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Millions of Dead Ukrainians Suggest That Ignoring History Is Dangerous
In reading about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I’ve come across sources that mention Russia’s economy, Putin’s historical revisionism, Zelenskyy’s background as an actor, Russian military tactics, oil pipelines, Finland’s military might, and the complex history between Russia and Ukraine. But I am amazed that there is one name that I have not seen mentioned anywhere: Lazar Kaganovich.
In a strange twist of fate, I am friends (not close friends, but friends) with Mr. Kaganovich’s grandson. Sort of a long story. I’ve considered writing about that. But not today. Regardless, as most of you know, Mr. Kaganovich was born to a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family in what is now Ukraine, became one of Joseph Stalin’s most trusted friends, and ended up being the leader of the Ukrainian genocide (the Holodomor famine) which killed 3-4 million Ukrainians under absolutely brutal conditions. He is remembered as one of Stalin’s most vicious henchmen. Although my friend remembers him as a kind, doting grandfather. Wow. Anyway…
Ten years ago, I befriended a woman who moved to Tennessee from Ukraine with her junior high school daughter (who was in my daughter’s class – they became best friends). I mentioned that I knew Kaganovich’s grandson, and my friend was shocked, but her daughter had no idea who he was. She went to school in Ukraine until age 14, and had never heard of Kaganovich, who was responsible for the deaths of many in her family. I wonder how many Ukrainians are unaware of this period of their history? It was 90 years ago, so no one alive was there at the time. But is it possible that no one remembers it at all?
Granted, Ukraine’s oppression under Soviet rule from WWII to 1991 was no picnic, either. And perhaps it is the combination of these two events which is motivating Ukraine’s spirited defense of their homeland against Russian invaders. They appear to have a much more clear understanding of what Russia represents than, say, President Biden. And honestly, they should.
While we seem to be minimizing the evil of Russian leadership, that in itself may be proof of just how consistently evil they are. For example:
Imagine if 70 years ago, Germany had killed millions of Jews (which, of course, they did). And then imagine that Germany invaded Israel today. Can you imagine the press coverage? Every Western news channel would run endless loops of Hitler speeches and Jews in concentration camps. As they should.
But yet, here we are, with Russia invading Ukraine. Again. And there has been little to no discussion of Ukrainian suffering under Soviet occupation from 1956-1991, and no mention whatsoever of the butcher of the Holodomor, Lazar Kaganovich. There are no screaming headlines of the evil of Putin, comparing him to Kaganovich (as the media would have compared Germany’s invasion of Israel to the Nazis).
No – It’s Russia. I mean, c’mon. This is just what they do, right?
Perhaps the media doesn’t bring up Kaganovich because they don’t have to. The vicious tactics of Russia aren’t excused, exactly. They’re just presumed. After all, it’s Russia that we’re talking about here, right? Perhaps. But I really don’t think so.
I would feel better if we paid more attention to history. Instead of reading story after story about how Putin feels about his progress in Ukraine this afternoon, perhaps we should be looking at this invasion as just a small part of a big picture. This isn’t a shocking aberration. It’s just another brick in the wall.
Putin may be unpredictable. But Russia is not. They even cheat in figure skating, for Pete’s sake. Even when everybody knows they’re cheating, and they’ve already been suspended. They lie, and they cheat. After all, it’s Russia we’re talking about here, right? Even Jimmy Carter figured this out. Eventually.
But because so many in our media and our ruling class share Russia’s affinity for socialism, bureaucratic power, and other centralized control systems, they are hesitant to criticize Russia too harshly. When your beliefs don’t make any sense, then hypocrisy becomes a cardinal sin. Dissenting viewpoints become heresy when you know you’re on shaky ethical ground. So criticism of Russia must be done gently.
Focus on the omelets, not the eggs. Call Putin unpredictable. But don’t call Russia a dangerous, dishonest, oppressive, imperialist power based on centralized control systems. That just wouldn’t do.
This is just an understandable disagreement between some white dudes in Europe. This is not evidence of the horrors of government power that American Democrats covet so openly. Heavens no. Golly, that Putin guy is so unpredictable.
Right.
Let’s fund Russia’s military by buying petroleum from them! Great idea! That way, we can pretend to believe in climate change, with no consequences! Awesome! Why not? Russia’s just some other country, like Sweden or whatever, right? What’s the worst that could happen? Don’t listen to all those dead Ukrainians. There’s fund-raising to do!
