Category Archives: Ukraine

by | 2 August 2011 · 8:19 pm

Soviet Methods vs. Poles, 1937-38

From Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder (Basic Books, 2010), Kindle Locs. 1905-28, 1951-73, 2031-35, 2043-48, 2060-72 (pp. 95-97, 102-104):

Soviet citizens would have to “unmask” themselves as Polish agents. Because the groups and scenarios of the ostensible Polish plot had to be generated from nothing, torture played an important role in the interrogations. In addition to the traditional conveyer method and the standing method, many Soviet Poles were subjected to a form of collective torture called the “conference method.” Once a large number of Polish suspects had been gathered in a single place, such as the basement of a public building in a town or village of Soviet Ukraine or Soviet Belarus, a policeman would torture one of them in full view of the others. Once the victim had confessed, the others would be urged to spare themselves the same sufferings by confessing as well. If they wanted to avoid pain and injury, they would have to implicate not only themselves but others. In this situation, each person had an incentive to confess as quickly as possible: it was obvious that everyone would be implicated eventually anyway, and a quick confession might at least spare the body. In this way, testimony that implicated an entire group could be assembled very quickly.

The legal procedures were somewhat different than in the kulak operation, but no less scanty. In the Polish operation, the investigating officer would compose a brief report for each of the prisoners, describing the supposed crime—usually sabotage, terrorism, or espionage—and recommending one of two sentences, death or the Gulag. Every ten days he would submit all of his reports to the regional NKVD chief and a prosecutor. Unlike the troikas of the kulak operation, this two-person commission (a “dvoika”) could not sentence the prisoners by itself, but had to ask for approval from higher authorities. It assembled the reports into an album, noted its recommended sentence for each case, and sent them on to Moscow. In principle, the albums were then reviewed by a central dvoika: [Nikolai] Yezhov as the commissar for state security and Andrei Vyshynskii as state prosecutor. In fact, Yezhov and Vyshynskii merely initialed the albums after a hasty review by their subordinates. On a single day, they might finalize two thousand death sentences. The “album method” gave the appearance of a formal review by the highest Soviet authorities. In reality, the fate of each victim was decided by the investigating officer and then more or less automatically confirmed.

Biographies became death sentences, as attachment to Polish culture or Roman Catholicism became evidence of participation in international espionage. People were sentenced for the most apparently minor of offenses: ten years in the Gulag for owning a rosary, death for not producing enough sugar. Details of everyday life were enough to generate a report, an album entry, a signature, a verdict, a gunshot, a corpse. After twenty days, or two cycles of albums, Yezhov reported to Stalin that 23,216 arrests had already been made in the Polish operation. Stalin expressed his delight: “Very good! Keep on digging up and cleaning out this Polish filth. Eliminate it in the interests of the Soviet Union.”

…

In the city of Leningrad in 1937 and 1938, Poles were thirty-four times more likely to be arrested than their fellow Soviet citizens. Once arrested, a Pole in Leningrad was very likely to be shot: eighty-nine percent of those sentenced in the Polish operation in this city were executed, usually within ten days of the arrest. This was only somewhat worse than the situation of Poles elsewhere: on average, throughout the Soviet Union, seventy-eight percent of those arrested in the Polish operation were executed. The rest, of course, were not released: most of them served sentences of eight to ten years in the Gulag.

Leningraders and Poles had little idea of these proportions at the time. There was only the fear of the knock on the door in the early morning, and the sight of the prison truck: called the black maria, or the soul destroyer, or by Poles the black raven (nevermore). As one Pole remembered, people went to bed each night not knowing whether they would be awakened by the sun or by the black raven. Industrialization and collectivization had scattered Poles throughout the vast country. Now they simply disappeared from their factories, barracks, or homes. To take one example of thousands: in a modest wooden house in the town of Kuntsevo, just west of Moscow, lived a number of skilled workers, among them a Polish mechanic and a Polish metallurgist. These two men were arrested on 18 January 1938 and 2 February 1938, and shot. Evgenia Babushkina, a third victim of the Polish operation in Kuntsevo, was not even Polish. She was a promising and apparently loyal organic chemist. But her mother had once been a washer-woman for Polish diplomats, and so Evgenia was shot as well.

