Lviv, Donetsk agree: Nazism = Communism

East and West Together!

Two men in Donetsk, reportedly miners, burn the Soviet hammer-and-sickle and Nazi swastika flags on June 22, 2011, the anniversary of Hitler's attack on Stalin (Hitler attacked after a a nearly two year lovefest known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact when Stalin let the Nazis conquer most of Western Europe).

(pravda.com.ua)

Meanwhile, Lviv city council commissioned four billboards to mark the same anniversary. They show Nazi and Soviet atrocities in that western Ukrainian city. "Communism = Nazism" read the bold, red letters. The caption under the image of victims executed by the Soviets (left) reads "Lonsky Street Prison, Lviv, June 30, 1941." Victims of the Nazis (right) with caption: "Square in front of the Opera Theatre, Lviv, March 1942."

Bridging the east-west divide that's been artificially imposed on the people of Ukraine, local governments and individual citizens agree: standards bearing Hitler's swastika and Stalin's sickle were essentially cut from the same cloth.

Putin angers commies, vets in Ukraine

"Surgeon" helps Put foot in mouth

Vladimir Putin has once again angered Ukrainians, but this time around it’s not only the nationalists and euroatlantacists who’re upset.

The cocksure future president of Russia managed to rattle Ukraine’s communists and war veterans on Dec. 16 when he claimed that Russia didn’t need Ukraine’s help to win WW2.

(Russian language original. "Offending" Putin quote at 3:20)

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1yiaQ-Z-84 

Ukraine’s communists and war veterans – usually diehard proponents of closer ties (and in some cases union) with Russia –expressed indignation at Putin’s words as politicians called for Ukraine’s foreign ministry to respond to the Russian leader’s outrageous statement.

The Ukrainians have the leader of a Russian bike club to thank for exposing what Putin really thinks about Ukraine’s formidable contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis forces in the “The Great Patriotic War.”

Alexander Zaldostanov, president of the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club was in the audience for the live, televised Q+A session with Putin last Thursday, when the microphone lady gave him a chance to ask the Russian leader a question.

Zaldostanov and Putin had met before and rode their Harleys together in Crimea during the summer before last when Putin traveled to Sevastopol for one of his macho PR stunts. (And to gloat over Ukraine’s extension of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s lease in that port city.)

Speaking from the studio audience last Thursday, the leather-clad, bearded leader of the Night Wolves’ pack known by his handle “Khirurg” (Surgeon) reminded Putin of the rally of 5,000 bikers in the preface to his question that saw Putin put a foot in his mouth in a way that no spin doctors could help get out.

Sporting tattoos and a thick gold chain around his neck, Zaldostanov reminded Putin that the bike rally in Crimea was dedicated to the “65th anniversary of Victory” and “the idea that we probably would not have won the war if we [Russia and Ukraine] were separate states.”

Khirurg proceeded to paraphrase Putin, claiming the Russian leader once lamented “he who doesn’t want Ukraine and Russia to be together doesn’t have a heart but he who wants Ukraine and Russia together doesn’t have a mind.”

Speaking straight from his own heart and with hope in his eyes, Zaldostanov asked “Would you agree that the heart can sometimes replace the mind but that the mind can never replace the heart?”

“Sash,” Putin said, speaking to the biker like to a good buddy, “that’s a very deep question, one that I’m not sure I understand.”

First, Putin clarified the quote Zaldostanov attributed to him.

“I was talking about the demise of the Soviet Union... He who isn’t sorry that the Soviet Union fell apart has no heart, but he who wants to recreate the USSR, as it was, has no head.”

“Concerning our relations with Ukraine... I will allow myself to disagree with you when you say 'if we were divided, then we wouldn’t have won the war.'”

“We would have won either way,” Putin said in a lecturing tone.

Awkward pause. Scattered applause.

“That’s because we’re a country of winners,” Putin said in a victorious tone as the clapping continued.

He proceeded to back up his claim with “facts” such as 70 percent of the losses suffered by the Soviet Union were incurred by the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.

“That war was won – I do not want to offend anyone – but primarily on account of the resources, human and industrial resources of the Russian Federation. That’s a historical fact, it’s all in the documents,” Putin said.

The communists and war veterans of Ukraine reacted to the news of Putin’s statements with disbelief and indignation. But some, displaying the slave mentality that has been instilled in them by centuries of imperial domination, tried to make apologies for their masters in Moscow explaining Putin’s statements away as a mistake made in haste ahead of the 2012 presidential elections in Russia.

