January 2016: a rally in honour of wartime nationalist Stepan Bandera's birthday in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photo: Sergei Chuzavkov / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Earlier this year, more than 50 members of US Congress issued an open letter demanding American pressure on Ukraine in response to recent “incidents of state-sponsored Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.” The lawmakers called on Kyiv to “unequivocally reject Holocaust distortion and the honoring of Nazi collaborators and fully prosecute anti-Semitic crimes,” a claim rejectected as “a mix of incompetence and deliberate distortion of information” by Ukrainian memory czar Volodymyr Viatrovych.
In a previous analysis, Sam Sokol briefly touched on Ukraine’s efforts to rehabilitate its wartime nationalist movements – many of whose members had been involved in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews. This campaign, a throwback to the memory policies of President Viktor Yushchenko, was strongly supported by the country’s post-Maidan political leadership and made ideal fodder for Russian propaganda, which sought to portray Ukraine as a hotbed of fascism and anti-Semitism.
This revisionist historiography reemerged shortly after Russia began a vicious propaganda campaign against Kyiv. Here, as part of the propaganda war waged alongside the physical conflict, the Kremlin portrayed Ukraine’s post-revolutionary leadership as a “fascist junta” – one out to get Jews and other minorities.
