Dmytro Dontsov

In this name that follows East Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Ivanovych and the family name is Dontsov.

Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov (Ukrainian: Дмитро Іванович Донцов; 29 August [O.S. 17 August] 1883 – 30 March 1973) was a Ukrainian nationalist writer, publisher, journalist and ideologist whose radical ideas, known as integral nationalism, were a major influence on the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, especially the Banderite generation.^[1][2][3]

Dmytro Dontsov
Born	(1883-08-30)30 August 1883 Melitopol, Taurida Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died	30 March 1973(1973-03-30) (aged 89) Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Pen name	O.V.
Occupation	Ukrainian nationalist writer, publisher, journalist, political thinker, activist, literary critic
Language	Ukrainian
Nationality	Ukrainian
Alma mater	Saint Petersburg University (1907)
Literary movement	Integral nationalism
Spouse	Maria Bachinsky (1891–1978)
Signature

Biography

Early life and education

Dontsov was born in Melitopol, located in the Taurida Governorate — considered part of Novorossiya by the imperial authorities at the time and now within Zaporizhzhia Oblast. He was born to a Ukrainian mother, Efrosinia Iosifovna Dontsova, and a Russian father, Ivan Dmitrievich Dontsov, who was a successful merchant elected to the city duma in 1873 and appointed mayor in 1894, although he died of an apparent heart attack on the eve of his inauguration when Dontsov was eleven.^[4] His mother (descended from Italian and German colonists) died the following year from an illness, leaving Dontsov to be largely raised by his German step-grandfather. Dontsov and his younger sisters adopted a Ukrainian identity while his two brothers, Vladimir and Sergei, maintained Russian identities, joining the Bolshevik underground (though he would later be arrested on false charges regarding his association with Dontsov in 1938 and executed) and the Russian imperial bureaucracy respectively.^[4]

In 1900 Dontsov moved to Saint Petersburg to study law and in 1905 joined the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDRP) where he met and befriended Symon Petliura, editor of the magazine Slovo where his first articles were published.^[5][4][6] Dontsov participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 in the course of which he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Kyiv. Following his release, he continued to contribute news and editorials to the socialist Slovo and the Russian-language liberal Ukrainskaia zhizn (both edited by Petliura) though he was arrested again in the wake of the 1907 Stolypin Coup that saw the intensification of Russification efforts and repressions of critics of the state, this time being imprisoned for eight months in Kyiv before escaping abroad to Lviv, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in April 1908.^[4][6][7]

Dmitry Dontsov's mug shot from his 1907 arrest

Recovering from a chronic illness contracted during his imprisonment, Dontsov moved to a resort town in the Tatra Mountains where he became acquainted with the leading theorist of Ukrainian conservativism Vyacheslav Lypynsky, a pro-independence monarchist.^[4][6] At this time, Dontsov advocated a federalist position that envisioned an autonomous Ukraine part of a social democratic Russia and believed in the possibility of coordination between the USDRP and its Russian counterpart. On the movement to establish a Ukrainian university in Lviv, Dontsov wrote in 1911:

"Moreover, the history of the struggle for a Ukrainian university proves for the hundredth time that in politics it is the argument of force, not the force of argument, that matters."^[4][a]

From 1909-1911, Dontsov continued his law studies in Vienna before settling in Lviv in 1912 where, in May of that year, he married Mariia Bachynska (meeting in 1909 as students in Vienna and hereon Bachynska-Dontsova), a pro-Ukrainian activist, feminist, and public intellectual from a wealthy family who, fluent in German, provided translation services for Dontsov and the later Hetmanate, going on to head the Ukrainian Women's Union from 1926-1927 before being ousted due to her association with Dontsov amid his later political works.^[4][7][8]

Disillusioned with the utopian promises of Marxism, Dontsov developed a Russophobic worldview rooted in Realpolitik concerns that advocated for Ukraine's alignment with Mitteleuropa as an Austro-Hungarian protectorate in the inevitable clash between the 'progressive' West and 'reactionary' East.^[4] He presented this political programmme, with complete separatism from Russia at its centre and featuring a condemnation of the Little Russian orientation prevalent among the Ukrainian intelligentsia, to the IInd All-Ukrainian Students' Congress in July 1913 and subsequently published the pamphlet Suchasne politychne polozhennia natsiï i nashi zavdannia (The Present Political Situation of the Nation and Our Tasks), attaining notoriety for what at the time was a deeply controversial and exceptionally radical position that saw him ostracised from the USDRP whom he castigated for placing their trust in Russian liberalism's commitment to self-determination which he characterised as subterfuge.^[4][7]

