Window on Eurasia: by Paul Goble, Vienna, Thursday, May 21, 2009

12.  HOLODOMOR: METAGENOCIDE IN UKRAINE - ITS ORIGINS AND WHY IT'S NOT OVER

Seventy-five years after the most brutal ethnic genocide in history,

Russia’s goal to eradicate all things Ukrainian remains

13.  UKRAINE SHOULD REMOVE ALL SOVIET MEMORIALS SAYS PRES YUSHCHENKO 

Window on Eurasia, By Paul Goble, Vienna, Friday, May 22, 2009

15.  ‘THERE WILL BE NO FORGIVENESS'

16.  “BYKIVNIA ARCHIPELAGO”
Eighteen burial grounds of the victims of the 1937-40 mass-scale

political repressions have been found in Ukraine
By Ivan Kapsmun, The Day Weekly Digest in English #14

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s commission to block “ the falsification of history at the expense of the interests of Russia’ will either be harmful to Medvedev’s reputation and Russia’s prospects for reform or prove useless as an operational body, even if it says a very great deal about the habit of mind of its authors.

“The struggle against the falsifications of history,” Memorial’s Arseny Roginsky argues, “is not an affair of the state,” and consequently, “the activity of the new commission will be useless or harmful” because “we all know very well how [the Russian] state struggles with falsifications” (www.polit.ru/event/2009/05/19/historyfalse.html).

“Truth,” he continues, “is achieved not by the resolution of a state commission, even the highest created by decree of the president but is defined in free discussion among professionals or simply among people, among societies and peoples in various countries if this involves the definition of one and the same event.”

But clearly few in Russia expect this new body to produce that kind of truth. Indeed, the titles of some of articles about Medvedev’s action make that entirely clear: “A New Fascism” (www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=9098), “A State Built on Lies” (net14.org/?p=66), and “A Commission against History” (www.polit.ru/country/2009/05/19/history.html).

And while the very outrageousness of the idea of this commission has attracted the most attention – one can only imagine how Moscow’s defenders would react if any other government were to do the same – less attention has been paid to three more mundane aspects of this example of bureaucratic authoritarianism, which in the end may prove more important.

[1] First, it is important to be clear about what this commission is mandated to do.  It is not supposed to be a continuously operating body; instead, it is called upon to meet only twice a year. And it is not asked to define truth but rather to point to falsifications of it and not even to all of those but only the ones that “harm” Russia’s image.

[2] Second, its 28 members, led by Presidential Administration head Sergey Naryshkin, include few scholars but a large number of political figures with backgrounds in intelligence or the force structures and with reputations of committed nationalists, often of the most extreme kind, an indication that they will not be the ones making the decisions about “falsifications.

[3] And third, the practical consequences of the commission, at least as currently established, seem likely to be small and perhaps even counterproductive.  On the one hand, the power of the Internet means that whatever the commission says, other points of view are likely to be available to those who are interested.’

On the other – and this is likely to be far more important – any comments by the commission about “falsifiers” is likely to attract more attention to their works than they might otherwise gain. That is what happened in Soviet times when the Communist party ideologists attacked “bourgeois falsifiers,” and this commission may do the same for a new generation.

But in addition to these observations, which reflect a narrow reading of what the commission is about, the new body, or more precisely the order calling it into existence, provides instructive guidance as to the general direction in which Russia unfortunately appears to be moving at the present time.

As Latynina writes in “Yezhednevny zhurnal” today, prior to yesterday’s announcement, “it would have been difficult to imagine” that “Our Liberal Hope, Mr. Medvedev, would sign a paper about the establishment of [what she calls] the establishment of [an Orwellian] Ministry of Truth”

(www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=9098).

Moreover, this announcement has a long prehistory, not only from Soviet times but from the presidency of Vladimir Putin, who, as Aleksandr Karyev points out today on APN-SPB.ru, has long been obsessed with defining a particular approach to history that serves his needs if not those of the country (www.apn-spb.ru/publications/article5423.htm).

And that view, Karyev continues, reflects “the pseudo-ideological vector” along which Russia has been moving in recent times, one “directed not toward the future but toward the past,” an effective acknowledgement of the intellectual and political bankruptcy of the current Russian regime.

Given the uncertainties over whether this commission will “really function” or simply prove to be one more ideological flash in the pan, it is probably premature to conclude that the decree creating it is “an act bearing an openly totalitarian character as human rights activist Lev Ponomaryev put it today (www.sobkorr.ru/news/2/4A1263D299255.html).

