Ukraine’s double bind
Ukrainians have responded with fierce defiance, and sometimes even humour, to Russian aggression. But creating a sense of patriotism has also reawakened some troubling ghosts from the past.
United in song: Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw sing their national anthem on Independence Day, 24 August 2022
Attila Husejnow · SOPA · LightRocket · Getty
In early July last year, as people drank coffee and browsed among new titles at the Old Lion bookshop and café in central Lviv, a biography praising the fascist leader Stepan Bandera (1909-59) published by the magazine Lokalna Istoriia (Local History) went on display next to bags printed with ‘Make books, not war’. This sums up the double bind facing Ukrainians: their country is expected to represent Europe’s peaceful, democratic values in the war with Russia, but it is also nourishing its patriotic impulse, even if that means cultivating old nationalist instincts.
This ambivalence has been visible since the Maidan protests in 2013. Supporters of the civic movement seeking closer ties with the European Union waved both the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag and the star-spangled one of the EU. And the demonstrators who commemorated the deaths of the 100 victims of the Ukrainian authorities’ crackdown in February 2014 shouted, ‘Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes!’ In the 1920s and 30s this was the rallying cry of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the far-right ultranationalist group to which Stepan Bandera belonged (1).
In 1942 his supporters founded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) (2), which the following year carried out the Volhynia massacre (3), a brutal ethnic cleansing operation in which tens of thousands of Poles were killed. Despite this, the Ukrainian government in 2014 chose the official day of the UPA’s establishment, 14 October, as Ukraine Defenders Day. The declared purpose of this public holiday was ‘to honour the courage and heroism of the defenders of Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, military traditions and victories of the Ukrainian people, foster the further strengthening of patriotic spirit in society and support the initiative of the Ukrainian public’ (4).
Since the outbreak of war last February, history has been used more than ever to drum up patriotism. A bill on the ‘decolonisation’ of place names was put before the Rada (parliament) in April 2022 and passed its first reading in July. Its purpose is to eradicate place names which ‘symbolise the occupying state’ or commemorate people who implemented the Soviet state’s ‘totalitarian policy’. This link between contemporary Russia (‘the occupier’) and the ‘totalitarian’ Soviet Union points up its similarity to 2015’s decommunisation laws, which many historians criticised at the time (5).
Ukraine is expected to represent Europe's democratic values in the war with Russia while cultivating old nationalist instincts
Seven years on, however, the perspective has shifted. In 2015 the Russian threat was presented as the legacy of 70 years of communist dictatorship. Now, the Soviet period is seen as one episode in centuries-long domination by Russia, all traces of which must be swept away. Russia’s latest aggression has lent weight to the idea that Moscow’s subjugation of Ukraine is a form of colonialism. However, that view has caused academic controversy; Swiss historian Andreas Kappeler, for one, rejects it (6) and sees the absence of a racist dimension as a critical difference between Moscow’s relationship with Ukraine and Western powers’ domination of their African and Asian colonies.
Authors of Russian classics attacked
Derussification began at local level even before the bill passed into law. Last May the local authorities in Sumy, a city of 260,000 in northeast Ukraine, put a ‘decommunisation and derussification’ page on their website (7), listing all the changes to street names since 2015 and inviting discussion about the next phase. In June a major Lviv weekly attacked authors of Russian classics, such as Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Pasternak, calling them ‘killers, looters, ignoramuses’ as part of a push to reform school syllabuses (8), which were indeed revamped over the summer. Ukrainian-born writers who wrote in Russian, such as Gogol and Bulgakov, retained their place but ‘foreign’ Russian writers have been dropped (9).
In September a local politician in Kharkiv proposed renaming the city’s Pushkin theatre. A majority of the city council in this largely Russian-speaking city oppose this, but actors back it and want to rename their theatre after the Ukrainian dramatist and founding figure in Ukrainian literature, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko (1778-1843). A bust of Pushkin in the city centre was twice vandalised before the authorities had it removed on 9 November (10).
Is this cultural aversion to Russia, which is prevalent in politics and the media, also the dominant form of patriotism in the wider population? No, to judge by the streets of Lviv in early July. The city, which was the cradle of Ukrainian nationalism, has taken in many refugees from the Russian-speaking east (11). Among locals and people from the Donbass, one way of expressing patriotism was immediately apparent: half to two thirds of people in the street were wearing T-shirts with the country’s coat of arms, a gold trident on a blue background. The tone of the accompanying slogans was mild, such as the very popular ‘Good evening! We are from Ukraine’, the chorus of a hit song by the electronic duo PROBASS ∆ HARDI.
