Burlingame, California, Monday, August 28, 2006
Five years ago, I wrote a column about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I
was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians
of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my article, they knew
nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Stalin’s regime murdered 7 million
Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps.
How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many young
North-American Ukrainians? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their
people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives.
Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of
Ukraine’s population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history’s
black hole.
So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the Soviets in the 1920′s,
and Volga Germans, in 1941; and mass executions and deportations to
concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles. At the
end of World War II, Stalin’s gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23%
Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.
Almost unknown is the genocide of 2 million of the USSR’s Muslim peoples:
Chechen, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkir, Kazaks. The Chechen
independence fighters today branded “terrorists” by the US and Russia are
the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.
Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from
1945-47 of at least 2 million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and
the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which 2 million
German girls and women were raped.
Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of
numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people. In 1932 he sent Commissars
V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch, and NKVD secret police chief G. Yagoda
to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization
Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated.
NKVD death squads executed “anti-party elements.” Furious that insufficient
Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch “the Soviet Adolf Eichmann” set a
quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals
were shot.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being
shot or dying of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine,
writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future
Bergan-Belsen death camp.
The mass murder of 7 million Ukrainians, 3 million of them children, and
deportation to the gulag of 2 million (where most died) was hidden by Soviet
propaganda.
Pro-communist westerners, like the New York Times’ Walter Duranty, Sidney
and Beatrice Webb, and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured
Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet
“agrarian reform.” Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded
“fascist agents.”
The US, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the
genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to
Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized
murder were, ironically, Hitler and Mussolini.
Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and many senior communist party and NKVD
officials were Jewish, Hitler’s absurd claim that communism was a Jewish
plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across fearful
Europe.
When war came, Roosevelt and Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin,
though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million
people long before Hitler’s extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in
the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.
Though Stalin murdered 3 times more people than Hitler, to the doting
Roosevelt he remained “Uncle Joe.” At Yalta, Stalin even boasted to
Churchill he had killed over 10 million peasants. The British-US alliance
with Stalin made them his partners in crime. Roosevelt and Churchill helped
preserve history’s most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of
Europe.
After the war, the Left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre
denied the gulag even existed. For the Allies, Nazism was the only evil;
they could not admit being allied to mass murders. For the Soviets,
promoting the Jewish Holocaust perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their
own crimes.
The Jewish people saw their Holocaust as a unique event. It was Israel’s
raison d’être. Raising other genocides would, they feared, diminish their
own.
While academia, media and Hollywood rightly keep attention on the Jewish
Holocaust, they ignore Ukraine. We still hunt Nazi killers but not communist
killers. There are few photos of the Ukraine genocide or Stalin’s gulag, and
fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no tales.
Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.
We know all about crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler;
about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.
But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda,
Yezhov, and Beria? Were it not for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never
know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma, and Vorkuta. Movie after
movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes
from view or dissolves into nostalgia.
The souls of Stalin’s millions of victims still cry out for justice.
Historical Battle Lines
Why is Russia afraid of a 300-year-old Ukrainian hero?
Lord Byron, Pushkin, and Victor Hugo wrote poems about him. Liszt composed a symphonic work in his honor, Tchaikovsky devoted an opera to him, and Gericault painted him tied naked to a horse. In centuries past he was a historical superstar — a poster child for the Romantic era.
His name was Ivan Mazepa, a Ukrainian Cossack chieftain who allied with Sweden’s Charles XII to fight Russia’s Czar Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava, 300 years ago this week.
The swashbuckling subject of Romantic-era adulation is once again attracting attention, this time as the subject of a dispute over history between the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. In the eyes of the Russian state and its propagandists, Mazepa is Public Enemy No. 1 — a turncoat who betrayed Peter the Great, Orthodox Christianity and the unity of Slavic peoples. Most Russian historians have judged Mazepa a traitor. Acting under the instruction of Czar Peter, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him and placed an anathema on him, and still vilifies him in annual Poltava services. In turn, many Ukrainian historians regard Mazepa as an honored fighter for Ukraine’s statehood. President Viktor Yushchenko extols Mazepa as a heroic precursor of Ukraine’s independence and his image is emblazoned on the 10 hryvnia note ($1.30).
Passions over Mazepa have not been as heated in three centuries as this year. In recent days, amid ceremonies, costumed reenactments, conferences and television programs on the Poltava battle, Russian demonstrators have burned him in effigy. Ukrainian patriots rallied in Poltava on June 27 and unfurled a 30-meter by 45-meter Ukrainian flag in his honor. And a security force of nearly 1,000 has been deployed in Poltava and successfully staved off conflicts between the two sides.
