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33
English translation © 2013 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2011 ZIMOS
(Zentralinstitut für Mittel- und Osteuropastudien). “Pravoradikal’naia partiinaia
politika v postsovetskoi Ukraine i zagadka elektoral’noi marginal’nosti ukrainskikh
ul’tranatsionalistov v 1994–2009 gg.,” Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii
i kul’tury, vol. 8, no. 2 (2011), pp. 157–80 (www.academia.edu/323613/_1994-2009,
accessed 7 August 2013). Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.
This article first appeared in Ab Imperio (2010, no. 2). We are grateful to two
anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the first draft of the article
and to Il’ia Gerasimov for effective collaboration. We have also presented some of
the arguments developed here in Anton Shekhovtsov, “By Cross and Sword: ‘Cleri-
cal Fascism’ in Interwar Western Ukraine,” Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions, vol. 8, no. 2 (2007), pp. 271–85; Andreas Umland, “Kraine slabye,”
Korrespondent, 21 June 2008, p. 34; Umland, “Die andere Anomalie der Ukraine:
ein Parlament ohne rechtsradikale Fraktionen,” Ukraine-Analysen, 2008, no. 41,
pp. 7–10; and Shekhovtsov, “The Creeping Resurgence of the Ukrainian Radical
Right? The Case of the Freedom Party,” Europe–Asia Studies, vol. 63, no. 2 (2011),
pp. 203–28.
Notes renumbered for this edition.—Ed.
Russian Politics and Law, vol. 51, no. 5, September–October 2013, pp. 33–58.
© 2013 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.com
ISSN 1061–1940 (print)/ISSN 1558–0962 (online)
DOI: 10.2753/RUP1061-1940510502
An d r e A s Um l A n d A n d An t o n sh e k h o v t s o v
Ultraright Party Politics in Post-Soviet
Ukraine and the Puzzle of the
Electoral Marginalism of Ukrainian
Ultranationalists in 1994–2009
The authors consider the past, present, and possible future position of
ultraright parties in Ukraine in the comparative context of Eastern Europe
and Europe as a whole.
“What happened to the nationalists in Ukraine?”—thus Paul Kubicek
titled a 1999 article in which he tried to explain the relatively insignifi-
cant role played by extreme nationalist parties in Ukrainian politics in
the 1990s.1 Little has changed since then with regard to the marginal
34 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
position of ultranationalist groups in the Kyiv political space.2 Ukrainian
nationalism certainly exists and in recent years has become a popular
theme in the post-Soviet mass media, but the political relevance of this
issue often has virtual as well as real sources.
The unexpected victory of the ultraright All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda
under the leadership of Oleh Tiahnybok in the preterm elections in Ter-
nopil oblast was indeed impressive. In the elections, which took place
on 15 March 2009, Svoboda gained the support of 34.69 percent of those
who went to the polls, while the closest competitor of the ultranational-
ists, the propresidential United Center, obtained only 14.2 percent of the
vote. As a result, the Extreme Right received 50 of the 120 seats on the
Ternopil oblast council and a member of Svoboda, Oleksii Kaida, became
head of the council presidium. Nevertheless, the national significance of
this undoubtedly important success of Tiahnybok’s organization is still
unclear.3 The turnout in these elections was low. A number of prominent
Ukrainian politicians of the nonpresidential Orange camp—for example,
Yulia Tymoshenko, Arsenii Yatseniuk, and Anatolii Hrytsenko—took no
active part in the election campaign.4
Be that as it may, the chief source of the current “popularity” of the
theme of Ukrainian nationalism in the post-Soviet mass media is the
phenomenon that the influential Kyiv weekly Ukraïns’kyi tyzhden’ has
called the media “Hitlerization” of Ukrainian politics.5 This expression
refers to the manipulation of the information flow from Ukraine in the
Russian and pro-Russian media with a view to creating a negative image
of the Ukrainian authorities by (1) blowing up matters of little signifi-
cance, such as the sale of Hitler dolls from Taiwan in a single Ukrainian
store, (2) oversimplifying complex historical processes, such as the ac-
tions of fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during and after World
War II, or (3) manufacturing baseless scandals, such as a libel against
Andrii Yushchenko, the late father of the Ukrainian president—a former
prisoner in the Flossenburg concentration camp—in a book written in
Russian by a mythical “Jewish historian” named “Iurii Vil’ner” and is-
sued by a nonexistent Pakistani Publishing House.6 Despite these and
other campaigns waged by certain Russian media outlets and directly or
indirectly inspired by the Russian political establishment—campaigns
that are sometimes successful in Western Europe, too—Ukraine is in fact
a special case in the East European and even in the general European
context in precisely the opposite sense.
This article has three goals: (1) to draw attention to the “anomalous”
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 35
nature of the electoral weakness of radically ethnocentric Ukrainian
parties from a comparative point of view; (2) briefly to examine the his-
tory of the development of the ultraright political scene in Ukraine over
the last fifteen years; and (3) to put forward a few hypotheses to explain
why Ukrainian ultranationalism remains marginal at the national level.
A definitive answer to the question of why the Ukrainian extreme right
did not succeed in the parliamentary elections of 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006,
and 2007 is beyond the scope of our investigation.
Ukraine as a “Doubly Anomalous” Case in Postcommunist
Politics
Ukraine already has a good reputation among political scientists and
students of contemporary world history. In 2004, Ukrainians aston-
ished the world when without a single shot they successfully carried
out a mass demonstration of civil disobedience, lasting many days, that
came to be known as the Orange Revolution.7 It is remarkable that con-
temporary Ukraine—after the recent relative failures of new waves of
democratization in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia—remains the only former
republic of the Soviet Union as constituted in 1922 still moving toward
democracy.8 Admittedly, we might point out that only part of present-day
Ukraine belonged to the Soviet Union as early as 1922. In this sense,
present-day western Ukraine belongs to the Central rather than to the
East European context, and in some ways resembles the Baltic countries
more closely than it does other former Soviet republics. A majority of
the most important figures of the Orange Revolution, however, come not
from Galicia, Transcarpathia, Volhynia, or Bukovina but from central or
eastern Ukraine—for example, Viktor Yushchenko comes from Sumy
oblast, Yulia Timoshenko from Dnepropetrovsk, and Oleksandr Moroz
from Kyiv oblast. The second “orange” prime minister of Ukraine, Yuriy
Yekhanurov, is a Buriat born in Siberia. Thus, in contrast to the first demo-
cratic wave of 1989–91, which really did originate in western Ukraine,
the “bourgeois” traditions of pre-Soviet interwar Ukraine played only a
relative role in the events of 2004. The Orange Revolution remains an
exceptional phenomenon in the post-Soviet world.9
Although these facts are well known, another, no less astonishing
distinction of post-Soviet Ukraine has gone almost unremarked in inter-
national political science: for many years now, there have been no ultra-
nationalist factions in the Ukrainian parliament. The political landscapes
36 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
of other East European states comparable with Ukraine demonstrate
why this fortunate situation should not be taken for granted. Whether
we consider Slavic states like Poland and Slovakia, which have already
been members of the European Union (EU) for several years, or new EU
members such as Bulgaria and Romania, which—like Ukraine—belong
to the Orthodox tradition, or Ukraine’s Orthodox-Slavic “brothers” Serbia
and Russia, which are developing separately from the rest of Europe, we
discover that in most of the partly or wholly pluralistic states of postso-
cialist Europe extreme nationalist groups have become well-established
participants in the public discourse and political life of their countries.10
This development finds expression primarily in the relative success of
the extreme right in parliamentary and presidential elections. The politi-
cal significance of postcommunist ultranationalism also manifests itself
in the not always constant but nonetheless marked presence of various
ultraright or right-wing populist factions in East European national or
federal legislatures and, recently, in the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe and in the European Parliament of the EU.
