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Stanislav Byshok, author of the book, chief consultant of the International Electoral Monitoring Organization CIS-EMO
In Russia we know very little about the political life of Ukraine, despite the fact that many consider Ukraine a brotherly country and the Ukrainian people a brotherly people.
What is going on there in the political sense? If one gathers all the information which is commonly known by the people in Russia and Ukraine,
in the mid-2000s there was the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, then its main leaders, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko had disputes, Yushchenko left politics, Tymoshenko was jailed.
At the moment in Ukraine there is Yanukovych and the "Party of Regions," which many perceive as a Ukrainian version of "United Russia".
People also know that Ukraine consists of Eastern and Western Ukraine and that in Western Ukraine there are banderovites, gloomy guys who sometimes march in the uniform of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who sometimes dismantle statues of Lenin and tear medals from WWII veterans' chests.
Actually, that is basically all that we know about Ukraine. In fact, I think that it is necessary to know a little more, particularly about the banderovites, because recently these people and this political movement have become part of the political mainstream of the Ukraine and joined the Verkhovna Rada.
For the first time since the independence of the Ukraine, they have managed to form a faction in the Verkhovna Rada. The "Freedom" party is a nationalist party, which regards itself as the successors of Stepan Bandera.
In fact, the idea of the book came to me on one particular day on October 28, 2012.
At that time I was in the Ukraine as an electoral observer, it was in the middle of October 28, 2012 that we began to receive the results of the first exit polls that stunned so many and turned out to be, in fact, perhaps the most important discovery and surprise of these elections.
The "Freedom" party, the nationalist party, which had been given by the experts a maximum of 4-4.5% votes, a subliminal result, did not only overcome that threshold, but even doubled it.
That is, in the end, they received 10.44% of the vote, and in Kiev and other major cities, which, in fact, until recently, had not been considered "banderovite", they received 17 and more percent, even among Russian speakers of the Ukraine and among the intelligentsia.
According to the surveys that were conducted, it turned out that these were not marginal groups that had voted for the nationalists, for the banderovites, for the successors of Bandera, as it was perhaps assumed, but young, educated people with above-average incomes and residents of large cities, including the Russian-speaking population.
What does this mean? This implies that we should look into why the Ukrainian voters, those who are usually attributed to the "creative class" in Russia, voted for a political entity that is usually rejected by the creative class in Russia. Why did this happen?
Some people believe that people voted for the nationalists in protest.
Just as the opposition in Russia votes for the Communist Party or "Fair Russia", while not sharing their ideologies, it was assumed that protest voting was the reason that people voted for the "Freedom" party.
However, several months after the elections, very recently, at the end of March, a sociological poll was conducted. People were asked: "Are you disappointed by the choice that you made, that is, by the party that you voted for?"
It turned out that the "Freedom" party has the most loyal and most dedicated voters.
If I'm not mistaken, 4 or 5% said they were disappointed by the "Freedom" party that they had voted for.
In comparison, among those who had voted for Yanukovych's "Party of the Regions," there were about 30% disappointed people. When I was writing this book and conducting the study, I had two almost equally strong feelings.
On the one hand, I was interested in how such a group, which appeared in the early 1990s, a subculture, just a regional entity, which was based in Lviv, a radical group, which at that time was not known as the "Freedom" party but as the "Social-National Party of Ukraine "- you can even draw some analogies based on its name with some other political parties...
On the one hand, I was interested in how was is possible that such a small-town party developed into an All-Ukrainian Union which received votes from the Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking citizens of the Ukraine, and residents of the West, as well as of the East.
I had some anxieties, because while studying the ideology of the party, including the ideology of the party's predecessors in the face of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, I realized that there might arise very serious problems, first, in relation to the unity of Ukraine, of Ukrainian citizens, and secondly, regarding relations between Ukraine and Russia, for instance,
because Ukrainian nationalism in the form in which it is represented by the current mainstream, the "Freedom" party, differs greatly from, for example, classic Russian nationalism.
Whereas classic Russian nationalism at least presupposes the trinity of the three fraternal peoples the Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians "banderovite nationalism" or "Freedom's nationalism" which is now the mainstream in Ukrainian politics, presumes an absolute difference between, for example, the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, and more than that an initial hostility between the peoples.
It also provides for the maximum withdrawal of all the things Russian and of the Russian language from the political life and even the everyday life of Ukraine.
For example, perhaps, many of you know that recently, perhaps for the past year, the parliament and Ukrainian society have been debating the status of the Russian language.
What should its status be? Should it be the second state language or a regional language or should it have some other status? I will quote the ideologist of the "Freedom" party, a current deputy of Verkhovna Rada, Irina Farion, on the Russian language: "The Russian language in Ukraine cannot be the second state language, either a regional language or anything else, it can only be one things - a language of the occupiers."
This is a quote. It is pronounced from high tribunes, and, in fact, not many people except for the Communists and the "Partly of the Regions" refute or challenge this statement.
I also wanted to say in preface that, after 1991, when Ukraine became an independent state, it turned out that the people of the Western and the Eastern parts of the Ukraine had small and sometimes very serious differences in their perception of the history of their people, of the history of their country and of the neighbors of their country, they perceived differently relations with Russians and with Russia, in a very different way.
Moreover, if Eastern Ukrainians traditionally gravitate towards Russia, largely speak Russian and do not have any negative emotions regarding Russia, in the West there was a different picture.
There, Russia and the communist era are seen only through black-colored glasses, almost in a negative way. When Ukraine became an independent country in 1991, it was assumed that the representatives of different political parties, different views, different regions of Ukraine were to meet together, sit down at a round table and discuss, try to develop a unified view of their own history, of their own people, of their path, try not to radicalize certain different points of view, but rather come to a consensus.
But in the end, it did not happen. In the end, the mainstream attitude towards Ukrainian history is exclusively Western-centric. I am not talking about the West in terms of Western Europe or the U.S., but in terms of Western Ukrainian attitudes.
Nowadays, the official history of Ukraine is very Western-oriented, with all its consequences, in particular the negative attitude towards Russia.
Therefore, the "Freedom" party on the one hand, of course, stands out for its radicalism.
Actually, in the Ukraine in the long run there are only two truly ideological parties, that is, parties built on ideology - the Communist Party of the Ukraine, its ideology is clear, and the "Freedom" party, the others are rather amorphous.
The discourse of the "Freedom" party, even if it is presented, certainly, in a radical form, unfortunately, reflects the current political mainstream and the ideas that are adopted with regard to history, geopolitical issues, and so on.
So it is about a development that was made by the nationalistic party of the Ukraine from the early 1990s, starting in the Ukrainian city of Lviv into an All-Ukrainian entity which received 10.44% of the votes in elections to the Verkhovna Rada and now is largely supported by the population.