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Home , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and

TARAS KUZIO

Russian leaders and Donbas separatists use the term “fascist” to describe any Ukrainian who supported the EuroMaidan or to those who do not see in the Russkiy Mir (Russian World). Te roots of these designations, however, and their use by those in the West today can be traced much earlier than the recent crisis in Ukraine. In the , designations such as “bourgeois nationalist” and “Nazi” were applied to of every ideological persuasion, from national communist through liberal to nationalist and to both Ukrainian and Russian speakers. Similarly, the “anti-Zionism” the USSR promoted and Donbas separatists continue to promote is a camoufaged form of antisemitism.

Nationalism, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia are not the preserve of the extreme right. It is sufcient to cite the Doctors’ Plot in ’s Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 50s and the antisemitic campaign in communist Poland in 1968. Stalin had planned to deport all Soviet Jews to the ; thankfully his death in 1953 prevented this policy from being implemented. Nationalism has operated through communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cuba, while separatist and nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, Quebec and republicans in Ireland are left-wing. Terrorist groups in Latin America have been traditionally Marxist and left-wing, anti-American nationalists. In addition, the extreme left and extreme right have long been allies. After all, the Stalinist regime was not just Marxist but National Bolshevik, combining an 94 Opinion & Analysis The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and antisemitism, Taras Kuzio

eclectic mix of , Great Power imperialism and Soviet com- munism. Tis turn to the right in the 1930s helped attract many younger Russian émigrés to return to the USSR and support the new “Russian” state. Te émigrés formulated the doctrine of Eurasianism, a kind of without , which today plays a key part in ’s ruling ideology.

Unusual alliance

International volunteers who have travelled to fght alongside Donbas separa- tists come from Europe’s extreme left and right. Anti-Zionism and anti-American- ism has long had traction with an eclectic coalition of the far left of European and Latin American politics, who are opposed to globalisation and big business, free trade, US hegemony in world afairs, NATO and, more recently, the European Union. Anti-Americanism has forged an unusual alliance of the British and Euro- pean far left with Putin’s authoritarian and Anti-Americanism pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. has forged an Te anti-Americanism of Europe’s extreme left places unusual alliance it in bed with Putin’s Russia whose regime is increas- ingly defned as “fascist” by western scholars, like of the British and J. Motyl. It is also defned by some as a European far left with “Mafa state” or, as Mark Galeotti believes, “a state with Putin’s authoritarian a nationalised mafa”. Te current alliance of the ex- treme left and extreme right, however, follows an ex- Russia and pro- tensive path of strange bedfellows. Russian separatists Te extreme left and right have long been opposed in Ukraine’s to the EU. In the United Kingdom, the media has Donbas region. mostly focused on political parties like UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), with less mention of the fact that the UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had voted against Britain joining the EU in the 1970s. His passive approach to the June 2016 referendum on whether the UK should remain as an EU member was largely criticised by more mainstream Labour members. What’s more, in the April 2016 referendum in the Netherlands, the extreme left Socialist Party and far right anti-Immigrant Freedom Party campaigned together against the ratifcation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Nationalism, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia exist on both extremes in European and North American democracies, as well as in post-communist coun- tries. Although it is commonplace to view “nationalism” as a European disease The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and antisemitism, Taras Kuzio Opinion & Analysis 95 that does not exist in immigrant settler countries such as in North America, this is not true as nativist nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment has always existed in the United States. For instance, the 2016 Republican Party presidential candi- date Donald Trump’s campaign has continued to illustrate this claim to be fallacy. Trump’s anti-immigrant nationalist populism is supported by over 40 per cent of , making it as popular as extreme-right anti-immigrant nationalism in France or Austria.

