Contra Cold War Redux: 3. Ukraine & Russia
Ukraine is, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia once were, comprised of multiple nations within a single state. The question now is whether Ukraine’s fate will be that of the former or the latter.
‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’—Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Adviser writing in The Grand Chessboard, 1997
‘Ukraine’s anti-Russian position is precisely what the United States needs. Ukrainian government subserviently plays along with the American goal of weakening Russia. And this quickly reached the “special relationship of Ukraine with NATO” and the US Navy exercises in the Black Sea. One is forced to recall Alexander Parvus’ immortal plan of 1915: Using Ukrainian separatism to succeed in breaking up Russia.’—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia in Collapse, 1998
The name ‘Ukraine’ is derived from the Slavonic word for ‘border,’ and both the Slavophone Poles and Russians referred to this region of eastern Europe by that name, which can be translated as ‘borderland.’
The territory of what is now Ukraine was the location of the first Russian state, ‘Kievan Rus,’ from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. Prince Vladimir was the first of ‘the Rus’ to be baptised, at the Greek colony of Khersonesos on the Crimean coast. This was the birthplace of the Russian Orthodox Church and is the ‘sacred homeland’ of the Russians, comparable to Jerusalem for the Jews, Mount Ararat for the Armenians, Tibet for the Hindus, Mount Fuji for the Shinto Japanese, Mecca/Medina for Muslims, and so on and so forth. The secularised, deracinated Western peoples of this late-stage modern age cannot even begin to empathise with this feeling.
Over time, repeated Mongolian invasions pushed the Rus people north, out of what is now Ukraine and into what is now Russia, and the Turkic descendants of the Mongolian ‘Golden Horde’ established the ‘Crimean Khanate’ in what is now southern Ukraine.
Between 1667 and 1686, Russia gradually reclaimed the lands of Ukraine east of the Dnieper River and in the basin of the Don River (hence ‘Donbas’). During the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1795), Russia reclaimed from the Ottoman Empire what is today southern Ukraine (called ‘Novorossiya’ back then, meaning ‘New Russia’), including Crimea itself in 1783.
Most of what is now ‘Ukraine’ was within Russia until the First World War redrew the map of the world and the Russian Revolution redrew the map of Russia. To be precise, modern Ukraine was merely the unification of the Chernigov, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev, Kharkov, Kherson, Kholm, Podolia, Poltava, Volhynia, and Taurida governorates of the Russian Empire.
Ukraine is, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were (but are no longer), multiple nations within a single state. The question now is whether Ukraine’s fate will be the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia from without as well as from within or the non-violent, no-fault divorce of Czechoslovakia. It may already be too late.
Broadly speaking, the eastern half of Ukraine is ‘Malorossiya’ (meaning ‘Little Russia’). The people who live there are primarily ethnically and linguistically Russian, meaning they (or their ancestors) migrated there from Russia and speak the Russian language. This part of Ukraine became a part of the Russian Empire when Americans were still subjects of King Charles II (1660-1685) and before every one of the Thirteen Colonies even existed. That is, this part of Ukraine was Russian before Pennsylvania and New Jersey were American.
Broadly speaking, the western half of Ukraine is ‘Ruthenia,’ which, before it was ruled by Russia, was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and is Catholic rather than Orthodox.1 The ‘Ukrainian language’ primarily spoken here originated in the pan-European romantic-nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century, known as ‘The Spring of Nations.’ During this time, intellectuals and artists living in Ruthenia began codifying this local rural Slavonic dialect as its own language. The Bolsheviks, practicing a prototypical form of identity politics, promoted this Ukrainian language and ‘Ukrainism’ as part of its political agenda to decolonise the Russian Empire.2
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, writing in 1998, described the politicisation of the Ukrainian language:
In rejected Galicia, accompanied by Austrian mocking, there grew a distorted Ukrainian language that was not of organic nature, packed with German and Polish words…
Even the ethnic Ukrainian population does not speak or use the Ukrainian language under many circumstances. Thus, there must be measures of transferring all nominal Ukrainians into the Ukrainian language. Then, there will obviously be the task of masking Russians use the Ukrainian language, too (and this already—not without violence?) Then, the Ukrainian language is yet to vertically sprout into the upper strata of science, technology, and culture—this task is ahead, too. Furthermore, the Ukrainian language must become mandatory in international relations. Perhaps, all these cultural tasks might need more than a single century. For now, we are reading the news about the persecution of Russian-language schools, even thuggish attacks on Russian schools, about ceasing to broadcast Russian television in certain places all the way through to the ban on the Russian-language use between librarians and readers. Is this really the development course of Ukrainian culture?
