Russia’s refusal to accept an independent Ukraine did not start with Vladimir Putin. And if lessons from recent history, together with the beliefs of many everyday Russians today are anything to go by it won’t end there either.
The Muscovite invasion of Ukraine has revealed many things. Planned by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, enthusiastically supported by Patriarch Kirill and the so-called church of Moscow, and seemingly endorsed by ordinary Russian soldiers and their mothers, the war shows the true face of the uncivilized brutal Russian aggressor.
However, there are still some naïve Ukrainians, Americans, and other world leaders such as President Macron of France, who believe that, for Russia, Putin is something of a fluke or exception.
I address this article to the naive or the blind.
In the first years of the Cold War following World War II, U.S. government officials understood the need to fight the Soviets while defending enslaved peoples. But including Russians among them seemed incomprehensible to almost all other enslaved peoples.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) even tried to involve the organized Ukrainian community in such an inane policy, but most were only too aware of Moscow’s historic aggression and understood that the USSR was just a continuation of the misanthropic Russian Empire.
The Russian community in the U.S. did not attempt to conceal its anti-Ukrainian position. For purposes of propaganda amongst Americans, a Russian Publishing Company put out an English language monthly magazine entitled “Russia.” The editor was Czarist remnant Colonel Nikolai Ribakoff. The main topic, “Russia, the United States, and the Liberation Struggle,” set the tone.
One of the more telling articles was written by Archpriest Peter G. Kohanik in 1952, entitled “The Greatest Lie of the Century – ‘Ukraine.’”
Kohanik wrote:
“We all dislike the abhorrent Bolshevism and its sinful work in Russia and all over the world, but this does not mean that we should also hate Russia and her people. In trying to destroy Bolshevism, we have no right whatsoever to undermine the former Great Russian Empire by striving as the ‘Ukrainian’ Separatists do (assisted by good and honest, but misled Americans), to detach from [the Russian Empire].”
His disdain for Ukraine is emphasized further:
“A study of Little Russian ‘history’ leads to the conviction that ‘Ukraine’ as a nation never existed…and, as such, deserves no assistance in its separatist aims”
And:
“At the present time, ‘Ukrainianism’ causes so much trouble to the Moscow Bolshevik rulers that they have been forced to purge many of its ranking officials…It seems that the Moscow Bolshevik rulers understand now more clearly the meaning of the ‘Ukrainian’ separatist movement. That is why they commence to resettle the ‘Ukrainian’ population into other parts of the Soviet Union, thereby destroying (by intermixing the population) the invented ‘Ukrainian’ inhabitants.”
Not even Putin has expressed as much vitriol against Ukrainians. He and the Archpriest are like-minded. Putin simply reiterated his words, although there was little effect on U.S. policy.
Another Russian liberal, the poet-dissident Joseph Brodsky, came to the U.S. in 1977 and was given the opportunity to teach at such prestigious institutions as Yale, Colombia, Cambridge, and Michigan. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Apparently, the rest of the Free World was also duped. For after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence in 1991, he wrote his scathing poem “On the Independence of Ukraine”.
In its final lines, he states that independent-minded Ukrainians should – on their deathbed – abandon their love of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and instead embrace the Russian literary figure Alexander Pushkin.
“God rest ye merry Cossacks, hetmans, and gulag guards!
But mark: when it’s your turn to be dragged to graveyards,
You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing,
Not Taras’ lies but poetry lines from Pushkin.”
These thoughts are worth reading in full (an English translation of the complete poem can be found here) since it’s hard to imagine anyone making it up.
And Pushkin, by the way, a famous poet and freethinker in his earlier years regressed into a sycophant lauding the despotic tsar, Nicholas I and Russian imperialism. The poet’s notorious “To the Slanderers of Russia” written in 1831 in which he attacked Europeans defending Poland’s attempts to free itself from Russian domination shows how little has changed in Russian mindsets.
I recently attended the premiere of the Ukrainian documentary film “A Rising Fury,” which follows two hopeful Ukrainian idealists from the peaceful protest in Kyiv in 2013 to the full-scale Russian invasion to Ukraine in 2022.
The film was showcased at the famous Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. The director said it was difficult for the organizers to agree on the synopsis of the film because her proposal was seen as “too anti-Russian.” So American naivete extends from branches of government to the film industry.
Should we be surprised?
The preeminent Russian novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:
“Not the whole of Ukraine in its current formal Soviet borders is indeed Ukraine. Some regions… clearly lean more towards Russia. As for Crimea, Khrushchev’s decision to hand it over to Ukraine was totally arbitrary.”
Solzhenitsyn’s antisemitism was prevalent as well. After all, he considered himself a Great Russian and that meant chauvinism and the denigration of others because that is what Great Russians do.
Curiously, Solzhenitsyn’s mother was Ukrainian.
So, what does this say about Putin? He is not an outlier. He is simply a Muscovite. He is like the aforesaid Muscovite archpriest and liberal dissident Russian poet, Brodsky, who – together with Solzhenitsyn – are not alone in their Ukrainophobia.
There were, are, and will be, others just like Putin. There is, of course, the Russian mother whose soldier son rapes and kills innocent Ukrainian children upon her directive.
Let’s take a page from the Brodsky-denigrated Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko:
“Fall in love with marigolds,
but not with the Muscovites,
Because Muscovites are evil people,
They are doing evil to you!”
This was written well before Putin.
Askold Lozynskyj is an attorney based in New York City. He is a former president of the Ukrainian World Congress.
