Paul Goble
Staunton,
October 6 – Russian officials and pro-Kremlin commentators have reacted angrily
to the decision of the US Senate to pass a resolution stating that the 1932-33 terror
famine in Ukraine was “a planned action of Stalin’s totalitarian regime which
was directed against the Ukrainian people and was a genocide.”
In
general, these attacks on the American action have been based exclusively on
the notion that “neither Stalin nor the communist party had any plans for the
destruction of Ukrainians. And no one intentionally destroyed anyone: there was
a famine and it affected not only the population of Ukrainian oblasts but
territories populated by Russians and others” (forum-msk.org/material/news/15062846.html).
But in making that argument, which
Ukrainian researchers and scholars from Robert Conquest to Anne Applebaum have
shown to be specious, some Russian writers, like Anatoly Baranov as quoted
above, advance an additional one that deserves to be mentioned because it is
even more damning of the Soviet system.
Baranov entitles his diatribe
against the US Senate’s action, “They’re accusing us of committing genocide
against ourselves,” a view that narrowly suggests that for him Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same but more broadly indicates the approach of the Soviet government toward the entire Soviet population.
That too may seem
superficially plausible to some. It is difficult if not impossible for many to imagine
that the leadership of any country could engage in genocide against its own
people.
Tragically, however, that is exactly
what the Soviet leadership did, either because it did not view the peoples of
the USSR as its own people but rather only a base for the launch of a world
revolution or because it did not view members of particular classes as its own
people or because it did not view members of many nations, including Russians,
as its own people either.
It is a welcome development that the
US Senate by its resolution has provoked the reflections, albeit negative,
among some Russian supporters of the Soviet system – and Baranov is one of them
– because it highlights something most people in Russia and the West are
unwilling to admit.
And that is this: The Soviet
government was not a government of the people however much support it may have been
able to claim as a result of compulsion and propaganda but rather an occupying
force that behaved toward those under its power not as “its people” but rather
in the way occupiers have all too often behaved toward the occupied.
Even more unfortunately, that is an
attitude that continues to inform the thinking of many in the Putin regime who
are more concerned with exploiting the peoples still under its control for the
benefit of those in power rather than with reflecting the interests of this
population and promoting its interests.
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