A long, but very worthwhile read explaining what has happened in Ukraine. AMERICA’S-- AND EUROPE’S-- BLOODY LEGACY IN UKRAINE Victor Rud Chairman, Committee on International Affairs & Foreign Policy Ukrainian American Bar Association [email protected] THE DINNER Friday night before Thanksgiving, and New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel was the place to be seen. The atmosphere was bubbly. Over a thousand of America’s beautiful people from politics, to the media, to the clergy to whatever. The waiters, freshly starched, were so earnest you could forgive them their affectation of “Mesdames” and “Monsieurs” . The menu? Beluga Caviar Canapes, Coulibiac of Lake Trout, Filet de Boeuf Strogonoff, with New Green Peas and Potatoes Noisette, Autumn Salad, Risolle of Cheese, all rounded out with Bombe Glace Chocolate Praline Wladimire Gourmandises and Café Filtre. And, yes, champagne. That same evening, November 24, 1933, the ambiance in Ukraine was colder, and the menu (entrée only) was decidedly uninspiring: human trachea . . .and no champagne. Bland on the palate--like calamari, but without the garlic or the sauce. Boiling would have helped soften the gristle. But that wasn’t in the cards. The oven in the village cottage had been destroyed, the bricks pulverized to prevent rebuilding, and all cooking utensils confiscated. There already was a foot of snow on the ground. Since what had been the oven had also been the only heat source for the cottage, the temperature was the same, inside and out. For a few in the village there were other body parts, the shriveled organs, and the even more desiccated muscle. The heart was the best. The brain, better still. But that was a pain. Hard to get at unless it was the skull of an infant. Overall, not that much on the bones of cadavers, still moving or no longer. But that is what a mother, driven by starvation to otherworldly insanity, was reduced to eating--often, one of her own children. At times a child who already starved to death, at other times a child who, with barely a wisp of life remaining, she would kill in its sleep to try to save the siblings. After the cemeteries were emptied, kidnapping became a food source. But it never helped. Neither did a despondent father’s cutting off strips of what remained of his flesh. At most, the inevitable was merely postponed for a few hours or days. At the end, each person became a cannibal of himself, as starvation caused the body to start eating parts of itself to sustain the most vital organs—the heart, the brain. And it was the inevitability of it all, the immutable, screaming hopelessness of it all, that was the psychological side of suffering a horrific vengeance, so degenerate that the moniker “genocide” wastes to nothingnesss. In a matter of months, a country where every other citizen seemed to aspire to be a poet, was reduced to a vast, mute necropolis. Ukrainians call it the “Holodomor”— torture to death by starvation. The murder rate of the apocalypse wrought by Moscow upon the Ukrainians was so massive that Stalin simply shot the census takers for “undercounting the population.” Ten million was the number that circulated among the Communist Party nomenklatura. Folks, that’s 10,000,000 civilians. In less than a year. By comparison, the US suffered some 660,000 military deaths in all wars over a period of 250 years. For those in the West who have some vague awareness of “a famine”, it is most often dismissed with a shrug as a by-product of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture, a “consequence” (somehow) of a misbegotten economic policy that simply went amok. A famine? Certainly unfortunate, but at the end an “acceptable cost.” (As if building the autobahn would excuse Germany’s extermination of the Jews.) But hunger, privation and even starving to death in other parts of the Soviet Union in the course of a generic collectivization drive are one thing. Being intentionally starved to death is another. Malcolm Muggeridge interviewed: “The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind.” The situation in Ukraine was utterly unique compared to the rest of the then Soviet Union. “Collectivization [of agriculture] in Ukraine has a special task . . . to destroy the social basis of Ukrainian nationalism–individually owned peasant agriculture,” wrote Proletarska Pravda in 1930. Well, it didn’t work. With collectivization virtually complete in early 1932, Ukrainian resistance to Russian rule remained unabated. Collectivization having failed to subdue the nation, and having already exterminated hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s intellectual, religious and cultural leaders, Stalin turned his attention against the Ukrainian countryside. There, in the neatly white-washed village cottages, was the well-spring of Ukraine’s national self-identity and home for the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population. In August 11, 1932, the Father of Nations wrote to his executioner in Ukraine, Lazar Kaganovich: “Things in Ukraine are terrible . . . If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine . . . .” After attacking “nationalist” elements in Ukraine, Stalin instructed his future brother-in-law: “Give yourself the task of transforming Ukraine into truly a fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic.” (Rather like a letter from Putin to his now defunct shill Yanukovych, no?) The gastric vitriol