Anti-Slavic sentiment

Anti-Slavic sentiment, also called Slavophobia, refers to prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination directed at the various Slavic peoples. Accompanying racism and xenophobia, the most common manifestation of anti-Slavic sentiment throughout history has been the assertion that Slavs are inferior to other peoples. This sentiment peaked during World War II, when Nazi Germany classified Slavs— especially the Poles, Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians—as "subhumans" (Untermenschen) and planned to exterminate a large number of them through the Generalplan Ost and Hunger Plan.^[1][2][3] Slavophobia also emerged twice in the United States: the first time was during the Progressive Era, when immigrants from Eastern Europe were met with opposition from the dominant class of Western European–origin American citizens; and again during the Cold War, when the United States became locked in an intensive global rivalry with the Soviet Union.^[4]

At the beginning of the 20th century, anti-Slavism in Albania was developed by the work of the Franciscan friars ^{[citation needed]} who had studied in monasteries in Austria-Hungary,^[5] after the recent massacres and expulsions of Albanians by their Slavic neighbours.^{[unreliable source?][6]} The Albanian intelligentsia proudly asserted, "We Albanians are the original and autochthonous race of the Balkans. The Slavs are conquerors and immigrants who came but yesterday from Asia." ^{[unreliable source?][7]} In Soviet historiography, anti-Slavism in Albania was inspired by the Catholic clergy,^{[citation needed]} which opposed the Slavic people because of the role the Catholic clergy^{[citation needed]} and Slavs opposed "rapacious plans of Austro-Hungarian imperialism in Albania".^[8]

In the 1920s, Italian fascists hated the Yugoslavs, especially the Serbs. They accused the Serbs of having "atavistic impulses" and they also claimed that the Yugoslavs were conspiring on behalf of "Grand Orient Masonry and its funds". One anti-Semitic claim stated that the Serbs were involved in a "social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot".^[9]

Benito Mussolini considered the Slavic race inferior and barbaric.^[10][11] He believed that the Croats were a threat to Italy because they wanted to seize Dalmatia, a region which was claimed by Italy, and he also claimed that the threat rallied Italians at the end of World War I: "The danger of seeing the Jugo-Slavians settle along the whole Adriatic shore had caused a bringing together in Rome of the cream of our unhappy regions. Students, professors, workmen, citizens—representative men—were entreating the ministers and the professional politicians."^[12] These claims often tended to emphasize the "foreignness" of the Yugoslavs by stating that they were newcomers to the area, unlike the ancient Italians, whose territories were occupied by the Slavs.

Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son in law, and the Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy who was later executed by Mussolini, wrote the following entry in his diary:^[13]

Vidussoni comes to see me. After having spoken about a few casual things, he makes some political allusions and announces savage plans against the Slovenes. He wants to kill them all. I take the liberty of observing that there are a million of them. "That does not matter." he answers firmly.

In Canada, many xenophobic white supremacists were deeply tied to their nation's "Anglo-Saxon" culture, specifically from the early 1900s to the end of World War II. The Ku Klux Klan in Canada was prominent in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, both of which have a relatively high Eastern European ethnic population. Immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland were frequently denounced and targeted.^[14]

During World War I, thousands of Ukrainian Canadians were seen as "enemy aliens" as Canadian nativists saw them as a "threat" to Canada's Western European heritage. Due to this, many of them were interned in concentration camps. There was constant discrimination towards Ukrainians who recently immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.^[15]

Though anti-Slavic sentiments reached their peak during Nazi Germany, Germany has had a long history of Slavophobia. In particular, the Germanic people of Prussia often depicted Polish people in a negative light, which paralleled future Slavophobia in the Nazi regime.^[16]

Nikolay Ulyanov [ru] in his 1968 article " Замолчанный Маркс" (Hushed-up Marx) provides ample evidence of anti-Slavism the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.^[17] For example, in his 1849 article "The Magyar Struggle," Engels wrote that the Slavs living in the Austrian Empire were "barbarians" who "needed to be saved" by the Germanic Austrians.^[18]

