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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 10

Publication Date: October 25, 2023

DOI:10.14738/assrj.1010.15655.

Álvarez, J. M. S. (2023). Operation Barbarossa, the Dissolution of the USSR and the Russo-Ukrainian War: 1917-2023. Advances in

Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(10). 85-103.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

Operation Barbarossa, the Dissolution of the USSR and the Russo- Ukrainian War: 1917-2023

José Maurício Saldanha Alvarez

Media and Cultural Studies Department, Federal Fluminense University, Brazil

ABSTRACT

After World War One and the fractionation of the empires of central Europe,

Ukraine, the nascent USSR, created the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, which became a

political unit with a state apparatus for the first time. The USSR invested heavily in

making Ukraine an industrial country producing minerals and electricity. The

collectivization of agriculture resulted in great famine, and brutal repression

marked the Ukrainian imagination. The German invasion of the USSR aimed to

explore the East and colonize it with the Aryans. During Barbarossa, right-wing

Ukrainian nationalist groups welcomed the Nazis, who repelled Ukrainian

independence by narrowing collaborationism and practicing the Holocaust. After

the defeat of the Third Reich, the USSR retook Ukraine, repressing Nazi

collaborators and opponents and reintegrating the republic into the Soviet

economy. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine became independent and,

under the Yushchenko government (2005–2010), government organizations

supported by the diaspora built a new national identity, distancing itself from

communism and Russian influence, rehabilitating heroes and nationalist-fascist

organizations, The Ukrainian government allying itself with the West and NATO

sees the fight against the invasion of the USSR in 2023 as a war of independence

consolidating nationality.

Keywords: European Nationalism, Collectivized Economy, Operation Barbarossa,

Collaboration, Fascism.

INTRODUCTION

On January 26, 2023, CNN aired a new special hosted by Ward, "who crisscrosses the country

to explore the extraordinary resilience and unwavering will to win of ordinary Ukrainians." (1)

Who are these remarkable beings despite ordinary people? What country is this so-called

Ukraine capable of generating such determined islanders? Ukraine, until 1919, was a region

without political unity divided between more powerful countries. At the end of the First World

War, the Bolshevik Revolution, ending the turmoil of the civil war, proclaimed, in 1922, the

Ukrainian SSR. It acquired the cohesion of a state administrative framework based on Soviet,

proletarian, and internationalist Marxist Leninist doctrine. The USSR developed the Republic

industries, mining, energy, steel, and urbanism, practicing forced agricultural collectivization

resulting in famine, carrying out deportations, and fierce religious and police repression.

Ukrainian nationalist movements organized clandestine ideological bases opposing the Soviet

system and the Polish occupation. For Rossolinski-Liebe, "Only the experience of the First

World War, the failure to establish a state, and the reception of racist, fascist, and antisemitic

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 10, October-2023

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

discourses transformed this nationalism into a rather typical East Central European fascist

movement." (2) The invasion of the USSR and Ukraine by the Third Reich in 1941 led Ukrainian

nationalist sectors, ideologically identified with the invader, to proclaim their independence,

promptly repelled by the Nazis. The East was a colonization space for them, and the Slavs would

eliminate it.

Ukrainian movements such as the OUN and its armed wing, the UPA, practiced ethnic cleansing

in many cases associated with the Holocaust. Since 1943, like wild Berserker warriors, they

have fought Soviets, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and Germans.

The essay analyzes Ukrainian nationalism as a contemporary problem since, according to

Greenfeld, we have come to a "phase of neo-nationalism. At no other time has this been

demonstrated more clearly than during these very days when regimes and ideologies crumble

around us, and nationalism everywhere raises its head amid the rubble and confusion, as full of

energy as ever." (3) Given the exclusive character of this German and Eastern European

nationalism, we discuss Renan's classic text, which points to the inclusive construction of many

Western nations. In them, extreme nationalisms flirting with fascism were the exception rather

than the rule. Paradigms of the nation in Renan, such as oblivion and the daily plebiscite, are

excluded in favor of an exclusive Ukrainian ethnic root.

In the third part, we will see how, after 1945, Ukraine, reincorporated into the USSR, occupied

a prominent position in the Soviet economic system. The structural crisis of the Soviet economy,

the defeat in Afghanistan, and the crisis of the Chornobyl nuclear plant collapsed the USSR.

