Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Lecture at the conference "Other People's Fascisms", October 9, 2025
Fascism played an important role in Ukraine, although the standard narratives of Ukrainian history do not mention fascism at all or introduce it only briefly. This common approach to Ukrainian history is based on the assumption that the Ukrainian nationalists were not fascists but freedom fighters and liberators, and that the Ukrainians suffered so much from the Nazis and the Soviets that the history of the Ukrainian perpetrators does not need to be integrated into the history of Ukraine. One result of this understanding of Ukrainian history are the monuments to Stepan Bandera, Yurii Shukhevych, and the soldiers of the Waffen-SS Division Galizien which have been erected in Western Ukraine since the early 1990s and before then by the Ukrainian diaspora in countries such as Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the USA. The cult of Stepan Bandera in post-Soviet Ukraine was used as an excuse by the Russian president Vladimir Putin to attack this country, although more than 80 percent of the Ukrainians condemned the worship of Bandera, Shukhevych, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, prior to his attack on Ukraine. In my presentation, I show that fascism is an important part of the history of Ukraine and that it is decisive to study this transnational phenomenon in Ukraine as well as in other countries in East Central and South-Eastern Europe in order to rethink the history of violence and to democratize the memory of World War II and the period between the early 1920s and late 1940s.
Lecture at the conference "Other People's Fascisms", October 9, 2025
Fascism played an important role in Ukraine, although the standard narratives of Ukrainian history do not mention fascism at all or introduce it only briefly. This common approach to Ukrainian history is based on the assumption that the Ukrainian nationalists were not fascists but freedom fighters and liberators, and that the Ukrainians suffered so much from the Nazis and the Soviets that the history of the Ukrainian perpetrators does not need to be integrated into the history of Ukraine. One result of this understanding of Ukrainian history are the monuments to Stepan Bandera, Yurii Shukhevych, and the soldiers of the Waffen-SS Division Galizien which have been erected in Western Ukraine since the early 1990s and before then by the Ukrainian diaspora in countries such as Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the USA. The cult of Stepan Bandera in post-Soviet Ukraine was used as an excuse by the Russian president Vladimir Putin to attack this country, although more than 80 percent of the Ukrainians condemned the worship of Bandera, Shukhevych, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, prior to his attack on Ukraine. In my presentation, I show that fascism is an important part of the history of Ukraine and that it is decisive to study this transnational phenomenon in Ukraine as well as in other countries in East Central and South-Eastern Europe in order to rethink the history of violence and to democratize the memory of World War II and the period between the early 1920s and late 1940s.
