The second half of the 20th century, which began after the end of the next world post-war redistribution of territories and spheres of influence, seemed peaceful and prosperous to many contemporaries. After two global military confrontations, multi-million victims, and unprecedented destruction, humanity, as it were, decided to take a break, extinguish conflicts, dwell on the mistakes that led to catastrophes and preserve, at least for a while, a kind of status quo in the world legal order.
However, already in 1946, the undisputed leader of the opinions of his time, the war hero and the forge of victory over Nazism, Sir Winston Churchill, in his famous speech at Westminster College, warned the civilized world about the reality of the threat of Moscow aggression and tyranny. The former Prime Minister of Great Britain stated for the first time that “if before the war we could not stop Hitler, now we need to stop Stalin and the Soviet Union.”
Although this speech by Churchill is considered, by some experts, to be an unofficial announcement of the beginning of the “cold war”, not everyone wanted to see and recognize the harsh and painful truth. It was more profitable to put on post-traumatic glasses, even if not rose-colored, and concentrate attention on creating shaky structures of the international balance of peace, on rebuilding the economy, protecting workers’ rights, and modelling a bright future in the form of a comfortable bubble.
In 1948, the famous English writer George Orwell finished writing his most famous utopian novel “1984”, in which he illustrates the fallacy of world complacency. He describes the work of the fictitious ministries of truth, love, peace and prosperity not so much ironically as in a warning form, but in fact – a totalitarian system, very similar to the one that was established on the territory of one of the winners of the last war – the Bolshevik empire.
It turned out that the threat had not disappeared. A huge evil empire remained on the world map, which became a constant threat to the civilized world and international security, rattling weapons, in particular – nuclear, and the possibility of igniting the “third world war”, which continued to destroy nations, organizing famines and genocides, implementing the “elder brother” programme in relation to the enslaved nations.
The three pillars on which empires are founded and held are swords, prisons and myths or enslavement, fear and propaganda. All of them were inherent in the Bolshevik system of holding power, as, at one time, in the Moscow kingdom or, in modern times, in Putin’s Muscovy. Some representatives of the civilized world often did not want to see and admit this, and, in the end, continue to do so in the future. Instead, they invented hundreds of reasons and explanations, trying to explain and justify the evil that Russia carries within itself, not realizing that any attempts to pacify, fertilize, democratize or train the Moscow bear will never have a chance of success.
In this context, following Churchill’s warnings and Orwell’s predictions, immediately after the end of the war, the leading figures of the organized nationalist movement and ideologues of Ukrainian nationalism spoke. The mandate to declare a position was primarily given to them by the fact that the armed confrontation between the national liberation movement and the Red Kremlin was still ongoing on Ukrainian soil, and, therefore, the anti-imperial, anti-colonial liberation struggle was not over. Moreover, in the summer of 1944, the Ukrainian Main Liberation Council (UGVR) was formed – the coordination centre of the Ukrainian revolutionary and liberation movement and before that, in November 1943, on the initiative of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Banderites), the Conference of the Enslaved Nations of Europe and Asia was held, which laid the foundation for the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Peoples (ABN), reorganized for the struggle of enslaved peoples against the Red Empire in 1946.
Yaroslav Stetsko, the long-time leader of the ABN, a leading figure and ideologue of the organized nationalist movement, became one of the first to publicly advocate the unification of the efforts of the entire civilized world to support the struggle of enslaved nations and the collapse of the Bolshevik empire. In the process of destroying the Kremlin’s “prison of nations”, Yaroslav Stetsko attributed the main role to Ukraine. “Ukraine should become the biggest, main lever that should destroy the last world empire, the shameful system of enslaving hundreds of nations – Russia,” he emphasized in his writings. – “The development of history did not follow an imperialist path. In the wake of the Second World War, Stetsko wrote, all Western European empires disappeared. The imperial principle of organizing the world order gave way to the victorious national principle… Therefore, Ukraine, as the power that most undermined the last empire, became in the second half of the 20th century the “revolutionary problem of the world”. Stetsko constantly emphasized the falsity of the Western European policy, which wanted to solve the problem of Eastern Europe in such a way as to hand it over to Moscow’s “anti-European, Eurasian, ruinous” empire. Such a policy, according to Stetsko, led to excessive growth of the power of the Muscovite region and, as a result, posed a danger to stability and freedom in Europe itself.
