'Aryan' Ukrainians resurrect pagan beliefs
d to foreigners as anathema, and thinks the statues of Lenin in Kyiv should never have been torn down. Yet Babych is anything but a communist. He arrives at those positions from quite different premises.
Babych is a neo-pagan, or as he prefers to be called, a native believer. He is a member of the Reformed Ukrainian Native Faith, or RUNVira, a nationalistic religion whose followers believe they are recreating the pre-Christian religion of Ukraine. The two things this group holds most sacred are land and ancestors.
'Every normal race should respect ancestors, home and country,' Babych says as he sits in the grass beside the foundations of the ancient Desyatina church, built not long after Christianity was introduced to Kyivan Rus.
Babych is not interested in the foundations, unless to revile them. Instead he points out a peculiar round stone construction with four arms, like a cross.
Babych says it is a reconstruction of a sacrificial block from a native Ukrainian church – although he hastens to add that the sacrifices were milk, flowers, fruit and grain, not blood. The four arms represent the seasons, the four compass directions, the four faces of the god of wisdom, or the four arms of the swastika, he says.
The native faith, according to believers, has been around for 10,000 years. Native believers worship the elements and the seasons through an arcane hierarchy of symbols. They reject any religious ideas that have been imposed on Ukraine from abroad, writing off the last thousand years of Ukrainian Christian history as an unfortunate aberration in the true scheme of things, in which Ukrainians worship god in their own way.
It therefore seems ironic that the native faith, in the form it is practiced today, was developed not in Ukraine but America, and from many of the same ideas that inspired Hitler's Third Reich.
It began in a Germany recovering from the aftermath of Hitler's drive for a purified Aryan race, when two Ukrainians met in a camp for displaced persons in Bavaria. They too discussed the Aryan race of white Indo-Europeans, inheritors of the knowledge of the Hindu Veda.
The two Ukrainians, however, had a slightly different interpretation of who the Aryans were. Volodymir Shayan and Lev Sylenko believed that knowledge of the Veda had been brought to Northern India by peoples from the Dnieper river, making Ukraine the birthplace of Indo-European civilization.
Shayan and Sylenko both emigrated, Sylenko to the United States. In 1968 in upstate New York he founded RUNVira, and wrote the book, the Maha Vira, on which the faith's tenets rest.
Sylenko's books and teaching circulated in Ukraine in the 1970s, where they attracted patriotic Ukrainians. But the revival of the native faith in Ukraine didn't really get started until 1992, when the faith was registered.
Sylenko has not visited his spiritual followers in Ukraine, to the puzzlement of Ukrainian high priest Bohdan Ostrovsky, and some native believers in Ukraine already believe that their young faith has outstripped its founders.
'Ukrainians shall not have holy places outside Ukraine,' says Babych, a lawyer in his 20s. 'I don't believe in the development of the native faith in America. … [Believers] come here [from abroad] and we meet, but we don't understand each other.'
RUNVira's appeal is to patriots interested in history and tired of being dismissed as a peasant nation.
'I thought it was shameful that we were the kind of race the history books wrote were stupid and understood nothing,' he says. 'I couldn't see how such a stupid people could have produced a great grain-producing culture, the Trypillia culture.'
The committee for religious affairs registered 32 RUNVira affiliates in Ukraine in 1996. In Kyiv the sect holds services, sport and embroidery groups, reviving ancient traditions and reclaiming others that have been taken over by Christianity.
'Christians feel this force is pushing Christianity back into history, because we have a modern understanding of god and a scientific understanding of god,' says Ostrovsky, whose sweeping moustaches preside solemnly over the weekly service in Kyiv.
'God is the world's action in a given moment, this is secret, enigmatic action which people haven't fathomed yet,' he says. 'We don't try to picture god, we see him in his actions, and therein lies our holiness. Christian have to believe in what is said to them … we are supported by science.'
The 'scientific' aspect of the native faith is its emphasis on the order of the natural world. It also defines an equal relationship between god and humans; the ancient Rus people (Ukrainian and Russian) are Dazhboh's grandchildren. Sylenko's major reform of the faith was to declare Dazhboh, who represents Autumn and harvest, the one god, thus transforming a vague, polytheistic pagan tradition into a more structured monotheism.
