On New Year’s Eve, Putin, under the mantra of readiness for negotiations with Ukraine, gave an order to brutally attack the memorial sites associated with Ukrainian national heroes Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych – museums in Dubliany and Lviv.
The war against the historical memory of nations enslaved by Russia is one of the key directions of Russian imperialism’s aggression.
In his propaganda, Putin cites common historical heritage and uses the cliché “one nation” as the basis for aggression against Ukraine. As though, Ukrainians and Russians are one people, only “confused” by the West and “Ukrainian Nazis”.
At the same time, within Russia, Putin increasingly disregards the federal status of the country and the presence of national autonomous entities, and uses the Black Hundred definition of “multinational Russian people.” This means, the enslaved and robbed Yakuts, the Buddhist Buryats, and the Finno-Ugric nations squeezed into one community of the rapist and the raped under the common denominator – “Russian”.
To develop such a brazen ideological “feint”, the Kremlin has been waging a war against the national and historical memory of enslaved nations for centuries.
The empire uses the same techniques from century to century: to erase an inconvenient part of historical memory, especially about the heroic period of resistance against Russian imperialism and aggression, or to rewrite history.
Local heroes are being captured and recast as great friends of the Russian people. Those who do not fall under such a brutal historical scheme are trying to erase and physically destroy their memory. Thus, Taras Shevchenko, a descendant of the Haydamaks, a serf deprived of personal rights and sent by the Russian Empire to serve in the occupation army, actually imprisoned in the best years of his life, became a “revolutionary-democrat” (the inscription on the grave in Kaniv) and “a great friend of the Russian people”. The fact that he was forced to write a diary in Russian (because Ukrainian was categorically forbidden) is cited as an undeniable example of friendship between nations and belonging to the Russian culture. There are many such examples. Bohdan Khmelnytsky, during whose lifetime, in fact, the Russian-Ukrainian war (the war for the Belarusian heritage) began in the 17th century became one of the propaganda clichés and moved to the category of the highest awards of the USSR. The empire made similar “tricks” with national giants Lesya Ukrainka (Olena Kosach) and Ivan Franko.
Already during the current phase of Russia’s bloody aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin, driving enslaved nations to slaughter for its imperial purposes, who bear disproportionately large losses, has resumed an ancient practice.
In October 2023, Kremlin collaborator Ramzan Kadyrov announced the creation of a battalion named after Sheikh Mansur, the first imam of the North Caucasus, who led the struggle of the Caucasian peoples for independence against Russia in 1785-1791. This is at a time when the detachment named after Sheikh Mansur has been fighting on the side of Ukraine since 2014.
In general, the empire, after heavy losses in Ukraine, began to fill human losses at the front with so-called regional volunteer battalions. Only in 2022, 52 such battalions representing 33 regions were formed.
It was the national regions, especially the Muslim ones, that occupied the first places in terms of the number of dead per capita. At the same time, they perished for “Russian and Orthodox” propaganda clichés.
These hastily formed and poorly equipped battalions, which at the battlefront play the role of meat (cannon fodder), like a bad joke, also began to be assigned the names of national heroes who fought against Russian enslavement, or toponyms that existed before the occupation and harsh Russification. The so-called Mari-El volunteer battalion is called “Poltysh”, in honour of the leader of the meadow Mari who led the liberation struggle against Ivan the Terrible in the middle of the 16th century.
At the same time, with those whom it is impossible to capture and “forgive”, as, for example, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych – the leaders of the national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian nation in the middle of the 20th century – the empire acts demonstrably brutally and cruelly. They are trying to erase their memory and totally destroy their physical memories.
The New Year’s terrorist attack on the museums of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich in the Lviv region shows that even fallen heroes pose a mortal danger to the empire. Russia will never make Bandera its own, and the pseudo-historical practice of “ideological anathema” did not yield results. Stepan Bandera was sentenced to death by all occupational regimes, was on death row in a German concentration camp, where his brothers died, and after the war living in Germany, which underwent total and thorough denazification after the Second World War, obviously does not lend itself to the cliché “Nazi, fascist”.
