Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 10 – Igor Strelkov,
the former defense minister of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk Peoples Republic”
and the ideological hero of many Russian nationalists, has called for the
formation of an alliance between the left and the right to oppose a Maidan-style
revolution to overthrow Vladimir Putin and promote democracy in the Russian
Federation.
His appeal puts him in a position
which recalls that of Ernst Rohm, the pro-socialist part of Hitler’s National
Socialism, who won enormous support for the Nazis as the SA street fighter but
whose anti-capitalist attitudes posed a threat to Hitler’s base that he had to
be killed along with his supporters in what became known as the “Night of the Long
Knives” in 1934.
But more immediately, Strelkov’s
words (ukraina.ru/news/20140908/1010412111.html)
call attention to something many in Russia and the West prefer to downplay or
even forget: the Nazis were National Socialists, a term Moscow propagandists
never use lest they call attention to the leftist as well as rightist
dimensions of Hitler’s movement.
One
of the earliest members of the National Socialist German Workers Party, to give
Hitler’s organization its full name, Rohm organized the SA in the 1920s, a
group of street fighters who often intervened in support of workers who had
gone on strike even as it attacked communists and Jews.
Hitler
and other Nazis welcomed the support that Rohm’s SA brought them, but the
fuhrer and others were uncomfortable not only with the homosexuality of Rohm
and his top associates but also with the indiscipline of the SA and its stress
on the socialist part of the Nazi agenda.
By
1930, when the SA had grown to more than a million members, Hitler took direct
command of that organization in order to control the organization’s activities,
but Rohm remained his chief of staff and continued to push for ideas that
Hitler found increasingly problematic.
Rohm
and his followers rejected capitalism and called for nationalization of the
largest corporations, workers’ control of enterprises, and the dividing up of land
held by the old German nobility. They
talked about “a second revolution” against the conservatives, second because it
was to follow Hitler’s “first revolution” against the communists.
Hitler’s
supporters in the business community were horrified by Rohm’s views, and Hitler
moved to reassure them that his revolution would not grow into a second
Rohm-style one. But his doing so further
antagonized many in the SA and led to their radicalization. Given the SA’s size
by 1934 – three million men – this radicalization constituted a danger to
Hitler.
The
German leader moved to rein in the SA but at least at first in a relatively
cautious way given that Rohm and his ideas had a great deal of support among
rank-and-file Nazis. In response, Rohm
armed an increasing number of his units, something that his enemies within the
Nazi party presented to Hitler as evidence of Rohm’s plan for a coup.
Then
on June 30, 1934, Hitler launched the “Night of the Long Knives.” He had Rohm
and the entire leadership of the SA arrested and purged. Many were killed, and
Rohm himself, after being offered the chance to commit suicide, was murdered in
his prison cell.
Strelkov’s
past statements and actions in the Donbass suggest that he places at least as
much stress on socialist themes as on nationalist ones, something many commentators
have pointed out. (For only the most recent, see Viktor Yadukha’s “Will there
be socialism in ‘Novorossiya?’” this week at rosbalt.ru/ukraina/2014/09/08/1312858.html).
Like Rohm, Strelkov brings Putin
support from part of the population that might otherwise be alienated from the
Kremlin leader’s crony capitalism. But also like Rohm, Strelkov and those he
may be able to count on represent a real threat to Putin and Putinism and thus
may have to be disposed of one way or another.
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