Solzhenitsyn deplored the suppression of the Russian language in Ukraine not just because it was destroying the cultural and social bonds between Ukraine and Russia, but because it was redefining the Ukrainian national identity from a positive one (affinity for what is authentically Ukrainian) into one that is merely negative (enmity towards whatever is perceived as Russian):
The Ukrainian authorities had chosen the path of forcefully persecuting the Russian language. Not only did they deny its right to become the second state language, but they are also zealously pushing it out of radio, television, and print media. Everything is done in the Ukrainian language in post-secondary institutions, from the entrance exam to the final project, and it is too bad if the terminology is insufficient. School programs either completely exclude Russian, or introduce it as a ‘foreign’ language in an elective course; they completely pushed out the history of the Russian state and almost all the Russian classics from the literature courses. We hear accusations along the lines of ‘Russian linguistic aggression’ and ‘Russified Ukrainians are the fifth column.’ Thus begins the suppression of Russian culture, rather than the growth of the Ukrainian one. And they persist in oppressing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—the one that remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate with its 70% of Ukrainian Orthodox…
The fanatical suppression and persecution of the Russian language (which the previous polls demonstrated as the main language for more than 60% of the population) is a brute measure, one that is directed against the cultural prospects of Ukraine itself.
We shall return to this linguistic conflict between Ukrainian and Russian later, however.
After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks hastened to finalise a peace treaty with the Central Powers in order to end the war abroad and consolidate their power at home. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 surrendered what are now the Baltic states to Germany, part of what is now Armenia to the Ottoman Empire, and created a new nation-state called ‘Ukraine.’ This was the first time in history that there had ever been a ‘sovereign’ or ‘independent’ Ukraine.
At the Versailles Peace Conference, however, Brest-Litovsk was nullified, and much of the territory which Russia had ceded, including the western territories of Ukraine, was used to recreate the nation-state of Poland, which had been partitioned out of existence in the 18th century. From 1918 to 1922, this disputed territory in Poland/Ukraine became a major battleground in the Russian Civil War between the ‘Reds’ (Communists) and the ‘Whites’ (loyalists to Czar and Church), whereafter the Reds emerged victorious and declared Ukraine a ‘Socialist Soviet Republic.’3
As is often the problem with state formation, when the Bolsheviks began redrawing the map of the Russian Empire to invent new nation-states they consolidated two nations—the eastern Malorossiyans and the western Ruthenians—into one ‘Ukrainian’ state. State formation, by imposing a single, centralised order on existing stateless societies, is an inherently coercive and destructive process, bringing together peoples who may have little to do with each other and separating other peoples who may have much more to do with each other. This is manifestly the case in Ukraine: The Ukrainians in the east have far more in common with other Russians (from whom they have been circumstantially separated) than they do the Ukrainians in the west (who, in turn, have far more in common with the Balts than they do with the Russians). For instance, the Galicians, Carpathians, and Podolians in the far west of Ukraine had not been a part of the Russian Empire, let alone anything called ‘Ukraine,’ since the Middle Ages!
Indeed, in 1918, after the Bolsheviks formed the Socialist Soviet Republic of Ukraine out of various formerly Austro-Hungarian, Polish-Lithuanian, and Russian lands, the people living in the region formerly known as Novorossiya formed the ‘Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic’ and tried to reunite with Russia (then-known as the ‘Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic’). Bolshevist leaders such as Lenin and Stalin supported the Ukrainian nationalists over the Russian separatists, however, and the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic was abolished and the term ‘Novorossiya’ itself became illegal.4 So, ‘Russian separatism’ in Ukraine did not begin after the Euromaidan in 2014, but with the very creation of Ukraine in 1918.
Beginning with the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 and the subsequent Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland, Stalin began to annex even more of medieval Ruthenia into modern Ukraine.
Ukraine was another major battleground in the Second World War. In the Wehrmacht’s scorched-earth offensive through Ukraine, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic Banderites in the west joined with their fellow Hitlerite Übermenschen to liberate their country of Untermenschen, whether ‘Muscovites’ or ‘Semites’ (which were often one and the same to the Nazis). In Ukraine alone, it is estimated that of the four million civilians killed, one million of them were Jews, and some estimates are even higher.
