History Repeats, Ukraine Again Plaything of Foreign Politics. Part I: a Short History of Ukraine
This picture shows the colors of the Ukrainian flag; the upper half is blue, the lower half is yellow. Ukraine is an agricultural country, so it is easy to see the blue sky above a yellow field of wheat. The combination of blue and yellow as a symbol of Ukrainian lands comes from the flag of the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia used in the 12th century.
The trident of Ukraine is also depicted in this picture. As a state emblem, the trident dates back to Kyivan Rus, when it was the coat of arms of the Riurykide dynasty. There are four letters recognizable, воля, or volya, which means Freedom. Ukraine’s history has been stormy, to put it mildly, and Freedom has always been a scarce thing. Ukraine means borderland, and throughout history, this has been an appropriate name. Ukraine has been at war with Russia for eight years. The USA and Western Europe tend to forget that. All this time, this has attracted ample attention from Western media or politicians. So what has changed? Why the sudden attention to this conflict?
Some Highlights From Ukraine’s History
I will start by telling something about Ukrainian history; not all western people know about this, and it can be helpful to understand the current situation.
Ukraine is the second-largest land in Europe. Its population is close to France, and its GNP is comparable to Italy´s. Yet the political prerogatives of the Ukrainians as a nation – not only in Europe but even on their own well-endowed and highly developed land – are minimal. Today, the source of ultimate decision-making power over all aspects of Ukrainians´ lives is located beyond their country’s borders, as it has been for centuries.
Subtelny
In the year 852, the land of Rus´was first named. The foundations of Kievan Rus´ were laid by the Varangians, a Germanic-Scandinavian people known in the West as the Vikings or Normans.
Seeing the trident of Ukraine, it is easy to see the influence and similarity with Viking symbols. Around 860, the Varangians went back overseas to the Varangian Russes; they were known as Russes, just like the Normans, Swedes, Goths, etc. They selected three brothers, with their kinsfolk, who took with them all the Russes and migrated. (Subtelny, 1988)
Iaroslav the Wise (1036-1054) is perhaps best known for his codification of customary laws that became the basic legal code of the land, the Ruska Pravda (Rus´ justice). Not only were existing laws systematized, but some were modified, thus reflecting the increasing involvement of the ruler in the lives of his subjects.
By the late 17th century, Moscow established its sovereignty over Cossack Ukraine; it strove to transform its nominal overlordship into direct control. This work was started by Peter I, but it took till 1764 till Catherine II finished this work.
Pylyp Orlyk (1710-1742) is the chief author of the Pacta et constitutiones (Constitution of Bendery, 1710); he pursued policies aimed at liberating Ukraine from Russian rule. This was the first constitutional law in history. The constitution obligated him to limit the hetman’s prerogatives, eliminate socioeconomic exploitation, to preserve the Zaporozhians´special status, and work for the political and ecclesiastical separation of Ukraine from Russia if he were to regain power in Ukraine. (Subtelny, 1988)
Serfs
Catherine II was the empress of Russia from 1762-96. Catherine’s policies towards the non-Russian nations and peoples of the empire were centralist, especially with respect to Ukraine. In 1764 the hetman office was abolished, and in the 1780s Ukraine’s autonomy was completely liquidated. In 1765 the regiments of Slobidska Ukraine were abolished, and in 1775 the Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed. In 1783, Crimea and in the 1790s, the entire Right-Bank Ukraine were incorporated into the empire. In the cultural sphere, Catherine’s reign was marked by further Russification in Ukraine. The rights and interests of the Ukrainian church were curtailed, and in Right-Bank Ukraine, Catherine’s government advanced a policy aimed at the annihilation of the Ukrainian Catholic church. (Subtelny, 1988)
In 1783, the Ukrainians were deprived of their right to leave their landlords just as Russian peasants had been long ago. In other words, the peasantry now became officially enslaved. Serfs were basically slaves. The serfs started out as peasants, people who worked the fields. But the rulers made a succession of laws that stripped them of their freedom. When Catherine reached the throne, only 20% of the Russian peasants remained free; the rest had become “serfs,” aka slaves. According to the law, the serfs belonged to the land they were born in, and they were not allowed to leave. The serfs were forced to work that land, which someone else owned. When the land was sold, they were sold along with it. Serfs had few rights. They could not own property, they were mistreated and flogged, and if they displeased their lord, they could be killed without repercussions. According to the law, serfs were not slaves. Yet most people recognized that they were indeed enslaved. Catherine herself stated more than once that the serfs were slaves in everything but name and that the institution was inhuman. Catherine was not the first Russian ruler who thought of abolishing serfdom. Others had tried and failed before her. One of the problems was that Russia’s economy was heavily dependent on agriculture. And millions of serfs worked the fields.
