Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.
Albert CamusFootnote 1Both present-day detractors and sympathizers, in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora, remember Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973) as the architect of “active nationalism” (chynyi natsionalizm)—the foundational ideology of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).Footnote 2 Created in 1929, the OUN was an underground political organization based in West Ukraine, a region then controlled by the interwar Polish government, against which it struggled violently. The OUN was dedicated to the construction of an independent Ukrainian nation state by any means necessary. Following a 1940 schism in the OUN, its more radical faction (the OUN-b) followed Stepan Bandera—a Dontsov enthusiastFootnote 3—and organized the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which from 1943 to 1949 engaged in the largest internal struggle against Soviet power in the USSR's history.Footnote 4 Bandera's controversial leadership upheld a particularly radical interpretation of the OUN's official doctrines of ruthless political action, voluntarism (the idea that the will is superior to the intellect), a “might-is-right” understanding of international relations, and the subordination of all values, individuals, and classes to the national summum bonum. These ideas stemmed directly from Dontsov's seminal 1926 work, Natsionalizm,Footnote 5 in which he called for the birth of a “new man” with the “burning faith and stone heart” that an independence struggle would require of its fighters.Footnote 6 In this and voluminous other writings from the 1920s on, Dontsov glorified will, faith, action, and war over reason, science, deliberation, and peace. He insisted that the survival and expansion of the nation trumped all moral considerations, and ridiculed the language of universal rights. With shrill, florid rhetoric Dontsov derided Marxism, materialism, “Russian messianism,” liberalism, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. Then, over the course of the 1930s and World War II, his journalistic work and political thought dovetailed with Nazism, the racialist elements of which he combined with the mystical traditionalism of his 1944 work, Dukh nashoi davnyny (The Spirit of Our Antiquity), and a crescendo of völkisch, millenarian occultism and Russophobia that culminated in his 1961 German-language diatribe Der Geist Russlands (The Spirit of Russia).Footnote 7
Late in life, Dontsov claimed to have espoused these same ideas from the beginning of his political career at the turn of the century, simply making logical improvements to his original world view of fanatical commitment to the “Ukrainian idea” along the way.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, Dontsov's publications prior to World War I present the different picture of a far-left-wing revolutionary activist, antichauvinist, and energetic publicist for the cause of internationalist socialism.Footnote 9 If Dontsov's retrospective assessment of his own ideological trajectory is to be taken seriously, then there must be an underlying continuity between his early period on the extreme “left” and his subsequent career on the extreme “right.” Tracking Dontsov along the conventional left/right political spectrum, this change of heart seems like an impetuous leap, but to his mind it was a minor reorientation, necessitated by circumstance yet not preclusive of his long-standing radical convictions.
Dontsov's experience of and reaction to the interceding conflicts, coups d’état, and revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe left him with a philosophy seemingly antithetical to his former Marxism by the time of the 1921 publication of Pidstavy nashoi polityky (The Foundations of Our Politics)—the first monographic exposition of Dontsov's new world view after his nationalist volte-face.Footnote 10 In the 1918 Russian Bolshevik attack on the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), Dontsov had witnessed the first war between two nominally socialist states and the confirmation of his view, first expressed in 1913,Footnote 11 that the free development of the Ukrainian people would remain impossible under the imperialist aegis of Moscow, or the weak-willed governance of the all-too-tolerant Ukrainophiles—the liberal-minded, populist scions of Ukrainian national resistance in the late Russian and Austrian empires. Disillusioned with the scientific pretensions and utopian promises of Marxism, Dontsov replaced federalism with separatism, materialism with idealism, and the international struggle of the toiling classes against the bourgeoisie with an imagined civilizational conflict between the enlightened, progressive West and despotic, reactionary Russia.
What accounts for Dontsov's dramatic, wartime political shift from social-democratic internationalism to extreme nationalism? Alexander J. Motyl asserts that Dontsov developed his world view independently of outside influences, which merely affirmed opinions that he had already developed.Footnote 12 Unfortunately, Motyl offers this assessment of the young Dontsov's transformation without further elaboration, as the subject falls outside the scope of his monograph. It is nevertheless difficult to believe that Dontsov's ideological about-face owed nothing to an external, intellectual catalyst or the zeitgeist of early twentieth-century Europe. Frank Golczewski's attribution of the mature Dontsov's amoral nationalism to a “vulgarization” of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the “will to power” represents a step in this direction, but it ignores the younger Dontsov's adherence to Marxism, within which he had developed his lifelong ethical and political prejudices well before Nietzschean language—let alone citations of Nietzsche—appears in his oeuvre.Footnote 13 According to Dontsov's chief biographer to date, Mykhailo Sosnovs’kyi, the mature Dontsov “did not free himself from the effects of assimilated socialist ideology, the Marxist understanding of social phenomena, and the problems of the Marxist method, which were . . . clearly reflected in his later work and in the ideology of ‘active nationalism’ in particular.”Footnote 14 Moreover, “[in] condemning the Ukrainian socialist movement for its ideational connections to Russian socialism, Dontsov [nevertheless continued to] positively evaluate western European socialism for a long time.”Footnote 15 Sosnovs’kyi points to Dontsov's adherence to the fundamentals of Marxism for years after his break with Ukrainian social democracy, arguing that Dontsov's contempt for Bolshevism and the Russia-oriented Ukrainian leadership is more accurately attributed to anticolonialism and Russophobia than to a rejection of socialism per se. Yet the actual process by which Dontsov's Marxism transmogrified into “active nationalism” is unclear in Sosnovs’kyi's account. As Sosnovs’kyi suggests, Dontsov's anti-Russian sentiments likely found roots (or, at the very least, confirmation) in the Marxist canon. The following study addresses this problem by placing Dontsov into the broader context of the fin de siècle “crises” of Marxism and reason throughout Europe. Dontsov, I argue, understood the world through the language, concepts, and logic of a turn-of-the-century Marxism that had become riddled with “heterodoxies.” Applying his own increasingly “heretical” version of Marxism to an analysis of contemporary events, Dontsov adumbrated key components of “active nationalism” within the day's social-democratic discourse well before World War I.
The term “integral nationalism” has emerged as the most accurate and least tendentious label for “active nationalism” in the scholarly literature on Dontsov and the OUN—a convention that this paper follows. Charles Maurras coined the phrase in 1900 to describe the platform of his far-right monarchist movement, Action française, and Carlton J. Hayes made integral nationalism one of the five forms of nationalism in his 1931 typology, which Peter Alter has adopted and updated.Footnote 16 Oleksandr Zaitsev is the most recent specialist to apply it to the interwar ideologies of Dontsov and the OUN, defining integral nationalism as an authoritarian “political religion” that “regards the nation as an organic whole and demands the unreserved subordination of the individual to the interests of his or her nation, which are placed above the interests of any social group, other nations, and humanity as a whole.”Footnote 17 The pricklier question whether Ukrainian “active nationalism” is not also a form of “fascism”—an interpretation popularized, but not invented, by Soviet scholarship and propagandaFootnote 18—depends upon the perennially contested definition of generic fascism and lies beyond the scope of this essay, but requires comment. Zaitsev argues that Ukrainian integral nationalism failed to reach its full “fascist potential,” but habitually fell into liberal and democratic positions and practices despite its obvious affinities for Italian Fascism and German Nazism because it purported to represent a nation that was oppressed, colonized, and stateless—as Ukraine in fact was. As Motyl put it, “fascism was a way of organizing a state, while Ukrainian Nationalism was a way of attaining a state.”Footnote 19 Still, Ukrainian integral nationalism was intellectually akin to and politically entangled with Nazism (which might also be classified as integral nationalism). I will treat Dontsov's early ideology as a related attempt to chart a totalitarian “third path” between liberalism and communism, but suspend judgment on whether it later became “fascism,” clarifying the senses in which cited authorities use this term as it appears below, but without weighing in on the definitional debate.
