Canadian issues

Over the past year Ukraine has figured prominently in global media.  The world has watched as Russia, a country once considered to be a strategic partner in global affairs, invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and launched a war in the country’s east.

81 years ago a different crisis was raging in Ukraine, but this time it was one that largely went unnoticed by the West.  Now known as the Holodomor, this crisis was a genocide in which millions of Ukrainians were ruthlessly and purposely starved to death.  Much like the situation today, the Holodomor was also planned and executed by the Kremlin.   

It is this interplay of past and present that Pulitzer Prize-winning Anne Applebaum so poignantly demonstrated on October 9^th as the speaker for the 17^th Annual Toronto Ukrainian Famine Lecture.  During her talk, entitled “Why Stalin Feared Ukraine and Why Putin Fears It Today,” Applebaum suggested that perhaps the best way to understand figures such as Stalin and Putin is to examine them through the prism of their formative experiences.

For Stalin, this was the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war.  The Bolsheviks had learned a number of important lessons from their violent coming to power, not the least of which was that Ukraine would not be easily subdued.  After all, Ukrainians had put up the most resistance to the Bolshevik invasion and occupation, and Ukraine was considered to have been the biggest failure during the Bolshevik Revolution.

Stalin had been in Ukraine often during the years of the Revolution and civil war, and had thus witnessed firsthand the massive peasant revolts of 1918, the collapse of the second Bolshevik regime, and the widespread resentment amongst Ukrainians which almost led to the success of the counter-revolution.  It was from experiences such as these that Stalin learned that the more ruthless he was, the more likely he was to succeed.  Extreme violence and repression were deemed the best ways to prevent future such rebellions.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s peasant revolts in Ukraine continued to be a top concern for Soviet authorities.  By the 1930s, when it became increasingly obvious that collectivization was failing, the prevention of another peasant uprising (undoubtedly the result of “Polish machinations and those of the nationalists under Simon Petlura”) became a priority.  Stalin’s fear of losing Ukraine – a most certain precondition to the collapse of the Soviet Union – was real.  The response to this intense fear was equivalent in ruthlessness, violence, scale, and inhumanity. 

The borders of Soviet Ukraine were sealed off, all food and means of producing it were confiscated, and one would immediately be shot if caught trying to salvage a solitary sheaf of wheat.  In this way, millions of innocent Ukrainians were starved to death.  Silently, of no concern to the West, hundreds of Ukrainian towns and villages fell silent, the stench of unburied corpses the only remaining signs of the lives which once inhabited these now deserted homes.

Eventually the Soviet Union did fall apart, and its dismemberment was hailed as a major victory for Western ideals.  For most people, memories of the Cold War slowly started to fade into the recesses of history, and Russia was no longer considered to be enemy no. 1.

But as Applebaum pointed out, there were also those for whom memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 remained vivid.  The collapse of the Soviet Union, argued Applebaum, was a formative experience for Putin, a former KGB agent turned undisputed ruler of the Soviet successor state.  He remembers well the instability that followed, how the KGB lost its power and possessions (if only temporarily), and what “dangerous ideas of freedom” did to his country.

In many ways, Stalin and Putin are similar in their attitudes towards Ukraine.  Both see the country as an existential threat to their established orders and as representing instability and anarchy, but as Applebaum noted, key differences exist.  Stalin feared Ukraine because he understood Ukrainians as being different from Russians, whereas Putin fears Ukraine because he considers Ukrainians to be very similar to Russians.  Thus, according to Putin’s logic, if a major revolution, one which overthrows a corrupt and thuggish president, can occur in Ukraine, what is stopping the same situation from playing out in Russia?

The answer, for the time being, can be found in Putin’s kleptocratic “managed democracy,” marked by fake political parties, mass voter fraud, suppression of free media, a lack of a real opposition, and a vicious propaganda campaign.  In part, these steps have been taken to ensure that no coloured revolution, such as the Orange Revolution of 2004 or the even more outrageous and annoying Euromaidan Revolution of 2014, are able to succeed in Russia.

These measures, said Applebaum, shed light on the real question, that is, what is Putin really threatened by in Ukraine?  It is not, she asserts, the Ukrainian army (which is but a fraction the size of Russia’s) or even NATO and its weapons.  Rather, it is Western ideas of democracy and their permeating into Russian society which Putin fears the most.  If Russians, following the example of their Ukrainian neighbours, begin to call into question the system which governs their country, Putin will most certainly risk losing his own power, together with the unfathomable wealth he has accumulated since assuming office in 2000.

Throughout her presentation, delivered to a packed auditorium, Applebaum provided her audience with several insights on Ukraine’s past and present relations with the Russian ruling elite.  Perhaps most illuminating were her concluding remarks, in which she alluded to a conversation had with a colleague.  Often people consider Ukraine’s geopolitical position to be its biggest problem, but as Applebaum’s colleague suggested and her own presentation demonstrated, it is not so much Ukraine’s geopolitical positioning that is the problem as Russia’s consideration of Ukraine as a factor in its internal rather than external politics.  Seen through this lens, it is little wonder that Ukraine’s current European orientation has been so virulently attacked, in every sense of the word, by a Russia mired in kleptocracy and deathly afraid of the principles of real democracy and freedom.

Kalyna Kardash

Toronto, Canada