The Conflicting Life of Dmytro Dontsov: A Review of Trevor Erlacher’s Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes ( 2021, Harvard University Press)

Following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, many of the street names in Lviv were changed from that of Soviet generals and communist leaders to the heroes of the Ukrainian resistance. Quite a few of these changes stirred up a public polemic, but the one that I remember most vividly—even now, after almost thirty years—is the decision to name a street after Dmytro Dontsov.

He was a famous nationalist, we were told. Others interjected that he was also a fascist. Why would you name a street after a fascist? Coming of age in the late 1980s, my generation were very aware of how a fascist label could be used by the Soviet authorities for propaganda. When everything that we had been taught was crumbling all around us, why would we believe in one more lie? On the other hand, the anti-fascist prejudice of a Soviet-born child, a grandchild of war veterans, also ran deep within me. Could there have been a chance that he was a fascist? 

Then there was also the matter of his surname—Lviv of the late 80s and early 90s was finely-attuned to the ending of surnames. Russian surnames ending in “-ov” were thought to be disadvantageous, as they very clearly pointed to a person’s Russian heritage, and any Russian presence in Lviv was largely considered to be a symbol of the occupant’s presence. A few of my classmates changed their names from the Russian-sounding ones of their father’s to the Ukrainian-sounding ones of their mother’s back then. My own maiden name is Kiselyova, which is about as Russian-sounding as it gets. I was extremely curious to learn how this person with what appeared to be a Russian last name had become an adherent of Ukrainian nationalism. Things just did not add up, but in the highly-charged atmosphere of those times, you learned not to ask provocative questions. I pushed these lingering questions aside and went on with my life instead.

My curiosity resurfaced again last year when I saw that Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute had published a book on Dmytro Dontsov. Trevor Erlacher’s Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes is the first English language biography of Dontsov. I wondered: could this book give the answers I had been searching for all these years?

Trevor Erlacher is an academic, but fear not—this book is written in a narrative style that makes it engaging to the general public, and not just scholars of the region. In addition to providing a thoroughly-researched story of Dontsov’s ideas and their evolution, Erlacher puts them into their proper historical context, providing an excellent overview of Ukrainian history in the early twentieth century. 

The picture of Dontsov that emerges is complex and controversial. Hailing from southeastern Ukraine, Dontsov spent his early days as a Marxist. His conversion is still not well understood, especially given that his older brothers could not even speak Ukrainian. Erlacher argues that Dontsov made the conscious choice to ‘become’ Ukrainian: “To become a Ukrainian in the Russian Empire, Dontsov felt, was to join a minority faith besieged by official and unofficial forms of Russification, which denied the existence of Ukrainians as anything more than confused and traitorous Russians.”

Dontsov’s version of Marxism was always a bit heretical, but he came to view the Russian interpretation of it as imperialistic, and all Russians, in turn, as imperialists, regardless of their professed political values. His interpretation of Marxism, notes Erlacher, contained the seeds of its own destructive fascism.

The next chapter of Dontsov’s life covers the pivotal years between 1914 and 1918, the years of the First World War, revolution, and a period of brief Ukrainian independence. Erlacher calls this chapter “The Götterdämmerung of Ukrainophilism”, which refers to the tectonic shift in Dontsov’s thinking, mainly his disappointment in the “squabbling, bumbling, out-of-touch aesthetes and leftists of the Ukrainophile camp”, He became a lifelong adversary of that camp, represented by Ukrainian left-leaning democrats like Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and Mykhailo Drahomanov before them. Most of Dontsov’s writings on Ukrainian integral nationalism were devoted to destroying this ideology in favor of the creation of a new nation, that of strong-willed Ukrainian willing to fight for their country no matter the personal cost. This was when the shift to right-wing nationalism started.

Dontsov ended up in Lviv after the First World War, married into a rich Ukrainian family, and started editing the literary magazine Vistnyk. He also managed to burn bridges with almost everyone who was anyone in the Ukrainian diaspora. Yet there was a new generation of Ukrainians growing up in what is now Poland, and they became enamored with his message, which was increasingly fanatical and right-wing as the years went by. Dontsov’s writings inspired Galician youth to join the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and undertake an active resistance against the Polish government. With Hitler and Mussolini coming to power, Dontsov was actively promoting their regimes as an example to follow for Ukrainians. He also became an avid anti-semite.

A very interesting story that Erlacher covers in detail is Dontsov’s relationship with Olena Teliha, a Ukrainian poet who perished under the Nazis. Dontsov was the editor who discovered her as a poet and probably had a romantic relationship with her; the young poet was infatuated with him. Olena Teliha was a compelling figure in her own right—born Olena Shovheniv, she spent her childhood among the Russian intelligentsia of Saint Petersburg. The Silver Age poet Zinaida Gippius was her godmother. In 1918, her father moved the family to Kyiv, where he served as a minister in the Ukrainian People’s Republic until the Bolshevik takeover. In Erlacher’s words, there began Teliha’s “conversion experience from imperial chauvinist to Ukrainian poet.” 