INTEGRAL NATIONALISM AND MARXISM IN THE LATE RUSSIAN AND AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRES
Dontsov's “turn to the right” was not atypical of radicals of his generation. At root it consisted of an adjustment to classical Marxism's theory of “historical materialism,” allowing revolutionary intellectuals to make appeals to the tenacious national-patriotic sentiments of industrial laborers. This revision permitted them to place the mobilizing “false consciousness” of national identity in the service of their struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and “bourgeois values.” By ascribing historical change in the realms of law, art, religion, philosophy, and science to the economic base or the “mode and relations of production” rather than “mind” or “spirit,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed to have “put Hegel on his feet.” Until then, they argued, Hegel had been “standing on his head,” propounding an idealistic inversion of the true, objective dialectic of progress. Heterodox Marxists of the turn of the century took one step further and stood Marx on his head, producing a neo-Hegelian idealism alloyed with the vision of revolutionary socialism.Footnote 20 This ideology was equipped to harness the “irrational,” however defined, in the service of the “rational” (i.e. the international workers’ movement). Zeev Sternhell considers this “antimaterialist revision of Marxism” the short-term intellectual (as opposed to long-term cultural) basis of “fascist ideology,” tracing it back to the works of Georges Sorel.Footnote 21 Most instances of integral nationalism by the above definition, including the Ukrainian, would fit easily into Sternhell's broad category of “fascist ideology” as a synthesis of nationalism and socialism (although he excludes Nazism due to its privileging of biologistic racism over German nationalism). Sternhell does not go as far as A. James Gregor, who considers fascist ideology a variant of Marxism. Instead, fascism was the consequence of a particular, nationalism-infused revision of Marxism by the radicals of late nineteenth-century France, from which it spread to the rest of Europe. Sternhell's account goes a long way toward explaining why the ostensibly far right-wing ideology of fascism was first articulated by and popular among (former) revolutionary leftists, but his diffusionist model is inadequate given the independence, idiosyncrasies, and simultaneity of the proto-fascist ideas and movements of eastern Central Europe and Russia, which followed their own logic of development and reacted to problems unique to the region. The reactionaries and revolutionaries of imperial Russia and Austria were inventive and sophisticated in their adumbrations of fascist ideology, not simply imitating French fashion. Indeed, as Faith Hillis shows, the rise of the radical, antiliberal right in fin de siècle France owed much to originally Russian sources.Footnote 22
Nevertheless, for most of Europe's long nineteenth century, nationalism and liberalism went hand in hand. The first generations of French, German, and Italian nationalists were liberals who saw national self-determination and individual freedom as complimentary and analogous. Similarly, the early activists of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian nationalism—despite overlapping and conflicting understandings of what people, territories, and histories their respective nations encompassed—often shared liberal critiques of the Russian autocracy and socioeconomic injustice. Consequently, the imperial Russian state and its conservative backers approached even Russian nationalism with extreme caution. Reacting to the failed Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863 against Russian (as well as Prussian and Austrian) rule, the tsarist regime nevertheless felt the need to incorporate those aspects of modern nationalist ideology that would allow it to mobilize a loyal population on a mass scale in defense of the empire. The “official nationalism” of the Russian Empire first propounded under Nicholas I had as much to do with political tsarism and Orthodoxy as it did with Russian language and ethnicity. It imagined all Orthodox East Slavs, emphatically including “Little Russians” (i.e. Ukrainians) and Belarusians, as branches of a single “Russian” nation, whose purportedly simple, morally pure peasant folk had long suffered exploitation and oppression by Polish barons and Jewish merchants. Supporters of this idea deployed the concept of “Rus’, holy and indivisible,” in the hopes of resolving the tension between Russia as a cohesive nation and Russia as a multinational empire. They opposed any form of Ukrainian separatism, but claimed to be protectors and promoters of the unique and imperiled “Little Russian” culture. From the 1860s on, Russian officialdom increasingly supported a growing movement of Little Russian activists in Right-Bank Ukraine whose politics moved in the direction of aggressive xenophobia; violent anti-Semitism; and discriminatory, tsarist, patrimonial statism—the origins of the early twentieth-century proto-fascist Black Hundreds movement.Footnote 23 Russians were thus among the first Europeans to synthesize the mass mobilization politics of the socialist and liberal left with the right's rejection of democratic, cosmopolitan, and bourgeois values. Though Ukrainian nationalism emerged from the same milieu, its champions—from the libertarian socialist thinker Mykhailo Drahomanov to the populist historian Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi—were committed to liberal, progressive, and federalist platforms throughout the imperial period. Under the influence, rather, of the Little Russian activists, Dontsov belonged to the first generation to break with this tradition.Footnote 24
Key precedents and obvious analogues for Ukrainian integral nationalism appeared in late nineteenth-century partitioned Poland while Dontsov was still in gymnasium. Despite the ultimate divergence of their rhetoric and practice, the left-wing patriotic Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the integral nationalist, anti-Semitic National Democratic Party (Endecja) emerged from common circles in the 1880s and shared a commitment to both national and social emancipation.Footnote 25 Both camps had grown weary of the previous generation's “Warsaw positivism”—a long-term national liberation program that emphasized the evolutionary development of Polish society and culture through “organic work” rather than doomed revolutionary “action.” As Marxists, the PPS kept the liberal positivists’ faith in linear progress, but they rejected what they saw as the materialist fatalism and failure to appreciate the mobilizing power of national sentiment in Rosa Luxemburg's party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, which broke away from the PPS in 1893. The PPS's most important early leader, but subsequently non-socialist nationalist dictator of the Second Polish Republic, Józef Piłsudski, saw the path to Polish independence in military struggle against the Russian autocracy, alongside the other oppressed nationalities of the empire. By contrast, the Endecja under Roman Dmowski's leadership directed its efforts against the German Empire and the threat of germanization rather than against Russia and russification. Unlike Piłsudski, Dmowski envisioned an ethnically homogeneous Poland, backed by Russia, and did not sympathize with the national aspirations of Ukrainians, whom he regarded as fated for double assimilation by the more powerful Russians and Poles. Brian Porter argues that the social Darwinian Endecja's “abandonment of historical time” in favor of a synchronic, non-teleological conception of the world, wherein nations struggled for survival in an eternal present, is what ultimately separated it from the PPS.Footnote 26 A close follower of Polish politics, Dontsov would eventually embrace a similar blend of pessimism about the future with veneration of “the deed.”
The modern European phenomenon of antirational illiberalism that Sternhell calls the “anti-Enlightenment tradition” reached its apogee in the course of Dontsov's lifetime.Footnote 27 At the same time, the self-consciously positivist and rationalist tradition of “orthodox” Marxism was in the throes of a closely related moral, political, and philosophical crisis. Under Engels's influence the tradition of “classical Marxism” turned into a coarser economic determinism, grounded in Darwinian evolutionary theory.Footnote 28 Soon after the death of Engels in 1895, Marxist theorists Josef Dietzgen and Karl Kautsky both made attempts to elaborate a collectivist, “proletarian,” “scientific” ethics of Marxism on the basis of popular Darwinian watchwords: the “struggle for survival,” the “survival of the fittest,” and “progressive evolution,” all of which would soon find a prominent place in future fascisms and Dontsov's own “active nationalism.” No problem weighed more heavily upon debates within the early twentieth-century social-democratic circles of Central and Eastern Europe than the national question. In this regard, the incorporation of Darwinian anthropology into Marxism that Engels had first initiated would have significant consequences. Coming to grips with the social structures of primitive man, many Marxists—both “orthodox” and “revisionist”—came to believe in biologically determined categories of identity that existed prior to and outside class.Footnote 29 Tribes, races, and nations—inasmuch as they were manifestations of human evolution through genetic inheritance—seemed no less rooted in material reality than classes, and therefore had to be taken into consideration and explained by the “science” of Marxism.
