Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov (; – 30 March 1973) was a Ukrainian nationalist writer, publisher, journalist and ideologist. Dontsov fundamentally influenced the emergence of a radical wing of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1920s and developed his own brand of radical Ukrainian nationalism. His ideas and writings strongly influenced the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, particularly the Banderite faction.
Dontsov preached a separation of Ukraine from Russia and a reorientation towards the West. He termed his ideological programme "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.
Biography
Early life and education Dontsov was born in Melitopol, in the Taurida Governorate of the Russian Empire — territory referred to by the authorities as part of Novorossiya and now within Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine. His mother, Efrosinia Iosifovna Dontsova, was Ukrainian and his father, Ivan Dmitrievich Dontsov, was a Russian entrepreneur who was elected to the city duma in 1873 and appointed mayor in 1894. His father died of an apparent heart attack on the eve of his inauguration when Dontsov was eleven.
His mother, 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.
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.
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. He advocated a platform closer to the Russian Bolshevik faction on everything but the national question in relation to Ukraine.
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 mazepynstvo ('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.
First World War and Ukrainian War of Independence (1914–1921) At the outset of the First World War in 1914, Dontsov became a founding member of the pro-Austrian Union for the Liberation of Ukraine before leaving in September to head the Ukrainian Parliamentary Club and its press bureau in Vienna that distributed pro-Ukrainian, pro-Central Powers, and anti-Russian propaganda. His German language brochures initially circulated widely in diplomatic circles concerned with the 'Ukrainian question' though this would practically amount to little due to Austrian reluctance to offend its Polish subjects. Dontsov relocated with the League of Russian Foreign Peoples (LFR) to Lausanne, Switzerland in mid-1916 where he was one of the signatories of an appeal to President Woodrow Wilson on the grounds of self-determination. He was subsequently recruited by the German Foreign Office to head the LFR's press operations in Bern, publishing pro-Ukrainian independence propaganda in German, French, and English. Amid tensions with members of the LFR surrounding his editorship, Dontsov moved back to Lviv in 1917 where he completed his doctorate in law.
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 White Russia, 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 strongly opposed the new socialist regime and, returning to the UTA, advised the Directorate to grant Petliura emergency dictatorial powers. On receiving news that the White Volunteers 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.
Interwar period (1921–1939) Having advocated that Ukraine become a part of Józef Piłsudski's Intermarium project, portraying it as a cordon sanitaire against the Bolsheviks who he regarded as an insidious reincarnation of Russian imperialism, Dontsov was granted permanent settlement in Lviv, personally approved by Piłsudski. In 1921, Dontsov published his first book, Pidstavy nashoї polityky (The Foundations of Our Politics), in which he presented a political ideology he termed 'active nationalism' () and which largely resembled integral nationalism in a Ukrainian context, arguing for the subordination of individual, class, and humanitarian interests to the biological survival of the nation. Criticising the Hetman movement, Dontsov advocated for the Ukrainian peasantry as the necessary basis for any nation-building, insisting that if guided by a philosophy matching its temperament and traditions, the peasantry was capable of building a society strong enough to "save Europe from Muscovite barbarism". He blamed Ukrainophilism and Ukrainian conservatism for the failure of the revolution and envisaged a social Darwinian, agrarian, and authoritarian democracy grounded in self-discipline and self-action.
Dontsov became closely connected to the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) though avoided Polonophobic 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. With Konovalets's support, 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 nationalist views and what he presented as a Ukrainian nationalist cultural renaissance. Contributors to the LNV included poets, novelists, literary critics, and scholars, among them Olena Teliha, Oleh Olzhych, and Ulas Samchuk.