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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
The Russians (like the Germans) have a very different idea of what is ideal in a state because they have vastly different histories and geographies than we do. We value and have been able to achieve a strong state and individual rights and to keep those two in tension with one another. We do not have a history of invasions and the chances of invasion have been slim to none for over 150 years.
The Russians value a strong state for the purpose of keeping out invaders. They extend their boundaries for that purpose. Individual rights don’t ever enter the picture because they don’t have the luxury.
That does not follow. If a state cannot maintain its own sovereignty, I wonder if it should still be a state.
What we are saying about doing something, is that we should take actions to preserve the sovereignty of a state that is not able too. I am not saying that is wrong, but it what we are saying. The Ukraine has no historical ties to America, or really to our culture. I suppose we can impose more sanctions on Russia and see how that works. I don’t quite see how it is any of our business.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, sometimes called the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church is in full communion with Rome. A link to it’s history during the Stalin regime, and later.
Some was, certainly, but Napoleon also kicked over numerous petty kingdoms and principalities, and smashed the concept of hereditary Divine Right. Plus, his rearrangements of borders actually created prototype German and Italian states. In short, his conquests and antics inadvertently planted the notion “Hey, why should we be beholden to these aristocratic jerks, just because their ancestors conquered this area.” He broke the feudal border stagnation.
Right, which is another way of distinguishing itself from Ukrainian Orthodox or Russian Orthodox.
Well I suppose we should stand aside and let Russia take what it pleases, perhaps they’ll be satisfied when they reach the beaches of Normandy.
The service folder at the Ukrainian Catholic was printed in Cyrillic on one side of each page and English on the other. (There were a lot of pages.) I presume the language was more like Old Church Slavonic. Anyway it was close enough to Russian that I was able to follow it mostly, but occasionally got lost and had to find my place with the help of the English. The priest told me afterwards that he usually delivers the homily in English, but it depends on which subset of the congregation is going to be present. There were people there who like some of the same Russian movies that I do. It was nice being with people who could converse about such things; some of them are movies that even Russians who like Russian movies don’t seem to know much about.
Ukraine is a long way from Normandy. The problem with the Russians is they always overreach and it leads to their demise. There is a lesson there.
Sometimes their demise is very expensive to us. We should try to make their aggression more expensive for them than for us.
As I recently half-joked on another post – studying Russian history is like watching the word’s longest tragic play. How many 4th act set ups can they go through, followed by how many 5th act hubristic falls?
I don’t understand. How is their demise expensive to us?
The Cold War was expensive, but their demise ended the expense.
It didn’t demise all on its own. We quit propping it up.
I think Ukrainian forces will do their own fighting, but the Obama plan of sending them MRE’s was not much help. Javelin anti-tank missiles is probably a much better plan. Simple, but elegant against Russian tanks, and Russian artillery emplacements in the eastern Ukraine.
It is tragic. But Putin is far better than the Soviets, so it has improved. Russia may never be a liberal democracy. Russian liberal democrats have a terrible track record, are ineffectual, and completely feckless. At some point that could change. The current system will have to be shown to be a failure and Russians convinced of it. The most likely route is via overreach. That could happen in Ukraine. That could happen in Syria and further adventures in the Middle East.
Field hospitals are another item that should be provided.
Ah, yes. The really futile and stupid gesture principle.
I’ve often thought that news stories that remind you of Animal House don’t bode well. “Loretta” comes to mind.
Monty Python bits, too. “Loretta” comes to mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp9MPLEAqA
Reactionary.
Well in Yugoslavia you had nationalism but the problem is you had several nationalities (which in Europe was and is really a term for ethnicities). Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, and Slovaks. Though I guess some of these are really religious divisions too, between Catholic and Orthadox groups within one ethnicity. Kind of like Belgians and Dutch.
This all though highlights the various problems and pitfalls of nationalism as an organizing structure for states. In one way it is a natural way to group people, but it is also reductive and exclusionary and though everyone has some sense of ethnicity its precise definition is often elusive. But what is one to expect of a product of Romanticism other than that it will feel right, but be problematic in practice and implementation.
I’m going there next month, down the Dneiper, Kiev to Odessa, same route taken by Catherine the Great. I was reviewing my Russian ( not gonna take on Ukrainian now) and I had begun to feel why bother–but after reading this I think it may be useful after all…!
Catherine was almost an exact contemporary of George Washington, remember. This isn’t a commentary; I just find it interesting. And she did the same kinda thing our country did with the dissatisfied Germanophone farmers–offer ’em land of their own!
What Stalin did there, engineering a famine, was horrible–but a lot like what he did to the Russian peasantry as well.
Ill let you know what I observe.
