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THE BIRTH OF UKRAINIAN “ACTIVE NATIONALISM”: DMYTRO DONTSOV AND HETERODOX MARXISM BEFORE WORLD WAR I, 1883–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

TREVOR ERLACHER
TREVOR ERLACHER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of North Carolina E-mail: erlacher@email.unc.edu
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Abstract

During the 1920s, Ukrainian publicist Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973) created “active nationalism,” a political doctrine that later became the ideology of the radical right-wing Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Yet, before World War I, Dontsov was a fervently internationalist social democrat. Much of his shift rightward occurred during the internecine fighting that beset Ukraine from 1914 to 1922, but he had already adumbrated key components of his mature, “integral nationalist” world view prior to this time, from a vantage point well within the mainstream of the day's social-democratic discourse. His incendiary brand of Ukrainian realpolitik used the language of an early twentieth-century Marxism that had become riddled with various “heterodoxies.” Anticipating a world conflict that would favor the Germans and dismantle the Russian Empire, Dontsov advocated a pro-“Western,” anti-“Muscovite” orientation for Ukrainians, and in 1913 spearheaded a controversial program for Ukraine's separation from Russia and integration into “Europe.”

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 519 - 548
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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