SUMMARY:

Alexander Gogun in general has high praise for the recent book by Oleksandr Zaitsev, Ukrainian Integral Nationalism (1920s–1930s): Studies in Intellectual History (Kyiv, 2013), albeit dismissing its main conceptual framework. Gogun sees the notion of integral nationalism as redundant, and instead proposes to analyze Ukrainian nationalists of the period as a branch of global totalitarianism. To Gogun, totalitarianism embodies a feudal reaction that seeks to restore forms of servitude. The relatively late abolition of serfdom in East Central Europe was responsible for the powerful totalitarian potential of the East Slavic world in the first half of the twentieth century. In Gogun’s view, only a stylistic difference existed between the Ukrainian nationalists and their Nazi and Stalinist adversaries.