in the state-controlled press against “Ukrainian nationalists” was palpable. Ukraine, a mere 2.5% the size of the colossus to the North, was about to be vaporized. THE THIRD HORSEMAN The Kremlin’s plan was simple and diabolical--the world’s first “famine on command.” Oxford’s Professor Norman Davies, wrote , “The world has seen many terrible famines, many aggravated by civil war. But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.” Valentin Berezhkov was Stalin’s personal interpreter at his talks with Churchill and Roosevelt at the infamous Yalta Conference. Previous to that he was personal interpreter for Vyacheslav Molotov, Litvinov’s successor as “People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs” striking the secret joint venture deal with Hitler in 1939, and triggering WWII. Berezhkov spent many years in Ukraine, and wrote about his experience during the Holodomor in his memoirs: “In the past, the word combination that is the title of this chapter [“Famine in the Ukraine”] would have been taken as a contradiction in terms. A fabulously rich country with fertile lands, vast natural resources, and a hardworking people . . . and suddenly – famine! In time of peace, too!” Eo instante, a scrap of bread became the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. In the very breadbasket of Europe, in its very geographic center. No cost (actually, a communist can honorably turn a capitalist profit on it). Predictable. Certain. And fully controllable to satisfy the sticklers who would be concerned about “collateral damage” to your neighborhood branch of the GPU (NKVD, KGB etc.) And—finally--facially deniable. No chemical residue, no radiation. Nothing, literally To this day, if not denied outright, Russia’s starvation of Ukrainians is airily dismissed by Moscow and fellow travelers as a result of lazy peasants, bad crops, worse weather, stupid peasants, lousy infrastructure, dirty peasants, voracious locusts (well, OK, no locusts in Ukraine), too much rain, lunar eclipse, not enough rain, solar eclipse, meteor showers, asteroid collision, sabotage by Polish agents (mind as well include the CIA . . oops, not in existence at that time; how about the Chinese?) a misguided frolic toward a brave new world that simply screwed up an economic delusion that was already pretty well screwed up anyway (really, now, how can you blame youthful exuberance?). We’ve heard it all. Of Biblical proportions, yet manifestly not an Act of God, Russia’s starvation of Ukraine was intended to break the back of Ukrainian resistance to Moscow’s Russian rule. It was intended, as Professor Davies and others have written, to forever inter any notion of Ukrainian statehood. The engineered starvation was the continuation of Moscow’s war against the Ukrainians and their very ethos as a nation (Is that why Putin whispered to President Bush that “Ukraine is not a nation”?,) And “war” was precisely the characterization given by Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin’s favorite assassin and the guru behind Stalin’s penetration of the America’s Manhattan Project during WWII. (Ted Turner to Tom Brokaw—“the KGB is an honorable profession” -- would be proud. Putin? Ecstatic.) And food was the weapon in that war. Ukraine’s borders were sealed; no food in, no people out. The measures specifically included territories that historically were ethnographically Ukrainian, but by then had been annexed by Russia. Promptly after the August 1932 harvest in Ukraine, all forms of sustenance were confiscated from Ukrainian villages. Stalin, Putin’s “efficient manager”, personally micromanaged the ethnic cleansing. His January 1, 1933, order to Kossior, then a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, dictated a macabre protocol denying starving Ukrainian villagers access to forage grain intended for horses (those that still survived) to be used in the Spring sowing in 1933. The feeding was to be done in the presence of three witnesses, including at least one party functionary, all to be written down and signed. “Merciless persecution” was prescribed for the triumvirate that would allow humans access to horse feed. But human feed was nowhere to be had. Seed grain for next year’s sowing was removed from the villages, but stored under armed guard in special bunkers. Grain and dairy product that were exportable, were. Daily fare on the table and in the mouths of Ukrainians – a mix of worms and weeds—was simply removed and destroyed. Farming tools were confiscated. Human excrement was minutely examined to determine a possible food source until even that stopped; there wasn’t enough for the human body to process. Stray dogs were shot in preparation for the Sochi olypmics—80 years earlier, Putin’s role models bravely shot stray dogs, and cats to further reduce any possible source of nutrition. Vast fields of grain that were not harvested for export, were guarded day and night by special security troops, smoldering until the grain rotted into the ground. A bullet to the unfortunate who tried to pick a grain or two of his own labor. The Ukrainian word for starvation – “holod”—was decreed a “counter-revolutionary rumor” and its use a capital offense. Death certificates could not record starvation as the cause of death, but soon even that formality was dropped, the death roll being too massive. It was a medal on the proud chest of heroic sadists for a “job well done”, and a black flag