article<\/a> you wrote, published on change.org, cosigned by numerous academics in the field of Ukrainian history and sociology, warns journalists to be careful to not dismiss Maidan as co-opted by extremists. You declare the makeup of Maidan as simply reflection of Ukrainian Society. Do you feel that the moderate parts of the movement need to take steps to limit the growth of fringe right or left elements within Euromaidan due to its present on the world stage and visibility?<\/p>\nYes, I would say so. The extreme right in particular has gained a prominence which is now becoming detrimental to the aims of the movement, however, the problem is: how do you do that? The movement here understands itself as a people’s movement, and it so happens that the people among the people who assemble here, there are also these nationalists and extreme nationalists. And they’ve also now gained some legitimacy now because they’ve taken part in the violent clashes with the special police forces.<\/strong><\/p>\nThey have “proven themselves useful”?<\/p>\n
Yes, one could say so. They, in a way, defended the Euromaidan – or, they took part in its defense – they are not the only ones who used violence, but they were certainly among the crowd with sticks and stones who defended the Euromaidan from attack by the special [Berkut] police units. That’s now a difficult situation indeed, but it doesn’t change the core of this entire insurrection, which is not about nationalism or right wing extremism, but as I mentioned, about these European or “Western” values.<\/strong><\/p>\nSo it’s now a complicated situation, and one shouldn’t dismiss these complications, but one should also not use these complications to defame the entire movement here, to call it fascist or right-wing extremist, which would be wrong. It would be right for a certain section of the movement here, but it would be wrong for the majority of people active here.<\/strong><\/p>\nHow do you see Svoboda fitting in to the conclusion of Euromaidan? Will their party membership grow due to increased exposure, and would this be a good thing for Ukraine if it did?<\/p>\n
To start with the last question: it would be bad, because this is a party that is ultranationalist, and that is also dividing the country. The paradox of Svoboda is that it sees itself, calls itself an All-Ukrainian Union, when in fact it has a nationalist ideology which doesn’t cover the all of Ukraine. They have an ethno-centrist discourse which is very much rejected in southern and eastern Ukraine, who have another view on their national identity in Ukraine. That is why it would be certainly bad if they would gain from this protest.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nBut so far, the opinion polls indicate that they are not actually gaining from it. They are very present here, and they also have maybe the most talented orator, a man called Oleh Tyahnybok, the party leader, who is very effective on the stage, on the podium. He’s rhetorically very strong, and he’s also a very experienced politician. He was already here on the Maidan in 1990 when the first anti-Soviet revolution took place, it was the so called “Granite Revolution” because it took place on granite stone. Tyanianbok is, as far as I understand, the only prominent political leader here who was already, back then, at this place, actively demonstrating. This experience now is visible – he is more experienced than the others. But, paradoxically, in the polls this is not reflected. The party is not doing particularly well.<\/strong><\/p>\nAbout 5%, yes?<\/p>\n
Yes. Tyahnybok, in the last poll that I saw, had support of 4%, the party had support of around 6%, but in the last elections they actually got over 10%. So compared to 2012, Svoboda seems to have lost support, oddly. So in spite of all this presence here on on Maidan, the party as a whole has not yet gained from it. That’s why it also doesn’t make sense to compare developments here with, let’s say, those in the Arab countries, where sort of anti-Western forces have then gained, actually, prominence. The support simply is not here for either the exrta-parliamentary right or for the intra-parliamentary extreme-right.<\/strong><\/p>\nTyanyabok has toned down his nationalist rhetoric since Euromaidan began. He was skeptical of EU integration, but he turned that around and toned down a few other of his more radicalized notions. It seems like he is attempting to drive Svoboda to a more moderate place within Ukrainian politics. Is this a temporary gesture made to gain acceptance from the primarily moderate forces within Euromaidan? Will he revert to his previous ideologies after it concludes, or is this a true reversal?<\/p>\n
You’re very well informed that you know some of these subtleties…<\/strong><\/p>\nBest I could do before I arrived!<\/p>\n
