Close your eyes, repeat the words “Ukrainian nationalist,” and an image might spring to mind: probably a man, most likely bearded, possibly with a shaved head and a drooping moustache. Perhaps he will be dressed in a black uniform, or a leather jacket and boots.

Depending on where you come from, you may additionally imagine an anti-Semite or a murderer of Polish peasants. Like any other stereotype, this one will be related to some historical realities. Two generations ago, there were Ukrainians who, caught between two of the most murderous dictatorships in history, collaborated with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. There were some who participated in the mass murder of Poles and some who participated in the mass murder of Jews.

But this grim image also leaves out some other historical realities. It excludes another, less infamous group of Ukrainian nationalists, the ones who—in a country with luckier geography—would have become the Giuseppe Garibaldis, the Sándor Petőfis, or the Thomas Jeffersons of the modern Ukrainian state. It leaves out the enlightened nationalist Mykhailo Hrushevsky, for example, who wrote the first histories of Ukraine and chaired Ukraine’s short-lived independent parliament in 1917 and 1918, before Ukraine’s defeat and incorporation into the USSR.

Above all, it leaves out the story of what actually happened to the vast majority of Ukrainian nationalists in the twentieth century: They became prominent targets of purges, artificial famines, and deportations. Between three and five million Ukrainian peasants were deliberately starved to death in 1932 and 1933 because Joseph Stalin feared the power of rural nationalism. After they were wiped out, Russians, deported from elsewhere in the USSR, were sometimes sent to live in their empty villages in order to complete the process of cultural genocide. Arrests of people whom the state considered “too Ukrainian” continued into the 1980s.

By 1990, when the Soviet Union was beginning to break apart, the widespread result was not, therefore, a Ukraine awash with textbook nationalists marching in parades, but a nation filled with people who had no national identity whatsoever. In that year, I spent a few weeks in L’viv, in western Ukraine, reporting on the nascent independence movement. Hotels were scarce, so I stayed in the apartment of two middle-aged musicians, Władek and Irina. At the time, I didn’t write about them at all, but now I realize that their apathy and their cynicism about independent Ukraine were just as significant as the heated debates that the flag-waving nationalists were then holding in L’viv’s central square.