The essence of the rule of law is to create a system where people are provided protection that they can not provide themselves is it not? We don’t look at a rape victim and think that they deserve no help because they were unable to repel their attacker. But, the help in combating criminality against strangers is that invariably criminal that go unchecked will eventually victimize yourself or someone who you do care about? And then the question is why did you not act sooner when a pattern was clearly evident?
As to historical ties to the US, well frankly given Americas ethnic diversity there are plenty of Americans with roots back in the Ukraine, I think we have as much of a connection to them as we do with Poland or at least did prior to Poland joining NATO. And any way there is no time like the present to expand our circle of friends and allies, and a the best time to draw people into our orbit is when they actually need us. Simply put from a realist perspective our goal should always be to increase our sphere of influence and shrink that of rival nations. Russia is a rival. Not because we made them so but because they chose to be so. We were fine to keep ignoring them following the collapse of the USSR. Heck considering the order and magnitude of crimes the Russians were responsible for under the USSR the fact that they were never held to proper account of that was excessively generous of us.
AMEN!
I just read a book about what Romania did in Odessa during its hegemony there, y’know, while it was a Nazi ally.
Odessa is gorgeous. Italianate architecture. Catherine took the area from the Turks and built a beautiful city (same as with Crimea). There is finally a statue honoring her and her achievement. The statue wasn’t there when I first went there long ago. The Potemkin Steps remain an amazing gateway. See Eisenstein’s film before you go. To me, his work is dreck – way over the top – and highly inaccurate. But the part on the steps is worth watching.
And there you have it: the formula for overreach.
If you believe the Biblical account, the united Kingdom of Israel and Judah should probably be considered a nation, since it was the union of 12 tribes who spoke the same language, followed the same religion, and abided by the same legal code. However, even the Bible says it only lasted for about 80 years (with ten of the tribes seceding over, surprise surprise, taxation by the other two tribes).
Roman citizens should probably be considered a single nation, with the Roman territory considered a single state.
Rome never conquered Germania like they did Gaul, at least in part because the Germanic tribes were way more united than the Gauls were. Ditto for Pictland. Of course, Germania wasn’t united enough to fend off the Huns, but that was three centuries later, and nations do have a tendency to be ephemeral.
Norway in the 9th Century might have a pretty good claim to nationhood. One language. One religion. One legal code.
Medieval universities in the 14th Century divided their students into nationes, so that students who spoke the same languages were housed together. In the 15th Century the Knights Hospitaler segregated their hostels by nationes so that travellers who spoke the same language could eat together and also have their peculiar religious customs catered to.
It’s argued that the first “modern nation” was the Dutch Republic, and it was founded in the 16th Century.
The Iroquois Confederacy was founded in the 12th Century, and was referred to as “nations” at least as early as 1722.
What was new in the 19th century after Napoleon was the idea that nations could co-exist peacefully side-by-side, not the idea that nations could exist in the first place. If anything, the fascism of the early 20th century was a repudiation of nationalism and a return to imperialism.
That’s not a formula for overreach. It needs a lot more ingredients to be that.
Vlad is like a man holding a candle and trying to out run the winds of chaos to keep it lit. The real question is, what happens when Vlad goes away? All bets are off. Who will the Russian Army side with then? We in the West would like to think these events will not affect us, but that is highly unlikely.
Is it right to assume the Russian Army will be the deciding power after Vlad? The Russian economy depends on the oligarchs, and they can pretty easily move their cash out of Russia if they don’t like the way the wind blows after Vlad bows out. Russia is a kleptocracy, not a military dictatorship.
As the rest of the world develops, markets for Russian military hardware dwindles every year. China can produce it’s own weapons these days, and they’ll rely on Russian oil less and less over time. Europe isn’t going to keep buying natural gas from Russia if they keep threatening the western border. So where is Russia going to get the money to pay for its (deteriorating) military?
Look at the invasion of Crimea. It was a decidedly low-tech affair. It was mostly just soldiers driving across an undefended border in trucks. It only worked because Ukraine’s military is even more badly staffed and/or equipped.
I agree that Vlad wants to recreate the glory of the old Russian empire, but I don’t think he calculates that it would be worth a war with NATO. When Vlad retires, how much of his old imperial dream will dissipate? Does the army really want expansion, or does it merely want to protect its own interests? How does economic isolation help the oligarchs’ interests?
If I was a betting man, I’d wager that Vlad’s successor will be more like a mobbed-up Russian businessman and less like a former KGB officer, and that the army will back whoever’s in the best position to pay their bills.
Doesn’t seem to stop Germany, which is trying to get out of restrictions it has agreed to.
Whoever controls the guns will have the power. I agree the Red Army is not the best army in the world, but as the comedian Richard Prior once said: a rusty switch blade that opens half the time, is still a dangerous weapon. I also agree with you that the Red Army will follow the money. A mobbed-up Russian businessman may be the best result the West could hope for. However, I think there will be some sort of internal political collapse with a general social/economic decline.