An exceptional document explains the plans for destroying the Ukrainian identity and severely punishing the Ukrainians, who are at least “passive Nazis.”
by Bitter Winter
Introduction by Bitter Winter:
RIA Novosti is a state-owned Russian news agency, and one of the media most closely reflecting the ideas and orientations of the Russian government. On April 3, it published an editorial signed by Timofey Sergeytsev. The latter is a “political technologist” (a specifically Russian profession) and “research adviser” at Moscow State University’s Department of Global Processes’ Zinoviev International Research and Education Centre. The article is so sinister that we believe it deserves to be translated and brought to the attention of international audiences.
Of course, his theory that Ukraine is a Nazi state is ridiculous. Bitter Winter published a series of articles on neo-Nazism in Ukraine (including one on the heritage of Stepan Bandera) discussing in detail the presence of neo-Nazis there. They do exist, as they do in most European countries, but they are a small minority and certainly do not control the government. It is also true that there are neo-Nazis in Russia and in the battalions fighting in the present war with the Russians. In fact, in this war there may well be more Nazis fighting “for” than “against” Russia.
The RIA Novosti article does not tell us anything serious or valuable about Nazism in Ukraine but it tells us a lot about Russian plans for a genocide, starting from its cultural dimension. Denazification really means de-Ukrainization. i.e., destruction of Ukraine as a country and of the Ukrainian identity through destruction of books and Stalin-style “reeducation.”
There is more in the article, however. RIA Novosti tells us that the formula “Ukrainians are good, only their government is bad” no longer works. All Ukrainians, except those who support the Russian invasion, are at least “passive Nazis” and should be severely punished. Ironically, both the paranoid plan and the violent language closely resemble Goebbels’ projects for an “aryanized” Eastern Europe. They are a warrant for physical, not only cultural genocide.
Yes, RIA Novosti advocates for the death penalty for the Nazis and the “liquidation” of a great number of Ukrainians, but does not explicitly incite soldiers to rape women before killing them together with their children, as it happened in Bucha and elsewhere. Neither did Goebbels, at least in writing. It is not necessary. When you have offered the ideological basis for violence and genocide, the soldiers understand, and the practice follows. After all, we read that, “The denazifying state, Russia, cannot be inspired by a liberal approach to denazification. The ideology of the denazifier cannot be challenged by the guilty party undergoing denazification.”
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Here is the English translation of the article published by RIA Novosti
[quote]
Back in April of last year, we wrote about the inevitability of Ukraine’s denazification. We do not want a Nazi, Bandera-style Ukraine, an enemy of Russia and an instrument of the West to destroy Russia. Today the issue of denazification has moved to a different, practical plane.
Denazification is necessary when a significant part of the people most likely, its majority—is mastered and dragged by the Nazi regime into its politics. That is, when the hypothesis “the people are good—the government is bad” does not work any longer. Recognizing this fact is the basis of the policy of denazification and of all its consequences, and the fact itself constitutes its subject.
Ukraine is exactly in this situation. The fact that Ukrainian voters voted for “Poroshenko’s peace” and “Zelensky’s peace” should not be misleading—Ukrainians were quite satisfied with the shortest route to peace through a blitzkrieg, which the last two Ukrainian presidents hinted transparently at when they were elected. This very method of “pacification” of internal anti-fascists—through total terror—was used in Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol, and other Russian cities. And it suited the Ukrainian average citizen quite well. Denazification is a set of measures towards the nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be directly punished as war criminals.
Nazis who have taken up arms must be destroyed on the battlefield to the maximum extent possible. No significant distinction should be made between the Ukrainian army and the so-called nationalist battalions, as well as the territorial defense that joined these two types of military formations. All of them are equally complicit in outrageous cruelty against civilians, equally guilty of genocide of the Russian people, and do not observe the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis should be publicly and firmly punished. A total purification must be conducted. Any organizations that have associated themselves with the practice of Nazism must be eliminated and banned.
However, in addition to the top brass, a significant portion of the mass of the people who are passive Nazis, Nazi collaborators, are also guilty. They supported and indulged the Nazi power. A just punishment for this part of the population is only possible as the bearing of the inevitable burdens of a just war against the Nazi system, waged as gently and discreetly as possible against the civilians.
The further denazification of this mass of the population consists in re-education, which is achieved by ideological repression (suppression) of Nazi attitudes and severe censorship: not only in the political sphere, but necessarily also in the sphere of culture and education. It was through culture and education that the deep mass nazification of the population was prepared and conducted, consolidated by the promise of dividends from the Nazi regime’s victory over Russia, Nazi propaganda, internal violence and terror, and the eight-year war with the rebellious Ukrainian Nazi people of Donbass.
