‘Zavtra’ Resuscitates Notorious Anti-Semite V.V. Shulgin’s Hostile Views on Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 29 – Vladimir Vladimirovich Shulgin (1878-1976) is known today to most people either as one of the Russian nationalist Duma deputies who accepted the abdication of Nicholas II, the organizer of the intelligence service of the anti-Bolshevik White Russian movement, or as a gifted memoirist of the late imperial and émigré periods.

            But to those who have examined his career more carefully, Shulgin is notorious not only as an anti-Semite – his book What We Don’t Like about Them is a frequently cited text by the Russian extreme right – and as an enemy of everything Ukrainian who long before Putin saw the Ukrainian nation as something invented rather than real.

            His position was well known before and during the revolution and civil war. Before 1914, he edited the Kievlyanin, a Russian nationalist newspaper in Kyiv, that proclaimed from its first issue that the lands around Kyiv are “Russian, Russian, Russian” and who published a pamphlet in 1939 entitled The Ukrainizers and We.  

            Now, because Shulgin’s views on Ukrainians and perhaps other matters are so close to those of Vladimir Putin and his propagandists, Shulgin is enjoying a certain renaissance in Russia, with the right-wing nationalist newspaper publishing large segments of his works (zavtra.ru/blogs/v_v_shul_gin_ob_ukrainskom_voprose).

            Not everyone who is anti-Ukrainian is anti-Semitic but the two ideologies are not as far apart as many may think, and the appearance of Shulgin’s works in Moscow now raises the question as to whether some in the Russian capital may be ready to move from one kind of obscene xenophobia to another.

            What makes that seem possible is that the Zavtra article is hardly the only one that has appeared since Putin began his expanded war in Ukraine. Among the others, some of which are little short of being hagiographies, are vladtv.ru/society/133036/, spbvedomosti.ru/news/nasledie/deputatskaya-duel-kak-strelyalis-dva-parlamentariya/ and secretmag.ru/stories/ochered-dlinoi-v-xx-vek-istoriya-sovetskogo-deficita-ot-lenina-do-gorbachyova.htm.