This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was first published by The Conversation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission, a “denazification” of the country.

In his address to the Russian people on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin said the purpose was to “protect people” who had been “subjected to bullying and genocide … for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”

The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. While Ukraine’s new language laws have upset some minorities, independent news media have uncovered no evidence of genocide against Russian speakers. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin’s authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent. And while far right groups have been growing in Ukraine, their electoral power is limited.

As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.

Ukraine’s Jewish leadership

First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom “Servant of the People,” from which his party’s name was derived.

The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family” was barely noted during the election. “Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it,” he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky’s election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.

For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”

The pogroms against Jews

Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.

During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.

Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.

Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.

A pluralistic state

Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.

One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups – Russians, Jews, and Poles – broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.

The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.

However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.

From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland’s borders.

At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.

In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.

Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

The accusation that the Ukrainian government is “Nazi,” “nationalist” or “fascist” is an obvious red herring: It is a product of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s infuriation with Ukraine’s opposition to Kremlin plans for its conquest and control. But such accusations have been a staple of the disinformation campaign that Putin has engaged in since he came to power in 2000. Today they serve as cover for his desire to destroy a Ukrainian state that offers an attractive democratic alternative to his own and thereby presents a threat to his personal safety.

He has removed all internal opposition in Russia, arrested protestors, taken control of major media outlets, and threatened with fines and imprisonment anyone who broadcasts views critical of his government. This, however, has not been enough. The Ukrainian state and nation by their very existence are considered dangerous. 

This is not because Ukraine or any NATO country poses a military threat. This accusation is another red herring. However, democracy does present a danger. Freedom of speech and assembly, the ability to criticize corruption, greed and repression would destabilize his rule. This is why in his recent deranged speech he stated that Ukraine and its people have no right to exist. In doing so he was declaring genocidal intent against a sovereign nation.

It does not take much imagination to understand that these appalling and ridiculous statements are projections. Because he himself thinks like a Nazi (promising to remove an entire people from the face of the earth, extend his state borders, grasp a neighbour’s resources), he accuses others of doing the same. His rhetoric, like his military aggression, is indiscriminate. He urges the destruction of an entire people — ironically, and completely irrationally, because they are “really” Russians and a part of Russia. The big lie has been a favorite tactic: spread hatred and contempt against Ukrainians in order to justify their extermination. This has allowed him to buy time while befuddled Western commentators try to sort out his motives.

During the Second World War about 1.2 million people within Soviet borders wore German uniforms of various kinds, mostly as soldiers or as auxiliaries who performed various guard and police duties. Some of them were Ukrainian — giving the smallest of historical fig leafs to Putin’s surreal “neo-Nazi” claims. Largely ignored, however, is that most of those Nazi collaborators in the former Soviet Union were, in fact, Russians.

Recently there have been attempts in the Russian press to “rehabilitate” two of the most prominent leaders who raised armies to fight on the German side: General Andrei Vlasov and General Petr Krasnov. 100,000 soldiers wore the insignia of Vlasov’s ROA (Russian Liberation Army), while 18,000 were raised by Krasnov who wore the Russian Ribbon of Saint George over his German uniform. These figures are considered patriots by many Russians because they were determined to keep Ukraine as part of a restored Russian empire. In Rostov, Russia, there is a monument to Krasnov, and in Nanuet, New York, to Vlasov. This last site also has a monument to the Russian Corps, which at its height included over 17,000 men. Western commentators never express an interest in these “Nazis” or ask why so many Russians were prepared to fight against their own regime. Investigating the issue would entail discussing the crimes of the Soviet state and its record of mass murder. The only allowable talking point is that some Ukrainians served the Germans.

Today the entire Ukrainian people, whatever their racial, religious or ethnic origins, is heroically resisting a massive invasion and wave of brutal destruction. It should be obvious to reasonable observers that the justification for these acts is a pretence. After all, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish; his family was killed during the Holocaust. Nearly 5 million Ukrainians fought against Hitler. They hoped that after the war the repressive Soviet system would be reformed. Hundreds of thousands, who had seen the West, were immediately shipped to Siberia, because Stalin could not believe that someone who had seen the West could be unaffected by anti-Soviet sentiments.

For similar reasons Putin needs to block access to Ukrainian reality. The anti-NATO charge is another red herring, a smokescreen for his own imperial ambitions. The anti-Ukrainian hate speech is a cover for his own brutal plans. He needs to create the image of an irredeemable enemy to distract from the suffering he is imposing on millions.

Myroslav Shkandrij is a professor at the University of Manitoba. He specializes in modern Ukrainian literature and cultural history. His books include Ukrainian Nationalism: Ideology, Politics, and Literature (2015) and Jews in Ukrainian Literature (2009).

Correction: This article initially undercounted the number of Ukrainians who joined the Red Army to fight the Nazis.