Inspired by Dontsov and having high hopes for the German administration in Ukraine, Olena Teliha returned to Kyiv in 1941 as a part of the expeditionary force. However, she was eventually arrested by the Nazis and shot at Babi Yar along with over forty other activists from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. 

As her name often comes up in Ukraine whenever there is a conversation on how to structure a memorial around Babi Yar grounds, it is worth examining what Teliha stood for. As Erlacher convincingly shows, Olena Teliha shared Dontsov’s pro-fascist sympathies of the inter-war years: “She followed Dontsov in approving of Hitler’s power-consolidating action, the Night of the Long Knives in which SA and its leader Ernst Röhm were executed without trial…. She even compared Hitler to Jesus Christ, who was willing to strike “with a bloody whip” at even his closest brothers, his own race, for the sake of an idea, for “our party.” Many Ukrainians made the mistake of aligning themselves with the Nazis, and would pay the ultimate price for it--their lives. How can we reconcile Teliha’s pro-fascist views with the heroism that she exhibited near the end of her life, when she would openly act in defiance of the Nazis? Can we commemorate and celebrate her in the same place where tens of thousands Jews perished? Erlacher’s book could provide some much-needed background for discussions on historical memory once it is translated to Ukrainian.

The book also points to the resistance to Dontsov’s ideas which existed among the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the inter-war period. Far from being a uniform environment, Dontsov was opposed by everyone, including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that by 1937 felt, “Ideologues of Dontsov’s type were giving Ukrainians an inferiority complex.” There were also prominent figures, such as Yurii Lypa, who tried to oppose the growing antisemitism among Ukrainians, and reminded Dontsov of how the Russian state had continuously poisoned Ukrainian-Jewish relationships, from the Black Hundreds to The Protocols of Elders of Zion, and how Dontsov himself defended Jews from Ukrainian nationalists in the pogroms of 1906 and 1911. The important takeaway here is that there was always a sizable opposition to Dontsov's ideas in Ukrainian circles all throughout his life. Ukrainian nationalism does not have its roots solely in the right-wing ideas of the converted communist: its roots are based on anti-colonial, pro-socialist politics of the 19th century, and many Ukrainians maintained these ideas in the darkest hours of Europe's fascination with authoritarianism.

Dontsov responded to all the criticisms in a characteristically Dontsov way: “I am so sick of fighting all those idiots. Maybe a Führer is exactly what this country needs?”

Dontsov, who inspired Olena Teliha and many other young Ukrainians “with a morbid ethos of fanatical violence, self-sacrifice, and courage, was nowhere to be found in Ukraine at its darkest hour,” Erlacher reminds the reader. He found safety working for the Nazis at the Reinhard Heydrich Institute, a Prague-based Nazi-sponsored institute that studied Eastern Europe. After the war, Dontsov found his way to Canada, where he was denounced by some in the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora as a fascist and Nazi collaborator. An investigation was launched into Dontsov’s past; he was found not to have committed any war crimes, and allowed to stay in Canada. He retreated to a quiet life, found refuge in religion, and wrote about spiritualism. But even then he maintained a keen interest in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and underlined names of his opponents in the brochures he was reading, scribbling “Jew” in the margins.

Columbia University professor Yuriy Shevelov offered a damning critique of Dontsov, writing that “Bolshevik propaganda can invent nothing more compromising for the Ukrainian national movement and the Ukrainian idea than the hysterical man who has lost all connection with the soil, with the people, and wants to make up for this with the cynicism of an executioner.” 

“What Dontsov advocated,” concludes Erlacher, “was indistinguishable from Bolshevism in practice, and useful to it in the press.”

Trevor Erlacher concludes his impressive work with an examination of where Dontsov fits into the current landscape of Ukrainian politics; in Erlacher’s view, the controversial figure is unlikely to have a long-lasting influence. Dontsov can be taken “a la carte'' with some of his ideas, especially from his early days, that fit quite well with political thoughts of a nation at war with Russia. However, those who mention Dontsov still tend to skip over the more troubling parts of his legacy.

During the last thirty years a lot of progress has been made de-soveticizing Ukrainian history and returning the names of those that were banned to their proper place, but perhaps there will soon come a time when we can start having a discussion about some of the unattractive beliefs that these people had and in what ways these beliefs contributed to the horrors of the Holocaust? In this sense, Trevor Erlacher’s Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes is a very useful tool for those that would like to understand the origins of the ideas that fueled Ukrainian nationalists and to do so in a way that is free from both Soviet propaganda and the patriotic fervor of some of the more recent Ukrainian historians.

Reviewed by Maria Genkin