SUMMARY:

German historian Anna Veronika Wendland offers her explanation for a most strange alliance between the German left-leaning intellectuals and the Kremlin oligarchic and autocratic regime in regard to the Ukrainian revolution. She identifies two main factors at work here: the influence of the complex of guilt espoused by the older generation of Germans (that, for some reason, singles out as the object of German guilt only Russia but not Ukraine as the legitimate heir to the Soviet Union); and the utter ignorance of the younger public about the actual situation in Ukraine, causing many leftists to support Russian aggression only to irritate their archenemy – the “imperialist United States.” Wendland exposes the superficial character of their criticism, which neglects the archetypal (socioeconomic) component of the left analysis in favor of ideological and even geopolitical speculations. She suggests that a proper leftist (arguably, truly Marxist) analysis would have revealed the real roots of the Ukrainian crisis in Russia’s own domestic problems, and have explained why Donbass became susceptible to Russian manipulations by means of applying political economy analysis.