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Stalin Lives: The Scouring of Crimea
Welcome to the 1930s, Comrade. The Ukrainian language is now forbidden in Crimea. That’s not all that the Russian government has forbidden there. The Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic Churches are also forbidden. The forbidden list also includes Ukrainian political parties and Ukrainian-language media. History is repeating itself in the Russian ethnic cleansing of Crimea.
The ethnic cleansing is not restricted to Ukrainians. Crimean Tatars who returned to Crimea decades after the mass deportations ordered by Josef Stalin have been targeted as well. In 2016, the Russian government banned Crimean Tatar organizations. One activist, Ervin Ibragimov, was abducted in May 2016; his whereabouts are unknown to this day. Ukrainian activists have also been abducted and disappeared as well.
The FSB and so-called self-defense units intimidate, harass, and abduct those who are resisting the Russian occupation. They also put pressure on citizens to inform on anyone who does not acknowledge Russian authority.
Yes, Stalin, the Breaker of Nations lives on. The insatiable appetite to conquer and loot will probably not stop at the Crimea. 10,300 Ukrainians have died in eastern Ukraine in the latest Russian invasion.
Published in Foreign Policy
If only we had Hillary back in charge, with a large plastic button that says “Reset” on it. That would help.
It appears that Putin did use the “Reset” button.
Outstanding point…
Salami tactics.
It sucks. Wish we could do something, but don’t see what.
How about increasing sanctions on the Criminal Russian regime to make sure not one Russian associated with the Putin regime can so much as buy a pencil anywhere in the world.
I don’t think that will work. Besides, I thought all inhibitions on trade were bad ideas.
Work? perhaps not, but why not work to make the lives of our enemies harder? Certainly letting them continue to operate without any friction or opposition isn’t going to soften their hearts. I also don’t have a problem with baring criminals from the global banking and market place. The US should push other nations to adopt targeted sanctions against Russians individuals and the companies they run. Especially in Europe.
Also it is always worth highlighting and exposing their criminal actions at all opportunities. This is where it would be nice to have a president who wasn’t enamored with making friends with the Putin regime. The prospects of friendship and cooperation are dead. Begin a policy of containment and isolation.
Well, to be historically accurate it should say “Overcharge”. Just imagine if a Vice President Palin working for President McCain had made that same mistake in 2009. We’d still be hearing about it from the media & the Dems.
a) There already are plenty of international sanctions against Russia. How much further do you propose to go? A total US embargo of Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis
b) During the Cold War, US sanctions against the USSR could have an effect because of the USA’s dominant position in the global economy, thanks to the rest of the world’s industrial powers having been flattened by the bombs of WWII. The US was able to not only embargo the USSR but also to threaten to embargo any other country that did business with the USSR, because those countries depended so much on American aid. Today’s global economy makes that option effectively impossible. Russia has way more choice when it comes to who it trades with.
c) A total US embargo against Russia could maybe hurt the US more than it hurts Russia, considering how many American businesses depend on Russian loans and investment, not to mention how much the US depends on trade with countries who definitely wouldn’t join the embargo. I mean, is the USA going to cut all trade with China if they refuse to join an embargo of Russia? It is for to laugh.
There may be nothing we can do at all that works. Doing something for the sake of doing something does not sit well.
They want to go back to recreating the Russian Empire and these pieces of Eastern Europe they consider theirs. I don’t think these countries will ever go peacefully. Also, this morning on Fox, they had correspondent in Syria and apparently the UN, and Doctors Without Borders cannot get in to see the injured from the chemical blast or do any analysis because of Russia – they are blocking their access, not the Syrians. They have their sites on large pieces of pie that go beyond their immediate territory.
But that’s diplomacy on most days ending in ‘y’.
Time to invite more countries to NATO.
You wouldn’t have heard Ukrainian in Crimea during Stalin’s time since it was part of Russia and had been. Khrushchev is the one who made it part of Ukraine. Catherine the Great took Crimea from the Ottomans and then the Tatars over about a 15-year period. She then brought in lots of her fellow Germans to settle. The nobility would have summer homes in Crimea and it was their playground. Most of the Tatars were gone by Stalin’s time having been chased out following the Crimean War since the Tatars provided assistance to the invading British and French armies. Stalin removed the relatively few Tatars who were left. There were many more Germans for him to work on there. And Greeks. There were lots of Greeks as well.
The Russian government takes its religion seriously and doesn’t allow apostasy. Whether Old Believers, Catholics, Protestants or Muslims. Peter the Great waged civil war on the Old Believers who either perished or fled to the northern forests. Catholics and Protestants felt the wrath from Nicholas I on. But the Jews got the worst of it under the tsars. Most of the pogroms would take place in Ukraine with Ukrainians as perpetrators. Many Jews as a result would go on to be revolutionaries of one kind or another Some provided the backbone of the Cheka, OGPU and NKVD. They would reap their revenge on Ukrainians under Stalin’s direction. And once the job was done, it was off to the camps or a bullet for them. And Hitler would march in and be greeted as a rescuer, but he had other things – darker things – on his mind. Stalin’s paranoia about Ukrainians and their loyalties was not totally misplaced. A cycle of revenge that continues to play out and has absolutely nothing to do with us.