First World War and the Ukrainian War of Independence (1914-1921)

At the outset of the First World War in 1914, Dontsov briefly headed the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine before leaving to head the Ukrainian Parliamentary Club in Vienna, from 1916-1917 heading the League of Russian Foreign Peoples (LFR) [de] and working as editor of its press bulletin, publishing pro-Ukrainian independence propaganda in German, French, and English and which, likely unbeknownst to Dontsov, was covertly funded by the German Foreign Office.^[4][6][7] Dontsov's 1915 work initially circulated widely in diplomatic circles concerned with the 'Ukrainian question' though this would practically amount to little. Dontsov relocated with the LFR to Lausanne, Switzerland in mid-1916 where he was one of the signatories of an appeal to President Woodrow Wilson on the grounds of self-determination.^[4] In 1917, he moved back to Lviv where he completed his doctorate in law.^[7]

Opposed to the initially pacifist and pro-dialogue Ukrainophile movement (Petliura and Yevhen Konovalets among them) that would found the Ukrainian People's Republic in March 1917 following the February Revolution, and thus starting the Ukrainian War of Independence, Dontsov joined the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party (UDKhP) founded by Lypynsky and quickly rose through its ranks.^[4] Dontsov returned to Kyiv in March 1918 by which time the Bread Peace had seen the Central Powers recognise the UPR and the German Empire militarily occupy Ukraine in return for deliveries of grain to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the Central Rada's socialist agrarian reforms intefered with these deliveries and lowered productivity, leading the German military authorities to conspire with the UDKhP to effect a coup d'état in April that installed the Ukrainian State under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi.^[4]

In May, Dontsov joined Skoropadskyi's government as director of the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency (UTA) and press bureau, overseeing the production and dissemination of news and pro-Hetmanate propaganda.^[6] From the summer of 1918 onwards, Dontsov led the Hetmanate's Ukrainisation efforts aimed at drumming up support for the government and Skoropadskyi regularly consulted Dontsov on matters of Russification and the regime's relationship with the Germans, Bolsheviks, Russians, and peasants, directing him to set up Selianske slovo (Village Word) in an effort to appeal to the latter group.^[4] Dontsov advocated for Crimea as an "integral part of Ukraine" and was outraged at the proposed federal union in November between the Hetmanate and White Russia, resigning from the UTA and going into hiding following the appearance of an order for his arrest as the Anti-Hetman Uprising broke out.^[4][6] Despite his friendship with Petliura, Dontsov loathed the new socialist regime and, returning to the UTA, advised the Directorate to grant Petliura emergency dictatorial powers.^[4] On receiving news that the White Volunteers had placed a bounty on his head, Dontsov departed to Paris in early January 1919 as part of the UPR's diplomatic mission to the Versailles peace talks for ten days before meeting Lypynsky in Vienna in order to coordinate their propaganda efforts from the latter's Ukrainian Bureau but they disagreed on the way forward ideologically and geopolitically with Dontsov opposed to what he saw as the Hetmanite movement's pro-Russian tendencies and Lypynsky opposed to an alignment with a resurgent Poland.^[4][6] In February, following the fall of Kyiv, Dontsov left for Bern to once again head the UPR's now-exiled press bureau while Bachynska-Dontsova worked for the UPR's diplomatic mission to Denmark in Copenhagen, with efforts later focused on securing the UPR's place at the Treaty of Riga negotiations that concluded in 1921 with the partition of Ukrainian lands primarily between Poland and the Bolsheviks.^[4]

Interwar period and Ukrainian integral nationalism (1921-1939)