The textbook narrative maintains that the principal controversy among social democrats in the Russian Empire and the chief cause of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split was a dilemma between stikhiinost’ (“spontaneity” or “class instinct”)Footnote 30 and soznanie (“consciousness”). The Mensheviks held to the purportedly more democratic and orthodox position that stikhiinost’ precedes and determines soznanie, cautioning that a socialist revolution would be premature in Russia until Russian workers had reached a higher level of development. Consequently, the workers themselves would have to take the lead, and the Mensheviks optimistically expected them to do so as soon as the moment was right. In the interim, the socialist intelligentsia was not supposed to assume command over the workers, but guide them toward greater class-consciousness and assist them organizationally. By contrast, the allegedly more pessimistic Bolsheviks placed soznanie above and before stikhiinost’, and the socialist intelligentsia above the proletariat, hoping to subvert the laws of history and hasten revolutionary change through sheer will. Under this interpretation, Lenin's 1902 work What Is to Be Done? is the confession of an apostate who upended Marx's philosophy of historical materialism in order to justify his own seizure of power, and the founding document of Bolshevism. Recent scholarship has rendered this account dubious, however.Footnote 31 It was not Lenin's purportedly dissenting voluntarism and activism that made him controversial, but his “merciless centralism,” which Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, and Lev Trotsky rejected as unsuited to Russian conditions (though desirable under Western European ones).Footnote 32 War and colonialism were more salient questions than “consciousness” and “spontaneity,” and on these points the four were more or less of the same antiwar and anticolonial mind. This position placed them in the minority together, outside the social-democratic mainstream during the prehistory of World War I, but they never reached a consensus on the related and fundamental problem of national self-determination.
During the decade prior to Dontsov's journalistic debut in 1905, only Rosa Luxemburg among the major figures of early twentieth-century Marxism in Eastern Europe held to the position of “national nihilism” that Marx and Engels had first hinted at in The Communist Manifesto. Luxemburg opposed any intrusion of national politics, sentiments, and identities into the international workers’ movement. The members of the PPS were among her most adamant opponents. Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz mounted a particularly strong case for the compatibility of Polish national aspirations with Marxism. Kelles-Krauz held that nationalism's political salience rendered socialism realizable only within democratic nation states.Footnote 33 He rejected the distinction between “historical” and “unhistorical” nations, as Dontsov later would, and predicted the disintegration of Europe's multinational empires into their national components. Echoing Georges Sorel, Kelles-Krauz believed in the importance of “historical myths” as the justification and mobilizing impetus behind national and social upheavals.Footnote 34 Sorel had supported Kelles-Krauz's motion, subsequently struck down, to place Polish independence on the agenda at the Second International. Kelles-Krauz argued that industrial capitalism created and was in the process of creating nations and national languages (including the Ukrainian), not destroying them, and he insisted upon the power of ideas and culture to shape history.Footnote 35 Kelles-Krauz died in 1906 and does not appear in Dontsov's antebellum works, but his arguments anticipated Dontsov's own attempts to reconcile Marxism with national identity.
Well before socialist parties across Europe caved under the pressure in the summer of 1914, violated their former ideals, and voted in favor of their respective nations going to war, Dontsov had also arrived at the conclusion that, under the prevailing conditions, socialism could manifest itself only within a national framework. Simultaneously and independently following a path of intellectual development similar to those of Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Lenin, Dontsov came to believe that only a disciplined vanguard of “professional revolutionaries”—an “initiative minority”—could inspire the masses to carry out their historic mission. Whereas the late Marx and Engels had argued that the “working men have no country,” and could therefore be expected to spontaneously revolt in global solidarity on the basis of their common class interests, Dontsov's generation of Marxian radicals had grown cynical about the efficacy of appeals to an omnibus “universal human welfare,” and began doubting the explanatory power of economic reductionism. Too impatient to continue passively waiting for the crisis and death of capitalism to materialize, the new breed of radical to which Dontsov belonged began looking for the keys to a better future in mass culture and charismatic leadership, rather than the purportedly immutable laws of historical materialism.
THE PREWAR LIFE AND POLEMICS OF DMYTRO DONTSOV
Dontsov was born into a Kozak officers’ family in Melitopol, Tavria Governate, in southeastern Ukraine (or “New Russia,” as it was then known), on 29 August 1883. It was an otherwise eventful year in the history of ideas, rich with significance for the future “apostle of Ukrainian separatism”:Footnote 36 Marx died in the spring, leaving his legacy to the stewardship of Engels; Mussolini—the future Duce of Italian Fascism—was born (just eighteen days before Dontsov); and Nietzsche authored Book One of his posthumously earth-shattering Also sprach Zarathustra. Dontsov's family, which included three sons and two daughters, owned 1,500 desiatinas (4,125 acres) of land. His father, Ivan, sold agricultural machinery for a living. Open steppe and a considerably russified population characterized the environs of Dontsov's childhood. Ukrainians nonetheless comprised some 70 percent of the rural population. Dontsov recalled the hostility between Ukrainian and Russian students at the school in Melitopol, where he and his comrades derogatorily referred to the latter as katsapy (from the Ukrainian word for “goat”). Still, among each other they typically spoke Russian. This was the case in Dontsov's home too, though everyone was also fluent in Ukrainian. The Dontsovs had a library containing Russian, Ukrainian, and even a few translated Western European works, and they took an interest in cultural life, occasionally attending Ukrainian theatrical productions. Dontsov's father and mother died early, when he was just eleven years old; his maternal grandfather took in the orphan with his brothers and sisters. During this time, Dontsov grew close to his grandfather, who exerted an important influence on the development of his “national consciousness” as a Ukrainian.Footnote 37 Although Dontsov's older brother and sister later became social democrats in the “Russian camp” (tabir), his younger brother and sister, similarly under the influence of their grandfather, joined him on the Ukrainian side. In 1900, Dontsov moved to St Petersburg, completed his classically focused secondary education at a gymnasium, and enrolled at Petersburg University to study law.Footnote 38
In Dontsov's recollection, Ukrainian cultural and political life was much more vibrant in St Petersburg than it had been in Ukraine, particularly among students.Footnote 39 It was here in the Russian Empire's northern capital that he became a founding member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party (USDRP) in 1905. The USDRP's platform attempted to accommodate the varied demands of the “nationally conscious” Ukrainian socialists that comprised its ranks. They demanded recognition from their counterparts in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP) as the sole representatives of the ethnically Ukrainian proletariat. The RSDRP did not assent to this, denying the USDRP the status it had previously granted to the Jewish Bund and the Latvian and Polish Social Democrats. The maximal demands of the USDRP included an independent Ukrainian state, but they contented themselves with calls for federation with Russia on the condition of national autonomy. Closer to the Menshevik than to the Bolshevik faction of the RSDRP, the USDRP advocated the organization of socialist parties along national lines and did not support the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat under the prevailing socioeconomic conditions of imperial Russia. Lenin vigorously opposed the USDRP's program, regarding it as a manifestation of divisive “bourgeois nationalism,” even if it did purport to represent the interests of an oppressed and colonized peasant nation.Footnote 40
Shortly after the 1906 appointment of Peter Stolypin as prime minister and the ensuing crackdown on radical political activity, many of the USDRP's members fled to the majority ethnically Ukrainian eastern Galicia, which was then a part of the relatively liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire. The tsarist authorities had already arrested Dontsov for participating in a pro-Ukrainian demonstration at the university during the 1905 Revolution. Having served a short sentence in the Lukiianivs’ka prison camp in Kyiv, Dontsov was granted amnesty in November 1905. He returned to Saint Petersburg only briefly before settling in the provincial Ukrainian capital, where he began collaborating with future leader of the Directory of the UNR Symon Petliura, contributing to the Ukrainian socialist newspaper Slovo, and propagating the USDRP's ideas among the city's laboring population.Footnote 41 Dontsov was arrested again in 1907, and after an eight-month imprisonment in Kyiv escaped abroad to L’viv in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 12 April 1908. Here, Dontsov became acquainted with the leading theorist of Ukrainian conservatism and originator of the “statist school” of Ukrainian historiography Viacheslav Lypyns’kyi, and the maverick Polish Marxist philosopher Stanisław Brzozowski—both of whom strongly influenced Dontsov's subsequent intellectual development.Footnote 42 Shortly thereafter, he moved to Vienna, where he studied economics, law, and history until 1911.
