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Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov (; – 30 March 1973) was a Ukrainian nationalist writer, publisher, journalist and ideologist. His radical ideas, known as integral nationalism, strongly influenced the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, particularly the Banderite generation.
Dontsov preached a separation of Ukraine from Russia and a reorientation towards Western world. He termed his ideological programme in the 1920s 'active nationalism' and extolled an "initiative minority" modelled on the examples of Italian fascism and Bolshevism. In the 1930s, Dontsov became heavily influenced by fascism and Nazism and republished works by fascist politicians and ideologues.
Dontsov's ethnic nationalism was rejected by the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the postwar years, though he remains highly regarded among the Ukrainian far-right.
Efrosinia, who had Italian and German ancestry, died the following year from an illness. As a result, Dontsov was largely raised by his German step-grandfather. Dmytro and his two younger sisters adopted a Ukrainian identity, while his two brothers, Vladimir and Sergei, chose Russian identities. Vladimir joined the Bolsheviks underground while Sergei pursued a career in the Russian imperial bureaucracy.
In 1900, Dontsov moved to Saint Petersburg where he completed gymnasium and enrolled at Saint Petersburg University to study law. In 1905, he joined the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDRP) where he met Symon Petliura, editor of the magazine Slovo which published Dontsov's first articles. According to historian Trevor Erlacher, Dontsov at this time advocated a platform closer to the Russian Bolshevik faction on everything but the national question in relation to Ukraine.
He was arrested for participating in a pro-Ukrainian demonstration during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and briefly imprisoned in Kyiv. After his release, he settled in the city and continued to contribute news and editorials for both Slovo and the Russian-language liberal Ukrainskaia zhizn ( Ukrainian Life; also edited by Petliura). Following the Stolypin Coup in 1907, which intensified Russification and repression of dissent, Dontsov was arrested again and imprisoned in Kyiv. After eight months' imprisonment he escaped abroad to Lviv in April 1908, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Recovering from a chronic illness contracted during his imprisonment, Dontsov moved to a resort town in the Tatra Mountains where he became acquainted with Vyacheslav Lypynsky, a leading theorist of Ukrainian conservativism and a pro-independence monarchist. At this time, Dontsov opposed the notion of Ukrainian independence and supported a federalist vision of Ukraine as an autonomous part of a social-democratic Russia, believing in the possibility of coordination between the USDRP and its Russian counterpart.
Dontsov moved to Vienna in 1908 where he studied law, economics, and history at the University of Vienna until 1911 before settling in Lviv in 1912. In May of that year, he married Mariia Bachynska (later Bachynska-Dontsova), a fellow student he had met in Vienna in 1909. Bachynska was a pro-Ukrainian activist, feminist, and public intellectual from a wealthy family. Fluent in German, she provided translation services for Dontsov and the later Hetmanate. Writing about the movement to establish a Ukrainian university in Lviv, Dontsov observed 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."
Disillusioned with Marxism's utopian promises, Dontsov developed a Russophobic worldview rooted in Realpolitik. He advocated Ukraine's alignment with Mitteleuropa as an Austro-Hungarian protectorate in what he saw the inevitable clash between what he cast as the “progressive” West and “reactionary” East. He first expressed these views in a pamphlet titled Moderne moskvofilstvo ( Modern Muscophilism) that earned him fame and notoriety among politically active Ukrainians and Russians in Lviv and elicited accusations of Ivan Mazepa ('Mazepism'). Dontsov presented this political programme, centred on complete separation from Russia and in which he condemned the 'Little Russian' orientation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, at the Second All-Ukrainian Students' Congress in July 1913. His speech was subsequently transcribed in the pamphlet Suchasne politychne polozhennia natsiï i nashi zavdannia ( The Present Political Situation of the Nation and Our Tasks). The work brought him notoriety for its radical stance and led to his ostracism from the USDRP, which he castigated for placing faith in Russian liberalism's supposed commitment to self-determination, a commitment which he characterised as subterfuge. Vladimir Lenin denounced Dontsov's speech as "nationalist philistinism", though he attacked Russian liberals for their displays of contempt for Ukrainian national aspirations.
Opposed to the initially pacifist, federalist, and Ukrainophile Central Rada that would found the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) 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. 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 interfered 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.
