Dmytro Dontsov

Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov (Ukrainian: Дмитро Іванович Донцов; 29 August [O.S. 17 August] 1883 – 30 March 1973) was a Ukrainian nationalist writer, publisher, journalist and political thinker whose radical ideas, known as integral nationalism, were a major influence on the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, especially the Banderite generation.^[1][2][3]

Dontsov was born in Melitopol, located in the Taurida Governorate — considered part of Novorossiya by the imperial authorities at the time and now within Zaporizhzhia Oblast. He was born to a Ukrainian mother, Efrosinia Iosifovna Dontsova, and a Russian father, Ivan Dmitrievich Dontsov, who was a successful merchant elected to the city duma in 1873 and appointed mayor in 1894, although he died of an apparent heart attack on the eve of his inauguration when Dontsov was eleven.^[4] His mother (descended from Italian and German colonists) died the following year from an illness, leaving Dontsov to be largely raised by his German step-grandfather. Dontsov and his younger sisters adopted a Ukrainian identity while his two brothers, Vladimir and Sergei, maintained Russian identities, joining the Bolshevik underground (though he would later be arrested on false charges regarding his association with Dontsov in 1938 and executed) and the Russian imperial bureaucracy respectively.^[4]

In 1900 Dontsov moved to Saint Petersburg to study law and in 1905 joined the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDRP) where he met and befriended Symon Petliura, editor of the magazine Slovo where his first articles were published.^[5][4][6] Dontsov participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 in the course of which he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Kyiv. Following his release, he continued to contribute news and editorials to the socialist Slovo and the Russian-language liberal Ukrainskaia zhizn (both edited by Petliura) though he was arrested again in the wake of the 1907 Stolypin Coup that saw the intensification of Russification efforts and repressions of critics of the state, this time being imprisoned for eight months in Kyiv before escaping abroad to Lviv, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in April 1908.^[4][6]

Recovering from a chronic illness contracted during his imprisonment, Dontsov moved to a resort town in the Tatra Mountains where he became acquainted with the leading theorist of Ukrainian conservativism Vyacheslav Lypynsky, a pro-independence monarchist.^[4][6] At this time, Dontsov advocated a federalist position that envisioned an autonomous Ukraine part of a social democratic Russia and believed in the possibility of coordination between the USDRP and its Russian counterpart. On the movement to establish a Ukrainian university in Lviv, Dontsov wrote in 1911:

"Moreover, the history of the struggle for a Ukrainian university proves for the hundredth time that in politics it is the argument of force, not the force of argument, that matters."^[4][a]

Dontsov settled in Lviv in 1912 where, in May of that year, he married Mariia Bachynska (meeting in 1909 as students in Vienna and hereon Bachynska-Dontsova), a pro-Ukrainian activist, feminist, and public intellectual from a wealthy family who would go on to head the Ukrainian Women's Union from 1926-1927 before being ousted due to her association with Dontsov amid his later political works.^[4]

Disillusioned with the utopian promises of Marxism, Dontsov developed a Russophobic worldview rooted in Realpolitik concerns that advocated for Ukraine's alignment with Mitteleuropa as an Austro-Hungarian protectorate in the inevitable clash between the 'progressive' West and 'reactionary' East.^[4] He presented this political programmme, with complete separatism from Russia at its centre, to the IInd All-Ukrainian Students' Congress in July 1913, attaining notoriety for what at the time was a deeply controversial and exceptionally radical position that saw him ostracised from the USDRP whom he castigated for placing their trust in Russian liberalism's commitment to self-determination which he characterised as subterfuge.^[4]

At the outset of the First World War in 1914, Dontsov briefly headed the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine before leaving to work as editor for the official publication of the League of Russian Foreign Peoples (LFR) [de], publishing pro-Ukrainian independence propaganda in German, French, and English and which, likely unbeknownst to Dontsov, was covertly funded by the German Foreign Office.^[4][6] Dontsov's work initially circulated widely in diplomatic circles concerned with the 'Ukrainian question' though this would practically amount to little. Dontsov relocated with the LFR to Lausanne, Switzerland in mid-1916 where he was one of the signatories of an appeal to President Woodrow Wilson on the grounds of self-determination.^[4]

