According to https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY (Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine: NEWSNIGHT, 2014) nazi/far right groups are more popular in ukraine than left wing groups.
I’d have thought the communist groups would have come out on top since i’d think they read more theory than nazi groups.
to greatly oversimplify; before, during, and after WWII Ukraine harboured Nazis, though after the war they went underground.
The CIA encouraged these cells of Nazis through the cold war, which included “”“education”“”, free propaganda, funding, and promised military support (a quick aside, my father was an Airborne Ranger in the 80s, he was stationed in Berlin and required to learn Ukrainian as part of his mission. Though his true mission was classified and he was never told what it actually was, he believes he would have been required to drop into Ukraine to link up with the anti-communist cells and lead them against the Soviets).
After the fall of the Soviet Union, conservative groups ended up in control of a lot of the Ex-SRs including Ukraine. Some speculate the CIA may have been behind the sudden popularity of liberal democratic dictators in Eastern Europe, and it’s speculated that Ukraine was one of those Eastern European countries that the CIA led a colour revolution in.
Those conservative governments banned communism, and spread anti-communist propaganda through the state apparatuses. So now 30 years since the Union fell, people who are in their 20s and younger have only known anti-soviet narratives and believe the USSR to have been a dictatorship of the few over the many, that enforced its authority with violence. The older generation are discredited as “out of touch” when they defend the USSR, and much of the generation that remembers the USSR has memories of the troubled times of the 70s and 80s when reformists destroyed the security of the proletarian class, and willingly accept anti-communist propaganda about those hard times. To sum this paragraph; people have been propagandized to a point of fully believing the Soviet times were worse than times are now, and reject that communism is the answer to stopping the hellish reality they live in.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is true of energy, and it is true of politics. The rise of communism will inherently entail the rise of a reactionary ideology to counter it. The suppression of an extreme will only create the rise of the opposite extreme. The direct result of suppressing Marxism-Leninism, is the rise of Fascism. The direct result of the rise of Fascism in Ukraine was the rise of Communism in Donbas. The suppression of Communism in Donbas and Ukraine as a whole as a reaction against the rise of it only inspired more Fascism in Mariupol and western Ukraine. It’s a self digging hole.
When people can not read Communist literature or openly discuss Communist theory, people will try to explain the bad parts of their reality in some other way, which almost always results in people reading Fascist literature and openly discussing Fascist theory. This is the disease that’s plaguing Eastern Europe.
And as a result of decades of anti-communist propaganda, slander and NATO’s imperialist influences, Ukraine is the only European country to openly “officially” allow and integrate neo-nazi militias into their armed forces.
So now 30 years since the Union fell, people who are in their 20s and younger have only known anti-soviet narratives and believe the USSR to have been a dictatorship of the few over the many, that enforced its authority with violence.
Over here, people in their 30s and younger have only learnt the narrative that social welfare is good via school but they still grow up and vote to defund social welfare for some reason. Any ideas how ukraine manged to actually convince citizens of anti-communist narriatives? since schools over here can’t even convince ppl to vote for social welfare.
According to my podcast listening and such (find your own sources tbh) the US funded nationalist (Nazi collaborator) groups fighting the Sovjets after the war, and when these were crushed they funded exiled ultra-nationalist Banderites throughout the cold war.
These far-right exile groups promoted and funded a revionist view of history, which draws a false equivalence between the Nazis and the USSR and tries to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators, Holocaust perpetrators and mass murderers like Stepan Bandera as heroes and freedom fighters against sovjet oppression. In the 90s, this view was adopted in Eastern European countries in order to promote Nationalism and Anti-Communism and reduce Russian influence. The balkanization of the USSR basically.
In the Maidan coup of 2014 these sort of US promoted Nazis were instrumental, and subsequently gained government positions. They then got sent to Eastern Ukraine as paramilitary forces in order to intimidate and fight the protestors and rebels there, since the regular forces weren’t very enthusiastic about that. The funding came from pro-Western oligarchs at first, but they have since been given official status as part of the national guard.
tl;dr They got money from the US, oligarchs and now also the Ukranian state. Communists get a beating.
According to my podcast listening and such (find your own sources tbh) the US funded nationalist (Nazi collaborator) groups fighting the Sovjets after the war, and when these were crushed they funded exiled ultra-nationalist Banderites throughout the cold war.
Based on what happened in south america, i could see this.
Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union has been parasited by staunch anti-communism. It is just overcorrection, a standard thing. That and Western propaganda.
The far right currently is more successful than any leftist movement in much of Europe, not just Ukraine.
This is a natural consequence of the psychosocial phenomenon Marx called alienation. As US imperialism works nonstop to savagely destroy workers’ movements and petty-bourgeois “socialism” is pinned down into subservience (see the recent, terrible experience of Greek socialism), vicious and destructive ideologies which offer a false hope of protection through class discrimination and violence take root simply because they are the path of least resistance for the exploited.
