“Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The dominant left narrative is that Viktor Yanukovych was Ukraine’s version of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, a “popularly elected” (as Stephen F. Cohen puts it) president whose decision to reject a deal with the EU in favor of a better deal with Russia made him the target of a conspiracy of local fascists and Western imperialism. Furthermore, if not for protesters being killed by snipers “hired” by the Euromaidan protest leaders, the “putsch” would have not succeeded. This is the story put forward by RT.com and echoed by WSWS.org, Global Research, and other websites too numerous to mention.

A deeper investigation reveals that it was his own erstwhile backers who were decisive in his ouster. In a maneuver that evokes Mubarak’s removal in Egypt, elements of the “pro-Russian” oligarchy decided to throw Yanukovych to the wolves in order to deflate the mass movement and make continued oligarchic rule possible. As Don Fabrizio put it in Giuseppi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The most detailed account of this behind the scenes machinations can be found in a February 25^th Der Spiegel article titled Yanukovych’s Fall: The Power of Ukraine’s Billionaires written by Christian Neef. The billionaires referred to in the article’s title were not those who were on the side of the protesters like the candy mogul Petro Olekseyevich Poroshenko, now running for president but rather two of Yakunovych’s staunchest supporters: Rinat Akhmetov and Dmitry Firtash, who controlled half of the pro-Russian Party of Regions.

I had written about Akhmetov six days before Neef’s article appeared and would have assumed at the time that the oligarch would have stuck with Yanukovych until the bitter end. Neef cites Vadim Karasev, a long-time political operative in Ukraine: “The two knew that, were Yanukovych to fall, they would be the biggest losers. That is why they did everything to prevent the radical solution sought by the protesters on the Maidan.” In other words they understood that for things to remain the same, they had to change.

Akhmetov and Firtash literally buy and sell politicians. In the last presidential election, they provided the funding that won them roughly 90 spots on the Party of Regions ballot. They sensed weakness in the Yanukovych administration long before the sniper attack in Maidan Square and began looking around for alternatives. Like Putin, Akhmetov had always gotten along well with Tymoshenko, according to Neef.

Last week the Global Research/WSWS wing of the left was beside itself over RT.com’s transcript of Tymoshenko’s phone call with Nestor Shufrych, the former deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. She told Shufrych that she would like to “grab a machine gun and shoot that motherfucker in the head”, the motherfucker in question being Putin. Although there is little likelihood that Tymoshenko has a shot of being Ukraine’s next president, largely over lingering resentment over her selling out her country to Gazprom, one imagines that Putin would have no problem with her. The Moscow Times reported on how the Russian strongman continued to support her despite the violent rhetoric that he clearly understood was empty bombast:

Putin made it very clear that Moscow would like to see former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko become that country’s next president. He alluded to this twice recently, using almost exactly the same wording each time and wistfully recalling their productive working relationship.

Why is Putin endorsing Tymoshenko? Does he want to undermine her chances of winning the presidential elections on May 25 by casting her as the Kremlin favorite? Or does he have just the opposite plan in mind — to help Tymoshenko win the support of the pro-Russian voters who previously stood behind former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych?

The second theory is bolstered by the fact that Tymoshenko holds very close political ties to Viktor Medvedchuk, once the head of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma’s administration and a man who has long and unabashedly been Putin’s personal agent for influencing the situation in Ukraine. Also, Medvedchuk’s long-time political and business partner, Andrei Klyuyev — a pro-Russian politician and former head of Yanukovych’s presidential administration — was one of the main advocates for unifying the Party of Regions with the bloc supporting Tymoshenko into a so-called “broad” coalition in 2009.

It was the Maidan Square killings that made up the oligarchy’s mind that Yanukovych had to go. While the identity of the men who did the shooting will probably never be fully revealed, it could be said that if it was not for this incident, the slow steady erosion of support for the beleaguered president would have led to the same result.

To start with, two out of three Ukrainians preferred the EU to Putin’s trade bloc in early October 2013. And even more tellingly, a full half of all those living in the eastern half of the country agreed that the EU was the way to go.