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. From the summer of 1918 onwards, Dontsov led the Hetmanate's Ukrainisation efforts aimed at drumming up support for the government. 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. Dontsov advocated for Crimea as an "integral part of Ukraine". Outraged at the federal union proclaimed in November between the Hetmanate and Russian State, Dontsov resigned from the UTA and went into hiding following the appearance of an order for his arrest as the Anti-Hetman Uprising broke out.
Despite his support for the uprising and his friendship with Petliura, Dontsov loathed the new socialist regime and, returning to the UTA, advised the Directorate to grant Petliura emergency dictatorial powers. On receiving news that the Volunteer Army 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. He remained with the delegation for ten days before departing to meet Lypynsky and Yevhen Konovalets in Vienna in order to develop a military and political strategy going forward, with Konovalets attempting to construct a unit out of Ukrainian POW's. Dontsov and Lypynsky coordinated 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. In mid-February, and following the fall of Kyiv, Dontsov left for Bern to once again head the UPR's now-exiled press bureau, with efforts later focused on attempting to secure 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.
Dontsov became closely connected to the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) though avoided Polonophobia rhetoric and even motioned for an alliance with Poland at the UVO's founding congress in August 1920 which was blocked by Konovalets and Yevhen Petrushevych. 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 constructing a nationalist mythology capable of inspiring fanatical devotion, among them Olena Teliha, Oleh Olzhych, and Ulas Samchuk.
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. In a 1923 article, Dontsov extolled Bolshevism and Italian Fascism as models of a ruthless 'initiative minority' on which to base the Ukrainian nationalist movement. The Tyutyunnyk affair that year 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. Dontsov himself had written several criticisms of the Polish establishment and maintained close connections with the nationalist underground for which the embarrassing 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.
In 1926, Dontsov published the book Natsionalizm ( Nationalism), his most famous 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. Dontsov exemplified a new Ukrainian that is youthful and brutal, "with stone heart and burning faith", and prescribes a value system of active nationalism comprising romanticism, dogmatism, illusionism, fanaticism, amorality, creative violence, and the initiative minority. In a critique of Natsionalizm, Lypynsky accused Dontsov of bastardising and plagiarising his ideas whereafter the two leading nationalist theorists would enter into a polemic.
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. OUN ideologues criticised Dontsov's ideology throughout the 1930s, most significantly leading to a heated polemic between Dontsov and Volodomyr Martynets, editor of the OUN's ideological journal Rozbudova natsiï ( Building the Nation), during the summer of 1930. In response to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's outspoken criticism of his politics and the effect it was having on Galician youth in the early 1930s, Dontsov adopted anti-clerical positions.
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. With Adolf Hitler's rise to power that year, Dontsov enthusiastically supported the new Chancellor and advocated for an alignment with Nazi Germany. The rise of Nazism reflected a triumph of Dontsov's ideas whereafter it exerted a significant influence on his writings, deepening his obsession with 'International Jewry' that had largely been inflamed by the 1927 Schwartzbard trial to the point where antisemitic themes began to appear in almost all his articles. By the spring of 1939, Dontsov's antisemitic writings were closely aligned to those of Hitler. In the final issue of Vistnyk for September, Dontsov reacted with puzzlement to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and published the article Zhydivske pytannia i natsional-sotsializm ( The Jewish Question and National Socialism) that had the stated aim of popularising Hitler's teachings in Mein Kampf.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Dontsov moved to Nazi-occupied Prague in late 1941 where he contributed to the SS-operated Reinhard Heydrich Institute , founded in July 1942 after Heydrich's assassination two months earlier. Dontsov continued espousing pro-Nazi views despite the violent crackdown on OUN members in Ukraine, some of whom he had had close relationships with as contributors to the LNV and Vistnyk. He opposed the Banderites's presentation of a liberal democratic platform in 1943 in private correspondence with the organisation's leadership, writing that "the OUN should stand against imperialist powers, including Jewry, but not against imperialism". He complained that the new programme was bereft of what he saw as Ukrainian historical traditions with regard to Cossackdom, xenophobia, and antisemitism.