Having advocated that Ukraine become a part of Józef Piłsudski's Intermarium project, portraying it as a cordon sanitaire against the Bolsheviks who he regarded as an insidious reincarnation of Russian imperialism, Dontsov was granted permanent settlement in Lviv, personally approved by Piłsudski.^[4] In 1921, Dontsov published his first book, Pidstavy nashoї polityky (The Foundations of Our Politics), in which he presented a political ideology he termed 'active nationalism' and which largely resembled integral nationalism in a Ukrainian context, arguing for the subordination of individual, class, and humanitarian interests to the biological survival of the nation.^[4] Dontsov extolled Bolshevism and Italian Fascism as models of a ruthless 'intitiative minority' on which to base the Ukrainian nationalist movement and blamed Ukrainophilism and Ukrainian conservatism for the failure of the revolution.^[4] He advocated for a social Darwinian, agrarian, and authoritarian democracy grounded in self-discipline and self-action as a long-term ideal. Though critical of the more outlandish conspiracy theories associated with it and stressing that Bolshevism was principally a Russian phenomenon, Dontsov gave credence to the Judeo-Bolshevism myth.^[4]

Dontsov became closely connected to the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) though avoided Polonophobic rhetoric and even motioned for an alliance with Poland at the UVO's founding congress in August 1920 which was blocked by Konovalets.^[4] At Konovalets's insistence, Dontsov became chief editor of the Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (Literary-Scientific Herald, hereon LNV) in 1922, reshaping it from an impartial non-partisan forum into a vehicle for his integral nationalistic political agenda and a Ukrainian nationalist cultural renaissance to which end he published poets in service of creating a nationalist mythology, among them Olena Teliha and Oleh Olzhych.^[4][6] The LNV became successful among the new generation of Ukrainian nationalists with Konovalets describing Dontsov as the "spiritual dictator of Galician youth"— Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, as members of a Ukrainian nationalist youth organisation several years later, organised public readings of the LNV in Lviv.^[4] An embarrassing affair in 1923 saw Dontsov for several months publish anti-Petliura and anti-Polish materials in Zahrava (literally translating to 'a glow or radiance on the horizon'), another publication he edited, purportedly written by Yuriy Tyutyunnyk but who was actually under the coercion of the Ukrainian branch of the GPU.^[4] Dontsov himself had written several criticisms of the Polish establishment and maintained close connections with the nationalist underground for which the affair was used as a pretext to threaten him with deportation to the Ukrainian SSR, leading him to agree to adhere to a pro-Polish agenda.^[4]

In 1926, Dontsov published the book Natsionalizm (Nationalism), his most successful work designed to incite a fanatical devotion to the Ukrainian integral nationalist programme that cemented his position as an idol of the Ukrainian nationalist youth in Galicia and across Europe.^[4] Having already diverged and clashed on matters of will regarding conscious striving against irrational feeling and strategy regarding top-down landed gentry against bottom-up peasantry, Lypynksy accused Dontsov of bastardising and plagiarising his ideas whereafter the two leading nationalist theorists would continue to trade polemics.^[4] Dontsov's refusal to cooperate with the UVO and later the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (founded in 1929 and hereon the OUN) in spite of the degree to which his works inspired its members fostered mutual suspicion whereby the exiled executive leadership sought to regain control over the outbreak of unsanctioned political violence in Galicia, leading to polemics between Dontsov and Volodomyr Martynets, editor of the OUN's ideological journal Rozbudova natsiï ('Building the Nation'), during the summer of 1930.^[4] In response to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's outspoken criticism of the effect his politics and the OUN were having on Galician youth in the early 1930s, Dontsov adopted anti-clerical positions, advocating for a militant church.^[4]

A dwindling readership and a crisis in contributing authors who clashed with Dontsov's authoritarian editorship led to the demise of the LNV in 1932, later restarted under the name Vistnyk (Herald) in 1933 with the financial support of the UVO and Bachynska-Dontsova.^[4][6] With Adolf Hitler's rise to power that year, Dontsov enthusiastically supported the new Chancellor and advocated for an alignment with Nazi Germany whereby Ukraine would assume a place in the propagandised fascist New Europe.^[4] Having long espoused antisemitic views largely inflamed by the 1927 Schwartzbard trial, Kurylo & Khymka note that in the early 1930s, "anti-Jewish themes began to appear in almost all his articles", with Dontsov in the late 1930s openly subscribing to and promoting the world Jewish conspiracy and "propagating Hitlerite methods of "resolving the Jewish question"" by which time they considered him to have formulated 'a Ukrainian version of fascism'.^{[9][10][11]:264}

Second World War (1939-1945)

