TORONTO – The demonstrations on the Maidan in Kyiv that subsequently became known as the Euro-Maidan and the Revolution of Dignity began on November 21, 2013, when it became known that the Yanukovych government had refused to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. An avalanche of propaganda was let loose against the Maidan demonstrations, mostly stemming from Russian sources. The demonstrators were accused of being: “fascists,” “neo-Nazis” and “ultra-nationalists,” but the major charge was of “anti-Semitism.” Unlike “fascist” or “ultra-nationalist,” the latter was a specific charge that could be refuted.
That is the topic of a new book – “Jews, Ukrainians and the Euromaidan” – edited by Dr. Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, professor of the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. In selections by various authors, covering the period November 21, 2013, to March 20, 2014, Prof. Luciuk offers compelling evidence about the positive role Ukraine’s Jews, as well as those in the diaspora, played in defense of the political sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.
The specific motivation in putting together this volume, Prof. Luciuk said, came from his reading about Jews who had been active in Kyiv in the government of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1918, particularly the role of Arnold Margolin, a Ukrainian Jewish lawyer and politician.
During the revolutionary period Margolin had played a prominent role in Ukraine’s liberation struggle and had been deputy minister of foreign affairs of the UNR and a member of the UNR delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. He worked for good Ukrainian-Jewish relations, defended Ukraine’s right to independence and the reputation of Symon Petliura. Yet, today, Margolin is unknown.
As a historian, Prof. Luciuk said he felt the interaction between Ukrainians and Jews on the Maidan was equally significant, and he wanted to preserve that historical record.
The book “Ukrainians, Jews and the Euromaidan,” which was presented in Toronto on November 30, 2014, underscores that tarnishing Ukrainian-Jewish relations was the most malicious tactic used against the Euro-Maidan protesters. Now there is a good deal of proof that the Yanukovych regime recruited neo-Nazi activists to carry out physical attacks on the protest movement and its activists.
According to one of the articles in the newly released book, one by Vyacheslav Likhachev of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, the charge of anti-Semitism was used to promote anti-Western and pro-Russian ideas, and as a weapon of political technology to discredit the Maidan protests.
Anton Shekhovtsov (visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Austria and student of the far right movements in Europe who was a participant in the September 2014 Graduate Student Seminar organized by Ukrainian Jewish Encounter) writes that a pro-Russian network is behind the anti-Ukrainian defamation campaign. He traces links among the authors to the following institutions: British Helsinki Human Rights Group, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, Center for Research on Globalization. These institutions, he says, are obviously ideologically driven anti-democratic activists engaged in anti-Ukrainian and anti-European subversive operations. Their reports are regularly broadcast on the English language channel RT (formerly known as Russia Today).
The same authors are in another pool of political commentators used by another Kremlin-sponsored media service: Voice of Russia. This shows that there is an overlap of people aimed at promoting anti-Western, pro-Russian and Eurasianist positions in the European Union, the United States and Canada.
There are also paid social media trolls who post on news media comment pages, as well as on Twitter and Facebook – fake experts with fake authority. Others may be real experts, but are paid – former ambassadors to Moscow, businessmen who have been recruited to Russian company boards, and European politicians who have been compensated by positions in Russian companies, such as former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
There are academics who play along with the Kremlin goal of sowing discord and dissension in Ukrainian society. For example Prof. Stephen Cohen uses his concert of “two Ukraines” in an attempt to show that Ukraine is divided into two countries. In fact, however, Ukrainians may be divided on policy but they are united on being Ukrainian and wanting a democratic and honest government that is accountable and abides by the rule of law, writes Prof. Howard Adelman.
The strongest arguments against the charges of the Maidan’s anti-Semitism have come from Jews themselves. Even the titles of some of the articles attest to this: “Ukraine Chief Rabbi accuses Russians of Staging anti-Semitic Provocations” or “The Ex-Israeli Soldier Who Led a Kiev [sic] Fighting Unit.” Vladimir Melamed writes in the Jewish Journal in an article titled “We care about Ukraine”: “We the Jews care about Ukrainian independence and Ukraine people. We can say, in the time of trials, the Jews are on the side of a free and democratic Ukraine.”
Konrad Schuller of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung notes: “Moscow and the Ukrainian government claim that the protest movement contains anti-Semitic elements. The truth is the Jews themselves are becoming part of the Euromaidan.” He writes about a commander on the Maidan who grew up in an orthodox Hasidic family in Odesa, spent some time in Israel and then returned to Ukraine to take part in the Maidan protests.
Jewish Ukrainian historian Vitaly Nakhmanovich defends the revolution because Jews have a long history in Ukraine. The book points out that Rabbi Hillel Cohen, an orthodox rabbi in Kyiv, offered a prayer on the Maidan; a klezmer band performed Yiddish songs; scholars gave lectures on Ukrainian Jewish history. And there are at least three Jews in the Heavenly Brigade, demonstrating that the Jews were in the thick of battle defending Ukraine’s democratic orientation.
Among those who signed the appeal of Churches and religious organizations – which called “on the Russian authorities to come to their senses and stop aggression against Ukraine and immediately pull out Russian troops from the Ukrainian land” – were leaders of the Ukrainian Orthodox, Ukrainian Catholic and other Christian Churches, as well as Yaakov Dov Bleich, chief rabbi of Kyiv and Ukraine. The Open Letter of Ukrainian Jews to President Vladimir Putin was signed on March 4, 2014, by the leading Jewish organizations of Ukraine; it stated: “We decisively call for you not to intervene in internal Ukrainian affairs, to return the Russian armed forces to their normal fixed peacetime location, and to stop encouraging pro-Russian separatism.”
Another charge against the Maidan protests was that they were dominated by the Ukrainian radical right . An international team of experts, including German political scientist Andreas Umland, German historian Gerhard Simon (from the University of Cologne) and the American historian Timothy Snyder came to the conclusion that elements of the right-wing do exist among the Ukrainian opposition parties; however, the inordinate amount of attention they have received abroad is “unfounded and misleading.” The influence of the radical right in Kyiv is much too exaggerated and serves as a pretext for military intervention by Russian troops.
Some well-known human rights groups in Ukraine – the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group – joined this call. Former Soviet political prisoner Josef Zissels, head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities in Ukraine, said, “Despite some solitary expressions of hostility toward the Jews, anti-Semitism in the Ukrainian movement does not exist today.”
Anne Applebaum, in her article, provides help in decoding the smears and stereotypes used in the propaganda against the Euro-Maidan protesters. She cautions that it is necessary “to treat some of the clichés describing the situation with deep skepticism: “fraternal assistance”– once used to justify Soviet invasions of Prague and Afghanistan, hence a cue for pro-Russian organizations to ask for intervention; “Nazi or fascist” – loaded historical terms used to describe opposition leaders and groups; “ethno-linguistic divisions” – another loaded term, used to describe what is actually political conflict.
The above are just a few examples of the wide-ranging issues raised in the 44 articles included in “Jews, Ukrainians and the Euromaidan.” At the end of the compendium, there is an additional bibliography that includes additional useful articles about the Maidan.