Right-Wing Extremism in Eastern and Western Europe
From a comparative point of view these East European developments are
not surprising. In a frequently cited 1967 article, the German political
scientists Erwin K. Scheuch and Hans Dieter Klingemann defined right-
wing extremism as a “normal pathology” of Western industrial societies.11
Ultraright parties currently exist in all European countries, and in many
they are constant participants in politics.12 Of course, not all ultraright
parties have much support from society. Neofascist and ultraright par-
ties function on the periphery of political life and are often subjected
by the state to legal and police pressure that impedes or even prevents
their participation in electoral processes. At the same time, many new
ultraright parties in the EU have managed to modernize their ideology
and adapt to the contemporary political situation, which is character-
ized by the stable adherence of European states to liberal-democratic
sociopolitical systems.
The ideological foundations of most new ultraright parties in Western
and Eastern Europe are a hybrid of openly antidemocratic and more or
less effective pseudodemocratic views.13 On the one hand, these parties
stand for the preservation, formation, and reproduction of an ethnically
and/or ethnoculturally homogeneous type of society, in opposition to
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 37
the ideas of multiculturalism, the rights of the individual (rather than
the nation), and political equality that underlie the political regimes of
postwar Europe. On the other hand, they publicly insist on their loyalty to
such key democratic values as the principle of constitutionalism and the
institution of free elections. Taking advantage of the inability of present-
day liberal democracy fully to resolve all the problems that arise under
conditions of globalization and postindustrialization, the new ultraright
parties exploit the political, economic, and social tensions inherent in
contemporary European states for the purpose of destroying the public
consensus regarding the basic principles of a democratic society. Against
this backdrop, the relative political relevance of ultranationalism in
today’s constantly self-transforming capitalist societies appears, in a
certain sense, “natural.”
If this kind of “normal pathology” is characteristic of the highly
developed, stable, and relatively long-established democracies of the
West, then how much “more normal” is the presence of ultranationalist
factions in parliaments shaken by the deep crises of transitional postso-
cialist states with their weak traditions of pluralism, unstable political
institutions, numerous economic problems, and underdeveloped civil
society! Both social science theory and civic intuition suggest that in
view of the stressful situations that the inhabitants of Eastern Europe had
to endure in the 1990s, the popularity of such odious political figures as
Vojislav Seselj (Serbian Radical Party), Vadim Tudor (Great Romania
Party), Vladimir Zhirinovsky (Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia), and
Volen Siderov (Bulgarian National Union Ataka) is not surprising. Nor
is it particularly amazing in this context that in Slovakia and Poland the
ultraright Slovak National Party and League of Polish Families should
have temporarily joined governing coalitions.
In Western Europe the notable electoral success of political parties
of this type is also no exception: it suffices to recall the stable electoral
support won by such right-wing radicals as Jean-Marie Le Pen (French
National Front), the now deceased Jörg Haider (Austrian Freedom Party,
Alliance for the Future of Austria), or Gianfranco Fini (Italian National
Alliance). The absence of right-wing populist or ultraright factions
from the national legislatures of a few European states such as Germany
and Great Britain is something of an exception and reflects the special
sociopolitical and historical traditions of these countries. In the United
Kingdom, in particular, the majoritarian electoral system creates obstacles
for all small parties, including those of the extreme right. In Germany,
38 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
important factors are obviously the policy of Vergangenheitsbewältigung
(overcoming of the past) and the idea of wehrhafte Demokratie (self-
defending democracy), which involve numerous measures by the state
and purposive actions by German elites aimed against any attempts by
German nationalists to return to parliamentary politics or public discourse
at the federal level. After World War II, a special political culture of con-
trition emerged in Germany, thanks to which right-wing extremism was
marginalized in the country to a greater degree than in other European
states.14 Apart from these systemic factors, we must note that the main
ultraright parties in Britain and Germany today—that is, the British
National Party and the National-Democratic Party of Germany—stand
out against the background of their West European “colleagues” by their
especially extremist views and openly neofascist past.15
In this context, the political landscapes of many East European states
even appear relatively favorable.16 Despite the deep sociocultural crises
that these countries went through in the 1990s and their still significantly
lower standards of living, the electoral results of ultraright parties and
politicians in Eastern Europe in recent years have been only slightly bet-
ter than those of similar parties and politicians in Western Europe. But
what happened to the ultranationalists in Ukraine?17
Ukrainian Right-Wing Extremism in the 1990s
It is not surprising that during the Soviet period radical Ukrainian
nationalism should have occupied a marginal position in Ukrainian
society.18 The majority of those who had been active in the Organiza-
tion of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) or the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
were forced to live abroad, while in Soviet Ukraine itself all attempts to
revive right-wing extremism, even at the level of subcultures or small
groups, were suppressed by the police and KGB.19 This situation stood
in marked contrast to the position of Russian nationalism under Stalin
and Brezhnev, when definite Russophile ideas, camouflaged in one form
or another, were integrated into the political system and cultural life of
the Soviet empire.20
Only during perestroika did the security and defense agencies start to
adopt a less repressive approach; as a result, even before the disintegration
of the Soviet system in Ukraine—a little earlier in Soviet Russia—the
first openly ultraright organizations appeared. In 1990, one of the best-
known nationalist parties—the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA),
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 39
headed by Dmytro Korchyns’kyi—was established in Lviv. In 1991, the
UNA conducted a scandalous torchlit procession through the streets of
Lviv, and at the time of the August putsch the UNA leadership decided
to set up a military wing of the party to confront the State Committee for
the State of Emergency. This was the Ukrainian National Self-Defense
(UNSD)—a formation manned by UNA members who had served in the
Soviet armed forces. It turned out that the UNSD was not needed for its
original purpose, because prodemocratic forces in Russia itself overcame
the putsch. New “tasks” were assigned to the organization, however, and
between 1992 and 1994 members of the UNA-UNSD took part in the
military conflicts in Transnistria (against Moldova), in Georgia (against
Abkhaz separatists), and in the Chechen Republic (against Russian
federal troops).21
In Ukraine itself, the UNA-UNSD became a media phenomenon, not
least thanks to its deliberate provocation aimed at left-wing and pro-Rus-
sian forces and its frequent clashes with the police. But the UNA had
little political success. In 1994, the party got just a single deputy into
the Verkhovna Rada in a single-mandate district. Moreover, in 1995—on
account of its aggressive behavior—the UNA lost its official registration;
in 1997, however, it again acquired the status of a political party.22 Before
the 1998 elections, a number of the most radical politicians, including
Korchyns’kyi, withdrew from the party leadership, but this “purge” did
not affect its electoral image. In the 1998 elections, when half of the
deputies in the Verkhovna Rada were elected under the proportional
system with a 4-percent electoral threshold and the other half under the
majoritarian system, the UNA received only 0.39 percent of the vote
and got not a single candidate elected to parliament in a single-mandate
district.23
The second best-known ultraright party to emerge at the beginning of
the 1990s was the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (CUN)—a direct
heir of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera) (OUN-B),
which Stepan Bandera headed in 1940 after a split in the original OUN.
