We’re starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don’t respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We’ll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won’t be locked.
You can read the text here.
I’m not sure I follow, what is so specific to Galicia in the current Ukrainian national identity? How is it different from Ukrainian identity of the UkrSSR?
It seems to me Ukrainian Nazis did the same thing Nazis do everywhere - take a national identity and slap some hatred on top. In this case, Bandera cult and russophobia. Remove that and you’re back to just… Regular Ukrainians. Am I missing something?
For one thing the anti-Russian hate. Another is the insistence on linguistic homogeneity. The Ukrainian SSR never enforced the Ukrainian language on those who didn’t want to speak it.
Exactly. That’s the point. The problem is that now the Ukrainian national identity that began to be built (with western backed NGOs, CIA funded activists and Ukrainian diaspora groups with roots in the OUN and other Nazi collaborators who fled the USSR driving this process) after 1991 relied heavily on anti-Russian historical narratives, on the “holodomor” myth and other narratives of victimization by Russia, and on exaggerating the differences and the historical animosity between Ukrainians and Russians.
The problem is that at this point, it has become very hard to separate the Bandera cult and the russophobia from Ukrainian identity. Not because this is what Russia or Russian people think (i think even now the vast majority of Russians today, with the exception of a very small minority of extreme nationalists, want to believe that Ukrainians are still the same brotherly people and can return to what they used to be, the “regular Ukrainians” as you said) but because this is what the current Ukrainian state and Ukrainian nationalists insist on and what they have been teaching Ukrainian children in schools for decades to believe, which has resulted in a population that to a significant degree now shares this view.
And those who didn’t buy into this “new” post-Soviet conception of Ukrainian identity, the people living in Eastern Ukraine, as a result began to view themselves less and less as Ukrainian if being Ukrainian meant having to hate everything Russian. The “Russian Spring” in the Donbass was a direct result of the Maidan coup, but its roots lay in this longer process of polarization of Ukrainian society. It is tragic but no surprise that this ended up in a civil war and then eventually a Russian intervention when all diplomatic attempts to end that civil war failed.
That’s just Great-Russian chauvinism. Sorry but you’re parroting the most reactionary Russian propaganda, like this piece which openly states de-nazification of Ukraine is necessarily also de-Ukrainization: https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html
I can’t agree with that. Even Nazi Germany didn’t need to be de-Germanized after the WW2, you only had to change the system and you got DDR.
Please read the rest of the paragraph. I explicitly say that this is not the view of the majority of Russians (and obviously it’s not my idea of what being Ukrainian should mean either). This is what the current Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nationalist (Banderite) movement have been insisting on telling the Ukrainian people. It is they who have turned the notion of being Ukrainian into the antithesis of everything Russian, when this clearly didn’t need to be the case and wasn’t the case in the USSR. It is they who insist that you are not Ukrainian if you don’t embrace Bandera worship, that you are Russian and thereby an enemy of Ukraine if you have a positive view of Ukraine’s Soviet past, if you want to be a part of “the Russian world” instead of (or even in addition to) “Europe” and the West.
And i don’t agree with that. I think history shows that that is not the case. But there does need to take place a rethinking in certain segments of Ukrainian society of what it means to be Ukrainian, a kind of return back to how it was viewed in the USSR as something more broad and heterogenous that could include people of various languages and diverse cultures, away from the almost all-consuming obsession with linguistic homogenization and from this self-destructive Russophobia that has led Ukraine into catastrophe. A culture cannot define itself purely by what it hates and what it isn’t. That is neither healthy nor sustainable. It actually makes for a very poor foundation for building a national identity.
Ironically, it is precisely this kind of negative and exclusionary definition of national identity that, far from saving the Ukrainian nation as Ukrainian nationalists think it does, risks destroying it.