• M68040 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    How did they end up like this, anyhow? It’s weird to think there isn’t more animosity towards the guys who shot at their great-great-granddads or whatever.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago
      • USSR goes to shit and collapses
      • you give up your nukes
      • you allow shock doctrine into your country
      • you embrace capitalism, but you never rise up to your former soviet standards
      • your politicians blame the failures of capitalism on a country that no longer exists and ideology that is no longer a competition
      • capitalists in the west keep pushing anti communism into your country
      • communism and nazism is branded as the same thing
      • but then your politicians run out of heroes to praise now that communism evil
      • government gives surface level praise to Makhno because he fought both sides, but is also anarchist so they can’t praise him too much
      • last resort is to start praising Nazis because they wanted “Ukrainian independence”
      • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        My basic understanding of it is if you think both capitalism and communism failed, there is one ideology left to try, and these people have been indoctrinated with “communism bad and doesn’t work” for the last 30 years. The collapse of the Soviet Union would be a sign to the uneducated and/or propagandized that communism doesn’t work, and the last 30 years of Ukrainian history have made it clear that capitalism doesn’t work. Depressed civilians then turn to the last major ideology that is coincidentally being propped up by both national and international interests, and you have the absolute disgrace that is Nazism and fascism in Ukraine today.

    • TheLastHero [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      There was a non insignificant segment of the Ukrainian population that sided with the Nazis when they invaded (UPA, OUN-B), mostly in the western part of the country). These guys very much enjoyed a good war crime against Poles, Jews or Russians, enough that they were willing to ignore the Germans killing other millions of other Ukrainians, most of whom did heroically defend their homeland alongside the Red Army.

      After nazis lost, Stalin annihilated these bandit groups. He and Beria were extremely thorough in laying waste to the collaborators. However in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union the more nationalist/nazi-adjacent side of the Ukrainian government is continuing the tradition of their nazi collaborating ancestors and turning the OUN-B into the patriotic martyrs.