by Tim Judah
When Vladimir Putin, Russia’s triumphant president, spoke on March 18, 2014, to his parliament, the Duma, and other Russian leaders and announced the annexation of Crimea following its referendum, which took place with no free debate and was rammed through under the watchful eyes of armed men and Russian soldiers, he repeated the line that maybe even he believes, but certainly many Russians and those in rebel-held territory believe. There had been a coup d’état in Kiev against the lawfully elected government of President Yanukovych executed by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites.” Some of these there were, just as there are plenty of the same on the Russian and rebel side, but to tar the whole revolution in this way made sense only to people who actually wanted to believe it. For supporters from Western countries and other foreign admirers of Putin and the rebels, it also provided what seemed like a noble “anti-fascist” cause to belong to, rather than subscribing to an invented and racist interpretation of events in which all Ukrainians were fascists and the Russians or the rebels were heroic liberators. “We can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of [Stepan] Bandera,” said Putin, “Hitler’s accomplice during the Second World War.”
In Kiev I talked with Professor Grigory Perpelytsia, a former Soviet naval man, who now teaches at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy. We walked down the hill from the academy and ducked into a dark restaurant serving hearty old-fashioned Ukrainian cuisine, meaning mostly large portions of meat. Putin, he said, wanted Russian troops to be welcomed with “flowers and songs”—as they were by many in Crimea, though anyone who did not feel this way was hardly likely to be on the streets. In order to achieve this, he said, Putin had launched an info-war against “Ukrainian fascists” and Banderovtsi. Many were receptive to this kind of message, he explained, especially older people in Russia and to a certain extent in Ukraine, because many still retained a Soviet mentality, “want to go back to the USSR” and perceived Russia to be its inheritor. To burnish this image Russia exploited the victory of the Second World War and the symbols of the USSR, which disoriented people and confused them. In Ukraine, all this served to consolidate divisions which already existed. One of the great failings of the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all. The modern Ukrainian state has no common soundtrack of history, which for Britain for example includes Churchill telling Britons they would fight on the beaches and in the hills, or de Gaulle telling the French that they had lost a battle but not the war. Reality might have been more complex, but nevertheless there are no serious challenges to these modern narratives—even in France, where there was plenty of collaboration. In Ukraine’s case, however, the story is different and, as the conflict has shown, two baleful figures loom over it, those of Bandera and Stalin. Understanding this is essential to understanding Ukraine today.
In April 2014, as the war began, Ekaterina Mihaylova, aged thirty-five, ran the press office of the newly proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. She told me that she used to be a journalist. Her office was in the regional administration building in Donetsk, which had been seized by a motley collection of protesters and activists and surrounded by Maidan-style walls of old tires. There were posters of the European Union flag crossed out in red and reproduction Second World War Soviet posters urging people to watch what they said in case of spies. One picture showed an angry Putin spanking a naughty child Obama who was laid across his lap. A large misspelled sign in English pasted to a low wall decorated with mining helmets said: “NO FASHISM.” Someone had photocopied a photo of Red Army troops being welcomed into Donetsk in 1943, stuck it on the wall and written “Liberation of Donetsk” on the A4 sheet of paper. Why was there so much Soviet iconography?
Putin spanks Obama. Picture taped to the wall of the rebel-held regional administration building in Donetsk. April 2014.
As we talked Mihaylova echoed Putin’s famous speech to the Duma in April 2005 saying that the collapse of the USSR was a geopolitical catastrophe. “It is not just Putin who thinks that,” she said, “and many people believe that one of the results of that was an artificial border between Ukraine and Russia.” Both points are debatable. Many borders are artificial and that is exactly why the post-Soviet republics decided not to challenge them. If one border could be legally and militarily contested, and not just relatively minor ones as in the Caucasus, then all could be challenged. Now that they have been—in Crimea formally, and in the east of Ukraine quite possibly, depending on the outcome of the war and whether Russia finally decides to annex these areas too—this is a threat across the post-Soviet space, including of course Russia. It is noteworthy that in his April 2005 speech Putin underlined that one of the most disastrous consequences of the collapse of the USSR was that “for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.” And it is precisely this that Putin has begun to correct.
Russians outside Russia, however, was not the topic of the moment. Mihaylova was warming to another theme. Ukrainians should be grateful to Stalin, she declared, because he had fashioned the Ukrainian Soviet republic out of diverse bits of territory and this was now the state they had. Historically this region, known as the Donbass, had belonged to Russia, but Lenin had given it to Soviet Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and civil war when the region, or rather communists here, had declared this to be the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. It was a short-lived affair, extinguished as the Red Army defeated its enemies, including the also short-lived German-supported Ukrainian state, which the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic had resisted. Now, she said, it was a ridiculous irony that Ukrainians were destroying statues of Lenin when they should be grateful to him.