The continuity between the OUN-B and the CUN was ensured by the
return from emigration of Iaroslava Stets’ko, a former member of the
OUN-B and the widow of Iaroslav Stets’ko, one of the leaders of the
OUN-B and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.24 In 1994, five members of
the party were elected to the Verkhovna Rada in single-mandate districts,
and in the preterm 1997 elections the CUN leader Iaroslava Stets’ko also
became a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament.25
40 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
The venerable age of its members became a problem for the CUN. The
party proved incapable of the ideological and organizational moderniza-
tion that grew increasingly necessary and urgent with the rapid transfor-
mation of post-Soviet Ukrainian society. In the 1998 elections—the first
to be partly based on the proportional system—the CUN abstained from
submitting its own party list but joined the National Front pre-electoral
bloc together with Stepan Khmara’s Ukrainian Conservative Republican
Party and Bohdan Iaroshins’kyi’s Ukrainian Republican Party. In the
elections, however, the bloc received the support of only 2.71 percent of
Ukrainian voters—and therefore failed to enter the Verkhovna Rada. The
National Front received the most support in Ivano-Frankiv’sk, Ternopil,
and Lviv oblasts (23.75, 20.86, and 9.72 percent, respectively) and the
least support in the southeastern part of the country, where its results
did not exceed 1 percent. Nevertheless, the CUN managed to get three
candidates elected in single-mandate districts, and Iaroslava Stets’ko, as
the oldest deputy in the Verkhovna Rada of the third convocation, opened
the first session of parliament.
The third Ukrainian ultraright party of the 1990s—initially just as
marginal as the others but, as later became clear, the most significant of
them all—was the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU).26 It was
established in Lviv in 1991 by Iaroslav Andrushkiv, Andrii Parubii, and
Oleh Tiahnybok, who until 1994 was also chairman of the Lviv Student
Fraternity.27 The SNPU, in the words of one observer, was based partly
on the “public organization of veterans of the war in Afghanistan.”28
Another commentator indicates that the SNPU “arose as a result of the
unification of the most radical elements of the nationalist movement
in the Lviv region.”29 The backbone of the party consisted of members
and leaders of the Lviv guard of Rukh and of Legacy, the organization
of Ukrainian youth.30 Two years later, the organization gained notoriety
thanks to its announcement that it was starting to form people’s detach-
ments for the purpose of blocking railroads and sabotaging oil and gas
pipelines and electricity cables. “In the autumn of 1993, an Emergency
Committee for the Salvation of the Nation and State (ECSNS) was set up
in Lviv. Together with the ‘conservatives’ and the SNPU, it included the
Student Fraternity, by this time dominated by the extreme nationalists.
Members of the Student Fraternity formed people’s guard detachments.”31
Members of the people’s detachments, dressed in black uniforms (not
least to distinguish themselves from the fighters of the UNA-UNSD,
who wore military camouflage), created mass demonstrations in front
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 41
of the Verkhovna Rada building. “After their return to Lviv, the guard
detachments were not disbanded but merged into the SNPU. The Student
Fraternity of the Lviv Polytechnical University stood aside from these
events and refused to take part in the ECSNS. Appraising these events,
the UUS (Union of Ukrainian Students) expelled the Student Fraternity
of Lviv. Many former fraternity brothers could later be seen at a gather-
ing of the SNPU.”32
It is noteworthy that of these various Ukrainian nationalist parties
the SNPU was the least inclined to conceal its neofascist affiliations. Its
official symbol was the somewhat modified Wolf’s Hook (Wolfsangel),
used as a symbol by the German SS division Das Reich and the Dutch
SS division Landstorm Nederland during World War II and by a number
of European neofascist organizations after 1945.33 As seen by the SNPU
leadership, the Wolf’s Hook became the “idea of the nation.” Moreover,
the official name of the party’s ideology, “social nationalism,” clearly
referred back to “national socialism”—the official name of the ideology
of the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and of the
Hitlerite regime. The SNPU’s political platform distinguished itself by
its openly revolutionary ultranationalism, its demands for the violent
takeover of power in the country, and its willingness to blame Russia for
all of Ukraine’s ills. Moreover, the SNPU was the first relatively large
party to recruit Nazi skinheads and football hooligans. But in the politi-
cal arena, its support in the 1990s remained insignificant. In the 1998
elections, the SNPU joined forces with the All-Ukrainian Political Union
State Independence of Ukraine to form the ultraright electoral bloc Fewer
Words, which won only 0.16 percent of the vote nationwide and did not
exceed 1 percent in even a single oblast. Despite the bloc’s failure at the
national level, one of the SNPU leaders, Oleh Tiahnybok, was elected to
the Verkhovna Rada in the single-mandate district for Lviv.
The 1998 elections brought temporary success to a radical organization
of a somewhat different kind—the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine
(PSPU) under the leadership of Nataliia Vitrenko. The PSPU is usually
considered an ultraleft party; in our view, however, this description applies
fully only to the party’s economic doctrines, much less to its political
doctrines. Vitrenko’s party is characterized by an attachment to the idea
of radical pan-Slav nationalism with a clearly marked pro-Russian and
openly anti-Western bent. In this connection, it seems to us justified to
regard Vitrenko’s party as ultraright rather than ultraleft. As confirma-
tion, we note that in the early 2000s the PSPU began to cooperate closely
42 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
with Aleksandr Dugin, leader of the international Eurasian Movement
and Russia’s most influential neofascist theoretician, and with Sergei
Baburin, leader of the Russian ultranationalist party of national revival
People’s Will and once a well-known deputy in the Supreme Soviet of
the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the State
Duma of the Russian Federation. Dugin’s and Baburin’s ultraright ori-
entation is beyond doubt.34 Nevertheless, to all appearances many people
did vote for the “progressive socialists” of the PSPU out of sympathy for
socialist economic models (thereby taking the name of the party seri-
ously) and perhaps out of nostalgia for the Soviet past, which Vitrenko
considerably idealizes. In addition, the PSPU mobilizes part of the
electorate—especially in eastern Ukraine and Crimea—that is unhappy
with “forced Ukrainization.” Thus, the successes of Vitrenko’s party can
be interpreted only in part as an exception to the general pattern of the
last fifteen years.
In the parliamentary elections of 1998, the PSPU received 4.04 per-
cent of the vote and thereby crossed the threshold, then at 4 percent;
two members of the party were also elected to the Verkhovna Rada in
single-mandate districts. The party obtained its best results in Sumy and
Kharkov oblasts (20.89 and 10.08 percent, respectively); its worst results
were in the western regions of Ukraine (Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivs’k, and
Lviv oblasts) and—strange as it may seem—in Sevastopol, where its sup-
port did not exceed 1 percent. In the first round of the 1999 presidential
elections, Nataliia Vitrenko received 10.97 percent of the vote and came
in fourth—apparently, the apogee of her political career.
Ukrainian Right-Wing Extremism in the 2000s: Searching
for a Development Strategy
During the 1990s, no ultraright party except for the PSPU managed to
gather enough electoral support to create its own faction in the Verkhovna
Rada.35 The right-wing radicals confronted the question of whether they
would continue to exist, initiating a search, in most cases, for develop-
ment strategies.
Disillusioned with participation in marginal electoral blocs, the CUN
decided in 2002 to join the Our Ukraine bloc, united around former
Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, who began his political ascent in
2001 during the campaign for a “Ukraine Without Kuchma.” Coopera-
tion with Our Ukraine enabled the CUN to get three deputies into the
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 43
Verkhovna Rada in 2002 and 2006. In 2007, however, in the run-up to
the special parliamentary elections, Our Ukraine dropped from its list of
candidates Oleksii Ivchenko, the by then unpopular leader of the party
and temporary head of the Naftogaz state corporation. Later the CUN
gave up participation in elections altogether.
In turn, the PSPU evidently decided to take advantage of the relative
popularity of its leader and set up the Nataliia Vitrenko bloc (NVB), in
which the Party of Educationalists of Ukraine joined the PSPU. Neverthe-
less, in the 2002 elections the bloc received only 3.22 percent of the vote
and fell below the 4-percent threshold crossed by the PSPU in 1998. In
addition, the party failed to get a single deputy into the Verkhovna Rada
in a single-mandate district. In 2006, when the electoral threshold was
lowered to 3 percent and single-mandate districts were abolished, the
PSPU joined with the party Russian–Ukrainian Union (RUS)* to establish
an electoral alliance called the Nataliia Vitrenko bloc People’s Opposition.