Another indication of the prevailing tone of patriotism is the popularity of stamps that the Ukrainian post office has issued since the invasion. Several of them use humour: one stamp depicts the Ukrainian soldier on Snake Island who famously told an officer on a Russian warship to ‘go fuck yourself’. Another shows a Ukrainian tractor towing away a Russian tank. And a third uses a child’s drawing to celebrate the rebirth of the ‘Ukrainian Dream’, a reference to Ukraine’s Antonov AN-225 Mriya (‘Dream’) aircraft — the world’s largest plane — destroyed at Hostomel airfield last February. To these benign, sometimes mawkish forms of patriotism, can be added images of pets being rescued from the war.
Writing for Victory: sales of these stamps will fund a demining machine, 1 September 2022
Mykola Tys · SOPA · LightRocket · Getty
‘The red viburnum in the meadow’
Since the war began, one song above all has become the common anthem of resistance to Russian aggression: Oi u luzi chervona kalyna (Oh, the red viburnum in the meadow):
‘Oh, in the meadow a red viburnum has bent down low, / For some reason, our glorious Ukraine is in sorrow. / And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up,
And, hey-hey, we shall cheer up our glorious Ukraine! ... Marching forward, our fellow volunteers, into a bloody fray, / For to free our brother Ukrainians from the Muscovite shackles.’
Last March Andriy Khlyvnyuk, frontman of the group BoomBox, recorded it in combat fatigues on Kyiv’s Sophia Square, since when it has been covered by other Ukrainian artists and even Pink Floyd. It has become the focus of real popular fervour; when a street singer struck up the song in central Lviv, a crowd of a people who all knew the words joined in. It was also sung in a refugee camp for people who fled Luhansk on the outskirts of Lviv. More surprisingly, a video of Miss Crimea 2022 singing it in the annexed region led to her being fined (12).
Though the song’s lyrics make it relevant to the present, it dates from the early 20th century (the red viburnum has a long history in Ukrainian folklore). In 1914 it became the anthem of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (USS), ‘the first and most durable Ukrainian military formation during and after the first world war’, according to the Internet Encyclopaedia of Ukraine (13). The Ukrainian Legion was, however, created as part of the Austro-Hungarian army; the Habsburgs, who had ruled Galicia (the region of which Lviv was the capital) for 150 years, welcomed the involvement of their empire’s minorities in the war, even if it meant allowing Ukrainians to wear a yellow-and-blue badge on their Austrian uniforms. As the conflict went on, the USS fought in very different configurations.
At first, they were deployed in the Carpathians against the Russian army. After the October Revolution of 1917, some of them were sent as prisoners of war to serve the People’s Republic of Ukraine, which had just been proclaimed in Kyiv, to protect it from Bolshevik incursions. After the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in late 1918, other USS detachments attempted in vain to defend the Ukrainian flag flying over Lviv against the troops of Józef Piłsudski’s newly independent Poland.
The city was at that time the capital of another short-lived People’s Republic of Ukraine, known as the Western Republic. In the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, under the orders of Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, they supported Polish forces against the Red Army. Although the riflemen initially wore the uniform of one of the empires that dominated Ukraine, then joined conflicting alliances, and ultimately failed to build an independent Ukraine, they nevertheless later became a ‘site of memory’ for the nationalist movement that had developed in the Galician diaspora beyond the Soviet border.
What began as a nationalist, regional reference point has now become a national symbol, shared nationwide regardless of political affiliation. This piece of Galician history has since replaced other sources of Ukrainian patriotism, such as the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-18) — which had Kyiv, not Lviv, as its capital — whose leaders were self-styled socialists. This episode, though promoted by the authorities in the 1990s and 2000s, has been fading from memory since 2014. As has the reality of what the years 1914-20 were like on Ukrainian soil: a clash of empires, then of new states, in which Ukrainians were often found on opposing sides — in the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian armies, among the Bolsheviks and of course in pro-independence political forces which charted their course according to the vagaries of shifting alliances.
The reappearance of the ghosts of the Sich Riflemen in this war highlights a particularly relevant paradox in the history of Ukraine’s national movement: to fight the ‘main enemy’ in the east, it has had to rely on foreign protectors, who have unsurprisingly pursued their own interests.