On the surface, there is little in Mazepa’s biography that would warrant such intense feelings. He was born to a prosperous and educated family in Polish-occupied Ukraine in 1639 and served in the Polish court until 1665, when he returned to Ukraine, eventually joining the ranks of the Cossacks loyal to the Polish crown. In 1687, Mazepa was elected Hetman, or chieftain, of the Cossack Host in eastern Ukraine that was loyal to the Muscovite Czar. A prosperous magnate, Mazepa built churches and supported the arts and education while pursuing the goal of uniting all Ukrainian lands in a Cossack state. After years of partnership with Peter the Great, Mazepa sensed Russia’s growing ambitions were a threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty. He abruptly turned against Peter and in 1709 joined Sweden’s young king, Charles XII, in a campaign against Russia. The Swedish-Ukrainian alliance suffered a crushing defeat at Poltava. Charles died from a battle wound and Mazepa fled to today’s Moldova, where he also died soon after.
Poltava helped shape Europe’s geopolitics for three centuries. Russia’s emphatic rout of Sweden and its Cossack allies signaled its emergence as a European superpower and ensured Russian dominion over Eastern Ukraine for the bulk of three centuries. Peter constructed a new narrative for his realm. Instead of being Muscovy, it was to be Russia. As such, he and his state could claim lineage with the Kievan state called Rus that had accepted Christianity in 988 and collapsed in the 13th century. In one simple historical revision that complemented his opening to the West, Peter and his realm would be transformed from Asiatic upstarts to a European empire. Kiev would become the “mother of all Russian cities.”
There was, of course, no place in this scheme for anything resembling an independent or autonomous Ukraine. Indeed, any claim to Kiev’s autonomy or separate nationality, any Ukraine-based opposition to Russian rule, was a direct threat to the Petrine myth and the legitimacy that it helped confer on the Russian state. Mazepa had to go, and has never been allowed to return to historical grace for the same reason. Every Russian ruler has vilified him since the fateful battle at Poltava.
For Russians, Poltava without question was a great historical victory and Russians should be free to memorialize it as such. And there is no question that in the 17th century, national identities were ill-formed and many inhabitants of the territory of Ukraine felt a stronger kinship for the common Orthodox faith they shared with Russians than for any aim of independence. But for contemporary Ukrainians, there can be no similar ambivalence. As a young state that gained independence in 1991, Ukraine must develop its own sense of history, its own heroes and founding fathers. In short, it needs a common historical narrative to bind its citizens.
Such efforts are at best benign and should excite from Russia no more than a firmly agnostic ambivalence. But the vehemence of Russian polemics over events and personalities three centuries old speaks to the Russian state’s interest in keeping alive the idea of the eventual reunification of the two states. It also helps perpetuate a cultural divide between Ukraine’s Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russophone east.
In this context, there are several reasons why Poltava resonates. First, Mazepa and the Cossacks represent a political force that sought autonomy and independence from Russian dominion. Second, Mazepa not only turned against Russia, he made common cause with Sweden, i.e. with Europe and the West. Third, for politicians like Vladimir Putin who lionize the Russian empire and lament the disintegration of the Soviet Union, branding Mazepa a traitor sends a not-so-subtle message that proponents of Ukraine’s statehood today are also betraying the cause of Slavic unity.
With Russia adamantly opposed to Ukraine’s integration into European structures and with Mr. Putin on record as questioning the permanence of Ukraine’s statehood, Russia is investing significant resources on challenging Ukraine’s shaping of a separate national identity and history. These efforts include film documentaries challenging Ukraine’s effort to commemorate Stalin’s famine as a national genocide, and financing “Taras Bulba,” a big-budget epic film that depicts the Cossacks as loyal supporters of the Russian empire and adds scenes — absent in Gogol’s 19th century novel on which the movie is based — of Poles as murderous barbarians engaged in pillaging and rape.
While this Russian effort to upend Ukrainian national identity is not likely to succeed, over the short term it can help perpetuate Ukraine’s east-west divide, promoting instability and increasing Russia’s opportunities to reassert hegemony over its weak neighbor.
Until Ukraine can shape its historiography calmly and professionally without external interference, its polity will continue to be plagued by divisions and its society by lack of cohesion. This is why the contemporary battle over the meaning of Poltava is as significant as the Battle of Poltava was three centuries ago.
Mr. Karatnycky is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council of the U.S. Mr. Motyl is professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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