Young Communist leader resilient amid brutal repression in Ukraine

By Tyson Strandlund, YCLer from Victoria

On March 7, it was reported that Mikhail Kononovich, the General Secretary of the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine (or Komsomol), was arrested by the Ukrainian regime along with his brother Alexander, accused of acting as Russian and Belarusian spies. At the time of writing, their whereabouts remain unknown. In the summer of 2017, while studying at Ukraine’s Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, I took the opportunity to meet with comrade Mikhail at the Komsomol’s office. I took notes of our interview, which, until now, have never been published. The interview was conducted primarily in Russian with occasional help from a translation app.

Before I begin, let me preface by stating that I have visited Ukraine on numerous occasions both before and since 2014, and I have witnessed first-hand the horrific transformation of a country in freefall toward fascism. While many countries in Europe have large far-right and neo-Nazi movements, none have been institutionalized as is the case in Ukraine. In no other country can you see swastikas and fascist symbols displayed so openly – not only displayed, but even sold as merchandise to tourists, such as Azov battalion t-shirts and bracelets, and Nazi medals and antiques sold by street vendors. When I visited in 2017 and 2019, the red and black flags of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) could be seen as frequently and prominently as the blue and yellow on the streets of Kyiv and Lviv. Not only statues of Lenin had been removed, but so too statues of the Ukrainian generals and anti-fascist leaders who had fought and died to liberate Ukraine from Nazi occupation during WWII, known in the former Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War. During my time as a student there, I witnessed a demonstration by elderly veterans of this war against the removal of one of the last such statues, a demonstration that was met by violence carried out by masked thugs in a display so shameful it would be difficult to believe had I not seen it with my own eyes. Some of these statues have been replaced, like the streets which have been renamed, in bitter irony, after Banderite Nazi collaborators and perpetrators of genocide. During the 1940s the OUN had carried out mass murder against Jews, Poles, Romani, Russians, and even ethnic Ukrainian anti-fascists and communists. In what was once the Great Patriotic War Museum, the Banderites now received a sympathetic portrayal.

My mother’s family is of Ukrainian descent, and growing up with a strong sense of this Ukrainian identity and culture had played a large part in my decision to study Eastern European history and Slavic studies, and ultimately to visit the old country and attend university there. The Ukraine I witnessed, however, was one which had been so mutilated by nationalistic fervour that at times I could not even sit through my classes at the university, where professors were paid in American dollars to explain that “Hitler was a very smart man. The swastika, you see, was in fact a Ukrainian symbol!” Frequently courses on culture and history would descend into racial pseudoscience teaching that Ukrainians were an Aryan people, while Russians had been tainted by the Mongol yoke of the 13th to 15th centuries, which had imbued them with Asiatic despotism from which they never recovered. It was in their blood, and they could understand nothing but violence.

There were other Canadian students present during these classes who had come from the University of Manitoba – insufferable Cossack cosplayers who openly praised Bandera as a Ukrainian hero. It is troubling to think that these same students would return to Canada to receive degrees in history and Slavic studies, and one day perhaps become professors or leaders of Ukrainian-Canadian organizations.  

This is the context in which I had gone to speak with Mikhail Kononovich, who warned me over the phone to be extremely cautious as I entered and left the office, making sure I wasn’t followed. By chance, it was Mikhail’s birthday, though that did not prevent him from putting in a full day’s work. As I entered his office I was greeted with vodka, cookies, and typical Slavic hospitality. Although I stayed and chatted for over two hours, there were a number of things that stood out to me. After several minutes of small talk and birthday drinks, Mikhail grew more serious as he began to explain the conditions to which he and other communists had been subjected in Ukraine since the Maidan coup in 2014, which had seen fascists, neo-Nazis, and Banderites rise to proiminence both in formal government positions and in terms of their impunity on the streets. Not long after the coup, the office had been raided by these same fascists armed with machine guns while police waited outside. Mikhail pointed to a short thin hole gouged into his desk and looked me in the eye. He then placed his hand over this mark revealing a matching scar in his hand where a knife had gone through and pinned him to the desk while he was beaten. He then showed me his missing teeth which had been knocked out before he was dragged unconscious from the building to an unpopulated area in the forest. Here he was beaten continuously and threatened with death, but miraculously was left with enough life to drag himself to relative safety after his assailants had gone. 

He and his brother had since been subject to numerous other attacks, however, along with countless other Ukrainian communists, some captured on videos that he showed me. He had many other scars that indicated the violence he had faced as well, requiring countless stitches, and had even been tortured through electric shocks – an image that brought to mind the victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Even his five year-old daughter was not safe, Mikhail explaining that the fascists had brazenly gone to her school, and that no one made any attempt to stop them from attempting to question and intimidate her in front of her classmates and teachers. 

The Ukrainian government, meanwhile, had prevented him from leaving the country for any purpose, and had even attempted to bribe him to betray his comrades and spread lies about communists in Ukraine. Of course, Mikhail had not survived such brutal attacks just to be bought by increasingly worthless Ukrainian hryvnia. He explained to me that through violence, repression, and terror, the number of Ukrainian communists had plummeted to a third of what it had been before the coup, with the Communist Party of Ukraine banned by the government. Only those capable of withstanding the years of state and paramilitary terrorism now remained. It is worth noting that this combined terror from above and from below is a definining feature of fascism. 

At that time, he asked me to bring a message back to comrades in Canada. If there is one thing that I should take from our conversation and return with, he said, it is this: “We never thought it could happen here. We were unprepared, and our organization was unable to defend itself. We forgot one of Lenin’s most important teachings… Do not think that in Canada you are safe from fascism, and that they will not one day come for the communists there.” Mikhail did not mean that this future was inevitable, but that it would be if we failed in our historic task in the construction of socialism. Less than five years since he spoke these words, we can see clearly with the rise of the far-right in Canada, the growth of the People’s Party, and the brazen occupations by the so-called Freedom Convoy that the contradictions of capitalism are sharpening, and that if things continue in this direction, Mikhail’s warning could one day be proven prophetic. 

Mikhail’s resilience and hopefulness left a powerful effect on me, as I hope it will on my readers. For all he suffered, he refused to bend, even when he knew his very life hung in the balance. When Banderites held a gun to his head in the forest and demanded he renounce communism, he refused, fully prepared to die with integrity and principle. For all we know, he may since have paid the ultimate price for it. Mikhail’s determined and inspiring resistance in the face of such brutality remains worthy of the legacy of the countless Ukrainian partisans and Red Army soldiers who similarly gave their lives during the Great Patriotic War, and who preferred death in the concentration camps or by a bullet to connivance with Hitler or Bandera.