Due to his pro-Nazi views, Dontsov was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Bereza Kartuska Prison at the outset of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, before being released by the Nazi authorities whereafter Dontsov and Bachynska-Dontsova divorced.^[4] Dontsov moved to Berlin, Danzig, and finally Bucharest where he lived with and was financially supported (for the remainder of his life) by Ukrainian biologist Yurii Rusov and his wife, Nataliia Gerken-Rusova, an artist and playwright who had been a key contributor to Vistnyk prior to its dissolution at the outbreak of the Second World War.^[4][7] Dontsov worked with the couple to publish Batava which ran until November 1941 and where Dontsov, influenced by Rusov, began promoting scientific racism, dividing the Ukrainian population into stratified racial castes: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, and Oriental.^[4] Due to Rusov's position as editor, Dontsov also contributed to the Hetmanite publication Ukraïnskyi robitnyk (Ukrainian Worker).^[4]

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Dontsov moved to Nazi-occupied Prague in late 1941 where he contributed to the Reinhard Heydrich Institute [de], founded in July 1942 after Heydrich's assassination two months earlier.^[4] Dontsov continued espousing pro-Nazi views despite the violent crackdown on OUN members in Ukraine and opposed the OUN-B's presentation of a liberal democratic façade in 1943 in private correspondence with the organisation's leadership.^[4]

Post-war exile

With the advance of the Red Army, Dontsov left Prague for the American occupation zone in early 1945 from where he travelled to Paris and then to London in 1946, before moving to New York in 1947.^[4] Later that year, he crossed the border into Canada on a tourist visa and, despite a public investigation into his wartime activities, was permitted to settle in Montreal where he taught Ukrainian literature at the French-language Université de Montréal from 1949 to 1952.^[4][6][7]

Dontsov attempted to promote his Russophobic anti-communist views in speaking tours but found himself a pariah in much of the Ukrainian diaspora in large part because of the pro-Nazi and fascist views he espoused before and during the war but he was also perceived as a faithless, hypocritical coward by many nationalists due to his alignment with the Nazis despite the deaths of Teliha, Olzhych, and other nationalists by their hand who had followed his teachings.^[4] Dontsov's activities in postwar exile consisted of him writing for the Ukrainian émigré press, mainly in publications associated with the OUN-B.^[7] In later years he became a devotee of theosophy, repackaging his worldview pertaining to the Soviet Union for a Christian fundamentalist audience during the Cold War and excised pro-Nazi and antisemitic elements from his republished works.^[12][4][7]

Death

Dontsov died on 30 March, 1973 in Montreal, aged 89, and is buried in the Ukrainian Orthodox Cemetery in Bound Brook, New Jersey.^{[4][6] [13]} His funeral was attended, among others, by former members of the UPA and representatives from Ukrainian diaspora organisations, including the World Congress of Free Ukrainians, the Organisation for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.^[4]

Ideology

Historian Trevor Erlacher characterises Dontsov's personality and the all-encompassing taxonomy of his fluid body of work as iconoclastic authoritarianism, asserting that he "reserved the right to modify his ideological [programme] whenever and however he saw fit" and "moved chameleon-like between political, cultural, and philosophical trends".^[4]:20 Erlacher characterised Dontsov's seminal 1926 work Natsionalizm as being "a collection of impressions and expressions designed to have an emotional effect and undermine the reader's trust in reason", going on to write that "[p]atent falsehoods, such as Dontsov's misrepresentation of the Ukrainian anarchist Drahomanov as a "convinced Russian statist," either evade detection and are accepted prima facie, or anger the reader and turn them immediately against the book".^[4]:246

Volodymyr Yaniv, writing for the Encyclopedia of Ukraine^[b], asserts that Dontsov "made a decisive contribution to the undermining of Russophilism and the influence of Communist ideas in Western Ukraine in the 1920s", changed his worldview several times, and that "[h]e quoted his ideological opponents somewhat freely", while his writings largely served as the basis for OUN revolutionary underground activity in the 1930s.^[7] Yaniv characterises Dontsov's ideological system, based on the principles of voluntarism and idealism, as voluntarist and pantheistic monism.^[7]