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 despite the deaths of Teliha, Olzhych, and other nationalists by their hand who had followed his teachings. Dontsov's activities in postwar exile consisted of him writing extensively for the Ukrainian émigré press, mainly in publications associated with the OUN-B. Stepan Bandera remained in contact with Dontsov throughout the 1950s, offering him the role of editor in his organisation's newspaper which Dontsov declined. In his later years Dontsov 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. Dontsov argued that the Cold War should become a holy war against the Soviet Union and that, since a Third World War was inevitable, Western World should Preemptive war. Following Bandera's assassination, Dontsov published an obituary in a November 1959 issue of OUN-B periodical Homin Ukraїny in which he praised Bandera as the embodiment of a principled anti-democratic, anti-communist fighter.
In a style more typical of the Russian intelligentsia of the time, Dontsov mixed literature and politics and, according to Ivan L. Rudnytsky, exhibited a doctrinaire turn of mind that resorted to simple reductionist formulas accompanied by radical solutions. Critics of Dontsov at the time and since have asserted that he did more to import Russian Russian culture and thought into Ukrainian culture than anyone else during the interwar period, with his contemporaries often citing his Russian background to the extent that it plagued his career in Western Ukraine.
Trevor Erlacher characterises Dontsov's personality and his body of work as 'iconoclastic authoritarianism', asserting that he "readily sacrificed logic and consistency for the sake of emotive impact or political expedience, vulgarized the ideas of the writers whom he invoked to fit the rhetorical needs of the moment, and moved chameleonlike between political, cultural, and philosophical trends". Erlacher describes 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 "patent 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".
Volodymyr Yaniv, writing for the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, asserts that Dontsov "made a decisive contribution to the undermining of Russophilia and the influence of Communist ideas in Western Ukraine in the 1920s". Yaniv characterises Dontsovism as voluntarist and pantheistic monism.
Dontsov's active nationalism has commonly been ascribed as a Ukrainian form of integral nationalism in the historiography. Some historians, such as Per Anders Rudling and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, object to this classification of Ukrainian radical nationalism, noting that integral nationalism is itself a proto-fascist ideology or arguing that it is indistinguishable from fascism. Zaitsev considers this position to be not without foundation though asserts the view that such a designation is of limited heuristic value.
Dontsov attempted to provoke Lypynsky several times in 1925, attacking the centrality of legalism to his thinking and denying his commitment to Ukrainian independence. Lypynsky responded in a letter to the New Jersey newspaper Svoboda:
"I know you Ukrainian intelligentsia snakes too well to be surprised by these lies, to have any desire to answer them, or to engage in polemics with you. Keep lying. The more your lies besmirch the Ukrainian name, which you yourselves represent, the more your baseness will drive away all honest Ukrainians, and the sooner the branch on which you sit will fall, and you boors will die, blinded by your own spite."
The polemic that ensued after the publishing of Natsionalizm in 1926 became highly acrimonious and personal and served as one of the main themes of discussion among Ukrainian nationalists going forward.
Andrew Wilson describes Dontsov and Lypynsky as the two most influential Ukrainian nationalist thinkers of the twentieth century, with their feud symptomatic of a wider clash of ideas between democratic and militant nationalism that remained relevant to modern Ukrainian politics.
During his time in Kyiv from 1905 to 1907, Dontsov developed a lifelong fascination with the medieval Kyivan Rus' whereby he came to view Russia as a crude imposter. He thereafter viewed Russia and Europe as two antithetical civilisations, in his 1921 book promoting hatred of and struggle against Russia as a basis for the politics, literature, and spirituality of Ukraine and the wider Western world. His polemic of Russian culture based itself in its supposed Mongol origins that engendered barbarian whereby he presented his Weltanschauung as a struggle between European and Asiatic civilisation, with Ukrainians responsible for whatever was European in Muscovite culture.
From 1926 to 1933 he began to argue that Bolshevism was the latest manifestation of an Asiatic, Jewish-Muscovite essence that arose out of the "racial chaos" of the Mongol khanates. According to Erlacher, in the latter half of his life Dontsov exhibited a Psychopathology hatred of Russians and openly fantasised about genocidal vengeance at any cost. In Batava (published from 1940 to 1941), Dontsov characterised 'Oriental', the lowest racial caste in his system, as a Tatars-Mongol-Russian people mix that corrupted the Ukrainian gene pool with slavish, disorderly traits. Though he would in exile remove overtly antisemitic and pro-Nazi passages from his republished works, his sections on race science remained.
