Harvest of Sorrow in Ukraine

I’ve been reading a bit about the horrors of Stalin’s “dekulakization and collectivization.” My impression is that if you want to know very much about these subjects, you are going to have to read a European language. These horrors were downplayed, explained away, or ignored in Russia – and, by the way in Leftist circles throughout Europe and elsewhere as well. Stalin was the leader of that noble utopian experiment called Communism. Of course he hadn’t achieved it, no one is saying that, but he was well on the way – sort of like the Christian who is “saved,” and yet a long way from perfection – at least that was the theory everyone on the Left had faith in.

And given this faith in the Communist experiment, those who first spoke out about its failure, about what was actually happening in the Soviet Union were castigated for their disbelief. Comparisons of Stalin to Hitler and the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany seemed especially heinous to them and yet parallels exist. The same sorts of things went on in both places. The true believer is forced to say that the Soviet horrors were perpetrated in a worthy cause. But we know now that the cause was a sham. It was a reckless experiment that cost the lives of millions. It is time to quit apologizing for Stalin and the Soviets and start assigning blame.

I recently bought Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, subtitled, “Soviet Collectivization and the terror-famine.” It is still in print, I was interested to note. It is ranked 192,240 by Amazon.com. The left has been outraged by Robert Conquest for years. How dare he describe what actually happened during the “dekulakization and collectivization” in the Soviet Union?

Bear in mind that what Stalin and his Soviets did was all experimental. It had never been tried before except in very tiny little enclaves all of which were short-lived.

[p. 4] “. . . Dekulakization meant the killing, or deportation to the Arctic with their families, of millions of peasants, in principle the better-off, in practice the most influential and the most recalcitrant to the Party’s plans. Collectivization meant the effective abolition of private property in land, and the concentration of the remaining peasantry in ‘collective’ farms under Party control. These two measures resulted in millions of deaths . . .”

“Then in 1932-3 came what may be described as a terror-famine inflicted on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and the largely Ukrainian Kuban (together with the Don and Volga areas) by the methods of setting for them grain quotas far above the possible, removing every handful of food, and preventing help from outside – even from other areas of the USSR – from reaching the starving. This action, even more destructive of life than those of 1929-32, was accompanied by a wide-ranging attack on all Ukrainian cultural and intellectual centres and leaders, and on the Ukrainian churches. The supposed contumaciousness of the Ukrainian peasants in not surrendering grain they did not have was explicitly blamed on nationalism: all of which was in accord with Stalin’s dictum that the national problem was in essence a peasant problem. The Ukrainian peasant thus suffered in double guise – as a peasant and as a Ukrainian.”

“. . . Though confined to a single state, the number dying in Stalin’s war against the peasants was higher than the total deaths for all countries in World War I. There were differences: in the Soviet case, for practical purposes, only one side was armed, and the casualties (as might be expected) were almost all on the other side. They included, moreover, women, children and the old.”

COMMENT:

It surprises me that Stalin still has his supporters. The evidence is in. He killed more of his own people than Hitler did. My only question is in regard to motive. Did he purposely kill the Kulaks and the Ukrainian peasants? Or did he stupidly believe that his experimentation would really work. Conquest takes the former view. Evidence may be on his side. We know that Stalin ruthlessly killed those who opposed him as well as those who “might oppose him” at some time in the future. Those independent Ukrainian kulaks clearly fit into that category.

Now, years later Ukraine was anxious to be independent of Russia. It had its Orange Revolution, and of the former Soviet Republics it is among those who get along least well with Russia. Can one nation forgive another which has killed so many of its people? I don’t know. Let’s ask Poland.

Medvedev & Obama on Iran

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/04/09/moscow-open-severe-punishment-iran-nuclear-program/

The last time we looked at Obama’s attempts to diplomatically thwart Iran’s ambitions, it looked as though he was going to have to “crawl” to even be able to talk to a leader in Iran. But Obama didn’t crawl. He first attempted to speak directly to Iranian leadership, but when that failed he went to Russia. Russia, real or imagined, has seemed to be Iran’s chief protector, and Medvedev responded to Obama by saying the American intelligence may be better than the Russian’s on Iran’s nuclear progress.