But this alliance also did not get into the parliament, because it picked up
only 2.93 percent of the vote, thereby failing to cross even the 3-percent
threshold. The PSPU participated in the 2007 elections outside of any
blocs, and its results were even less comforting—1.32 percent.
After the UNA’s defeat in the 2002 elections, when it did not manage
to pick up more than 0.09 percent of the vote in any oblast, it too tried
to create an electoral bloc. The potential partner of the UNA was the
Ukrainian Conservative Party (UCP). This political organization was
established in 2005 by members of staff at the Interregional Academy
of Personnel Management (IAPM)—a higher educational institution
with an openly anti-Semitic administration. The IAPM is a large private
university with branches in several Ukrainian cities, is thought to receive
financial support from the Arab world, and puts out an anti-Semitic
journal called Personal (Personnel) as well as a book series under the
same title.36 The leading staff members of the IAPM who belong to
the UCP—above all, Hyorhii Shchokin, Vasyl Eremenko, Iurii Shilov,
and Mykola Holovatyi—are authors of conspiracy-theory pamphlets
(which appear in Ukrainian bookstalls alongside the works of other
Ukrainian pseudohistorians—Eduard Khodos, Ihor Kahanets, and Iurii
Kanyhin—and older Ukrainian Judeophobic and contemporary Russian
racist literature).37 Negotiations to create a pre-electoral bloc of the UNA
*A play on words: the Russian abbreviation RUS is also the old name for Russia;
the first Russian state was Kyivan Rus.—Trans.
44 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
and the UCP ended in failure, however, and as a result the two parties
went into the 2006 elections separately, receiving 0.06 and 0.09 percent
of the vote, respectively. Neither party contested the 2007 elections.
As later became clear, the SNPU picked the most effective develop-
ment strategy. The party did not take part in the 2002 elections, but in
2004 it held a congress that oversaw a superficial renovation—that is, an
overhaul of the organization’s public image. First, the SNPU gave up its
ambiguous name in favor of the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda. Second,
the party changed its official symbol. The neofascist Wolf’s Hook was
replaced by a stylized trident, consisting of three fingers of a right hand.
Third, the leader of the organization became Oleh Tiahnybok, who had
earned authority in the party thanks to his two terms as a parliamentary
deputy. By freshening up its official image in this way while preserving
its basic ideological principles, Svoboda was evidently able to distance
itself from its neofascist past in the eyes of the public while retaining
the support of extreme nationalists.
In 2005, Svoboda, like the UNA, tried to create a pre-electoral alli-
ance with Shchokin’s UCP. Such parties as the People’s Movement of
Ukraine (Borys Tarasiuk), the Ukrainian People’s Party (Iurii Kostenko),
the All-Ukrainian Union Fatherland (Yulia Tymoshenko), the URP, and
the CUN were invited to participate in a proposed “bloc of right-wing
conservative parties.” Despite active efforts to create such a bloc in 2005,
it remained an unrealized project, and as a result Svoboda contested the
following parliamentary elections as an independent force.
The party’s results in the 2006–7 elections to the Verkhovna Rada—
0.36 and 0.76 percent, respectively—were reminiscent of the level of sup-
port that other ultranationalist organizations had achieved in nationwide
elections. Nevertheless, the trend in these results already indicated that
the party was becoming the sole ultraright organization to demonstrate
an as yet insignificant but stable growth in popularity. The convincing
victory of Tiahnybok’s party in the spring 2009 elections to the Ternopil
oblast council, mentioned at the beginning of this article, was a continu-
ation of the same tendency.
The Anomalous Weakness of the Ukrainian Extreme Right
Despite Svoboda’s recent successes in the regions, other phenomena that
have been mentioned, and the frequent participation of radicals like Vit-
renko, Korchyns’kii, and Tiahnybok in national public debates, right-wing
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 45
extremism in Ukraine remains at present—viewed from a comparative
perspective—a surprisingly marginal force at the national level. Given that
nationalistic views have the approval of a certain section of the Ukrainian
population, the electoral unviability of organized Ukrainian radical ethno-
centrism is striking in comparative terms. Unless we are to regard the left-
wing populist and often opportunistic Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU)
as a full-fledged element of the radical political spectrum, we may conclude
that only once in the 1994–2007 period was an extremely antidemocratic
party elected to the Verkhovna Rada as an independent organization on
the proportional principle—the PSPU in 1998 (Table 1).
Even if we include the CPU—part of the governments of Viktor
Yanukovych and Mykola Azarov—in the spectrum of radical political
forces, the general picture does not change to any significant extent.
Petro Symonenko, head of the CPU, received 4.97 percent of the vote
in the 2004 presidential elections, and his party won the support of 3.66
and 5.39 percent of voters, respectively, in the parliamentary elections
of 2006–7. Moreover, communist parties in the post-Soviet states may
be regarded as postsocialist, conservative electoral clubs of old-age
pensioners. Their worldview and public image are marked by nostalgia
for the Soviet past rather than a search for alternative scenarios of the
future. In addition, Symonenko’s populism seems less aggressive than
the anti-Semitic ploys, bows in the direction of the German Conserva-
tive Revolution, and geopolitical speculations that figure with increasing
frequency in the declarations of leaders of the Communist Party of the
Russian Federation (CPRF), which for this reason should probably be
classified as an ultraright rather than an ultraleft political group.38
We would note, nevertheless, that various convocations of the Verk-
hovna Rada have included numerous politicians who might be accused
Table 1
Results for Ukrainian Ultraright Parties and Blocs in Parliamentary
Elections, 1998–2007 (%)
Election year
National
Front Fewer Words UNA PSPU/NVB Svoboda
1998 2.71 0.16 0.39 4.04 —
2002 — — 0.04 3.22 —
2006 — — 0.06 2.93 0.36
2007 — — — 1.32 0.76
46 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
of having a nationalistic past or recently making politically incorrect
statements. Such deputies include supporters of the Yulia Tymoshenko
bloc (YTB) Andrii Shkil (a former member of the UNA) and Levko
Luk’ianenko (whose name headed the pre-electoral list of the National
Front in 1998), current members of Our Ukraine Andrii Parubii (a
former member of the SNPU) and Roman Zvarych (a former member
of the CUN), and leader of the People’s Self-Defense Iurii Lutsenko,
who is well known for his racist statements.39 As parliamentary depu-
ties, however, these individuals have mostly acted either alone or as
members of nonextremist factions. Moreover, some of those named
have adapted to reigning standards of political correctness or even
turned—as has Shkil, for instance—into exemplary liberal democrats
and—if partly for show—tolerant political interlocutors.
Nor have there been significant consequences from the repre-
sentation in the Verkhovna Rada of dependent nationalistic groups
within the Our Ukraine—People’s Self-Defense bloc or the YTB.
For example, the tiny nationalistic groups integrated into the former
bloc do not fundamentally affect the generally democratic line of its
leadership. Moreover, in democratic systems the integration of politi-
cally borderline elements is one of the functions of centrist parties.
The large centrist parties of the West also include politicians whose
statements are on the edge and sometimes beyond the limits of political
correctness. Such statements keep antiliberal groups of voters within
the fold of the centrist parties, thereby helping to exclude antidemo-
cratic organizations from politics. Such a solution works only so long
as the ideology of radical sections within the large centrist parties has
no chance of influencing the views, statements, and conduct of the
leadership of these parties. Recent instances of this kind of pathology
in contemporary democracies are the growing influence of evangelical
fundamentalists within the Republican Party on the White House in
Washington, DC, and Yushchenko’s attempts to make national heroes
out of certain Ukrainian wartime collaborationists with dubious politi-
cal views and somewhat cloudy military biographies.40 But despite
these tendencies, which encounter resistance from a substantial part
of Ukrainian society, on the most important issues the patriotically
oriented parties that currently govern Ukraine continue to support the
liberal-democratic public order. In this way, they constrain rather than
enhance the influence of their extreme nationalist elements. When,
for example, the CUN—one of the relatively significant nationalist
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 47
groups within Our Ukraine—left the bloc before the 2007 parliamen-
tary elections, this move had no effect on the bloc’s public profile and
apparently went unnoticed by most voters.