Invoking the bogeyman

Scholarly and journalistic analysis of nationalism, antisemitism and xenopho- bia which focused on contemporary Ukraine has concentrated heavily on the ex- treme right. Tere are countless studies of the Svoboda (Freedom) party, which is surprising in light of its electoral weakness, having only won seats one time in the Ukrainian parliament in 2012 (when it received ten per cent). Svoboda failed to win any seats in the October 2014 elections and despite Ukraine being in the midst of a war with Russia, its popularity currently stands at around fve per cent. In con- trast, the Ukraine left in the 1990s and the Party of Regions and Communist Party of Ukraine, from 2002 through to the EuroMaidan, received four times as many votes as Svoboda. To a great degree the bogeyman of “” has infuenced scholarly and journalistic bias. Tis in turn was refected in studies of the crisis by pro-Russian scholars in the West, such as Richard Sakwa, who repeat- edly used infammatory language against “Ukrainian nationalism” while completely ignoring Russian nationalists and their infuence on Putin and his regime. In Ukraine, left-wing Soviet and oligarchic populist nationalism is anti-European and pro-Russian, with strong bases of support in Crimea and Donbas. Opinion polls have long suggested, for example, that Crimea is the most xenophobic re- gion in Ukraine (not “nationalist” western Ukraine). Tis reality is evident in the racism, political repressions and murder of Crimean Tatars living under Russian occupation since 2014. Russian and Soviet nationalists and communists agree with Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars in 1944 on bogus charges of “collabo- ration” with ; a deportation that led to the death of half of them en route to Central Asia. One aspect of left-wing nationalism in Ukraine that has been completely ignored is that of antisemitism. One reason is because antisemitism is usually ascribed to the extreme right, not the left; and when it was discussed within the Ukrainian context, it has usually been examined within studies of the Svoboda party, as men- tioned earlier. Tis focus seems to imply a bias, since antisemitism in contemporary 96 Opinion & Analysis The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and antisemitism, Taras Kuzio

Ukraine is most prevalent in the separatist DNR and LNR (Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics) which are kept afoat fnancially, economically and militarily by Russia. As in the former USSR, Donbas antisemitism is of course not described as such but as “anti-Zionism”, a loaded term that is used by the left to often disguise its own antisemitism. On the other side of Europe, a crisis in the UK Labour Party is evidenced by the extreme left’s denial that antisemitism, racism and xenophobia also exist within its own ranks. Eighteen Labour Party members were suspended pending investigations into allegations of antisemitism. Te roots of left-wing antisemitism in British and European political parties can, in part, be traced back to Soviet and internationalist anti-Zionism. Te National Conference on Soviet Jewry were correct in pointing out that Soviet anti-Zionism was really traditional antisemitism camoufaged as opposition to Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. Te far left in Britain had always been in thrall to the Soviet “workers’ state” and many of them, such as play- wright , had been outright apologists for a Stalinist system that had murdered millions of people and repressed workers and non-. New York Times reporter Walter Duranty became infamous for his cover up of the Ukrainian which murdered an estimated 4 – 5 million people in 1933.

Perpetuating propaganda

Te Soviet Union churned out anti-Zionist propaganda for the majority of its existence, when millions of copies of anti-Zionist literature were published and this continues to infuence contemporary Homo Sovieticus in the DNR, LNR and Russia. Anti-Zionism was widely broadcast on Soviet television and radio. It compared Zionism to Nazism and alleged that Zionists were in cahoots with the freemasons. Paradoxically, the Zionists were depicted in the same ideological niche as the “fascists”, who together sought world domination with the capitalist West and the US military-industrial complex. Propaganda authors like Yurii Kolesnikov, Lev Korneev and Evgeniy Evseev focused on the alleged collaboration of Zionists and Nazis, through a conspiracy between Jews, the Nazi SS and the Gestapo. Zion- ism and Apartheid were alleged to be political collaborators since modern racism emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition, where Jews are God’s chosen people and freemasons are basically secular Jews. Soviet anti-Zionists followed the same paths as those western revisionist historians who downplayed the number of Jews murdered in . In the 1970s Valerii Emelyanov’s memorandum to the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, for The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and antisemitism, Taras Kuzio Opinion & Analysis 97 instance, made six outrageous allegations: Zionism controls the economy and media of the West; all people in the world are slaves to the Jews; the Jews have a goal of achieving world domination by the year 2000; they will use the freemasons to achieve their goal; the main Jewish conspiratorial organisation is B’nai B’rith; and that the organisation Amnesty International, various dissident groups in the USSR, , and are all agents of the Zionists and freemasons. Includ- ing Solzhenitsyn within this group is wit historical Antisemitic Soviet hindsight paradoxical as towards the end of his life he propaganda became a mouthpiece for Putin’s propaganda against infuenced an the Orange Revolution and an apologist for his au- thoritarian regime. entire generation Te Soviet Public Anti-Zionist Committee and of Soviet citizens, the Association of Soviet Lawyers published a White some of whom Book, in a print run of 150,000, to “unmask” the ideology and practices of international Zionism. Te today are in power White Book and other examples of anti-Zionism were in Russia and the strongly condemned by the National Conference on separatist republic’s Soviet Jewry for vilifying the Jewish people, various in Ukraine’s east. Jewish religious fgures and the state of Israel. Soviet anti-Zionist pamphlets and books were no less than coded antisemitic attacks. Propaganda pieces, such as Trofm Kichko’s Judaism without Embellishment, were published in millions of copies and infuenced an entire generation of Soviet peo- ple who today are in power in Russia and the DNR and LNR. Anti-Zionism was prevalent in the political directorate of the armed forces, the KGB (where Putin was an ofcer between 1975 and 1991) as well as strongly infuencing the Russian nationalist and conservative wing of the Soviet Communist Party. Anti-Zionism permeated a large number of fctional books by authors, such as Ivan Shevtsov, where the villains were always Jews and portrayed as murderers.