Most Soviet Poles lived not in Soviet Russian cities, such as Leningrad or Kuntsevo, but in westerly Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine, lands Poles had inhabited for hundreds of years. These districts had been part of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Over the course of the nineteenth century, when these territories were western regions of the Russian Empire, Poles had lost a great deal of their status, and in many cases had begun to assimilate with the surrounding Ukrainian and Belarusian populations. Sometimes, though, the assimilation was in the other direction, as speakers of Belarusian or Ukrainian who regarded Polish as the language of civilization presented themselves as Poles. The original Soviet nationality policy of the 1920s had sought to make proper Poles of such people, teaching them literary Polish in Polish-language schools. Now, during the Great Terror, Soviet policy distinguished these people once again, but negatively, by sentencing them to death or to the Gulag. As with the contemporary persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, the targeting of an individual on ethnic grounds did not mean that this person actually identified himself strongly with the nation in question.

…

In the Ukrainian countryside, as throughout the Soviet Union, wives would ritually visit the prison each day, bringing food and clean undergarments. Prison guards would give them soiled undergarments in exchange. Since these were the only sign that husbands still lived, they were received with joy. Sometimes a man would manage to smuggle out a message, as did one husband in the underwear he had passed to his wife: “I suffer and I am innocent.” One day the undergarments would be soiled by blood. And the next day there would be no undergarments, and then there would be no husband.

…

The Polish operation was fiercest in Soviet Ukraine, in the very lands where deliberate starvation policies had killed millions only a few years before. Some Polish families who lost men to the Terror in Soviet Ukraine had already been horribly struck by the famine. Hanna Sobolewska, for example, had watched five siblings and her father die of starvation in 1933. Her youngest brother, Józef, was the toddler who, before his own death by starvation, had liked to say: “Now we will live!” In 1938 the black raven took her one surviving brother, as well as her husband. As she remembered the Terror in Polish villages in Ukraine: “children cry, women remain.”

…

The Polish operation was in some respects the bloodiest chapter of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union. It was not the largest operation, but it was the second largest, after the kulak action. It was not the action with the highest percentage of executions among the arrested, but it was very close, and the comparably lethal actions were much smaller in scale.

Of the 143,810 people arrested under the accusation of espionage for Poland, 111,091 were executed. Not all of these were Poles, but most of them were. Poles were also targeted disproportionately in the kulak action, especially in Soviet Ukraine. Taking into account the number of deaths, the percentage of death sentences to arrests, and the risk of arrest, ethnic Poles suffered more than any other group within the Soviet Union during the Great Terror. By a conservative estimate, some eighty-five thousand Poles were executed in 1937 and 1938, which means that one-eighth of the 681,692 mortal victims of the Great Terror were Polish. This is a staggeringly high percentage, given that Poles were a tiny minority in the Soviet Union, constituting fewer than 0.4 percent of the general population. Soviet Poles were about forty times more likely to die during the Great Terror than Soviet citizens generally.

The Polish operation served as a model for a series of other national actions. They all targeted diaspora nationalities, “enemy nations” in the new Stalinist terminology, groups with real or imagined connections to a foreign state.

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Filed under nationalism, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 7 July 2011 · 8:53 pm

Breadlines in the U.S. and Ukraine, 1933

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder (Basic Books, 2010), Kindle Loc. 533-575 (pp. 21-22):

Nineteen thirty-three was a hungry year in the Western world. The streets of American and European cities teemed with men and women who had lost their jobs, and grown accustomed to waiting in line for food. An enterprising young Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, saw unemployed Germans in Berlin rally to the voice of Adolf Hitler. In New York he was struck by the helplessness of the American worker, three years into the Great Depression: “I saw hundreds and hundreds of poor fellows in single file, some of them in clothes which once were good, all waiting to be handed out two sandwiches, a doughnut, a cup of coffee and a cigarette.” In Moscow, where Jones arrived that March, hunger in the capitalist countries was cause for celebration. The Depression seemed to herald a world socialist revolution. Stalin and his coterie boasted of the inevitable triumph of the system they had built in the Soviet Union.

