One Of The Most Intelligent, Informative Articles On The Situation In Ukraine That I Have Read. I Highly Recommend It! Volodymyr Ishchenko... became part of Ukraine’s Marxist milieu while studying at the National University of Kyiv–Mohyla Academy, where, despite the institution’s pro-Western orientation, a small leftist subculture emerged in the later 2000s; this included the journal Spilne (Commons), of which he is one of the founding editors. Within an intellectual scene dominated by nationalist themes, Spilne sought to redirect attention to socio-economic questions from an explicitly internationalist, and anti-capitalist, perspective. Did the far-right groups now active in Ukraine—Svoboda, Right Sector, Trident—have some kind of clandestine existence under Soviet rule? Volodymyr Ishchenko: No, they emerged after 1991. There were some diaspora nationalist groups in the West who went back to independent Ukraine in 1991–92, but they weren’t successful. Svoboda was originally founded in 1991 as the Social-National Party of Ukraine—a none-too-subtle reference to National Socialism—and borrowed a lot from the legacy of Ukrainian nationalism, but at the same time tried to draw on the experience of West European far-right movements like the Front National. Right Sector is a recent phenomenon, it emerged as an umbrella coalition of various far-right groups. Some of them are overt neo-Nazis—for example, Patriot of Ukraine, which uses the Wolfsangel symbol, is unambiguously racist: it was involved in arson attacks on migrant hostels. Right Sector also includes the Social-National Assembly and the Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian National Self-Defence (una–unso). The major group in Right Sector, Trident—Tryzub, in Ukrainian—is not neo-Nazi, but they are certainly far-right, radical nationalists. It would be too soft to call them just national conservatives, as some experts do—including Anton Shekhovtsov, who is quite active in English-language analysis of the far right in Ukraine. Right Sector has now been registered as a political party.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 13:56:59 +0000