New home

Te bizarre claim that the Nazis had negotiated a conspiratorial alliance with Zionists was repeated by the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who is one of the 18 members suspended from the Labour Party earlier this year. In a recent interview, Livingstone said that Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism “be- fore he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. Labour MP John Mann confronted Livingstone, condemning him as “a lying racist and a Nazi apologist”, 98 Opinion & Analysis The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and antisemitism, Taras Kuzio

adding “You’re rewriting history. Go back and check what Hitler did – the book is called Mein Kampf.” Te line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has been blurred since the 1939 – 1941 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Stalin’s USSR and Nazi Germa- ny. Today, this is refected in Putin’s courting of anti-EU neo-Nazi and national- ist-populist parties in Europe and, in the case of Marie Le Pen’s Front National, openly fnancing them. American and European nationalist-populists, neo-Nazis and the extreme left excuse Putin’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine as “defensive” and “reactive” actions in the face of an allegedly aggressive West. Contemporary Russia, like the USSR before it, is depicted as never invad- ing countries, but only being invited in or forced to intervene against its wishes. Te extreme left and extreme right both blame the EU and NATO enlargement and the promotion of US and EU democracy for Europe’s worst crisis since the Second World War. Meanwhile, Soviet anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism has found a new home in the separatist DNR and LNR. Vyacheslav Likhachev, Ukraine’s foremost expert on antisemitism, wrote that there is a “high level of antisemitism in the public dis- course” of the Donbas separatists. Likhachev added that “antisemitism has long become an important component of the ofcial ideology of the puppet regimes declared on the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, occupied by Russia”. Propaganda in the DNR and LNR, similar to that espoused by Russian nationalists and Eurasianists in the Russian Federation, understand the EuroMaidan revolution as a conspiracy between the EU (which they depict as a puppet of US imperialist designs), Jewish oligarchs (such as Ihor Kolomoyskyi) and “fascist” EuroMaidan leaders. Te mythical Soviet era alliances of Zionists with American imperialists and Nazis have re-appeared in Donbas. Contemporary Russian and Donbas separatist use of the term “anti-fascism” has been similarly imported from the language of Soviet ideological tirades against dissidents, oppositionists, nationalists and the Ukrainian diaspora. Although the (ROA), led by former Soviet General Andrei Vlasov, was far larger than Ukrainian and Baltic units in German uniforms, the Soviet regime never attacked Russian nationalist émigrés because they were never separatists (Russian nationalists never called for the independence of the Soviet Russian re- public). Ideological tirades against “bourgeois nationalists”, “agents of the West” and “Nazi hirelings” were reserved for Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians and Lithu- anians. Today, Russian leaders and Donbas separatists use the term “fascist” for any Ukrainian who supported the Orange Revolution and EuroMaidan, who does not see Ukraine as a Little Russia in the Russkiy Mir (Russian World) and supports European integration. Soviet-style designations like “bourgeois nationalist” and The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and antisemitism, Taras Kuzio Opinion & Analysis 99

“fascist” are applied to every ideological persuasion, from national communist, liberal to nationalist (and to both Ukrainian and Russian speakers).