That was an interesting thing for Medvedev to say – very “diplomatic.” It is a noncommittal factual sort of statement, but it also conveys something. For a Russian leader to say an American leader is right about anything seems a very positive thing. Also, Iran’s nuclear progress is in a sense a count-down toward a military option. Bush didn’t take it off the table and while I haven’t heard that Obama has, he is clearly intending to use diplomatic means for now. But will he use the military option if Iran plows ahead and develops nuclear weapons despite the best diplomatic efforts to get them stopped? In this article Clinton is quoted as saying that the Obama administration has not reconciled itself to the Iranian addition to the nuclear club and hinting at criticism of Bush for accepting India’s addition. Well, Hillary Clinton, if Iran does plow ahead despite the disapproval of Russia, America and everyone else, and you will not accept an addition to the nuclear club, the last resort to prevent this addition is the military option. Does anyone really have the stomach for that? The US may cave in as Ahmadinejad predicts, but one nation definitely has the stomach for a military strike. Its resolve was evidenced by their taking out, in an air strike, the French built Osirak nuclear weapons facility in Operation Opera on June 7, 1981. So even if Obama and Clinton change their minds (something diplomats sometimes do) and content themselves with the idea of Iranian nuclear weapons, that doesn’t mean that Israel will.

And just on the chance that Israel may be planning an Iranian version of Operation Opera, it behooves those bent upon a diplomatic solution to produce something tangible soon, i.e., to get Iran to back off and give up its plans (if it has them; which Putin recently denied, but Medvedev seems now to accept) to produce nuclear weapons. Obama thinks draconian sanctions might just do the trick. We are watching his efforts, many of us, with great interest.

Russian Depopulation exacerbated by drunkenness

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Spring/full-Eberstadt.html

The above article was written by Nicholas Eberstadt and entitled “Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb. It appears in the Spring 2009 issue of World Affairs. Let’s begin with some statistics. We knew Russia’s population was shrinking, but the shrinkage is rather more dramatic than I realized. Eberhardt calls it a “depopulation”: “. . . Between 1976 and 1991, the last sixteen years of Soviet power, the country recorded 36 million births. In the sixteen post-Communist years of 1992–2007, there were just 22.3 million, a drop in childbearing of nearly 40 percent from one era to the next. On the other side of the life cycle, a total of 24.6 million deaths were recorded between 1976 and 1991, while in the first sixteen years of the post-Communist period the Russian Federation tallied 34.7 million deaths, a rise of just over 40 percent. The symmetry is striking: in the last sixteen years of the Communist era, births exceeded deaths in Russia by 11.4 million; in the first sixteen years of the post-Soviet era, deaths exceeded births by 12.4 million.” To suggest that Russia is somehow unique in its shrinking population seems to me hard to prove. All the European populations have ceased to grow as much as in the past; so what is so different about Russia? Eberhardt paints a rosier picture of European population declines than I have read in the past but then quotes two organizations as they predict Russia’s demographic future: “Both organizations’ projections trace a continuing downward course for the Russian Federation’s population over the generation ahead. As of mid-year 2005, Russia’s estimated population was around 143 million. UNPD projections for the year 2025 range from a high of about 136 million to a low of about 121 million; for the year 2030, they range from 133 million to 115 million. The Census Bureau’s projections for the Russian Federation’s population in 2025 and 2030 are 128 million and 124 million, respectively. “ . . . that would amount to almost as dramatic a demographic drop as the one Russia suffered during World War II. In absolute terms, it would actually be somewhat greater in magnitude.” And what does this mean for Russia’s economy? The democratic sovereigns think it will have no negative effect, but that goes against everything I’ve read about economic growth and Eberhardt writes, “. . . history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline. It seems highly unlikely that such an ambitious agenda can be achieved in the face of Russia’s current demographic crisis. Sooner or later, Russian leadership will have to acknowledge that these daunting long-term developments are shrinking their country’s social and political potential.” Eberhardt goes on to provide more statistics about Russia’s expected economic and population decline and these are similar although much worse than what I’ve read about Western European nations. This is clearly a “doom and gloom” article. But I’ll skip all that to focus on something that especially caught the negative Eberhardt’s attention: “Alcohol abuse”: “. . . Professor Alexander Nemstov, perhaps Russia’s leading specialist in this area, argues that Russia’s adult population—women as well as men—puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week. . . .” “. . . Death rates from . . . alcohol poisoning appear to be at least one hundred times higher in Russia than the United States—this despite the fact that the retail price in Russia today is lower for a liter of vodka than a liter of milk.” COMMENT: I was willing to concede that the US was worse off than China or Russia when it came to licentiousness and abusive self-indulgence. After all, we have Hollywood and Las Vegas. We glorify pop singers and contest winners. Surely we are worse off in terms of morality than China or Russia, but now I read that Russia has a drinking problem. I recall a famous movie of the past: “Lost Weekend” in which Ray Milland played a pathetic alcoholic who hid his bottles all over his house. Russia hides its drinking problem by making its own, samogon, which I suppose is something like the “bathtub gin” we used to make during our Prohibition period. And it doesn’t show up in any of the statistics, at least not directly. One needs to go looking for the signs: “. . . a medical examiner’s office in a city in the Urals, for example, indicated that over 40 percent of the younger male decedents evaluated had probably been alcohol-impaired or severely intoxicated at the time of death—including one quarter of the deaths from heart disease and over half of those from accidents or injuries.”

