VUW Hosts Exhibition Glorifying Ukrainian Fascists

By Tom Peters.

Victoria University of
Wellington (VUW) is currently hosting an installation
designed to promote the US-NATO proxy war being waged by
Ukraine’s military against Russia, while whitewashing the
Ukrainian regime and its fascist supporters.

The
exhibition, titled “Ukraine: The Cost of Freedom,” was
exhibited in the Auckland War Memorial Museum during
September and October, before moving to Wellington last
month.
 

The display at VUW was mounted by the
Ukrainian Gromada of Wellington (UGW). This group is
affiliated with the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), a
network of organisations founded in 1967 in New York to
oppose the Soviet Union from the standpoint of right-wing
Ukrainian nationalism and anti-communism.

Since
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the UWC has
served as an important propaganda arm of Volodymr
Zelensky’s regime, staging rallies and raising funds for
Ukraine’s war effort, while demanding more direct military
action against Russia by the US and NATO.

The UGW,
along with the Ukrainian Association of New Zealand, is
calling for the Labour Party-led government to expel
Russia’s ambassador, and to provide more funding, weapons
and training for Ukraine’s armed forces.

Jacinda
Ardern’s government has already declared its
“unwavering” commitment to the war against Russia and
has sent more than 200 soldiers to help train Ukrainian
forces in the UK, gather intelligence, and coordinate
supplies for the war.

The exhibition at VUW falsely
depicts the Ukrainian regime as the blameless victim of
“unprovoked” Russian aggression aimed at “denying
Ukraine its statehood and killing
indiscriminately.”

Vladimir Putin’s invasion was
certainly reactionary: it has led to thousands of deaths,
along with rampant inflation that is devastating millions of
people throughout the world. The war, however, was
deliberately prepared and instigated by the US and NATO,
which have for years militarily encircled Russia, carrying
out military provocations, and in 2014 supported a coup in
Ukraine that overthrew a pro-Russian government.

The
coup is glorified in the VUW exhibition as a “Revolution
of Dignity” carried out to integrate Ukraine into the
European Union. It was led by far-right US-backed forces,
which brought to power a viciously anti-Russian government.
This sparked a civil war with the eastern provinces of
Donetsk and Luhansk with large ethnic Russian populations,
and Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The long-standing
aim of US imperialism is to counter its economic decline by
securing its domination over the entire Eurasian
landmass—with its vast natural resources and working class
population—even if this means war with both Russia and
China.

A central aspect of the VUW installation is its
glorification of the Azov Battalion, a fascist militia
founded following the 2014 coup, which has been integrated
into Ukraine’s military and promoted, trained and funded
by the US and its allies.

A wall panel states: “Azov
Battalion, praised as ‘our best warriors’ by President
Petro Poroshenko (2014–2019) became part of our National
Guard under government command. Putin then played upon and
inflated Azov’s far-right links with false propaganda
about Ukrainian ‘Nazi’ government.”

While
admitting that Azov was founded by “a person with
far-right views,” the text claims that the
organisation’s “radical core” has been diluted by the
influx of new fighters. This assertion is not backed up by
anything and flies in the face of reality.

Azov, along
with other militias like the Right Sector’s Ukrainian
Volunteer Corps and the country’s military leadership
itself, is teeming with fascists, racists and anti-Semites.
Its founder Andriy Biletsky is a white supremacist who in
2010 stated that Ukraine had a mission to “lead the white
races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led
Untermenschen [subhumans].”

Azov forged links with
other neo-Nazi and white supremacist organisations
internationally, including the Rise Above Movement and the
Atomwaffen Division in the US, and has played a significant
role in recruiting foreign fighters for the Ukraine war. The
militia uses Nazi symbols, including—until a recent
rebranding—the Wolfsangel used by Hitler’s SS, and the
Black Sun, which was used by terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who
massacred 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New
Zealand in March 2019.

Like the Ukrainian government,
the Azov Battalion promotes Stepan Bandera as a national
hero. As the leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN), Bandera collaborated with the Waffen SS
during World War II in carrying out the Holocaust in
Ukraine. The OUN viewed Nazi Germany as an ally in the
struggle to restore capitalism to Ukraine and break from the
Soviet Union.
 

The VUW exhibition includes a
picture of Bandera alongside a map of Ukraine, with two
other OUN leaders, Yevhen Konovalets and Roman Shukhevych.
During World War I, Konovalets led the Sich Riflemen, which
began as a unit of Ukrainian soldiers within the
Austro-Hungarian army. He played a leading role in the
operation to crush the January 1918 uprising of workers in
Kyiv supporting the Russian Revolution.

Shukhevych was
a leader of the OUN’s armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent
Army, which directly participated in the massacre of tens of
thousands of Poles and Jews in WWII. He was also a commander
in the Nazis’ Nachtigall Battalion, and a deputy commander
of the Schutzmannschaft 201 auxiliary police
battalion.

None of these facts are explained in the
exhibition, which presents a right-wing nationalist version
of Ukraine’s history aimed at relativising the Nazi
Holocaust.

Under the subheading “~7 mil. Ukrainian
lives paid to win World War II,” the wall text declares:
“The world knows about the atrocities of Hitler, but many
do not realise that his regime was just an ambitious student
that surpassed (arguably) its real teacher, Stalin and his
Soviet killing machine.” The text falsely equates the
actions of the Soviets and the Nazis in Ukraine, saying that
both sides showed “especial hatred towards ethnicities
deemed unwanted and massacred.”