Weeks before the Maidan Square bloodbath, there were signs that disaffection with Yanukovych was nation-wide as the NY Times reported on February 5^th (Ukraine Chief Loses Support in Stronghold). In Dnepropetrovsk, a military-industrial complex in eastern Ukraine that most analysts would regard as Yanukovych territory, even a modest and peaceful pro-EU rally was viewed as a threat. The cops arrested 24 protesters on January 26th and charged them with “participation in a mass disturbance,” a crime carrying a penalty of up to eight years. This kind of repression was occurring all through the Ukraine since the protests began, a huge irritant to the body politic. The Times reports on what happened that day:

The rally, near the regional administration building, turned violent when unidentified men in track suits started beating pro-Europe demonstrators. The administration building is now a fortress, its main entrance protected by riot police officers behind a barricade of icy snow, its lobby strung with razor wire and packed with security officials. The police block all but official cars from taking a nearby road.

“They feel under siege and are trying to build a castle to keep out the enemy,” said Yuri Raikhel, a local political commentator. “They all understand that everything they have could collapse like a house of cards.”

The Maidan Square bloodbath brought the weakness and isolation of the Yanukovych administration to the point of no return. Members of Yanukovych’s ruling Party of Regions beginning to abandon him in droves, including Volodymyr Makeyenko, the mayor of Kyiv and a long-time member of the Party of Regions. In a Youtube video, Makeyenko stated: “No power is worth the cost of human lives.” Like rats deserting a sinking ship, Yanukovych’s most senior aide joined the pro-EU faction:

The most senior defection, and one of the first, was that of the President’s chief of staff and ally of 15 years, Serhiy Liovochkin, who tendered his resignation in late November, just after the first crackdown of the uprising saw police in Kiev’s Independence Square severely beat dozens of students, who had been holding a peaceful all-night vigil for integration with the European Union. “These acts were the beginning of the current crisis in the country,” Liovochkin wrote in e-mailed remarks to TIME on Feb. 17, on the eve of the latest wave of deadly clashes in Kiev.

“I strongly oppose those who offer stability without freedom and without development,” he wrote, making a veiled jab at the hardliners surrounding Yanukovych. “He has many people around him that express opinions and offer advice, but at the end of the day he is the one who is making decisions and bears the responsibility for them,” Lyovochkin wrote in what appear to have been his first remarks to the media since his resignation. That diversity of views, he said earlier this week, should have urged the President to start “looking for a new balance and looking for the formula of appeasement.”

If you take the Global Research/WSWS reporting at face value, you would conclude that Yanukovych is counting on the support of his party and of the Kremlin to return to power—almost like Aristide after the killers in Haiti prevented him from assuming the presidency after winning the elections. You would not know, however, that Yanukovych has zero support in the Ukraine now, neither from the Euromaidan faction nor from the pro-Russian Party of Regions. Just yesterday he got the boot, along with his right-hand man:

Delegates at the Party of Regions congress in Kyiv on Saturday, March 29, expelled from their ranks the former president Viktor Yanukovych and several members of his team, reports Dzerkalo Tyzhdnya.

In addition to Yanukovych, the following members were expelled: former prime minister Mykola Azarov, former head of the Ministry of Revenues Oleksandr Klymenko, former deputy prime minister Serhiy Arbuzov, former minister of the Department of Energy Eduard Stavytskyy, former head of the Donetsk Oblast Administration Andriy Shyshatskyy. However, the former head of the presidential administration, Andriy Klyuyev, was not on the list of those expelled.

These profound changes reflect the massive support for a turn away from the oligarchic status quo, of either the Tymoshenko or Yanukovych variety. Ordinary people did not come out into the streets from October to February because they were “in love” with the West. They simply wanted an end to corruption and the chance to live in a freer and more equitable society. If membership in the EU does not realize those hopes, and certainly it won’t, it is up to them to decide their own destiny. The least thing they need, however, is to be slandered as tools of NATO, the CIA, and the social base for the Ukrainian version of the Third Reich. A Marxmail subscriber who has been active in the Ukrainian left for over a decade informed us on how narrow the support for the ultra-right is:

As for the real popular support behind the Right sector, we can measure it using the recent presidential rating

http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/03/26/7020392/

(it’s in Russian but you can always use Google translate).

