From the struggle for independence to the present day: a brief history of Ukrainian eco-nationalism
Although history will remember the question of nationalities and the failure of perestroika as the main factors in the process that led to this historic moment, the country's march towards freedom also owes much to the environmental concerns of a population traumatized by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.
The combination of pro-independence and environmental aspirations gave rise to a movement known as "eco-nationalism", which has undergone a number of changes over the course of its existence.
The Soviet authorities' indifference to environmental issues
Ecology and nature protection have had an often chaotic itinerary in Ukraine, in an economy heavily marked by Marxist-Stalinist legacies.
Subjected to the arbitrariness of a regime scarcely concerned about the long-term consequences of extensive development in a rural periphery that was the mainstay of an empire economy, Ukraine experienced, from the 1930s onwards, massive industrialization of its territory, encouraged by brutal five-year planning. Forced collectivizations, artificial fountains, the deportation of rural dwellers, over-industrialization and disastrous agronomic experiments proved particularly harmful to the Ukrainian environment.
While environmental protection was not totally overshadowed in the USSR, it could not take the form of a civic movement, as it did in the West. Totalitarian and hostile to any form of initiative outside its direct control, the Soviet state preferred to rely on conservation organizations directly affiliated to it. Founded in 1946, the State Committee for the Protection of Society represents one of the USSR's most important environmental organizations.
However, this body is rarely consulted when decisions are made. Far from defending nature, it instead participates in the process of legitimizing the latest major projects to transform and conquer natural territory, intended to complete the construction of the Soviet "workers' paradise". It wasn't until the onset of perestroika that the Soviet authorities, hitherto insensitive to ecological issues, realized the need to revise their environmental grammar.
Ecology in the era of perestroika
It was only during Mikhail Gorbachev's brief period in power (1985-1991) that we began to sense that glasnost and perestroika were synonymous with a new awareness and reformulation of the ecological imperative in the USSR. The Soviet power that Gorbachev inherited was running out of steam as a result of its fierce competition with the Western bloc. Not only was the economic system no longer able to keep up in the race for technical innovation and withstand the spectacular fall in oil prices from 1979, but Communist ideology was showing its limits - as evidenced by the proliferation of dissident works such as those by Solzhenitsyn. To avoid implosion, the USSR had no choice but to adapt a new strategy. It made environmental protection one of the cornerstones of its restructuring policy. Indeed, ecology is proving determining for perestroika.
By embracing a cause that has become global, the USSR aspires to take the lead in an anti-capitalist protest movement already well established in Western Europe, thus enhancing the prestige of Soviet ideology.
In a context of economic stagnation, ecology appeared, moreover, as a means of reviving and redirecting technological innovation towards renaissance and energy diversification. Thanks to ecology, perestroika was able to assert a radically different sectoral choice from that inherited from Stalinist models. It was no longer a question of placing steel eaters such as the military-industrial complex and the extractive sector at the heart of growth, but rather of reviving key light industries and consumption.
As perestroika's main objective was the transformation of the USSR into a "state governed by the rule of law", where the bureaucratic system would be expunged of its cumbersomeness, environmental protection would be above all for Gorbachev a means of democratizing Soviet society. The "green revolution" takes place through the gradual reintegration of "dissident" actors once blamed by the regime for their "contemplative idealization" of nature. By allowing them access to information channels once again, the government intends to use these actors as an instrument of political legitimization. Of course, dissidents' criticisms of administrative malfunctions are now heard, but they contribute to the self-regulation of the Soviet system rather than threaten it.
Finally (and not least), the reconciliation of man and nature is intended to accentuate the decentralization of power. This strategy opens the way for nationalities to reclaim their immediate environment. Above all, it calms and minimizes the rise of nationalism within the Union. The environment was used by Soviet propaganda. Like its people, it was the fruit of a harmonious combination of national cultural and ecological elements. This rhetorical shift was intended to be clear: defending the environment would induce the idea of preserving the remarkable heritage of a "natural homeland" idealized by Communist ideology. This would ultimately lead to a renewed justification of the merits of collectivism and nationalism to protect against the West, presented as hostile to ecological ideals.
Pious on the surface, this vow does little to hide the fact that the environmental question remains suspended on the elitist approach of a Communist party in dire straits. From the late 1980s onwards, Gorbachev's environmental policy destabilized the Union more than it consolidated it.
Zelenij Svit: defending the Ukrainian environment as a definitive rejection of the USSR
On April 26, 1986, north of Kiev, the main reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant went into meltdown and collapsed, resulting in significant nuclear fallout over the southwestern part of Soviet territory.
An environmental disaster on an unprecedented scale, the Chernobyl shockwave went beyond the simple malfunction of a state-of-the-art Soviet facility. The nuclear threat, hitherto identified as an external military threat, took on a completely different face in the wake of this event: that of an enemy within.
Imputable for the failings of the Union's leaders, who were accused of poisoning their fellow citizens, the Chernobyl disaster very quickly became the catalyst for widespread environmental awareness. With glasnost no longer providing sufficient leverage to contain public reaction, the ruling elite was unable to hinder the creation of citizen movements and collectives rejecting nuclear power in the USSR. Initially dubious about the real environmental benefits of the perestroika reforms, the Ukrainian population discovered that they were more than just hostages to the atom. The burgeoning radiophobia resurrected a militant anti-Sovietism.
On December 28, 1987, based on an aggregate of scientific associations, ethnographic clubs and literary circles, the Zelenij Svit (Green World) association was founded. It became the epicenter of the environmental struggle. Although hostile to the government, Zelenij Svit initially presented itself as a loyalist association.
Zelenij Svit activists in 1988.
On March 29, 1988, the first public conference of Zelenij Svit was organized in conjunction with the Ukrainian Writers' Union, to express the association's concern about the bureaucracy hampering the management of the Chernobyl disaster. The Ukrainian authorities let this happen because they saw Zelenij Svit as an indispensable think-tank in a context where the principle of "ecological safety" had become crucial.
Made possible by perestroika, the circulation of information enabled the association's influence to grow a little wider every day. On November 13, 1988, more than 10,000 people gathered in Kiev at its call to demand not only referendums on the construction of new power plants in Ukraine, but also the constitution of a "Green Rada" - in other words, real participation by ecologists in central decision-making. For the first time, this mass mobilization shows that it is possible to beat back Soviet authoritarian policy and develop a singular approach capable of mobilizing citizens in large numbers.
A new identity-based environmental discourse is taking shape around Zelenij Svit. Indeed, Chernobyl is much more than a trauma. It's a real rupture that leads to concrete proposals for gradually adapting to a nuclear phase-out, making it possible to link the issue of preserving the territory to that of the Ukrainian nation. "Down with Soviet colonialism! this famous slogan sums up the nationalist turn of Ukrainian environmental activism. Through the diversity of its fields of action and the new rhetoric of eco-nationalism, Zelenij Svit is helping to create a wake-up call for other nationalist and democratic-oriented movements.
Zelenij Svit demonstration denouncing the handling of the Chernobyl disaster, November 1988.
Negotiating since 1987 with various nationalist movements to find ecological solutions in a future sovereign Ukraine, Zelenij Svit takes part in the creation in 1989 of the Ukrainian People's Movement for Perestroika (RUKH), to which he allies himself. The holding of semi-free elections in 1990 enabled Zelenij Svit to win 7 deputies to the Rada, as part of the RUKH, which won 15 seats in total.
Ecology, though attractive to a large part of the population, was not the decisive element that helped bring the RUKH to the Rada. Rather, the party's success can be explained by the convergence of demands it managed to catalyze: anti-nuclear positions, a choice for independence and a desire for de-Ovietization. On July 16, 1990, the Rada's final decision of July 16, 1990 on the political sovereignty of Ukraine was approved.
Faced with the putsch of August 21, 1991 fomented by the conservative Communist elite, a final mobilization constituted the ecologists' last argument to get the Ukrainian Communist elite to vote for the declaration of independence, on August 24. Leader of the Zelenij Svit movement, Yuri Shcherbak has in all likelihood been appointed as the proxy to announce the news to the Supreme Council of the USSR. Un ouvrage présentant l’histoire du mouvement rapporte, sans doute avec exagération, cet événement :
« Le discours s’est déroulé dans le plus grand silence. He said that the USSR had collapsed, that the empire had been destroyed. Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the USSR, turned purple and fainted."
From post-Soviet deadlock to ultranationalist resurrection
Promising, the ecologist movement scored several successes in independent Ukraine. Ministerial portfolios, the institutionalization on June 28, 1990 of the Rada Committee for Ukrainian Environmental Policy, rapprochement with the European Green Party in 1993: these political decisions augured real opportunities for action in favor of the environment.
However, the process soon came to an end. To offset the effects of the divorce from the USSR and cope with the immediate economic needs imposed by the transition to a liberal model, Ukraine gradually turned away from ecological issues and the demands of Zelenij Svit, transformed in December 1990 into The Green Party of Ukraine. Once in the vanguard of eco-nationalism, Ukraine failed to overcome the political and systemic reconfigurations of the post-Soviet era, dominated by predatory oligarchy and the transition to a capitalist market economy. Relegated to the sidelines of public debate, the Ukrainian Green Party failed to gain a foothold in the country's various parliamentary elections.
Although marginalized during the 1990s and 2000s, eco-nationalism nevertheless seems to be implicitly regaining a role in the components of the post-Maidan Ukrainian political field. Ultra-nationalists are finding it a field of action to invest in to distinguish themselves from other parties.
Logo of the Ecological Corps cell in Kharkiv, which comes under the Azov ultranationalist movement. nackor.org
The new ecology professed by far-right parties such as the National Corps (stemming from the Azov regiment) and its green wing the Ecological Corps is driven by the desire to unite Ukrainians around a "Green Dignity". While this rhetoric borrowed from the Maïdan gives rise to various militant initiatives such as cleaning up green spaces, tracking down individuals responsible for animal abuse or violent opposition to the various illegal infrastructure projects flourishing in Ukraine under the influence of politicians deemed corrupt, it nevertheless espouses a radical representation in the service of a reactionary, Darwinian ideal.
The deep ecology and ecofascism hold a fundamental place in the ideological construction of some of these movements. Because nature represents fertile traditional values that cannot be transgressed by modernity, and is the site of affirmation of an "ancestral Ukrainian culture", the new Ukrainian eco-nationalists argue for a vitalist revival of ancient Ukrainian culture that would take into account the "wild" elements of its environment.
This attitude corresponds to a romantic re-identification with the Proto-Slavic tribal communities or the Rus, comparable to those of the German völkisch movement of the 1930s. Maintaining that "the Nation constitutes the most optimal form of human existence" - Ukrainian nationalism thus intends to return, through the defense of the environment, to the primary meaning of the state nation: territorial and political synthesis.
Adrien Nonjon, PhD student in History at the Centre de Recherches Europe(s) Eurasie (CREE) at Inalco.
Article headline illustration: Ukrainian environmental activists allied with nationalists to demand that the country take independence from the USSR, celebrated here in Kiev on August 25, 1991, the day after its proclamation. Anatoly Saprononekov/AFP. DR.
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