Before discussing Dontsov's first works, it is important to direct attention to the environs of early twentieth-century Central Europe, and Vienna in particular, which shaped the young publicist. In Carl Schorske's telling, Vienna was at the epicenter of the crisis of European values that preceded World War I—a continental rejection of liberalism, rationalism, and universalism—an assault on the most essential doctrines of the Enlightenment.Footnote 43 Vienna's “post-Nietzschean” cultural and intellectual climate, Schorske argues, provided the irrationalist and voluntarist content for this unique proliferation of antiliberal ideas and movements, but it was the anxiety and resentment generated by the disintegrative encroachment of industrial modernity that provided its original impetus. In the political sphere, the declining social status and rising economic insecurity of Austria's agrarian, aristocratic, and artisan classes drove them into the hands of the stridently nationalistic alternatives offered by Georg Ritter von Schönerer's Pan-Germanism, Karl Lueger's Christian Social Party, and Theodor Herzl's Zionism. Rejecting the individualism, natural rights, and secularism of preceding generations, this “politics in a new key” struck at the heart of classical liberalism—the rational, freely willing ego. Similarly, in the realm of science, Sigmund Freud and his school of psychoanalysis challenged the self's purported supremacy over instinct, pointing to the decisive power of the subrational, unconscious mind in determining all human behavior. The resultant “ahistorical culture”—Vienna's “collective oedipal revolt” against the preceding generations’ values—was both the crucible for an outpouring of bold innovations in art, music, literature, and architecture, and a prelude to the catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Stanisław Brzozowski had the strongest impact on the young Dontsov in Vienna, where the two met in 1908. According to West Ukrainian literary critic Mykhailo Rudnyts’kyi,
It was none other than Brzozowski who begat the famous critic and publicist Dmytro Dontsov. Word for word, Dontsov followed the very same evolution as Brzozowski—from a passionate Marxism to a no less passionate nationalism and traditionalism—constantly borrowing, in his own name, the ready quotes, images, and thoughts already found in the tenets of Brzozowski's “lectures.”Footnote 44
In Brzozowski we find the most immediate inspirations for Dontsov's later attitudes on ethics, nationality, and the primacy of will, ideas, and power in human history. Brzozowski's work anticipated the antipositivist cultural turn in Marxist thought first represented by Georgi Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci.Footnote 45 He created a version of Marxist heterodoxy suffused with subjectivism, antinaturalism, and idealism that drew heavily on Nietzsche, Sorel, and Henri Bergson. Although Brzozowski was originally one of the most effective and outspoken opponents of the Endecja in the world of Polish socialism, in 1908 he avowed, “Je suis nationaliste et presque national-démocrate.” At the same time, he expressed his disdain for the sanctimonious PPS: the PPS “favors what I think are the most abominable features of European socialism: it is optimistic, altruistic, Beecher-Stowe-like.” Advocating a “tough historical realism” that approached Dmowski's doctrine of “national egoism,” Brzozowski declared, “the worst government of one's own is better than the best alien rule.” He felt the Endecja should be praised for “maintaining, albeit in reactionary forms, the postulate of national independence, as well as representing, sincerely and deeply, the instinct of national self-preservation.”Footnote 46 Brzozowski's Marxian realpolitik entered Dontsov's repertoire almost unchanged.
As early as 1909, Dontsov was also expressing a principled, Marxian amoralism—which he would only later build around a “realistic” assessment of geopolitics as a zero-sum struggle between nations in which sheer power served as the final arbiter of all struggles. In a speech to the Galician Ukrainian Students’ Congress entitled “Shkola a relihiia” (The School and Religion), later published in a separate brochure, Dontsov first presented this view in a typically Marxist antireligious diatribe. Dontsov embraces the classical Marxist tradition of rejecting the notion of a universal moral order in favor of historicizing moral codes and sentiments vis-à-vis the mode and relations of production within a given epoch. “There are the ethics of Aristotle's era, the ethics of serfdom, the ethics of the capitalist era, the ethics of cannibals, the ethics of these and other classes,” Dontsov writes, but social democrats know no “general-human [zahal’noliuds’koi] ethics.”Footnote 47 Although Dontsov would eventually reject atheism as a betrayal of nationalism in the mid-1920s, Sosnovs’kyi argues that he did so to meet the demands of practical politics, and never abandoned the belief that moralities are binding only to the extent that they are useful for a particular aim in a particular context.Footnote 48
Classes and nations with conflicting interests would, therefore, subscribe to different conceptions of right and wrong, and disputes between them could not be settled by reference to a common moral framework. Just as the proletariat could rely only upon its own strength and the force of arms to secure its well-being against antagonistic classes, so too would Ukrainians fail to attain national sovereignty through appeals to abstract notions of justice. Entering the controversy surrounding the establishment of a Ukrainian national university in L’viv, which was opposed by the city's politically dominant Poles, Dontsov declared,
These paper resolutions about the rights of the nation become a fact only insofar as a given nation possesses the requisite energy and will to life. Moreover, the history of the struggle for a Ukrainian university proves for the hundredth time that in politics it is the argument of force, not the force of argument, that matters.Footnote 49
Similarly, according to Brzozowski, Poland had a “right” to exist only insofar as it had the martial wherewithal to assert itself against other, hostile nations; and it could hope to achieve that strength only by harmonizing its national movement with its workers’ movement: “To argue that the workers’ movement can be independent of the nation's life and destiny is to say that it does not matter what range of forces and means of action it has at its disposal.”Footnote 50 Dontsov later came to fully share Brzozowski's views on nationality and history, but only after he had become convinced, in 1913, that a war between the German and Russian worlds was fast approaching.