Bizarre claims

In their obsessive-like focus on Svoboda, western scholars point primarily to homophobia when referring to Ukraine’s extreme right. In reality, extremist ideol- ogy is found to a greater extent among Soviet nationalists, Eurasianists and Pan- Slavists within Crimea and DNR-LNR, as well as in Russia. Homosexuality in Russia is routinely depicted as an example of Europe’s slide into decadence. Bill- boards erected in Ukraine in 2013 prior to the EuroMaidan by the organisation Ukrainian Way, led by close Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk, denounced the EU as an international organisation promoting same-sex marriage. After the EuroMaid- an, prominent Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin wrote that “Ukraine is in the hands of homosexuals and Jewish oligarchs”. Soviet and contemporary anti-Zionists are faced Soviet and with a similar problem, namely, their accusations do contemporary not match everyday reality. Soviet Zionist dissidents and political prisoners, for example, closely co-operated anti-Zionists with Ukrainian dissidents, and even nationalists, and are faced with a found the greatest levels of antisemitism in the Gulag similar problem: to be among Russian political and criminal prison- ers. In contemporary Ukraine the country’s Jewish their accusations community is overwhelmingly made up of Russian do not match speakers who supported the EuroMaidan and have everyday reality. backed Ukraine in its war with Russia. Tere existed among the EuroMaidan self-defence units a “Jewish Sotnia” (Company) and the nationalist Pravvy Sektor gave a gun salute at the funeral of one of the Sotnia of- fcers, Aleksandr Scherbanyuk, who was murdered by Berkut police snipers. Te Jewish population from the DNR and LNR escaped to Ukraine, fearing persecu- tion amidst anti-Zionist propaganda and economic collapse. Eliyahu Zilberbord, a leader of the Jewish community in Donetsk, jokingly commented that “Jews are running from the Russian world to hide under the wing of the fascist Kyiv junta.” DNR and LNR leaders undertake excruciating contortions to seek to explain why Jewish leaders support the EuroMaidan. Quite bizarrely, they claim that Ukrainian leaders are actually Jews who have disguised their names. President Petro Poroshenko, for example, is described as a Jew whose has Slavicised his Jewish name. Similar insinuations have also been made against former prime minister, Arseniy Yatse- 100 Opinion & Analysis The Soviet roots of anti-fascism and antisemitism, Taras Kuzio

nyuk, and the Batkivshchina (Fatherland) party leader Yulia Tymoshenko. During the 2010 Ukrainian presidential elections, the Party of Regions and Viktor Yanu- kovych’s election campaign made similar antisemitic claims against Tymoshenko. Igor Plotnitsky and Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the so-called prime ministers of the DNR and LNR respectively, ridiculed the “pathetic Jews in power in Ukraine”. Zakharchenko said on Rossiya-24 television that Ukrainian leaders are “miserable representatives of the great Jewish people”. In other words Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda has returned, claiming Jews are now manipulating Ukrainians just as they were manipulating westerners during the . Assertions of innocence of antisemitism will continue because Russian na- tionalists and the extreme left-wing of the UK Labour Party, similar to its allies on the European far left, will continue to deny that its anti-Zionism has anything to do with antisemitism. Similarly, Russian nationalists and antisemites continue to mythically portray their struggle alongside Donbas separatists against Ukrain- ian “fascists” without looking in the mirror at their own ideologies, Nazi symbols, raised-arm salutes and xenophobic and conspiratorial myths. Nevertheless, it is high time to recognise three factors. First, the scourge of racism, xenophobia and antisemitism exists on the extreme left and the extreme right of European and American politics. Second, Russia is fnancially and militarily supporting Soviet- ophile xenophobes and anti-Zionist (i.e. antisemitic) separatists in Donbas. And fnally, Russia’s alliance with Europe’s neo-Nazi and nationalist populist right is the modern day equivalent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but this time Putin and Le Pen are the organ grinders.

Taras Kuzio is a senior research fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. His book Russia’s War Against Ukraine: Nationalism, Identity and Crime is due to be published later this year.