Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 30 -- Following
the Crimean Anschluss, Russians have stopped focusing their anger on Nikita
Khrushchev, who transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine, as a primary source
of their problems with Ukrainians and shifted attention to the role Vladimir Lenin
and Joseph Stalin played in creating the current tensions between the two
nations.
Some Russians, largely out of
ignorance, Ilya Lazarenko writes in a commentary on Rufabula.com, believe that “Lenin
created Ukraine, added Kharkiv to it, and so on.” But such views arise from the “one
grandmother said to another” school of historical interpretation and need to be
fought (rufabula.com/author/ilya-lazarenko/116).
The facts, the Ukrainian commentator
continues, are these, “the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) appeared
as a result of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic (UNR),” had borders which “corresponded
with the borders” of that earlier state, and was demarcated according to regins
which were “predominantly” Ukrainian in population.
But those historical realities were
overwhelmed in the minds of many Russians by government propaganda beginning a
year or so ago which claimed, among other falsehoods, that “Lenin was the creator
of Ukraine,” a claim that not only denigrated the Ukrainians as a nation but implied
that Lenin had made a mistake and that Moscow must “correct” it.
The events of 1917 and the years
following are complicated but not that difficult to understand, Lazarenko says.
Two days after Nicholas II abdicated, the Ukrainian Central Rada was set up in
Kyiv as a coordinating council for the Ukrainian national movement which at
that time was pressing for the autonomy of Ukraine within a Russian federal
state.
Even when the Bolsheviks ceased power in
November 1917, Kyiv did not immediately declare independence because it was
placing its faith in the Constituent Assembly. But even before the Bolsheviks
suppressed that body, they issued an ultimatum to Kyiv to subordinate itself to
their regime, something the Ukrainians rejected.
Even then, however, Kyiv did not declare
its independence, but its refusal to recognize the Bolshevik regime led a group
of Bolshevik deputies of the All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets to go to Kharkiv
where they proclaimed what was in effect a marionette state, the Ukrainian
Peoples Republic of Soviets.
When
Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly, Lazarenko continues, “the legitimacy
of statehood on the territory of the former Russian Empire completely broke
down.” And as a result, the Ukrainian Peoples Republic declared its
independence. Although later destroyed
by the forces of the Bolshevik regime, it continued to exist de jure in the emigration until 1992.
That summary should make it clear, he
says, that “the USSR was not established by the Bolsheviks from nothing” as
some Russians think, “but was the result of the recognition of the right of
Ukrainians to self-determination under the pressure of objective circumstances
-- a strong Ukrainian national movement and a Ukrainian statehood recognized
even before the Bolsheviks.”
More intriguing are Russian commentaries
about Stalin’s role in creating the current situation in Ukraine as a result of
his decision to annex Western Ukraine, something that became possible as a
result of his alliance with Hitler and invasion of Poland but that, as many
Western specialists have pointed out, has had serious consequences for Ukraine
and Moscow ever since.
In an article on the Russian nationalist
site Stoletie.ru, Mikhail Slobodskoy argues that by annexing Western Ukraine,
the Soviet leadership allowed into the USSR “a Trojan horse” that ultimately
played a key role in the destruction of the USSR and the radicalization of
Ukrainian nationalism (stoletie.ru/territoriya_istorii/zapadenskij_trojanskij_kon_628.htm).
“The events in 1939 developed so
rapidly,” he says, “that the Soviet leadership apparently then simply was not
able or not able correctly to calculate all the negative consequecnes connected
with the unification of Western Ukraine to the USSR,” given that the different
historical experiences of Ukrainians there who were now to be tied to Soviet
Ukraine.
It is very likely, Slobodskoy says,
that “the leadership of the USSR” – his euphemism for Stalin – “simply did not
have any other geopolitical possibility” and may have been driven by a desire
for “the triumph of historical justice” by the inclusion of lands that in most
cases had been part of the Russian Empire.
“But by including Western Ukraine within
the country, the leadership of the USSR by its own hands allowed in a unique ‘Trojan
horse,’ which was absolutely alien socially and historically on what was then
the common territory” of the Ukrainian SSR and of the USSR as a whole.
Moscow first encountered this
reality when following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, people from
Western Ukraine were among the first to join the German forces to fight the
Soviet ones. But even after the war and until at least 1953, Western Ukrainians
continued their armed resistance to Soviet power.
But the destructive influence of the
Western Ukrainians re-emerged with the beginning of perestroika, Slobodskoy
continues, during the discussion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, something
which “literally” became a Pandora’s box for the USSR. “The unification of Galicia to the USSR on the
whole played a negative role in the fate of the entire former Ukrainian SSR
and, as we see, Russia” as well, he says.
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