Yet 1933 was also a year of hunger in the Soviet cities, especially in Soviet Ukraine. In Ukraine’s cities—Kharkiv, Kiev, Stalino, Dnipropetrovsk—hundreds of thousands of people waited each day for a simple loaf of bread. In Kharkiv, the republic’s capital, Jones saw a new sort of misery. People appeared at two o’clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until seven. On an average day forty thousand people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. Some were so weak from hunger that they could not stand without the ballast of strangers. The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. Pregnant women and maimed war veterans had lost their right to buy out of turn, and had to wait in line with the rest if they wanted to eat. Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear.

People in the cities of Soviet Ukraine were afraid of losing their place in breadlines, and they were afraid of starving to death. They knew that the city offered their only hope of nourishment. Ukrainian cities had grown rapidly in the previous five years, absorbing peasants and making of them workers and clerks. Ukrainian peasant sons and daughters, along with the Jews, Poles, and Russians who had inhabited these cities for much longer, were dependent upon food they obtained in shops. Their families in the country had nothing. This was unusual. Normally in times of hunger city dwellers will make for the countryside. In Germany or the United States the farmers almost never went hungry, even during the Great Depression. Workers and professionals in cities were reduced to selling apples, or stealing them; but always somewhere, in the Altes Land or in Iowa, there was an orchard, a silo, a larder. The city folk of Ukraine had nowhere to go, no help to seek from the farms. Most had ration coupons that they would need to present in order to get any bread. Ink on paper gave them what chance to live that they had, and they knew it.

The proof was all around. Starving peasants begged along the breadlines, asking for crumbs. In one town, a fifteen-year-old girl begged her way to the front of the line, only to be beaten to death by the shopkeeper. The city housewives making the queues had to watch as peasant women starved to death on the side-walks. A girl walking to and from school each day saw the dying in the morning and the dead in the afternoon. One young communist called the peasant children he saw “living skeletons.” A party member in industrial Stalino was distressed by the corpses of the starved that he found at his back door. Couples strolling in parks could not miss the signs forbidding the digging of graves. Doctors and nurses were forbidden from treating (or feeding) the starving who reached their hospitals. The city police seized famished urchins from city streets to get them out of sight. In Soviet Ukrainian cities policemen apprehended several hundred children a day; one day in early 1933, the Kharkiv police had a quota of two thousand to fill. About twenty thousand children awaited death in the barracks of Kharkiv at any given time. The children pleaded with the police to be allowed, at least, to starve in the open air: “Let me die in peace, I don’t want to die in the death barracks.”

Hunger was far worse in the cities of Soviet Ukraine than in any city in the Western world. In 1933 in Soviet Ukraine, a few tens of thousands of city dwellers actually died of starvation. Yet the vast majority of the dead and dying in Soviet Ukraine were peasants, the very people whose labors had brought what bread there was to the cities. The Ukrainian cities lived, just, but the Ukrainian countryside was dying. City dwellers could not fail to notice the destitution of peasants who, contrary to all seeming logic, left the fields in search of food. The train station at Dnipropetrovsk was overrun with starving peasants, too weak even to beg. On a train, Gareth Jones met a peasant who had acquired some bread, only to have it confiscated by the police. “They took my bread away from me,” he repeated over and over again, knowing that he would disappoint his starving family. At the Stalino station, a starving peasant killed himself by jumping in front of a train. That city, the center of industry in southeastern Ukraine, had been founded in imperial times by John Hughes, a Welsh industrialist for whom Gareth Jones’s mother had worked. The city had once been named after Hughes [Yuzovka (Юзовка)]; now it was named after Stalin. (Today it is known as Donetsk.)

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Filed under democracy, economics, food, U.S., Ukraine, USSR

by | 7 July 2011 · 8:32 pm

What Ukraine Meant to Hitler and Stalin

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder (Basic Books, 2010), Kindle Loc. 519-531 (p. 19) (reviewed at length here):

Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow, but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between. Their utopias of control overlapped in Ukraine. Hitler remembered the ephemeral German eastern colony of 1918 as German access to the Ukrainian breadbasket. Stalin, who had served his revolution in Ukraine shortly thereafter, regarded the land in much the same way. Its farmland, and its peasants, were to be exploited in the making of a modern industrial state. Hitler looked upon collectivization as a disastrous failure, and presented it as proof of the failure of Soviet communism as such. But he had no doubt that Germans could make of Ukraine a land of milk and honey.

For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food. It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image. Their programs and their power all depended upon their control of Ukraine’s fertile soil and its millions of agricultural laborers. In 1933, Ukrainians would died [sic] in the millions, in the greatest artificial famine in the history of world. This was the beginning of the special history of Ukraine, but not the end. In 1941 Hitler would seize Ukraine from Stalin, and attempt to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered. During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.

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Filed under food, Germany, nationalism, Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 26 September 2009 · 6:42 pm

Ukraine’s Sure Got Talent in Sand Animation

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by | 27 September 2008 · 9:58 am

Policing the Pirates of Puntland

The India-oriented blog, The Acorn, recently noted that the Indian navy is proposing to join the multinational effort to police the pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa, many of them operating out of Somalia’s “self-governing” region known as Puntland.

Among the tasks assigned to the Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150)—an international naval task force comprising, among others, of US, British, French, Pakistani and Bahraini ships—are maritime security operations in the Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. While its purpose is to deny the use of the seas to smugglers and terrorists the main problem in the area under its watch is piracy.

CTF-150 doesn’t have enough ships to secure one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. So it advises large, slower vessels to travel in convoys so that it can better watch over them. But since this is not always possible, around one in 500 ships fall victim to pirates. Since the monthly traffic is around 1500, pirates succeed in raiding three or four ships each month.

Now the Russian navy is sending a warship to the area after one group of the pirates may have bitten off more than they can chew.

SOMALI PIRATES who seized a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 T72 battle tanks – apparently bound for the autonomous government of South Sudan – yesterday warned against any attempt by Western navies to rescue the vessel’s weapons cargo or its crew.

Januna Ali Jama, a spokesman for the pirates in the breakaway north statelet of Puntland said the pirates would soon begin the routine Somali pirate tactic of negotiating the return of the cargo ship Faina to its Ukraine state owners in exchange for a ransom.

Jama told the BBC Somali Service that the pirates demand is £18 million from the Kiev government because apart from the Russian made tanks the Faina is carrying “weapons of all kinds”, including rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and many hundreds of thousands of ammunition….

The pirate syndicates – of which there at least five, each about 1000-strong – operate out of Puntland, far to the north, wrapped around the Horn of Africa where the Gulf of Aden meets the Indian Ocean, which declared itself separate from the Republic of Somalia 10 years ago. Puntland is to Mogadishu what Kurdistan, semi-autonomous and far off in the northern mountains of Iraq, is to Baghdad.

Unrecognised internationally – although the British Embassy in neighbouring Ethiopia maintains close contact with the Puntland government, which is allowing oil exploration by three Western companies – little diplomatic pressure can be put on Puntland, which says piracy grew after international “sea robber” fishing fleets plundered and wrecked its rich fishing grounds. The United Nations estimates that fish worth at least £50 million a year are plundered illegally from Somali waters by Spanish and other foreign boats.

The pirates are unlikely to be unable to unload the tanks because of a lack of specialist heavy-lifting gear in the tiny ports and innumerable coves of Puntland, a barren land three times the area of Scotland which historically depended on fishing and camel and goat-herding.

But that will hardly discourage the pirates. What they want is booty, in the form of on-board cash, cargo and, most importantly, ransom money, which owners are increasingly willing to pay, given the huge values of ships and their cargoes and the daily costs of maintaining them at sea. On the same day as the Faina was captured, another Puntland pirate syndicate released a Japanese ship and its 21-member crew after a £1 million ransom was paid. The 53,000-tonne bulk carrier Stella Maris had a valuable cargo of zinc and lead ingots. And as the Stella Maris was being freed, Somali pirates were hijacking a Greek chemical tanker with 19 crew on board as it sailed through the Gulf of Aden from Europe to the Middle East.

The Faina is believed to be heading to the pirate port of Eyl, the main destination of hijacked ships where Puntland entrepreneurs run special restaurants for the hundreds of seized crewmen and where the pirates’ accountants make calculations on laptops and drive state-of-the-art land cruisers….

Worldwide, pirates attacked a known 263 large vessels in 2007, up from a reported 239 in 2006, according to Choong’s piracy reporting centre. Southeast Asia, especially the shipping lanes of the Malacca Straits between Malaysia and the huge Indonesian Island of Sumatra, used to be the world’s busiest place for pirate attacks. Better co-operation between southeast Asian nations and the consequences of the 2004 tsunami have greatly reduced the number of attacks. Many pirates operated out of Aceh, the northern province of Sumatra, but the tsunami destroyed their ports, wrecked their boats and killed many of the pirates.