This state of affairs stands in sharp contrast to that in the Russian
Federation, with which Ukraine is increasingly compared on account
of the two countries’ shared historical and cultural ties. There is no
equivalent in the Ukrainian parliament to the aggressive anti-Western-
ism and nationalism that until recently was represented in the Russian
parliament by Dmitrii Rogozin’s Rodina bloc and that continues to be
represented there by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s “liberal-democrats” and
Gennadii Ziuganov’s national-communists. Russia’s political center
has also obviously shifted to the right. A number of extravagant ideas
about Russian and world politics—expressed only by politically mar-
ginal groups in the 1990s—are today commonplaces for the Russian
political mainstream.41 This observation concerns primarily appraisals
of the West (the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion [NATO], in particular) and interpretations of political changes in
the post-Soviet states—for instance, theories of secret conspiracies
to explain the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose and Tulip
revolutions in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.42
The difference between Ukraine and Russia is perhaps most clearly
visible in the numbers and degree of aggressiveness of neo-Nazi
activists in these two post-Soviet states. According to Viacheslav
Likhachev, a leading specialist in East Slavic right-wing extremism,
the number of Nazi skinheads in Ukraine in 2008 did not exceed two
thousand.43 In Russia, by contrast, the corresponding figure, estimated
by Galina Kozhevnikova of the Sova Information-Analytical Center,
ranged from twenty thousand to thirty-five thousand.44 According to
other data, the number of Russian skinheads exceeded sixty thousand
in 2006 and may have reached seventy thousand in 2008.45 Even taking
into account that the population of Russia is over three times as large
as that of Ukraine, there remains a substantial difference between the
prevalence of skinheads in the two countries.
There is a similar difference in numbers of acts of violence with a
clear racist motivation. In Ukraine in 2008, for example, eighty-three
such assaults were registered, of which four had a fatal outcome.46
These, of course, are high figures—unless they are compared with the
corresponding indicators for Russia. Over the same period—that is, dur-
ing 2008—the Moscow Sova Center registered 434 people wounded and
48 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
97 killed as a result of assaults by ultranationalists.47 A similar picture
can be observed over a longer time period (Table 2).48
As early as the end of 2005, these tendencies prompted one inves-
tigator of Russian neo-Nazism to speak of an “undeclared war against
the Other” in Russia.49
Ukraine as a Model to Emulate?
Why are Ukrainian voters and elites the ones who over the last fifteen
years have almost completely excluded organized ultranationalism from
the national legislature, offering an example worthy of emulation not
only in Eastern but also in Western Europe? This is a question to which
it is difficult to give a categorical answer, one that has been insufficiently
investigated. Neither defects in Ukraine’s nationalist party spectrum nor
the special tolerance sometimes attributed to Ukrainians can provide a
comprehensive explanation. The activity of Ukrainian ultraright groups
has indeed been marked by self-obstruction and self-destruction caused
by internal tensions and conflicts among megalomaniacal leaders. These
features, however, are typical of ultraright political parties throughout
the world, many of which nonetheless sooner or later successfully
overcome the problems of collective interaction and create more or less
successful—in terms of electoral results—political organizations and/or
alliances, thereby not just getting their members elected but forming
ultraright factions in the parliaments or assemblies of their countries,
Table 2
Ultraright Violence in Russia and Ukraine, 2006–8
Category 2006 2007 2008 Total
Russia
Beaten or
wounded 522 605 434 1,561
Killed 66 85 97 248
Ukraine
Assaulted 12 81 79 172
Killed 2 6 4 12
Sources: Russian statistics come from the Sova Information-Analytical Center (http://
xeno.sova-center.ru/files/xeno/stat-eng-09-04-15.doc); Ukrainian statistics from VAAD
and Viacheslav Likhachev, Ksenofobiia v Ukraine–2008: Doklad po rezul’tatam moni-
toringa (Kyiv, 2009), p. 35.
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 49
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the
Council of Europe, and the EU.
For similar reasons it is necessary to reject other actor-centered ex-
planations for the weakness of ultranationalist party politics. One com-
mentator, for example, recently proposed this interpretation:
After an outburst of activism in 1991, the activity of nationalist parties
and organizations went into decline. As a result, throughout the 1990s
many ultraright parties rushed from indiscriminate opposition, as when
Levko Luk’ianenko refused to support Viacheslav Chornovil in the 1991
presidential elections, to unstinting support for the authorities, as when
Pavlo Dorozhyns’kyi, leader of the OUN in Ukraine, supported the former
KGB man Evhen Marchuk in the 1999 presidential elections, while all
the nationalists campaigned together for Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid
Kuchma in the second round of the presidential elections in 1994 and
1999, respectively. Due to this confusion, the diaspora and dissident parties
have now in effect left the political arena, having dissolved themselves in
Our Ukraine and the YTB.50
However, many parties—not only extremist ones and not only in
Ukraine—behave in an opportunistic and illogical manner and are guided
by tactical considerations. There is no clear and unambiguous connec-
tion between the political flexibility or ideological inconsistency of party
politicians and their political failure.
Let us therefore take a more detailed look at a few structural interpre-
tations of the marginality of the Ukrainian extreme right.
First, the Ukrainian ultranationalists’ lack of significant electoral suc-
cesses is conditioned by the fact that nationalism as a political movement
in Ukraine is, as Taras Kuzio among others observes, postcolonial and—in
the understanding of national-patriots—liberatory.51 For this reason, late
Soviet and post-Soviet Ukrainian patriotic aspirations have often gone
hand in hand with certain liberal and democratic ideas. This distinguishes
mainstream Ukrainian nationalism from, for instance, Russian imperial
nationalism, which is often fused together with radically antiliberal ideas
such as Eurasianism (as in the case of Baburin), communism (Ziuganov),
racism (the former State Duma deputy from the Rodina bloc Andrei
Savel’ev), or fascism (Dugin) and is thereby transformed into a radically
antidemocratic ideology. The national-liberatory views that were shared
by Ukraine’s national-democrats and ultrarightists in the 1980s, however,
lost their relevance once Ukraine regained its independence in 1991. For
years Ukraine’s ultrarightists suffered from a shortage of socially relevant
50 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
ideas: they were unable to offer their potential electorate new slogans,
apart from “recycling” open or veiled Russophobic and anti-Semitic
rhetoric. Moreover, although the Ukrainian extreme right retained certain
liberal propositions in their doctrines, they were unable to compete with
political groups that prioritized democratic ideas, at least at the level of
public speeches and political platforms. This lack of novelty may in part
explain the marginality of Ukrainian ultranationalist parties, even though
public opinion survey data reveal that certain xenophobic attitudes are
widespread among the Ukrainian population and have become even
more widespread in the last decade.52 Ukraine is hardly different in this
respect from other countries passing through a transition period (if it is
different, then the situation is worse).
Second, an obvious factor reducing Ukrainian ultranationalists’ chanc-
es is the cultural division of the country into two large historically differ-
entiated regions—center–west and east–south—that define the Ukrainian
nation and its interests differently and, thanks to differing levels of influ-
ence of Russian and pro-Russian local mass media, constitute separate
information spaces. Tiahnybok’s Svoboda has significant representation
in several regional and city councils in western Ukraine, while Vitrenko’s
PSPU enjoys a similar position in eastern and southern Ukraine. As we
have seen, however, despite their substantial regional support neither of
these parties today has a presence in the Verkhovna Rada.
