Thirty Days That Changed the World

Abstract

The author argues that the Maidan and subsequent coup in Ukraine were the product of a plan organized by Western intelligence services to subvert the country and turn it into a weapon aimed at destabilizing Russia. The conflict exposed Russian liberals as traitors who want to destroy Russia and are working at the best of the Western powers. As a result of the events in Ukraine, the Russian political leadership will mobilize the population against Russia's external enemies and clean out domestic traitors.

Keywords::

• Crisis
• “fifth column”
• neo-Nazism
• Russia
• Ukraine

Notes

English translation © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text “Tridtsat’ dnei, kotorye izmenili mir: Ukrainskii krizis, ego podzhigateli i skrytye shifry,” Svobodnaia mysl’, no. 2, 2014, pp. 33–48. Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield. Translation reprinted from Russian Politics and Law, vol. 53, no. 1. doi: 10.1080/10611940.2015.1042327. Andrei Ilyich Fursov is director of the Center of Russian Research at the Moscow University for the Humanities, director of the Institute of Systemic-Strategic Analysis, a member of the International Academy of Science (Innsbruck, Austria), and chief editor of the journal Vostokovedenie i afrikanistika.

^* Saruman is a powerful but corrupt character in J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings; the Orcs are a race of warlike beings.—Trans.

^* Actually a remark made by Marx in a letter to Engels.—Trans.

^* Head of the foreign intelligence service of the KGB, 1989–91.—Trans.

^* Two high-technology firms in Southeastern Ukraine: Motor Sich is in Zaporozhye and manufactures aircraft engines and gas turbines, and Yuzhmash (Southern Machine Building) is in Dnepropetrovsk and makes rockets, satellites, buses, trams, agricultural equipment, and wind turbines.—Trans.

^** The largest Ukrainian neo-pagan movement, founded in the United States by émigrés after World War II and established in Ukraine in the post-Soviet period.—Trans.

^* A quotation from the writer and Red Army field commander Arkady Gaidar.—Trans.

^* Roman Shukhevych was a leader in the “Banderite” Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and a general in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which massacred an estimated 60,000–100,000 Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–45. The degree to which Shukhevych was personally responsible for the massacres is a matter of dispute. His son Yuri Shukhevych was a political prisoner and dissident under the postwar Soviet regime; in post-Soviet Ukraine he has been active in the right-nationalist Ukrainian National Assembly and in the left-nationalist Radical Party.—Trans.

^* A reference to Selma Lagerlof's Wonderful Adventures of Nils; these stories were taught to children in Soviet schools and an animated film based on them was released in the Soviet Union in 1955.—Trans.