Slavs worship many gods in one god, Babych says. There is the svarha or swastika, which represents the highest creation or creator. There are Svetovir and Perun, gods of strength and wisdom. There are the four gods of the seasons.
'We can't see the perfect one god but we can see his many manifestations,' Babych says.
According to native believers, the pinnacle of Ukrainian achievement was 6,000 years ago, when the Trypillia culture was building huge and complex settlements. RUNVira believers claim their religious beliefs stem directly from that period and were corrupted by Christianity.
'What we have now are the rags of what was before,' Babych says. 'People have been celebrating these ancient festivals for thousands of years, and no one could forbid it. Instead [Christians] decided to take these festivals for themselves. They turned the meaning upside-down and these days not many people understand them.'
For example, Babych points to Ivana Kupala, the midsummer festival that Ukrainians, thanks to the quirks of the Gregorian calendar, celebrate two weeks after the longest day. Native believers have returned the festival to its astronomical date and have got rid of 'Ivana' (John the Baptist) while keeping the fertility rituals of 'Kupala,' the summer god.
A new movement originating in Lviv also claims that Ukrainian classic, the Cossack dance, claiming to have transformed it back into the martial art it originally was.
Expounded in a 1994 book by Volodymir Pilat, Boyovy Hopak [The Fighting Dance] is also based on the premise of the supremely civilized Aryan race, explains Bozhedar Marchuk, a trainer in Boyovy Hopak.
Each 'race' – black, white or yellow – has its own physique and its own mentality, he says. Thus, he says, although Asian martial arts have spread all over the world, other races will never be able to excel in them. Boyovy Hopak is specific to Ukraine, and is designed for white Indo-Europeans or Aryans.
'I came to this from karate,' Marchuk says. 'I achieved a very high level in karate, but then I realized that to get any further I had to be Japanese, because it is all linked to the spiritual and mental aspects.'
'The white race have had the longest period of development, and especially Ukrainians and Ukrainian land,' he added. 'I think all the achievements of civilization are passed on through the genes, and we can take them from our subconscious, and that will tell us how to defend ourselves.'
The 25 assorted youths assembled for a training session go through movements that look most like boxing, somewhat like karate and a little like Cossack dancing. Not all are members of the RUNVira congregation, but the higher the spiritual level, the more effective the fighting skills, Marchuk says.
Boyovy Hopak is not just a way of attracting young people to RUNVira, he says, it is important to defense of the motherland.
'Our enemies are most afraid of the Ukrainian fighter who is armed with knowledge, a world-view and a martial art,' Pilat wrote in his book.
The faith's nationalism has attracted the attention of the extreme nationalist party the Ukrainian National Assembly, Babych says, and though he says native believers do not support UNA's rabidly nationalistic stance, he himself is in favor of the paramilitary training obligatory for members of the UNA-affiliated group Ukrainian National Self Defense.
Defense of the nation is a principle of RUNVira, as for native believers the church is the state and the state is the church.
'The Ukrainian state is a holy thing, the Ukrainian earth is a sacred thing,' Babych says. 'Patriotism is in the first place.'
During RUNVira's Sunday service, the priest reels off a long list of Ukrainian heroes, from Kyivan Rus kings to Cossack leaders to 19th century poets. 'Glory to Dazhboh! Glory to Ukraine!' exclaim the congregation as he holds high the tryzub, the Ukrainian trident symbol that now adorns everything from the national airline to the Cabinet of Ministers building.
Other symbols used by the native faith are not so unique to Ukraine. It is easy to see insidious links with the ideology that inspired Hitler's third Reich, as RUNVira shares the same roots, the same Aryan ideal and many of the same symbols, including the lightning sign that signified the SS and the swastika (in the reverse direction and with the hooked arms of the cross curved instead of at right-angles).
Native believers say that the Nazis interpreted ancient knowledge incorrectly, and that RUNVira is trying to return the original significance.
'Hitler did a lot of harm,' says Babych, pointing out that the symbols RUNVira shares with Nazism are far older than that German movement. 'The Nazis drew the wrong conclusions from this knowledge. We need to defend our own land, but not conquer others. That's the difference.'
