Drawing on Ukrainian Republican Roots
By Vladyslav Starodubtsev
July 11, 2025
Introduction:
(Liberal Currents) Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the question of Ukrainian identity has taken on sharper importance, both in Ukraine and outside it. This is true for Ukrainians making enormous sacrifices for the sake of a sovereign state, of course, as the question is really one of what exactly they are fighting to preserve or to build. However, as Ukrainians have called on its neighbors and the international community to support its struggle, often using the language of freedom and democracy, they have run into a variety of counter-narratives that suggest that, in this case, there is no ‘nationhood’ worth defending, at least not at any appreciable cost. These narratives come in several varieties, but the most common refrain is that either Ukrainian nationhood is somehow artificial, existing only since the 1990s or, in an even more extreme telling, 2014, or that Ukrainian nationalism is somehow a fundamentally right-wing phenomenon.
The former rests on an understanding of Ukraine, as well as Belarus and perhaps other Slavic speaking states, as part of a larger ‘Russian world’ whose internal distinctions are artificial. The latter points especially to Ukrainian nationalists’ resistance to the USSR, and the modern state’s anticommunism (typical of former Eastern Bloc states), as indicative of a nation or people so steeped in right wing ideology that they must be forcibly deprogrammed; in this way Russia attempts to whitewash its invasion as ‘antifascism’, and independence for Ukraine as somehow spelling victory for ‘fascists’. While much of this rhetoric originates in Russia, it has found purchase among many western politicians and decision makers.
However, both narratives are dramatically at odds with the facts. Ukrainian nationalism can be traced back to the heyday of other European nationalist movements, and it is hardly an ‘invented’ tradition of the post-war era. Perhaps more importantly, the intellectual history of Ukrainian identity reveals a deep rooted tradition of republicanism and egalitarianism. These values were especially associated with Ukrainian nationhood due to its unique material circumstances under the rule of primarily foreign monarchs and aristocrats, and they continue to hold lessons for the Ukrainian people, and their supporters, today.
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Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill
