My trips to former Soviet bloc countries always started the same way. The minute I was introduced as a Canadian, the face of the person to whom I was being introduced would light up and they would say “Inderson!” and then slap me on the back. I would smile in return and repeat with less enthusiasm, “Yeah, yeah… Inderson!” In Kyrgyzstan I met an English-speaking guy who did the same and then, at my question, explained to me that this was in reference to Paul Henderson and the hockey series of 1972. I am not a big sports person, but the strength of that common link was very impressive to me. The guy in Kyrgyzstan had played with the Soviet greats like Maltsev and Tretiak and went to a couple of Olympics. Impressive guy. If you ever get into trouble in that part of the world, boldly say, “Inderson!” and slap someone on the back. All will be well.
About a decade ago, I and two colleagues from Australia, visited Kiev, Ukraine to pitch our consulting services for a major mine development. I had been to Russia and thought a trip to Ukraine would be equally wonderful and it was. Kiev, even in the dead of winter, is a beautiful city and the cuisine is certainly to my taste. It was in Kiev that I learned that the Ukrainians take toasting much more seriously than the Russians. Unlike in Russia, the Ukrainians are aggressive about your rudeness in not downing the shot. So, you down the shot. Repeatedly and with predictable results as I learned at one memorable dinner. Well, the first part of the evening was memorable. The rest is kind of a blur.
We visited the famous Monastery of the Caves, and I followed the older folks into the underground tombs where they kissed the sarcophagi of the dozens of saints who gloomily stared out of the glass windows of their caskets. I was particularly taken with Independence Square and the museum of the Great Patriotic War known to us as World War II. Adjacent to that museum are the monuments commemorating the Holodomor. Prior to visiting these monuments, I had no real understanding of that event other than reading Solzhenitsyn’s account of it. To understand the events of today, one must comprehend that tragedy. An estimated seven million Ukrainian kulaks - land owning farmers - were starved to death as Stalin took their grain and sold it in Moscow and internationally. Anyone caught holding on to the grain was shot on the spot. The photos of emaciated and cadaverous children, parents, and grandparents dead and dying in the streets were shocking, draining and intensely thought provoking. Only two of the dozens of Western journalists in Russia at that time faithfully reported on these seven million deaths. They were, indeed, Stalin’s useful idiots.1 Remember this when you read today’s newspapers because nothing has changed, in my view.
Another event in Kiev is etched into my memory. Our agent for the business development trip was a middle-aged Russian man whose father had been a ranking official in the communist party. He had grown up in Kabul, Afghanistan when it was a garden and loved Stalinist Russia. I know this because he kept saying, “Russia is sh#t. Stalin was better.” Apart from this he was very funny and quite knowledgeable about the collapse of the Soviet Union. At his urging we hired a guide to take us on a bus tour of Kiev to see the hundreds of beautiful churches that occupy its skyline. Our tour guide was a young, enthusiastic Ukrainian girl who clearly loved her city and filled us full of interesting factoids about Volodymyr and the birth of the city as it straddled the mighty Dnieper River. But then she and our Russian interlocutor started to talk politics resulting in her screaming at him in Ukrainian and he, laughing and provoking her in Russian. It was an ugly but telling moment and the pictures of the Holodomor rose in my mind. This is a scab that should never be picked.
This past weekend, Ukrainians in four eastern provinces voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia. This is another reverberation of the bomb set off by Western powers in 1999 in a Serbian province called Kosovo. The United States needed to replace its military air bases in Turkey so, following the bombing of Belgrade, the West offered a future “independence election” to the Albanian Muslims who had swarmed into Serbia. It was an act of unprincipled aggression that was noted and commented on by the then Russian Premier, Vladimir Putin, and decried by Henry Kissinger among others2. Remember this too when the Western press proclaims the “so-called” Ukrainian elections to be illegal and invalid. There is no question that they are invalid - just like the Belgrade bombing and the Kosovo election were invalid.