Although in 2015 the DNR declared itself to be the legal successor of the 1918 republic, few people there actually knew much about it, as it was a taboo topic in Soviet times. This was of course because it had fought against incorporation into Ukraine. Today’s black, blue and red DNR flag is based on its flag of 1918, though then it was soon dropped for a red banner. What is more revealing for us though are Mihaylova’s views on Stalin which, shocking though they may be to us in the West, are widespread in Russia and among many Russians. I was baffled, I said, that she could expect Ukrainians to be grateful to Stalin, when he was responsible for the famine of 1932–33 in which some 3.3 million are estimated to have died. (The figure is that of Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian of the region and the period, but many put it far higher.) “The legend of the Holodomor,” she said, using the name given to it by Ukrainians and which means “hunger-extermination,” was created in Canada by fascist Ukrainian exiles. Yes, some had died, but to argue that Stalin had deployed it as a weapon against Ukrainians was a “fairy tale.” Russians had died too. There is a legitimate debate about this issue and to what extent Stalin used the famine to eliminate and break the will of the Ukrainian peasantry—because they were Ukrainian—but the tone of the conversation suggested something else. Stalin was a great man and the death of millions was a minor detail which should not sully the big picture. So, when it came to the Gulag, to which millions of Ukrainians were sent, not to mention Russians and other Soviet citizens of course, she argued that “that story is like Snow White, or…” and at this point Ludmila, who was translating for me, stumbled, looking something up on her iPhone translator. “Thumbelina? Do you know what that is?” Yes, said Mihaylova, there was an organization and there were prisons, but it was nothing more serious than this. Stalin took this country, one in which people used “wooden plows and left it with nuclear weapons and he was no more evil or tough than Roosevelt or Churchill at the time.” Stalin has a “bad image in the West” but he was “good for us.”
Listening in was Viktor Priss, a twenty-eight-year-old IT systems administrator, who worked in the office. In a previous job he had worked for the co
nfectionary company of Petro Poroshenko, the man who would a few weeks later be elected as Ukraine’s next president. Viktor is the type of man much in demand by Western IT companies, either to work for them in Ukraine or abroad. He was only a small child when the USSR expired. He did not think that the Gulag was a fairy tale. Stalin’s problem was that “it was very difficult to hold the country together with such an ideology and some people disagreed, so it was necessary to re-educate them.” Stalin was a product of his time and “time creates its leaders.” In that sense, he argued, he had been a product of the will of the people to create a dictator. The Soviets created a signal that “we were in danger,” and as a result had sent a message, which was interpreted by the people as meaning “we are ready to help you” and hence Stalin “was a dictator by the will of the people.” Viktor was not sure if the same applied to Hitler given that he was after all elected, unlike Stalin. As for Putin, while there were no social conditions for him to become a new Stalin, he could certainly become the type of leader ready to respond to the will of the people. And presumably, for those who think like Viktor, that is what he is already doing.
For a foreigner it is hard to fathom such logic and quasi-mystical thinking about leaders and especially Stalin, responsible for so many millions of dead. But, in this context, what is important to understand is that, if people think that Stalin made the world tremble and that everything has gone to hell in a handcart since the end of the Soviet Union, then, with such a black-and-white view of history, for them restoring him to greatness makes sense. If this is what you believe, then Stalin cynically doing business with the devil, or in this case Hitler, by drawing a line from the Baltic to the Black Sea and destroying other countries, as was done in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, is fine. And what does Putin think of this? In 2009 he said that the pact had been “immoral,” but in 2014 he revised his opinion and claimed it had been to avoid fighting, and what was wrong with that?
When, to the shock of the world, Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up eastern Europe, Stalin sparked off the Second World War. In the period from 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union was allied to Nazi Germany and supplied it with the raw materials it used to make war on the Western allies. After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union everything changed of course, but officially the Soviet account could only say that the war had begun in 1941. Understanding this is central to understanding Ukraine today. The story of the great sacrifices of the Soviet people in the Second World War and the struggle against Nazism has been detached from the years 1939 to 1941, which saw the conquest and annexation of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and eastern Poland; from Romania, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were annexed. When the Red Army met the Nazis in Poland, there were cordial meetings of military commanders and soldiers and an agreement to crush any Polish resistance. The NKVD, who were interior ministry security men and troops, and part of which was the progenitor of the KGB—now the FSB in Russia and the SBU in Ukraine—went into action. Tens of thousands were deported from the conquered Baltic states, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and hundreds of thousands of Poles were sent to the Gulag. Thousands of Polish officers were murdered, most infamously in the Katyn Massacre of 1940.
Today, what you think of this past, how you relate to it, determines what you think about the future of Ukraine. And what you think of the past is quite likely to be bound up with the history of your own family and where you live. This is true for the Donbass, a mining region, just as it is for anywhere else. People came from all over the Soviet Union to work and settle in this flat land pockmarked by pyramids and hills of slag and scruffy little mining and industrial towns. Donetsk was a working-class mining town. For many of its inhabitants then, Ukraine, which had been part of imperial Russia, was not a land where they had roots. With the demise of the Soviet Union it was harder for many of these people, almost all of whom spoke Russian as their first language, to identify with or to love Ukraine as their own country. It was just where they ended up when Soviet republics’ borders became international frontiers.