Communist MP Oleksandr Holub called Putin’s statement “very controversial” but speculated that the Russian may have uttered it “without appropriate preparation.” He said that “Putin’s concept helps the cause of Ukrainian nationalists who assert that Red Army soldier ‘fought for a foreign country.’”

“Germany waged war with the Soviet Union, not with Russia, Ukraine or other republics,” said Yuli Korotkin, chairman of the Committee of War Veterans. “I consider such thoughts and answers to be primitive. To divide our victory like a pie is sacrilege! It’s desecration of the memory of 27 million Soviet people who died in the GPW and 1.9 million veterans still alive from the Great Patriotic.”

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said it will not officially react to Putin’s words, adding that Ukraine’s position is that all the peoples of the former USSR can consider themselves winners of the Great Patriotic War.

At least Ukrainians now have further proof of what Putin, the man likely to be Russia’s next president, really thinks about their country(in addition to his claim that Ukraine “is not really a country.”) And we have the straight-shooting bikers of MC Night Wolves to thank for it.

Two presidents: Alexander Zaldostanov (taller, left), president of MC Night Wolves and Vladimir Putin, president-wannabe (2012-2017) in Moscow. (daylife.com)

Holodomor Wikileaks and Russia's Single Historical Space

The Holodomor won’t go away. This past weekend, we marked the sad anniversary of the terror-famine that occurred nearly eighty years ago. And just when the Kremlin thought it was over for another year, the Holodomor has surfaced in the wikileaked US embassy cables.

Ukraine is mentioned in eight of the 278 embassy cables leaked thus far, and it’s not just in connection with Muammar al-Qadhafi’s “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse. 

(The US Embassy in Kyiv is not (yet?) among the embassies listed as sources for the cables.)

The Holodomor is referenced twice in cables from the past two years.

At the end of October 2008, the US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Gfoeller attended a lunch briefing in Bishkek with Prince Andrew of the British crown ahead of his royal highness’ meeting with the Kyrgyz government. Many issues were discussed, and the Prince “pounced” when the topic of Russia came up:

"[Prince Andrew] stated the following story related to him recently by Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev. Aliyev had received a letter from President Medvedev telling him that if Azerbaijan supported the designation of the Bolshevik artificial famine in Ukraine as 'genocide' at the United Nations, 'then you can forget about seeing Nagorno-Karabakh ever again.' Prince Andrew added that every single other regional President had told him of receiving similar 'directive' letters from Medvedev except for Bakiyev. He asked the Ambassador if Bakiyev had received something similar as well. The Ambassador answered that she was not aware of any such letter."

More recently, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov raised the Holodomor with Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman when the two met in Moscow at the beginning of June 2009, according to a US Moscow embassy cable:

"Lavrov raised Russian concern with ‘historical revisionism’ regarding the Soviet Era and Second World War, which, he said, was particularly acute in Eastern Europe but was also present in Israel. He cited Israel's official recognition of the Holodomor, the 1930s famine that occurred in Ukraine. Lieberman explained that by recognizing this tragedy, Israel had not said Russia was guilty of causing it, nor that it was an act of genocide."

Lieberman has probably not read Raphael Lemkin’s assessment of the Soviet genocide in Ukraine. Lemkin was a Jewish lawyer who lived in Poland near border with Soviet Ukraine during the years of Holodomor; he was also the man who is credited with coining the term genocide.

Then again, Israel is no longer all that interested in history. At least that’s the message Israel’s President Shimon Peres recently delivered in Ukraine when, during a public lecture on “political and economic challenges in the epoch of globalization,” he said:

“If I was asked what advice to give Ukraine, I’d say: forget history, history isn’t important... you won’t be able to avoid the mistakes of the past, you’ll simply repeat them,” according to the BBC.

Wow is right. Anyway, back to wikileaks and Holodomor: Why would the President of Russia threaten the leaders of former Soviet states with dire consequences if they recognize the Holodomor as genocide? Why would the Russian foreign minister raise the same issue with his Israeli counterpart?

Ukraine never blamed Russia as a state for anything; in fact a Ukrainian court established the guilt of seven organizers of the famine led by Josyf Stalin: two Russians, two Jews, a Georgian, Pole and Ukrainian.

So what exactly irked Russia about former President Yushchenko’s campaign surrounding the Holodomor?

