I’ve eye-witnessed the Odessa events of May 2, when the neo-Nazis killed my fellow activist Andrey Brajevsky, member of the Borotba party. Aleksey Alba, wounded on the same day, was repeatedly interrogated by the SBU. He was to be arrested along with me and some of our friends. In Kiev, the apartment of my fellow activist Andrei Manchuk, a well-known journalist, was searched. On the same day, “little black men” raided the central office in Kharkov and destroyed property on the pretext of searching. While doing that, they tore apart our flags and symbols. Many fellow activists were forced to flee or hide. In fact, the entire Borotba party found itself underground, where the Kiev regime is brutally forcing everyone who disagrees with them.
By Victor Shapinov
But all this fades in the face of the full-blown war of terror that the Kiev junta has let loose against its own people, complete with killing civilians and artillery fire on the South-Eastern cities of the country. Ukraine has known nothing like this since the 40s of the 20th century, not until somebody came around to bless it with “democratic” regime of usurpers who turned Ukrainian nationalism and neo-liberalism into a state religion, under threats of inquisition and ‘autodafé’ to all the heretics.
Now I’m a lot more sympathetic to those people who took to the arms so that they can defend peaceful civilians from the neo-Nazi terror, from private armies of the oligarch Kolomoysky and from mercenaries of foreign military companies. Even if these people have strange glitches in their heads, even if the twenty years of Ukrainian rule have taught them to undeservedly love Poutin. Whatever. Now the Kiev junta is the absolute hub of evil and the main threat to democratically minded citizens of our country. Its fascist ways and oligarchic nature manifested in the alliance of the right wing thugs, tycoons and neo-liberal officials is plain to see for all who are ready to honestly call a spade a spade and shed the illusions about the Maidan and the aftermaths of its victory. This is what we have warned Ukrainians about, many times.
In the war for the republican Spain, there were some contributors quite different than the idealistic communists. It is known that among the republican resistance, some have been reported to be even ex-soldiers of Petlyura’s troops. It is enough to read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, to understand that people of all backgrounds, and many of dubious backgrounds, have stood up to defend the Republic. Nonetheless, all of them are accepted in history as anti-fascist heroes. Volunteers have manned the Interbrigades, and some of them came from Western Ukraine, that was so far away from Spain. At those times too, the propaganda of the fascist coup of general Franco would call them “Stalin’s tourists”, “provocateurs” and “terrorists”.
There can be no doubt that 99% of the militants of the East are Ukrainian nationals, local people. It is likely that over a half of them are ethnic Ukrainians. But now it is no longer relevant who is fighting for democratic freedom and against the fascism, and where they come from. It is irrelevant because what we are seeing now is no longer a domestic affair of Ukraine. It is a civil war on all the post-Soviet territory, in the whole of our artificially partitioned homeland. In this war, a Moscow liberal will side with Tyagnibok and Yarosh, and a (Ukrainian) communist, with the resistance of the South East.
The categorical imperative for any anti-fascist now is as follows: anything that serves to counter anti-fascism and social racism in Ukraine is the good. Anything that supports fascism, no matter how appealing their pretexts may be, is evil – whatever they are, it is helping the enemy. It is a practical, rather than theoretical conclusion. I came to it based on my own experience and that of my fellow activists, who, in conditions of great adversity have put aside their personal pursuits to oppose the fiercest right-wing regime in the history of after-war Europe.
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