Dmytro Dontsov

How a Marxist from a russian-speaking family became a nationalist ideologue

Dmytro Dontsov was born on 29 August 1883 in Melitopol, into a well-off russian-speaking family. His brothers stayed within russian culture, and one became a communist. Dontsov, too, began as a Marxist: as a law student in St Petersburg he joined the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party and later the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. It was there, in Ukrainian student circles, that he came to see himself as Ukrainian. At that time he even spoke out against the nationalism of Mykola Mikhnovskyi, arguing that it went against “the interests of the Ukrainian proletariat”. He was arrested for his party work, and in 1908 he fled Kyiv for Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary.

Against the “Little Russians”

At a student congress in Lviv in 1913, Dontsov attacked the “Little Russian” outlook of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and called for political separation from russia. Socialists criticized the speech, and so did Lenin. Soon afterwards Dontsov broke with the social democrats, and in 1914 he became the first head of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, but left it within a month. In Kyiv in 1918 he ran the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency and the state press bureau of the Ukrainian State, but he left when the Hetman’s government proclaimed a federation with russia.

The editor in Lviv

From 1922 Dontsov lived in Lviv. In the early 1920s he gave up socialism and Marxism and became the ideologue of an anti-democratic integral nationalism, in which the nation came before everything else. His book Nationalism came out in 1926. As editor of Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk and then of Vistnyk, a journal revived by Yevhen Konovalets, Dontsov became one of the most influential writers in Galicia. Olena Teliha published in his journal, and he later wrote a book about her. His ideas captivated young people in the 1930s; one student circle that discussed them was run by Stepan Bandera. He was called the OUN’s “spiritual father”, yet he never joined it.

War and emigration

In 1939 the Polish authorities arrested Dontsov and sent him to the Bereza Kartuska camp. After the Soviet occupation of Galicia he made his way through Gdańsk and Berlin to Bucharest, and from 1941 he lived in Berlin and Prague, writing for the German press. In 1945 Dontsov fled to the American zone of occupation, then lived in France, Britain and the United States. In 1947 he settled in Montreal, Canada, where he taught Ukrainian literature at the University of Montreal. After 1939 he never lived in Ukraine again. Dmytro Dontsov died in Montreal on 30 March 1973.

Debates and assessments

Dontsov is one of the most contested figures in 20th-century Ukrainian thought: he was both praised and vilified more than any of his contemporaries. Critics point to the anti-democratic, elitist ethics of his ideas, to the view that the end justifies the means and the nation stands “beyond good and evil”, to the admiring books about Mussolini and Hitler published in his book series, the xenophobia and antisemitism of his writing in the 1930s and 1940s, and his sympathy for fascism and Nazism. One historian writes that in Nazi-occupied Prague Dontsov worked with the German authorities, that after 1933 his ideology was no different from fascism, and that the term “integral nationalism” merely softens the likeness. Other scholars stress that he helped undermine Russophile and communist influence in 1920s Galicia, and that his nationalism grew up as the movement of a stateless nation, typical of its time. Others again recall that Soviet and russian propaganda spent decades equating all Ukrainian nationalism with fascism. He was criticized by nationalists too, among other things for splitting the movement and imitating fascist models. How to judge Dontsov remains a matter of debate.

Why it matters today

Dontsov insisted that Ukraine must be a state separate from russia, not a part of it or a federal province. His writing shaped a whole generation of Ukrainians who fought for independence, and the history of the OUN can’t be understood without him. His path from a Marxist in a russian-speaking family to a Ukrainian ideologue shows that being Ukrainian can be a choice. At the same time, he teaches us to read ideas carefully: to tell the striving for independence apart from the totalitarian models he supported.