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Slava Ukraini

I've already mentioned how if you look up who I stop blame for the Georgia war, the google writing will state it was Russia's fault. But instead, if you have a little more in-depth knowledge about the EU report on it, you'd see that in that Report, they blame Georgia for starting it, though they also go on to talk about how Russia took things too far and also that both sides played large roles in ethnic cleansing (which I believe is going on for both sides in Ukraine... or at least all evidence points that way). 
 
With that in mind, here's another quick lesson in terms of that which Google shows and the narrative out there. I've been hearing the phrase "Slava Ukraini" since the start of the war. And though I had thought it a little much (for here in the States, given all the propaganda our elites are throwing at us, it was a little too much), I didn't think it bad. After all, look at this wiki article (first link above):

The phrase first appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in different variations, when it became popular among Ukrainians during the Ukrainian War of Independence from 1917 to 1921.[1] From the 1930s it was used by different Ukrainian groups, as well as Ukrainian diaspora groups and refugee communities in the West during the Cold War. In the Soviet Union the phrase was forbidden and discredited by Soviet and later Russian authorities. The phrase eventually resurfaced in Ukraine during the country's struggle for independence in connection with the fall of the Soviet Union. Its use was revived again during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the Russo-Ukrainian War, during which it became a widely popular symbol in Ukraine.
Seems pretty tame, right? Well that was my first take on it. 

Then some people started saying it was the equivalent of Sieg Heil, especially since Stephan Bandera used it while carrying out his many massacres. Okay, that's new information. Gotta absorb that and take it in. Is it right, though? That wiki article doesn't even mention the fascists using it (copopting it, sure, but so did types like the Nazis and we pretty much eschew the symbols they've tainted, haven't we? This includes Sieg Heil)[1]. 

And many of the first google results to the question of if Slava Ukraini is fascist are basically people claiming the words are just that (glory to Ukraine) and then comparing it to any other "glory to Xcountry words" and I have to say that sounds completely mendacious to me. 

Of course when you read the Wiki on Bandera, this comes up in the footnotes (not in the body of text):

  1.  Radeljić, Branislav (18 January 2021). The Unwanted Europeanness?: Understanding Division and Inclusion in Contemporary Europe. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 978-3-11-068425-4For instance, the chant, "Glory to Ukraine!" (Slava Ukraini!), followed by "Glory to the Heroes!" (Heroiam slava!), had its origins in Ukraine's national revolution of 1917-1920, but it became widespread as a slogan under the wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. By 1941, the Bandera wing of the OUN had embraced the ideals of fascism and Nazism, emphasizing militarism, one-party rule, and the cult of the leader.
And again, one can definitely say that perhaps the fascists took a term to try to overtake existing, less odious, versions of ideology, and that case is being made in some parts of the internet, but I'm not seeing people present much evidence of that. Note that Bandera is an issue in Ukraine (the west). Our congress even passed legislation to make sure his followers or the NeoNazis didn't get US money (before the invasion). 

It's always better to look at results from before this war, btw. You'll get more nuanced takes like this. 

The phrase dates back to World War I, when military units from the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic were fighting alongside German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers against Russia. However it was in the 1930s when it really took hold, becoming a rallying cry for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), explained Oleksandr Zaitsev, a historian from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. "There are records showing that during the court hearings against OUN's leader Stepan Bandera in 1936, his supporters were accompanying the slogan 'Glory to Ukraine' with a hand-throwing fascist-style salute," he told DW.

Okay, and then:

Critics of the slogan point toward its affiliation with the OUN, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, another World War II-era nationalist militia. Today, the organizations are honored in the country as freedom fighters who battled for an independent Ukraine, but some of their members were involved in atrocities against Poles and Jews.
Seems like a big deal, though there is a professor who says (and I have to imagine many in Ukraine using it are not Banderites) otherwise further down in that argument. That being said, it seems like the article simply goes on to point out many issues with almost all the nationalists in Eastern Europe, to varying degrees. 

