed Svoboda (Freedom) soon
came to the fore; giving the protests a progressively darker and more violent
edge,” he wrote.

The turning point, he
says, was the toppling of the Lenin statue, a symbol to many of tyranny and
oppression, but revered by die-hard Communists. But perhaps more frightening,
he asserts, was the annual New Year’s Day torchlight procession of some 15,000
nationalists that included thousands of Svoboda members in central Kyiv to
celebrate the 105th anniversary of the birth of Stepan Bandera, a much
misunderstood and highly controversial figure who headed the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists.

It arose after World War
I with the goal of restoring Ukrainian independence that briefly existed in
1917-1921. Representing a people without a titular nation who were brutally
oppressed by both the Soviets and Poles, some of its radical elements were accused
of killing tens of thousands of Poles and Jews in the 1940s. Jews and other
ethnic groups also served in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and many OUN members
saved Jews.

Despite being the target of
a heavy smear campaign by Soviet propaganda that portrayed him as an
anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator, many Ukrainians deem Bandera a hero of the
country’s liberation movement during World War II.

He actually spent most of
WWII as a Nazi prisoner, after his short-lived declaration of national
independence in 1941. A Soviet KGB agent assassinated him in 1959. The Soviets
murdered his father in Kyiv, while his two brothers perished in Auschwitz, a
Nazi concentration camp.

Former President Viktor
Yushchenko, during his term in office, posthumously gave Bandera the Hero of
Ukraine award in 2010, only to watch a court annul it under Yanukovych in 2011.

Flying prominently above
the marching crowd on New Year’s Day were the blue-and-yellow Svoboda Party
flags, but also the red-and-black “blood-and-soil” nationalist flags of decades
past that have resurfaced in recent years. Both have been widely present during
EuroMaidan protests, but the red-and-black flag is considered by some as a
racist symbol and is banned for display at soccer games by FIFA, the world soccer
governing body.

While experts argue that
it was Yanukovych’s and his Party of Region’s rise to power in 2010 that
sparked the rise of Svoboda, leading to the party winning 36 seats in
parliament in 2012, it might also be the far-right party’s prominence now that
shores up support for the president’s re-election in 2015.

“Svoboda’s presence at
EuroMaidan protests has cemented Yanukovych’s electorate,” Taras Berezovets, a
political consultant and director of Berta Communications in Kyiv, told the
Kyiv Post. “People believed (in 2010) that Svoboda was the only party that can
stop Yanukovych. But Svoboda’s radicalism is something that scares the EU and
keeps many would-be protesters away from EuroMaidan.”

Some believe that
collaborating with the nationalist Svoboda party undermines the credibility of
opposition leaders Yatsenyuk of Batkivschyna and Klitschko of UDAR. Both have
worked closely with Tiahnybok since parliamentary elections in 2012, in an
effort to garner enough support to oust Yanukovych next year. To salvage their
remaining credibility and bolster their positions, they now “must denounce the
neo-fascist drift of recent weeks and break off their alliance with Svoboda,”
Feldman says.

Berezovets said that it
won’t be long before “Yatseniuk and especially Klitschko will sideline
Svoboda.”

However, Olexiy Haran, a
political science professor at National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, says
that isn’t necessary.

“There is a lot of
misunderstanding surrounding Svoboda,” he said. “(Svoboda) is not fascist like
people say. But they are radical.”

Kyiv Post editor
Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected], or on Twitter at
@ChristopherJM.