In Russia, the formula of “Ukrainian betrayal” — being disloyal to Moscow — boils down to three names: Mazepa, Petliura, and Bandera, almost like those good old slogans: Peace, Labor, May!, Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality!, or Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite! All these names are functional necessities for the Russian historical myth, although they refer to absolute traitors rather than absolute foes. Mazepa appears to have betrayed the man who created the Russian empire (even though Mazepa’s own contribution to its creation remains to be properly assessed). Petliura is also supposed to have betrayed the (a) enemies or (b) defenders of the Russian empire (these items remain to be ascertained). Bandera failed to appreciate the joy of living in the Soviet empire.
VICTORY DAY THE SOVIET WAY
There has appeared a new post-Soviet propaganda cliche approach to WW II. Kremlin ideologues now regard the Allied victory of 1945 not only as a major historic event — a victory won by tens of millions of Soviet nationals who fought and died for it and a feat performed by members of all the “brotherly peoples of the invincible Soviet Union” — but also as a basis for what is best described as a new public/civic religion. Remarkably, the spin doctors in question think nothing of using this semantic combination. In fact, some of them use “memory policy” (suffice it to recall Viktor Yushchenko’s concept of the Holodomor, Armenian Genocide, and Holocaust as public religions).
After WW II the [Soviet] state preferred to ignore war veterans. They were known as frontovik [literally, front-line soldier, an affectionate popular appellation that eventually became a semiformal one. — Ed.] and most were, generally speaking, young healthy individuals. As it was, Stalin’s government canceled combat decoration bonuses back in the 1940s, and May 9 was no longer a red-letter day, what with several battle-hardened generals hauled in and executed by the NKVD, among them General Grigorii Kulik in 1950. Nikita Khrushchev tried to update the notion of Victory Day [still known and officially celebrated as The Day of Victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, albeit reasonably refuted by unbiased domestic and foreign historians as running counter to historical truth. — Ed.] by exposing and condemning Stalin’s personality cult and making public the USSR’s actual manpower losses during the war: 20 million (current updated death toll findings point to 26.5 million, at least).
May 9 was reinstated as a red-letter day in 1965, precisely when the world public learned about the incredible military prowess [later made laughingstock] of Comrade Leonid Brezhnev while fighting the Nazis at Malaya Zemlya. As General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Brezhnev tried to wage his policy with support from the masses, among them WW II veterans in the first place. Lots of books and movies were made about the war [strictly in accordance with Soviet propaganda, whereby Nazi Germany was destroyed by the Soviet Union, single-handedly, with the Allies largely throwing monkey wrenches into the works. — Ed.], along with heartwarming veterans’ songs (among them the notorious Malaya Zemlya), and reminiscences broadcast live, producing the presence effect. In a word, the Second World War was fed to the Soviet masses as a Soviet version thereof, meant to be perceived emotionally rather than logically, let alone knowingly, as a recent past, an ethic absolute.
Sixty-five years later, this war is generally analyzed on a rational basis, as a component of an ideological structure. Naturally, in this context everyone is trying to take advantage of the Victory Jubilee to serve their own interests. What we have is another attempt to privatize this war: Once you recognize the Great Victory Day, back in 1945, you and your country are loyal to the Kremlin and its current policy.
Cultural interpretations of WW II have become noticeably glamorous. Over the twenty years since the USSR’s collapse, it is hard to mention a single motion picture that reflects past realities with a reasonable degree of objectivity, August 1944 being perhaps the only exception.
This year’s red-letter day [i.e., June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, known ever since in the post-Soviet countries as the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. — Ed.] will be celebrated in accordance with a special youth entertainment program, including Dima Bilan, other dubious singers with wartime songs, and a “uniting space bridge” involving the pro-Kremlin [rock bands] Nashi, Molodaya gvardiya, etc., and of course the anti-Bandera motion picture We’re from the Future-2. The latter is complete with Russian cliches like St. George Order’s ribbons and lines like “My grandfather’s cause is now mine!” or “I thank my granddad for this victory!”.
This year’s 65th anniversary of Victory Day was meant to lift the Kremlin to an [ideological] altitude no one else could reach, making the Medvedev-Putin regime flawless in the eyes of the international community. However, the big event was ignored by Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, and Gordon Brown, lending the whole affair a marketplace show touch.
BANDERA BRAND
I’m not versed in WW II history, so I will cautiously and gradually formulate my attitude to the OUN, UPA, Bandera, Shukhevych, Stetsko, Bulba-Borovets, Smersh, all those zagradotriad barrier troops [a.k.a. blocking units and anti-retreat forces deployed to cut down Red Army men retreating in the first months of the Third Reich’s triumphant blitzkrieg on Soviet territory. — Ed.] or Viktor Suvorov’s concept of Stalin as the aggressor. I’m in no position to offer the reader a detailed account of the Soviet-German confrontation or that of the insurgent movement.
My family history has nothing to do with the UPA or [postwar anti-Soviet] guerrilla warfare in Western Ukraine, except that my grandfather, on his way home from Prague after the 1945 Victory Day, got in harm’s way at the hand of people my relatives later described as Banderites, although I still don’t know who they were. As it was, my granddad was aboard a train when it was attacked during the night, somewhere in western Ukraine. They wanted to throw him off the train, but my granddad was a tall hefty man (183 cm in height), so the scuffle ended with him throwing the attackers off the train. He returned home with a record of contusions sustained in the line of duty and he died in 1999.