Understanding history can make seemingly complex decisions become more straightforward.
Many tyrants have openly acknowledged that you can’t control a country’s future without first controlling its history. Islamists seek to control countries by destroying any ancient artifacts which don’t fit with Islam. Putin just gave a speech claiming that his Russian ‘peacekeeping forces’ were merely attempting to free Ukraine from Nazi control (Ukraine’s Prime Minister is Jewish). American leftists have been tearing down statues and renaming schools on a wholesale level. All for the same reason.
You can’t control a country’s future without controlling its history.
And people wonder why those who love freedom are so upset about the historical revisionism of the left. We should remember history. Even the bad parts of it.
Especially the bad parts of it.
Our lives may depend on it. Many, many, many other lives may depend on it, too. Just ask a dead Ukrainian.
Published in General
You’re not a big fan of reading history, are you?
Here’s what I think, exclusive of what you seem to believe is historical justification for your POV:
I think an independent nation–or even a nascent country that is trying–with every appearance of sincerity and effort–to establish its independence–regardless of its history and historical relationship to other countries, its neighbors, its tribal connections, or any other perceived limitations on its autonomy, should be able to do whatever it wants to do to secure its borders and maintain its self-determination.
Otherwise, I don’t really see how the United States of America comes into existence.
Please consider the fact that you “don’t see” what you consider to be my “rank hypocrisy” might be a beam in your own eye, when you’re focusing on the mote in mine. Expecially when you consider yourself the “realist” in this equation. That’s not insulting at all.
Glory be.
Every one of my friends and colleagues who are from former Soviet-bloc states are saying the same thing. They are unabashedly and uniformly against Russia in almost everything. And they seem to be truly terrified for any family members they have who are still back there. So I know that there are global geopolitical forces going on, much as there were at the time of our own Revolution. But to understand our Revolution only in terms of what France and Britain wanted and were doing instead of the Americans who fought it is wrong, in my opinion. So I don’t know who is right or wrong in the now dozens of analyses I have read about Russia’s motives and America’s motives. I do see genuine fear and hatred of Russians in anyone who lived under their rule firsthand. They do not seem to have any friends when people can speak openly. Does Cuba fear the US like they fear Russia?
You mean the Russians will let Ukraine survive if & only if it does what they want? I think the Ukrainians voted the last 4 days and the answer was a resounding “HA XYN”[as close as I can get to Ukrainian].
Where is the law-or any International agreement- that the Russians get to dictate Ukraine’s foreign & internal policy? Must be the position of Putin & RT.
Great-so when the Russian’s aim is bad 4 million Ukrainians die? What happens when their aim is good?
Where is there any serious discussion of NATO missiles in Ukraine (BTW NATO has no nuclear missiles under its command).
My aunt is Ukrainian and her parents survived the Holodomor. More horrible starvation followed in the aftermath of WWII and they couldn’t feed their two sons. As I recall her father telling it (I was only about 11 at the time), her dad and mom decided to leave when they discovered that an old woman on their street was so hungry, she was luring neighborhood children into her house — to eat them.
So, the mom took one of the kids, dad took the other, and fled on separate routes to Vienna. They hoped at least one of the parties could escape to freedom. They agreed to meet at a train station in Vienna to catch a trip at a certain day/time.
In Vienna, the mom and one son were on the train, but there was no sign of dad. As the train was pulling out, dad ran up, tossed his son to a passenger, and then the other passengers pulled him into the car.
They both made it to America and soon introduced my aunt and her little sister into the world.
And? City was founded about 800 years before that. Not Russia.
Kyiv was the capital of Kyiavan Rus. From the 800- to the 1200. Encompassed almost all of current Ukraine, again Not Russia. Moscow was a swamp.
But i could make the argument that if anything, much of Western Russia actually belongs to Ukraine. Based on precedent.
Yeah. So what? Take a look at a map of the Europe in 1900
No Poland. No Czechia, Slovakia, Finland, no independent Bosnia, Hertzogovina, Norway, or Ireland.
The Nationalism that swept through Europe in the 19th century was fully present in Ukraine . There was no Germany until 1871. Italy wasn’t unified till 1871. Poland didn’t exist from 1772 to 1918. would you deny Ireland its right to independence because it was under the English yoke for centuries and only won its freedom in 1920? Or Polands which has only been independent since 1945? ( don’t forget its partition between Germany and the USSr in 1939).