But it is certainly fair to conclude as Yuliya Latynina does that Medvedev’s action represents “a new variety of fascism,” of a set of ideas which propagandizes “the exclusiveness of one’s own nation” and of its right to dominate others, however they may be defined from one moment to the next.

And she is certainly right that commissions like the one Medvedev has just created reflect a habit of mind and “an ideology of hatred to an open society, an ideology of struggle with ‘internal enemies,’” like that described by Orwell in “1984.”  And that is something that in today’s Russia is “becoming ever more horrifying,” even if this new body never meets.

Window on Eurasia: by Paul Goble, Vienna, Thursday, May 21, 2009

Vienna - Yuri Shcherbak, Kyiv’s former ambassador in Washington, says that some Russian leaders are actively considering the possibility of seizing all or part of Ukraine and are preparing public opinion in Eurasia and the West for such a move by pushing the notion that Ukraine has become “a failed state.”

In a lengthy article in today’s Kyiv newspaper, “Den’,” Shcherbak says that “aggressive conversations relative to Ukraine and the possible dividing up of its territory are being conducted” now in Moscow by a variety of Russian nationalist politicians and analysts (www.day.kiev.ua/274238/274238 and www.day.kiev.ua/274251/).   

Among the people he names are the followers of Konstantin Zatulin, the first deputy head of the Duma committee on compatriots and director of the Institute of CIS Countries, Aleksandr Prokhanov, the novelist and “Zavtra” commentator, and Aleksandr Dugin, the leader of the Eurasian Movement.

And while these individuals are notorious for their openly imperialistic views, Shcherbak says that he is convinced that “the idea of the division of Ukraine into parts is completely seriously being worked out at various levels of the powers that be in Russia.” And he reminds that it was not so long ago that Bolshevik “fantasies” informed Moscow’s “bloody reality.”

Moreover, he adds, many Russians took note, even if few in the West did, of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s comments at the Bucharest summit when he burst out: “Ukraine is not a state! What is Ukraine? One part of it is Eastern Europe, but another – and a very large part – was given by us!”

Such statements, the former Ukrainian diplomat warns, “are called in military language the ideological-propagandistic preparation of a future operation for the seizure of the territory of a sovereign state.”  And like most such efforts, they rely on a mix of facts and fictions in order to appear plausible to the greatest number of people.

The idea that Ukraine is a “failed” state, he continues, is simply not true.  According to one recent international ranking, neither Ukraine nor Russia falls in the category of a failed or failing state, but Ukraine’s obvious problems combined with Moscow’s vastly more powerful propaganda effort has allowed Russia to put Ukraine in that box.

Indeed, two articles by Russians have appeared in the last 24 hours that appear to provide evidence of the Ukrainian ambassador’s point.  In one, Andrey Stavitsky pointedly asks “has the sentence already been returned” on Ukraine in the current economic crisis? And will that entity thus “disappear as a state?” (odnarodyna.ru/articles/6/666.html).

And Konstantin Zatulin yesterday wrote that Moscow must view the Russian diaspora in Ukraine and elsewhere as an ally, “in the same rank with the army, the fleet and the Church,” thus making a direct appeal for Russia to act before ethnic Russians in Ukraine disappear through assimilation (www.russkie.org/index.php?module=fullitem&id=15609).

Many in Ukraine, the West and even in Russia will be inclined to dismiss Shcherbak’s article as an overreaction to overheated Russian nationalist commentaries in Moscow. One very much hopes that such a dismissal is appropriate, but unfortunately, there are increasing indications that at least some in the Russian government are actually thinking about partition.

In the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Georgia and the West’s failure to take tough action to punish the Russian government for this breach of international law, more and more people in the Russian Federation are thinking about the possibility of redrawing borders in the post-Soviet space.

An example of that is provided by Mikhail Chernov, the secretary of the Movement for a Single Ossetia which wants that nation to unite under the aegis of the Russian Federation, in an interview he gave to the Israeli journalist Avraam Shmulyevich that was posted online in Russia on Tuesday (www.apn.ru/publications/article21616.htm).

In the course of the wide-ranging interview, Chernov suggested that incautious actions by Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili could again lead to war and to the Russian conquest and dismemberment of that Caucasus republic. Indeed, he suggested that such an event could lead to further redrawing of the borders in the region.

Asked whether Russia might be “playing with fire” if it pushes for further border changes, Chernov replied that “it is impossible to stop this process” and that if Russia wants “to survive,” Moscow must have “its own projects for the redrawing” of the map of the world before others can achieve their goal of “the destruction of the Russian state as a single whole.”