Stalin Has Left You May Eat Again
Activists mark the third anniversary of the Euromaidan revolution, which overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally. (Roman Pilipey/EPA)
Anne Applebaum
In February 2014, men dressed in cover-up, driving armored trucks and carrying military-issue weapons emerged from the Russian armed services base in Sevastopol and began streaming across the Ukrainian province of Crimea. Within hours, they had occupied boondocks halls and tv stations. Within days, they had co-opted local thugs and criminals to create a provisional government. They held a tightly controlled referendum and announced that residents of the region wanted it to belong to Russia.
While it unfolded, Russian spokesmen, journalists and Internet trolls deliberately cloaked the invasion in a thick cloud of falsehood. The looting was described as a revolt confronting "Nazis" and "fascists" in Kiev who had staged a coup d'etat; in fact, Ukraine's pro-Russian president had fled the country afterwards ordering his troops to fire at people demonstrating against his increasingly corrupt and authoritarian rule. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave emotive speeches and announced the looting of Crimea in March. A hyper-patriotic victory entrada lauding the acquisition of Krym nash — our Crimea — followed.
Abroad, the push to control Crimea and the residual of eastern Ukraine raised alarms: This was the start time since 1945 that a European border had been altered past force. But within Russia, it was a perfectly sensible course of events, consistent with nearly a century of Ukraine-phobia. Embedded deep inside Russia'southward national consciousness is a knowledge of Ukrainians' thirst for autonomy, awareness of Ukraine's unpredictability — and an old fear that Ukrainian demands might spread to Russia.
In 2014, Russian officials looked with horror at the immature people waving European flags and calling for democracy in Kiev's Maidan Square and were determined to brand sure such a movement would never spread to Russia itself: A mass anti-abuse protest — specially ane that ends with occupation of the dictator's palace — is what Russian federation's corrupt oligarchs fear almost. Putin witnessed exactly that kind of "chaos" every bit a immature KGB officeholder in Dresden in 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall struck him every bit catastrophic. He now blames protests against him on "strange agents" and Hillary Clinton.
Just the demand to control Ukraine too has important roots in Russia'southward historical memory, and the KGB'southward. Turbulence in Ukraine hits panic buttons, because anarchy in the Soviet Matrimony's agricultural heartland has virtually destabilized Moscow more than once. Maybe the all-time way to explain Putin'southward paranoia and covetousness toward Kiev is this: Russia remembers those moments well.
Russian unease near Ukraine goes dorsum to the very beginning of the Soviet Marriage, in 1917, when the Ukrainians first tried to set up their own state. During the ceremonious war that followed the revolutions in Moscow and Kiev, Ukrainian peasants — radical, left fly and anti-Bolshevik all at in one case — rejected the imposition of Soviet rule. They pushed out the Red Army and, for a fourth dimension, had the upper hand. Just in the anarchy that followed the Red Army's retreat, Smooth armies likewise as the Czarist White Army reentered Ukraine. One White general, Anton Denikin, crossed into Russia and came within 200 miles of Moscow, nearly catastrophe the revolution earlier information technology really got underway.
The Bolsheviks recovered — but they were stunned. For years, they spoke obsessively of the "cruel lesson of 1919." A decade later, in 1932, Stalin had crusade to remember that lesson. That year, the Soviet Spousal relationship was again in turmoil, following his disastrous decision to collectivize agronomics. As famine began spreading, he became alarmed by news that Ukrainian Communist Party members were refusing to assist Moscow requisition grain from starving Ukrainian peasants. "I do non want to accept this plan. I volition non complete this grain requisition programme," an informer reported one saying before he "put his political party card on the table and left the room."
Stalin sent a baking letter to his colleagues: "The main affair now is Ukraine. Things in Ukraine are terrible. . . . If nosotros don't make an endeavor now to better the situation in Ukraine, we may lose" it. He recalled the Ukrainian national movement, and the Polish and White Army interventions. It was fourth dimension, he declared, to brand Ukraine a "real fortress of the USSR, into a genuinely exemplary republic." To practice so, harsher tactics were required: "Lenin was right in saying that a person who does not have the courage to swim against the current when necessary cannot be a real Bolshevik leader."
Those harsher tactics included the blacklisting of many Ukrainian towns and villages, which were forbidden from receiving manufactured goods and food. They too prohibited Ukrainian peasants from leaving the commonwealth and gear up up roadblocks betwixt villages and cities, preventing internal migration. Teams of activists arrived in Ukrainian villages and confiscated everything edible, not just wheat merely potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, farm animals and even pets. They searched barns and closets, smashed open walls and ovens, looking for food.