Nevertheless, this explanation for the absence of a ultraright parliamen-
tary faction—be it pan-Slavist/Eurasianist or narrowly ethnocentric—is
inadequate, given the low electoral thresholds for entry into the Verkhovna
Rada that have applied since the partial introduction of the system of
proportional representation—4 percent from 1998 to 2005 and 3 percent
since 2006. A relatively low barrier to entry might enable even small parties
with a regionally concentrated potential electorate to obtain parliamentary
representation, especially since the current 3-percent threshold strategic
electoral behavior—that is, goal-oriented voting for the most “tolerable”
rather than for the most “likable” parties—does not play a great role.
Third, the political marginality of the Ukrainian extreme right at the
national level is conditioned by the low degree of ethnic polarization
between Ukraine’s largest ethnic groups. Although cultural differences
between Ukrainians and Russians living in Ukraine undoubtedly exist,
the two ethnocultural communities are still kindred East Slavic nations.
At least, many ordinary citizens in central, eastern, and southern Ukraine
appear convinced of this point. According to public opinion surveys, the
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 51
pro-Russian orientation of these demographically important regions of
Ukraine finds expression in the fact that their residents like Russians
much more than citizens of Russia like Ukrainians.53 Polls conducted in
2009 also showed that most Ukrainians have more respect for Russian
leader Vladimir Putin than they have for former Ukrainian president
Viktor Yushchenko. (We might add that Russian citizens disrespect,
ridicule, or hate Yushchenko and regard him in ways that resemble their
feelings about George W. Bush, or at times even Adolf Hitler more than
the respect they feel for their own president Dmitry Medvedev.) The in-
strumentalization of Russophobia by the Ukrainian nationalists remains
constrained by the small demographic weight of western Ukraine and
the nationalistically inclined intelligentsia.
Fourth, we cannot ignore the fact that during the 1990s, Ukraine
experienced a relative homogenization of the population—that is, the
contraction of ethnic-minority communities through emigration and as-
similation. As a result of these and other processes, the specific weight
of self-proclaimed Ukrainians in the population increased.54 The Jewish
community contracted most of all, not least on account of anti-Semitic
attitudes in Ukrainian society.55 Thus, Judeophobia now often assumes
the form of “anti-Semitism without Jews”—a social pathology also found
in many other postwar European states. In this especially strange variety
of xenophobia, the visible presence of Jews as an object of hatred is of
secondary importance, because this type of ethnic prejudice is directed
against the mythologized image of Jews as an “idea.” Despite such odious
tendencies, the marked contraction of the Jewish community in Ukraine
clearly does make it more difficult for right-wing radicals effectively to
mobilize an electorate based on anti-Semitism.
Fifth, some observers consider that the strong polarization of Ukrainian
politics and the structuring of conflicts around the confrontation between
what are conventionally known as national-democratic and pro-Russian
political forces (since 2004, these have acquired colors—orange and
white–blue) have played a role in marginalizing the Ukrainian extreme
right. Since 2007, moreover, a second polarization has occurred inside the
orange camp. Constant and extraordinarily tense public conflict among
moderate parties leaves little political space for action by the extreme
right. Under these conditions, the extremist rhetoric of the ultranational-
ists has less dramatic impact than the strident accusations traded between
the centrist camps.
In any case, we need to supplement the relatively positive picture of
52 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
Ukraine drawn here with an observation mentioned above. According
to the data of an authoritative sociologist of Ukraine—the recently de-
ceased Nataliia Panina, a specialist in interethnic relations—correlations
exist between the strong pro-Western orientation of western Ukrainians
and of the young generation of Ukrainians as a whole and the degree of
acceptability of xenophobic ideas.56 The regions and social groups usu-
ally considered the most pro-European are today, paradoxically, further
removed from certain basic European values of the postwar period than
the pro-Russian eastern regions. For example, Yushchenko’s electorate
is significantly more anti-Semitic than Yanukovych’s. The chief factor
here may have less to do with region as such than with the more rural
character of western and the more urban character of eastern Ukraine (in
other countries, too, rural residents are often more ethnocentric than city
dwellers). Be that as it may, the prevalence of xenophobic stereotypes
among young people is a bad omen.
Moreover, Ukraine—which in the 1990s demonstrated, leaving aside
such culturally close groups as Russians and Belarusians, a comparatively
low level of ethnic heterogeneity—is changing. At the beginning of the
2000s, immigration to Ukraine rose together with improvements in the
Ukrainian economy—although the world financial crisis interrupted these
trends in 2008–10. Increasingly large groups of nontraditional migrants
started to arrive from China, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Im-
migration from countries outside the former Soviet Union and the ap-
pearance of completely new communities viewed by the ultranationalists
as “hostile ethnic objects” may in the future provide a basis for electoral
mobilization by the Ukrainian extreme right in both the western and
the eastern regions. It is easy to guess that the rapidly rising Svoboda
will probably gain the most from this situation.57 In addition, continu-
ing political instability may convey to voters the impression that the
moderate parties—despite the polarization among them—not only differ
little from one another but are also incapable of resolving the country’s
urgent economic problems. Studies of European ultraright parties show
that such public moods have often led to growth in electoral support
for ultrarightists posing as an antisystemic political force critical of all
representatives of the political mainstream. Under these circumstances,
it seems to us possible that if Ukraine retains its low 3-percent barrier to
the entry of parties and blocs into parliament, then the next parliamentary
elections will—sadly—bring the composition of the Verkhovna Rada
into conformity with the European norm.
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 53
Notes
1. Paul Kubicek, “What Happened to the Nationalists in Ukraine?” Nationalism
and Ethnic Politics, vol. 5, no. 1 (1999), pp. 29–45; Kubicek, “Dynamics of Con-
temporary Ukrainian Nationalism: Empire Breaking to State Building,” Canadian
Review of Studies in Nationalism, vol. 23, nos. 1–2 (1996), pp. 39–50.
2. By the generic concept “ultranationalism” we mean antiliberal, anti-Enlight-
enment forms of nationalism characterized by ethnocultural exclusiveness and an
emphasis on the “rights of the nation” (in contrast to the liberal emphasis on the rights
of the individual). Ultranationalism rejects multiculturalism and internationalism,
insisting on an organic understanding of the nation, defined in ethnocultural—and
sometimes racist—terms. In contemporary politics, ultranationalism manifests as
the ideology or element in the ideology of ultraright and neofascist movements,
organizations, and parties.
3. Nor do the results of the first round of the 2010 presidential elections clarify
the situation: in contrast to the results of the 2009 oblast elections, Tiahnybok re-
ceived only 4.89 percent of the vote in Ternopil oblast. Here, however, it is hardly
possible to speak of a sharp fall in the rating of Svoboda in Ternopil oblast in light of
the obvious differences between voters’ strategies in presidential and parliamentary
elections of local and national significance.
4. Taras Kuzio, “Populist-Nationalists in Ukraine,” Ukraine Analyst, vol. 1, no.
16 (2009), pp. 1–4.
5. A. Lavrik, “. . . plius gitlerizatsiia vsieï kraïni,” Ukraïns’kyi tyzhden’, 2008,
nos. 18–9 (27–28), pp. 22–23 (www.ut.net.ua/art/166/0/800, accessed 21 December
2009). See, e.g., G. Kriuchkov and D. Tabachnik, Fashizm v Ukraine: ugroza ili
real’nost’? (Kharkiv, 2008); Iurii Kozlov, ed., Banderizatsiia Ukrainy—glavnaia
ugroza dlia Rossii (Moscow, 2008).
6. Iu. Vil’ner, Andrei Iushchenko: personazh i “legenda” (s.l., 2007). The first
digits of the ISBN number shown in the book indicate that the book was published
in Pakistan. However, the number itself does not pass the check sum, which sug-
gests a counterfeit ISBN.
