Trevor Erlacher's biography of Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973) places the ideologue of the Ukrainian extreme right in his proper, “broader European, Eurasian, and global” setting, thereby “contextualizing Dontsov and Dontsovism diachronically, placing his words, actions, and associations in their . . . contexts” (43). In this pursuit, Erlacher aptly and intelligently navigates Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, and French literature and Ukrainian, Polish, and Canadian archives. In six, chronologically organized chapters, Erlacher takes us through Donstov's life from his early years in the sleepy Russian provincial city of Melitopol. Here, the young Russian started his political development as an orthodox Marxist, before around 1909, influenced by (mis)reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, taking up voluntarist positions, glorifying “amorality,” and calling for Ukrainian belligerence (69–70). Radicalized further during World War I, Dontsov breaks with the Ukrainian People's Republic and his former mentor Symon Petliura (107), supporting the German-staged coup that brought Pavlo Skoropads΄kyi to power, serving as head of the Hetmanate Telegraph Agency (146), before being antagonized by the hetman's last-minute attempts for federation with Russia.
Erlacher skilfully guides his readers along Dontsov's intellectual journey, from his Novorossiia childhood, as young Dontsov, a speaker of a muddled “Muscovite-Ukrainian jargon” who was unable to distinguish Ukrainian from Polish, to the main ideologue and icon of the Galician extreme right (273). Despite radical transformations from orthodox Russian Bolshevik to pro-Nazi propagandist, racial scientist at the Reinhard Heydrich Institute to Christian mystic and Cold warrior, Dontsov traded one totalitarian Weltanschauung for another. His greatest influence was that of transmitter of transnational fascism and as translator and popularizer of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Antonia de Oliveira Salazar, and Leon Degrelle (312). Dontsov perceived himself as a Ukrainian Joseph Goebbels (318) or Mussolini (339). Though the idiosyncratic totalitarian himself never joined its ranks, Dontsov inspired the fanaticism of the Stepan Bandera wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN(b), its violent hatred that aimed at forming a “new Ukrainian: youthful, brutal, ‘with stone heart and burning faith.’”(233) In the 1930s he conceptualized antisemitism as “a Ukrainian tradition,” condemning the leadership of the UNR for having failed to take advantage of the Judeophobic sentiments of the Ukrainian masses (318), and commending Hitler and the Third Reich for their determination to exterminate those “bacilli” (319). These would form the underpinnings for the wave of ethnic violence the OUN(b) launched against Jews, Poles, and, not least, Ukrainian political opponents during the war, claiming the lives of 90,000 Poles and many thousands of Jews.
Erlacher intelligently and elegantly situates Dontsov in the larger European fascist, or multi-totalitarian context. He aptly guides the reader through European intellectual history from Melitopol to Lemberg/Lwów/L΄viv, Vienna, Warsaw, Bucharest, Berlin, Prague, and Montreal. The title of Erlacher's book seems to suggest that the agency lies elsewhere; that Dontsov was active in an age that was extreme—thereby merely “drifting along” and conforming to the Zeitgeist. In the Ukrainian literature one often encounters the claim that Ukrainian nationalism, unique in the post-Habsburg realm, supposedly did not produce a fascism of its own; even that Ukrainian fascism, in the absence of statehood, was an impossibility (449). Such selective narrations formed the basis for the attempts, under Viktor Iushchenko (2005–2010) to rehabilitate Dontsov, whose ghost, Erlacher notes, ”still haunts Ukraine's cities and universities”: with streets named in his honor across Ukraine, “Dontsov's influence is felt in every region of the country” (451). Erlacher notes the paradoxes of his posthumous rehabilitation; how memory managers at the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) “dismisses claims that Dontsov was antidemocratic or totalitarian as baseless defamations,” (452); how “such efforts to reimagine Dontsov as a liberal democrat are not only unpersuasive but would probably have baffled and vexed the publicist, who attacked the notions of democracy and universal human rights throughout his career” (452–53).
Russia's war of aggression against the democratically elected government of Ukraine, a reconquista grotesquely packaged as “de-nazification” complicates the work of historians of Ukrainian nationalism. At a time of massive Russian systematic disinformation, some may question whether this is the right time to address the legacy of the Ukrainian far right. To others, the war serves as a painful reminder about the dangers leaving the difficult topics in the hands of ideologues and information warriors. Erlacher's book will become indispensable as the post-war, democratic, European Ukraine begins the process of Aufarbeitung of the past.
