My Heart Breaks

 

My Heart Breaks

May 20, 2022

 

I just read an essay in the June, 2022, issue of The Atlantic by Anne Applebaum titled “They’re Not Human Beings.” Applebaum begins her essay with an account of one of the most horrific deeds of the horrific regime of the Stalinist Soviet Union, the artificial famine and forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians in what the Ukrainians call the Holodomor, the Great Famine. The Holodomor is perhaps the greatest human tragedy about which Americans know the least. Almost all of us know about Hitler’s Holocaust. Some of us have heard of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia. Some of us know a bit about the millions of deaths for which Mao is responsible in China. Fewer of us, I fear, know about the Holodomor. Before Russian invaded Ukraine on March 24, 2022, almost none of us had even heard of it. I have a PhD in Russian history. My focus in my studies was on tsarist Russia not the Soviet Union, but I still find it appalling that I knew so little about Stalin’s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s.

In my experience, most of which I know was decades ago, American teaching about Stalin focused on his liquidation of the so-called Old Bolsheviks, the people who had worked with Lenin to bring about the Bolshevik coup of 1917 and create the Soviet Union. Stalin was of course an Old Bolshevik in that sense himself, but he killed Soviet Communist leaders across the spectrum of opinion in the Bolshevik movement. He put on highly publicized show trials of some of those Old Bolsheviks before having them executed. I knew about that part of the Stalinist horror. I knew about the so-called “black Mariah’s,” the cars Stalin’s political police drove, almost always in the middle of the night, on their errands to break into people’s homes, arrest one or more of the people there, haul them away most of them never to be seen again. I have read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. I understood in general terms that Stalin was responsible for something like twenty million Soviet deaths before the beginning of World War II. What I didn’t know enough about was the Holodomor, the way Stalin and his goons intentionally starved something like four million Ukrainians to death in the early 1930s. Yet that is precisely what Stalin and the Soviet Communist party did.

In her essay Applebaum addresses the question of how ordinary Soviet people, mostly Russians, could do what they did to the people of Ukraine. Stalin enforced his famine by having brigades of Communist party members confiscate all food from the people of the Ukrainian countryside. Applebaum describes what those brigades did and the consequences of their actions this way:

 

They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They led away farm animals and confiscated tomato seedlings. After they left, Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.

 

Applebaum asks the question we all must ask: How was it possible? How could ordinary Soviet people do what these brigades did to other Soviet people? She states the answer to this question in the title of her essay—They’re Not Human Beings. Stalin and his Communist henchmen did it the way genocidal dictators always do it, by dehumanizing the victims of their genocide. In this case Stalin did it by convincing people that all of the people he forced into starvation were “kulaks.” Kulak is the Russian word for fist, but from the time of the Bolshevik coup in 1917 onward, the Soviet Communists used the word to designate relatively wealthy, land-owning peasants. The Communists portrayed the kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet proletariat, the class the Communists claimed to represent and to benefit. They said the kulaks were intent on defeating the Communists’ program of the collectivization of agriculture. They may actually have been right about that, but then virtually every peasant in the Soviet Union opposed the collectivization of agriculture. Applebaum includes in her essay an old Soviet poster. It depicts a disreputable looking man stealing grain while a strong, heroic looking, Soviet realism type man with a rifle is about to discover and presumably shoot the grain thief. In Applebaum’s piece part of the Russian text of the poster is translated, but not all of it. The full text reads: “Collective farm member, protect your fields from the class enemies—thieves and idlers misappropriating the socialist crop.” Applebaum says this about the regime’s propaganda against the kulaks and its effects on the people who enforced the famine:

 

At the time, the activists felt no guilt. Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies—rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia its leaders had promised. The kulaks should be swept away, crushed like parasites or flies. Their food should be given to the workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did.

 

Applebaum quotes one of the men who participated in the confiscation of food, who she describes as a Ukrainian born Soviet defector, as saying this years later about how he could do what he did, “I persuaded myself, explained to myself, I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five year plan.” Of course few if any of the Ukrainians who starved to death were actually kulaks. Yet Soviet propaganda had so dehumanized Ukrainian peasants that presumably otherwise decent people participated in the creation of a genocide exceeded in scope in Europe only by Hitler’s Holocaust.