Prior to 1913, Dontsov rejected the idea that the whole of Ukrainian society should be united on a national basis, and favored what he considered to be an incompatible proletarian solidarity. He declared in 1910,
The ideology of all-Ukrainian nationalism [vseukrainstva Footnote 51] is the most hostile outrage to the proletarian movement. We will be certain that, in the struggle of Ukrainian society for national liberation, the Ukrainian proletariat acts not under the blue-yellow banner of all-Ukrainian nationalism, but under the red flag of revolutionary social democracy.Footnote 52
Holding to an essentially federalist position, Dontsov argued that “the overthrow of absolutism [would take the form of] a democratic Russia with an autonomous Ukraine.” To his fellow USDRP members, Dontsov wrote,
We should always and everywhere explain to the proletarian Ukrainian masses that our position on the national question emanates from our firm, principled commitment to the interests of the Ukrainian proletariat; we should struggle against the chauvinism of certain groups of Russian and Polish society, [and] also against “all-Ukrainian nationalism” and the consequence of its essence; against the attempt to obscure the class consciousness of the Ukrainian working class; against its hostility toward social democracy; against its unprincipled, one-sided, and chauvinistic infatuation [zasliplenist’].Footnote 53
Dontsov still seriously believed in the possibility of mutual aid and coordination between the USDRP and the RSDRP, on the condition that the latter assent to the federalist principle and the “national organization of the proletariat,”Footnote 54 as the Mensheviks advocated.
Strategic considerations rather than principle determined the Bolshevik faction of the RSDRP's official position on the national question in the Russian Empire. On the one hand, they recognized the political importance of guaranteeing in their program the empire's national minorities’ right to self-determination. On the other, they exhibited a classical Marxist preference for large, centralized polities and “historical nations,” which they expected to survive into the socialist future, swallowing up doomed “unhistorical nations” and smaller, decentralized states through a global process of political, economic, and cultural homogenization. Once the conditions for socialist revolution had become ripe, Lenin believed, nationalism could be only a reactionary impediment to class consciousness and proletarian solidarity. But prior to that point, nationalism, inasmuch as it encouraged industrial growth, ought to be regarded as progressive. Convinced that the conditions were in fact ripe for socialism—even in backward tsarist Russia—Lenin argued that only proletarian internationalism was appropriate for socialist parties, and accordingly opposed the Jewish Bund, the USDRP, and other Marxist revolutionary organizations that claimed to represent a particular national group. Lenin and Josef Stalin—the Bolshevik faction's authority on the nationalities question—nevertheless adopted a conciliatory policy of granting “national self-determination” to the “oppressed nationalities” of the Russian Empire, which they regarded as too “backward” to be fully disabused of their nationalist sentiments. Their intention, however, was for the right of nations to secession and self-determination to be granted only after the revolution had been carried out, and even then, only on the condition that it is the “progressive” will of a given nation's proletariat—a logical impossibility insofar as Lenin and Stalin believed that nationalism could serve only the bourgeoisie that had called it into existence.
Lenin and Stalin crafted their solution to the national question in explicit opposition to the theories of Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, who argued that nationalist sentiments had persisted among industrial workers despite Marx's prognosis, that nationalism would therefore play an important role in the proletarian revolution, and that Marxists needed to develop a more sophisticated understanding of nationalism and its potential uses.Footnote 55 Bauer also rejected the concept of the “unhistorical nation,” citing as examples the Serbs and Czechs—countries that Marx and Engels had predicted an expanding Germany would inevitably assimilate. For Bauer, nationality was not simply a “false consciousness” malevolently inculcated into the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, but a “real” and “legitimate” force for historical change that was not likely to disappear anytime soon. Nations, Bauer maintained, emerged not through the subterfuge of capitalists, but from breeding circles of kindred blood (Blutsgemeinschaft), representing communities with a common past, a common character (Charaktergemeinschaft), and a common destiny. Nations preceded and transcended merely economic associations. Socialism, Bauer argued, would herald the full flowering of national differences on free and equal terms, not their inevitable withering away. He thus regarded any struggle for the principle of nationality on the part of the exploited classes as inherently revolutionary.
Dontsov first expressed his admiration for Bauer's thought, which he extensively incorporated into his subsequent writing on Marxism and nationalism, while writing for Ukrainskaia zhizn’—a democratic-leaning Russian-language journal published legally in Moscow under the editorship of Symon Petliura from 1912 to 1917.Footnote 56 Prior to his gradual break with the USDRP over the course of World War I, Dontsov preferred to direct his accusations of hypocrisy, ignorance, and evil intentions concerning the Ukrainian question against Russian liberals rather than social democrats, chastising them for their “unforgivably feebleminded” understanding of the problem.Footnote 57 In another article published in Ukrainskaia zhizn’, Dontsov argued that Russian liberals, despite their high-minded, constitutionalist rhetoric, had plans to use Ukrainian souls and soil as a bargaining chip to win Polish loyalty and build a “neoslavist” bulwark against Germany.Footnote 58 For their part, the Polish bourgeoisie depended on Russia's might to defend them against the presumably more aggressive assimilatory policies of the German Empire. Dontsov cites Roman Dmowski's La question polonnaise and Myśli powoczesnego polaka (Thoughts of a Modern Pole) as evidence of Polish nationalism's “Russophilia” and intentions of reclaiming and Polonizing the historical provinces of eastern Galicia and Volhynia (modern-day Western Ukraine), which had been parts of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russian liberals, Dontsov alleges, regularly indicated their willingness to relinquish these regions to a reconstituted, autonomous Poland in exchange for Polish cooperation in the struggle against Germany. They exhibited an “imperialist tendency” and desire to achieve a “mono-national” (odnonatsional’ne) government through the centralization, homogenization, and regimentation of the national cultures, laws, and markets of the Russian Empire. He accused them of suffering from the “infection of nationalism,” signaling his disapproval, even as late as 1912, of nationalism as such. All of this led Dontsov to conclude that the achievement of Russian liberalism's dream of a constitutionally governed Russian Empire would actually leave Ukrainians worse off than they already were: at the mercy of a bourgeois capitalist regime ruled by Ukraine's two greatest national enemies.
Hereafter Dontsov began to transition away from a belief in “the nation as an instrument of progress” and “Ukraine as an agent of revolution” and toward “the nation as the state” and “Ukraine as a part of Mitteleuropa,” according to Tomasz Stryjek's periodization.Footnote 59 Dontsov chose to write “Central Europe” in German for a reason: if the common interest that bound the Polish Endecja and Russian liberals together in their conspiracy to annihilate the Ukrainian nationality were the German Drang nach Osten, then the Germanic world would be a natural ally to Ukrainians in their struggle against Poland and Russia, with its Drang nach Westen.Footnote 60 This is precisely the conclusion that Dontsov arrived at in 1913 and defended, through two world wars, for the remainder of his career. Dontsov regarded his own pro-German orientation and Germanocentric prescriptions for Ukrainian geopolitics as an affirmation of “Western civilization” and its values, which, he alleged, stood in glaring opposition to the chaotic “oriental despotism” of “horde-like Muscovy.” Even as a protectorate and colony of Berlin or Vienna, Dontsov believed, Ukraine would fare better than it had under Russian hegemony because the West championed democracy, socialism, and the free development of individuals and nations. He nevertheless expected the German and Austrian empires to be interested in annexing Ukraine not out of altruistic concern for the rights of the people living there, but out of their own interests as expanding states in a geopolitical contest with Russia.