Gustav Freytag's 1855 novel Soll und Haben ("Debt and Credit") was one of the most-read German novels of the 19th century, and contained antisemitic sentiments as well as depictions of Poles as incompetent.^[19]

Anti-Slavic racism played a significant role within the ideology of Nazism.^[21] Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party held the belief that Slavic countries - particularly Poland, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, as well as their respective peoples - were "Untermenschen" (subhumans). According to their viewpoint, these Slavic nations were deemed to be foreign entities and were not considered part of the Aryan master race. Nazi Germany depicted the Soviet Union as an "Asiatic enemy" of Europeans, in addition to portraying its population as inferior subhumans controlled by Jews and communists.^[22]

Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf was openly anti-Slavic. He wrote: “One ought to cast the utmost doubt on the state-building power of the Slavs,” and from the beginning, he rejected the idea of incorporating the Slavs into Greater Germany.^[23] There were exceptions for some minorities in these states which were deemed by the Nazis to be the descendants of ethnic Germanic settlers, and not merely Slavs who were willing to be Germanized.^[21]

Hitler considered the Slavs to be racially inferior, because, in his view, the Bolshevik Revolution had put the Jews in power over the mass of Slavs, who were, by his own definition, incapable of ruling themselves but were instead being ruled by Jewish masters.^[24] He considered the development of modern Russia to have been the work of Germanic, not Slavic, elements in the nation, but believed those achievements had been undone and destroyed by the October Revolution,^[25] in Mein Kampf, he wrote, “The organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race.”^[26]

Because, according to the Nazis, the German people needed more territory to sustain its surplus population, an ideology of conquest and depopulation was formulated for Central and Eastern Europe according to the principle of Lebensraum, itself based on an older theme in German nationalism which maintained that Germany had a "natural yearning" to expand its borders eastward (Drang Nach Osten).^[21] The Nazis' policy towards Slavs was to exterminate or enslave the vast majority of the Slavic population and repopulate their lands with millions of ethnic Germans and other Germanic peoples.^[27][28] According to the resulting genocidal Generalplan Ost, millions of German and other "Germanic" settlers would be moved into the conquered territories, and the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed or enslaved.^[21] The policy was focused especially on the Soviet Union, as it alone was deemed capable of providing enough territory to accomplish this goal.^[29]

As part of the Generalplan Ost, Nazi Germany developed the Hunger Plan, a forced starvation programme which involved the seizure of all of the food which was produced on Eastern European lands and the delivery of it to Germany, primarily to the German army. The full implementation of this plan would have ultimately resulted in the starvation and death of 20 to 30 million people (mainly Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians). It is estimated that in accordance with this plan, over four million Soviet citizens were starved to death from 1941 to 1944.^[31] The resettlement policy reached a much more advanced stage in occupied Poland because of its immediate proximity to Germany.^[21]

For strategic reasons, the Nazis deviated from some of their ideological theories by forging alliances with Ukrainian collaborators, the Independent State of Croatia (established after the invasion of Yugoslavia), the Slovak State (established after the occupation of Czechoslovakia) and Bulgaria. Yugoslav general Milan Nedić would also lead Nazi Germany's Serbian puppet government.^[32] The Nazis officially justified these alliances by stating that the Croats were "more Germanic than Slav", a notion which was propagated by Croatia's fascist dictator Ante Pavelić, who espoused the view that the "Croats were the descendants of the ancient Goths" who "had the pan-Slavic idea forced upon them as something artificial".^[33][34] However, the Nazi regime continued to classify the Croats as "subhumans" despite its alliance with them.^[35] Hitler also believed that the Bulgarians were "Turkoman", while the Czechs and Slovaks were Mongolians in their origins.^[34] After conquering Yugoslavia, attention was instead focused on targeting mainly the nation's Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) population.^[32]