Given the weakness of the central government, the "aspirations of the imprisoned peoples"

were awakened in 1991. (4)

Independent Ukraine underwent two revolutions, consolidating its turn to the West, the EU,

and NATO. The Yushchenko administration dramatically manufactured solid new capital by

emphasizing a break with the Russian and Soviet past and Soviet historiography. History,

according to Heidegger, "would not only be the projection that man makes of the present into

the past but the projection of the most imaginary part of his present, the projection into the past

of the future he chose, a history-fiction, a history of desire." (5)

The ongoing process in present-day Ukraine constitutes what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic

power. (6) According to the notions of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida, one has the

impression that Ukrainian organizations write a new contemporary truth or an updated

"narrative." (7) Giorgio Agamben suggests that contemporaneity has a timeless character that

emerges as the Uranian nation recovers in the past, lights capable of clarifying its present. (8)

Le Goff believes that history "should clarify memory and help it to rectify its mistakes. However,

will the historian be immunized against a disease, if not from the past, at least from the present

and, perhaps, an unconscious image of a dreamed future?" (9)

As per Pierre Nora, the war against the Russian invasion of 2022 is the return of the immediate

story and the event. This time, going beyond traditional journalism, it is enhanced by digital

media. (10) We debated the war resulting from the Russian invasion as one of independence.

This circumstance is valued by many countries, celebrating their birth in the pain of a conflict

and not as parthenogenesis. The struggle for independence produces meanings, narratives, and

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Álvarez, J. M. S. (2023). Operation Barbarossa, the Dissolution of the USSR and the Russo-Ukrainian War: 1917-2023. Advances in Social Sciences

Research Journal, 10(10). 85-103.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.1010.15655

a pantheon of heroes. In the Ukrainian case, they are controversial, supported by celebratory

historiography of anti-Soviet resistance and other unknown spots in Ukrainian history. Many

authors on this current exacerbate pre-existing divisions by refusing to forget the past and

practice a daily plebiscite. The nation divided between Ukrainians and Russians proves that a

war of independence is always a civil war.

1939, TWO INVASIONS

On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. On September 16, the USSR occupied its part,

according to the secret clauses of the German-Soviet Treaty integrating Ukrainian territories

into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. (11) In 1940, the country was territorially integrated for the

first time in its history. (12) (Gross, 2021) This data must not have escaped the Ukrainian

nationalists who, already in contact with Nazi leaders, felt tempted to create a fait accomplit by

proclaiming an independent state. (12)

As Norman Davies points out, historiographies are scarce, almost not referring to the Soviet

invasion of Poland, which integrated the tsarist empire. (13) Some Poles believed that the USSR

would come to their aid and fight the Germans. However, the Soviet invasion eliminated Polish

resistance east of the Vistula River by obtaining a secure border. (14) Immediately, the NKVD

arrested and deported thousands of Poles, rigged the elections and incorporated parts of this

country into the Republic of Ukraine.

BARBAROSSA

The Nazi racial cleansing policy began in 1939 in Poland. Population deemed helpful in the

interests of the Reich supplied and fed, while those outside this category were starved to death.

(15) Eastern Europe would receive German colonial expansion whose population would return

to "nature." For the Nazi doctrine, the country's growing industrialization distanced the

Germans from nature and its virtues. The reading of Germania, the work of the Roman Cornelius

Tacitus (c 56 AD – 120 AD), suggested to the Nazis a return to the historical origins of "agrarian

Germania." That wish would come true by colonizing the fertile lands of Ukraine. (16) Europe

would be subjected to Germanic supremacy, based on the utopia of its racial superiority,

excluding Jews, Slavs, and other "inferior races."

In early 1941, the Third Reich failed to invade Britain, supported by the US. The strategic option

to turn to the USSR configuring the military nightmare of a war on two fronts. To achieve this

goal, Hitler and his staff planned Operation Barbarossa, the largest in military history, causing

the world to hold its breath. (17) Barbarossa's name came from Emperor Frederick I, called Red

Beard, leader of the III Crusade, held in the East. Magical thinking made the Nazi high command,

confident in their military expertise, consider the invasion a "child play." Nazi plans foresaw the

German colonization of Ukraine and invaded the USSR, carrying out an ideological crusade

against the Judeo-Bolshevik. (21) With the Slavs annihilated, Crimea would be transformed by

employing highways into a summer vacation spot for the Germans.

The military planners of Operation Barbarossa, among them Lossberg, and General Halder,

wanted to enlist the support of local populations and implant in Ukraine a puppet and

collaborationist government destined to dominate it more easily. (18) The OUNb decided to

collaborate with the Nazis in response to the desire of the OKW and the Abwehr to enlist their