And then you read the article...
Muddle muddle muddle muddle
In 2008, Ukraine aired a television polling program called The Greatest Ukrainians and the winner of the poll turned out to be Yaroslav the Wise.
However, it was later revealed that the result had been manupulated as the actual winner was Stepan Bandera:
The Chief of Great Ukrainians project, journalist Vakhtang Kipiani, informed the public in his blog, that the voting system had been manipulated by unknown persons. He stated that a couple of days prior to publishing the results he was aware of a possible win for Yaroslav the Wise. Prior to that, with a huge lead in first place was the controversial Stepan Bandera. For example, the winner, Yaroslav I, received 60,000 votes in one month and almost 550,000 in just one day. Mykola Amosov, who took second place, received almost 150,000 votes in just one day. Kipiani said that if these manipulation hadn't taken place Yaroslav would not have won.
Very interestingly, also in the same year, Russia aired a similar television program called The Name of Russia and the winner was Alexander Nevsky.
It was also exposed that the polling result was rigged as the actual winner was Joseph Stalin:
In his book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, author Peter Pomerantsev (working as a consultant for the Russian television industry at the time) claims the actual winner of the contest was Joseph Stalin, rather than Alexander Nevsky, and that the "embarrassed" producers had to rig the vote in favor of Nevsky.
Absolutely amazing. Bandera and Stalin occupied the hearts of the Ukrainian and Russian people and continued to fight it out in the 21st century, and the respective governments had to bury their popularity and prop up medieval historical figures to keep things calm.
Also calling Yaroslav the Wise "Ukrainian" is about as accurate as calling Vercingetorix "French"
I really think a lot of Bandera's popularity was drummed up deliberately by Ukrainian nationalists in the last years of the Ukrainian SSR and after the fall.
The article title makes it sound like this is a good thing, but around a third of your country's population having a positive attitude towards a genocidal fascist isn't good.
89% of Americans have a favorable view of George Washington, an aristocrat who owned and abused over 100 slaves and ordered mass murder of indigenous people. No hope for these people
Someone was going on about Ukraine having the right to self determination and i'm just like "which ukraine, the nazis in Galacia or everyone else? Which one gets to decide?" And they just start dissembling, because all it's really about is russia bad, and russian speaking ukrainians are just secret russian orcs or some shit, slobber ukraini, we have to let the 50% of ukraine that's nazis wipe out the 50% that isn't because national right to self determination or some bullshit.
Another friend "a lot of the Ukrianians i know hated the Ukrainian ssr and the cccp"
"Aren't you Canadian?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
Same energy as when lib Eastern European younger millennials and zoomers talk about living through the horrors of communism lmao
"Bu-but the Russians overthrew the legitimate Ukrainian People's Republic and imposed the SSR on them!" is another one I've heard. As if the UPR under Petliura (the second incarnation of it after the Krauts destroyed the first one which was ironically established by the Bolsheviks, I mean) didn't shoot itself in the foot by reversing course to the right, giving Ukrainian Bolsheviks the legitimacy to overthrow the Central Rada with support from the Russians.
"why did the Ukrainian SSR commit genocide against itself?" should be the armor-piercing question that starts a crack in the Holodomor narrative, and yet.
The idea that all Communists were a handful of somehow super-competent mind-controlling Russians and one Georgian everyone thinks was Russian is so frustratingly impenetrable.
It was called the All-Union Communist Party for a reason. Part of what made the Bolsheviks able to unite a bunch of territories amidst a civil war against dozens of adversaries is because their party ran the breadth of the old empire across different ethnicities whose cadres wanted it dismantled . The idea that the Russians alone were able to subjugate Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Baltics and so on entirely against their will, after a disastrous series of wars and catastrophes which severed the colonial apparatus of the old Empire no less (first beginning with the February Revolution), is deeply insulting to the agency of those nationalities. Not at all surprisingly given how local nationalists have done their best to spread this narrative to decouple and "purify" their countries from participation in the Soviet project while Westerners cynically propagate it in a cynical appeal to national liberation.
Now this is not to say the Soviet Union didn't have cultural/structural holdovers of the old empire and would go on to foster Russian Chauvinism later on which came to a head in 1991, but there's a world of difference between looking at that more critically and thinking there's an unbroken line from the Russian Empire to the USSR to the current Federation.
ackchually 21% of them are undecided abt the genocidal freak who sold out their country to the nazis. thats why we should 100% uncritically support sending WMDs to ukraine
Many of those Ukrainians have probably left the country, as what happens so often in Eastern Europe.
Only the reactionaries are left, mostly.
But have you considered Soviet Union bad, for reasons I have completely made up.
A little personal anecdote to add to the conversation, I recently learned from youtube and wikipedia that Stalin banned klezmer music and making matzo. No citation needed because it's obviously true that the political leader that made the biggest commitment to ending the holocaust and punishing its perpetrators also wanted to eliminate Jewish culture.
31% have a positive attititude
In Donbass, ... 3%
wonder how much that 31% spikes up when you remove all the "Ukrainian" regions polled with great Russian populations who didn't even want to be part of Ukraine; Donbass, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, etc., maybe even Crimea if it wasn't captured before this study; large portions of the population with likely overwhelmingly majority results against Bandera skewing the average down
if 67% favor him in western Ukraine I'd imagine over 50% in central Ukraine too
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/7138
archive https://web.archive.org/web/20230111011424/https://www.kyivpost.com/post/7138
