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Mark Ames: The Hero of the Orange Revolution Poisons Ukraine

[Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull) and The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove). He is a regular contributor to eXiled Online.]

If you've been wondering what ever happened to that wonderful Orange Revolution in Ukraine--because let's face it, it was probably the last feel-good moment America collectively experienced in an otherwise bummer-packed decade--Sunday's presidential elections in the former Soviet republic provided the answer: it went bad. Voters returned to power the same supposed villain, Viktor Yanukovych, whom they forced out in mass demonstrations the last time there presidential elections were held in 2004. The Orange Revolution's leaders were overthrown by the same voters whom they empowered....

Last month, shortly after Yushchenko's humiliating defeat in the first round of elections, he officially rehabilitated one of Ukraine's most controversial WWII-era figures, the ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera--a move so fraught with danger down the road that it's as though he did it to punish his disloyal voters. Operating in the western region of Ukraine known as Galicia from the 1930s through the 1950s, Bandera's military organization adopted typical fascist symbols and trendy racist ideas promoting ethnic chauvinism and racial purity to pursue its goal of creating an independent Ukrainian state.

The move sparked angry reactions from Jewish groups in Ukraine and abroad, as well as Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Poland, among others....

Ever since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has had to grapple with the ethnic divisions, which some (including the CIA) have worried could tear the country apart if someone should exploit it. Making a hero out of Bandera, an ethnic chauvinist and arguably the most divisive Ukrainian figure of the past century, is exactly the sort of reckless move that could cleave Ukraine internally and set off its neighbors....

Dovid Katz, a professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University in Lithuania, said, "This is a plague over the entire anti-Soviet, anti-Russian part of Eastern Europe, this adoration of fascists and racists. It's an ultranationalism that is anti-Russian and anti-Semitic, that is a social illness." Katz said that in Lithuania, for example, the government has been moving to prosecute only Jews among surviving veterans of the anti-Nazi Soviet partisans for alleged 'war crimes' against Lithuania--but they have yet to punish a single Nazi collaborator, despite the mass extermination of Jews by the Lithuanian units that enthusiastically carried out most of the killing....

And to think we were going to plunge into a new cold war with Russia on behalf of Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia--who recently announced that he was imposing mandatory patriotic-military classes to be taught in schools across Georgia, something not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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