over a village that they totally depopulated. THE VICTORY The unprecedented ethnic cleansing was not just for the hell of it. A report by the “Soviet of Peoples Commissars of the USSR” to the head of the GULAG, the infamous Matvei Berman, detailed the resettlement of Russians to the “sparsely populated” areas of Ukraine. Yet another damning proof in a catalog of proofs of the calculated, pre-meditated intent: the resettlement plans were put into place before the forced starvation was put into play. The millions transplanted into the cleansed Ukrainian countryside were largely Russian retired Red Army officers, functionaries of the satanic secret police and other whose loyalty was thus rewarded. Look here for the roots of the “east/west” split in Ukraine. (Western Ukraine at the time was under Polish rule.) It’s the progeny of the original persecutors and Russian “resettlers” that formed Moscow’s fifth column in Ukraine, and that today “lean toward Russia”. Moscow was happy. Pavel Postyshev, top level acolyte: “We have annihilated the nationalist counter-revolution during the past year we have exposed and destroyed nationalist deviationalism . . . . 1933 was the year of the overthrow of the Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolution.” Stalin’s deputy, Stanislav Kossior: “Acknowledging the great amount of work put . . . into the fight against Ukrainian nationalist and other counter-revolutionary elements, work which has not ceased and which shall not cease, we must say that of course we gave the nationalists a beating, a good one, as the saying goes, we hit the spot.” Speaking in New York on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Holodomor, Rafael Lemkin, author and father of the UN Genocide Convention, condemned Russia’s ongoing genocide in Ukraine as reaching beyond the mere extermination of beings, and targeting the erasure of the nation’s core sense of identity and very existence. So there it is . . . the “common history” between the Ukraine and Russia mouthed in seemingly practiced unison today by America’s media. The audience invariably concludes that there must, simply must, be some legitimacy to Russia’s claims on Ukraine. It’s the common history between the rapist and his victim. And it’s not as if no one knew about all this stuff at the time. In Switzerland, the Neue Zuericher Zeitung wrote: “The terrible famine in Ukraine is a fact which no longer can be kept secret from the world. . . It is possible that in this summer millions of Ukrainian peasants have died of hunger. This unprecedented plunder, this planned extirpation of a great people is carried out not in some distant uncivilized country, but within the limits of our own Continent.” In Paris, Le¬ Matin wrote: “The systematically organized famine has as its objective the destruction of a nation, whose only crime is that it is striving for freedom . . . Ukraine has come under the impervious rule of Moscow and the communist regime against her will.” THE COVER-UP And so, as Europe feasted in Ukrainian grain, butter and other foodstuffs, the very Ukrainian farmers who for millennia tilled the soil of the world’s cornucopia, themselves became the fertilizer (100% organic) for that very soil. Europe was the market for the food ripped away from the murdered who produced it. With the above news reports being the exception, the Kremlin’s propaganda mill steamrolled reality. “In spite of the fact that reliable information was published at the time, it [the Holodomor] has disappeared from the public consciousness so completely that it represents the most successful example of the denial of genocide by its perpetrators.” So wrote James E. Mace, the pre-eminent Holodomor researcher who died under circumstances in Kyiv that remain bizarre. Western governments, obsequious as ever, turned a blind eye. In assessing an inquiry from the House of Commons, the British Foreign described its calculus: “We do not want to make it [information about the Holodomor] public, however, because the Soviet Government would resent it and our relationship with them would be prejudiced. We cannot give this explanation in public.” This, despite the British Embassy’s own information documenting Moscow’s rampage in Ukraine that it said was “hair-raising” and “horrifying.” In the best Potemkin tradition, French Prime Minister Herriot toured Ukraine and returned to indignantly deny any famine. Bernard Shaw lampooned it. And John Paul Sartre burst crimson with fury upon any mention. But there was no lack on this side of the pond of “useful idiots,” as the Generalissimo called them. The American Quaker Henry Hodgkin wrote” “As we look at Russia’s great experiment in brotherhood, it may seem to us that some dim perception of Jesus’ way, all unbeknown, is inspiring it. . .” And then there’s Upton Sinclair: “Maybe it cost a million lives, maybe it cost 5 million --- but you cannot think intelligently about it unless you ask yourself how many millions it might have cost if the changes had not been made . . . . Some people will say that this looks like condoning wholesale murder. That is not true; it is merely trying to evaluate a revolution. There has never been a great social change in history without killing.” Back to Friday night at the Waldorf…. THE BETRAYAL As Stalin was scything millions of Ukrainian souls out of existence, America celebrated his shill, Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Max was the