Dontsov first expressed this idea in his brochure Moderne moskvofil’stvo (Modern Moscophilia)—a bold and original work when it appeared in 1913. Dontsov had moved to L’viv to continue his publicist work at the center of Galician Ukrainian cultural and political life, where the publication of Modern Moscophilia secured his fame and notoriety among politically active Ukrainians and Russians. It sparked widespread controversy and derisive accusations of “Mazepism” (mazepynstvo)Footnote 61—a term that derives from the name of the Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who famously sided with the Swedes against Peter I during the Great Northern War in an abortive attempt to assert Ukraine's independence from Russia. After Russian Constitutional Democratic Party leader Pavel Miliukov read it, for example, he warned the Duma on 19 February 1914, “Again we see the germination of separatist sentiments, [and] I present to you Dontsov's brochure as evidence. To you I say: fear him! If you continue your politics, Dontsovs will not be numbered by the ones and tens, but by the hundreds, thousands, millions.”Footnote 62 Placing Ukraine at the center of an age-old conflict between European civilization and “Muscovy,” Dontsov contended that the latter had exerted and continued to exert the most pernicious influence on Ukrainian politics and culture. For Dontsov, Moscophilia was “the widespread [condition] among certain quarters of our intelligentsia of boundless reverence for Russian civilization and an astonishing dependence upon domineering and progressive Russian circles.” “This dependence,” he argued “does not allow the Ukrainian movement to leave the diaper and stand on its own feet, [and] weakens its strength of resistance in the struggle against alien forces.”Footnote 63 Slavish, colonial imitation of Russia in the realms of culture and politics laid over Ukrainian society like a “thick, heavy fog,” emaciating its national vitality. Dontsov especially reproached Ukrainians for their “national hermaphroditism”:
Our duty is to discard on the side of theory analytic-cultural-sentimental ukrainstvo and to outline a clear program of Ukrainian politics that relies upon an analysis of the nature of national movements [and] of national relations within Russia, [and that] is free from the influence of those alien concepts that are undesirable to us and do not correspond to our needs. Ukrainstvo—even [of the] philistine [mishchans’ke] [sort]—needs a new orientation!Footnote 64
Dontsov directed his attack against the Ukrainian liberal democrats and “bourgeois nationalists” of the “philistine camp,” whom he accused of having sold out Ukrainian society for petty economic gains. Still writing as a representative of the Ukrainian “Marxist intelligentsia,” Dontsov did not extend his opprobrium to fellow social democrats.Footnote 65
Dontsov wasted no time in drawing up a radical new political program for the Ukrainian movement that made “separation from Russia” its central motto. He presented it in a speech to the Second All-Ukrainian Students’ Congress in L’viv, July 1913, titled “Suchasne politychne polozhennia natsii i nashi zavdannia” (The Present Political Situation of the Nation and Our Tasks), which he published later that year in a separate brochure.Footnote 66 Several Ukrainian authors on the left had conceived of Ukrainian independence prior to 1913, but they dissented from the mainstream of the Ukrainian national movement, which, prior to the Fourth Universal of the Central Rada,Footnote 67 was overwhelmingly committed to a federalist reorganization of imperial Russia's nationalities and did not contemplate separatism. Arguing from Marxist premises, the West Ukrainian radicals Viacheslav Budzynovs’kyi and Iulian Bachyns’kyi both made cases for an independent Ukrainian nation state within the Austrian Galician context as early as 1891.Footnote 68 The more conservative Ukrainian political activist Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi's brochure Samostiina Ukraina (Independent Ukraine), published in 1900, called for an independent Ukrainian nation state on the legal and historical grounds of the provisions of the Treaty of Pereiaslav.Footnote 69 Prominent Ukrainian poet, scholar, and publicist Ivan Franko's Poza mezhamy mozhlyvoho (Beyond the Limits of the Possible), published the same year, made a fervent plea for the dream of Ukrainian independence, however far-fetched, that clearly anticipated the older, radically idealistic Dontsov's world view.Footnote 70
What set Dontsov and his speech apart from these precedents was his focus on geopolitics and a concrete political program that did not make appeals to justice or the utopian possibilities of an unforeseeable future, but to realpolitik. In “The Political Situation of the Nation,” Dontsov advocated Ukrainian separatism, not independence (samostiinist’), which he regarded as impossible under the prevailing circumstances. The speech was nevertheless exceptionally radical in its call for Ukraine's complete severance from Russia. Anticipating an inevitable and fast-approaching war between Russia and the Germanic world, Dontsov believed that he had identified an opportunity for Ukraine to enter the orbit of the “civilized West” as a protectorate of the Austrian Empire. Dontsov regarded the latter as patently more amenable to the idea of Ukrainian autonomy, especially since this would entail a dramatic enfeeblement of Russia's geopolitical position. To Dontsov's mind, Ukraine's alignment with Mitteleuropa against Russia in the coming conflict could serve as a practical first step on the path to total independence: “We must fulfill our task faithfully and to the end, remembering that history knows no instance, where an enslaved nation liberated itself from under a foreign yoke with only its own forces.”Footnote 71 Dontsov distinguished his own “realism” from the “provincialism” of his compatriots, who foolishly placed their trust in Russian liberalism's noble-sounding lip service to “national self-determination.” He dismissed the latter as mere subterfuge, designed to obscure the inherently colonialist, anti-Ukrainian aims of the Russian bourgeoisie, insisting that his analysis took into account only “objective conditions,” and snubbing his opponents’ “hypocritical” talk of rights.
Dontsov set out to provide a “scientific,” “non-utopian,” and Marxist justification for his program of Ukraine's separation from Russia in his 1914 article “Engels, Marx and Lassalle on ‘Unhistorical Nations.’” Marx and Engels themselves, as Dontsov was well aware, had never expressed anything but disdain for Ukrainians, expecting that they would perish along with the other “reactionary peoples” of the Slavic East in the great revolutionary conflagration to come.Footnote 72 The Ukrainians—as an “unhistorical nation” of smallholding peasants on the wrong side of progress—were destined for extinction. Against this view, Dontsov proffered a Marxist account of the interceding half-century of historical development and escalating national movements among the Slavic nationalities of eastern Central Europe, arguing that the opinions of Marx and Engels concerning the national question east of the Danube had ceased to be applicable and ought to be relegated, in the spirit of Marxism, to their historical context (i.e. the mid-nineteenth century). Their beliefs, Dontsov maintained, were “already long ago refuted by history—some by such generally recognized socialist authorities as Kautsky, Bauer, and Franz Mehring—others again by Marx and Engels themselves.”Footnote 73 The Ukrainian nation did have a future as an independent entity, but for no other reason than its own strength and will to survive, as determined by the “historical process”:
[The] widely disseminated sentimental-high-minded [santymental’no-prekrasnodushnyi] view of national rights recognizes a “right to self-determination” for every nation, [and] even for every half-cultured tribe. This quasi-liberal view found an extremely harsh evaluation from the quarter of Marx and Engels, who approached the national question from an entirely different, healthy criterion . . . As we’ve already seen, our authors subordinate the business of liberating unhistorical nations to the interest of the great, civilized peoples. Only those national movements that did not collide with the revolutionary strivings of the great nations obtained placet. Hence this Quos ego!—thrown by Engels against the Balkan “little boys” [khlopchakiv], who were so inconsiderate as to not be taken in by this highest principle . . . All told, [we have] arrived at a modification of the initial starting point with which the national strivings of modern nations were evaluated: [it is] not their conformity or divergences from the high civilizational interests, but only their revolutionary or reactionary role in the historical, irrespective of anyone else; the standard became: is a given national movement in favor of civilization or not? Are the problems that it will necessarily create colliding with the tendency of historical development?Footnote 74