Holodomor
The Holodomor (Ukrainian: голодомор), literally “killing through starving,” was a genocide-through famine on the territory of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1932-1933. It was one of the largest national disasters in Ukraine in modern history; The number of deaths was between 2.5 and 7.5 million. (Snyder, 2012)
“Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. (Snyder, 2012)
The Bolsheviks had brought Ukraine under control in 1919; in the following years, power moved from Lenin to Stalin. Perhaps even more so than in Soviet Russia, where communal farming was traditional, in Soviet Ukraine, peasants were terrified by the loss of their land. Their whole history was one of a struggle with landlords, which they seemed finally to have won during the Bolshevik Revolution. But in the years immediately thereafter, between 1918 and 1921, the Bolsheviks had requisitioned food from the peasants as they fought their civil wars. So peasants had good reason to be wary of the Soviet state. The Ukrainian peasantry knew about deportations to prison camps, which had touched them from the mid-1920s onward. (Snyder, 2012)
The peasants had few guns and poor organization. The state had a near-monopoly on firepower and logistics. Peasants’ actions were recorded by a powerful state police apparatus, one that perhaps did not understand their motives but grasped their general direction. The OGPU noted almost one million acts of individual resistance in Ukraine in 1930. Of the mass peasant revolts in the Soviet Union that March, almost half took place in Soviet Ukraine.
In the first four months of 1930, 113,637 people were forcibly transported from Soviet Ukraine as kulaks. Such an action meant about thirty thousand peasant huts emptied one after another, their surprised inhabitants given little or no time to prepare for the unknown. It meant thousands of freezing freight cars, filled with terrified and sick human cargo, bound for destinations in northern European Russia, the Urals, Siberia, or Kazakhstan. It meant gunshots and cries of terror at the last dawn peasants would see at home; it meant frostbite and humiliation on the trains, and anguish and resignation as peasants disembarked as slave laborers on the taiga or the steppe. (Snyder, 2012)
More than half of the (unspoiled) harvest was removed from Soviet Ukraine in 1931. Many collective farms met their requisition targets only by handing over their seed grain. Stalin ordered on December 5 that collective farms that had not yet fulfilled their annual requirements must surrender their seed grain. Stalin perhaps believed that peasants were hiding food and thought that the threat of taking the seed grain would motivate them to hand over what they had. But by this time, many of them truly had nothing. By the end of 1931, many peasants were already going hungry.
A cart full of dead bodies is dragged off to be burned. Ukraine. Circa 1932-1933.