7. Andreas Umland, “Introduction to Aspects of the Orange Revolution I–VI:
Ukraine’s Second Transition in the Russian Mirror,” in Aspects of the Orange
Revolution I: Democratization and Elections in Post-Communist Ukraine, ed. Paul
D’Anieri and Taras Kuzio (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2007), pp. 7–16.
8. According to the data of the American nongovernmental organization Freedom
House, the Rose and Tulip revolutions had less impact on the political systems of
Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, respectively, than the democratic impulse of the Orange
Revolution did in Ukraine. See “Table 9. Democracy Score: Year-to-Year Summaries
by Region,” in Nations in Transit 2009 (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2009).
9. A. Umland, “ ‘Oranzhevaia revoliutsiia’ kak postsovetskii vodorazdel: de-
mokraticheskii proryv v Ukraine, restavratsionnyi impul’s v Rossii,” Kontinent, 2009,
no. 142 (http://magazines.russ.ru/continent/2009/142/um16.html, accessed 10 March
2010); Umland, “Orange Revolution als Scheideweg: Demokratisierungsschub in
der Ukraine, Restaurationsimpuls in Russland,” Osteuropa, vol. 59, no. 11 (2009),
pp. 109–20; Umland, “Die ukrainische Protodemokratie im zeitgeschichtlichen
Kontext,” Ukraine-Analysen, 2010, no. 67, pp. 16–19 (www.laender-analysen.
de/ukraine/pdf/UkraineAnalysen67.pdf, accessed 10 March 2010).
54 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
10. Latvia and Estonia are among the few European countries that—by contrast—
are repeating the Ukrainian experience. See Daunis Auers and Andres Kasekamp,
“Explaining the Electoral Failure of Extreme Right Parties in Estonia and Latvia,”
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (2009), pp. 241–54. Here
it is also possible to highlight Belarus—a historically and ethnoculturally close
neighbor of Ukraine. In Belarus, however, the political space is even more restricted
than in Russia and for several years has blocked the development not only of radical
parties but of political opposition in general. The overwhelming majority of signifi-
cant opposition forces in Belarus pursue a liberal and not an antiliberal (as in the case
of right-wing radical parties) agenda. We have not mentioned geographically close
Moldova here because it is today a “failed state.” See “Fund for Peace: Moldova
priznana samoi ‘nestabil’noi stranoi’ v Evrope,” Press Obozrenie, 25 February 2010
(http://press.try.md/item.php?id=110971, accessed 10 March 2010).
11. Erwin K. Scheuch and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, “Theorie des Rechtsradika-
lismus in westlichen Industriegesellschaften,” Hamburger Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts-
und Sozialpolitik, vol. 12 (1967), pp. 11–29.
12. There are a broad range of studies devoted to contemporary ultraright parties
in Europe. See, for example, Hans-Georg Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in West-
ern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Herbert Kitschelt and Anthony J.
McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995); Michael Minkenberg, Die neue radikale Rechte
im Vergleich: USA, Frankreich, Deutschland (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1998); Piero
Ignazi, Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003); Elisabeth Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe: Success or Failure?
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Terri E. Givens, Voting Radical Right
in Western Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Pippa Norris, Radi-
cal Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005); Michelle Hale Williams, The Impact of Radical Right-Wing Parties in
West European Democracies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Cas Mudde,
Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007); Paul Hainsworth, The Extreme Right in Western Europe (New York: Psychol-
ogy Press, 2008). Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of studies ignore Eastern
Europe. The only exception in the list above is the monograph by Cas Mudde.
13. Roger Griffin, “Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the ‘Post-
Fascist’ Era,” Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2000), p. 173.
14. David Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
15. Matthew J. Goodwin, New British Fascism: The Rise of the British National
Party (London: Routledge, 2010); Uwe Backes and Henrik Steglich, eds., Die NPD: Er-
folgsbedingungen einer rechtsextremistischen Partei (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007).
16. Cas Mudde, “Warum ist der Rechtsradikalismus in Osteuropa so schwach?”
Osteuropa, vol. 52 (2002), pp. 626–30.
17. Most of the Ukrainian and Russian analytical (in part pseudoanalytical)
literature on this topic is more or less tendentious. Our presentation therefore relies
mainly on Western studies, including Taras Kuzio, “Radical Nationalist Parties
and Movements in Contemporary Ukraine Before and After Independence: The
Right and Its Politics, 1989–1994,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 25, no. 2 (1997), pp.
211–42; Liudmila Dymerskaya-Tsigelman and Leonid Finberg, “Antisemitism of
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 55
the Ukrainian Radical Nationalists: Ideology and Policy,” Analysis of Current Trends
in Antisemitism, 1999, no. 14; Roman Solchanyk, “The Radical Right in Ukraine,”
in The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe Since 1989, ed. Sabrina Ramet
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) pp. 279–96 and 357–58;
and Per A. Rudling, “Organized Antisemitism in Contemporary Ukraine: Structure,
Influence, and Ideology,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 48, nos. 1–2 (2006), pp.
81–119. On the history of Ukrainian nationalism, see Alexander Motyl, Turn to the
Right: The Ideological Origins of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980); Kenneth C. Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism in
the Post-Stalin Era: Myths, Symbols, and Ideology in Soviet Nationality Policy (The
Hague: Springer, 1980); John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism (Englewood,
NJ: Ukrainian Academic Press, 1990); and Andrew Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism
in the 1990s: A Minority Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
18. Julian Birch, The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement in the USSR Since 1956
(London: Ukrainian Information Service, 1971).
19. Per A. Rudling, “Theory and Practice: Historical Representation of the War
Time Activities of OUN-UPA (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army),” East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 36, no. 2 (2006),
pp. 163–89; Franziska Bruder, “Den ukrainischen Staat erkämpfen oder sterben!”
Die Organisation Ukrainischer Nationalisten (OUN) 1929–1948 (Berlin: Metropol,
2007).
20. Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1956); David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist
Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); A. Ianov, Russkaia ideia i 2000-i
god (New York: Liberty, 1988); Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian
Nationalism and the Soviet State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998); N. Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR,
1953–1985 gody (Moscow, 2003).
21. A. James McGregor, “Radical Ukrainian Nationalism and the War in Chech-
nya,” North Caucasus Analysis, vol. 7, no. 13 (1999) (www.jamestown.org/single/
?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=3198, accessed 24 May 2009).
22. G. Bendza, “UNA-UNSO: Nove oblichchia?” Studiï politologichnogo tsentru
Geneza, 1997, no. 1, pp. 48–51.
23. Here and below, the electoral results of parties and blocs are from the of-
ficial data base of the Central Electoral Commission of Ukraine (www.cvk.gov.ua,
accessed 24 May 2009).
24. Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists and Its Attitude Toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941
Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 23, nos. 3–4 (1999), pp. 149–84.
25. Iaroslava Stets’ko did not take part in the 1994 elections due to her lack of
a Ukrainian passport.
26. The SNPU obtained official status as a political party only in 1995.
27. T. Streshnev, “Partiia ‘Svoboda’: ‘Ariitsy’ na marshe. Chast’ vtoraia,”
Ukraina kriminal’naia, 17 January 2006 (www.cripo.com.ua/index.php?sect_
id=1&aid=13326, accessed 21 December 2009).
28. N. Babanina, “Illiuziia ‘Svobody,’ ” Ekspert: ukrainskii delovoi zhurnal, 2009,
no. 28 (220) (www.expert.ua/articles/8/0/7041, accessed 21 December 2009).
56 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
29. T. Streshnev, “Partiia ‘Svoboda’: ‘Ariitsy’ na marshe. Chast’ pervaia,” Ukraina
kriminal’naia, 16 January 2006 (www.cripo.com.ua/?sect_id=1&aid=13272, ac-
cessed 21 December 2009).