Dontsov's answer to this question as it concerns Ukraine is a resounding “no,” and he castigates Russian socialists for using the concept of the “unhistorical nation” to combat national movements within the empire “in the name of defending their own hitherto position.”Footnote 75 History alone would be the judge, and the signs pointed to the Ukrainian national movement's confluence with the trends of European democracy. Dontsov argued that this conclusion followed from a Marxist analysis of the prevailing situation and was already conceived by some of the most respected names in Marxism:
When speaking about the views of Marx and Engels on unhistorical nations, it would be desirable if Russian Marxists who do not want to consider these modifications of [Marx's and Engels’s] views—which they themselves and their great disciples made in their lifetimes—paid attention to the method that guided our authors in the problems of interest to us. Then they would see that uncritically repeating in the twentieth century that which Marx and Engels wrote and said on the national question in the second half of the nineteenth means lowering oneself to the role of a scholarly parrot; to be faithful not to the spirit of their science, but only to their letters.Footnote 76
Despite his best efforts to demonstrate his fealty to Marxist orthodoxy, Dontsov's publications on the eve of World War I stirred up much controversy among Russian and Ukrainian social democrats, who widely censured his call for the separation of Ukraine from Russia as a discordant “heresy”—a betrayal of the international workers’ movement. Russian liberals and conservatives, for their part, heaped unmitigated scorn upon Dontsov in the press. Lenin entered the fray as both a defender and a detractor of Dontsov's speech, “The Present Political Situation of the Nation”:
For a long time, mention has been made in the press and from the Duma rostrum . . . of the absolute indecency, the reactionary character and the impudence of statements made by certain influential Kadets (headed by Mr. StruveFootnote 77) on the Ukrainian question. A few days ago we came across an article in Rech’, the official organ of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, written by one of its regular contributors, Mr. Mikhail Mogilianskii, an article that must not be ignored. This article is real chauvinist badgering of the Ukrainians for “separatism” . . . Mr. Mikhail Mogilianskii himself points out that at the All-Ukraine Student Congress in L’vov some Ukrainian Social Democrats, Ukrainian émigrés from Russia, also spoke against the slogan of political independence for Ukraine; they spoke against the Social Democrat Dontsov, who proposed the resolution on “an independent Ukraine” that was adopted at the congress by a majority of all present against two. It follows, therefore, that there is no question of all Social Democrats agreeing with Dontsov. But the Social Democrats disputed the matter with Dontsov, put forward their own arguments, discussed the matter from the same platform and attempted to convince the same audience. Mr. Mikhail Mogilianskii lost all sense of elementary political decency when he hurled his coarse invective drawn from the lexicon of the Black Hundreds against Dontsov and against the entire congress of Ukrainian students, knowing full well that it was impossible for his opponents to refute the views of Rech’, that it was impossible for them to speak to the Russian audience from the same platform and just as resolutely, openly and freely.Footnote 78
Thus, despite Lenin's characterization of Dontsov's world view as “quasi-democratic” “nationalist philistinism,”Footnote 79 he offered him a patronizing defense by way of an attack upon Russian liberals for their display of contempt for Ukrainian national aspirations, accusing them of having spurned the right of national self-determination that Lenin himself regarded as a mere tactical concession.
Dontsov harbored no illusions about the RSDRP's or the Kadets’ magnanimous intentions, and accordingly denied that the right to self-determination existed or mattered. Ukraine would be free and independent not because democratic Russians would benevolently permit it to be so, but because impartial circumstances were militating in favor of Ukrainians and against the imperial Russian regime. Lenin's amoralism nevertheless acknowledged the importance of moralistic oratory; Dontsov’s, by contrast, unabashedly advertised itself and renounced all decorous phrasemaking. Lenin misunderstood Dontsov's speech when he accused him of having placed the Ukrainian nation before the international proletariat.Footnote 80 Dontsov started from the premise that the most salient enemy of labor, progress, and democracy was the autocratic Russian Empire and the tyrannical “Muscovite” civilization more broadly. Ukraine's separation from Russia would therefore serve the cause of revolution throughout the “spiritually socialistic” West by crippling the reactionary menace in the East. He regarded as purely secondary the benefits that would accrue to Ukraine itself as a result of its historically necessary secession westward. Thus, for Dontsov, the interests of ukrainstvo and those of the proletariat were identical in practice, but the latter still held primacy.
Increasingly isolated within his own party and confined to exile in West Ukraine, Dontsov began moving in different circles and publishing in different venues between the summers of 1913 and 1914. He penned a scathing rejoinder to Mogilianskii and published it in Shliakhy (Pathways)—the L’viv-based journal of the nationalistic Ukrainian Students Union between 1913 and 1914. He responded to his critics at the USDRP organ, Dzvin (The Bell)—a publication to which he had previously made numerous contributions. Dontsov's move from “democratic” newspapers such as Ukrainskaia zhizn’, Nash holos’, Slovo, and Dzvin to an outfit like Ukrains’ka khata (Ukrainian House) further signaled his ongoing estrangement from the USDRP. Under the editorship of the antipopulist Ukrainian literary critic Mykola Yevshan, the monthly Ukrains’ka khata promoted a new national liberation ideology for Ukraine based upon a blend of Nietzscheanism, antimaterialism, antipositivism, individualism, occidentalism, voluntarism, aristocratism, neo-Romanticism, and the purging from Ukrainian culture of any “external,” but especially Russian, influences.Footnote 81
It was from this new milieu in L’viv that Dontsov published his ripostes—“Dzhentl’menam iz Dzvonu” (To the Gentlemen of The Bell) and “Z privodu odniei eresy” (On the Subject of a Single Heresy), among others—to the Ukrainian liberal and social-democratic press in Kyiv. He summarizes the charges against him as follows:
What have my opponents hurled at me? Firstly—this “heresy” is a utopia based upon assumptions that cannot be calculated in advance. Secondly—it is antidemocratic and anti-Marxist; thirdly, it can only pull us away from real, useful work. Thus speak my countrymen, those—living yet again by the utterance of the second priest of Rada Footnote 82—who “sit like a mouse beneath the broom,” [and] for whom looking out onto the wide world from the position of this broom is a dangerous utopia.Footnote 83
Dontsov then contended that his program was, in fact, far less “utopian” than those of his opponents because it took into account geopolitical developments beyond the faltering Russian Empire, reminding them of the centrality of the Western proletariat in any properly Marxist political program. Ukraine's separation from Russia, Dontsov maintained, was a strategy in the spirit of Marxism, even though it might take the outward form of “national conservatism,” because it would serve the cause of revolution throughout Europe by dismembering the reactionary Russian state. Recalling his thesis in Modern Moscophilia, Dontsov accused his Ukrainian opponents of base, “provincial” subservience to Russian liberalism and antidemocratic imperialism. He asserted that his ideas fell within the mainstream of contemporary Marxism from Engels to Max Weber, charging his opponents with the sin of isolation from the historical and intellectual trends in Europe, and a bevy of other deviations from Marxist orthodoxy.Footnote 84 In the final analysis, both camps to the dispute were at least partly correct: Dontsov's ideas on the eve of World War I were indeed becoming more nationalistic and antidemocratic, but then so were those of Marxists throughout Europe.