perfect choice with America. Pleasingly rotund, with a ready smile and a twinkle in his eye as his pudgy fingers playing with his cigarette holder, Max could charm a cobra. And that’s because he was one himself. Soulless, vicious, psychotic to the core, it was Max who coined “Food is a weapon” and who charmed a hopelessly naïve FDR. (Dessert, by the way, was sinfully decadent for the earthy proletarian: “Bombe Glace Chocolate Praline Wladimire Gourmandises.”) Max was in all his cheeky glory, as the cream of American society and dowagers galore rose to their feet and lustily sang The Internationale, the Soviet anthem (later adopted by Vlad for Russia). The reason for all the good cheer? Washington’s diplomatic recognition of the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. And it wasn’t as if Washington didn’t know about Russia’s barbarity in Ukraine. The archives are clear. And for Stalin, America’s recognition was the holy (strange word to use) grail… holy (again, that word) water anointment by the world’s leading democracy of a demonic war criminal. With the wave of a pen, America’s action in the eyes of the world stamped affirmation, credibility and legitimacy onto a monstrous netherworld. Caligula was now legit, diplomatic soirees, canapés . . . the works. Membership in the League of Nations became a no-brainer, and the League hurriedly interring the Ukrainian horror as “a very sensitive matter.” There are, after all, priorities. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS America’s diplomatic recognition in the middle of the real world Hunger Games was described thusly by New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty: “Litvinov is taking home a pretty fat turkey.” Duranty should know. A Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, Duranty was the only Western correspondent that Stalin allowed to accompany Litvinov on his trip to seduce FDR. Later that year, on Christmas day, Stalin rewarded Duranty with a personal interview (“You have done a good job reporting on the Soviet Union”.) How did Duranty get the gig? Two years earlier, a June 4, 1931 memo from the US Embassy in Berlin to the State Department in Washington betrayed the dirty little secret: Duranty disclosed to US Embassy personnel that The New York Times had struck a deal with Stalin to only report Moscow’s party line. (CNN would strike the same deal with Saddam Hussein decades later.) Privately, however, to William Strang, the counselor at the British Embassy in Moscow, and to United Press International, Stalin’s mouthpiece admitted to 10 million corpses and a “ghastly horror” in Ukraine, that Ukraine “has been bled white”. The NYT was the world’s newspaper of record, and anything written contrary about the Holodomor simply didn’t stand a chance. Walter Duranty, its Moscow correspondent, was the most influential journalist in the world. He was a journalistic celebrity and a confidant of such individuals as industrialist Armand Hammer, Isadora Duncan, George Bernard Shaw and Sinclair Lewis. Washington and the NYT took the lead in pushing a “monstrous hoax” on the world, so characterized later by UPI’s Eugene Lyons, himself a participant in that very hoax. One intrepid Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, bucked the media cartel, reported the truth, was prompted slandered by The New York Times, and ostracized by Western journalists stationed in Moscow, Lyons included. Jones was murdered two years later by the predecessors of the KGB heros who more recently murdered other journalists and other prey that Putin hasn’t warmed to. Remember Anna Politkovskaya (gunshot), Alexander Litvinenko (polonium laced London tea), et al 3-176 (swan dives from the 5th floor, etc.)? But Jones’ intrepid, fatal reporting was a drop in the bucket. George Orwell summarized it all: “Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933 . . .involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of Russophiles.” SO WHAT? But the point of this vomitive history is not simply its irony, injustice, media fraud, hypocrisy or complicity. It’s Washington’s and Europe’s felonious stupidity (that’s the only word in the thesaurus that fits, though “inane” would do as well). And the penalty for that felony was capital punishment for American soldiers who over two generations were deployed ‘round the world, sacrificing lives to stem a tide of Soviet aggression. America’s home front sat motionless, scarcely able to breathe lest an errant air current set off the button. The point, therefore, is that Russian conquest, occupation and control of Ukraine was pivotal to the creation, and ongoing viability of the USSR. This, in turn, went to the very core of American national security for generations. So why did the US never support, but to the contrary subverted, Ukraine’s ages long bid for freedom? Washington did this repeatedly, consistently and manifestly against its own interest. Tens of thousands of American lives, trillions in treasure, was the cost. Towards the end of that empire, Washington directed Ukraine to reconcile itself to remaining a captive nation. Despite the sage advice, Ukraine ignored the sage advice, declared its independence and snapped the razor wire binding that empire. Abruptly, Washington took the credit. And suddenly, Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world, succeeding to roughly the half of the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal that was on its territory. So what was Washington’s brilliant move? It induced Ukraine to surrender its nuclear deterrent to Russia in exchange for US guarantees of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. By both the US and Russia. So what now, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? First, however, the run-up. THE TRAMPOLINE FOR THE FUTURE To reconstitute, in 1922, the old Russian Empire as a new “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics“, the re-conquest and re-occupation of Ukraine after WWI was key: “If we lose Ukraine we lose our head,” said Lenin. (Not, mind you, that Ukraine was ever Russia’s to lose.) Hopelessly outgunned, Ukraine battled both the Russian Red Army and the Russian White Army. Its capital, Kyiv, changed hands fourteen times in two years. While Russia “unreservedly recognized the independence of Ukraine,” on the same day it invaded the country. Lubynsky, a Ukrainian diplomat at the time, responded prophetically: “The Bolshevik regime has proclaimed the principle of self-determination only to fight more resolutely against the introduction of this principle into life. The government of the Bolsheviks, which is chasing out the Constituent Assembly, this government which is based upon the bayonets of the mercenary soldiers, will never adopt the just principle of self-determination because it knows that not only do Ukraine and the other nations of the former Empire not recognize it as the legitimate government but the Russian people as well.” Warning Europe and the US of the threat that Moscow would bring to their doorstep a generation later, Ukraine was breezily waved off by Washington. And her pleas for WWI surplus blankets and expired medicines were ignored with a sniff. There was no room for Ukraine in Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.’’ (Point Six, dealing with “Russia”, was prepared by the US in consultation with Russia’s US Ambassador Bakhmetieff.) Ukraine was quartered, with the lion’s share tossed to Moscow. Reconquered by now a Communist Russia, Ukraine was pivotal Russia’s formation of the reconstituted Russian Empire, now a freshly minted “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” For generations afterwards, Moscow exploited Ukraine as the economic and industrial locomotive of its empire, the agricultural cornucopia, and the geopolitical linchpin of that “union.”And the site of half of its nuclear arsenal. In the early 1920’s a famine – this time drought induced--ravaged Ukraine and parts of southern Russia. The US responded with massive food aid for Russia via the American Relief Administration with Herbert Hoover at its head. Moscow barred deliveries to Ukraine, and additionally confiscated food from Ukraine to feed Russia. It was a dress rehearsal for what would be wrought a decade later. The US had no objections, and openly expressed a lack of sympathy for any notion of Ukrainian independence. “[T]he Soviet government informed the Americans that grain was being shipped from Ukraine to the famine victims on the Volga. . . . In fact politics was at the heart of the matter. . . Moscow had good reason to be wary of Ukraine’s peasants and therefore of having American relief workers at liberty among them. . . .” As far as the American members of the ARA were concerned, however, it was all “Russia.” “None of the Americans in Russia could work up any sympathy for the cause of Ukrainian independence . . .” So wrote the American delegation at the time. And Stalin took note—not for nothing was he the Commissar of Nationalities. Nine years after the Holodomor, Nazi Germany turned on its partner, Stalin, as 3,200,000 German Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian, Finnish, Spanish and Slovakian troops invaded the USSR. (By comparison, on D Day, the Allies’ invasion of Normandy involved 132,000 troops.) with Ukraine as simultaneously the prize and the crucible. It was one of the few countries in all of Nazi occupied Europe to be ruled directly from Berlin. Ukraine had no puppet government as did Quisling’s Norway or Petain’s Vichy France, nor did it have a fascist party like those not only in Norway and Hungary, but also the tiny countries of Holland Belgium and Denmark. The Saturday Evening Post’s Edgar Snow wrote: “The whole titanic struggle, which some are so apt to dismiss as ‘the Russian glory,’ was first of all a Ukrainian war. ***No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry and its humanity.” Ukraine lost more than 9 million of its population, the greatest human loss of any country in WWII, wrote English historian Norman Davies; more losses than the combined military losses of the United States, the British Commonwealth, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy. This was even more horrific than the comparison suggests, since more than half of Ukraine’s losses were civilians. An additional more than 2 million Ukrainians were deported as slave laborers to Germany. Toward the end and after WWII, US troops in Europe, in an unholy alliance with Stalin’s NKVD, hunted down Holodomor survivors, forcibly returning them to Stalin. Where two despots stumbled, America willfully picked up the baton in a homicidal relay race in the ultimate hunt. Not content with having awarded Stalin with diplomatic recognition of his legitimacy during the Holodomor, the US now provided a bonus by rounding up its remnants. No room for bourgeois