Denazification can only be carried out by the country that wins the war, which presupposes (1) its unconditional control over the denazification process and (2) the power to ensure such control. In this respect, the denazified country cannot be sovereign. The denazifying state, Russia, cannot be inspired by a liberal approach to denazification. The ideology of the denazifier cannot be challenged by the guilty party undergoing denazification. Russia’s recognition of the need for denazification of Ukraine means the recognition of the impossibility of the Crimean scenario for Ukraine as a whole. However, this scenario was also impossible in 2014 in the rebellious Donbass. Only eight years of resistance to Nazi violence and terror led to internal cohesion and a conscious, unequivocal refusal to maintain any kind of unity and connection with Ukraine, which defined itself as a Nazi society.
The timeframe of denazification can in no way be less than one generation, which must be born, grow and mature under the conditions of denazification. The denazification of Ukraine has been going on for over 30 years—starting at least in 1989, when Ukrainian nationalism received legal and legitimate forms of political expression and led the movement for “independence” towards Nazism.
The peculiarity of today’s nazified Ukraine is its amorphous and ambivalent nature, which allows it to disguise Nazism as a desire for “independence” and a “European” (Western, pro-American) path of “development” (in reality—a path to degradation), to claim that “there is no Nazism in Ukraine, only private sporadic excesses.” There is no main Nazi party, no Führer, no full-fledged racial laws (only a stripped-down version in the form of repression of the Russian language). As a consequence, there is no opposition and no resistance to the regime.
However, all of the above does not make Ukrainian Nazism a “light version” of the German Nazism of the first half of the twentieth century. On the contrary—since Ukrainian Nazism is free of such “genre” (political-technological in essence) frameworks and restrictions, it unfolds freely as the fundamental basis of all Nazism —as European and, in its most developed form, American racism. Therefore, denazification cannot be carried out in a compromise, based on a formula such as “NATO no, EU yes.” The collective West itself is the designer, source. and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism, while the Western Bandera cadres and their “historical memory” are only one of the instruments of Nazification of Ukraine. “Ukronazism” poses no less, but a greater threat to peace and Russia than German Nazism in its Hitler version.
The name “Ukraine” obviously cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity in territory liberated from the Nazi regime. The People’s Republics newly established in Nazi-liberated territory must and will grow out of the practice of economic self-government and social welfare, the restoration and modernization of the population’s life-support systems.
Their political aspirations in fact cannot be neutral—the redemption from guilt towards Russia for treating it as an enemy can only be realized by relying on Russia in the processes of reconstruction, revival, and development. No “Marshall Plan” for these territories should be allowed. There can be no “neutrality” in the ideological and practical sense, compatible with denazification. The cadres and organizations that are the instruments of denazification in the new denazified republics cannot help but rely on the direct power and organizational support of Russia.
Denazification will inevitably be de-Ukrainianization—a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic component of the self-identification of the population of the territories of historical Little Russia and New Russia, started by the Soviet authorities. As a tool of communist superpower, after the fall of communist power, this artificial ethnocentrism did not remain orphaned. In this service capacity, it was taken over by another superpower (power over states)—the superpower of the West. It must be returned to its natural boundaries and stripped of its political functionality.
In contrast to, say, Georgia and the Baltic countries, Ukraine, as history has shown, cannot and should not exist as a nation-state, and attempts to “build” such a state inevitably lead to Nazism. “Ukrainianism” is an artificial anti-Russian construction that has no civilizational content of its own, a subordinate element of a foreign and alien civilization. Debanderization by itself will not be enough for denazification—the Bandera element is only a performer and a screen, a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, so the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.
The Banderist leaders must be liquidated; their re-education is impossible. The social “swamp,” which actively and passively supported it through action and inaction, must survive the hardships of the war and assimilate the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for its guilt. Those who did not support the Nazi regime, who suffered from it and the war it unleashed in Donbass, must be consolidated and organized, must become the support of the new power, both vertical and horizontal. Historical experience shows that wartime tragedies and dramas benefit peoples who have been seduced and carried away by the plots of Russia’s enemies.
Denazification as the goal of the special military operation itself is understood as a military victory over Kyiv regime, liberation of territories from armed supporters of nazification, elimination of irreconcilable Nazis, capture of war criminals, and creation of systemic conditions for subsequent peacetime denazification.
