The killing of ideological chameleon Irina Farion is a symbol of both the victory and defeat of radicals.
Last weekend, Irina Farion, a notorious Ukrainian far-right politician and academic was shot in the head by an unidentified assassin not far from her house in the western city of Lviv. She died some time later in hospital.
The killer has not been found yet, but the main suspect is an unidentified young man who, according to the accounts of neighbors, had been watching Farion’s house for several weeks. The motives remain unknown, but it is no secret that the victim – a former MP in the national parliament for the ultra-nationalist Svoboda – had many enemies.
Farion’s scandalous, offensive, and chauvinistic views were so radical that she even became involved in a public conflict with right-wing radicals from the Ukrainian army. Now her murder has shaken the country.
A scandal-monger from the Soviet Communist Party
In February 2010, as a deputy of the Lviv Regional Rada, Farion visited a kindergarten and insulted children whose names she considered insufficiently “Ukrainian”. The deputy claimed that a boy named Misha should be called Mykhailyk, that the name Liza comes from the word “lick”, and told girls named Alyona to “pack [their] bags and go to Moscovia (Russia).” Despite causing a public uproar, however, the incident did not affect Farion’s political career, something quite typical for modern Ukraine.
The future champion of the “purity” of the Ukrainian language was born in Lviv in 1964, to a librarian mother and machine fitter father. After graduating from school, she briefly worked in a regional library herself, and in 1982 entered Lviv’s Ivan Franko National University, where she studied at the Department of Ukrainian Philology. While at university, Farion worked as an assistant at the Department of General Linguistics and was the head of the Center for Ukrainian Studies at the Department of Folklore Studies.
Farion was definitely no dissident at the time. She was a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, a member of the group’s Komsomol bureau, headed the club of general linguistics and Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, and was a member of the department’s International Friendship Club, where she helped foreign students learn Russian.
Farion was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) until 1989. Later, after launching a political career with the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, she stubbornly denied this fact, but was later forced to admit it after the corresponding evidence was published.
At first, Farion explained that she became a member of the CPSU because she wanted to destroy the communist system from the inside. Her political opponents didn’t really buy it, but Farion didn’t care. “Eagles don’t confess to hyenas,” she said at the time. However, a few years later, her version changed. Farion stated that she “joined this shit [the Communist Party]” guided “only by career growth motives.”
In the ‘90s, Farion taught, wrote scientific articles, and popularized the Ukrainian language. The 2004 Orange Revolution was a turning point in her life. At that time, the pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko actively relied on the nationalists during a street confrontation with supporters of Viktor Yanukovych. Ukrainian nationalist organizations which had previously been considered marginal suddenly had the opportunity to take part in legal electoral politics.
The philologist comes to power
In 2004, Lviv politician Oleg Tyahnybok became a member of the Verkhovna Rada. Shortly afterwards, he took control of the very small but highly active and radical Social-National Party of Ukraine. Tiahnibok “rebranded” the party, which became known as the The All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda [Freedom]. He subsequently removed direct references to the national-socialist ideology from the party’s symbology and political program.
Svoboda decided to act in a different way. After the Risorgimento, Massimo d’Azeglio, who took part in the fight for the unification of Italy, famously said, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” Svoboda decided to “make” proper Ukrainians, and turned the Ukrainian language into a yardstick by which loyalty to the Ukrainian state was measured. That’s when the philology professor turned out to be very useful for the party.
In 2006, Farion was elected to the Lviv Regional Rada (parliament), and in 2012, during the period of Svoboda’s greatest electoral success, she became a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada (national parliament), joining the its Committee on Science and Education. However, as a deputy she became known not so much for lawmaking as her involvement in scandals.
“The people who don’t know the language are either politically biased or mentally retarded. Which coordinate system are you part of?” she asked then-Prime Minister of Ukraine Nikolai Azarov – who defended the Russian language – during a parliamentary meeting.