sensitivity sessions here: “Without regard to their personal wishes and by force if necessary” was the repatriation order of January 4, 1946, of the Headquarters, U.S. Armed Forces, European Theatre. “Operation Keelhaul”. The name was all you had to know about the horror inflicted upon a desperate, trembling mass of third class humanity, already persecuted beyond measure. Untold numbers were captured and returned, receiving a kick Makarov bullet to the back of the skull or a frozen death in the GULAG . Holodomor Famine survivors who survived the Allies’ dragnet in Europe and remained in the West were, since their arrival, simply disbelieved, ridiculed, lampooned, dismissed, and slandered as they desperately sought to tell the world about the Holodomor and the other atrocities committed by “Uncle Joe.” WEST MEETS EAST At the same time, America’s Vice President Henry Wallace visited Kolyma, a vast Siberian expanse of death camps that were disproportionately the last stop not only for Ukrainians but also for the proud Georgians, the stalwart Balts, and other nationalities. Wallace was oblivious to it all, taking in the sights of Sochi’s pedigree. Kolyma was heavily prepped for America’s second in command as another Potemkin village, this time supersized. The area of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, combined. Or larger than France, Spain, Japan, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Greece, Sweden and North Korea. Combined. Take your pick. Kolyma was also the destination for Ukrainians repatriated by the United States, not immediately murdered but marked to die with compatriots already there. The United States Vice President had travelled to Siberia from the East, Ukrainians from the West. Almost like two railroads linking east and west at Promontory Rock, Utah in the American West. Wallace couldn’t suppress paroxysms of joy over the parallels for him between the US and “the Wild West of Russia” and also the “immensely fresh air.” He concluded his visit: “Both Russians and the Americans are groping for a way of life that will enable the common man everywhere in the world to get the most good.” It was surreal. His hosts, all NKVD executioners, were dressed in American boots and clothing, and afterwards guffawed uproariously at America’s second-in-command. In the meantime, in reoccupied Ukraine, after battling first the Nazis the Ukrainian underground fought reinvading Soviet interior security forces numbering more troops than the US fielded in Vietnam. No assistance or even recognition from the West. The French resistance solidified only after Allied victory was assured after D-Day. The Ukrainian underground however knew that it was a lost cause almost from inception. Not compromising with either tyrant, Hitler or Stalin, the Ukrainians’ hopeless struggle continued into the 1950’s, sabotaging rail lines Soviet troops to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Image the shock upon their seeing Soviet security troops (as in Kolyma and other islands of the GULAG archipelago) armed, clothed, fed and equipped by the US taxpayer, all under the Lend-Lease program that had run amok. Pavel Sudoplatov, see above, was one of those Soviet heros. Battling Ukrainians was his reward after stealing American A-bomb secrets. BACK IN WASHINGTON At the same time, on August 18, 1948 the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department sent a memo the National Security Council at the White House, discussing Ukraine and the “national unity” of the USSR. A quarter century after establishment of the USSR, America didn’t have a clue that the USSR was not a unitary nation, not all “Russia”, but a multinational empire comprised of subjugated and now colonial nations, such as Ukraine, Georgia and other countries of the Caucasus, BeloRus, the Balts, and the nations of Central Asia. Others had simply been obliterated by Moscow. In toto, the NSC memo was predicated on a nonexistent achievement of the ultimate Russian dream: In 1870 by Russian Interior Minister Dmitri Tolstoy: “The ultimate goal in the education of the non-Russians must be their russification and assimilation within the Russian nation.” And Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote: that “All people should become Russian and Russian above all else, because the Russian national idea is universal.” US totally ignored reality, and by tenaciously treating the USSR as a Russian monolith it endorsed a massive rewrite of reality, necessarily ascribing to Moscow the achievement of the “virtual reality” that it was desperately striving for as goal #1. For American Ukraine was simply a part of “Russia,” just as Pennsylvania or Texas was a part of the US. At the end of the day, Ukraine as a nation did not exist (as Putin has said) and therefore it could not be relevant. (No contrition in Washington after Ukraine pulled the plug and unraveled the empire. And even less embarrassment in taking the credit for it.) CHICKEN “KIEV” Fast forward to 1991. Who can forget George Bush in Kyiv, lecturing Ukrainians about “suicidal nationalism”? A memorable banner greeted Bush: “If being part of an empire is so great, why did America get out of one?” Ukraine ignored the pitch, declared its independence and the Soviet Union then necessarily, predictably disintegrated in weeks. And Washington celebrated its own prescience. You would have thought that, with the US “winning” the cold