Somali piracy easily tops the world table, both in terms of the number of attacks and the money made. It is the Somali financiers sitting mainly in Dubai, Britain, Canada, Denmark and Kenya who make the big money by keeping the bulk of the ransom payments. Pirates based in Nigeria and Peru are also climbing the league table.

France is now circulating a draft resolution in the UN Security Council urging nations to contribute more warships and aircraft to the fight against piracy off Somalia. While the Foreign office has ordered the Royal Navy, to the incredulity of the nation’s maritime industry, not to detain Somali pirates from fear of human rights complications, the French are being pro-active.

UPDATE: On The Atlantic magazine’s blog The Current, Robert Kaplan describes a bit of the lifestyle of these pirates.

I spoke recently with several U.S. Navy officers who had been involved in anti-piracy operations off Somalia, and who had interviewed captured pirates. The officers told me that Somali pirate confederations consist of cells of ten men, with each cell distributed among three skiffs. The skiffs are usually old, ratty, and roach-infested, and made of unpainted, decaying wood or fiberglass. A typical pirate cell goes into the open ocean for three weeks at a time, navigating by the stars. The pirates come equipped with drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, short ladders, knives, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They bring millet and qat (the local narcotic of choice), and they use lines and nets to catch fish, which they eat raw. One captured pirate skiff held a hunk of shark meat so tough it had teeth marks all over it. With no shade and only a limited amount of water, their existence on the high seas is painfully rugged.

The classic tactic of Somali pirates is to take over a slightly larger dhow, often a fishing boat manned by Indians, Taiwanese, or South Koreans, and then live on it, with the skiff attached. Once in possession of a dhow, they can seize an even bigger ship. As they leapfrog to yet bigger ships, they let the smaller ships go free. Because the sea is vast, only when a large ship issues a distress call do foreign navies even know where to look for pirates. If Somali pirates hunted only small boats, no warship in the international coalition would know about the piracy.

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Filed under Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East, piracy, Russia, Somalia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, U.S., Ukraine

by | 17 March 2008 · 9:09 pm

Who Were the Soviet Collectivizers?

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 91-92:

What were the motives of the men and women who carried out this brutal war against the peasantry? Most of the collectivizers were conscripted soldiers and workers – people anxious to carry out orders from above (and in some cases, to line their pockets). Hatred of the ‘kulaks’ had been drummed into them by their commanders and by propaganda which portrayed the ‘kulak parasites’ and ‘bloodsuckers’ as dangerous ‘enemies of the people’. ‘We were trained to see the kulaks, not as human beings, but as vermin, lice, which had to be destroyed,’ recalls one young activist, the leader of a Komsomol brigade in the Kuban. ‘Without the kolkhoz,’ wrote another collectivizer in the 1980s, ‘the kulaks would have grabbed us by the throat and skinned us all alive!’

Others were carried away by their Communist enthusiasm. Inspired by the romantic revolutionary passions stirred up by the propaganda of the Five Year Plan, they believed with the Bolsheviks that any miracle could be achieved by sheer human will. As one student in those years recalls: ‘We were convinced that we were creating a Communist society, that it would be achieved by the Five Year Plans, and we were ready for any sacrifice.’ Today, it is easy to underestimate the emotional force of these messianic hopes and the fanaticism that it engendered, particularly in the younger generation, which had been brought up on the ‘cult of struggle’ and the romance of the Civil War. These young people wanted to believe that it was their calling to carry on the fight, in the words of the ‘Internationale’, for a ‘new and better life’. In the words of one of the ‘25,000ers’ – the urban army of enthusiasts sent into the countryside to help carry out the collectivization campaign: ‘Constant struggle, struggle, and more struggle! This was how we had been taught to think – that nothing was achieved without struggle, which was a norm of social life.’