Opposed to the initially pacifist and pro-dialogue Ukrainophile movement (Petliura and Yevhen Konovalets among them) that would found the Ukrainian People's Republic in March 1917 following the February Revolution, and thus starting the Ukrainian War of Independence, Dontsov joined the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party (UDKhP) founded by Lypynsky and quickly rose through its ranks.^[4] Dontsov returned to Kyiv in March 1918 by which time the Bread Peace had seen the Central Powers recognise the UPR and the German Empire militarily occupy Ukraine in return for deliveries of grain to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the Central Rada's socialist agrarian reforms intefered with these deliveries and lowered productivity, leading the German military authorities to conspire with the UDKhP to effect a coup d'état in April that installed the Ukrainian State under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi.^[4]

In May, Dontsov joined Skoropadskyi's government as director of the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency (UTA) and press bureau, overseeing the production and dissemination of news and pro-Hetmanate propaganda.^[6] From the summer of 1918 onwards, Dontsov led the Hetmanate's Ukrainisation efforts aimed at drumming up support for the government and Skoropadskyi regularly consulted Dontsov on matters of Russification and the regime's relationship with the Germans, Bolsheviks, Russians, and peasants, directing him to set up Selianske slovo (Village Word) in an effort to appeal to the latter group.^[4] Dontsov advocated for Crimea as an "integral part of Ukraine" and was outraged at the proposed federal union in November between the Hetmanate and White Russia, resigning from the UTA and going into hiding following the appearance of an order for his arrest as the Anti-Hetman Uprising broke out.^[4][6] Despite his friendship with Petliura, Dontsov loathed the new socialist regime and, returning to the UTA, advised the Directorate to grant Petliura emergency dictatorial powers.^[4] On receiving news that the White Volunteers had placed a bounty on his head, Dontsov departed to Paris in early January 1919 as part of the UPR's diplomatic mission to the Versailles peace talks for ten days before meeting Lypynsky in Vienna in order to coordinate their propaganda efforts from the latter's Ukrainian Bureau but they disagreed on the way forward ideologically and geopolitically with Dontsov opposed to what he saw as the Hetmanite movement's pro-Russian tendencies and Lypynsky opposed to an alignment with a resurgent Poland.^[4][6] In February, following the fall of Kyiv, Dontsov left for Bern to once again head the UPR's now-exiled press bureau while Bachynska-Dontsova served as ambassador to Denmark in Copenhagen, with efforts later focused on securing the UPR's place at the Treaty of Riga negotiations that concluded in 1921 with the partition of Ukrainian lands primarily between Poland and the Bolsheviks.^[4]

Having advocated that Ukraine become a part of Józef Piłsudski's Intermarium project, portraying it as a cordon sanitaire against the Bolsheviks who he regarded as an insidious reincarnation of Russian imperialism, Dontsov was granted permanent settlement in Lviv, personally approved by Piłsudski.^[4] In 1921, Dontsov published his first book, Pidstavy nashoї polityky (The Foundations of Our Politics), in which he presented a political ideology he termed 'active nationalism' and which largely resembled integral nationalism in a Ukrainian context, arguing for the subordination of individual, class, and humanitarian interests to the biological survival of the nation.^[4] Dontsov extolled Bolshevism and Italian Fascism as models of a ruthless 'intitiative minority' on which to base the Ukrainian nationalist movement and blamed Ukrainophilism and Ukrainian conservatism for the failure of the revolution.^[4] He advocated for a social Darwinian, agrarian, and authoritarian democracy grounded in self-discipline and self-action as a long-term ideal. Though critical of the more outlandish conspiracy theories associated with it and stressing that Bolshevism was principally a Russian phenomenon, Dontsov gave credence to the Judeo-Bolshevism myth.^[4]

Dontsov became closely connected to the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) though avoided Polonophobic rhetoric and even motioned for an alliance with Poland at the UVO's founding congress in August 1920 which was blocked by Konovalets.^[4] At Konovalets's insistence, Dontsov became chief editor of the Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (Literary-Scientific Herald, hereon LNV) in 1922, reshaping it from an impartial non-partisan forum into a vehicle for his integral nationalistic political agenda and a Ukrainian nationalist cultural renaissance to which end he published poets in service of creating a nationalist mythology, among them Olena Teliha and Oleh Olzhych.^[4][6] The LNV became successful among the new generation of Ukrainian nationalists with Konovalets describing Dontsov as the "spiritual dictator of Galician youth"— Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, as members of a Ukrainian nationalist youth organisation several years later, organised public readings of the LNV in Lviv.^[4] An embarrassing affair in 1923 saw Dontsov for several months publish anti-Petliura and anti-Polish materials in Zahrava, another publication he edited, purportedly written by Yuriy Tyutyunnyk but who was actually under the coercion of the Ukrainian branch of the GPU.^[4] Dontsov himself had written several criticisms of the Polish establishment and maintained close connections with the nationalist underground for which the affair was used as a pretext to threaten him with deportation to the Ukrainian SSR, leading him to agree to adhere to a pro-Polish agenda.^[4]