CONCLUSION
Dontsov met World War I with the Marxist conviction that morality inhered in the historical process itself—that the winners of history were, ipso facto, the rightful winners of history, or at least the only ones worthy of consideration. The “natural rights” of individuals, nations, and classes—much bandied about by the adherents of liberalism—struck Dontsov as inconsequential illusions. Human beings were nothing more than the expendable raw material by which progress is achieved. No god could be counted upon to guarantee the salvation of humanity—a captive to deterministic laws beyond its control—but an ineluctable process of biological and socioeconomic evolution ensured that groups and individuals would kill and enslave one another until the end of history, when the dialectic of class struggle, coupled with the advancement of the means of production, would finally resolve itself into communism. In the interim, all morality is provisional—tolerable only insofar as it hastens the arrival of this final, blessed state. An astute follower of the latest deviations from classical Marxist theory, Dontsov believed that national identities and formations could be utilized toward this telos, particularly if they were arrayed alongside the peoples of Western Europe—the epicenter of universal progress—in a crusade against the Russian Empire—the quintessence of reaction. He placed Ukraine at the center of this world-historic confrontation. If Ukraine aligned itself with Western Europe, then it had a place in the future and in the construction thereof; but if Ukraine remained within Russia, then it would drown to death in the “all-Russian” sea, reduced to an appendage of the “undifferentiated Muscovite horde” and abused as a battering ram against the revolutionary Occident. These basic ingredients of “active nationalism” were all present in Dontsov's thought before his incremental apostasy from social democracy in the following years. Dontsov's Marxism—like that of so many of his contemporaries—contained the seeds of its own destruction qua fascism.
At the outset of the war, Dontsov put his ideas into action and became a founding member of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (ULU), which, with the support of the Central Powers, propagandized and agitated among Ukrainian POWs and émigrés, shaping them into nationally conscious soldiers for the war against Russia.Footnote 85 Dontsov left the ULU a few weeks later over ideological differences—the beginning of a lifelong habit. He switched his allegiance numerous times over the course of World War I, striving to retain his ideological purity within the confines of a political philosophy that he himself was still in the process of cobbling together from disparate sources. The February Revolution set off a chain of events leading to the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) in the spring and summer of 1917. Dontsov returned to Kyiv to serve in the new government shortly after finishing his legal studies in L’viv, but the UNR soon proved too weak to preserve itself under the conditions created by the Russian Civil War. Besieged in the Ukrainian capital by the Red Army in February 1918, the Central Rada was compelled to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in exchange for German support against the Bolshevik advance. Germany's move to support an ostensibly independent Ukrainian nation state as a bulwark against Russia confirmed Dontsov's prediction that such a state could be built under the conditions created by the war, but only with the help of the Central Powers. Just two months later, the German military, which was chiefly preoccupied with acquiring food for its war effort, assumed control over the Ukrainian state, arrested the uncooperative Central Rada, and placed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in power.
Skoropadsky proved little more than a puppet of the German war machine, but the uniquely Ukrainian conservative–monarchist ideology of Viacheslav Lypyns’kyi both informed and legitimized the hetman's short-lived government. Dontsov joined Lypyns’kyi's Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party (UDAP), which initially supported Skoropadsky's coup, and served in the Hetmanate as director of the Press Bureau and Ukrainian Telegraph Agency. At this time, Dontsov accepted many of Lypyns’kyi's ideas: (1) a cyclical yet nondeterministic conception of history and civilizations; (2) an emphasis on agriculture, territorial patriotism, and the reassimilation of Ukraine's native yet Polonized or Russified aristocracy as the basis for a Ukrainian national rebirth; (3) the desirability of social stratification and nondemocratic or “classocratic” forms of government, based on iron discipline and unity of purpose; (4) the primacy of the will over the intellect, and the political inefficacy of appeals to reason; and (5) the belief that the church should serve as an autonomous and potent source of the nation's moral and cultural strength. Dontsov embraced Lypyns’kyi's critique of the left-wing Ukrainian intelligentsia and the UNR leadership, but disagreed with him on the historical relation of nations to states, preferring the populist view that nations precede and invent states, not vice versa.Footnote 86
The final product was a doctrine that resonated with the despondent generation of West Ukrainians who came of age between 1914 and 1939. Despite its appeal to many Ukrainian students and veterans of the wartime independence struggle, integral nationalism remained a fringe political phenomenon in Galicia until the beginning of World War II, when the Soviet invasion and rapid Stalinization of the region crushed the legal, democratic alternatives to the OUN. The OUN-b survived thanks to its underground, conspiratorial nature and willingness to collaborate with the Nazi authorities that supplanted Soviet power in Ukraine for much of the war. But these same authorities crushed the OUN-b when it declared an independent Ukrainian nation-state in the summer of 1941, forcing its adherents, including the rank and file of the UPA, into ultimately opposing “totalitarianism” in general, rather than the Russian Communist version of it alone. The Red Army's second conquest and ruthless anti-UPA pacification of West Ukraine from 1943 to the early 1950s forced any surviving Ukrainian integral nationalists into exile still farther west, to Britain, the USA, West Germany, and Canada, where Dontsov settled for the final decades of his life. Though Dontsov moved intellectually rightward until his death, the émigré OUN factions’ positions veered toward Anglo-American liberalism and the obfuscation their illiberal pasts.
Ukrainian integral nationalists returned to Ukraine following the country's independence in 1991 and established several far right-wing parties, but these remained on the margins of Ukrainian politics. The political party Svoboda (“Freedom”), whose leaders (Oleh Tiahnybok, Iryna Farion, etc.) regard themselves as students of Dontsov, achieved its greatest popularity during the 2012 elections, in which it clinched about 10 percent of the vote nationally. Svoboda members and the militant Ukrainian nationalist organization Right Sector played a conspicuous but greatly sensationalized role in the mass antigovernment protests on the Maidan (Independence Square) in Kyiv that ultimately led to former President Viktor Yanukovych's flight from power in March 2014. Maidan protesters of diverse political stripes adopted OUN and UPA slogans and symbols (such as the red-and-black flag and “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!” which in fact have older, Kozak origins), but repurposed them for a democratic, anticorruption struggle that shared little more than a pro-European orientation with Dontsov's ideas at different stages. Serhii Kvit—the author of a sympathetic biography of Dontsov,Footnote 87 member of the Ukrainian nationalist think tank Tryzub (“Trident”), and rector of the National University of Kyiv–Mohyla Academy—served as minister of education in the interim government, but charted a liberalizing course in this capacity. Even in the face of the Russian Federation's annexation of Crimea and its overt and covert support for armed groups of so-called pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine's easternmost oblasts, fewer than 3 percent of Ukrainians voted for the presidential candidates from Right Sector and Svoboda in the May 2014 elections. Despite pernicious stereotypes, integral nationalism was a late and short-lived aberration in the longue dureé of Ukrainian politics.
The image of Marxism, both classical and heterodox, has fared just as poorly in Ukraine thanks to bad memories of the Soviet era and its popular association with oppression, poverty, corruption, and Russian chauvinism (epitomized nowadays by the remnants of the Communist Party of Ukraine). Ukrainians toppled over a hundred monuments to Lenin across Ukraine in the course of the Maidan revolution. But nostalgia for the Soviet Union is more common among the residents of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, where crowds formed to agitate for Russian irredentism. In light of the Russian state's military actions, ethno-nationalist rhetoric, and anti-Western information war in support of the ostensibly autochthonous upsurge of “pro-Russian separatism” in Ukraine, it is apparent that “neo-Eurasianism”—the expressly fascist doctrine of the Dontsov-like yet virulently anti-Ukrainian ideologue and Kremlin adviser Aleksandr Dugin—has entered the mainstream of Russian geopolitics and foreign policy.Footnote 88 As Moscow seeks to reaffirm Russian hegemony in Ukraine, Dontsov's astute critiques of Russian imperialism and colonialism are certainly germane, but few Ukrainians take the bulk of his world view seriously anymore, relegating it to the dark days of the interwar period. On the centennial of the outbreak of World War I, antiliberalism of any sort appears unlikely to witness resurgence in Ukraine—a country already too well aware of the havoc that totalitarian states and movements can wreak.
