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Excellent perspective, in my opinion! LB
Ukraine not succeeding, but not giving up: Yaroslav Hrytsak
As part of a small Ukrainian delegation, I gave a speech to the European Parliament nearly five years ago, aiming to convince MEPs that Ukraine was unlikely to break up. The Euromaidan Revolution had immediately raised, again, the “Huntingtonian” scenario of Ukraine splitting into a Ukrainophone west and Russophone east. The protests in Kyiv were presented as coming only from the Ukrainian-speaking west of the country, supposedly risking a negative response from the east and ultimately threatening a civil war and possible end of Ukraine as a state.
I tried to show that regardless of its internal strifes and divisions, Ukraine is a relatively stable political entity. I don’t know how convincing my arguments were, but the best proof of my thesis came one year later, in December 2014, with the disgraceful end of the “Russian Spring” in Ukraine. (To recall: it was a widely implemented attempt at a counter-revolutionary separatist uprising in the Russian-speaking oblasts of Ukraine’s south and east that was intended to spur the defection of these oblasts from Kyiv as part of a newly declared “New Russia.”) The Russian Spring had failed to prevail in the spring of 2014, by summer it was already extinguished, and in December the Kremlin declared it was over. Ukraine proved again that it is quite resistant to, and able to defend against, the threat of splitting.
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One of the finest books about Ukraine I've read in a long time. A MUST-READ!!! LB
Anne Applebaum. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.
(Book Review by Alexander J. Motyl)
Anne Applebaum sets out to tell the story of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, and she does so masterfully and powerfully, providing the historical background, the political and economic context, and a blow-by-blow account of the decisions that led to the annihilation of at least four million Ukrainian peasants. It is, frankly, depressing reading, despite Applebaum’s valiant effort in her final pages to mitigate the horror by invoking Ukraine’s independence and freedom today. The Bolsheviks viewed Ukraine as little more than a granary and its inhabitants as expendable non-proletarians whose only function consisted of providing Russia’s hungry proletariat with food. This was colonialism, pure and simple. And it is important for scholars to state, unconditionally, that it was evil.
It was also totalitarianism, at least by the late 1920s and 1930s, when Stalin and his Bolshevik henchmen constructed a system that incorporated all human activity and subordinated it to their murderous ends. There was slippage and there was chaos, of course, but the overriding reality was that there was top-down control by means of a ramified set of relationships that compelled everyone to play a preassigned social, political, economic, or cultural role. Some resisted and were shot. Others evinced insufficient enthusiasm and were purged. The system of incentives was such that collaboration was the only rational response for someone concerned above all with survival—a lesson that few Ukrainians would forget in subsequent years.
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