Applebaum correctly asserts that Russian propaganda today is doing the same thing to the Ukrainian people as Stalin did ninety years ago. She asserts that “the Russian state’s ability to disguise reality from its citizens and to dehumanize its enemies has grown stronger and more powerful than ever.” Russia’s state controlled media, she says, feed the Russians an unending string of lies about the cultures and peoples of western Europe and the United States, depicting life in the west as invariably corrupt and immoral and describing the European Union (and I’m sure the United States too) as aggressive and interventionist.

The Russian government’s propaganda assault on Ukraine has been particularly vicious. State media, which are the only media there are in Russia today, tell the Russian people that Ukraine is not a legitimate country with its own history. Applebaum quotes Russian president Vladimir Putin as saying that Ukraine is nothing more than the southwest of Russia. He says that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia’s history and culture (about which he is pretty much correct). He says that the west is using Ukraine as an anti-Russian force, about which he certainly is not correct. He says that he invaded Ukraine to protect Russia from that force.

Applebaum asserts that Putin’s aim in invading Ukraine is nothing short of genocide of the sort Stalin committed in the Holodomor. She writes that Putin

 

invaded Ukraine, he has said, in order to defend Russia ‘from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and our people.’

     In truth, Putin invaded Ukraine in order to turn it into a colony with a puppet regime himself….In Putin’s language, and in the language of most Russian television commentators, the Ukrainians have no agency. They can’t make choices for themselves. They can’t elect a government for themselves. They aren’t even human—they are ‘Nazis.’ And so, like the kulaks before them, they can be eliminated with no remorse.

 

Applebaum also says that “it was evident that the Russian military had planned in advance for many civilians, perhaps millions, to be killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes in Ukraine.” It isn’t clear what her evidence is for that statement, but she sees the way the Russians attack Ukrainian apartment complexes, hospitals, and schools as part of a campaign of genocide against the Ukrainians.

I spent years studying Russian history. I traveled to Soviet Russia twice, first for a few weeks in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language tour that spent a few days in what we then called Kiev (the city’s name in Russian) and now call Kyiv (the city’s name in Ukrainian). Then I spent the 1975-76 academic year in Russia, mostly in Moscow but also some in what was then Leningrad (now once again St Petersburg) doing dissertation research. I harbor no illusions about Russia. I see that country as being  as much Asian as it is European. I know the brutality of much of the country’s history. I know the horror of Stalinism and the unconscionable behavior of many Red Army soldiers in World War II. For all that, Russian culture is delightful in many ways. It’s folk culture is charming, and its higher culture is world class. The Russian people have lived through hell many times in their long history. They have survived, and they are proud of their ability to survive suffering better than most people. Russia is a mix of the good and the bad as much as any other country in the world.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 25, 1991, though it had been collapsing for at least a couple of years before that. What form post-Soviet Russia would take was far from clear. Both many Russians and many of us western students of Russian history and politics hoped that better days lay ahead for the long-suffering Russian people. I knew that the odds were probably against Russia becoming a western-style parliamentary democracy that respected and protected the civil rights of its people. Russia, after all, has no meaningful history of that western way of being. Still, many of us hoped for a better future for Russia than its past had been.

Those hopes have been dashed. Destroyed, and one man has been and is responsible for and is the chief symbol of those dashed hopes—Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The overarching policy of his regime since he first came to power on January 1, 2000, has been the recreation of the Soviet Union without that country’s Marxist-Leninist ideology. He has worked to recreate the USSR both domestically and in his interactions with some of the former Soviet republics that became independent nations upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In both of those spheres he has created conditions far worse than many of us thought would come to be in Russia’s post-Soviet era. Internally he has created a system of state control of information and of the people perfectly reminiscent of the Soviet state. Externally he has created an alliance with Belarus and its strongarm leader in which Russia is clearly the dominant party. He has invaded the former Soviet republic of Georgia, supposedly in support of two breakaway, mostly Russian speaking parts of that nation. He has probably meddled in the affairs of the former Soviet republic of Moldova in support of a breakaway, mostly Russian speaking part of that nation.