Dontsov was critical of ideas about pan-slavism, which had gained some popularity. Believing instead in a hierarchy of "master nations" and "plebian nations",^[3]: 403 Dontsov disdained pluralistic Western democracy, and recommended the ethno-nationalist model of fascist dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler.^[14] His theories came to be considered integral nationalistic but authentically Ukrainian.^{[citation needed]}

In a style of analysis more typical of the Russian intelligentsia, Dontsov exhibited a doctrinaire turn of mind with simplified, reductionist formulas, and radical ideological solutions, which, alongside his mixed heritage, became a longstanding crutch for his critics who accused him of 'importing Russian culture'.^[12][4] His writings lambasted the failures of Ukrainians to achieve independence in 1917–1921, ridiculed Ukrainian figures from that era, and idealised Cossack traditions.^[7] He proposed a new "nationalism of the deed" and a united "national will" in which violence was a necessary instrument to overthrow the old order, calling for the birth of a "new man" with "hot faith and stone heart" (гарячої віри й кам'яного серця) who would not be afraid to mercilessly destroy Ukraine's enemies. He believed in the sacredness of national culture and that it should be protected by any means necessary. His fiery exhortations had a profound influence on many of Ukraine's youth who experienced the oppression of their nation and who were disillusioned with democracy. Although he did not become a member of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, his writings served as an inspiration for OUN members^[3]: 400 and many Ukrainians not only in Galicia but in Volyn as well, where OUN influence had been negligible before 1941 and the local Ukrainian movement had been led by the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and where his writings were sold even more than in Galicia.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy

Commemorative plaque in Melitipol

According to Eastern Europe historian Timothy Snyder, Ukraine rejected Dontsov's theory that it should be exclusively for and about people who spoke Ukrainian and shared Ukrainian culture. His brand of ethnic nationalism lost out in favor of the pluralistic form championed by Vyacheslav Lypynsky and Ivan L. Rudnytsky.^[15]

From 2016 up until 2022, a street in Melitopol was named Dmitry Dontsov, in his honor.^[16]

A memorial plaque was unveiled on January 24, 2019 on the side of the Ukrinform headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine.^[17][18]

Main Works

• Modern Russophilism (Moderne moskvofilstvo, 1913)
• The Present Political Position of the Nation and Our Tasks (Suchasne politychne polozhennia natsiï i nashi zavdannia, 1913)
• The Ukrainian State Idea and the War Against Russia (Die ukrainische Staatsidee und der Krieg gegen Russland [in German], 1915)
• The History of the Development of the Idea of a Ukrainian State (Istoriia rozvytku ukraïns’koï derzhavnoï ideï, 1917)
• Ukraine's International Position and Russia (Mizhnarodne polozhennia Ukraïny i Rosiia, 1918)
• Ukrainian Political Thought and Europe (Ukraïnska derzhavna dumka i Evropa, 1919)
• The Culture of Primitivism: The Main Foundations of Russian Culture (Kul’tura prymityvizmu: Holovni pidstavy rosiis’koï kul’tury, 1919)
• The Foundations of Our Politics (Pidstavy nashoï polityky, 1921)
• The Poetess of the Ukrainian Risorgimento: Lesia Ukrainka (Poetka ukraïnskoho risordzhimenta: Lesia Ukraïnka, 1922)
• Nationalism (Natsionalizm, 1926)
• The Politics of Principle and of Opportunism (Polityka pryntsypiial’na i oportunistychna, 1928)
• Spirit of Ukraine: Ukrainian Contribution to the World Culture (1935)
• Our Era and Literature (Nasha doba i literatura, 1936)
• The Intoxicant of Socialism (Durman sotsiializmu, 1936)
• Where to Seek Our Historical Traditions (De shukaty nashykh istorychnykh tradytsii, 1938)
• The Spirit of Our Antiquity (Dukh nashoï davnyny, 1944)
• The Poetess of the Fiery Limits: Olena Teliha (Poetka vohnianykh mezh: Olena Teliha, 1952)
• The Truth of the Great Ancestors (Pravda pradidiv velykykh, 1952)
• Russia or Europe (Rosiia chy Evropa, 1955)
• From Mysticism to Politics (Vid mistyky do polityky, 1957)
• The Spirit of Russia (Der Geist Russlands [in German], 1961)
• The Watchword of the Era (Klych doby, 1968)

[Taken from the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.]^[7]