Therefore, it is easier for me to give you a breakdown of the current information-cognitive [sic] war being waged with respect to WW II.
This new quasi-religion badly needs more than a main deity, Joseph Stalin (replaced in the current [Russian] propaganda with “the people of Russia, subsequently joined by other peoples of the USSR”), and the antihero-cum-Satan, Adolf Hitler. It needs its Judas, in this case Stepan Bandera. Interestingly, no one in Russia has given a hoot about him as a historic personality, save for historians specializing in WW II, but he came in handy as a political brand, as high treason incarnate.
This brand is especially needed in the east of Ukraine, as a manifestation of loyalty to Russia in general and the Kremlin in particular. In fact, this is precisely what the Shot In The Back memorial of victims of Banderite atrocities in Simferopol is all about.
I’m not going to answer questions, like “Whom did Bandera, being an Austro-Hungarian national with Polish citizenship, turn traitor to?”, “Why did the populace of western Ukraine greet Red Army troops with bouquets in 1939 and then support the UPA guerillas fighting the Soviets until the mid-1950s?”, “How many Banderites fought to liberate Central Russia from the Nazi aggressor and why are they hated so much there?”, “Why did Bandera spend the better half of WW II in a Nazi concentration camp?”. I won’t answer any of these simply because an attempt to rationalize personality cult inevitably leads to the weakening of the faith, including a “public religion.”
Russia’s current ideology badly needs Bandera and all the Banderite topics and myths because this greatly benefits Russian self-consciousness: now they can rightfully assume that Russia isn’t just a participant in some geopolitical confrontation, but a warrior in a cosmic battle between Good and Evil — between God and Satan, if you will. In other words, this topic, originally on a small historical-political scope, suddenly appears on a worldwide, even galactic scale.
The “truth” about Bandera and Banderites that the [Russian] media conveyed on the eve of the 65th anniversary of the “Victory Day” (which included TV series and talk shows) boils down to the following:
(a) The Banderites mainly slaughtered their own men, peaceful western Ukrainians, rather than regular NKVD units;
(b) The Banderites were collaborators; they never fought the Wehrmacht, only the Soviet army and Soviet partisans; Russians, Poles, and Jews were their sworn enemies;
(c) NKVD details dressed as Banderites [who invaded Western Ukrainian villages, torturing and massacring the residents] is a myth created by the [Ukrainian] nationalists; the reverse was true, with Banderites posing as NKVD men and committing all these atrocities;
(d) Stepan Bandera’s personality cult was even greater than that of Joseph Stalin;
(e) Viktor Yushchenko, Yulia Tymoshenko, and other Orange Revolution leaders are Bandera’s direct inheritors.
WAR OF SHADOWS AND PROTOTYPES
In fact, Bandera is often compared with Stalin, not only because of public attitude they attract (rather, to their propaganda brands), which splits the Ukrainian and other post-Soviet societies. The fact remains that the social conditions in the first half of the 20th century produced the phenomenon of a totalitarian state and its totalitarian leader.
The biggest difference between Bandera, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Antonescu, and Pilsudski is that Bandera could only dream of building a totalitarian state, so no monuments to Hitler and Mussolini are erected (there were more than enough at the time), but those to Bandera are.
It is also true, however, that a monument to Stalin was unveiled in Zaporizhia, not so long ago. The latter-day Stalinist cult coincided with the process of turning Ukraine into a Little Russia colony. No one in the Russian metropolis could have produced this scenario, with both President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin repeatedly stating that no achievements made under Stalin can refute Uncle Joe’s bloodthirsty character. In Ukraine one can expect the Stalinist cult to flourish, considering that several years ago all those controversial monuments to Catherine II were unveiled.
By and large, all these 20th-century totalitarian “apostles” are very much alike, and the pattern is the same: the Leader, being portrayed as a Superman, will bring back their country’s past glory, assisted by an Uebermensch cohort, with them serving as construction material when building a happy future for one and all. The utmost important end justifies the means. Terror, whether brought to bear by the state or by guerrilla units (as was the case with western Ukraine) appears to be the most effective means of governance.
One can figure out two polarized messages in the latter-day politicized interpretations of the Second World War — the Great Patriotic War, if you will — along with all those St. George combat decorations.
The first one is ontological, addressing the younger generation, telling them to give vent to their emotions, to stop watching all that TV crap or enjoying virtual realities, for there are true values in this world, other than Internet, gadgets, ads, commercials, glamorous club get-togethers, and drugs.
The second one has to do with spin doctors who use all these [Russian] patriotic cliches, including St. George’s ribbons, to get the younger generation under control so their young and strong potential can be directed against the enemies and rivals of the powers that be. Back in 2005, these [Russian] patriotic sentiments served as an adequate response to the Orange threat. Any modern society is hard put to work out an objective view of recent history. There is the everlasting struggle of history, with ontological and spin doctors’ interpretations of historical events trying to get the better of each other. Assuming that the past is being turned into major construction material these days, the logical question is, “Do such countries and peoples have a future?”