Petro Poroshenko is the leader with almost 25% support. Others are trailing far behind him.

He is a wealthy oligarch nicknamed Chocolate King for owning several confectionary enterprises (I live not far from one of them – the Karl Marx factory in Kyiv). Politically he is a centrist.

As for the far right, Tyahnybok of Svoboda is supported by 1.7% and Dmytro Yarosh of the Right Sector has 0.9%.

Oddly enough, even Oleh Lyashko who is widely regarded as a political clown wins against both of them with 3.5%.

As an anarchist friend of mine commented on facebook, “finally, the country has rated its clowns appropriately.”

Ernst Röhm, a Nazi leader who died in the Night of the Long Knives

Although I would never go so far as Jaron Lanier or Evgeny Morozov in finding fault with the Internet, I continue to be dismayed by the intellectual laziness it breeds—particularly when it comes to the sort of “talking points” advanced on matters such as Syria or Ukraine. In tandem with the steady decline of the print medium, especially books, and the shorter attention span of the average adult fed on a diet of Hollywood blockbusters, cable TV and video games, you see, for example, a virtual ocean of articles on 9/11 making identical points most of which originate on a smaller core of truther websites. It does not seem to matter much to a conspiracy-minded blogger that they are repeating points made by thousands of other bloggers. There seems to be some sort of comfort in being part of  a herd.

Much of the garbage that has been dumped into the Internet about Ukraine since last November share the conspiratorial mindset of the 9/11 truthers. In fact Global Research, a website that is ranked 4,525 in the USA (by comparison, CounterPunch is ranked 10,522), is both a 9/11 truther outlet as well as a prime purveyor of RT.com wisdom. While the World Socialist Website is not quite into the 9/11 nonsense, it too can be relied upon to serve as sounding board for the Kremlin. (It is ranked 35,687—whew, that’s a relief.)

This morning as I checked WSWS.org, a daily task that might be equated to emptying the garbage or flossing my teeth, I noticed a talking point that has begun to reverberate through the pro-Putin left prompted by the police killing of a Right Sector goon named Alexander Musytchko:

The circumstances of Musytchko’s killing recall the Röhm putsch through which Hitler eliminated the leadership of the SA storm troopers in 1934 after they had fulfilled their task, rather than any move towards the rule of law.

As expected, Global Research ran an article making an identical point: Ukraine’s “Brown Shirts”. Recalling Nazi Germany’s “Night of Long Knives”

And bringing up the rear is Alex Jones’s Infowars, a website cherished equally by 9/11 Truthers, the more intellectually challenged “anti-imperialists” and mouth-breathing American fascists: Ukraine’s Night of the Long Knives.

Call me old-fashioned, but when someone brings up the Night of the Long Knives, my tendency is to apply some historical rigor. As it turns out, I had written something about this incident in an article on the Goldhagen thesis, a Zionist-inspired attempt to make German anti-Semitism practically genetic in nature. My goal in the article was to historicize Nazism, which required looking at the wing of the Nazi led by Gregor Strasser that took Hitler’s anti-capitalist rhetoric a bit too seriously:

From 1934 to 1936, every expression of Nazi radicalism was suppressed. After the working-class was tamed in 1933, the petty-bourgeois supporters of a “People’s Revolution” were purged from the government one by one. The real economic program of the big bourgeoisie was rearmament. Any pretense at “rural socialism” was dispensed with and the Third Reich’s real goal became clear: preparation for a new European war. It needed coal, oil and other resources from Eastern Europe. It also needed to channel all investment into the armaments industry, which could act as a steam-engine for general capitalist recovery. In brief, the economic policy of the Nazi government started to look not that different from Franklin Roosevelt’s. It was World War Two, after all, that brought the United States out of the Great Depression, not ineffectual public works programs.

