1.
Have you published any wisecracks in leading
academic journals?
2.
Do you think there was or is an excessive
ethnocentric slant in recent Maidan demonstrations?
3.
Do you think that symbols and ideas of the
wartime OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) promoted by the Svoboda
Party are not properly national but instead implicitly separatist?
4.
Do you believe that the attitudes in rusophonic
Ukraine are less xenophobic and homophobic than in other regions?
5.
Do you think that actions and expressions of the Stepan Bandera movement are foreign to Ukrainian historic traditions?
6.
Do you think that Soviet victory over Nazi
Germany in World War II has liberated Ukraine, whereas the fight of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) against the Soviets was all wrong?
7.
Do you think that Ukraine’s patriots must
address “the difficult issue of Banderite challenge”?
8.
Do you believe that the visible presence of
Bandera followers in recent Maidan demonstrations provides a crutch for
Russia’s Vladimir Putin for bad-mouth Ukraine’s opposition parties?
If your answers from 2 to 8 are yes, you are probably in
agreement with the recent article by professor Andreas Umland in the Kyiv Post
(“How spread of Banderite slogans and symbols undermine Ukrainian
nation-building,” Dec. 28).
If the
answer to question number 1 is negative, your credentials to debate these
topics may be doubtful, the professor has suggested.
With or without credentials, this doesn’t seem to be the
best time to indulge in “the difficult issue” in question number 7. But, as a minimum, it needs to be said that
the framework of discourse explicitly stated as acceptable by the professor excludes
referencing to the behavior of Ukraine’s enemies or to disreputable showings
elsewhere. He would characterize such referencing as whataboutism or
para-comparativism.
For instance, saying that Bandera’s faults were small fry in
comparison to what Josef Stalin had done would be out of order. And so would be
saying that Winston Churchill was an ultra-nationalist par excellence. Or that
British governance in Iraq before World War II included the use of mustard gas against the civilian population. That was some time before the recent flare of hypocrisy
towards the wartime OUN.
Wonder whether the professor could relax some of his
restrictions if his own relatives had lived their last days in penal camps at
the Magadan, as did some of mine and millions of others.
Given such restrictions, the science of Bandera bashing becomes
easier to sell. The opprobrium goes beyond noting that the wartime OUN was an
authoritarian, semi-military organization. Given its goal and the oath of its
membership (“Win independence for Ukraine or die fighting for it”), and
considering the most pernicious nature of Ukraine’s worst enemies — the modern satrapies Soviet Union and Nazi
Germany — the OUN could hardly afford to be overly
gentle.
As another minimum, the issue of fairness of judgment should
not be avoided. For someone decidedly critical of right-wing politics — in
Ukraine as well as in the USA — to defend the memory of Bandera is
indeed a matter of fairness and not ideological inclination. It is for me. Bandera
is someone who spent most of the war in a Nazi concentration camp, where also
his two brothers were murdered. He is someone who, with the OUN, openly stood
up against Adolf Hitler, by declaring an independent Ukraine in Lviv on June
30, 1941, eight days after the start of German – Soviet hostilities. It
promptly led to his arrest and jailing of his closest cohorts. That was when
many well known personalities in western Europe, yes, cooperated with the Nazis
to avoid Hitler’s wrath.
And he is someone who, alone among Ukraine’s so-called
leaders of that time, postulated an axiom saying that national liberation must
rely on own forces, and not on foreign assistance. It was the time when the
country was prostrate on its back under Stalin’s boot.
Referring to question number 5 above, how does this legacy
of Bandera compare with Ukrainian historic traditions? Considering that Ukraine
had a major “historic tradition” of subservience to Russian yoke that lasted nearly
300 years until 1991, and had lost much
of its Ukrainian identity as a result, doesn’t this question ring like an
odious wisecrack? It sounds almost like saying that rallying Ukraine to fight
for freedom is entirely out for character for the Ukrainian people.
And what about the ethnocentric slant of demonstrations at
the Maidan”? As the ethnic Russians comprise not more than about 15 percent of
Ukraine’s population, how much of ethnic Ukrainian slant is too much? Considering that today’s government has
little if any Ukrainian content and is behaving like an occupation regime, the
revival of OUN symbols at Maidan protests is not at all surprising.
These symbols, the author writes, are distracting “the
patriots” (his quotation marks) of the opposition from building a better
Ukrainian state. Building a better Ukrainian state? How can they do it — except by ousting the present regime —
when their most capable leader, Yulia Tymoshenko has been railroaded
into jail, in a vile display of trampling on the human rights? And then: “These
(OUN) symbols are seen as inappropriate or even offending by the overwhelming
majority of southern and eastern Ukrainians”. Unfortunately the big problem
facing Ukraine is that today’s government came to power and continues to be
supported mainly by the majority of these Ukrainians, with or without the OUN
symbols anywhere near.
The attitudes in these regions, often showing ukrainophobic
twist, are the product of intensive russification drives of the Stalin
era. Those who lived in the area
remember that as late as in the 1920s the spoken language in the suburbia of Donetsk
was Ukrainian.
To say that Ukrainians must address “Banderite challenge”
rather than focus attention on the most imminent danger to Ukraine’s
independence coming from the recently formed Putin-Yanukovych coalition borders
on the irresponsible. Russia’s imperialism is alive and is showing itself
irreversibly in its historic aggression sites such as Chechnia and in the
entire nearby region. Russia’s cardinal geopolitical aim remains to recapture
Ukraine into its bag of acquisitions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, as master of the KGB
methodology, can be thankful to professor Andreas Umland for joining and
encouraging those who are barking up the wrong tree.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