I was willing to give Michael Kuznetsov the moral high ground. Surely, I thought, Russia can’t be as immoral and dissolute as our present day US – at least the Left-Wing half of it. But now I learn that it can. I take it all back Michael. Russia now seems even worse than the US in terms of abusive self-indulgence. Now I know what all you ants do down there in your ant colony.

Kirill, Dvorkin and Religious Freedom

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/04/window-on-eurasia-kirills-restrictive.html

The article above, written by Paul Goble, is entitled “Kirill’s Restrictive View on Religious Freedom Backed by Russian Justice Ministry.” Michael Kuznetsov’s image of Russia as an ant colony comes to mind once again. For if Russia is like an ant colony, then surely it doesn’t need more than one religion, and, of course, that religion should be the Russian Orthodox. The above article is about the institutionalizing of the views of an American-type Cult-fighter in Russia. As a matter of fact, he learned his Cult fighting while in America. I have known people like him. They are fanatics in their own way – quite sure they can separate true religion from false religion. Here in the US we put up with cults and cult-fighters. It would be better to say that most of us ignore them equally. But over there in Russia they must do something about their cults – Freedom of Religion, yeah, but it has to be a real religion and not a cult.

“Patriarch Kirill’s support for what he calls “the traditional religions of Russia” – Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism – against all others has been institutionalized at the Russian justice ministry with the selection there of a specialist notorious for his hostility toward Roman Catholics, Protestant Evangelicals, and other groups.”

"Yesterday, the justice ministry’s experts council charged with providing guidance on religious questions to Russian courts and other bodies met for the first time in Moscow and in “a unanimous decision” chose Aleksandr Dvorkin, who describes himself as a specialist on “sectology,” as council head (www.minjust.ru/ru/news/events/printable.php?print=1&id4=87 ). . . .

“The inclusion of representatives from these four faiths but from no others is a victory for Kirill, who has been pushing the concept of “traditional religions” of Russia since the late 1990s, but the installation of Dvorkin is even more disturbing given his attacks on other religions and his extremely restrictive view on just what religious organizations should be permitted in Russia.”

COMMENT:

I was a little surprised to see on Dvorkin’s list of “traditional religions” Islam and Buddhism, but maybe that is Kirill’s list and not Dvorkin’s. It is more in keeping with what we know of Dvorkin that he has chosen Roman Silantyev as a deputy. Goble tells us Silantyev lost his position at the Russian-inter-Religious Council for his attack on Islam.

It serves no useful purpose to say that there “ought to be religious freedom.” One cannot just stick an “ought” out there without buttressing it with assumptions. In this case we would need to say, to provide a logical framework for religious freedom, “In a liberal democracy there ought to be religious freedom.”