There was a rebirth of a separate Ukrainian language, culture and national identity just like in Germany and Italy and Serbia Poland etc etc etc. The modern Ukrainian national consciousness, “we are a separate people” was born in the 19th century. But they could draw on their 1000 year history of Kyiavan Russian, of the Zaporezian Kozaks of fighting against Russians and Poles and Turks and Tatars in a fight for independence.
What matters is that 40 million Ukrainians believe they have a national identity and a right to govern their own affairs, despite the history of being oppressed by their Russian “neighbors”.
And they damn well are showing they are willing to fight for it.
All these claims that X years ago Y was part of Z therefore Z has rights to it is TOTAL GARBAGE-the picking of a particular year is arbitrary. Ukraine has been independent long enough to exist on its own terms-not to mention it was specifically recognized as such by RUSSIA in 1994. As an example- the Palestinians claim they own Israel b/c in 1947 it was theirs- why 1947? Why not 1917 & give it to Turkey?[I will leave those evil colonists the Brits out of it] Why not 1400 & give it to the Egyptians? Why not 1200 and find some old Southern Italian or French guy and make him king? Heck the Greeks & Romans want it too…don’t get me started with the possible Arab or Persian claims-and those Canaanities or Philistines fuggidaboutit
Ukraine has as good a claim to nationhood as anybody….
ІДЕ НА ХУЙ
Fixed for you.
THX
We’ve been told for decades, and especially throughout the Cold War, that Russia was justifiably afraid of the West and that if we just calmed down and stopped threatening them with armaments on their borders, all would be well. It was not true then and it is even less true now. When Putin looks at the West, what must he see? A culturally weak and disunited Europe, dependent upon him for energy, with NATO weaker than it has ever been and we in the hands of the demented and the ideologically petrified. We could solve our problem in very short order by becoming energy independent and we are not doing it. Good time to go into Ukraine.
Walter Duranty would be proud of you
“At the height of the Holodomor in June of 1933, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 people per day. Around 3.9 million Ukrainians died during the Holodomor of 1932-33 (as established in a 2015 study by a team of demographers from the Ukrainian Institute of Demographic and Social Studies, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill).
While Ukrainians were dying, the Soviet state extracted 4.27 million tons of grain from Ukraine in 1932, enough to feed at least 12 million people for an entire year. Soviet records show that in January of 1933, there were enough grain reserves in the USSR to feed well over 10 million people. The government could have organized famine relief and could have accepted help from outside of the USSR. Moscow rejected foreign aid and denounced those who offered it, instead exporting Ukraine’s grain and other foodstuffs abroad for cash.
Most historians, who have studied this period in Ukrainian history, have concluded that the Famine was deliberate and linked to a broader Soviet policy to subjugate the Ukrainian people. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of Soviet government archives (including archives of the security services), researchers have been able to demonstrate that Soviet authorities undertook measures specifically in Ukraine with the knowledge that the result would be the deaths of millions of Ukrainians by starvation.
“The Terror-Famine of 1932-33 was a dual-purpose by-product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw”
“Stupid agricultural policy?”
They were starving millions while exporting grain for hard currency, and just “coincidentally” causing the deaths of 4 million “troublesome” Ukrainians who wouldn’t just be good little kolhospnicks.
There was a signed agreement that Russia would respect Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial boundaries, and Putin violated that back in 2014. Been violating it ever since in Donbas and Luhansk.
I love it. The Russians are constantly threatening their neighbors, then cry when the neighbors try to find security, somewhere, anywhere else. Maybe, I don’t know if Russia would just leave their neighbors the F##k alone for 50 years, maybe they wouldn’t be so jumpy.
That is sort of the John Kenneth Galbraith view of the cold war. The west estimated that the USSR was spending far less of its GDP on the military than it actually was. Revisionist lefties claim that since the USSR’s economy was far smaller than we believed we should not have been worried-but in fact If we had known how much of their GDP was going to the military we would have been FAR more worried than we where- b/c nobody spends that much on their military unless they firmly believe a war is imminent (and typically b/c they plan to start it).
The problem is the only agreement the Russians ever held to was the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact (you know the one were they and Hitler agreed to start WW2 & divide up eastern Europe)-b/c Hitler violated it 1st.
It’s not a matter of right. It’s a matter of fighting and winning. Period. Ignominy and servitude lie ahead for losing. the rest is romantic nonsense.