The purge of the most famous Nazi radicals, the Strasserites, was absolutely necessary in order to rid the movement of its plebeian aspects. Analysis of the Nazi Party has often tilted in the direction of portraying it as a mere tool of capital. The reality is more complex. The Nazis were a grass roots movement that targeted the workers movement, but there was a important anti-capitalist dimension as well. The explanation for the anti-capitalist component is simple. The capitalist class in Germany was despised. The ruin of the economy could be attributed to the Treaty of Versailles, the Jews, strikes, etc., but at a certain point one could not let the bourgeoisie off the hook. Too many of the petty-bourgeois supporters of the Nazis had deep resentment to one or another bank that had foreclosed on their farm or businesses.

“Radical Perspectives on the Rise of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1945” (edited by Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann, Monthly Review, 1989) contains an interesting article “The NSDAP: An Alternative Elite for Capitalism in Crisis” by John D. Nagle. Nagle takes up the question of the nervousness of the big bourgeoisie with respect to the street-fighting, fanatical Nazi movement. One of the biggest anxieties was over the possibility that the Nazis represented a form of “national Bolshevism.” The Nazis called for the break-up of department store chains and railed against the big banks and insurance companies. They advocated a “People’s Revolution” in contradistinction to the proletarian revolution of the Marxist parties. However, the bourgeoisie is wary of any kind of revolution and preferred to see a stable Bonapartist government such as Hindenburg’s in power.

Hitler tried to reassure the big bourgeoisie in two ways. In private talks with the elites, he said that he had no intention of dismantling private property. And in June 1930 he threw Otto Strasser and his followers out of the Nazi party. Yet the influence of the Strasserites remained strong. Throughout the 1932 elections, the Nazi militants continued to employ anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Despite these measures, the ruling class continued to distrust the Nazis. It continued to fear the street-fighting army of the Sturmabeilung (or SA). In the early 1930s, its leader Ernst Rohm claimed not only military authority but political authority as well. The SA had attacked meetings and demonstrations of the left, but it had also attacked bourgeois parties as well.

Eventually the fears of the ruling class were assuaged and Hindenburg the Bonapartist decided to turn state power over to Hitler. Nagle suggests that the Protestant Church was a key factor in improving the public image of the Nazi party. The bourgeois press also began to view the Nazis as the only hope in the fight against Bolshevism. Once the Nazis took power, however, the dangers to the capitalist system from this party were no longer taken seriously. Hitler’s economic policy was conducted in close consultation with the ruling circles of big business and plebeian threats to the capitalist system were rooted up.

Now the fact that none of these conditions exist in Ukraine hardly matters to the Putinite herd. When the cops kill a neofascist leader, it automatically translates into the Night of the Long Knives. I understand that this should be obvious to anybody who has not drunk the Putinite Kool-Aid, but let me try to spell out the differences.

To start with, the present government of Ukraine is not fascist. It is instead neoliberal having much in common with a host of others across Europe, including Germany. Or maybe it would be more accurate to draw an analogy with the coalition government that ruled Austria from 2000 to 2005. It was made up of representatives from the Austrian People’s Party, a center-right formation very similar to the German Christian Democrats, and something called the Freedom Party of Austria. Does this Freedom Party ring a bell? It should. That was the party led by Jörg Haider that was exactly like Svoboda in Ukraine, a rightwing populist party that evoked fascist and anti-Semitic themes in its propaganda but that eschewed the sort of street violence true fascists like the Golden Dawn use. Suffice it to say, Austria survived the six years of the Freedom Party holding important government posts with no ill effects. This is not to minimize the role of parties like Haider’s or Svoboda, only to remind you that the mere presence of their representatives in government posts is not a sign that a new Third Reich is in the offing. The reason that the Kremlin is anxious to make comparisons with the Third Reich is obvious. It is designed to frighten the herd into a stampede. “Run for your lives, the Nazis are coming!”