Though Slavophobia became less prevalent after WWII, it still persisted to some degree and still persists today. Slavic immigrants in Germany experience discrimination due to their accents, their surnames, and their cuisine.^[36] Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, Russian speakers in Germany have faced increased discrimination, including collective blame for Russia's actions in the war, despite most having lived in Germany for decades and many not being Russian at all. Since the Russian language was the lingua franca of the Soviet Union, an immigrant living in Germany who speaks Russian could be from anywhere that was influenced by the Soviet Union.^[19]

Traditionally,^[when?] in Greece, Slavic people were considered "invaders who separated the glory of Greek Antiquity, by bringing an era of decline and ruin to Greece – the Dark Ages".^[37] In 1913, when Greece took control of Slavic-inhabited areas in Northern Greece, the Slavic toponyms were changed to Greek, and according to the Greek government, this was "the elimination of all the names which pollute and disfigure the beautiful appearance of our fatherland."^[38]

Anti-Slavic sentiment escalated during the Greek Civil War, when Macedonian partisans, who aligned themselves with the Democratic Army of Greece, were not treated as equals and suffered discrimination everywhere, they were accused of committing a "sin" because they chose to identify themselves as Slavs rather than Greeks.^[39] The Macedonian partisans were subjected to threats of extermination, physical attacks, murder, attacks on their settlements, forcible expulsions, restrictions on freedom of movement, and bureaucratic problems, among other discriminatory acts.^[39] Although they were allied with the Greek Left, due to their Slavic identity, the Macedonians were viewed with suspicion and animosity by the Greek Left.^[40]

In 1948, the Democratic Army of Greece evacuated tens of thousands of child refugees, both Greek and Slavic in origin.^[41] In 1985, the refugees were allowed to re-enter Greece, claim Greek citizenship, and reclaim property, but only if they were "Greek by genus", thus prohibiting those with a Slavic identity from obtaining Greek citizenship, entering Greece, and claiming property.^[42][43]

Today, the Greek state does not recognize its ethnic Macedonian and other Slavic minorities, claiming that they do not exist, with Greece therefore having the right not to grant them any of the rights that are guaranteed to them by human-rights treaties.^[44]

The United States of America has a long history of Slavophobia. Slavophobia began in earnest during the "second wave" of European immigration in the early 1900s, when many people from Southern and Eastern Europe were immigrating to the US.^[4] They faced opposition from the "old" immigrants, who were mostly from Northern and Western Europe. These attitudes culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, which established quotas for and limited the numbers of people from Southern and Eastern European countries who were allowed to enter the US.^[45] Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an "inferior race" who were unable to assimilate into American society.^[4] They were originally not considered to be "fully white" (and thus fully American), and Slavic peoples' "whiteness" continues to be a debate to this day.^[46]

Slavophobia in the US ramped up again during the Cold War, when Slavic peoples of all nationalities were considered enemies due to the United States' distrust of the Soviet Union.^[47] War in the Balkans (which America often had a part in) was considered inevitable due to the Balkan peoples' "propensity for extreme war violence."^[47] The United States government, while claiming to advocate for national determination for small countries, has denied national determination to many of the countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.^[48] As a result, many Slavic people in the US and Western countries felt pressure (and continue to feel pressure) to Anglicize their surnames and downplay their Slavic culture.^[49]

In American pop culture, Slavic people (specifically Russians) are usually portrayed as either nefarious, violent criminals^[50] or as unintelligent, oblivious comic relief.^[51][52] "Dumb Pole" jokes or "Polish jokes" (derogatory jokes towards Polish people) are just one manifestation of anti-Polish sentiment in America, and can be found in all sorts of media from many time periods.^[53]

Slavophobia has had a resurgence in America following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where Russian-Americans and people of Russian descent have been collectively blamed for the Russian government's actions.^[49][54]

Notes

• Zecker, Robert M. "“A Slav Can Live in Dirt That Would Kill a White Man”: Race and the European “Other”." Race and America's Immigrant Press: How the Slovaks were Taught to Think Like White People. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 68–102.

Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 5 Oct. 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781628928273.ch-004