This isn't to say things are clear cut. I'm just saying they're not, and I'm still looking for more evidence out there. 

But it goes to show how the narrative is shaped. Look at the Holodomor and how the first google result is:


So if you're not about digging deep, this is what you would think. But it isn't clear cut: [2]



[1] Sieg Heil: This is just the Wiki, so damn if I am wrong, just point out where. But in the end, it seems like its origins, though with a pan-german movement, were from an anti-semite to start with:

The spoken greeting "Heil" became popular in the pan-German movement around 1900.[15] It was used by the followers of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, head of the Austrian Alldeutsche Partei ("Pan-German Party") who considered himself leader of the Austrian Germans, and who was described by Carl E. Schorske as "The strongest and most thoroughly consistent anti-Semite that Austria produced" before the coming of Hitler. Hitler took both the "Heil" greeting – which was popularly used in his "hometown" of Linz when he was a boy[16] – and the title of "Führer" for the head of the Nazi Party from Schönerer,[15][17] whom he admired.[18]

The extended arm saluting gesture is widely, and erroneously, believed to be based on an ancient Roman custom, but no known Roman work of art depicts it, nor does any extant Roman text describe it.[19] Jacques-Louis David's 1784 painting Oath of the Horatii displayed a raised arm salutatory gesture in an ancient Roman setting.[20][21][22] The gesture and its identification with ancient Rome was advanced in other French neoclassic art.[23]

In 1892, Francis Bellamy introduced the American Pledge of Allegiance, which was to be accompanied by a visually similar saluting gesture, referred to as the Bellamy salute.[24][notes 1] A raised arm gesture was then used in the 1899 American stage production of Ben-Hur,[25] and its 1907 film adaptation.[26]The gesture was further elaborated upon in several early Italian films.[27] Of special note was the 1914 silent film Cabiria, whose screenplay had contributions from the Italian ultra-nationalist Gabriele d'Annunzio,[28] arguably a forerunner of Italian Fascism.[29] In 1919, when he led the occupation of Fiume, d'Annunzio used the style of salute depicted in the film as a neo-Imperialist ritual and the Italian Fascist Party quickly adopted it.[30]

By autumn 1923, some members of the Nazi Party were using the rigid, outstretched right arm salute to greet Hitler, who responded by raising his own right hand crooked back at the elbow, palm opened upwards, in a gesture of acceptance.[31] In 1926, the Nazi salute was made compulsory for all party members.[32] It functioned as a display of commitment to the Party and a declaration of principle to the outside world.[33] Gregor Strasser wrote in 1927 that the greeting in and of itself was a pledge of loyalty to Hitler, as well as a symbol of personal dependence on the Führer.[34] Even so, the drive to gain acceptance did not go unchallenged.[33]

[2] Alrighty, getting around to watching this. 

The "deliberately engineered" parts are iffy. To repost my answer

So this is a great question, and the answer in the case of the Holodomor is: it's complicated.

First, it helps to review what the legal definition of genocide is, at least according to the 1948 United Nations Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

"Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Now a couple things to say about the UN definition: there is a heavy focus on intent, meaning that for an act to qualify as genocide (as opposed to "merely" a crime against humanity), there has to be an intention to wipe out a national/ethnic/religious/racial group. There are arguments that this bar (largely set by the Holocaust) is too high. It's also worth noting that the 1948 UN language was determined with Soviet input, and so by definition the language approved by the Soviet government intentionally was designed to not immediately put them in legal issues (even though the person who coined the phrase, Rafael Lemkin, specifically had the mass deaths in Ukraine in mind). It's also important to note that there are other concepts of what concepts a genocide, notably "cultural genocide", as discussed in this excellent AskHistorians Podcast episode. 