When I left the regional administration building I got a taxi and asked the driver if he would like Donetsk to remain in Ukraine or become part of Russia as Crimea had done. He said: “I don’t care. I just want to get paid.”
In post-Soviet Ukraine, working-class professions were not valued as they had been, at least nominally, before. All Ukraine (and Russia) fell to predators and sharp operators who knew how to make money, to steal and to get rich. But, while many in the east remained wedded to their Soviet heritage and hence its interpretation of history, the west of Ukraine did not. And the twain have not met. History did not start the war. It is just that history has been used to shape the present by politicians.
Every time there has been an election you can see the regional divides on maps, with the east and south voting heavily for more pro-Russian parties and the west and center for more pro-European ones. If you drew a map of memorials you would find something similar. In much of the west and center of Ukraine, though by no means everywhere, statues of Lenin, especially prominent ones, have gone. During the Maidan revolution, and even afterward, many remaining ones were toppled because they were regarded not merely as memorials to the man and to communism, but as symbols held dear by those who see Russia as their lodestar and not just the past but the country’s future too. In the west, and in particular in Galicia—the largest former Austro-Hungarian part of Ukraine, annexed by the USSR in 1939 and retaken again in 1944—Soviet memorials decay while more and more are built to honor the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, of Stepan Bandera. Travel in the Carpathian region though, which was the tip of Czechoslovakia until amputated in 1939, and they vanish, because, as Vasyl Khoma, who runs a hotel in Rakhiv on the Romanian border and who had been its deputy mayor, told me sternly, “Our history is different!”
And so it is—sometimes even happily so. In this part of the country one of the most popular attractions and tourist draws is at the nearby village of Dilove. If someone had invented its story, few would have believed it. It is a monument erected in 1887 by the Austro-Hungarian Military Geographical Institute, which the locals claim marks their discovery of the center of Europe. They believe this thanks to an incorrect Soviet-era translation of the original Latin inscription that in fact makes no such claim. But at least the site, which attracts visitors on the basis of actually being the center of Europe and gives work to people in the café and those selling souvenirs and trinkets, is perhaps the most harmless of misconceptions commemorated in stone in Ukraine.
Far away, in Ukraine’s east, tourists once came to the monument of Savur-Mogila, an hour and a half’s drive from Donetsk. This was also the site of an annual pilgrimage to commemorate the crucial battle fought here in 1943 in which thousands of Red Army soldiers died. Now the ruins of this vast Soviet memorial are a tragic sight. The place was fought over then because it was virtually the only hill in otherwise flat eastern Ukraine. In 2014 it was even more important than before. Now it is ten kilometers, as the crow flies, from the Russian border, so whoever controls the hill controls the corridor to the border and the road along it.
At the bottom of a ceremonial-style walkway and steps to the top are Second World War tanks, artillery pieces and trucks. Now in the hands of DNR forces, one of the tanks has “To Kiev” painted on it. Among the surrounding burned pines are the remains of a destroyed Ukrainian armored vehicle. On either side of the walkway are the heavily shrapnel-pockmarked giant steel sculptured heads of tank drivers, soldiers and classic Soviet tableaux of fighting men. Before this war the main part of the monument was a huge 36-meter-high obelisk, which dominated the surrounding landscape. By the time DNR forces finally captured the monument on August 26, the obelisk had collapsed. Now, ragged Soviet-era flags fly there as a group of DNR soldiers camp by the giant stump and a remaining steel boot, all that’s left of a once huge triumphal statue. It is boring being stuck here so the soldiers play target practice and know how to laugh. Journalists are not su
pposed to take pictures showing their faces, so one obliges. Surrounded by the rubble he dons a Shrek mask.
Rebel in a Shrek mask at the stump of the Savur-Mogila monument. September 2014.
Between Soviet triumphalism and a giant Stepan Bandera statue in Lviv, however, perhaps the most interesting and even poignant place to consider how Ukraine remembers is in Kiev itself, which after all is halfway between Savur-Mogila and Lviv. During the Second World War Kiev, now a big city of 2.8 million inhabitants, was so badly destroyed that much of it is Soviet, and now increasingly post-Soviet. But churches destroyed under communism have been rebuilt or restored, including the Pecherska Lavra monastery complex, founded in 1051. From its walls you can look down on the mighty Dnieper River below that flows through the city. You can also see the 102-meter-high Soviet Motherland memorial of a woman, sword drawn. Nearby is a memorial complex with walls of giant bronze soldiers and workers on which children climb and play. Next to that is the military museum and captured rebel tanks and vehicles identifying them as having been supplied by Russia. On the other side of the monastery stands an obelisk and eternal flame commemorating the wartime defense of the city. It is a tradition, observed to this day, for couples about to wed to come and lay flowers here. Right next to that is a monument designed to look like a candle, sitting atop the city’s Holodomor memorial, commemorating the dead not just of the 1932–33 famine but of the far less well known ones of 1921–22 and 1946–47.