Ukrainian nationalism did not exist before the 19th century and was an Austrian invention to a large extent – they certainly fostered it. To use as a weapon against Russians. About 1/3 of the Ukrainian population was under Austria and about 2/3 under Russia before World War I. Ukraine was agriculturally richest part of the Russian empire with its wheat and had much more advanced commerce and industry than the rest of the empire. Nice target. Dominic Lieven is an historian at Cambridge and his thesis is that World War I was really all about who would control Ukraine. Now rather than Russia vs. Austria its Russia vs. EU. World War I again, anybody?
Ukrainians do not believe that they are Russians. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has never recognized the Primacy of the Russian Orthodox Church. Regardless of the timeline of Russian claims to Ukraine Russia granted Ukraine independence if they returned nuclear weapons to Russia, which they did, to include the Crimea. Russia may call Ukraine the Heart of Russia , but that does not include the Ukrainian people.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think it might be best if Ukraine controlled Ukraine.
Has that ever been the case for any long period of time?
This is the entire point. The Versailles Treaty created a whole new group of weak, unstable countries that were going to be the target of more powerful neighbors. Welcome to the current reality.
There is seismic political and religious activity currently taking place across the world – China, Russia, Israel – its astonishing to watch – Reuters reported yesterday that the Ukrainian President has been in talks with The Ukrainian Church leadership and the church is looking to break away from Russia which they consider as a counter-balance measure to Russia’s global ambitions, since the Russian Church is an arm of the gov and their power.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-church/ukraine-moves-to-split-church-from-russia-as-elections-approach-idUKKBN1HQ1Z3
https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/strategic-goals-restored-russia/
We are seeing an end to the Post WWII order. We have been hanging on to it, but the fall of the USSR started the change. Obama stopped any sort of guiding to the change, and now it is running on its own.
Depends on what you mean by “works.” If you expect an immediate, clearcut result, then no, it won’t work. That doesn’t mean it isn’t working.
Long enough to matter.
I can offer a bit of clarification on the history here.
First off, in the late 1500s, after Kiev had been smashed by the Mongols, and after Moscow had arisen as the new dominant kingdom, the state of the church in Ukraine was poor. For a variety of political reasons (protection, rivalry, funding, ethnic issues, and Turkish domination of most Orthodox lands outside of Russia), the churches of Ukraine united with Rome while keeping their Byzantine rite, at the union of Brest. Ever since, those churches have been called Uniates.
In the early 1600s, Russian clergy re-established Orthodox churches in Ukraine when Moscow took control of the region from Poland.
Thus for 400 years, there have been twin churches in Ukraine, with identical rites, but not in communion with each other. The Tsars and the Bolsheviks both used this lack of unity to divide the people of the region from each other, while continuously emphasizing that the “Little Rus” were not really true Russians. When the Bolsheviks took power, they seized and closed nearly all churches throughout the USSR. Stalin, during WWII, started reopening churches, but deliberately gave control over all Ukrainian churches (even the Uniate ones) to the Orthodox, then treated the Uniates as potential traitors. Following Ukrainian independence, the Ukrainian government has actually handed a number of those churches back to the Uniates.
Did Ukrainian nationalism exist, as we’d think of it, before the 19th century? No, but its rise during that time cannot be laid solely at the feet of Austria. The entire 19th century is boil of people’s rising senses of their own ethnic identities as separate from their temporal rulers.
Today, the Ukrainian Orthodox are indeed petitioning to gain autocephaly (church autonomy), and to shift their patriarchal allegiance from Moscow to Constantinople (the patriarchal throne still retains the old city name). This is because the Russian patriarch has the authority to appoint clergy within Ukraine. The church rift within Ukraine, however, has had a fair amount of violence, and the splinter churches (those seeking autocephaly) have come to actual blows with those remaining loyal to Moscow (with each side blaming agents of the other side, of course). So the church situation in Ukraine is tricky:
Uniates (Eastern Rite, going back to the original Byzantine missionaries, but now under the protection of Rome)
Russian Orthodox (that is Orthodox but under the patriarchate of Moscow)
Ukrainian Orthodox (Orthodox, but seeking to shift patriarchal authority)
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Eastern_Catholic_Churches#Union_of_Brest_.281596.29
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Union_of_Brest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Brest
Forgot to link to some sources.
There are also the Ukrainian Catholic Church (and the Byzantine Catholic). Eastern rite, but under the papacy. I’ve had the opportunity to attend services at both of these in San Diego. Are they the same thing as Uniates? I hadn’t heard that term when I was there.
Did any Nationalism exist before the 19th century? Because the very concept of nationalism emerges in the 19th century. All through out Europe especially in ethnic groups lacking a unified nation under ethnic control. We see it among Jews, Romanians, Serbs, and most famously Germans. The claims to a German nation are not much older than that of the Ukrainian nation.
The term “Uniate” is not one that they apply to themselves any longer (though they originally did), as some Orthodox now use it as an insult (I’m not, but it is a convenient shorthand to describe “Eastern Rite Catholic” and requires less typing).
Byzantine Catholic, Eastern Rite Catholic, and a couple of other terms all roughly equal the same thing: Catholic churches under the authority of Rome, but retaining the Eastern Rite. I believe that “Ukrainian Catholic” means about the same thing, but the way to tell is by looking at which liturgy they use.
Same could be said of Italy too, or of Yugoslavia as a failed example.
It was all part of the rise of Romanticism and a reaction against the Enlightenment – and particularly against Napoleon who drenched the Enlightenment in blood.