In 1926, Dontsov published the book Natsionalizm (Nationalism), his most successful work designed to incite a fanatical devotion to the Ukrainian integral nationalist programme that cemented his position as an idol of the Ukrainian nationalist youth in Galicia and across Europe.^[4] Having already diverged and clashed on matters of will regarding conscious striving against irrational feeling and strategy regarding top-down landed gentry against bottom-up peasantry, Lypynksy accused Dontsov of bastardising and plagiarising his ideas whereafter the two leading nationalist theorists would continue to trade polemics.^[4] Dontsov's refusal to cooperate with the UVO and later the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (founded in 1929 and hereon the OUN) in spite of the degree to which his works inspired its members fostered mutual suspicion whereby the exiled executive leadership sought to regain control over the outbreak of unsanctioned political violence in Galicia, leading to polemics between Dontsov and Volodomyr Martynets, editor of the OUN publication Rozbudova natsiï, during the summer of 1930.^[4] In response to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's outspoken criticism of the effect his politics and the OUN were having on Galician youth in the early 1930s, Dontsov adopted anti-clerical positions.^[4]

A dwindling readership and a crisis in contributing authors who clashed with Dontsov's authoritarian editorship led to the demise of the LNV in 1932, later restarted under the name Vistnyk (Herald) in 1933 with the financial support of the UVO and Bachynska-Dontsova.^[4][6] With Adolf Hitler's rise to power that year, Dontsov enthusiastically supported the new Chancellor and advocated for an alignment with Nazi Germany whereby Ukraine would assume a place in the propagandised fascist New Europe.^[4] Having long espoused antisemitic views largely inflamed by the 1927 Schwartzbard trial, Kurylo & Khymka note that in the early 1930s, "anti-Jewish themes began to appear in almost all his articles", with Dontsov in the late 1930s openly subscribing to and promoting the world Jewish conspiracy and "propagating Hitlerite methods of "resolving the Jewish question"" by which time they considered him to have formulated 'a Ukrainian version of fascism'.^{[7][8][9]:264}

Due to his pro-Nazi views, Dontsov was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Bereza Kartuska Prison at the outset of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, before being released by the Nazi authorities whereafter Dontsov and Bachynska-Dontsova divorced.^[4] Dontsov moved to Bucharest where he lived with and was financially supported (for the remainder of his life) by Ukrainian biologist Yurii Rusov and his wife, Nataliia Gerken-Rusova, an artist and playwright who had been a key contributor to Vistnyk prior to its dissolution at the outbreak of the Second World War.^[4] Dontsov worked with the couple to publish Batava which ran until November 1941 and where Dontsov, influenced by Rusov, began promoting scientific racism, dividing the Ukrainian population into stratified racial castes: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, and Oriental.^[4] Due to Rusov's position as editor, Dontsov also contributed to the Hetmanite publication Ukraïnskyi robitnyk (Ukrainian Worker).^[4]

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Dontsov moved to Nazi-occupied Prague in late 1941 where he contributed to the Reinhard Heydrich Institute [de], founded in July 1942 after Heydrich's assassination two months earlier.^[4] Dontsov continued espousing pro-Nazi views despite the violent crackdown on OUN members in Ukraine and opposed the OUN-B's presentation of a liberal democratic façade in 1943 in private correspondence with the organisation's leadership.^[4]

With the advance of the Red Army, Dontsov left Prague for the American occupation zone in early 1945 from where he travelled to Paris and then to London in 1946, before moving to New York in 1948.^[4] In 1949, he crossed the border into Canada on a tourist visa and, despite a public investigation into his wartime activities, was permitted to settle in Montreal where he taught Ukrainian literature at the French-language Université de Montréal.^[4][6]

Dontsov attempted to promote his Russophobic anti-communist views in speaking tours but found himself a pariah in much of the Ukrainian diaspora in large part because of the pro-Nazi and fascist views he espoused before and during the war but he was also perceived as a faithless, hypocritical coward by many nationalists due to his alignment with the Nazis and his reaction to the deaths of Teliha, Olzhych, and other nationalists by their hand who had followed his teachings.^[4] In later years he became a devotee of theosophy, repackaging his worldview pertaining to the Soviet Union for a Christian fundamentalist audience during the Cold War and excised pro-Nazi and antisemitic elements from his republished works.^[10][4]