Olga Andriewsky wrote an excellent literature review in 2015 for East/West: A Journal of Ukrainian Studies on the historiography of studying the Holodomor, so I'm going to lean heavily on that for this part of the answer. She notes that the conclusions of James Mace in his U.S. Commission’s Report to Congress in April 1988 hold up pretty well. She notes that all Ukrainian presidents (except for Yanukovich), favored official commemoration and historic of the Holodomor as a planned genocide, going back to Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk (who was Ukrainian Supreme Soviet Chairman and a longtime Communist Party member, so hardly some sort of anti-Soviet political dissident). "Holodomor as genocide" has effectively been the Ukrainian government's position since independence, as well as the position of many (not all) Ukrainian historians. Further research since 1991 that they feel has buttressed that view is that forced grain requisitions by the Soviet government involved collective punishment ("blacklisting", which was essentially blockading) of noncomplying villages, the sealing of the Ukrainian SSR's borders in 1932 to prevent famine refugees from leaving, and Stalin ignoring and overriding Ukrainian Communist Party requests for famine relief, and mass purges of the same party leaders as "counter-revolutionary" elements in the same year. Andriewsky notes that while some prominent Ukrainian historians, such as Valerii Soldatenko, dispute the use of the term genocide, they are in agreement with the proponents around the basic timeline, number of victims, and centrality of Soviet government policy - the debate is largely around intent.

So more or less open-and-shut, right? Well, not so fast, because now we should bring in the perspective from Russian and Soviet historians. Again, they will not differ drastically from Holodomor historians on the number of victims or the centrality of government policies (no serious historians will argue that it was a famine caused by natural factors alone), nor will they deny that Ukraine suffered heavily. 

But their context and point of view will differ tremendously from Ukrainian Holodomor historians in that they will note that the 1931-1933 famine was not limited to Ukraine, but also affected the Russian Central Black Earth region, Volga Valley, North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. This map from page xxii in Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 will give some sense of the geographic extent of the famine. In fact, while most of the famine victims were in Ukraine (some 3.5 million out of a population of 33 million), some 5-7 million died from the famine across the Union, and Ukraine was not the worst hit republic in relative terms - that misfortune befell Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh ASSR), where some 1.2 to 1.4 million of the over 4 million ethnic Kazakh population died through "denomadization" and the resulting famine. At least ten million people across the Union suffered severe malnutrition and starvation without dying, and food was scarce even in major cities like Leningrad and Moscow (although on the other hand, they did not face mass mortality). Kotkin very clearly states: "there was no 'Ukrainian' famine; the famine was Soviet." 

Other factors tend to mitigate the idea that it was a planned attempt to specifically wipe out the Ukrainians as a people - the Ukrainian borders with Russia were sealed, but this came in the same period where internal passports were introduced across the USSR in an effort to control rural emigration into cities (many of these were kulaks and famine refugees), and deny them urban services and rations.

Stephen Wheatcroft and Michael Ellman are two historians worth mentioning here, notably because they had a public debate about a decade ago around how much Stalin knew and intended as consequences during the famine. Wheatcroft argued that, in effect, the mass deaths caused by forced grain requisitions were the result of governmental callousness: unrealistic requisitions were set, including the punitive collection of seed grain in 1932. But in Wheatcroft et al's opinion, this wasn't specifically meant to punish peasants. Essentially, extremely flawed grain reserves policies (plus the elimination of any private market for grain) meant that millions of lives were lost. Ellman, in contrast, takes a harder line: that Stalin considered peasants claiming starvation to be "wreckers" more or less conducting a "go-slow" strike against the government, and also notes Stalin's refusal to accept international famine relief (which was markedly different from Russian famines in 1891 or 1921-22). But Wheatcroft and Ellman, for their disagreement, do agree that the famine wasn't an engineered attempt to deliberately cause mass deaths - it was an attempt to extract grain reserves from the peasantry for foreign export and for feeding urban industrial workers.

Ellman comes down on the position that the famine isn't a genocide according to the UN definition, but is in a more relaxed definition. Specifically he cites the de-Ukrainianization of the Kuban region in the North Caucasus as an example of cultural genocide. But even here he notes that while under a relaxed definition the Holodomor would be a genocide, it would only be one of others (including the famine in Kazakhstan, which I wrote about in this answer and I think has a stronger claim to the genocide label than the Holodomor, as well as the mass deportations and executions in various "national operations". He also notes that the relaxed definition would see plenty of other states, such as the UK, US, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, similarly guilty of genocides, and in the case of Australia he considers even the strict UN definition to be applicable. Which would make the Holodomor a crime of genocide, but in a definition that recognizes genocide as depressingly common and not unique to the Soviet experience.

