What has caused the rise of Nazi groups in places like Russia and Ukraine despite the fact that the Nazis wanted to exterminate those groups?

by westcoastlawboy

I’ve read about Nazis in places around the world. But when I read about Nazis in places like Greece or Russia I fail to grasp how people from those ethnicities could admire the ideology of a group of people who not only would have regarded them as inferior but in some cases, at least in the case of Slavic countries like Russia, actually wanted them exterminated. How did these groups emerge and how do they reconcile that tension?

DanyloHalytskyi

In the case of far-right groups in Russia, u/Kochevnik81 wrote an answer on the rise of Zhirinovski's ironically-named Liberal Democratic Party, which should serve as a good spark for further discussion.

As for far-right organizations in Ukraine, they only really started to accumulate momentum in the 2010s, and thus for now fall outside the scope of this subreddit. These organizations sometimes claim the heritage of certain Ukrainian far-right organizations active during the Interwar period and the Second World War. Mostly, they reference the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and related Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA), which had complicated relationships with the Nazis, as u/Kochevnik81 also previously described. Due to a lack of time and confidence (my specialty is on the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921), I will conclude by providing you a resource for further reading.

Below is a citation for a translated anthology of Ukrainian philosophical and political thought. The anthology contains an essay written by Dmytro Dontsov (an important political theorist who heavily influenced Ukrainian radical nationalist discourse during the Interwar period), the Manifesto of the OUN, and an essay written by Petro Poltava (an influential theorist within UPA).

Lindheim, Ralph and George S. N. Luckyj. Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought From 1710 to 1995. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. On JSTOR and Diasporiana.