“Bilingualism did not ‘develop historically’ but became the legacy of Moscow’s occupation, repression, genocide, mixed marriages, the prohibition of the Ukrainian language, and planned and natural migration,” Farion fumed.
As an MP, she actively opposed the Kolesnichenko-Kivalov law on regional languages in Ukraine, which effectively granted the country’s predominantly Russian-speaking regions the right to use the tongue as a second language. According to Farion, the aim of this law was not to ensure the right to speak a person’s native language, but to promote “degeneration and degradation.”
“The Russian language in Ukraine cannot be either a regional or a second state language, but only [the language of] occupants,” said Farion, who encouraged “true Ukrainians” to “aggressively resist everything Muscovite.”
In 2014, in elections held after the Western-backed Maidan coup, Farion lost her seat in the parliament for good. However, she remained a public figure in Ukraine.
Her war
With every year, Farion’s statements became more scandalous and provocative. For example, she said that “if Ukrainians had simply kicked every Muscovite in the jaw, [Ukraine] would have won the war long ago.” Farion also often blamed the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine’s southeastern regions for sparking the Civil War, which engulfed Ukraine in 2014. She called on the authorities to refuse employment and education to anyone who unable to speak Ukrainian, and in 2018 called Russian-speaking Ukrainians “mentally retarded traitors.”
In 2021, after seeing a photo of 19-year-old Ukrainian Olympic medalist Yaroslava Maguchikh standing alongside her Russian rival Maria Lasitskene, Farion called Maguchikh “biological waste” and said that she should be stripped of her medals. She also outlined how her grandson beat Russian children in kindergarten.
“My Dmytryk, when he comes to kindergarten, sees a certain Grisha, who says ‘privet’ [’Hi’ in Russian]. And my grandson has to teach him Ukrainian by using his little fist. The child comes home all nervous and says, ‘Grandma, there is a Muscovite in the kindergarten.’ And grandma says that Muscovites must be eliminated. And Dima eliminates the Muscovite, he punches him, [teaching him] the right pronunciation,” she said.
After the start of full-scale hostilities in 2022, Farion was critical of Russian-speaking soldiers in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). “I can’t call them Ukrainians. If they don’t speak Ukrainian, they should call themselves Russians. If they are such great patriots, they should show their patriotism,” she said about fighters from the Azov regiment, which has its roots in Ukraine’s southeast.
Farion stressed that her fight for the purity of the Ukrainian language is more important than the fighting on the front line, and called on Vladimir Zelensky and then-AFU Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny to react to the “rude behavior” of soldiers, who publicly criticized her for the scandalous remarks.
As a result, Farion was fired from the Lviv Polytechnic University where she taught, though she was later reinstated by a court ruling. However, Farion was killed before she managed to return to teaching.
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Her biography illustrates the course of Ukrainian nationalism over the past 30 years. When it was convenient, Farion positioned herself as an ideological communist; then, when the wind had changed direction, she became a radical nationalist – one that the Ukrainian authorities had no need for following the 2014 Euromaidan coup.
Farion constantly emphasized the “inferiority” of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, but ignored the fact that Ukrainian radicals from the western regions were not considered “first-class” citizens either. They were simply used by the elites to justify the idea of Ukraine’s independence and to sever ties with Russia.
In fact, western Ukraine has never felt the benefits of this independence. It remained significantly poorer than the Russian-speaking southeastern regions. Meanwhile, the oligarchs – who really run the country – have merely used the nationalists for political engineering purposes.
Currently, Ukraine’s southeast is bearing the brunt of the conflict: the fighting is taking place there, and Kiev aggressively conscripts from the region. Some Ukrainian political commentators believe that Farion’s killer was a Russian-speaking Ukrainian nationalist. In this case, it would be somewhat ironic, given her beliefs. It seems her movement indeed managed to “create” Ukrainian patriots. But ones with a different point-of-view.
By Dmitry Plotnikov, a political journalist exploring the history and current events of ex-Soviet states.
She must have been a delight to behold. I am sure she will be sadly missed. How will they find the assassin?