Stalin, a master of personal politics, presented the Ukrainian famine in personal terms. His first impulse, and his lasting tendency, was to see the starvation of Ukrainian peasants as a betrayal by members of the Ukrainian communist party. He could not allow the possibility that his own policy of collectivization was to blame; the problem must be in the implementation, in the local leaders, anywhere but in the concept itself. As he pushed forward with his transformation in the first half of 1932, the problem he saw was not the suffering of his people but rather the possibility that the image of his collectivization policy might be tarnished. Starving Ukrainian peasants, he complained, were leaving their home republic and demoralizing other Soviet citizens by their “whining.” (Snyder, 2012)
By now Stalin seemed to have worked out, at least to his own satisfaction, the connection between starvation and the disloyalty of Ukrainian communists: hunger was a result of sabotage, local party activists were the saboteurs, treacherous higher party officials protected their subordinates—all in the service of Polish espionage. In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. He shifted to a position of pure malice, where the Ukrainian peasant was somehow the aggressor and he, Stalin, the victim. In the face of starvation, some families divided, parents turning against children, and children against one another. As the state police, the OGPU, found itself obliged to record, in Soviet Ukraine, “families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating.” Countless parents killed and ate their children and then died of starvation later anyway. One mother cooked her son for herself and her daughter. (Snyder, 2012)
The Great Terror
People belonging to national minorities “should be forced to their knees and shot like mad dogs.” It was not an SS officer speaking but a communist party leader, in the spirit of the national operations of Stalin’s Great Terror. In 1937 and 1938, a quarter of a million Soviet citizens were shot on essentially ethnic grounds. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. (Snyder, 2012)
The Great Terror was a kulak action, which struck most heavily in Soviet Ukraine, and a series of national actions, the most important of them the Polish, where again Soviet Ukraine was the region most affected. Of the 681,692 recorded death sentences in the Great Terror, 123,421 were carried out in Soviet Ukraine—and this figure does not include natives of Soviet Ukraine shot in the Gulag. Ukraine as a Soviet republic was overrepresented within the Soviet Union, and Poles were overrepresented within Soviet Ukraine. (Snyder, 2012)
Second World War
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 die in the millions in the greatest artificial famine in the history of the 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. (Snyder, 2012)
As Hitler knew, in late 1940 and early 1941, ninety percent of the food shipments from the Soviet Union came from Soviet Ukraine. Like Stalin, Hitler tended to see Ukraine itself as a geopolitical asset and its people as instruments who tilled the soil, tools that could be exchanged with others or discarded. For Stalin, mastery of Ukraine was the precondition and proof of the triumph of his version of socialism. Purged, starved, collectivized, and terrorized, it fed and defended Soviet Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union. Hitler dreamed of the endlessly fertile Ukrainian soil, assuming that Germans would extract more from the terrain than the Soviets. (Snyder, 2012)
Food from Ukraine was as important to the Nazi vision of an eastern empire as it was to Stalin’s defense of the integrity of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s Ukrainian “fortress” was Hitler’s Ukrainian “breadbasket.” The German army general staff concluded in an August 1940 study that Ukraine was “agriculturally and industrially the most valuable part of the Soviet Union.”
In the long run, the Nazis’ Generalplan Ost involved seizing farmland, destroying those who farmed it, and settling it with Germans. But in the meantime, during the war and immediately after its (anticipated) rapid conclusion, Hitler needed the locals to harvest food for German soldiers and civilians.
Exhausted and terrified women fleeing from German bombing in Grushki district, Kiev, Ukraine, 23 June 1941.The opening phase of Barbarossa caused enormous civilian dislocation in addition to the destruction of almost all Soviet front line forces.
As German planners saw matters, the collective farm should be used again to starve millions of people: in fact, this time, the intention was to kill tens of millions. Collectivization had brought starvation to Soviet Ukraine, first as an unintended result of inefficiencies and unrealistic grain targets and then as an intended consequence of the vengeful extractions of late 1932 and early 1933. Hitler, on the other hand, planned in advance to starve unwanted Soviet populations to death. German planners were contemplating the parts of Europe already under German domination, requiring imports to feed about twenty-five million people. They also regarded the Soviet Union, whose urban population had grown by about twenty-five million since the First World War. They saw an apparently simple solution: the latter would die so that the former could live. By their calculations, the collective farms produced just the right amount of food to sustain Germans, but not enough to sustain the peoples of the East. So in that sense, they were the ideal tool for political control and economic balance.
