Eight
years ago, on Nov. 28, 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament officially
designated the famine of 1931-33, which killed 5 to 7 million Soviets
during Stalin’s rule, a genocide. On Saturday, Ukraine’s
president, Petro O. Poroshenko, accompanied by other officials and by
his wife, laid a jar of seeds of grain near the Dnieper River in Kiev to
mark the anniversary.
Stalin’s
rule is rightly associated with two of the most horrific episodes in
Ukraine’s history: the famine and the 1937-38 mass executions of
Ukrainian intellectuals and political figures, both of which took place
across the Soviet Union. Both tragedies have been invoked regularly in
the months since Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, seized Crimea and sent forces into eastern Ukraine.
But
there is an underappreciated aspect to this tangled history: Stalin’s
rule saw the formation of a land with strong Ukrainian national
consciousness. Yes, he was a murderous tyrant, but he was also a father
of today’s Ukraine.
Ukraine
emerged out of czarist Russia as a separate country as a result of
World War I, the revolutions of 1917, German military occupation and the
efforts of Ukrainian nationalists. Against the wishes of other early
Soviet officials, who wanted to suppress nationalism, Stalin strongly
advocated recognizing — and using — it. “Clearly, the Ukrainian nation
exists and the development of its culture is a duty of Communists,”
Stalin told the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. “One cannot go
against history.”
Stalin
knew from his Georgian homeland that national sentiment was too strong
to suppress. He also knew that the Communists could use it to win
loyalty and achieve economic modernization.
Ukraine
had remained effectively independent even after being reconquered by
the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921 and rechristened
the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. Through late 1921, Soviet
Ukraine signed a plethora of state-to-state treaties — with newly
independent Poland, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia — and maintained
diplomatic missions abroad. Ukraine had a diplomatic office in Moscow,
too. At the 10th Party Congress, Stalin argued for an integrated Soviet
state. But the form of that integrated state would carry fateful
consequences.
In
1922, Stalin proposed folding Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Caucasus
into Soviet Russia (formally known as the Russian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic) while allowing them to retain substantial autonomy, a
proposal that initially elicited Lenin’s support. But Lenin soon
changed his mind, and demanded a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in
which Ukraine and Russia would hold ostensibly equal status.
Lenin’s
counterproposal was based not on a commitment to self-rule but, like
Stalin, on tactics. He argued that as other countries underwent
socialist revolutions — a Soviet Germany, a Soviet Hungary, a Soviet
Finland — they, too, could join the new Soviet Union. Stalin was not so
naïve. “These peoples would scarcely agree to enter straight into a
federative bond with Soviet Russia” on the Ukrainian model, he told
Lenin. Lenin scorned Stalin’s realism, insisting that “we need a
centralized world economy, run from a single organ.”
Stalin
bowed to Lenin’s authority, and loyally and skillfully implemented the
Bolshevik leader’s vision to form the Soviet Union in late 1922. Lenin’s
vision amounted to an overconfident bet on world revolution. Stalin
also believed in world revolution, but his proposal — annexation into
Russia — would have been a hedge on that bet.
In
1991, of course, the Soviet Union dissolved. Ukraine, having avoided
absorption into Russia thanks to Lenin, became independent. But the new
nation encompassed as much land as it did thanks to Stalin.
When
it was first formed, Soviet Ukraine had no natural border in the east
with Soviet Russia. The demarcation disappointed all sides — and it is
the site of today’s separatist rebellion. In the west, as a result of
his 1939 pact with Hitler, Stalin seized eastern Poland and joined it to
Ukraine. The city today known as Lviv was then a largely Polish- and
Yiddish-speaking community, surrounded by a Ukrainian-speaking
countryside; under Stalin and his successors the city would become
predominantly Ukrainian-speaking — and the center of western Ukrainian
nationalism.
With
the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Stalin annexed Transcarpathia,
formerly part of Czechoslovakia, and now the southwest corner of
Ukraine. Finally, Crimea, at the time a predominantly ethnic Russian
territory, was transferred to Ukraine from Russia in a decision taken
under Stalin but implemented only after he had died, in 1954, on the
300th anniversary of the Cossack request for imperial Russia’s
protection against the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.
Except
for Crimea, today’s nationalist Ukraine is a bequeathal of Stalin. It’s
true that he executed countless officials of Ukrainian (and every
other) ethnicity. But as the Soviet state expanded, he promoted still
more Ukrainians to take their places. Even when he belatedly made study
of Russian language a requirement in all Soviet schools, he did not
discontinue instruction in national vernacular languages.
Of
course, in helping to enlarge and consolidate Soviet Ukraine, Stalin
never imagined that the Soviet Union would someday disappear. And so Mr.
Putin faces a formidable obstacle.
He
is said by diplomats to have told President George W. Bush, at a NATO
summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in 2008 that “Ukraine is not even a
state.” And in claiming territory from Ukraine, Mr. Putin has cited
Catherine the Great’s Black Sea conquests and creation of “New Russia”
in the late 18th century. But Mr. Putin cannot escape more recent
history.
Russia’s
annexation of Crimea has rendered Ukraine even more ethnically
Ukrainian, and helped elect Ukraine’s first ever pro-European
parliamentary majority. One does not have to take sides over the human
tragedy unfolding in eastern Ukraine to grasp that, whether Mr. Putin
does or does not have clear strategic goals, he cannot wipe out the
fruits of the Soviet period.
Mr.
Putin cannot simply swallow Ukraine — it is no longer “New Russia.” And
unlike Stalin — indeed, because of Stalin, and because of his regime’s
own behavior — Mr. Putin cannot entice Ukraine back into a new
“Eurasian” union with Russia either. Ukrainians have little affection
for Stalin’s dictatorship, but their struggle for statehood owes much to
his legacy — a legacy that, for different reasons, neither they nor Mr.
Putin like to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment