It’s bland--like calamari, but without the garlic. However, boiling the human trachea, if you chance upon any fuel, helps soften the gristle. And then of course there are the other body parts, the shriveled organs, and the even more desiccated muscle. Not much of that on the bones of walking cadavers, though. But that is what a mother, driven insane by starvation, 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, while barely still breathing, she would kill in its sleep to try to save the siblings. Kidnapping became a food source. But it never helped. Nor did corpse eating. It just postponed the inevitable. And it was the inevitability of it all, the absolute, categorical hopelessness of it all, that was the psychological side of a genocide that was so massive and degenerate, that the word shrinks to impotence. The horror was committed in the Europe during Fall/Winter 1932-33. Moscow, imperiously ruling the largest country in the world, wreaked an apocalypse on Ukraine (less than 3% its size). Six, ten, or more million were scythed down by state-contrived starvation. The murder rate was so massive, census takers were shot for “undercounting the population.”
It gets worse. Abetting it all, on November 16, 1933, Washington extended official US recognition to Stalin, welcoming the Great Sun to the diplomatic soiree. His membership in the League of Nations became a no-brainer, and the League honorably shelved the Ukrainian genocide as “a very sensitive matter.” Eight days after recognition, on November 24, Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was feted at the Waldorf Astoria, where he slurped Ukrainian borshch (you read it right) as bodies of millions of Ukrainians half a world away were exploding from starvation induced edema. (The dessert was remarkably decadent for an earthy proletarian: “Bombe Glace Chocolate Praline Wladimire Gourmandises.”)
Litvinov, of “food is a weapon” fame, was in all his cheeky glory, as the captains of American industry and dowagers galore rose to their feet and lustily sang The Internationale, the Soviet anthem. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty wrote that 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 mesmerize 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”.) Two years earlier, a 1931 memo from the US Embassy in Berlin to the State Department 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. Privately, however, to William Strang, the counselor at the British Embassy in Moscow, and to UPI correspondent Eugene Lyons, Stalin’s shill admitted to 10 million corpses and a “ghastly horror” in Ukraine.
And so, as Western Europe feasted in Ukrainian grain, butter and other foodstuffs, the very farmers who for millennia tilled the soil of the world’s cornucopia, themselves became the organic fertilizer for that very soil. The world press, with exceptions so rare that it made silence scream, not only denied it all., but engaged in active internment. (One intrepid Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, bucked the cartel, reported the truth, and was prompted slandered by The New York Times, and ostracized by Western journalists stationed in Moscow. He was murdered two years later by?) And Western governments, obsequious as ever, turned a blind eye to it all. In assessing an inquiry from the House of Commons, the British Foreign office wrote: “We do not want to make it [information about the Ukrainian genocide] 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 a horror that was “hair-raising” and “horrifying.” In the best Potemkin tradition, French Prime Minister Herriot toured Ukraine and returned to categorically deny any famine. Bernard Shaw lampooned it. And John Paul Sartre exploded crimson with fury upon any mention. And there was no lack on this side of the pond of “useful idiots,” as the Generalissimo called them. More than ten years later, after WWII, FDR did his best to forcibly “repatriate” survivors to the benevolent embrace of Moscow. No place for sensitivity sessions here. Tens of thousands were murdered upon their return. Famine survivors who survived the Allies’ dragnet in Europe and remained in the West were, since their arrival, simply disbelieved, dismissed, and increasingly slandered.
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 Soviet Russian rule. It was, as Oxford’s Prof. Norman Davies wrote, intended to forever inter any notion of Ukrainian statehood. To reconstitute, in 1922, the old Russian Empire as a new “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics“, the re-conquest and re-occupation of Ukraine was pivotal: “If we lose Ukraine we lose our head,” said Lenin. Ukraine simultaneously battled the Red Army, Denikin’s White Army, Poles and Germans. Its capital, Kyiv, changed hands fifteen times in two years. Warning of what the West would face from Russia in the decades to come, Ukraine’s pleas for surplus blankets and expired medicine were ignored by the US with a sniff. Notwithstanding, Moscow actually almost lost Ukraine. (Poor choice of words, as Ukraine was never Moscow’s to lose.) After murdering, almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s cultural, political and religious elite, on August 11, 1932, Stalin wrote to his executioner and future brother in law, Lazar Moyseiovich Kaganovich to administer the coup de grace: “Things in Ukraine are terrible . . . If we don’t make an effort to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine . . . Give yourself the task of transforming Ukraine into truly a fortress of the USSR . . . Without these and similar measures, I repeat—we can lose Ukraine.” Result? The world’s first “famine on command.” The ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Cheap (actually, a communist can honorably turn a profit on it), predictable, certain. And facially deniable. No chemical residue, no radiation. If not denied outright, the “famine” has more recently been breezily dismissed by Moscow and fellow travelers as a result of bad crops, worse weather, lazy peasants, lousy infrastructure, locusts (OK, no locusts in Ukraine), a misguided frolic toward a brave new world that simply screwed up an economic policy (really, now, how can you blame youthful exuberance?). We’ve heard it all.
But there is more to this than the real world giving life (strange word) to the Third Horseman. And more than world journalism’s breach of its public trust and the propagation of a monstrous hoax. What happened—and importantly—what didn’t happen, 80 years ago has burning implications today for the United States and the West. It can in a heartbeat displace Syria, Iraq, Iran and North Korea to page 2, as Putin accelerates the resurrection-- no, veneration-- of Uncle Joe; as he methodically, inexorably suborns the former republics of the USSR. The Beatles’ “Back to the USSR” will have a reprise. “Reset” be damned.
In the scenario, an independent, “non-compliant” Ukraine is enemy #1. Though miniscule compared to Russia, Ukraine is still the largest European country, equal in territory to England, Germany and Hungary, combined. It is, wrote Prof. Davis, the land through which millennia ago the greatest number of European peoples approached their eventual homeland. Several years ago, Sherman Garnett of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote: “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.” The Soviet Union, which “experts” and sophomores alike airily deemed to be “Russia,” was a multi-national empire. It was Ukraine that was the linchpin without which the empire would not have been, and would not have been able to hypnotize the US in a nuclear limbo. And it was Ukraine that, in 1991 declared independence, unraveling the razor wire that was the USSR. For a dizzying moment, Washington panicked. It was almost as if the states of the US were seceding from the Union. But marketing genius prevailed, and credit was given to where it was not due: official Washington.
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 went home. Well, but didn’t someone at least learn something, and finally start understanding either history or political geography? No.
Today, a generation after it all imploded, the website of the State Department’s historian introduces the history of US diplomatic recognition of the USSR thusly: “On November 16, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ended almost 16 years of American non-recognition of the Soviet Union . . . . “ So what’s the problem? The Soviet Union wasn’t around for 16 years. The USSR was established in December 1922. Sixteen years really was eleven. But it’s not that the State Department doesn’t know its arithmetic. The State Department doesn’t distinguish the very essence of it all, reduced to its irreducible core: it continues to blithely interchange “Russia” with the “USSR”. A rhetorical faux pas, it’s thought (not really, since it doesn’t even rise to the level of any consciousness), no different than interchanging “America” with the “United States.” This, a generation after the US won the Cold War--a feat which, if true, would have required an immutable understanding of the difference between and significance of the two. (No embarrassment, though as it is in good company with other government agencies. Reporting on the Chornobyl cataclysm, Time magazine on its April 1986 cover printed a photograph, from NASA, captioned “Chernobyl, Russia.”)
And so we have the bottom line: What led to the disintegration of the USSR, and what Washington hasn’t fully absorbed to this day, was that the USSR was an empire that could disintegrate (or be made to disintegrate) in the very first place. It was not a “Russian “monolith, but an enforced conglomerate of subjugated nations, some wholly obliterated and others bludgeoned into submission by Moscow. US policy totally ignored that fact, 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. Astonishingly, FDR himself formally wrote about the US recognition of “Russia.” And who can forget President Bush lecturing Ukrainians about “suicidal nationalism”? Ukraine was dismissed as simply a discontented region in the “south of Russia”. It’s beyond bizarre that from WWI through today there continues a perfectly inverse correlation between Russian’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.
The lessons, which long ago should have become tautological, were never absorbed. Henry Kissinger and R. James Woolsey (former CIA director!) continue to totally confound Russia with the USSR, and Condoleeza Rice, a “Russian” expert, writes in her memoirs that “for Russia losing Ukraine was like the United States . . . losing the original thirteen colonies”. That’s the very cathecism, in haec verba, that was created out of whole cloth by the Russian Tsar’s alchemist qua historian Karamzin in the 19th century, ever intent on establishing a respectable genealogy for Russian despotism by presenting itself as the legatee of Ukraine’s own etiology, the ancient Kyivan Empire. And Ted Turner tells Tom Brokaw on national television that the KGB –you know, the heroes ripping food out of children’s mouths--is an honorable profession. At the end of the day, we have a wholesale abdication by the US of the very cornerstone of any understanding of the USSR, of the imperatives driving Putin today, and of the consequences for US foreign policy and national security interests.
Ukraine today is not just a vast necropolis. It’s a vessel of eviscerated souls, their DNA imbedded with the offal of 300 years of mass murders, war crimes, death marches, homicidal russification, atrocities, recreational torture, arson, plunder, assassinations, predation, massacres, kidnappings, pillage, death ships, rape, executions cellars, ethnic cleansing, murder quotas, slave ships, stupefying terror, thought crime, and . . . forced starvation -- the ultimate weapon of mass destruction: no-cost, predictable and final, controllable to the last human. Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell collapsed into one. All locked in a straitjacket of mendacity, duplicity, fraud and a steamrolling dezinformatsia, other-worldly in its scope and effectiveness.
The mind reels. And we see the results. Italian diplomats stationed in Ukraine in 1933 reported a top OGPU secret police official’s pronouncement that Moscow’s goal was “to dispose of the Ukrainian problem within a few months at a cost of 10-15 million souls.” The consular officer continued: “However monstrous and incredible such a plan might appear, it should nevertheless be regarded as authentic and well underway . . . [It] will bring about a predominantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon . . . Ukraine will become a de facto Russian region.”
It is a prophecy fulfilled, where so much of Ukraine today, even after a generation of nominal independence, remains an exponential example of the Stockholm Syndrome, where the victim perversely identifies with his persecutor. Where else –in Armenia, Israel, Cambodia, Darfur, Ethiopia?-do hapless, pitiful victims deny their victimization, a phenomenon in much of Ukraine? Answer that, and you will understand the demonic thoroughness of Russia’s ethnic cleansing of Ukraine, a colonization planned even before it took the first steps in implementing forced starvation. And simultaneously you will be able answer how the jackbooted nomenklatura of the past has wrested control of Ukraine in true Soviet style.
Today, “independent” Ukraine has been hijacked by a Soviet thugacracy backed by Russia, a predator nation and the quintessential terrorist state. No surprise that, after an obsequious scurry to Moscow, the president of a nominally independent Ukraine suddenly back-pedaled from signing the EU association agreement at the upcoming Vilnius conference. We are seeing a reprise of the Beatles’ “Back to the USSR”, reset be damned.
So how can the US redeem the infamy of feting at the Waldorf the shill for a satanic war criminal? (A “war” against Ukraine was exactly how it was described by Pavel Sudoplatov, the engineer of Trotsky’s assassination and Stalin’s penetration of the Manhattan Project. Ted Turner—“the KGB is an honorable profession” -- would be proud.) 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 destabilizing and suborning Ukraine continues to eclipse America’s myopic, bemused glance. Moscow is condemning Ukraine to the coffin air of Lubyanka, and we will slingshot back to the age of M[utually]A[ssured]D[estruction]. Remember that? However, if the US and the rest of the “West” are successful in securing that reality 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.”
Victor Rud
Past Chairman, Board of Governors Ukrainian American Bar Association