According to this militant world-view, the creation of a new society would involve and indeed necessitate a bitter struggle with the forces of the old society (a logic reinforced by the propaganda of the Five Year Plan, with its constant talk of ‘campaigns’, ‘battles’ and ‘offensives’ on the social, economic, international and internal ‘fronts’). In this way the Communist idealists reconciled the ‘anti-kulak’ terror with their own utopian beliefs. Some were appalled by the brutal violence. Some were even sickened by their own role in it. But they all knew what they were doing (they could not plead that they were ignorant or that they were simply ‘following orders’). And they all believed that the end justified the means.

Lev Kopelev, a young Communist who took part in some of the worst atrocities against the Ukrainian peasants, explained how he rationalized his actions. Kopelev had volunteered for a Komsomol brigade which requisitioned grain from the ‘kulaks’ in 1932. They took everything, down to the last loaf of bread. Looking back on the experience in the 1970s, Kopelev recalled the children’s screams and the appearance of the peasant men – ‘frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad daring ferocity’:

It was excruciating to see and hear all this. And even worse to take part in it … And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the Five Year Plan!

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by | 7 October 2007 · 10:08 pm

A Father Confessor Researcher in Ukraine

Saturday’s New York Times carries a fascinating report by Elaine Sciolino on a remarkable research project undertaken by a priest who also doubles as a father confessor to the historical actors whose belated confessions he elicits.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.

Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.

“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”

Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.

Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective….

Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.”…

To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.

Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.

“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”

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Filed under religion, Ukraine, war

by | 8 March 2007 · 5:25 pm

Solzhenitsyn’s Full Circle

This week’s Times Literary Supplement offers a sad retrospective by Russian writer Zinovy Zinik on Solzhenitsyn’s return home to Mother Russia.

Solzhenitsyn’s status in Russia today would have been deemed peculiar if it were not almost tragic. On the face of it, the outlook is good. He celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday at his private estate near Moscow, which was specially built as a replica of his retreat in Vermont. With the ascent of Vladimir Putin to power, his optimism and belief in the new Russian state grew. He granted an audience to Putin who came to his house to discuss the Russian nation’s current problems; he has accepted state honours and honorary titles. The first parts of the multi-volume edition of his complete works are due to appear in the bookshops this year. Last year, a state television channel showed the ten-part serialization of his novel The First Circle which was narrated by Solzhenitsyn himself. According to witnesses he was moved to tears when he was shown the first episodes. After he endured eight years in labour camps (he was arrested on the front line in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in private correspondence with a friend), exile in Kazakhstan and the threat of cancer, his semi-underground existence in Moscow and fight with the literary establishment after Stalin’s death and during the Khrushchev thaw – after all that, it looks as though the truth has triumphed. Has it?

I am old enough to remember how, as Soviet schoolboys, we were from time to time given a talk by a guest lecturer, an Old Bolshevik, on the horrors of the tsarist regime. The aim was to demonstrate how happy and bright our days in the Soviet paradise were. It is alarming to see that Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is now being used by the new governors of Russia in a similar way. The country has not gone through the process of de-Sovietization, as did the other countries of Eastern and Central Europe after the fall of Communism. Nobody can give a clear answer why, during the period (short as it was) of the total collapse of the totalitarian state, the records of KGB informants were not made public, the main perpetrators of the Soviet genocide inside and outside the USSR were left in peace, the party apparatchiks were allowed to regain their political influence and financial affluence under the new regime. Some suggested that the scale of complicity in Soviet crimes was such that its exposure would have led to a civil war; others blamed Russian fatalism and lack of civic courage. Apart from all this, the new elite started early on adapting the parts of the former state security organs for their own private aims, thereby letting the most sinister elements of the defunct Soviet system take control of the new Russia.

Whatever the causes, we are now faced with a country once again under the thumb of a transformed state security apparatus, divided into warring factions and yet united in destruction of any semblance of political opposition – be it a politically active industrialist or charismatic journalist. The sense of impunity among criminals, old and new, is such that it has a demoralizing effect on the rest of the population: “Everything is permitted” is the person on the street’s opinion. And, since the origin and mores of the new Russian elite are transparent to the outside world, the new establishment is wary of foreigners and outsiders, whips up nationalistic feelings among the populace, and creates an atmosphere of deep suspicion of Western alliances. The West is for shopping, not for learning historical lessons. Russians are not to imitate the Western way of life blindly, we are told; instead they have chosen what is now called “controlled democracy” for the “indigenous population”. In short, the country – with all its current wealth, feverish economic activity and cultural exuberance – might easily sleepwalk into a state which in the good old days was called fascist.