The result of the recent elections may change the nature of the war in Ukraine because, if the provinces vote to join Russia, then Putin will be defending Russian soil and will no longer be restrained by the terms of a Special Military Operation. For three or four years, Western leaders have been suggesting tactical nuclear weapons as an option to bring Mr. Putin to heel. A week ago this fatuity was repeated by the new British Prime Minister. Mr. Putin rose to the bait and said, in response, that he would have all options on the table and was not bluffing. A couple of days ago the Nordstream undersea gas pipelines were destroyed, perhaps by bombs. Cui bono? I am not a big fan of nuclear war, and I wish there was an adult somewhere in the vicinity to stop this dangerous talk.
Assuming there will be no nuclear war (even as this becomes a bigger assumption) a potential outcome of this election is the end of Ukraine as a separate state. RIP Ukraine (1992 - 2023). In this scenario, the soldiers that Mr. Putin is calling up will protect the borders of the reconstituted Novorossiya and will expand those borders to Moldova, their historical limit. Poland, Belarus, and Romania will pick up chunks of what remains to bring “cultural protection” to those Ukrainians who are historically Polish, Belarussian and Romanian. If there is a remaining Ukrainian state it will be landlocked and cast aside by the West. I hope I am wrong. Mr. Zelensky will be living abroad and spending his fortune on bodyguards. In this, I hope I am right.
How did it come to this?
Most histories of Ukraine begin with the great Nordic migrations that occurred between approximately 800 - 1000 AD. In France they were called Normans, in Great Britain they were called Vikings, and, in the east, they were called Varangians. In all cases they were big, blonde, and fierce. Their trading routes were complementary, and it is estimated that over 250,000 Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Frankish women and girls were trafficked into the harems of the Middle East via the Varangian trade route down the Dnieper River. Remember that National Geographic Magazine picture of the Middle Eastern girl with startling blue eyes? Quite likely.
The Varangians settled around the Dnieper River in what is now Kiev and established a profitable trade with Byzantium to the south and the Turkic tribes to the east. Christianity made its way north through the work of Cyril and his brother Methodius and in 988 AD the Varangian Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) confessed Christ in the Orthodox tradition because he wanted to please his Christian mother, didn’t want to give up pork like the Muslims and was impressed by the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. All his subjects said, “Sounds like a good idea to me,” the alternative being a horrible death. I am not sure of that part, but you tended to go with the boss’s view in those days.
Volodymyr’s grandsons couldn’t work together and so the Empire of Rus was broken into separate kingdoms which were easily defeated in detail by Genghis Khan two hundred years later. As an aside, Genghis Khan had a written plan to conquer all the Eurasian landmass from Atlantic to Pacific and might have done so had he not died when he did. Quite a guy. In 1240 his grandson, Batu Khan, destroyed the splendor of Kiev and it was not renewed for 500 years. The Golden Horde took up residence along the north coast of the Black Sea, the Mongols became known as Tatars and tax-farmed the Rus, as the Varangian-Slavic tribes were called. If the outrageous taxes were not paid, the slaughter followed. Finally, in 1552, Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) said “nyet” and conquered the Khanate with the help of rival Tatars.
One of the debated issues between the Ukrainian tour guide and our Russian agent was whether the Russian and Ukrainian people were separated by something more substantial than changes in language. Over time, the people of eastern Rus called themselves Russky or Rossiya and the western Rus called themselves Rusyny or Ruthenian. “What is in a name?” asked Shakespeare. Did subsequent historical events change the Ukrainians into a distinct people? They sure think so and who am I to question it. By the same token, a Russian friend once told me, “Scratch a Russian and find a Tatar.” He certainly looked more Turkic than Slavic so maybe there is truth to what he said as well.
The vastness and fertility of the empty Ukrainian steppe (Ukraine means “Borderland” in most lexicons) soon attracted the errant and criminal sons of the Russian nobles or boyars leading to the romantic legends of the Don and Zaporozhian Cossacks. These fabulous horsemen and chivalric bandits became the favoured mercenaries of successive tsars to fight the hated Tatars. Southern Ukraine remained empty due to Tatar raids, while Poland took abusive control of the northern regions now known as Galicia. In 1657 the Zaporozhian Cossacks under Hetman (commander) Bohdan Khmelnytsky allied his forces with the Tatars and destroyed the Polish yoke. Under the resulting treaties, eastern Ukraine became part of the Tsardom of Muscovy, and the Cossacks swore allegiance to the Russian tsar. In contemporary Ukrainian history, this began the enslavement of the Ukrainian people under Russia known as the “Ruin”.