Dontsov died on 30 March, 1973 in Montreal, aged 89, and is buried the Ukrainian Orthodox Cemetery in Bound Brook, New Jersey.^{[4][6] [11]} His funeral was attended, among others, by former members of the UPA and representatives from Ukrainian diaspora organisations, including the World Congress of Free Ukrainians, the Organisation for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.^[4]

Historian Trevor Erlacher characterises Dontsov's personality and the all-encompassing taxonomy of his fluid body of work as iconoclastic authoritarianism, asserting that he "reserved the right to modify his ideological [programme] whenever and however he saw fit" and "moved chameleon-like between political, cultural, and philosophical trends".^[4]:20 Erlacher characterised Dontsov's seminal 1926 work Natsionalizm as being "a collection of impressions and expressions designed to have an emotional effect and undermine the reader's trust in reason", going on to write that "[p]atent falsehoods, such as Dontsov's misrepresentation of the Ukrainian anarchist Drahomanov as a "convinced Russian statist," either evade detection and are accepted prima facie, or anger the reader and turn them immediately against the book".^[4]:246

Dontsov was critical of ideas about pan-slavism, which had gained some popularity. Believing instead in a hierarchy of "master nations" and "plebian nations",^[3]: 403 Dontsov disdained pluralistic Western democracy, and recommended the ethno-nationalist model of fascist dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler.^[12] His theories came to be considered integral nationalistic but authentically Ukrainian.

In a style of analysis more typical of the Russian intelligentsia, Dontsov exhibited a doctrinaire turn of mind with simplified, reductionist formulas, and radical ideological solutions, which, alongside his mixed heritage, became a longstanding crutch for his critics who accused him of 'importing Russian culture'.^[10][4] His writings lambasted the failures of Ukrainians to achieve independence in 1917–1921, ridiculed Ukrainian figures from that era, and proposed a new "nationalism of the deed" and a united "national will" in which violence was a necessary instrument to overthrow the old order. In his writings, Dontsov called for the birth of a "new man" with "hot faith and stone heart" (гарячої віри й кам'яного серця) who would not be afraid to mercilessly destroy Ukraine's enemies. He believed in the sacredness of national culture and that it should be protected by any means necessary. His fiery exhortations had a profound influence on many of Ukraine's youth who experienced the oppression of their nation and who were disillusioned with democracy. Although he did not become a member of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, his writings served as an inspiration for OUN members^[3]: 400 and many Ukrainians not only in Galicia but in Volyn as well, where OUN influence had been negligible before 1941 and the local Ukrainian movement had been led by the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and where his writings were sold even more than in Galicia.

According to Eastern Europe historian Timothy Snyder, Ukraine rejected Dontsov's theory that it should be exclusively for and about people who spoke Ukrainian and shared Ukrainian culture. His brand of ethnic nationalism lost out in favor of the pluralistic form championed by Vyacheslav Lypynsky and Ivan L. Rudnytsky.^[13]

From 2016 up until 2022, a street in Melitopol was named Dmitry Dontsov, in his honor.^[14]

A memorial plaque was unveiled on January 24, 2019 on the side of the Ukrinform headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine.^[15][16]

• A romantic in the era of pragmatism (in English)
• Longing for the heroic - Dmytro Dontsov: a person of European spirit and Ukrainian mindset article by Dmytro Drozdovskyi (in English)
• Encyclopedia of Ukraine (in English)
• Dmytro Dontsov's life and examples of his work (in Ukrainian)
• Dmytro Dontsov: Die ukrainische Staatsidee und der Krieg gegen Russland., Berlin, 1915. (in German)
• Dontsov's view of Leninism (in Ukrainian)
• Belarusian translation of Dontsov's "Nationalism" (in Belarusian)
• Archives of Dmytro Dontsov (Dmytro Dontsov fonds, R6132) are held at Library and Archives Canada (in English)
• Rudnytsky, Ivan L. (1987). "Volodymyr Vynnychenko's Ideas in the Light of His Political Writings". Essays in Modern Ukrainian History. Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta. ISBN 0-920862-47-0. Retrieved 21 November 2021.
• Snyder, Timothy (8 September 2022). The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 2: The Genesis of Nations (lecture video). Yalecourses (Yale university). Event occurs at 37:39 – via YouTube.