A VERY LONG WINTER
On a warm summer evening in Kiev, my friend told me a story about his grandfather. The story takes place during World War II in Ukraine. As a peasant, his grandfather found himself in German-occupied territory after yet another German offensive. His grandfather wanted to fight Nazis, but needed to figure out how. There were two options: he could stay in occupied territory and look for a partisan unit, or could try to join the Red Army. He decided to find the partisans, which is how he stumbled upon a strange unit fighting the Germans. The story doesn’t mention how, but he figured that these were Makhnovists.1 My friend told me how his grandfather would vividly recount how he decided to stay as far away from them as he could, because those people would be crushed by both the Nazis and the Reds. The chances of survival in such a battalion were virtually non-existent.
Very little is known about this battalion today, but it was likely led by Ossip Tsebry—a well-known Makhnovist who fled from the Bolsheviks in 1921. In 1942, Tsebry returned to Ukraine in an attempt to build an anarchist partisan movement to fight both Nazis and Bolsheviks. While little is known about it, this unit did exist and was eventually defeated by the Nazis. Tsebry was captured and ended up in a concentration camp, then was liberated in 1945 by the Western Allies, and subsequently managed to escape the Bolsheviks once again.
We remembered Tsebry at the dawn of the fall of 2014. Russia had already annexed Crimea and was advancing troops in Donbass. At that moment, no one would have been surprised to hear that Russian tanks were moving on Kharkov, Odessa, or even Kiev. I had just arrived from Saint Petersburg, where I had seen how Russian society would actually fully support the invasion. There was no antiwar movement in sight, and as we exchanged words of remembrance among friends, our emotions matched the intensity of the situation.
TROUBLED WATERS
In the time that followed, the discussions revolved almost entirely around fascism and antifascism. All the other debates were overshadowed by the question: who is fascist and who is antifascist? Since the beginning of the Ukrainian uprising, Russian state propaganda stealthily resurrected the old Soviet vocabulary, declaring that those who were part of the movement were either fascists or Nazis, or were at least manipulated by them. Anarchists and leftists from the Ukraine responded by noting the Russian state is actually the region’s most fascist state. “Fascist” volunteer battalions and the “fascist” Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) were all over the news. Antifascists from Belarus and Ukraine, Spain and Italy, Brazil and God knows where else all went to fight. Some ended up on one side and some on the other.
At first, Western leftists, seduced by images of Soviet Berkut2 buses ablaze on the icy streets of Kiev, largely supported Maidan. But when they realized that the diagonal black and red flags were actually those of the fascists, they had a sudden change of heart and started supporting the “antifascist popular uprising” in the East. And then they saw VICE’s feature about pro-Russian antifascists, who actually turned out to be fascists. This was all a bit too complicated for them, so they turned away from the Ukrainian situation all together. Yet the West was not the only site of confusion. Anarchists and leftists from Russia were arguing to death over who exactly was fascist and antifascist in Ukraine, as if this could explain everything and summarily resolve the matter at hand.
No one had any clear idea of what to do in fact, even on the ground. We were all desperately looking for guidance, especially in stories from the past. But the reality of war, and the general mobilization it entails, was not an object of analysis for us. Most of us grew up with the feeling that war wouldn’t happen here. We felt like these things could only happen on the periphery—a space that we usually ignored or to which we gave little attention.
The only war story we were familiar with was the story of the Great Fatherland War.3 That story, like all myths, was clear and self-explanatory. There wasn’t much to debate, which made the war a powerful tool for manufacturing unity. That is how my friend and I came to remember the story of Ossip, today a story so neglected and forgotten.
THE GRANDFATHERS’ WAR
Our generation, which came into the world near the end of the Soviet Union, still remembers the myth of the Great Fatherland War. When we were children, we played at war—and it was always the same war. It was a war between us and the bad guys, the German fascists. We knew our enemy from the old Soviet movies. The new streets of my neighborhood, built in the eighties, were named after Soviet war heroes, and in the street you could never escape all the monuments of the great Red Army and the martyrs of the war. Some of our cities were even considered “heroic cities.” My grandfather was a veteran, and for big events, he would proudly take out his medals to wear.
During the nineties, when the news was filled with strange camouflaged men with guns, I couldn’t connect these images with the story of my grandfather and the monuments to the heroes. That war—the war of all the movies and the songs—was the sacred war. That war was full of heroism and purity. What we saw on television just seemed like a nameless bloodbath, a war full of confusion.
In “the country that defeated fascism,” oddly enough, no serious theory of fascism ever emerged. For the common Soviet citizen, fascism just meant the epitome of evil and abjection. But in the subculture of prison gangs, for example, tattoos of swastikas and other Nazi insignia were considered symbols of a radical denial of the state. These symbols did not have the same meaning in the West, and in Russia, antifascism came to mean something different.
This difference was a question of onomastics, established first through the act of giving a name. In the Soviet Union, World War II was called the Great Fatherland War, and was considered, in Soviet historiography, as part of the eternal fight to defend the fatherland. The term “Fatherland War” is a name that was already used during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. In the late thirties, and even more so during the war, Stalin and his propagandists began to speak of Soviet history within the wider historical context of the Russian Empire. This propaganda constructed the narrative of an unending struggle against the invaders from the West: from Alexander Nevsky in the thirteenth century to the Napoleonic invasion in 1812. This glorification of feudal and aristocratic heroes would have been impossible to imagine even a few years before, but, for the purposes of mobilization, of course it wouldn’t hurt to sacrifice a few principles. Because who, if not we, the Great Russian People, could smash fascism and liberate Europe? As the war dragged on, it became not only a fight against fascism, but a war against that insistent invader, who arrived again and again to conquer our sacred Russian land.
According to this logic, the enormous human losses during the war were not due to the failures of the Soviet state, but were a martyrdom of necessity. They were a sacrifice that fits comfortably within the old story of the God-chosen Russian Nation, humbly taking on the burden of others and saving Europe from eschatological disasters, again and again.
In the context of the repression of the thirties, ethnic deportations were massive. As this trend continued during the war, the deportations were justified through accusations of Nazi collaboration. Russian ideologists love to mention collaborator units formed by Nazis during the war, composed of different Soviet ethnic groups. By creating the figure of Traitor-Nations, they are able to omit the fact that most collaborators were actually ethnic Russians, in order to legitimate colonial politics and ethnic repression.
Through this revisionism, the state has successfully created an equivalency between the Soviet subject and the antifascist. By essence, a Russian is antifascist, and thus being against Russians means being fascist. Anybody standing against Moscow for any reason now became fascist by default. In this framework, victory could only be achieved through national unity, and being Russian meant being loyal. Now any protest against central power could be easily reframed in these simplistic terms.
RUSSIAN ANTIFA AND STATE ANTIFASCISM
While it has lost some