Photographs have survived of the German-Ukrainian liquidation of the Jewish ghetto of Mizocz. They are too disturbing for me to show to you without your consent, but I will quote from the captions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum where they are held:
…These Jews were collected by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft during the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, which held roughly 1,700 Jews. On the eve of the ghetto's liquidation (13 October 1942), some of the inhabitants rose up against the Germans and were defeated after a short battle. The remaining members of the community were transported from the ghetto to this ravine in the Sdolbunov Gebietskommissariat, south of Rovno, where they were executed…
Photograph #17876: ‘Jewish women and children are ordered to undress prior to their execution.’
Photograph #17877: ‘Naked Jewish women, some of whom are holding infants, wait in a line before their execution by German Sipo and SD with the assistance of Ukrainian auxiliaries.’
Photograph #17878: ‘A German police officer shoots Jewish women still alive after a mass-execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto.’
Photograph #17879: ‘German policeman prepares to complete a mass-execution by shooting two Jewish children, who were shot with the others in connection with the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto.’
This was a small-scale Aktion, relative to those at the Jewish ghettoes of Kiev, Odessa, or Nikolaev, where tens of thousands of Jews at a time.
During the Red Army’s scorched-earth counter-offensive back through Ukraine, similar tactics were inflicted upon the Ukrainian nationalists who had collaborated with the Nazis, with plenty of collateral damage to boot.
Between the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, controul over the Ukrainian state flip-flopped between the two Ukrainian nations—western-Ukrainian/pro-West oligarchs and eastern-Ukrainian/pro-Russia oligarchs. These oligarchs may have looted Ukraine’s public funds and natural resources, but they did manage to keep the peace between the Malorossiyan east and the Ruthenian west.
The key to governing a multi-national state with internal ethnic and linguistic differences is not mutually assured corruption between glorified mobsters, however, but cultural pluralism and political federalism. Yet the post-Euromaidan, anti-Russia, West-backed regime in Kiev (comprised of western-Ukrainian/pro-West oligarchs and some theretofore-marginalised far-right leaders) chose cultural and political nationalism, suppressing the Russian language spoken by a third of its people, creating a schism in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and rewriting Ukrainian history to glorify a mythical Ukraine and to vilify a mythical Russia. The term for this policy among Ukrainian nationalists was ‘de-Russification,’ and the Russians living in and out of Ukraine took note of it.
An analogy which may help ahistorical Americans understand the Ukrainian nationalism of the Euromaidan would be to imagine Texans taking over Washington D.C. in an insurrection financed and directed by Russia, mandating that the Texan dialect of American English be the official national language, informing the people that they were no longer Americans but Texans, and inviting Russia to forward-deploy troops and missiles on the borders of Mexico and Canada. (Now imagine the absurdity of the European journos and pols uniformly and instantaneously adopting the new ‘Texan language’ names of everything in the USA, as ‘Boomhauer’ would pronounce them.) This sounds nice if you are a Texan and a Russian, but not so nice if you are a non-Texan American.
Pardon my language, but how in the hell could the Americans have thought that ‘regime change’ in a country with a history like this—with external borders ever-changing, with deep-rooted internal divisions—would be anything other than catastrophic? Did they even look at its history before deciding to intervene there? The spectacle of blitheringly jingoistic Americans attempting to determine post-Soviet ‘frozen conflicts’ byzantine in their historical complexity would be laughable if the results were not so often lamentable. Why not just let the people determine the outcomes themselves? The fact that it is Russia, of all countries (which went from the absolutist Tsars to the totalitarian Communists to the authoritarian Vladimir Putin with nary a democratic interlude), which is advocating in favour of self-determination in opposition to the country that celebrates the Fourth of July as a national holiday is nothing short of surreal.
Lindsey A. O’Rourke is a young professor of political science and international relations who just published her first book, Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War. Here is her summary conclusion from an op-ed that she wrote in The Washington Post:
Between 1947 and 1989, the United States tried to change other nations’ governments 72 times; That’s a remarkable number. It includes 66 covert operations and six overt ones.
Most covert efforts to replace another country’s government failed.
During the Cold War, for instance, 26 of the United States’ covert operations successfully brought a U.S.-backed government to power; the remaining 40 failed.
I found 16 cases in which Washington sought to influence foreign elections by covertly funding, advising and spreading propaganda for its preferred candidates, often doing so beyond a single election cycle. Of these, the U.S.-backed parties won their elections 75 percent of the time.