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[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 21 points  

Some other things I'd note. 

It keeps talking about "individual farms" and "each family owning their land" before collectivization, which is kindatrue, but for many peasants what was happening was that they had strips of land intermingled with other families' strips in a village, somewhat similar to the open-field system in Medieval Europe. I confess this is where I would be happy for someone to correct me specifically on Ukrainian data though - I think it had more family farms than other regions (except Siberia), but it's kind of talked about quickly like everyone had their own family farm (with an implied compactness and individualism).

The post-famine resettlement - it happened, but it's a very, very weak link to describe why southern Ukraine is more Russified - most of the famine deaths in Ukraine weren't in that area, and it had already had Russian (and Russian-language) settlement from the late 18th century. Interestingly, most of the settlers from Russia returned there after a year, and were outnumbered by internal settlers from other parts of Ukraine. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which treats the famine as a genocide, nevertheless  states on the matter: 

" Subsequent attempts to repopulate Ukrainian villages devastated during the Holodomor drew mainly, though not exclusively, on people resettled involuntarily from other parts of the Ukrainian SSR. As such, resettlement from the RSFSR in response to the Holodomor was not a major factor in changing the ethnic composition of Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s. The long-term influx of ethnic Russians into Ukraine’s cities was the more pertinent factor, although demographic losses during the Holodomor, as well as deportations related to dekulakization, also affected the ethnic balance in Ukraine."

Weirdly the video takes the point that "the West didn't want to get involved in Soviet politics" and therefore didn't mobilize to help Ukraine. This is a little weird because I'm not actually sure how other countries - even today - are actually supposed to actively provide famine relief to a country whose government denies a famine is taking place (short of invasion).

Anyway, a big problem with this, as noted in my earlier comment, is that it tries to frame the famine as something that uniquely happened to Ukraine, especially connecting it to suppression of Ukrainian national political and cultural elites. It's a lie that the famine hit Russia just as hard - but the famine did hit Russia, and it hit Kazakhstan proportionately worse than it hit Ukraine. Vox is kind of constructing a strawman statement, when the actual Tweet from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs ("That famine was a common tragedy for Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and other Soviet peoples") is largely accurate from historians' perspective, if also (obviously) given for a political purpose.

Speaking of the persecution of Ukrainian elites - this did happen, but again it's something that happened all over the Soviet Union in the 1930s ("bourgeois nationalists" were arrested, imprisoned and executed pretty much everywhere, in a reversal of the "korenizatsiya" policy of the 1920s). It also compresses the fates of the figures mentioned into one campaign, which is simplifying things - Serhiy Yefremov of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was part of a 1929 show trial against the "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine", imprisoned, and died in prison in 1939. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary and President of the Rada, had gone into exile after the Russian Civil War, returned to Ukraine in 1924, was internally exiled to Moscow in 1931 and died during an operation in 1934 (this was actually a much lighter fate than the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, whose leadership had been put on trial in 1922, imprisoned, and then were executed during the Purges of the 1930s).

Lastly I should say that for all the suffering Ukraine has gone through in the past 100 years, I don't think I agree with the conclusion that the aggression and war crimes it faces currently are basically a second round of the same thing from the 1930s famine. I mostly just don't think this is a great framework for understanding either event (it also leaves out everything else that happened in between, like World War II and the postwar insurgency in Western Ukraine).

So I guess I would rate the video as not wrong for the most part, but it's trying to fit everything into a simplified and tight narrative (sometimes even at odds with the very facts they mention), and the events described are a bit more complicated than that.

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This post first appeared on Nelson Lowhim; Writer's Muse, please read the originial post: here

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