But that’s far from the worst of what Putin has done to former Soviet republics that are now sovereign nations. The worst of what Putin has done he has done in and to Ukraine. First, in 2014, he occupied Crimea while denying all the while that he doing so. Then he held a phony plebiscite  there and claimed that in accordance with the result of that vote Crimea was now part of Russia not Ukraine. Then he meddled militarily in the eastern part of Ukraine called the Donbas, a portmanteau word built from the Russian and Ukrainian names for the Donets River and their word for basin. Separatist forces in two regions in the Donbas populated mostly by Russian speakers had been fighting the Ukrainian army for a long time. They had declared their independence from Ukraine and had established two so-called People’s Republics there. It seems likely that Putin will at some point declare those two breakaway regions to be part of Russia not Ukraine.

All of that pales in comparison to what Putin began on March 24, 2022, and has been doing in Ukraine ever since. He invaded Ukraine. His aims for this invasion are not clear, and he has had less military success that many experts thought he would have. Nonetheless, he has waged war against the Ukrainian army, recently capturing the port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. However his attempt to take the northern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Kharkov in Russian, most of the population of which is Russian not Ukrainian, failed against stiff resistance. He also failed in his attempt to occupy the capital city of Ukraine, Kyiv.

Having the Russian army fight the Ukrainian army is bad enough to be sure, but it is far from the worst thing Putin’s army is doing. It is intentionally firing artillery and rockets at Ukrainian apartment complexes, schools, hospitals, theaters, and other public facilities. In doing so the Russian army is killing untold numbers of Ukrainian civilians, thereby committing war crimes over and over again. Russian troops are even murdering innocent Ukrainian civilians execution style with their hands behind their backs. Putin is causing death and destruction in Ukraine on a scale not seen in Europe since the end of World War II. I do not have words strong enough to condemn what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Moral outrage comes close I guess, but what Russia is doing is even worse than that. The horror of Russia’s actions in Ukraine is simply beyond words.

Is Applebaum right that Putin intends to commit genocide against the Ukrainian people? I don’t know. The way the Russians are targeting civilians certainly suggests that Applebaum may be right, but I suppose the answer to the question depends on what you mean by genocide. It’s highly unlikely that Putin will create a new Auschwitz in Ukraine. It is highly unlikely that he will industrialize genocide the way the Nazis did. Yet surely he will not refrain from killing as many Ukrainians as he thinks he has to kill in order to subdue the population and make Ukraine at least a vassal state of Russia. Depending on how successful his military operation turns out to be, he may even declare that Ukraine is now Russia the way he did with Crimea. There is surely no limit to the death and destruction he is willing to inflict on Ukraine to achieve his demonic goals. Only the valor of the Ukrainians and the massive amounts of military hardware the Ukrainians are receiving from the west can stop him.

I spent years studying Russia. I even lived there for ten months in the mid-1970s. Like I said, I have no illusions about the brutality of much Russian history. Yet I never once thought that post-Soviet Russia would descend to the moral depths to which Vladimir Putin has driven it. I could say that his attempt to recreate the Soviet Union is simply madness, yet Putin has come a long way toward realizing that distorted dream both domestically and militarily. Russia’s history of authoritarian and totalitarian rule along with its lack of any meaningful democratic traditions created the circumstances that have made Vladimir Putin possible. He has exploited the worst aspects of Russian history in his drive to recreate the country the loss of which he has called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Russia could be a vibrant, constructive member of the world community. Instead, Putin has made it a prison domestically and a pariah nation internationally. He may even be committing something at least close to genocide in Ukraine. He has provoked most of the world into imposing economic sanctions against his country and its people that will cripple the Russian economy and create hardship for the Russian people perhaps for decades to come. I can hardly believe that what Putin has done to Russia is real, but I know that it is. My heart breaks first of all for the people of Ukraine. It also breaks for the people of Russia, who Putin has led back into some of the darkest chapters of the Russian past. I pray that perhaps members of Putin’s inner circle will somehow remove him from power. I even pray (forgive me, Lord) that he may not survive the health problems from which he appears to be suffering. I pray, but I dare not hope. Both Russia’s present and its foreseeable future appear too bleak for hope. I pray that events will prove me wrong.