So we are reminded at once that Russia makes no pretense of being a religious democracy. Russia’s leaders prefer the term “Sovereign democracy” which reminds me a bit of the old debate between Calvinism and Arminianism. Is God Sovereign or is Man? Calvinists would say that God is Sovereign, period. Arminians would say God is sovereign but has given man free will. Perhaps the Russians are a bit like the Arminians. Their leaders have sovereignty, but they have given the Russian people free will – well, not complete free will but a lot of it. The government is finding its way in that regard. How much freedom can it give the people? It wants to give the people a lot of freedom because this is an important aspect of the Liberal Democracies and Russia wants to get along with the Liberal Democracies. But at the same time it wants an orderly society, one that causes no trouble; so it is reasonable (given the Russian assumptions) to expect Dvorkin to give them a hand with that. Maybe he can’t clean out all the troublesome cults, but he can probably make some inroads and get rid of some of them. He is just the man to handle the religious aspects of a Sovereign Democracy.

Racism in modern-day Russia

Is racism a problem in modern day Russia? I doubt that “problem” is a word they would use, but what we here in the U.S. we can’t avoid seeing that what we call Racism does exist there. Consider the following from a Wikipedia article:

“In May 2006, Amnesty International reported that racist killings in Russia were "out of control" and that at least 28 people were killed in 2005. In 2006 Amnesty International registered 252 victims of racist crimes, of which 21 died. In February 2007, President Vladimir Putin asked the Federal Security Service to combat racism, but hate crimes still increased. From January 1 to July 31, 2007, Amnesty International registered 310 victims of neo-Nazi and racist crimes in Russia; 37 of those victims died as a result of attacks. Amnesty International criticize Russian police for not doing enough to combat racist crimes, and for often ignoring reports from civilians about threats and crimes. According to the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, from January to March, 2008, 49 people were killed in assaults by radical nationalists, 28 of them in the greater Moscow area.

“The number of Russian neo-Nazis is estimated at 50,000 to 70,000, "half of the world's total.". The director of the Human Rights Bureau, Alexander Brod, stated that surveys show xenophobia and other racist expressions affect 50 percent of Russians.”

And Paul Goble’s just posted an article about attempts to bridge the gap between ethnic Russians (racists by US definition) and civic Russians. http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/04/window-on-eurasia-russian-citizens-try.html

COMMENT:

In reading about these matters, I recalled that a number of times Michael Kuznetsov referred to himself as 100% White Russian. Such an expression couldn’t be used with impunity here in the United States. One would instantly be classified as a racist. Racism is among the most serious of crimes here in the US, but apparently not in Russia, and that strikes me as especially interesting at the present time because I have just been wading through the horrors of the Red Army’s occupation of Berlin in 1945. Rape was considered an acceptable thing to do – gang rape was especially popular and it didn’t make any difference whether the victim was 12 or 62.

Apparently the Soviets referred to what the Red Army did as a “noble fury.” One of the effects was to trigger “the largest panic migration in history. Between 12 January and mid-February 1945, almost 8.5 million Germans fled their homes in the eastern provinces of the Reich.” [Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, pp. 36-37]

“’They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed,’ said the Komsomol leader in a tank company. He even went on to boast that ‘2 million of our children were born’ in Germany.” [ibid. P. 31]

If this is true; if the mass rape of countless German Women by Red Army soldiers produced 2 million Russian/German babies, then the prospect of another Racist Hitler rising up to speak of the purity of the German “race” would be problematic. But perhaps that is not nearly the same problem for modern day Russians. It is almost as though the Racist Germans have handed off their racist baton to the Racist Russians. For Hitler, the Slavic people were untermensch, but what about now? Are the 100% White Russians the new ubermensch? Are those in Russia who aren’t 100% White Russian untermensch? And how about the rest of the world? Are we all untermensch?

If one were to search my blog, one would find that I have sided with ethnic Europeans against the inroads being made by ethnic Muslims, but what I had in mind was the Oriana Fallaci – Bat Ye’or concern, of Muslins who move into the Netherlands or France but refuse to integrate. They remain in enclaves which as time goes on increase in power and number. Alarmist see the Muslin ethnicity drowning out the European; which I would consider a bad thing.