The “History of
Ukraine” panel does not mention the genocide of the Jewish
people by the Nazis (assisted by the OUN). Nor is there any
acknowledgement of the decisive role played by the Soviet
Red Army, which included about 4.5 million Ukrainian
soldiers, in defeating the Nazi war
machine.
 

The claim that Stalin was the
“real teacher” of Hitler, with the implication that the
Soviet Union bears responsibility for the Holocaust, is part
of an extreme right-wing narrative promoted during the 1980s
by Nazi apologists such as Ernst Nolte in Germany. More
recently, these claims have been repackaged by propagandists
for US and German imperialism against Russia, such as Jörg
Baberowski and Timothy Snyder.

While leaving out the
Holocaust, the VUW exhibition presents right-wing propaganda
that the Soviet famine of 1932–33 was a genocide, or
“Holodomor” (death by starvation), of the Ukrainian
population which “Stalin designed, and Soviet servants
eagerly conducted.”

The famine killed about 7
million people across the Soviet Union, and while Ukraine
suffered disproportionately with 3.5 million deaths, there
is no evidence to suggest there was a deliberate plan by
Moscow to kill Ukrainians. It was primarily the outcome of
the Stalinist bureaucracy’s disastrous agricultural
policies, including forced collectivisation in the
countryside. The persecuted Left Opposition led by Leon
Trotsky condemned these policies, which were the outcome of
Stalin’s reactionary nationalist program of building
“socialism in one country.”

Stalin represented the
nationalist reaction against the 1917 Russian Revolution. He
led a privileged bureaucracy, which consolidated its power
during the 1920s and 1930s through the mass murder,
imprisonment and exile of Left Oppositionists who fought to
preserve workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union, and to
defend the internationalist program of world socialism that
underpinned the revolution.

In lurid anti-communist
language, the “Cost of Freedom” exhibition states that
the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922 led to Ukraine
being “imprisoned by Bolsheviks” and oppressed by a
“Red horde of seasoned soldiers infected with promises of
wealth redistribution.”

In reality, the 1917
revolution was an uprising of millions of workers and
peasants, including in Ukraine, against the tsarist empire.
Millions subsequently joined the Red Army to defend the
gains of the revolution against imperialist intervention
during the Civil War.

As the WSWS has explained,
“the Soviet Union, based on workers’ power, was deeply
committed to the defense of the democratic and national
rights of all the nationalities that had been oppressed by
the tsarist regime. The bureaucratic degeneration of the
Soviet Union, personified in Stalin’s rise to power, found
particularly acute expression in the violation and
suppression of the legitimate democratic aspirations of the
national minorities within the USSR.”

Today, both
the Ukrainian and Russian regimes share an intense hatred of
socialism and the working class. Three days before launching
the invasion of Ukraine, Putin gave a lengthy speech which
glorified the tsarist regime and denounced Vladimir Lenin
and the Russian Revolution for “creating” the Ukrainian
state. The oligarchies represented by Putin and Zelensky
enriched themselves through the looting of state-owned
property following the Stalinists’ dissolution of the
Soviet Union in 1991 and the restoration of
capitalism.

The war in Ukraine, in the final analysis,
is the outcome of the break-up of the Soviet Union. This led
to the creation of intensely nationalistic states across
Eastern Europe, serving as military outposts for NATO and US
imperialism. Meanwhile, the working class across the region
suffered a catastrophic decline in its standard of living
due to the evisceration of social programs.

Now,
millions of working people face an ever-expanding war whose
purpose is to defend, on one side, the profits of the
Russian bourgeoisie, and on the other, those of the US and
NATO imperialists and their puppets in
Kyiv.
 

The fact that Victoria University of
Wellington and the Auckland War Memorial Museum have
provided a platform for extreme right-wing propaganda in the
service of the US-NATO war against Russia must be taken as a
warning by students and young people. As is the case
internationally, universities in New Zealand are being
transformed from places of learning and objective historical
research into centres for the promotion of war and
right-wing ideology.

VUW is playing a central role. In
August 2019, its Centre for Strategic Studies hosted a talk
by NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, who hailed the
military build-up in nations bordering Russia, and denounced
“China’s role and influence” as another “threat”
to the “rules-based order” dominated by US imperialism
and its allies. A few months later the university hosted a
presentation by Anne-Marie Brady, a prominent NATO-funded
academic who has demanded more open support from Wellington
for the US-led military build-up against China.

The
current exhibition is a continuation of this campaign aimed
at integrating New Zealand more closely into the US war
drive. This requires the relentless demonisation of Russia
and the whitewashing of fascism in Ukraine. It also entails
the falsification of history in order to smear the Russian
Revolution, which brought an end to the First World War and
charted the path for abolishing the source of war: the
capitalist system and its division of the world into
antagonistic nation states.

The study of the Russian
Revolution is indispensable for young people and workers who
are seeking the means to prevent a catastrophic third world
war involving nuclear-armed powers. As was the case in 1917,
building an anti-war movement today requires a revolutionary
socialist strategy to unite the working class in every
country, including Ukrainian and Russian workers, against
their capitalist rulers.

We call on students at VUW
and other universities in New Zealand to oppose the
pro-imperialist propaganda barrage. Join the International
Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), which is
fighting to build a global anti-war movement, based on
socialist and internationalist principles.

Read and
share our statement, “A call to youth throughout the
world: Build a mass movement to stop the Ukraine war!” and
attend the IYSSE’s global webinar on December 11 at 7 a.m.
New Zealand time: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/04/pers-n04.html

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