Populist Nationalism in Ukraine

Abstract

This chapter argues that populist nationalism in Ukraine is a product of manipulation of a politically immature society by self-serving elite. I apply Miroslav Hroch’s theory of stages of nationalist mobilization to show that, in Ukraine, the stage of “patriotic agitation” had to be repeated twice in drastically different political and social contexts. First, it was conducted under the banner of “indigenization” that the Soviets used to control the unstable national peripheries. Second, in the post-Soviet period, nationalist propaganda exploited bitterness of the masses that were dispossessed to enrich the select few. Populist nationalism offers symbolic compensation in the form of an officially privileged identity bestowed upon a “titular” population. However, the populist revolt that the elite manipulators unleashed threatens to get from under control: it engenders a xenophobic race to the bottom where the government is forced to compete with the right-wing nationalist groups of the more and more radical persuasion.