Other leading figures of the OUN (b), including Stepan Bandera and Stepan Lenkavskyi, expressed many reservations about the Bolshevik imperial threat in their publications, speeches and interviews for the Western press. However, one of the most consistent and professional critics of Moscow imperialism under the red banner was Ivan Vovchuk, a long-standing associate of Bandera, vice-president of the UGVR, and head of the Organization for the Defense of the Four Freedoms of Ukraine.
Myth hunter
Ivan Vovchuk can be safely called an uncompromising destroyer of the imperial myths of Moscow. Research and exposure of the Kremlin’s invasive, insidious, often hybrid colonial policy runs through all of his journalistic work.
It was Ivan Vovchuk, in the framework of his report, delivered at the Second Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party of Ukraine, who introduced into public circulation the concept of Great Russian racism – intolerance of the right to freedom and the proper state life of other nations, which has recently been enshrined in Ukrainian legislation under the name “racism”. In the spring of 2023, a year after the start of the full-scale invasion and fifty years after Ivan Vovchuk’s speech, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the Resolution “On the use of the ideology of racism by the political regime of the Russian Federation, condemning the principles and practices of racism as totalitarian and misanthropic.” The term, which many Ukrainians informally called the Russian government and which Ivan Vovchuk coined, is now part of Ukrainian legislation.
One of the first racist myths that Ivan Vovchuk exposes is the statement of the Moscow imperialists about the existential “craving” of enslaved nations, in particular Ukrainians, to the “great Russian nation”, to the “elder brother”, so that, based on this postulate, ” to deny the possibility of the collapse of tsarist Russia in national revolutions and to erase from the nations’ memory the conquering and occupation policy of the Bolsheviks based on the Russian people”. “Great-power Bolshevism (read – imperialism) never reconciled with the development of the national-political consciousness of non-Russian nations included in the colonial-imperial complex of the USSR,” emphasized Ivan Vovchuk. “This colonial-imperial work is the greatest paradox of the 20th century, and it was invented by the Bolsheviks in order to save the empire from collapsing into national states.”
When characterizing Muscovites, Ivan Vovchuk often deliberately used the term “Russian nation” or the so-called “Russians”, because, as a historian, he well understood the issues of ethnogenesis and the origin of the inhabitants of the northern swamps, which took place based on the interaction of Finno-Ugric and Turkic nations, prepared on the stolen history of Ukraine-Rus. That is why he argued about the complete artificiality of this concept, not to mention the attempts of the Bolshevik leaders to create an even more terrible mutant based on it – the “Soviet people”.
Sires Bolyaen, Inyazor of the Erzyan people, who spoke very aptly about this issue recently, emphasized that ethnogenesis is a complex process that does not obey Putin’s decrees. Just as he did not submit to the rewriting of history in the times of Peter I and Catherine II, he did not succumb to cheap Bolshevik tricks and stubbornly did not fit into the main imperial structures.
So what kind of “craving” of the thousand-year-old Ukrainian nation for such a hybrid entity as the “Russian people” could we be talking about? You should not look for an answer to this absurd question. It is much more important to think about the fact of who are these mythical “Russians”? Do they exist at all, or, like the Martians, do they pose a permanent threat to human civilization, but in fact do not exist?… Because even today, at the time of the total bombing of the inhabitants of the so-called Russian Federation, ask the average citizen about his origin. There will certainly be something from the Mokshans, something from the Erzians, from the Tatars, Bashkirs, and, of course, somewhere from the Ukrainians. But, in the end, the answer will be predictable and foreseeable – “We are Russian”, without any conscious arguments.
Ivan Vovchuk proposed his own label – khanate, for this “rabble of people” with a morbid mania for greatness, for these assimilated people, without race and tribe, for this artificial state with unreasonably large imperial ambitions, combining the origins of the Golden Horde, eastern despotism, barbaric tyranny and its stillborn vision of “unitary state and autocracy”. “After the restoration of the imperial complex by the Bolsheviks, in which the Ukrainian state was included by force of arms, – emphasized Vovchuk, – there is a struggle between two opposing forces: the Moscow-Bolshevik Great Power and the national idea, which is the life-giving force in the formation of the nation. Over the last decade, the khanate of the all-powerful party of the Central Committee of the CPSU intensified that struggle, pursuing an offensive policy of levelling non-Russian nations in order to merge them with the Russian people. The academics and scientific forces of the empire were asked to prove the historical “regularity” of the death of nations under mature socialism.”