This was the Hunger Plan, as formulated by May 23 1941: during and after the war on the USSR, the Germans intended to feed German soldiers and German (and west European) civilians by starving the Soviet citizens they would conquer, especially those in the big cities. Food from Ukraine would now be sent not north to feed Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union but rather west to nourish Germany and the rest of Europe. In the German understanding, Ukraine (along with parts of southern Russia) was a “surplus region,” which produced more food than it needed, while Russia and Belarus were “deficit regions.” Inhabitants of Ukrainian cities, and almost everyone in Belarus and in northwestern Russia, would have to starve or flee. The cities would be destroyed, the terrain would be returned to natural forest, and about thirty million people would starve to death in the winter of 1941–1942. The Hunger Plan involved the “extinction of industry as well as a great part of the population in the deficit regions.” These guidelines of May 23 1941 included some of the most explicit Nazi language about intentions to kill large numbers of people.
Babi Jar
Babi Jar (Oekraïens: Бабин Яр, Babyn Jar; Russisch: Бабий Яр, Babi Jar) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany’s forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, killing approximately 33,771 Jews. The massacre was the largest mass killing under the auspices of the Nazi regime and its collaborators during its campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called “the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust” to that particular date. Victims of other massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists, Ukrainian nationalists, and Roma. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 people were killed at Babi Yar during the German occupation.
Loss of Nuclear Option
In 1993, Ukraine possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. It had inherited 175 long-range missiles and more than 1,800 warheads after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following two years of talks been the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, US President Bill Clinton announced a breakthrough on January 10, 1994. Ukraine had agreed to remove all nuclear weapons from its soil in exchange for assurances that Russia would respect its sovereignty.
Ironically, Washington itself adopted a policy that eliminated the one factor that might have deterred Putin from using military force against his neighbor. When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, US leaders were adamant that Ukraine relinquish their newly acquired arsenals, leaving Russia as the only nuclear-armed successor state. Washington adopted a concerted carrot and stick strategy to persuade the newly independent countries to turn over their nukes to Russia. The main carrot was the promise of generous aid packages—not a small consideration for governments now struggling with an assortment of major economic woes. The financial inducements, though, were predicated on their willingness to fully cooperate in Washington’s effort to roll back the inadvertent proliferation that had occurred with the USSR’s disintegration. The stick was an implicit, but unsubtle, message that if they insisted on keeping their inherited arsenals, the United States would treat them as it would any other “rogue” proliferators and lead an international effort to isolate them, diplomatically and economically.
The signing of the Budapest Memorandum. From left to right, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, USA President Bill Clinton, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and UK Prime Minister John Major.
University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, widely considered the dean of hardcore foreign-policy realists in the academic community, was especially outspoken on that point. Writing in the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, he noted that the United States and its European allies “have been pressuring Ukraine to transfer all of the nuclear weapons on its territory to the Russians, who naturally think this is an excellent idea.” Mearsheimer emphatically disagreed with that approach. He argued that a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent is “imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it.” In a prophetic passage, he added: “Ukraine cannot defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia with conventional weapons, and no state, including the United States, is going to extend to it a meaningful security guarantee. Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression.”
The key term was a meaningful security guarantee. In 1994, the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Britain did sign the so-called Budapest Memorandum, an agreement pledging to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and current borders. That agreement also contained security “assurances” to Kyiv from the other three signatories. The reality is that the United States threw away the one high card it had to play more than two decades ago. Unfortunately, Mearsheimer and other academic dissidents had little influence and were unable even to slow, much less halt, the drive to de-nuclearize all USSR successor states, except for Russia. Moscow received a great geopolitical gift when Washington succumbed to its obsession to oppose nuclear proliferation in all cases, regardless of the strategic circumstances. That move effectively disarmed Ukraine and made it vulnerable to coercion by its much stronger neighbor. Both Ukraine and the United States are now paying the price for that.
In Part II I will discuss why, after already eight years of war, the acute new interest from USA and EU for the situation in Ukraine.
Interesting Link
History Repeats, Ukraine Again Plaything of Foreign Politics. Part II: Why Escalation Now?
References
Snyder, T. (2012). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books.
Subtelny, O. (1988). Ukraine: A History. University of Toronto Press.