A cool and dispassionate look at Germany in the summer of 1934, when the purge of the Strasserites occurred, will reveal very major differences with Ukraine today. To start with, Germany had become a full-fledge dictatorship with the elimination of a free press, parliamentary democracy, and the constitutional rights that prevailed during the Weimar Republic.

The Reichstag Fire occurred a year later. While there is a tendency to blame the Nazis for staging a “false flag” operation, the evidence indicates that a Communist acting alone was responsible. In any case, the fire was used as an excuse to crack down on German democratic rights, just the way that 9/11 was. The Communist Party was banned and its leaders arrested, including their Reichstag deputies.

Does anybody think that anything like this is about to happen in the Ukraine? It probably doesn’t matter. A lot of the analogies with Nazi Germany are not put forward in an effort to clarify things but to muddy them. The section of the left making these lazy and stupid comparisons has obviously lost the ability to think clearly.

Now in terms of repression, it would be good if these people would apply the same passion and energy to examining the entire record, and not just the material that serves their propaganda agenda. For example, I doubt that this will be of any interest to Alex Jones, Michel Chossudovsky or the idiots who run WSWS.org:

Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2014 5:50 p.m. ET

Killing of Crimean Tatar Activist Raises Fears in Community

By Philip Shishkin

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine— Reshat Ametov, an ethnic Tatar, was last seen alive on a central square here two weeks ago, protesting the Russian occupation of Crimea.

On Tuesday, family and friends, along with hundreds of strangers, attended his funeral. His naked corpse had been found three days earlier buried in a shallow, hastily dug ditch. The father of three, including a newborn girl, had been handcuffed and blindfolded. His head was wrapped with duct tape.

“He is the first Crimean Tatar who lost his life for the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” said Artur Sotsky, a young man attending the funeral.

Mr. Ametov’s killing, while unsolved, raises questions about hundreds of pro-Russian militiamen and various affiliated irregulars, whose chain of command and identity appear blurry.

A police official declined to comment on what he called a continuing murder investigation.

At least 14 people, including journalists and anti-annexation activists, have gone missing in the region, according to an estimate by ATR, a Crimean Tatar television channel.

Mr. Ametov, a 39 year old construction worker, was angry over the Russian incursion into Crimea. His wife, Zarina Ametova, said he told her that there was a national mobilization going on, and that he wanted to go to the Simferopol’s draft office to report for duty.

He had a highly developed sense of injustice, friends and relatives say, at one point holding a hunger strike in a dispute with a local administration that left his house without electricity for a year.

There was no Ukrainian mobilization in Crimea. Later that day Mr. Ametov was seen on television video on a central square, where self-defense militiamen were guarding the headquarters of Crimea’s regional government.

“He told his friends that he was there to protest,” says Teifook Gafarov, a Tatar lawyer who represents the family. “There is a video of him being led away from the square by self-defense guys.”

This is from chapter three of Anatol Lieven’s 1999 “Ukraine & Russia: a fraternal rivalry”. Over the years I have found Lieven’s reporting quite reliable. In this remarkable passage, he undercuts the talking points of the pro-Putin left by ascribing the predisposition to radical right-wing nationalism almost exclusively to Galicia. And contrary to expectations, it is this rather thinly populated province that is most hostile to economic “reform”. It should be mentioned that Lieven is quite hostile to socialism despite being a very good reporter.

A FORTUNATE GEOGRAPHY: GALICIA AND CENTRAL UKRAINE

Those who have seen a clear black-and-white divide between east and west Ukraine have missed three important elements of Ukrainian political geography: the fact that nationalist Galicia does not make up the whole of “west Ukraine” and that its specific variant of nationalism has very limited cultural and economic appeal outside its own region, the critical importance of central Ukraine, and the divisions within the whole of the Russian-speaking area.