Well, you did some reading obviously…that’s indeed what happened, actually. It has actually less to do with the Euromaidan than with the last parliamentary elections when the party got much more support than everybody expected, and much of this support was from well-educated urban, pro-European, pro-Western voters, who voted for Svoboda because they wanted a disciplined and effective party in the parliament that would take up the fight against the [Yanakovich] regime. These were non-ideological voters, or only partly ideological voters. “Strategic voters” one could call them, “protest voters”, “tactical voters” – who wanted a disciplined, radical anti-[Yanakovich] regime party in the government. So this move to the center has already been taking place before Euromaidan, but it had now, I would say, accelerated, because Svoboda is now an integral part of this coalition, at least on the surface. The coaltion, [called the Maidan People’s Union, comprises] …the two democratic parties, the Fatherland party of Tymoshenko and Yatsenyuk, and the so-called Ukraininan Movement for Democratic Reforms (UDAR), [lead by] the former boxer Vitali Klitschko. They are democrats.<\/strong><\/p>\nAnd Tyahnybok’s party, Svoboda, is more of a nationalistic party, but they have moved to the center, they have become more national-democratic, at least for the time being. We don’t know where this will lead to – whether the party will become a sort of moderate nationalist conservative party or if it will move again to the political fringe. This is now an extraordinary situation here, and so in this situation there are different rules than in normal politics. Maybe in normal politics the party would move again to the right, that’s very difficult to predict.<\/strong><\/p>\nBut for now, one has to admit that this party has been a rather disciplined part of the opposition and has behaved, in most regards, constructively. The most nonconstructive has been perhaps its promotion of wartime Ukrainian nationalist symbols and slogans, which are alienating the eastern and southern Ukrainians from Euromaidan.<\/strong><\/p>\nI met a Ukrainian girl earlier today in front of the stage on Independence Square. In our conversation, she pointed to the large photo of Stepan Bandera set up left of the stage, referring to him as a hero of her people. Bandera is reviled by some for his involvement with the Nazis during WW2, and for the acts of mass killing of Poles and Jews comitted by the paramilitary group he began, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA). It is difficult for some, especially in the West, to accept glorification of a man with such history. How would you recommend Westerners understand why even moderate Ukrainians like him so much?<\/p>\n
The personality of Bandera is particularly complicated issue. There were other ultranationalist leaders who were indeed collaborators with the Nazis, like the one-time commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Party, Roman Shukhevych, who also fought for the Wehrmacht. But Bandera himself was actually in a German concentration camp. During much of WW2, he was under German arrest, so he is a very complicated figure to interpret because he cannot be made directly responsible for some of the crimes that were comitted, presumably, by Ukrainian ultranationlists of his movement during WW2 against Poles, Jews, and fellow Ukrainians.<\/strong><\/p>\nSo Bandera is a complicated and tragic figure of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, but he was, eternally, a leading figure. He was also an ideologist of the movement, and while he was, in a way, a freedom fighter – the Ukraine that he wanted to build, at least for a while, was a totalitarian Ukraine, an ultranationlist Ukraine for Ukrainians, with a basically totalitarian state structure. The thing is that he never got there, so he was never able to implement these ideas. The only thing that he did, the nationalists – they fought against Soviet and German occupation, and that is what is remembered. The fight against occupation for independence. What is less remembered is what would have followed after independence, but that never occurred. Like in Croatia, for instance the Usta\u0161e, who came to power. The organization of Ukrainian nationalists never came to power. We cannot even be sure what they would have done had they gotten state power, how they would have behaved nor what their policies would have been. But Bandera, certainly, is a very controversial figure. It’s a big problem within Ukraine because he’s seen by one part of Ukraine as a hero, by the other as a trator. It’s also a problem in Polish-Ukrainian and Jewish-Ukrainian relations, because classical Ukrainian nationalism was anti-Polish and anti-Jewish, so yes, this a problematic aspect of this movement.<\/strong><\/p>\nHow do you explain the disparity between Svoboda’s visibility at Euromaidan and their relatively low numbers of membership within the country?<\/p>\n
Well, that’s in a way the problem of street-politics – it’s not fully representative. I would say the Euromaidan, as a whole, sort of represents the Ukrainian nation, because you have here southern, eastern Ukrainians, you have Russian speakers, Ukrainian speakers.<\/strong><\/p>\nBut one has to say that the western Ukrainians – often these are Svoboda supporters – they are over-represented here. They are active, they are mobilized, they are disciplined, they are the most resolute part of the opposition here, out of nationalism. They are nationalists. That is what is driving them and that’s what makes them visible here. They have also been covered a lot by the media.<\/strong><\/p>\nThis is one of your issues, I believe?<\/p>\n
Yeah, I mean I’m not against covering this part of the protest – this is actually not so much about Svoboda, but about the extra-parliamentary right, the so-called Right Sector. So they should be analyzed and covered and also criticized, obviously. The issue is more that Euromaidan has been identified with this part. It is a part of the Euromaidan but it’s not the driving force, it’s not what the ideology of the movement is about. So yes, this is a problematic aspect of the protests, in that you have both the non-violent parliamentary protests, or parliamentary parties that take part in the protests, you have an ultra-nationalist force [Svoboda], or at least a former ultranationalist force, and you have also the extra-parliamentary lunatic fringe, having a large presence here on the streets.<\/strong><\/p>\nIf there lie extreme fringe elements within Euromaidan, how do they compare to extreme elements from without, such as The Communist Party of Ukraine, Russian Block, Russian Unity? Those parties are, proportionally, much less powerful, especially given their lack of involvement in Euromaidan.<\/p>\n