Some would argue that reparations could be demanded from the Russian Federation, as the legal successor state of the USSR, if the international community recognizes genocide (kinda like the Germans paying for the Holocaust).

Others would argue that Russia is not afraid of paying, it’s more afraid of losing face.

Others would argue that Ukraine’s Holodomor narrative – and any historical narrative that’s independent of Russia’s – is unacceptable, because it will undermine Russia’s plans to re-establish hegemony.

Not only does Russia want Ukraine to be part of the Single Economic Space, it also wants all the Soviet republics to be part of the Single Historic Space. (The Single Religious Space and Patriarch Kiril’s Russian world Orthodox Church is part of that plan, too, but that’s another issue altogether).

There can be no room for Ukraine’s unique Holodomor in the common, shared experience of the Soviet Union. Collectivization can only be a common tragedy shared by all the people united by a Great Fatherland (as in Great Patriotic War instead of WWII).

Ask Education Minister Dmytri Tabachnyk: he can give you a copy of the new history text book he's writing for Ukrainian schoolchildren -- it'll all be in there.

Moscow just won’t have it any other way, as the wikileaks have shown. And that makes the Holodomor and other events from the past more than just far off history: it’s about the geopolitics of the very near future.

How many million will be enough?

In the presidential “Slovo” to the people of Ukraine on occasion of Holodomor Remembrance Day, President Victor Yanukovych’s slovo-writers take a sarcastic swipe at those people who claim that “three to five to seven million and even more” died from the tragedy.

Is the president really using the occasion of the Holodomor as an opportunity to criticize his political opponents?

More likely, this debate over the number of victims is allowing Yanukovych to avoid the real issue: that the 1932-33 Holodomor was part of the sustained Soviet genocide in Ukraine.

A similar swipe at Ukrainian Canadians was recently taken by a Canadian journalist in his blog. I left a comment earlier this week, but it has not appeared there. I don’t know why (or if) it’s being censored, so I’ll make the point here, because I feel it’s an important one, especially in the run up to the sad Holodomor anniversary.

By way of background, in his blog entry “Hyperbole has no place in national tragedies,” Peter O’Neil scolds Canada’s Prime Minister and Ukrainian Canadians for claiming that ten million people died in the Holodomor. *

O’Neil decided to take issue with the “ten million” figure after an academic from Australia wrote him that it was wrong. O’Neil did not report that this same academic, Stephen Wheatcroft, has claimed that the “famine was an accidental consequence of ill-conceived policies” and “ecological factors.”

O’Neil’s research let him to discover that other academics felt that the estimate of ten million deaths in 1932-33 is excessive and decided to make a story of it called “Harper accused of exaggerating Ukrainian genocide's death toll .”  (He also chose to make Harper’s visit to Lonsky Street Prison Museum in Lviv one-sided, but that’s another story.)

In focusing on the ten million, what O’Neil failed to realize that rather than an attempt to maliciously exaggerate the number of dead of the part of the PM and/or Ukrainian Canadians, something may have simply been lost in translation: Was it ten million in 1932 and 1933, or ten million in multiple famines in 1921 to 23, 1932 and 33 and 1946 and 47 combined? O’Neil failed to mention that there was more than one artificial famine during Ukraine’s Soviet experience.

I wrote, copied and pasted my comment, but it appears to be trashed by the censors. Working from memory, I wrote something along the following lines:

The monument in Kyiv where Stephen Harper honoured the victims of artificial famines is in memory of those innocents who died in the holodomors – plural.

The Soviets engineered the deaths of Ukrainians by starvation in 1921-23 and 1946-47 as well. The 1932-33 famine was but one episode in the three decades Lenin, Stalin and their bolsehvik henchmen spent killing Ukrainians through civil war, famine, execution, collectivization, forced labour and other means as they tried to replace the Ukrainian “ethnic material” with a new kind of person called homo sovieticus.

If you tally the number of Ukrainians killed by the communists between the 1920s and 50s, then saying that they killed ten million – or the equivalent of the population of Canada – would not be a stretch. It would be understatement.

But be wary of those trying to make this a debate about millions! That’s taking away from the bigger issue raised by PM Stephen Harper during his visit to Ukraine – and covered by the Ukrainian media – an issue that’s obfuscated by the debate over millions, namely that the crime of communism, and the communists themselves, have not had their Nuremberg.

Would the Holocaust not be genocide if only four million Jews were killed? Or (something an O’Neil might appreciate) would the Potato Famine be less of a tragedy if the population of Ireland fell by only fifteen percent?

Harper’s statements on communism not having its Nuremberg and genocide of Ukrainians were, in my opinion, more newsworthy than a rehash of the tired and old millions debate kept alive by O’Neil’s sources.*

But that news took a back seat to a chance to criticize Harper, Ukrainian “nationalists” and do some moral grandstanding. It’s just too bad that the memories of X million have to be dragged through the mud for the purposes of satisfying egos and avoiding the genocide charge.

As for Yanukovych, who wants "truth above all" in matter concerning the Holodomor, perhaps the truth about all the crimes of communism will come to see the light during his presidency. Perhaps this willl be accomplished by the communist he appointed to head the Institute of National Memory. For comparison's sake, that's like appointing a neo-Nazi to head Yad Vashem.

* Peter O’Neil’s favourite source when it comes to matters of Ukrainian history has been self-dubbed "anti-historian" John Paul Himka of the University of Alberta who wrote “How Many Perished in the Famine and Why Does It Matter?” in 2008.

Yanukovych's left foot

Yo Vic! Look Left!

komunist.com.ua

Yanukovych better start looking both ways before crossing Ukraine’s political street. The “left” is increasingly joining the “right” in criticizing him; the union in parliament and cabinet between the communists and his Regions is being questioned by the believers of bolshevism.


Communist Party of Ukraine leader Petro Symonenko said that his reds are the “only political opposition” in Ukrainian society to the “governing oligarchic capital.” Speaking after local elections that saw his party clash with the Regions in eastern Ukraine and Crimea – areas that provide core support for both parties – Symonenko appeared on the defensive as he justified his party’s cooperation with the Regions in parliament as “tactics.” He said his communists joined the Regions in creating the governing coalition in parliament and cabinet for the sake of “stability” and the chance to better protect the rights of the working class.

Why is Symonenko now justifying his party’s cooperation with the government? He didn’t see the need to do so nine months ago, when his party essentially delivered Yanukovych the victory in the presidential elections.

Yanukovych won those elections by less than fifty percent of the vote. He beat Yulia Tymoshenko in the second round by 887,000 votes; Symonenko scored 872,000 votes two weeks earlier in the first round of elections before endorsing Yanukovych in round two.

Yanukovych thanked the communists with positions in government, including control of the Institute of National Memory (that’s supposed to deal with the crimes of communism) and the appointment of Dmitri “the false” Tabachnyk to head the education and sciences ministry.

Yanukovych and his party have remained true to some of the ideological tenets they share with the commies, including genocide-denial, no to NATO, hate for Halychyna, love for Russia and the Russian language.

But issues of history, language and geopolitics tend to take a back seat when hunger and basic social needs are driving peoples’ needs.

Yanukovych’s government is working closely and depending on the IMF for sustained bailout and pushing through some unpopular measures like raising natural gas prices for residential consumers (after promising lower prices as a result of prolonging Russia’s lease of its naval base in Crimea).

These measures, coupled with funny business at the ballot box that saw the Regions snatch some sure victories away from the commies, have some communists to start asking questions. One prominent communist leader, Leonid Grach of Crimea, demonstrably left the party caucus in protest over his party’s marriage of convenience. All of a sudden the communist leaders have some splaining to do to their rank-and-file rickies and lucies with coal on the soles of their shoes.

Leonid Kuchma was once confronted by an opposition that transcended left and right, but he made sure it remained fragmented and divided by skilfully making concessions to the right and the left as required. Yanukovych could borrow a page from Kuchma’s playbook, but will firing Tabachnykoff, for example, be enough when students come out to protest Russian as a second-language and higher tuition fees?

Lonsky Street Blues

Lonsky Street Prison: Nice piece of real estate in Lviv's city center (wikipedia.org)

When I look at what happened to Ruslan Zabily last week, I can’t help but think that could have been me. You see, I was offered the job of director of the Lonsky Street Prison Museum by Lviv city officials back in 2009. And I was going to take it, but there was no stopping Zabily in his pursuit of the position. I just finished a museum project on Ukrainians in Auschwitz and a book of translated documents from the 1932-33 Holodomor, so I welcomed the break from the miseries of history: the Lonsky Street Prison would’ve just added to the nightmares. Let him have it, I thought, if he wants it so badly.

