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Russian leaders today cite the need to defeat Ukrainian
“nationalism.” The Eurasianist political philosophy driving Russia’s
revanchist foreign policy thus tracks closely with Czarist
imperialism and Soviet Communism.
Lenin distinguished “bourgeois nationalism” from socialist
patriotism. Stalin sought to stamp out – ideologically and violently
– feelings of attachment to national culture and traditions among
the peoples of the Soviet republics and satellite states. In place
of these would be a particular Soviet patriotism, defined and guided
by Russians, the so-called “elder brothers of the Soviet people.”
Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s current effort to crush its
national identity and sovereignty ought to be seen in light of how
the country’s Soviet-era human rights defenders reconciled universal
human rights principles with the country’s national culture.
Emergence of the Helsinki Committees
Numerous “Helsinki committees” grew out of the Soviet bloc in the
wake of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, and the founding of the Moscow
Helsinki Group in 1976. They were independent and civil society
organizations, made up mainly of intellectuals who sought to hold
their governments accountable based on the Soviet Union’s signature
on the document.
In general, these organizations sought not regime change, but
compliance with human rights commitments. Standing outside of
political structures, they positioned themselves to offer objective
analysis.
Many members of Helsinki groups faced exile, imprisonment, torture
and murder; indeed, at a celebration of a milestone anniversary of
the Moscow Helsinki Group in 2001, a participant joked that if he
had heard the words “Helsinki 25,” he would have thought it referred
to a jail term.
It is worth noting that, among these, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group
was the most persecuted. The Helsinki Commission of the U.S.
Congress, an independent entity set up to monitor compliance with
the Helsinki Accords, considered the Ukrainian Human Rights Group
“the most repressed, in terms of prison sentences, of the Soviet
Helsinki Groups.” All but one of its 83 members were jailed by the
Soviet regime.
Why did the Group pose such a threat? Of course, it was because
Ukraine was the jewel in the Soviet empire’s crown. The Ukrainian
human rights movement that raised its voice in the 1970s was both a
movement for compliance with the human rights standards defined in
the Helsinki Accords, and one focused on reviving Ukrainian
nationhood; for its founders, those goals were consistent with one
another, and indivisible.
The right to be a Ukrainian
A 1977 manifesto of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was largely a
lament about the degradation of Ukrainian culture under Soviet
dominion. The document stated that Ukrainians had “lost the living
spirit of the entire past under the press of bureaucratic usurpers.”
One of its members wrote that “the first, rudimentary condition of
my existence is the right to be a Ukrainian.” Indeed, Ukrainian
identify was considered “the root of spirituality and identity.”
Mykola Rudenko, the group’s founder, had been expelled from the
Communist Party for “idealizing the peasant style of life,” and was
sentenced by Soviet authorities to 12 years in jail and exile for
“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Rudenko, a poet and
philosopher, died in 2004.
The Helsinki Group, while stressing Ukrainian national rights,
professed a desire to be part of a Europe where both Ukrainian
identity and individual human rights protections could coexist.
Their credo was “peace and prosperity in Europe.” They reviled the
Soviet Union not only for punishing what its authorities called
their “bourgeois nationalism,” but also for its stifling
bureaucracy.
They envisioned a “united Europe” as an antithesis to the Soviet
Union – “not an empire.” It would be a Europe where Ukraine could be
Ukraine; where Ukrainians could realize the potential of their
culture and their national destiny.
Nationalistic feelings were what kept many Soviet and East European
citizens intellectually, morally, and even physically alive, and to
be able to form post-Soviet democracies. All the dissident human
rights groups in the Soviet Union either incorporated explicitly
nationalist elements, or defended the rights of movements for ethnic
or national self-determination.
Some, after the collapse of the USSR, veered off into ethnic and
national chauvinism. Post-Soviet and East European states, including
Ukraine, have often contended with ethno-nationalist movements, and
posed obstacles to the realization of minority rights.
But the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and others understood that there is
no intrinsic contradiction between upholding principles of universal
human rights and the goal of national self-determination. In fact,
the reality of universal, individual human rights is always best
understood in a particular national context, and our rights are
always most meaningfully and efficiently protected under national
constitutions.
That is a lesson that, inspired by the Helsinki activists, Ukraine
can bring as a future member of the European Union.
Aaron Rhodes is a Senior Fellow in the Common Sense Society. He was
executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for
Human Rights 1993-2007. In 2018, he published The Debasement of
Human Rights (Encounter Books). |