The latter, in turn, should begin with the organization of local self-government, police and defense, purged of Nazi elements, launching on their basis the founding processes of the new republican statehood, integrating this statehood in close cooperation with the Russian agency for the denazification of Ukraine (newly created or remade, say, from the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs), with the adoption, under Russian control, of the Republican regulatory framework (legislation) for denazification, defining its borders and frameworks directly. Russia should act as a custodian of the Nuremberg Trials in this regard.
All of the above means that in order to achieve the goals of denazification, the support of the population is necessary, their transition to Russia after liberation from the terror, violence. and ideological pressure of Kyiv regime, after being removed from the informational isolation. Of course, it will take some time for people to recover from the shock of military action, to become convinced of Russia’s long-term intentions— that “they will not be abandoned.”
It is impossible to foresee in advance in which territories such a mass of the population will constitute a critically needed majority. “The Catholic province” (Western Ukraine, comprised of five regions) is unlikely to be part of the pro-Russian territories. The line of exclusion, however, will be found experientially. A Ukraine hostile to Russia, but forcibly neutral and demilitarized, will remain behind it, with Nazism forbidden on formal grounds. Russia-haters will go there. A guarantee that this residual Ukraine will remain neutral should be the threat of an immediate continuation of the military operation if the aforementioned requirements are not met. This would probably require a permanent Russian military presence on its territory. From the alienation line and up to the Russian border would be the territory of potential integration into Russian civilization, anti-fascist in its inner nature.
The operation for denazifying Ukraine, which began with the military phase, will follow in peacetime the same logic of stages as the military operation. At each of them, it will be necessary to achieve irreversible changes, which will be the results of the corresponding stage. In this case, the necessary initial steps of denazification can be defined as follows:
– Liquidation of the armed Nazi formations (by which we mean any armed formations of Ukraine, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine), as well as the military, informational, and educational infrastructure that ensures their activity;
– The formation of people’s self-government and militia (defense, law, and order) bodies in the liberated territories, protecting the population from the terror of underground Nazi groups;
– Installation of the Russian information space;
– Withdrawal of current educational materials and prohibition of educational programs of all levels that contain Nazi ideological attitudes;
– Mass investigative actions to establish personal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, dissemination of Nazi ideology, and support for the Nazi regime;
– Purification, disclosure of the names of the Nazi regime’s collaborators, their enlistment for forced labor to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for their Nazi activities (from among those to whom the death penalty or imprisonment will not be imposed);
– Adoption at the local level, under the curatorship of Russia, of the primary normative acts of denazification “from below,” prohibiting all types and forms of revival of Nazi ideology;
– Establishment of memorials, museums, monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, perpetuating the memory of the heroes of the struggle against it;
– Inclusion of a set of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new People’s Republics;
– Creation of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.
Russia will have no allies in the denazification of Ukraine. Because this is a purely Russian affair. And also because not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be subject to eradication, but also and above all Western totalitarianism, imposed programs of civilizational degradation and collapse, mechanisms of subordination to the superpower of the West and the USA.
In order to carry out the plan of denazification of Ukraine, Russia itself will have to put an end to its pro-European and pro-Western illusions, and understand itself as the last instance in defense and preservation of those values of historical Europe (Old World), values that the West finally gave up, having lost the fight to save its own souls. This struggle continued throughout the twentieth century and manifested itself in the World War and the Russian Revolution, inextricably linked to each other.
Russia did everything it could to save the West in the twentieth century. It realized the main Western project, the alternative to capitalism that defeated the nation-states— the socialist, red project. It crushed German Nazism, the monster generated by the crisis of Western civilization. The last act of Russian altruism was Russia’s outstretched hand of friendship, for which Russia received a monstrous blow in the 1990s.
Everything that Russia has done for the West, it has done at its own expenses, by making the greatest sacrifices. The West ultimately rejected all these sacrifices, devalued Russia’s contribution to solving the Western crisis, and decided to take revenge on Russia for the help it unselfishly provided. From here on, Russia will go its own way, without worrying about the fate of the West, relying on another part of its legacy: leadership in the global process of decolonization.
As part of this process, Russia has high potential for partnership and alliance relations with countries that the West has oppressed for centuries and are not about to put on its yoke again. Without Russian sacrifice and struggle, these countries would not be liberated. The denazification of Ukraine is at the same time its decolonization, a fact to be understood by the people of Ukraine as they begin to free themselves from the stupefaction, temptation, and dependency of the so-called European choice.
[end quote].