Solzhenitsyn once dedicated his life to the fight against the regime in which the state security machine made everyone feel an accomplice in turning the country into a prison camp. He has now become part of a society where the mass media are reduced to self-censoring impotence, Soviet style; dissident artists and writers are regularly beaten up; journalists who expose corruption and the abuses of centralized political power are murdered. And yet Solzhenitsyn is silent; silent even when his most cherished idea of saving Russia by strengthening the independence of local government, Swiss-style, was first ridiculed in the press and then trampled over by a presidential decree that reinstalled the central authority of the Kremlin over the whole of Russia. On the whole, Solzhenitsyn avoids public appearances these days and refrains from public utterances. And yet, he found the time and energy to express his approval of the recent cutting off of gas supplies to Ukraine for a discount price “because that country tramples over Russian culture and the Russian language and allows NATO military manoeuvres on its territory”. Oh well. My country, right or wrong.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 13 November 2006 · 6:10 am

Ukraine Remembers While Russia Forgets

In an essay posted on Maidan, a Ukrainian civic action site, Ivan Ampilogov contrasts The Power of Memory in Russia and Ukraine.

We can say that the anti-empire tradition of Soviet dissidents has suffered defeat in the mass consciousness of contemporary Russian, while in Ukraine it can take on new meaning.

In Solzhenitsyn’s novel “The First Circle”, the author writes about camp prisoners, their future and at the same time about the future of the whole country. “Years will pass, and all these people, now oppressed, indignant, despairing and choking with rage will go to their graves, others will become weak, flabby, while a third group will forget it all, renounce it, with relief burying their prison past and a fourth will be turned around, and they’ll even say that it was all reasonable, and not ruthless – and maybe none of them will get around to reminding today’s executioners what they did to the human heart!” In contemporary Russia the idea that the terror was “reasonable” or “required” is gaining ever greater influence, most often they prefer not to remember it at all….

Over recent years many Ukrainians have become convinced that their country is freer than Russia, that their democratic institutions are much more developed and that at the end of the day, the Ukrainian state is more humane or, more accurately, less inhuman than Putin’s regime. The level of freedom both of Ukrainian, and of Russian society can be measured by the weakening or strengthening of the enforcement structures of the state – against its citizens. A Ukrainian feels that living without an omnipresent and all-powerful secret police is possible and very comfortable, whereas Russians loudly declare their attachment to unlimited power of the state and their readiness to endure its police, both secret and open. Modern Ukrainians do not face any dilemma of whether to forget the fate of their grandfathers who were left to rot in labour camps, or the fate of their parents frightened to talk with foreigners – and to forget who made their life like that – or to feel redundant in that colony of fervent patriots which Russia is once again becoming.

In contemporary Ukraine, at least two general groups are implacable opponents of the re-emerging Russian imperial spirit, being able to speak about themselves as victims of Soviet Russia – the descendents of Ukrainian nationalists and the Crimean Tatars. The link between the Crimean Tatar dissidents and the Ukrainian nationalists was strong back in the times of their common struggle with the Soviet regime.

via A Step at a Time

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by | 19 April 2006 · 2:41 am

Japanese Straggler in Ukraine

BBC News reports on yet another long-lost Japanese soldier finding his way back to Japan.

A Japanese ex-soldier who disappeared after World War II and was officially declared dead in 2000 has turned up alive in Ukraine.

Ishinosuke Uwano [上野石之助] was serving with the Japanese Imperial Army in Russia’s Sakhalin Island when the war ended. He was last reported seen there in 1958.

The 83-year-old has now reappeared, in Ukraine, where he is married and has a family, Japanese officials say.

Mr Uwano is due to visit Japan for the first time in six decades on Wednesday.

He is expected to visit his surviving family members and friends in Iwate, 290 miles (467　km) northeast of Tokyo, with his son before returning to Ukraine on 28 April, the AFP news agency reported.

The family’s last reported sighting of him was on Sakhalin in 1958; after that they lost all contact with him.

He’ll arrive in Iwate just in time to see the cherry blossoms he has expressed a desire to see. Uwano has pretty much forgotten his Japanese, but speaks Russian quite fluently, it seems.

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