In his 1921 book Dontsov criticised Judeo-Bolshevism, insisting that Bolshevism was principally a Russian phenomenon while also arguing that the Jewish working class had sided with the Russian Bolsheviks because of their racial psychology and class interests. Reacting to Petliura's murder in 1926, Dontsov asserted that "the Jew is not guilty of everything" but were "terribly guilty" of serving Russian imperialism and Bolshevism. The following line where he states "Only when Russia falls in Ukraine will we be able to settle the Jewish question in our country in a way that suits the interest of the Ukrainian people" has been interpreted by historians one of two ways. It has been interpreted as either a threat to the Ukrainian Jewish population and damning proof of his radical antisemitism as early as 1926 or as proof of his pragmatism towards Ukraine's Jews at this point, with the 'Jewish question' remaining secondary to Russia— historian Trevor Erlacher asserts that there is some truth to both interpretations. Reacting to the 1927 Schwartzbard trial, Dontsov denialism that the pogroms had taken place, Victim blaming Jews for having been hostile toward Ukrainians and asserting that they were motivated by a desire to rule and exploit Ukraine. He wrote that Petliura's mistake was that he "wanted to win the support of a cowardly and slavish race with concessions". Responding to a wave of antisemitic policies in Nazi Germany, Dontsov wrote in April 1933:
"We do not need to adopt Hitler's methods. But we must remember that a people cannot allow itself to be ruled (politically or spiritually) by an alien element and that this alien element dare not, as is now the case in Soviet Ukraine, be the master of our land."Throughout the 1930s antisemitic tropes appeared in almost all of Dontsov's articles in Vistnyk, often in the form of citing Jewish names to assert the Judeo-Bolshevism conspiracy theory. Dontsov also promoted the world Jewish conspiracy theory— for instance, in a 1934 article he wrote that to prevent the future state from becoming a "Ukraine of the Schwartzbards", the Ukrainian elite "should not be members of a people (or sect) that receives directives... from international Jewry, which actively supported Bolshevism and the expropriation of our peasants for the benefit of their race". Dontsov came to regard antisemitism as a Ukrainian tradition, in a 1937 article faulting the Ukrainian leaders of 1917-1921 for failing to take advantage of the Judeophobic sentiments of the Ukrainian masses. In a 1938 article, he criticised the most outlandish of conspiracy theories surrounding 'International Jewry', subscribing instead to a view of Jews as a "parasitic phenomenon" secondary to the Russian Bolsheviks. In The Riddle of the Third Reich published a few months before the start of the Second World War, Dontsov aligned himself with Hitler's view of Germany and extolled him and his entourage as a model for Ukrainian nationalists to follow, writing that, in spite of "Israel's millions of dollars", "Israel had to bow its neck" before the new German faith and power.
Despite Dontsov's revision of his republished works, he maintained a keen personal interest in antisemitic conspiracy theories, as evidenced by his personal papers which contain heavily underlined conspiratorial brochures and newspaper clippings in the margins of which he frequently scribbled "Jew" where his opponents in the media were Jewish.
According to 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 favour of the pluralistic form championed by Vyacheslav Lypynsky and Ivan L. Rudnytsky. Dontsovism was explicitly rejected by the Sixtiers who instead focused on individual rights, the rule of law, and constructing a common front with other Soviet dissidents.
Dontsovite nationalism reemerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the Ukrainian far-right, especially in the UNA-UNSO led by Yurii Shukhevych, the Social-National Party of Ukraine, and the politics of Valentyn Moroz. Far-right groups reprinted Dontsov's works and, in 2007, Oleh Bahan and Petro Ivanyshyn founded the Dmytro Dontsov Scientific-Ideological Centre to advance his ideas.
Petro Poroshenko has quoted The Present Political Position of the Nation and Our Tasks in his speeches.
According to Trevor Erlacher, virtually all 21st century Dontsovists selectively interpret the meaning of Dontsovism to fit various agendas, aided by Dontsov's varying beliefs and allegiances across his life, though the principle of moving away from Russia and towards Europe remains consistent.
Several streets in Ukraine are named in honour of Dontsov in Dnipro, Zhytomyr, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lutsk, Lviv, Odesa, Sumy, Kherson, and Kropyvnytskyi— a street in Melitopol bearing his name was renamed in 2022.
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