Why Ukraine? The Roots of Conflict

 

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 19^th 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.