Why Ukraine? – the roots
of conflict
Recent world
events are harsh enough without the mind-numbingly ignorant comments of several
Americans who should know better. To understand the current Ukraine crisis
requires more than just reading the headlines. It requires trying to understand
Vladimir Putin and his mindset. Even more significantly, it requires understanding what lies before the present unrest - in other words, a sense of history.
(You knew it was coming, didn’t you?)
As for Putin it’s fairly simple: In December
of 2021 he called the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago as the
demise of what he called "historical Russia." He then said, "We
turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over
1,000 years was largely lost," said Putin, saying 25 million Russian
people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from
Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy."
The greatest lie here is that those “Russians”
were in the main immigrants pushed by the Rulers in Moscow to settle and overwhelm
these formerly non-Russian political units. Consider Kazakhstan as just one
example of how it worked. The forced settlement of the nomadic Kazakhs in the
Soviet period, combined with large-scale Slavic in-migration, strikingly
altered the Kazakh way of life, and led to considerable settlement and urbanization
in Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs’ traditional customs still, uneasily coexist
alongside forced incursions of the modern and still Russian influenced world. During
the 19th century (not 1000 years ago!) about 400,000 Russians flooded into
Kazakhstan, and these were supplemented by about 1,000,000 Slavs, Germans, Jews,
and others who immigrated to the region during the first third of the 20th
century. The immigrants crowded Kazakhs off the best pastures and watered
lands, rendering many tribes destitute. Nominally a fairly permissively Muslim
people, (as were Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan etc.,) Russian incursion
served primarily to harden their mindset as Russian was forced as the national
language.
Soviet Russia
has had the same issues with Chechens and other minority groups. Since almost
all of the primarily Islamic “istans” have great mineral wealth, Putin’s real concern
is the most likely possibility that truly independent entities might choose not
to share with Moscow. Sadly, a number of these, now just nominally independent,
nations have replaced corrupt regimes subservient to Moscow with corrupt local
demigods subservient to Russian oligarchs and themselves. Since Ukraine is much
more western and historically a trade partner of Moscow, subjugation was harder
and cruel to an incredible degree.
At the heart of
the matter is an episode of history that many Americans have either never heard
of or have purged from their memory banks. Ask the average American what the
word “Holodomor” means, and a blank stare will probably be the response. Ask
the same individual what the Irish Potato famine was, and they will probably have
some reasonable answer. Why is this?
The Irish
potato famine, although a 19th century disaster happened to English
speakers who were of western European stock. It also spurred a wave of Irish emigration,
much of it to the US. Without the gory details, the high-end estimate of the
death toll in the Great Famine is about 1.5 million deaths.
Holodomor
literally translated from Ukrainian means "death by hunger",
"killing by hunger, killing by starvation", or alternately, "murder
by hunger or starvation." In English, the Holodomor has also been referred
to as the artificial famine, famine genocide, terror famine, and
terror-genocide. Since the events triggered a wave of Ukrainian emigration for
those with the means to escape, many to the US and Canada, the term was used in
such print media as were available to those groups. It was used in print in the
1930s in Ukrainian language in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor and by Ukrainian
immigrant groups in the United States and Canada.
in the Soviet
Union, of which Ukraine was (by implied threat of military force) a constituent
republic, any references to the famine were dismissed as anti-Soviet
propaganda, even after de-Stalinization in 1956, until the declassification and
publication of historical documents in the late 1980s made continued denial of
the catastrophe unsustainable.
So, what was it
and why is it important? The roots of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet Communist
leader, Joseph Stalin, to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist
Party representatives forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal
property, and sometimes housing, to collective farms, and they deported (or “liquidated”)
kulaks, or wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted
collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a sharp fall-off in grain production,
the collapse of the Ukrainian rural economy, and food shortages. It also resulted
in peasant rebellions, including armed uprisings, in some parts of Ukraine.
The rebellions
worried Stalin because they were unfolding in a region which had, a decade
earlier, fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.
(So much for the “happy Socialist family” myth). Even Ukrainian Communist party
officials showed anger and resistance to the state agricultural policy. That autumn, the Soviet Politburo, in Moscow,
enacted a series of measures which deepened the famine in the Ukrainian
countryside. Farms, villages, and entire towns in Ukraine were placed on
blacklists and prevented from receiving food. Peasants were forbidden to leave
the Ukrainian republic in search of food. Despite growing Ukrainian starvation,
food requisitions from Ukraine were increased and aid was not
provided in sufficient quantities. The disaster was measurably worsened in
1932–33, when organized groups of police and communist apparatchiks ransacked
the homes of peasants and took everything edible, from crops to personal food
supplies to pets.