The Russians, of course, see things differently and point out that it was Catherine the Great who ended the rule of the often-vicious Cossack hetmans by signing a truce with the Tatars and creating Novorossiya (New Russia) along the north coast of the Black Sea. Remember that term, Novorossiya, because we are going to be hearing it a lot. The Cossacks were no longer necessary to keep the Tatars at bay and so the vast plains (wild fields) became populated by free Russian farmers lured to the area by Catherine’s prime minister Grigory Potemkin. They were the first Russians to be freed from serfdom and converted to landholding kulaks. To demonstrate his success, Potemkin floated the Tsarina down the Dnieper River on a magnificent barge while his happy farmers waved from their fake or “Potemkin” villages. I once used this story in a Russian toast to express my desire that the proposed mining project not prove to be “Potemkin”. The Russians laughed enthusiastically, and fortunately my Western clients didn’t get it. Russians were the first settlers of southern Ukraine and have remained loyal to Russia ever since. When coal was discovered in the eastern Donbas in the 19th Century, it was Russians who immigrated to mine it. The push for separation and/or repatriation of these largely Russian areas is not a new phenomenon.
The history of northwestern Ukraine is entirely different and is inextricably bound to the history of Poland. It has been said that Galicia was “owned by the Poles, managed by the Jews and ruled by the Austrians”. Its history is complex and there was never room for the Ukrainians who, at times, were denied their religion and their language. Most of the large Ukrainian migrations came from this part of the country as did the Ukrainian nationalist poets. Influenced by British romanticism, poet Taras Shevchenko popularized the notion of a Ukrainian People and started the push to create a Ukrainian state. Interestingly he is revered by both Ukrainians and Russians but for different reasons.
Following the First World War, Galicia was given to Poland and the rest of what is now Ukraine was absorbed into Russia. With the rise of Hitler, Galicia became pro-German and fascist. But first came the Holodomor…
In 1932 the communists decided to collectivize the recalcitrant Ukrainian land-owning farmers who had left their feudal serfdom behind in the reign of Catherine. They weren’t prepared to lose that freedom to a thug from Georgia. Stalin, the thug from Georgia, felt differently and the collectivization came at the cost of seven million dead. Germany looked like a pretty good option in 1934. In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement moved Galicia back to the Russians and Poland was destroyed. In 1941, when Hitler moved his armies east into Ukraine, he found a welcoming population. The extermination of the Jews near Babi-y-Yar was carried out by Ukrainians as well as Germans and even the German SS were surprised by the zeal of the Ukrainians. An icon of this period of Ukrainian history is a man called Stepan Bandera who was as complex as the land he called home. He was a Nazi sympathizer who spent much of the war in a German jail. In 2010 he was posthumously awarded the “Hero of Ukraine” by outgoing and EU-leaning Viktor Yushchenko. The award was annulled almost immediately by incoming and Russia-leaning Viktor Yanukovych because Bandera was not born in Ukraine. It is complicated and Bandera represents another historical scab that should never be picked.
In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dreams of Taras Shevchenko were realized with the formation, for the first time, of an independent, unified Ukrainian state. It has been a troubled passage to statehood from then until today. Sadly, neoconservative warriors like Victoria Nuland of the US State Department believe that historical scabs exist to be picked. The Ukrainian colour revolutions of 2004 and 2014 were the picking of the scabs of the Holodomor and Babi-y-Yar. I put the horrors of today’s Ukrainian War squarely in the camps of both Mr. Putin and the US State Department. A double pox on both of their houses. I fear that the EU-leaning Ukrainians are about to realize how feckless Western leadership is and how it feels to be discarded when no longer necessary to the mission - whatever the mission is. Those in the East may soon learn that the Ukrainian oligarchs are easier to ignore than the Russian oligarchs. We don’t know how this will all turn out, but I am not betting on a soft landing for the poor Ukrainians.
A couple of years ago a revivalist group of Cossacks offered to provide corruption-free policing for the city of Moscow. Perhaps they can now lend their services to Ukraine in the spirit of Hetman Khmelnytsky.
In the meantime, I hope this loose talk of tactical nuclear war ends.
“Mr. Jones”, a film by Agnieszka Holland is a good primer on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambouillet_Agreement