I compared the difficulties Europeans have in integrating their immigrants with the ease with which that occurs in the US. To integrate immigrants is good, I assume. But if a nation can’t integrate them or if the immigrants won’t integrate, then that is bad – I have argued this in the past, but what I am reading about in Russia now is a different matter. The “Civic Russians” want to integrate – in fact they think they already have – but the “Ethnic Russians” won’t accept them.

I live in Southern California, the melting-pot of the US. We do integration better here than any place else in the US and the US does it better than any place elsewhere in the world; so are we thereby better than other nations? Or are we merely as Hitler described us, a nation of mongrels. The answer would depend on whether one accepts current thinking on genetics and anthropology or prefers obsolete and discredited racial theories.

Of this I am sure: genetically there is very little difference between any of us. Only in the realm of culture are their differences. We here in the US have cultivated a culture which encourages all the cultures coming here, immigrating here, to consider themselves and their beliefs as equal, but at the same time to accept America as a working-melting pot. But in other parts of the world ethnicity is more important. One can’t move to Japan or Saudi Arabia or, apparently, Russia, and expect to fit in. In fact there are probably more places where an immigrant wouldn’t fit in than places where he would.

Which, regrettably, brings me back to the political philosophy of Samuel Huntington who argued that for the foreseeable future, there will be military clashes between “Civilizations” along their “fault lines.” If I declare myself to be 100% White Russian, I may add that I don’t think I am superior to anyone, but it should go without saying that I don’t think anyone is superior to me. Also, how can I walk around with this declaration hanging around my neck without having it nailed down by a chip on each shoulder?

“Can’t we all just get along?” is a line Jack Nicholson used portraying the American President in Mars Attacks. The short answer was an unspoken, “no.”

Katyn: Death in the Forest

I’ve begun Death in the Forest, The Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre by J. K. Zawodny, 1962. This seems to be the “classic” of Katyn scholarship. Zawodny is succinct and meticulous. His scholarship holds up from what I have read about this book.

The search for 15,000 missing Polish Officers began sometime after June 21, 1941 when General Wladyslaw Anders was released from Soviet imprisonment. A deal was struck between the Polish Government and the USSR such that a Polish Army was to be created within Russia to aid in fighting the Germans. General Anders was to lead that army.

Anders began assembling his army sometime after June 21, 1941, as released Polish soldiers showed up to be part of that army. But very few Polish officers arrived – not enough for the army to be effective. He was able to learn a few things about the missing officers. As Polish men were released from prison and showed up, he questioned them about the missing officers. His search was well known and Anders received thousands of letters from the families of the missing officers. “The men from the three camps [where the 15,000 Polish officers had been held] stopped writing home in the middle of April 1940.” This is significant because the Germans didn’t overrun the Katyn part of Poland until July of 1941. And in 1943, the forensic teams examining the Katyn remains determined that April 1940 was the likely time of their death.

Three teams made independent examinations of the remains at Katyn, and though one of the teams was German, its findings didn’t disagree with those of the other two teams, one of which was an “international” team, and the third made up of members of the Polish Red Cross. The Poles by this time, 1943, seem to have hated the Germans worse than the Russians and suspected a German trick, but they couldn’t find one.

Page 20: “Microscopic analysis of the rope [used to tie up the Polish Officers] – made by a German scientist on the spot – showed it to be Soviet-made. The same kind of knots was found on the bodies of several men and women dressed in the remnants of garments of Soviet origin, who also were found in a separate common grave in Katyn Forest. Close examination of these cadavers established that the persons had been killed in the same manner between five and ten years earlier – many years before the Germans had come to this area.”

The bodies of several of the Polish Officers showed that they had been bayoneted, presumably because they wouldn’t hold still so that they could be shot in the head “The wounds and holes in the material were made by four cornered bayonets. It was observed that this type of bayonet was used by the Soviet Army at the time.”

The matter of the bullets is of interest. The bullets used to shoot the Polish officers were manufactured in Germany “by a factory belonging to Gustav Genschow in Durlach. German Ordnance speedily established that this type of ammunition [Geco caliber 7.56 and 6.35] was produced by the Genschow Company and was exported from Germany to Poland, the Baltic states, and the Soviet Union prior to 1939.”