A year and a half later, Zabily is detained in Kyiv by the State Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), questioned for fourteen and a half hours, his notebook and hard discs confiscated and a criminal investigation opened against him. The charge: Zabily was going to reveal state secrets.

Domestic and international human rights watchdogs were quick to condemn the SBU’s reversion to KGB tactics. The speculations about the reasons for intimidating Zabily are many. Some think the SBU of President Victor Yanukovych is trying too hard to please the Kremlin and demonstrably persecuting historians who do not subscribe to the Soviet historical narrative. Others consider the Zabily affair to be a warning to former SBU chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who has spent the better part of the year organizing a civic movement called “Renewal of the Country.” Nalyvaichenko, the SBU chief under President Victor Yushchenko when the spy agency declassified all the pre-1991 documents on Soviet repressions, has been vocal in his criticism of the Yanukovych regime. The Yanukovych regime has halted the declassification process started under Yushchenko.

I would add another reason to the list of speculations concerning the SBU’s hard-handed tactics, based on my experience with the Lonsky Street Prison Museum. It is much more mundane and although not as sexy as the KGB-Kremlin theory it’s just as worrisome. It goes back to the history of the prison and its location, location, location.

The prison is actually a complex of buildings constructed at different times. The building on the corner of Copernicus and Bandera streets was originally built as a barracks for Austro-Hungarian soldiers. It was used a prison by the Poles, Soviets, Nazis and Soviets again during the 20th century. The USSR liked the location so much they expanded the prison complex to include an administrative building and built a three-story prison in the courtyard.

The prison was closed in the mid 1990s and title to the land was transferred to the SBU. The KGB agents who once fought capitalism quickly embraced the entrepreneurial spirit and decided to start playing the real estate game and erecting an apartment high-rise in the courtyard. Workers said they discovered human remains soon after they broke ground, but the masters told the slaves to keep digging away. They laid the foundation and started work on the first story before a public outcry forced a halt to the construction. The human remains showed the prison complex was not only used to incarcerate enemies of the state, but to kill and bury them as well. The Nazis forced the local Jews to carry the corpses of those killed by the Soviets out of the Lonsky Street Prison in July 1941, but those bodies were identified and re-buried over half a century ago. So whose bones were these?

If I was the director of the Lonsky Street Prison Museum, the first order of business would have been the careful and respectful exhumation of the human remains found in the prisons’ courtyard. Instead, people became more concerned with who was going to get title to the land and which firm would get the contract to build the memorial complex on the location. I came away with a feeling of disgust for the whole process. The Soviet system killed human decency in these people. They had grown accustomed to having human remains lying beneath their feet and didn’t mind building condos on top of them. These are the kind of people who would much rather have their own person running the museum instead of Zabily. These are the kind of people who see mercantile advantages, take them using force and intimidation, and flourish in Yanukovych’s Ukraine. They care not about national memory or historical justice or ideology. They want to sell you a house built atop killing fields.

President misses lessons

“Ukraine for the people”: The president’s portrait and party program greeted the children of School #134 in Dnipropetrovsk on Sept. 1. (UNIAN)

Yanukovych is a homo: Homo sovieticus. Yanukovych and his entourage think they’re living in the USSR.

For example: when Ukrainian children went back to school on Sept. 1 they found “Yanukovych corners” in their classrooms where “Lenin (Stalin, Brezhnev) corners” once stood. These corners serve to inform children about the Great Plans their Great Leader has made for at least the next five years.

The danger of this throwback to Soviet times was not lost to Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk. “You shouldn’t force children in school to sing praises to the government. They shouldn’t have to learn about the president’s program, but about what the president is doing,” Kravchuk told the Argumenty i Fakty v Ukraini newspaper on Sept. 7. “I don’t want to live to see the day when some idiot hands my great granddaughter a portrait of some president and forces her to sing dithyrambs [hymns of glorification] to him.”

Kravchuk will see another example of “throw back” when the Party of the Regions holds its Annual Meeting on Sept. 11. The “party in power” proceedings are scheduled to be televised live on State TV Channel One. No other party enjoys such access to the airwaves ahead of the October local government elections.

The further Yanukovych goes back in time, the shorter his term will be. Yanukovych, it seems, could benefit from going back to school himself and re-reading the chapter on “cult of personality,” if it’s still in the textbooks.

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Kravchuk’s warnings to Yanukovych (Ukrainian): http://www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-394637.html