Ukrainian nationalism
[2] Nationalism emerged after the French Revolution while modern day Ukraine faced external pressure from the suzerainty of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Tsardom of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
They have played an important role in European geopolitics, participating in a series of conflicts and alliances with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.
[7] These conflicts created the conditions for Ukrainian nationalism as Bohdan Khmelnytsky spoke of the liberation of the "entire Ruthenian people".
After 1785 the Romanov dynasty made a conscious effort to assimilate the Ruthenian and Cossack elites by granting them noble status within the Russian Empire.
[14] As Bolshevik rule took hold in Ukraine, the early Soviet government had its own reasons to encourage the national movements of the former Russian Empire.
Until the early 1930s, Ukrainian culture enjoyed a widespread revival due to Bolshevik concessions known as the policy of Korenization ("indigenization").
The Ukrainization policies were abruptly and bloodily reversed, most of the Ukrainian cultural and political elite was arrested and executed, and the nation was decimated with the famine called the Holodomor.
After World War I ended in 1918, the newly created Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) and the Soviet Union (1922–1991) each annexed a part of the territory of present-day Ukraine.
[15] On 25 May 1926, at 14:12, by the Gibert bookstore, Petliura was walking on Rue Racine near Boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter in Paris and was approached by Sholom Schwartzbard.
[citation needed] The blind kobzars Pavlo Hashchenko and Ivan Kuchuhura Kucherenko composed a duma (epic poem) in memory of Symon Petliura.
This duma became popular among the kobzars of left-bank Ukraine and was also sung by Stepan Pasiuha, Petro Drevchenko, Bohushchenko, and Chumak.
[23][24][22] Hołówko was killed while staying in a guest house owned by nuns of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church at Truskawiec on 29 August 1931.
[26][27][a] Some time later, Emilian Czechowski, a senior Polish police commissioner investigating Hołówko's assassination, also became an OUN assassination-victim.
[28][25] In the early 1930s, OUN members carried out more than 60 successful or attempted assassinations, many of them targeted at Ukrainians who opposed the organization's policies (for example a respected educator Ivan Babij).
On 15 June 1934, Poland's Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki, was also assassinated by the faction led by Stepan Bandera within the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
Stalin also felt that Konovalets was a figure maintaining the unity of the OUN and that his death would cause the organization to become further factionalized, torn apart, and annihilated from within.
With the outbreak of war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, many nationalists in Ukraine thought that they would have an opportunity to create an independent country once again.
[33]: 47–51 The primary goal of OUN was "the rebirth, of setting everything in order, the defense and the expansion of the Independent Council of Ukrainian National State."
[34][35] The ethnic cleansing operation against the Poles began on a large scale in Volhynia in late February, or early spring,[35] of that year and lasted until the end of 1944.
On that day, UPA units surrounded and attacked 99 Polish villages and settlements in the counties of Kowel, Horochów, and Włodzimierz Wołyński.
[45] There was also a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalist thought, associated with dissident writers such as Viacheslav Chornovil, Ivan Dziuba and Valentyn Moroz, which the authorities tried to stamp out through threats, arrests, and prison sentences.
As such, he was a very influential person in the Soviet Union, and led a very reactionary administration, aimed at centralizing power and suppressing dissent.
Under Mikhail Gorbachev, a new era of Perestroika and Glasnost was instituted primarily to fix structural problems with the Soviet economy.
According to professor Per Anders Rudling, this not only allowed Viatrovych to sanitize ultra-nationalist history but also to officially promote its dissemination along with OUN(b) ideology, which is based on "ethnic purity" coupled with anti-Russian, anti-Polish, and antisemitic rhetoric.
[67] The autonomous nationalists focus on recruiting young people, participating in violent actions, and advocating "anti-bourgeoism, anti-capitalism, anti-globalism, anti-democratism, anti-liberalism, anti-bureaucratism, anti-dogmatism".
'[76] Although certain neo-Nazi-like groups such as the Azov Battalion participated in Euromaidan (alongside many other groups), and some were incorporated into the Ukrainian military and deployed in Donbas, that didn't make the Zelenskyy government 'neo-Nazis', said Jansen, who pointed out that Volodymyr Zelenskyy (elected president in 2019) is Jewish and his family has suffered in the Holocaust, with several relatives being killed by the Nazis.
[78] In June 2015, Democratic Representative John Conyers and his Republican colleague Ted Yoho offered bipartisan amendments to block the U.S. military training of Ukraine's Azov Battalion.
[89] The Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War in Donbas have in the post-2014 years led to profound political, socio-economic and cultural-religious consequences for Ukrainian society.
[90] The radical nationalists group С14, whose members openly expressed neo-Nazi views, gained notoriety in 2018 for being involved in violent attacks on Romany camps.
There was also a rapid shift in pro-Ukrainian attitudes in the eastern part of the country, including people vowing to use the Ukrainian language more.
