About Nazification
On February 21st, in a televised address to the Russian people, Vladimir Putin claimed “far-right nationalism” had “developed into aggressive Russophobia and Neo-Nazism.” To those paying attention, the claim struck a jarring chord in a message filled with dissonance (to Westerner’s ears). But few took it as a sign that Putin would actually invade Ukraine. Three days later, in a televised address explaining why he chose to attackUkraine, Putin doubled down:
“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.
It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory. We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force. At the same time, we have been hearing an increasing number of statements coming from the West that there is no need any more to abide by the documents setting forth the outcomes of World War II, as signed by the totalitarian Soviet regime. How can we respond to that? The outcomes of World War II and the sacrifices our people had to make to defeat Nazism are sacred.”
Having expanded and escalated an unprovoked invasion of their Western neighbor, this speech generated significant blowback from Western media and publics. Writing for NBC News, Allan Ripp said Putin’s goal to denazify Ukraine was his “most bizarre,” but acknowledged the rise of right-wing Neo-Nazis in the country. NPR reported that other “Russian officials continued to employ [denazification] rhetoric,” suggesting that Putin had explicitly chosen that frame and ordered his surrogates to echo it often. Some were quick to point out that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is jewish, making Putin’s claim nonsensical. And Olivia Waxman for Time Magazine sought to “fact check” Putin’s claim, suggesting he was “misusing the term ‘denazify’,” because the term “refers to a particular moment in time in the post-war era.”
These publications interviewed Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley (and other notable historians) to parse Putin’s phrase and glean something from it. These scholars suggested Putin had used the term for domestic political reasons (due to Russia’s memory of Soviet efforts to stop the Nazis in World War II), to “delegitimize” and “discredit” the Ukrainian government, and, potentially, as Snyder claimed, “to use the genocide and denazification language to set up some kind of kangaroo court which could serve the purpose of condemning these people to death or…prison.”
In spite of these assessments, virtually no one has thought more deeply about the meaning of the phrase “demilitarize and denazify.” This is astounding. Putin’s language is a marker that points to a very specific place and time, one that speaks of the future of Ukraine is Russia somehow triumphs. In the rhetoric business we call his form of argument an “enthymeme” because its principle premises are implied, not explicit. Enthymemes can be tricky to analyze and assess because they often require a sophisticated form of contextual analysis that burdens the analyst with recognizing cultural, political, and historical factors that the speaker’s audience automatically recognizes.
But that’s not the case here. You don’t need much sophistication to recognize the phrase derives directly from the 1945 Yalta Conference. Meeting in Crimea in February, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt discussed and defined how World War II would end and what would come next. (For an excellent examination of the Conference, see Michael Dobbs’ Six Months in 1945.) The weeklong event produced a Joint Statement that publicly declared the Allies’ war goals and their vision for Germany.
Why does this matter to understanding Putin’s claim? Because the very first declaration advanced in the statement was: “Unconditional Surrender.” The document explained:
“It is our inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism and to ensure that Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world. We are determined to disarm and disband all German armed forces; break up for all time…German militarism; remove or destroy all German military equipment; eliminate or control all German industry that could be used for military production; bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment and exact reparation…wipe out the Nazi Party, Nazi laws, organizations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influences…It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany, but only when Nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the comity of Nations.”
Roosevelt echoed these remarks when he addressed Congress on March 1, 1945, explaining that unconditional surrender “means the end of Nazism.”
After German participation in the war ended, the Allies met at Potsdam, issuing a report with elaborating similar goals:
“German militarism and Nazism will be extirpated and the Allies will take in agreement together, now and in the future, the other measures necessary to assure that Germany never again will threaten her neighbors or the peace of the world. It is not the intention of the Allies to destroy or enslave the German people.”
Harry Truman’s Radio Message on August 9th reaffirmed the essential point of occupation: “to rid Germany of the forces which have made her so long feared and hated, and which have now brought her to complete disaster…to eliminate Nazis rearmaments, war industries, the German General Staff and all its military tradition.”
With this as the context, the full implication of Putin’s remarks become clear. Russia can only “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine if Ukraine completely capitulates. “Unconditional surrender” is unstated - enthymemetic in our parlance - but assumed because you can’t have one without the other. Putin signaled to the Russian people and to Ukraine, if not the world, that he expected to assault his neighbor until they gave in. And, indeed, that is what he has done as the war has dragged on.
Similarly, “demilitarize” and “denazify” have historic linkages. For the Soviets, it meant packing up and crating home as much German technology, factory equipment, furniture, and more as they could pack unto the trains heading east. Stripping East Germany bare, Soviet occupation settled the war score in a particularly harsh capacity. We should recognize that history when Putin says “demilitarize.” His words conveyed a plan to completely remove Ukrainian “military” industry (a very loosely defined concept in our current age), an action that would have decimated the country and made it absolutely dependent upon its Russian overlords.
Denazification carried similar implications. For Germany, it meant a complete rebuilding of its political, social, economic, and cultural system. It meant removing all of the Nazi influences in the culture. And, while it may not have been terribly successful, it did remove and punish the most visible Nazis, as well as rework the governments of both West and East Germany. Putin’s use of “denazify” likewise implied the complete removal of most of Ukraine’s political leadership as well as a complete reworking of Ukraine’s constitution. Indeed, Russia forwarded a request for changes to Ukraine’s constitution in recent peace negotiations.
In sum, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine meant converting an independent, democratic country into a quasi-sovereign entity controlled, to a large degree, by another. It meant turning Russia into a Suzerain. And, in a subject for a future post, it proposed a theory of sovereignty antithetical to the so-called “rules based order” or the international system of sovereign states established by the Peace of Westphalia.