SUMMARY:

This is a Russian version of John-Paul Himka’s contribution to the roundtable “Fascism in East Central and Southeastern Europe: Mainstream Fascism or ‘Mutant’ Phenomenon?” organized by the journal East Central Europe. Drawing on his studies of OUN-UPA, the author elaborates on his understanding of fascism in general and the importance of the situational element in East Central European fascism in particular. Although there are many common features of the East Central European fascist parties, explains Himka, each of them had unique and salient characteristics, and he proceeds to analyze them. One reason for the popularity of fascism in East Central Europe was the widespread dissatisfaction with the results of the Paris Peace Conference. The importance of this situational element in East European fascism is illustrated by the case of the OUN, but Himka does not suggest that dissatisfaction with the results of World War I was an exclusive impetus of regional fascism. The conjunctural attraction of fascism was not limited to East Central Europe, as the case of Walloon nationalists in Belgium shows. Versailles may have motivated Germany’s national socialists, but it did not have any meaning at all for Spain’s Falanga, and so on. He treats in detail another situational element, anti-Semitism, however, he equally refuses to consider it as specific to East Central European fascism. Anticommunism was a factor of tremendous importance in Hungarian, Romanian, and Ukrainian fascism, a reflection of brief experiences with Bolshevism in the aftermath of World War I and their proximity to the Soviet Union. But it was not particularly germane to the Croatian Ustaše, and so on. Stylistically there are no grounds for selecting regional fascism as a specific phenomenon. Himka concludes that he does not see enough coherence among East Central European fascisms to warrant constituting them as a separate category.