30. See www.spadshchyna.org/news.php (accessed December 21, 2009).
31. Streshnev, “Partiia ‘Svoboda’: ‘Ariitsy’ na marshe. Chast’ pervaia.”
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. A. Umland, “Fashistskii drug Vitrenko,” Ukrainskaia pravda, 26 September
2006 (www.pravda.com.ua/ru/news/2006/9/27/46953.htm, accessed 21 December
2009); Umland, “Aleksandr Dugin, evropeiskii fashizm i Vitrenko: Chto obshchego?”
Ukrainskaia pravda, 20 July 2007 (www.pravda.com.ua/news/2007/7/20/61687/htm,
accessed 21 December 2009). For more detailed discussions of Dugin’s fascism,
see A. Shekhovtsov, “Palingeneticheskii proekt neoevraziistva: idei vozrozhdeniia
v mirovozzrenii Aleksandra Dugina,” Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii
i kul’tury, vol. 6, no. 2 (2009), pp. 125–26 (www1.ku-eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/forum/
docs/forumruss12/7Shekhovtsov.pdf, accessed 24 March 2010); Umland, “Pato-
logicheskie tendentsii v russkom ‘neoevraziistve’: O znachenii vzleta Aleksandra
Dugina dlia obshchestvennoi zhizni sovremennoi Rossii,” Forum noveishei vostoch-
noevropeiskoi istorii i kul’tury, 2009, 6, no. 2, pp. 127–41 (www1.ku-eichstaett.
de/ZIMOS/forum/docs/forumruss12/8Umland%20Pathological.pdf, accessed 24
March 2010).
35. For various reasons, the Statehood group of nationalist deputies, which existed
in the mid-1990s. does not satisfy the criteria to be regarded here as a full-fledged
parliamentary faction representing right-wing radicals in the Verkhovna Rada.
36. In September 2005, the IAPM awarded the academic degree of candidate of
historical sciences to the well-known American racist and former leader of the Ku
Klux Klan David Duke.
37. Adrian Ivakhiv, “In Search of Deeper Identities: Neo-Paganism and ‘Native
Faith’ in Contemporary Ukraine,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and
Emergent Religions, vol. 8, no. 3 (2005), pp. 7–38; K. Galushko, “Bitii shliakh
arkheologiï do natsizmu, abo iaki ‘teoriï’ mi obgovoruemo,” in Novitni mifi ta
fal’shivki pro prokhodzhennia ukraïntsiv, ed. Iuliï Olyinik (Kyiv, 2008), pp. 11–28.
For more detail on IAPP and anti-Semitism in Ukraine, see V. Likhachev, “Anti-
semitizm v Ukraine (2002–2004 gg.)” (www.vaadua.org/Antisemit/AntisLyh.htm,
accessed 21 December 2009); Likhachev, “Antisemitizm v Ukraine (2004–2005)”
(www.vaadua.org/News/05-05/AntismUALikh.htm, accessed 21 December 2009);
Likhachev, “Antisemitizm v Ukraine, 2005–2006” (www.vaadua.org/News/04-
06/02-04-06.htm, accessed December 21, 2009); Likhachev, “Proiavleniia anti-
semitizma v Ukraine: itogi 2007 g.” (www.vaadua.org/News/01-2008/Ukr-2007.
html, accessed December 21, 2009); V. Mindlin, “Obzor antisemitskikh publikatsii
i proiavlenii v Ukraine (2004 god)” (www.vaadua.org/News/05-05/Mindlin.htm,
accessed 21 December 2009); I. Zisel’s, “ ‘Antisemitskie’ zametki, ili Novye pesni
o starom” (www.vaadua.org/Antisemit/AntisJosef.htm, accessed 21 December
2009); S. Averbukh, Novyi antisemitizm v Ukraine (Kyiv, 2005); Nadine Epstein,
“The Mysterious Tale of a Ukrainian University’s Anti-Semitic Crusade,” Moment:
Jewish Politics—Culture—Religion, November–December 2009 (www.momentmag.
com/Exclusive/2009/2009-12/200912-MAUP.html, accessed December 21, 2009);
Per A. Rudling, “The Extreme Right in Ukraine,” in European Right-Wing Extremism:
SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 57
Nature, Identity, Mobilizing Passions, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin, and
Brian Jenkins (forthcoming), vol. 1.
38. Veljko Vujacic, “Gennady Zyuganov and the ‘Third Road,’ ” Post-Soviet Af-
fairs, vol. 12, no. 2 (1996), pp. 118–54; Joan Urban and Valerii Solovei, Russia’s
Communists at the Crossroads (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997); N. Riabotiazhev and
E. Solov’ev, “Ot Lenina k Danilevskomu: metamorfozy geopoliticheskikh vozzrenii
KPRF,” Politicheskie issledovaniia, 2007, no. 2, pp. 124–36. On anti-Semitism in the
leadership of the CPRF, see V. Likhachev, Politicheskii antisemitizm v sovremennoi
Rossii (Moscow, 2003), pp. 18–25.
39. “Mnenie: Ministr-ksenofob,” Korrespondent.net, 24 July 2008 (http://kor-
respondent.net/opinions/532867, accessed May 24, 2009).
40. Minkenberg, Die neue radikale Rechte; V. Grinevich, “Raskolotaia pamiat’:
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of History and the Second World War in Post-Communist Ukraine (1986/1991–
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obshchestvenno-politicheskikh debatov v postsovetskoi Ukraine),” Ab Imperio,
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History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: Central European University Press,
2007); Per A. Rudling, The Shukhevych Cult in Ukraine: Myth Making with Com-
plications (forthcoming).
41. A. Umland, “Rastsvet russkogo ul’tranatsionalizma i stanovlenie soob-
shchestva ego issledovatelei,” Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii i kul’tury,
2009, no. 1, pp. 5–38 (www1.ku-eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/forum/docs/forumruss11/
1UmlandVvedenie.pdf, accessed 21 December 2009). This article lists most of the
significant bibliographies and resources for scholarly literature on the theme of
contemporary Russian nationalism.
42. Umland, “ ‘Oranzhevaia revoliutsiia’ kak postsovetskii vodorazdel”; Umland,
“Orange Revolution als Scheideweg.”
43. Personal communication with Viacheslav Likhachev.
44. Quoted from G. Mursalieva and P. Kanygin, “Kak schitat’ skinkhedov? Po
golovam!” Novaia gazeta, 10 April 2008 (www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/25/25.
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gregating ‘Ethnic Violence’ in the Russian Federation,” Nationalities Papers, vol.
37, no. 5 (2009), pp. 641–64. “The Moscow Bureau for Human Rights asserts that
in Russia today up to seventy thousand people consider themselves skinheads. This
is practically as many as in Europe and North America taken together” (P. Sedakov,
K. Gaaze, A. Vernidub, and A. Raskin, “Razzhiganie mezhnatsional’noi rezni,”
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58 RUSSIAN POLITICS AND LAW
46. V. Likhachev, Ksenofobiia v Ukraine–2008: Doklad po rezul’tatam monito-
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47. G. Kozhevnikova, “Radikal’nyi natsionalizm v Rossii i protivodeistvie emu
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51. Taras Kuzio, Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives on Nationalism:
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2007).
52. N. Panina, “Faktory natsional’noi identichnosti, tolerantnosti, ksenofobii i
antisemitizma v sovremennoi Ukraine,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 2006,
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54. The sole exception is the growth of the Crimean Tatar community, the result of
the policy of repatriating members of this previously deported ethnic group to their
homeland in Crimea. For a more detailed breakdown of the ethnic composition of the
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(2008), pp. 689–723.
56. Panina, “Faktory natsional’noi identichnosti.” See also Kerstin Zimmer and
Femke van Praagh, “Fremdenfeindlichkeit in der Ukraine,” Ukraine-Analysen,
2008, no. 41, pp. 2–5.
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