Vladimir Golstein — Ukraine's Descent into Fascism and How the West Turns a Blind Eye

Vladimir Golstein is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Brown University, an American Ivy League university. 

We have decided to publish this article in full, since it is by far the best description we know of the rise of fascism in Ukraine.

The author, who is a top US scholar, shows that Ukrainian fascism is not the fringe phenomenon that western governments and media say it is, but that is central to Ukrainian politics and is the key to understanding Ukraine’s political crisis and the way that crisis is evolving as the situation in the country worsens.

He shows by drawing on the latest academic scholarship that the fascism currently loose in Ukraine is fascism in its classic form, identical to the fascism of that existed in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and that like that fascism it disguises its racist and genocidal agenda behind slogans of anti-communism. He describes how the racist hatred that drives Ukrainian fascism is focused on Russia and Russians and expresses itself with the same genocidal language against Russians that fascists of the 1930s and 1940s used against Slavs and Jews. 

The author shows that western governments and media, their judgement already clouded by their hostility to Russia, have allowed themselves to be beguiled by Ukrainian fascism’s anti-communist slogans and insincere “Europeanism” so that they turn a blind eye both to its reality and to its actions, with potentially disastrous results as the situation in Ukraine worsens.

Russia Insider
Ukraine's Descent into Fascism and How the West Turns a Blind Eye
Vladimir Golstein | Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Brown University