What is often described as “west Ukraine” in more superficial Western analyses really only applies to Galicia and to a lesser extent Volhynia—the two provinces that were part of Poland until 1939 and in the case of Galicia had previously been subject to Austria (and had been under Catholic influence since the Middle Ages). Galicia also suffered a brutal Russian military occupation during the First World War, followed by a ruthless Soviet antipartisan struggle after 1944.

As repeated election results have shown, it is only in these regions (and to some degree in the city of Kiev, because of its large concentration of nationalist intelligentsia and civil servants) that support for a radical, ethnic-based, and potentially antidemocratic version of Ukrainian nationalism is really overwhelming. This is not true even of the immediately neighboring regions, whether Transcarpathia on the Hungarian border to the southwest of Galicia, or Khmelnitsky and Ziwtomyr to the east. Furthermore, Galicia is relatively small: The city of Lviv had a population of 787,000 according to the census of 1989; but the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk together) had a population of more than 7 million.

Consequently, many genuinely patriotic Ukrainians elsewhere in Ukraine regard radical nationalism as a specifically Galician product, heavily influenced by the Polish and Uniate tradition, and culturally and historically separate from the rest of (Orthodox or previously Orthodox) Ukraine. A common insulting term for the Galician nationalists in eastern Ukraine is “the Pans,” after the Polish word for “mister” and previously for “lord” (this is especially hurtful because the Galician Ukrain-ian nationalists actually originated and spent much of their history in bitter struggles with the Poles).

Critics also point out—and quite rightly—that Galician nationalism is not “more Western” simply because it is geographically closer to Central Europe; the Central Europe from which Galician nationalism derived was that of the 1890s to the 1930s, and isolation under Soviet rule has hindered its modernization.

Galician and Galician-style Ukrainian nationalism today does indeed retain certain worrying features of the extreme “integral” nationalism of the 1930s. These elements were played down in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the nationalist umbrella organization Rukh seemed to have a brief chance of appealing to a majority of Ukrainians and of coming to power. However, with Rukh’s failure, extremist platforms have resurfaced in some of the various nationalist parties.

The result is not just that aspects of Galician Ukrainian nationalism today remain worryingly extreme and ethnicist, but also that Galicians are actually behind, not ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to some aspects of economic reform—as the International Finance Corporation found to its surprise in the case of privatization. Having set up its first regional project office in Lviv because it assumed privatization would go fastest there, it then discovered that it was actually in the east where the local administrative elites showed the greatest interest (or rather, self-interest) and dynamism in this regard.

One aspect of this Galician distinctiveness is language: Galicians sometimes claim to speak the “purest” Ukrainian, and this has been reiterated by some Western observers. In fact, the Ukrainian dialect on which modern literary and educational Ukrainian has been based is situated not unnaturally in the center of the country, in the region of Poltava. The people of that region regard the dialect of Galicia as a heavily PoIonized version of Ukrainian, just as they regard the language spoken in much of eastern and southern Ukraine, Surzhik, as a cross between Ukrainian and Russian —which indeed it is. It is this central region of Ukraine—and not the west or the east—that has provided the dominant elements in the Ukrainian administrations since independence (both Presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma come from this region, as do all of their likely successors), and could be said to have saved the country. If Galicia and the Russian-speaking areas of Donetsk or Kharkiv—let alone Crimea—had been geographically contiguous to each other, the unity and peace of Ukraine would have been in serious doubt, given the very real hatreds that exist between the ordinary people of these areas.

But in the words of Grigory Nemiria, sweeping his hand over a map, “Fortunately, Lviv is at that end, Donetsk at this end, and there is all this space in-between.” The two areas are separated by a broad belt of territory, five hundred miles wide and stretching from Khmelnitsky to Dnipro-petrovsk, in which most of the people, although ethnically Ukrainian (and mostly Ukrainian-speaking) and committed to Ukrainian independence, have a much milder and less ethnic version of Ukrainian nationalism and a much calmer and friendlier attitude toward Russians. Thus in 1994, while Kravchuk got more than 60 percent of the vote in Galicia and Volhynia, and Kuchma a majority in the east and south, neither candidate achieved a majority in the eight central regions.