My parents were DP’s in Austria when WW2 ended. Just miles from the Soviet zone of occupation, liberated by Patton.
They had spent the last 3 years fleeing West to escape the Red Army, and in fact were due to transit Dresden the night of the firebombing, but their train was sidetracked just outside of the city and they watched the firebombing, our way of showing “Uncle Joe” what good little allies we were.
They lived in a UN DP camp for 5 years. Shortly after the war ended, the US officials came to them and informed all the Ukrainians, “good news, we are sending you home.” Entire families committed suicide. They knew that they would be shipped all the way to Siberia, could not be allowed to associate with the people in the USSR as they had seen the West. Fortunately the deportations were suspended and the Allies finally figured out why the Ukrainians had no desire to be returned to the USSR.
That decision seems likely to have been made largely on the basis that Russia would not have been willing or able to produce the cheap imports that the American oligarchs wanted.
So horrifying. I just finished reading The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 1, and Solzhenitsyn repeatedly blasted the allies for shipping captured Soviet troops back home. Many, many in the gulags went straight from the battlefields and POW camps into the Soviet prisons.
Also, I’m wondering if a lot of the Ukrainians were resettled in Canada. I know they have a huge expat community up there.
One last note: When my aunt said she was marrying a non-Ukrainian, her dad was outraged… until he learned she was marrying a Finn. He was a big fan of the Finns because of the Winter War. :)
Also, apropos of nothing, I just realized your profile pic is Taras Bulba (if I’m not mistaken). Haven’t seen the movie, but that’s a great read!
Stalin also saw to it that the grain the farmers held back to plant for the next year was taken, which was quite effective to his purpose.
Afghanistan and (to a far lesser but still existent extent) Iraq were provoked.
From
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–1933
When I was is Tashkent ten (?) years ago we had a Russian guide who told us her family had moved to Uzbekistan then (was moved?) because there was food there. At that time Tashkent was called City of Bread.
Yes. Hitler surprised Stalin before Stalin was himself ready to violate the treaty.
Honestly, your parenthetical is not needed at all. The charge that it was unprovoked is crap…Iraq had been “provoking” almost daily for over a decade:
Now, we can debate all day long whether it was right or even smart (I’m willing to push back against 77 Senators and 296 Representatives…you know, people not useful enough for any real gainful employment so the turned to crime) but claiming “unprovoked” seems quite ignorant.
I guess he was in a coma on 9/11 and never heard of the UN Security Council Resolution 687- which Iraqi violated…..
Well, Hunter Biden was running one of the larger Ukrainian companies, so the drugs thing is accurate.
“You mean the Russians will let Ukraine survive if & only if it does what they want? I think the Ukrainians voted the last 4 days and the answer was a resounding “HA XYN”[as close as I can get to Ukrainian].
Where is the law-or any International agreement- that the Russians get to dictate Ukraine’s foreign & internal policy? Must be the position of Putin & RT.”
Bingo.
The Ukrainians are a separate people from the Russians. They speak a separate language. So they were conquered numerous times by numerous other people- so what?
From the late 800’s until the twelfth century the Kievan Rus ruled Ukraine and established a Ukrainian identity. They were then conquered by the Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , the Kingdom of Poland, the Crimean Khanate, and then the Russians. The Ukrainians tried to revolt against the Poles, tried to create a Ukrainian People’s Republic in dissolution of Russian Empire only to be conquered again by the Bolshevik Red Army and then in the period between the Germans leaving and Soviets Army advancing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army again tried to establish a nation only to be crushed again.
So now we actually have a established Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainians want to defend it. One should not be surprised that they want military hardware to defend themselves against the Russia that has abused them badly and repeatedly over the centuries. They are an established people who have shown that they want self determination for themselves over the centuries despite what the proto-commies like Putin and/or the commie democrats like Jerry want.
By the way, I had an elderly tenant years ago who told me in a story like the others that he and his parents fled the Ukraine in the time between when the Germans were retreating from the Ukraine and the Soviets were advancing on it. He spent a few years in the camps and then came to America.
Fair enough, I was thinking in terms of ‘sufficiently provoked to risk war’ and admit I had forgotten at least half of that. I do think harboring the 9/11 terrorists reaches the threshold of ‘no real choice other than to go to war’, while the other was always a war of choice (justified, but neither wise nor a moral or diplomatic imperative).