war, it would have promptly initiated at all costs a considered policy to ensure the viability of the former Soviet “republics” as independent, democratic states so as to forestall any reconstitution of a Russian empire, “soviet” or not. A “Marshall Plan” a la post WWII. It never happened. It never even dawned on anyone inside the Beltway to do so, despite the US having teetered on the precipice of a nuclear holocaust for decades. Like little boys bored with the game, we simply packed up our marbles and rushed home. Yes, sporadic, disjointed assistance of various sorts was lent to Ukraine since, but without any strategic or serious vision. And drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the consequences to the US of Russia’s retooling the empire. But didn’t someone at least learn something, and finally start understanding either history or political geography? No. Which is where we are today. Sherman Garnett of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote more than a decade ago: “Whether Russian led integration on the territory of the former USSR will pose a serious, long-term military challenge to the West, depends in large part on the role that Ukraine plays or is compelled to play.” If Moscow is successful in condemning Ukraine, yet again, to the coffin air of Lubyanka, global risks and terror will go through the roof. SO NOW WHAT? Understand that Ukraine today is a vessel of eviscerated souls, their DNA imbedded with the offal of 300 years of mass murder, war crimes, recreational torture, atrocities, arson, rapacious plunder, kidnapping, massacres, homicidal russification, experimental assassinations, ethnocide, pillage, rape, ethnic cleansing, mass executions, death ships, murder quotas, stupefying terror, thought crime, and man-made starvation. Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell collapsed into one. This, then, is the “common history” between the Kremlin and Kyiv. Putin & Co. are the legatees of the persecutors, jailers, executioners. They rejoice in it, they are proud of it. No remorse, no admission, no contrition. Putin’s grandfather (no warm jolly image here) was Stalin’s cook on the night of the Waldorf Astoria extravaganza. His father was with the NKVD for years. What do we think is in Putin’s DNA? Unless we understand what Ukrainians lived through, and who victimized whom, we understand neither them nor Putin nor Russia. Nor how it all impacts us. Nor what we are to do. It’s beyond bizarre that from WWI through today there continues a perfectly inverse correlation between Russia’s laser focus on Ukraine and the myopic, bemused glance accorded by Washington. Even today, a sovereign, independent Ukraine is regarded by Washington as something unnatural, an artificial construct, an inconvenience, fueling the largest country in the world, the quintessential terrorist state, to feel itself “surrounded,” threatened, insecure. That we don’t understand the depth of the savaging shows in the media, often asking how it is that Lenin’s statues were only now being toppled at places. It writes, as if repeating a litany, that eastern Ukraine likes, prefers, wants Russia. Uh, why? Only because of the Russian fifth column there, imported during the Holodomor, and those Ukrainians themselves who have been so castrated that they don’t know who or what they are, and how it all came about. On May 31, 1933, Gradenigo, the Italian consul in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv during the height of the man-made famine, reported to the Royal Italian Embassy in Moscow his discussion with a senior OGPU secret police officer who advised that 10-15 million starvation murders were required to tame, in the OGPU’s words, Ukraine’s “ethnographic material”. Not a nation. Not people. Not human beings. Just “ethnographic material.” Hitler’s term was untermenchen. Reporting further, Gradenigo said the government strived to ensure that “Russians would constitute the majority of the population” in certain regions of Ukraine, and thus assure that potential political difficulties would be removed. The Italian consul concluded: “However monstrous and incredible such a plan might appear, it should nevertheless be regarded as authentic and well under way. . .The current disaster will bring about a predominantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon, one will no longer be able to speak of a Ukraine, or a Ukrainian people, and thus not even of a Ukrainian problem, because Ukraine will become a de facto Russian region.” It is a prophecy fulfilled. What happens when for more than half a century you’re required to march in parades joyfully worshipping the murderers of your family, when you are required to believe that they deserved to be killed, or that they weren’t really killed but simply somehow disappeared, when you cannot grieve because you shouldn’t grieve because there’s nothing to grieve for, when you fear to whisper a word to your children and grandchildren, when you’re instead required to mouth a miasma of lies and to convince your children and grandchildren of the truth in the executioner’s denials? What happens when there is no acknowledgement, no apology, no contrition, no punishment? Of anyone? Ever? You are deformed to represent the quintessential Stockholm Syndrome, the victim identifying with his tormentor. You become a nation that condemns those who condemn its own executioners, you deny your own plight as a victim, you castigate those who seek to identify your family’s gravesites, and instead you grieve, as being unjustly accused, for those who gutted your own being. Where else –in Armenia, Israel, Cambodia, Darfur, Ethiopia?