The result was a humanitarian catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 across the Soviet Union. Amid them were nearly iv million of 31 1000000 Ukrainians, and they died not because of fail or ingather failure but because their nutrient had been taken. The overall death charge per unit was 13 percent, but it was every bit loftier as fifty percent in some provinces. Those who survived did and then by eating grass and insects, frogs and toads, shoe leather and leaves. Hunger drove people to madness: Previously law-abiding people committed theft and murder in lodge to consume. There were incidents of cannibalism, which the police noted, recorded and sent to the authorities in Moscow, who never responded. (In acknowledgment of its calibration, the dearth of 1932-33 is known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, a give-and-take derived from the Ukrainian for hunger, "holod," and for extermination, "mor.")
Later on the famine, Stalin launched a new wave of terror. Ukrainian writers, artists, historians, intellectuals — anyone with a link to the nationalist governments or armies of 1917-1919 — was arrested, sent to the Gulag or executed.
His goal was no mystery: He wanted to crush the Ukrainian national motility and to ensure that Ukraine would never again rebel against the Soviet country. He spoke obsessively about loss of control because he knew that another Ukrainian insurgence could thwart the Soviet project, not only by depriving the U.Southward.South.R. of grain but too by robbing it of legitimacy. Ukraine had been a Russian colony for centuries; the two cultures remained closely intertwined; the languages were closely related.
If Ukraine rejected Soviet ideology and the Soviet system, Stalin feared that rejection could pb to the downfall of the whole Soviet Union. Ukrainian rebellion could inspire Georgians, Armenians or Tajiks. And if the Ukrainians could constitute a more open, more tolerant state, or if they could orient themselves, equally and then many wanted, toward European culture and values, and then why wouldn't many Russians want the same?
Like Putin many decades after, the Bolsheviks went to neat lengths to hide the true nature of their policy in Ukraine. During the civil war, they disguised their Red Army every bit a "Soviet Ukrainian liberation movement." Stalin — commissar of nationalities at the time — created fake mini-states in Ukrainian provinces, designed to undermine the Ukrainian government in 1918, much like the "Donetsk People's Republic" seeks to undercut the Ukrainian government today.
In the aftermath of the 1932-33 dearth, a drastic information blackout was imposed. The deaths of millions were covered upward and denied. It was illegal to mention the dearth in public. Officials were told to modify the causes of death in public documents. In 1937, a Soviet census that revealed also many missing people in Ukraine and elsewhere was repressed; the heads of the census bureau were shot. Strange journalists were pressured to conceal the famine, and with a few exceptions, most complied.
Of course the parallels are not verbal: Putin's Russia is not Stalin's Soviet Wedlock. However, more than 80 years after the dearth and more than two decades afterward the collapse of the U.Due south.S.R., the relationship between Russian federation and Ukraine has come up full circle. Once again, a Russian leader speaks obsessively most the "loss" of Ukraine. Once once more, a regime based in Moscow sees the Ukrainian national motion as an existential, internal threat. And once more, Moscow has gone to extraordinary lengths to ward off the Ukrainian challenge. As in 1932, the constant talk of "war" and "enemies" in Ukraine remains useful to Russian leaders who cannot explicate stagnant living standards or justify their ain privileges, wealth and ability.
Simply history offers hope also every bit tragedy. In the end, the famine failed: Ukraine was not destroyed. The terrorization of the Ukrainian elite failed, also: The Ukrainian language did not disappear. The desire for independence persisted, as did the want for democracy, or a more just gild, or a Ukrainian state that truly represented Ukrainians. When it became possible, Ukrainians expressed these desires. In 1991, they voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine, as the national anthem proclaims, did not dice.
In the stop, Stalin failed, as well. A generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians was murdered in the 1930s, but their legacy lived on. The national aspiration was revived in the 1960s; it continued underground in the 1970s and 1980s; it became open again in the 1990s. A new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and activists appeared in the 2000s.
If Putin's Russia is not Stalin's Soviet Marriage, modern Ukraine is not the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, either. It is a sovereign state, with its own civic leaders and its own politicians, its own media and its own army. Above all, Ukrainians can now write their history and determine for themselves if this cycle of violence will finally come up to an end.
Twitter: @anneapplebaum
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-does-putin-want-control-ukraine-ask-stalin/2017/10/20/800a7afe-b427-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html
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