“Muscovites are unsurpassed masters of falsification of history,” Ivan Vovchuk convinced in his article “The Wind is Returning”. At that time, he could not yet accurately predict all the future strands of Kremlin propaganda, but he completely destroyed the thesis about “one people”! Just as he tore off the mask of the Kagebist-Bolshevik pseudo-religious entity under the label of the “Russian Orthodox Church” (ROC), devoting several publications to this topic in the “Bulletin of the OOCHSU”.
First of all, Ivan Vovchuk drew attention to the myth of the “struggle of the Soviet government with religion.” Pointing to the numerous crimes and repressions of the Bolsheviks against church leaders and believers in Ukraine, he rightly noted that in the territory where Moscow “Orthodoxy” reigned, an unbreakable alliance between the church and secular authorities was formed. Relying on the long-standing traditions of tsarist Russia, the church structure found a common language with the “Bolshevik antichrists”, and they, in turn, were aware of how, where and when they could use spiritual “links” to form the above-mentioned imperial racism.
It was the ROC, as a disciplined unit of the KGB, and later the FSB, that became the promoter of the establishment and spread the so-called “Russian peace” and the formation of the doctrine of Great Russian messianism. “Anti-religious drumming in government and party press bodies still takes place,” noted Ivan Vovchuk in his article “On the Black Hundred Paths”, but it does not fundamentally affect the politics of the Moscow church, which, with the support of the party and government, is competing for ecumenism. That the church has become necessary for the empire in its far-reaching and long-term foreign policy, as well as in the defense against nationalism – internal, is indisputable.”
In another publication – “Relations are Normalized”, Vovchuk points out that Moscow Orthodoxy ” has always been the spiritual foundation of imperialism, on which the government relied and consolidated the conquered regions and nations in the imperial cauldron, and trained Muscovites to see themselves as messengers of a higher, unearthly power “.
As for the latter narrative, Vovchuk points to the tenacity of the idea of Great Russian messianism, starting with the complex Moscow tsars, continuing with the rotten Dostoevshchyna, based on “imperial spirituality developed and strengthened, in the atmosphere of which modern Bolshevism matured.” “Moscow Bolshevism (communism) is a national phenomenon, it is based on the traditions of the Moscow kingdom,” Vovchuk convincingly asserts. – Only thanks to these traditions, the Bolsheviks were able to impose a dictatorship so similar to the tsarist one. As once the profession of the true Muscovite Orthodox faith determined belonging to the Muscovite kingdom, so now belonging to Soviet Russia is determined by the profession of the orthodox communist faith. Messianism is the most characteristic feature of the Moscow idea. It is inseparable from Bolshevism.”
Vovchuk, a resident of Poltava, does not miss one of the most terrible Bolshevik-imperial myths about the causes of the Holodomor in Ukraine in the context of a natural disaster. On the twentieth anniversary of the great tragedy, he publishes the article “The Siege of Ukraine”, in which, based on economic analysis, he convincingly proves the opinion that the only real cause of the Holodomor was the Kremlin’s carefully planned genocidal policy against the Ukrainian peasantry, as the heart of the nation. Vovchuk refutes all theses of Bolshevik propaganda about crop failure, drought or plans for excessive grain exports, emphasizing that it was the “imperial arithmetic” of the distribution of the harvest that caused the tragedy. The implementers of this “arithmetic” were specially sent cadres from Moscow. “This detail is characteristic,” Vovchuk emphasized, “because it indicates how scrupulously thought out the attack on the Ukrainian peasantry, the bearer of Ukrainian traditionalism, the welcoming force of the nation.”
Summarizing his thoughts on the causes and consequences of the tragedy, Vovchuk rightly remarked: “It is a mistake to think that the war against the Ukrainian peasantry is characteristic only of the Bolsheviks’ policy. No. Its sources are deeper, they lie in the Russian imperial mentality, and they are inseparable from the Russian empire. True to its imperial principles, Russia under Nicholas I cut and sheared, and Stalin’s new empire not only cuts and shears but also lives under siege. There is one imperial essence, although the methods of its implementation are different.”