-do hapless, pitiful victims deny their victimization, a phenomenon in much of Ukraine? What led to the fact that Ukrainians are often treated as second-class citizens in their own country, afraid at times to even speak their own language? Answer that, and you will understand the demonic thoroughness of Russia’s ethnic cleansing of Ukraine—and America’s endorsement of it. And that is why the stunning revolution, the generations suppressed self-assertion that we saw in Kyiv so recently is so incredible. But it will not survive the barbaric assault from the original, the ultimate and the quintessential terrorist state. Russia, again, has invaded Ukraine. And again, where is America? Look at a map. Russia is focused, Russia acts with an idea, a purpose and a goal. We are endlessly temporizing, responding and reacting. Russia is assertive, tenacious and implacable. We are defensive, flaccid and impatient. Russia seeks to change. We seek to “manage.” Russia has a policy of expansion. We do not have a policy—we drift. Russia has a vision. We are astigmatic. Russia today is the self-declared successor of the USSR, acceding to its global embassies and assets, usurping its seat in the United Nations, but never admitting, much less assuming, any of its liabilities or repenting of its genocides. Russia never followed in Germany’s footsteps of acknowledgment, repentance or atonement, never mind reparations. Moscow remains implacable, unmoved, unchanged. It remains aggressive, combative, undeterred. It admits to nothing, denies everything and everyone, and demands all as already its own, pre-destined entitlement. Russia is a carnivorous, predator nation. It otherwise could not have bloated to become the largest country in the world, encompassing the entire third of Asia. All the while, it locks Western media, politicians and “experts” in a straitjacket of mendacity, duplicity, treachery, and a steamrolling dezinformatsia, other-worldly in its scope and effectiveness. “Russia denies the facts, makes war on the evidence, and wins!”, wrote Frenchman Marquis de Custine, after his return from visiting “the East” in the 1800’s. No less an authority than Karl Marx wrote: “The ignorance, the laziness, the pusillanimity, the perpetual fickleness and the credulousness of Western governments enabled Russia to achieve successively every one of her aims.” His co-conspirator, Friedrich Engels added about Russian diplomats: “It is this secret society, recruited originally from foreign adventurers, that has elevated the Russian empire to its present might. With iron perseverance, with eyes fixed on the goal, not shrinking from any breach of faith, any treachery, any assassination, any servility, lavishly dispersing bribes, never grown overconfident from victory, never discouraged by defeat . . . this gang, as talented as it is without conscience, rather than all the Russian armies put together, that have contributed to the extension of Russian’s borders . . . . [It is this gang] that has made Russia great, powerful and feared, and has opened up for it the way to world domination. In so doing, however, it has also strengthened the power of tsarism internally. For the vulgar patriotic public, the glory of victory, the conquests that follow one another, the might and splendor of tsardom fully outweigh all its sins, all its despotism, all its injustices and arbitrariness: the boastfulness of chauvinism fully compensates for all the kicks received.” And the foremost target of it all is Europe’s oldest democracy. Though but 2.5% the size of Russia, Ukraine is still the largest European country, equal in territory to England, Germany and Hungary, combined. It is the nation that shielded Europe from the Golden Horde, then stopped the invasion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe. It gave refuge to John Smith, and helped found Jamestown, the first English settlement in the New World. It offered the model for the US constitution 77 years before Philadelphia did. It was the largest victim of WWII. It carries Chornobyl’s radiation into the future, forever. It dealt the deathblow to the Soviet Empire. It saved the West. It is America’s conscience. Maybe it’s time that we were aware of our own conscience? So how can the US redeem the infamy at the Waldorf? The US must ensure for Putin the realization of Lenin’s and Stalin’s nightmare, “if we lose Ukraine we lose our head”. For over 90 years, a dozen opportunities have come and gone, as Russian’s laser focus on sodomizing Ukraine continues to eclipse America’s myopic, bemused glance. Moscow is condemning Ukraine to the coffin air of Lubyanka, and we will rocket back to the age of M[utually] A[ssured]D[estruction]. Remember? However, if the US and the rest of the “West” are successful in securing that “loss” for Putin, homage at long last will have been paid to an emaciated, grief stricken little girl who cried, “Mommy told us to eat her when she dies.” (BTW, I almost forgot . . . soup was also on the menu, between the Beluga Caviar Canapes and the Coulibiac of Lake Trout. It was Ukrainian borshch.) March 3, 2014
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 14:28:31 +0000
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