My research found that after a nation’s government was toppled, it was less democratic and more likely to suffer civil war, domestic instability and mass killing. At the very least, citizens lost faith in their governments.
Prof. O’Rourke has just expanded her research into a book from Cornell University Press, Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War. In her book, Prof. O'Rourke also describes American espionage operations against the USSR through the remnants of the Nazi-collaborating Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists.5 In addition to Stepan Bandera (the OUN’s founder and the would-be dictator of an ethnically cleansed Ukraine who became a CIA asset during the Cold War), the CIA collaborated with Ukrainian Nazis like ‘Mykola Lebed,’ a OUN leader who trained with the Gestapo and participated in the pogrom of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Poland. Indeed, the CIA smuggled Mr. Lebed into the USA under an alias, where he was paid to front an ‘anti-Communist’ publishing company. At the same time, former OUN members in the USA formed the ‘Ukrainian Congress Committee of America,’ an ‘anti-Communist’ organisation which attained influence within the Reagan Administration for lobbying to heat up the Cold War.
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Oksana Lada, the Ukrainian-American actress on ‘The Sopranos’ who played Tony’s mistress, Irina Peltsin, was born in the city of Chernigov (Malorossiya), moved to the city of Ivano-Frankivsk (Ruthenia), and on TV played a Russian and spoke Russian. Igor Sikorsky, a Ukrainian-American aviator who emigrated to escape the Communists, was born in Kiev (Malorossiya), but belonged to an Orthodox Russian family, personally identified as Russian rather than Ukrainian, and was a member of the ‘Club of Russian Nationalists’ (which was headquarted in Kiev). These are just two people whom I know because ‘The Sopranos’ is one of my favourite shows and the airport near where I live named each of its elevators after famous aviators, but many other Russians—such as the authors Bulgakov, Chekhov, and Gogol—were from Ukraine, though they never identified with ‘Ukrainism’ and always identified as Russians who lived in a particular part of that empire. When ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ was written in the late 1800s/early 1900s, it was set in Imperial Russia’s ‘Pale of Settlement,’ which included more territory from present-day Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus than present-day Russia, but does anyone believe that the setting is anything other than Russia?
Imagine, if you will, future generations of Americans treating the dialect of American English spoken by black people in the rural South, such as that codified by Joel Chandler Harris in his collections of folk stories, as its own language. Indeed, now imagine if, in these U.S. of A. the ‘Black Belt’ declared itself a separate ethno-state—the ‘People’s Republic of Wakanda’?—and this dialect-cum-language became the official language of the government, the media, and academia, and therefore for the rest of the world it became politically correct to try and sound like Uncle Remus when naming any person or place from the Black Belt.
A word on ‘the’ Ukraine, ‘the’ Crimea, ‘the’ Donbass, &c. This grammatical convention is the traditional way of referring to these places as historical regions within Russia (as Americans refer to ‘the South’ or ‘the North’).
The Soviet Union was not a ‘Russian Empire,’ as Americans viewed it during Cold War, but rather, according to the title of a recent book, an ‘Affirmative-Action Empire.’ Every nationality within the Soviet Union had its own Communist Party except for Russians. There was no ‘Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic’ as there was for every other state in the USSR. The Communists’ crude redrawing of the map of Imperial Russia to create ‘Ukraine’ was, by no means, an isolated incident. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, ethnic minorities with tribal rather than national consciousnesses (steppe nomads) were nevertheless given statehood. Many Russians found themselves, overnight, in newly created non-Russian states. The Soviet Union created ‘Azerbaijan’ out of territory which Persia had ceded to the Russian Empire, part of which (‘Nagorno-Karbakh’) included a majority non-Azeri population which was never asked where it wanted to live. Russians did not even have their own national territory in the Soviet Union. The ‘Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic’ was further subdivided into numerous ‘Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics’ and other smaller units corresponding to different ethnic minorities, such as Bashkortostan/Bashkiria for the Bashkir.
A note on ‘Slava Ukraini’: This was the official salute of the League of Ukrainian Fascists in the 1920s, which ultimately merged with the ‘Hero of Ukraine’ Stepan Bandera’s Nazi-collaborating Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. Given its history, it is essentially equivalent to the German sieg heil. It has also, not-so-coincidentally, been adopted as the official salute of the Ukrainian military and police, which as you now know are rife with neo-Nazis.