Another one of the myths that Ivan Vovchuk debunked was the statement about the existence of not just “Russians”, but “good Russians”, which, unfortunately, is still popular in some circles today. Characterizing Russian opponents of the Bolshevik regime at the time, Vovchuk seems to be looking fifty years ahead: “Russian opposition movements, despite all their diversity, seek to improve and correct the existing system of the USSR’s imperial complex. All of them, starting with academician A. Sakharov and ending with the “Democratic Programme of the Nations of Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic States”, seek reforms of the Bolshevik totalitarian empire”, but not the disintegration of the evil empire, not the creation of independent states of free nations on its territory. The essence of the imperial “enchanted circle” is precise – that the good Khrushchev will replace the bad Stalin, the good Gorbachev will appear instead of the evil Brezhnev and Andropov, and the peace-loving Navalny will take the place of bloody Putin. No chance for the enslaved nations – Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Estonians and others in their time, and Chechens, Bashkortostans, Oirat-Kalmyks, Yakuts, Chuvash or Erzians, nowadays.
A careful researcher of the imperial interior of Muscovy warned against this trap as far back as 1960, when, while approving the proclamation by the President of the United States on Enslaved Nations Week, he at the same time called to support the struggle of all nations conquered by Bolshevism and limit Muscovy to its ethnographic boundaries in the future.
The last, but very important Kremlin myth, Ivan Vovchuk destroyed with his own life example and struggle in the ranks of the national liberation movement. Being a Transnistrian by birth and joining the activities of the OUN (b), Ivan Vovchuk refuted the myth that Ukrainian nationalism was a local, Galician or Western Ukrainian phenomenon. Fyodor Vovk from Poltava became a leading member of Ivan Vovchuk’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, in particular, in order to prove once and for all that Ukrainian nationalism is an all-Ukrainian phenomenon that covers the vast Ukrainian world on different continents, and which “is a single ideological force, dangerous for Moscow, because it opposes imperial policy.” We should not forget the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”, which the Ukrainian nationalist Vovchuk received for rescuing a Jewish family from the German Nazis. This fact completely breaks all Moscow patterns!
Based on the above, Ivan Vovchuk made an unequivocal conclusion that “Moscow racism, super-chauvinism and the infringement of the national pride of all other peoples have the opposite consequences because nothing infuriates peoples like an insult to their national pride. By emphasizing the genius and greatness of the Moscow people as a pillar of the Soviet system, politicians from the Kremlin accelerated the process of mobilizing the enslaved nations to fight against the empire, for liberation from the “guardianship” of the elder brother.
An unknown ideologue of Ukrainian nationalism
“High mountains need to be built on the northern borders of Ukraine,” Ivan Vovchuk figuratively summed up the study of Moscow’s imperial threat in his article “Who was tried and for what?”. As a Ukrainian nationalist, he knew well, and, most importantly, followed the commandments of the Decalogue and was clearly aware of what and where the eternal boundary between two worlds passes. It was not about the infamous border defensive fortifications of our time, but more about the worldview and ideological prohibition against the existential enemy.
Ivan Vovchuk perceived the struggle on this frontline as his own destiny and as the mission of the Organization to which he belonged. According to our contemporary Yaroslav Svatk, “Life on the edge of two worlds is a constant challenge for the Ukrainian nation, which will educate frontier fighters for generations. This should be the mission of the OUN, which no historical circumstances will cancel.”
That is why, as a practitioner and theoretician of the Ukrainian national liberation movement, Ivan Vovchuk waged an uncompromising struggle against the northern enemy on all aspects of the defined border, including on the ideological front, stressing that “the struggle of Ukrainian nationalism against imperial Bolshevism is the struggle of two opposing mutually exclusive forces in worldview, political and social plane – it embraces all aspects of the life of the Ukrainian nation”.