Well, in a way they are just a mirror-image. The communist party here is maybe not so much about communism, but an orientation towards Russia. They, in a way, promote a different vision of the Ukrainian nation than the Svoboda nationalists, who have a more ethnocentric view. The Communist Party [of Ukraine] and similar groups – the Russian Block, Rodina – there is also a strange group called the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine – what they actually promote is Ukraine as being part of the larger, all-Russian nation, that Ukraine should unite with Russia, and this would be the nation to which Ukrainians would then also belong. [These groups] also have a presence in parliament, they are also over-represented in eastern and southern Ukraine in the local and regional parliaments, so there is clearly this confrontation between these two different views of the Ukrainian nation.<\/strong><\/p>\nSome of these parties have referred to the people of Euromaidan as fascist. What are your thoughts about that classification?<\/p>\n
Well, there are probably people at Euromaidan whom want to be called fascist. The point I would make is that, certainly, there are these fascists, there are also anarchists, other radicals at Euromaidan, but that’s how it is. This is not what makes the protest movement what it is. They take part in it, they also play a certain part in it, but on the whole the movement is about justice, freedom, rule-of-law, democracy, all of these things. There’s a tension, then, of course, between these radical activists from the radical right or radical left and their values, and the actual mainstream ideology of the movement. But paradoxically, so far these radical right elements have, if you think in the logic of Euromaidan, perhaps even played a positive role because they actively defended Euromaidan from these special police units.<\/strong><\/p>\nLast weekend there was an incident in which men allegedly hired by the government – “titushki” – attempted to dismantle a barricade at Euromaidan. I don’t know how many extra-parliamentary right-wing extremists composed the force which reacted to this attempt, but the group dismantling the barricade were swiftly repelled.<\/p>\n
And peacefully repelled, this time, because there was no violence from the attackers and there was also no violence from the defenders, fortunately. The problem is that we have these young men here in their masks, with their armor and all these things, and we don’t really know who they are. Are they from Right Sector, maybe left-wingers? Do they have any formulated ideology? Some of them maybe just there because they are in favor of justice. Or maybe some of them just have fun doing that, I would’t even exclude that. There’s no research so far on what the relative weight of these right-wing extremists is in the [Euromaidan] defense forces. I guess they do play a significant role there, but maybe they are not even the majority of the defenders here.<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat if any change will Ukraine’s population of Jews, non-ethnic Ukrainians and those identifying as LGBT see if the Euromaidan movement is successful in unseating the government? Or is this not an issue for most Ukrainians?<\/p>\n
I don’t think it’s that much of an issue. The current [Yanukovich] government is also very much anti-gay, there was a whole propaganda campaign by the current power-holders blaming the European Union for too much liberalism concerning sexual minorities and for wanting to impose this sort of liberal approach to sexual minorities in Ukraine. This sort of homophobia, as one has to admit, is spread over all of Ukraine, so it’s nothing special.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nIs Euromaidan a movement, or a revolution?<\/p>\n
Well it’s both – it has become now a revolutionary movement, because they don’t want to just change the elite, they actually want to change the country in a fundamental way, to Europeanize it. And so, we will see whether it will be, at the end, a revolution, but many here see themselves as revolutionaries.<\/strong><\/p>\nThank you Andreas, for meeting with me after such short notice. I really appreciate it.<\/p>\n
Sure.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"February 14th, 2014 When researching the politics of and interactions between the various right and left-wing groups who struggle for political supremacy in modern Ukraine, one is certain to encounter the work of scholar Andreas Umland, a German political science and history authority who teaches at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, Ukraine. While preparing for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":450,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/458"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1030,"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/458\/revisions\/1030"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/richemyers.nfshost.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}