The result of
Stalin’s brutal campaign was an inhumane catastrophe. Between 1931 and 1934 at
least 3.9 million Ukrainians died of state enforced starvation. Official
records, repressed by Stalin for years contain numerous descriptions of
instances of cannibalism, brutality, and lynching. Mass graves were dug across
the countryside. Hunger also affected the urban population, though many were
able to survive thanks to ration cards. In Ukraine’s largest cities, corpses
could be seen on the street.
Also, on Stalin’s
orders, the famine was accompanied by a systematic state-sponsored effort to
undermine and dilute Ukrainian identity. As millions of peasants starved,
agents of the Soviet secret police undermined the Ukrainian political
establishment and intelligentsia. The famine was accompanied by a campaign of
repression and persecution that was carried out against Ukrainian culture and
Ukrainian religious leaders, most of whom were too weak to resist. The previous
official policy of encouraging the use of the Ukrainian language, was halted by
decree. Persons connected to the former short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic
that had been declared in June 1917, after the February Revolution, but dismantled
after the Bolsheviks conquered Ukrainian territory—was subjected to vicious
reprisals. All those accused during this campaign were publicly vilified,
jailed, sent to Siberian Gulags, or executed.
Even as the
famine was happening, all news of it was deliberately silenced by Soviet
bureaucrats. Party officials did not mention it in public. Western journalists
based in Moscow were instructed not to write about it. Stalin even ordered
suppression of the results of a 1937 census. Officials supervising the census
were arrested and murdered, primarily because the figures revealed the
decimation of Ukraine’s population.
Although the
famine was discussed during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in World War II, any
mention of it was quashed again during the postwar years. The first
public mention of it in the Soviet Union was in 1986, in the aftermath
of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, which was also initially kept
secret by Soviet authorities. Because
the famine was so deadly, and because it was officially denied by the Kremlin
for more than half a century, it has retained a huge place in Ukrainian public
memory, particularly since independence.
By early 2019,
16 nations, including the Vatican, had recognized the Holodomor as a genocide,
and both houses of the United States Congress had passed resolutions declaring
that “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against the
Ukrainians in 1932–1933.”
And yet:
Donald Trump said this yesterday:
"You say,
what's the purpose of this? They had a country. You could see it was a country where
there was a lot of love and we're doing it because, you know, somebody
wants to make his country larger or he wants to put it back the way it
was when actually it didn't work very well,"
This apologia
is nauseating from a man whose nose is so far up Putin’s arse that he can
barely breathe. He then, in another burst of blather, stated that “No one was
as tough on Russia as I was.” This would
be laughable if it didn’t so clearly point to Trump’s narcissistic belief that
everything Trump is the best, accompanied by his abysmal lack of knowledge of
the history involved. He has become an American embarrassment to many, while,
sadly, retaining his blindly allegiant sycophant core. And by the way, we used
to refer to “wanting to make his country larger” as Imperialism and criticized
western European powers for it. The United Nations, of which Russia is a member,
at least on paper, also has verbiage on self-determination in its charter
This litany of
misinformation has been further exacerbated and distorted by allegations of
persons such as Candace Owens who stated categorically that “NATO Eastward
expansion was prohibited in writing by its own charter. This is, simply put, a
lie, furthered by Putin’s assertion of the same falsehood. There is absolutely
zero written statement of any sort which specifies limits to NATO, but Putin
uses his own expansionist mindset when lying about it. The assumption that NATO
threatens Russia is a figment of his own psyche, projecting his own motives on
the Western allies.
Worse yet, Fox
News has apparently revived Axis Sally, and Lord Haw Haw (American William
Joyce, who broadcast Nazi propaganda to the UK from Germany during the Second
World War) in the personage of Tucker Carlson.
The Kremlin has
apparently instructed Russian state media to feature Fox News host Tucker
Carlson "as much as possible” in a leaked 12-page war memo, titled
"For Media and Commentators." The official release told Russian media
that it is "essential" to use more Carlson segments in their coverage
because of his positions on the war in Ukraine. Carlson "sharply
criticizes" the actions of the United States and NATO and their
"negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine," the memo said,
per the media outlet. He is also critical of the "defiantly provocative
behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the
Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally," the memo
continued. According to metadata reviewed
by the media outlet, it was produced by a Russian government agency called the
Department of Information and Telecommunications Support.
Meanwhile, ABC
News’ chief Washington correspondent on Thursday accused Carlson of
"almost a plagiarism" of Putin, adding that the Fox News host copies
him "almost word for word." Josef Stalin would have been so proud of
“Moscow Tucker.”
Ukraine is an
independent state which simply wants to remain one in the face of aggression
and expansionist efforts of a nation which inflicted an unforgiveable genocide
against its people less than a century ago.