Sharing the revolutionary and liberation principles laid down in the programme documents of the OUN, Ivan Vovchuk, like Stepan Bandera, like Yaroslav Stetsko, emphasized the importance of relying on the internal national forces of the people for the liberation struggle. “The Ukrainian people can gain an independent state only through their own struggle and hard work. The favourable development of the international situation can largely contribute to the new development and success of our liberation struggle, but it can only play an auxiliary, albeit very useful, role. Without the Ukrainian people’s own struggles, the most favorable situations would never give us state independence, except for the replacement of one enslavement with another. Both the liberation and the defense of an independent Ukraine can fundamentally rely only on Ukraine’s own forces, on its own struggle and constant readiness for self-defense,” Stepan Bandera wrote as if about modern events and the current armed struggle on the edge of two worlds.
“The political world has always been governed only by its own interests and never by the liberation of others. This last, when it was included in the plans, was only in the case when it weakened the opposing side and opened the prospects of victory. When the liberation of the nation sometimes comes as a result of a behind-the-scenes game, a combination, not based on the rank of the liberated people, it is always short-lived and easily lost. The only natural, true and pure one is orientation towards one’s nation and its national interests. Only based on such an orientation can a true liberation programme be developed, which guarantees against betrayal, deception and disappointment. But only those who believe in and respect their nation can focus on their nation’s strengths,” Ivan Vovchuk adds to the instruction of the Leader of the OUN and his sincere associate. In different historical circumstances, in different parts of the nation torn apart by imperialism, the essence of nationalism was and will always remain unchanged – there is the only guarantee of political freedom in the world – one’s own strength!
Ivan Vovchuk considered “Black Earth nationalism” to be such a victorious Ukrainian force, the outlines of which he outlined in his work “The Process Goes On”. Categorically rejecting the class doctrine, but using its matrix for a more vivid illustration, Vovchuk convincingly proves that the Ukrainian peasant and the Ukrainian worker, as, after all, the Ukrainian intellectual have a common root, a common DNA, such a “Black Earth nationalism, in which the Ukrainian peasantry and labor ripens and takes shape before the assault of the empire”, in which “the national clamour of our land can be heard, breaking through to the surface, beckoning, calling and mobilizing”.
Developing the theme of the liberation struggle, Ivan Vovchuk foresees a war between Ukraine and Muscovy in the future. “Knowing that Ukraine, like the rest of the freedom-loving world, cannot avoid the conflict with Russia,” Vovchuk prophetically emphasizes, “We worked so that in tomorrow’s conflict with the empire, the imperial wall would collapse. In a total war, we will emerge victorious only when we fully understand that we are not on the same road with the Russian empire.”
Ivan Vovchuk laid out the main Testament for posterity precisely in the formula of Ukrainian victory, the mandatory element of which is the final distribution of the “evil empire”. If, in his understanding, in the second half of the 20th century this centre of enslavement was the Bolshevik USSR, then in modern times it is the so-called Russian Federation. At the beginning of the 90s of the 20th century, many could consider this Testament fulfilled, because Ukraine received formal independence, but it is gaining real freedom only now, abundantly sprinkling it with the blood of its best daughters and sons. In the same way, imperial Muscovy did not cease to exist in 1991, it only hid, gathered its forces, suppressed the uprising in Ichkeria, occupied part of Georgia and Moldova and, finally, resumed armed aggression against Ukraine. The cynical nature of this aggression also lies in the fact that the enraged empire throws representatives of other enslaved nations into battle against the Ukrainian soldiers – Buryats, Yakuts, Tatars, Chuvash, Tuvans and others. This is a typical imperial practice: in the crucible of war, small colonized nations are destroyed like cannon fodder. However, not everything goes according to the Kremlin’s plan. Ukraine once again destroys their predatory plans and now on the side of truth and justice, national units of Chechens, Belarusians, Ingush, Oirat-Kalmyks and Tatars, the same Yakuts and Buryats are fighting in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. These military formations become prototypes of the national armies of the free nations of the North Caucasus, Idel of the Urals and Siberia. The ABN resumes its activities already in the format of the Anti-Imperial Block of Nations, and Ukraine becomes the centre of support for the struggle for national liberation. As Ivan Vovchuk predicted, the wheel of history is turning on a new, as yet unknown path of Ukrainian victory, crushing the last imperial outposts on its way. “An idea always gives life,” Ivan Vovchuk, a prominent son of the Ukrainian land, confidently asserted, “let the enemy rage and be mad, that means the idea is alive and it will win!”
Націоналістичний портал