Moreover, immediately after the Declaration of Independence, a folk cult of Stepan Bandera was formed. The central streets of the city began to be called by his name. Every year, massive marches are held in his honour across the country. In the 2000s, during a large-scale poll of public opinion, Bandera was recognized as the most outstanding Ukrainian. Russian agents at the time had to falsify this survey. In 2010, the Ukrainian state awarded Stepan Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine by Presidential Decree. In April of the same year, at the request of the Russian agent V. Olentsevich (convicted by the Ukrainian state for terrorism), the Donetsk District Administrative Court (occupied district of Ukraine) deemed the awarding of the title of Hero of Ukraine illegal.
In June 2017, the District Administrative Court of the city of Kyiv presided over by the Russian agent Vovk, who is officially under US sanctions, brutally overruled the will of Kyiv residents and cancelled the naming of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych avenues in Kyiv. At the same time, Russia had to put under the spotlight a whole network of its agency’s “umbrella” organizations, such as the “Anti-Fascist Human Rights League” and the so-called “Jewish Human Rights Group”.
In addition to subversive activities through its agents in the government and courts, Russia has repeatedly carried out terrorist acts against places associated with the names of Ukrainian national heroes. Only on the territory of Stepan Bandera’s family home in Stary Uhrynov, Ivano-Frankivsk region, three acts of terrorism were committed. In 1990 and 1991, Russian special forces tried to blow up the monument with the help of a helicopter. In 2019, 400 grams of TNT were planted once again and the museum building was damaged.
To destroy any physical references to one’s own or separatist identity, examples of struggle – this tactic is used by the empire everywhere. For example, in Russia, there is still no monument to the lamas, the spiritual elite of the Buddhist nations enslaved by Russia: Buryats, Kalmyks, and Tuvans, who were completely destroyed during the Bolshevik repressions. Likewise, during the Stalinist repressions, the spiritual leaders of the peoples of Siberia and the Volga – shamans – were purged. In Khakassia alone, 28 shamans were shot and sent to concentration camps in the 1930s.
And now, at a time when Russia wipes out the very possibility of national resistance of the nations enslaved by Russia, using their men on an industrial scale in the war of aggression in Ukraine, the fight against national memory and monuments is gaining, on the scale of Stalinist repressions. Thus, examples of attempts to dismantle monuments inconvenient for Putin’s regime by representatives of the national liberation movement such as Salavat Yulayev and Zaki Validi have been recorded in Bashkiria.
Therefore, the attack on the Ukrainian leaders of the national liberation struggle is not accidental.
During Putin’s regular annual press conference, the name of Stepan Bandera was mentioned as the only Ukrainian name.
Therefore, if Stepan Bandera remains the number one enemy of Russian imperialism, both the Ukrainian state and the nations enslaved by Moscow should make more use of Bandera’s legacy. Both as practices of the national liberation struggle and as ideas. Because, contrary to Putin’s imperial concept: slavery, denationalization in exchange for handouts to collaborators from the master’s purse, Bandera supported the concept of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Peoples under the slogan “Freedom for Nations – Freedom for the Individual!”.
Bandera justified the complete deconstruction of the Russian empire and the creation of national states under the rule of law of nations enslaved by Russia:
“…the struggle will not stop until the complete realization of our goal, which is a complete break between Ukraine and Moscow, the rebuilding of the Independent Unified Ukrainian State, the collapse of the USSR and the construction of independent, national states in post-Soviet Europe and Asia, the complete defeat of Russian imperialism and the establishment around Russia, locked in its own borders, a system of states so that it could no longer act with imperialist aggression” (Stepan Bandera, “Ukrainian National Revolution, not only anti-regime resistance”).
“Ukraine, taking into account its geopolitical location, can only gain and maintain its independence by its own forces, by its own struggle. At the same time, it will carry out an important mission of wider significance for other nations as well, implementing and defending the universal slogan: “Freedom for nations, freedom for the Individual!”.
“There is only one Russia – imperialist, and it will be so until Russian imperialism is totally destroyed, and the Russian people are not cured of it through the knowledge that their imperialism brings them the greatest harm – victims, suffering and downfall” (Stepan Bandera, “The Third World War and the Liberation Struggle”).
Only the joint efforts of the enslaved Davids can throw off the yoke of the Moscow Goliath.
Currently, Ukraine extends a helping hand to all those who have been enslaved by Russia for centuries. This chance is definitely worth taking advantage of…
Yuriy Syrotyuk