COMMENT:

I am familiar with the Mosin Nagent bolt action rifles used by the USSR in WWII. I got mine out to look at the bayonet. Mine was manufactured in 1951, but the description of the bayonet above matches what I see before me. It resembles a very long strong, reinforced four cornered ice-pick except that the point forms a very narrow flat screw-driver-shape less than ¼ inches wide. At its widest, it is about ½ inch. From base to point is slightly more than 12 inches. This is a very different sort of bayonet than the one on a K98, the German Rifle used in both world wars; which has a blade-shape.

The fact that the Polish Officers quit writing home all at the same time, about the time the forensic teams determined they had been in their graves, seems telling.

The Germans swept through Smolensk, (Katyn is just outside of that city), in July of 1941. If the Katyn massacre was some sort of elaborate trick, why wait until February 1943 to discover the grave? And why use ammo that is of German manufacture? The Germans had captured thousands of Soviet prisoners by this time and would have been swimming in unfired Russian ammo. Why not use that if this was a German hoax?

Today's FSB Very much like the NKVD

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/04/window-on-eurasia-todays-fsb-very-much.html

The above article was posted to his web site on April 2 by Paul Goble and entitled, “Today’s FSB ‘Very Much Like’ Stalin’s Secret Police, Russian Activists Say”

I am trying to understand Russia’s continuing love for Stalin and for Russian authoritarianism. Kuznetsov’s image of “ants” was helpful. Ants are happy because everything is under control. Not under their control, to be sure, but under the control of their authoritarian Ant Queen. There are worker ants, soldier ants, and everyone is happy doing the job he has to do. Well, not quite everyone as I read in this article. Lyudmila Alekseyeva doesn’t seem very happy.

Alekseyeva is the “dean of human rights activists” in Russia. She says that “the Russian FSB resembles Stalin’s secret police in that it is “absolutely outside the law” and its officers “do what they want” without even the fear of legal persecution that the late Soviet dictator sometimes visited upon his officers. . . “

A “roundtable” was held on the subject of whether “The FSB in Contemporary Russia is Special Services or a Punitive Organ.” The head of the Moscow Helsinki Group acknowledged that . . .“there is now no Stalinist mass terror,” but . . . the ability of the FSB to ignore the law opens the way to new horrors (www.grani.ru/Politics/Russia/FSB/m.149432.html ). . .”

Alekseyeva says the “situation under Vladimir Putin is far more frightening in some respects than it was under Leonid Brezhnev. ‘In Brezhnev’s times,’ . . she was called to the Lubyanka “more than 30 times, where she was subject to many kinds of intimidation but never physical violence. At that time, she said, “there was an order from above: one could scare people, but one must not apply physical force. But now this law does not operate, and thus the FSB has gained access to all available criminal methods,” as can be seen in the recent series of attacks on opponents of the regime.”

“. . . Mikhail Kasyanov, the leader of the Russian Popular Democratic Union, said that . . . the FSB today . . . has access not only to political power but also to financial flows, which is no less terrible,” and its officers “really think that they are the real saviors of Russia,” having on the basis of their action “rescued” the country after it had gone through the turmoil of the 1990s. The willingness and ability of the FSB and its representatives in the political establishment to ignore the law in pursuit and defense of power was not so obvious when times were good, Kasyanov said, but now that the country is in economic difficulties, this tendency “has become more than obvious” and the actions of the organs ever more violent. . . .”

“If violent actions not surprisingly attract the most attention, they are far from the only way in which Russia’s security services are restoring noxious aspects of the Stalinist past. Life.ru this week, for example, reports on the return of the system under which ordinary citizens either volunteer or are compelled to serve as confidential informants of the regime. . . .”

COMMENT:

Well, I must admit I am impressed. Kuznetsov’s analogy of the ant is being born out. Russia really needs an organization like the NKVD to keep everything running smoothly. The Russian ant colony tried to get by without it for awhile, but things were becoming much too disorganized, much too like a nation of Lady bugs, so back comes the NKVD with the name changed to the FSB – a kinder gentler NKVD to be sure what with all the cell phones that can take pictures and the internet that can post them, but still having the power to keep all those ants, some of whom seem to have a desire to be lady bugs, under control.