by Noel Hynd
“Oh, I disagree,” he answered. “You speak Russian. Odessa is an almost one-hundred percent Russian-speaking city. It was part of Russia until given to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Khrushchev in the early fifties as a PR move,” Cerny said.
“Touche,” she said. “I warned you I didn’t know the area.”
Cerny enjoyed scoring the point. Then he got back to business.
“Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t think a three-week crash course in Ukrainian language and culture would do much good,” he said. “But you’re not the normal student and you’re not being primed for a normal task. How much do you know about the relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian languages?” he asked.
“I know they have a similar grammar, a common root, and a similar vocabulary, while sounding quite different,” she said. “I traveled in eastern Hungary and Poland the summer I was in Russia. I heard some Ukrainian near the borders. I could understand a little. They’re similar, much like French and Spanish are similar.”
“Good start,” he said. “Assume that Ukrainian assumes the role of Spanish in your analogy and Russian is in the role of French. The river that runs through Kiev is known in Russian as the Dnieper. The dn-YEH-per. In Ukrainian it’s the Dnipro, the dnee-PRO. When I was there Kiev was almost entirely a Russian-speaking city. I suspect that it remains so despite efforts by the new government to promote Ukrainian.”
“When were you there?” she asked.
“From 1996 to 2005,” he said. “Due to Soviet dominance, every Ukrainian, at least in Kiev and the eastern Ukraine, is usually able to speak Russian fluently even if he regards Ukrainian as his native language. I would have meetings at the foreign ministry and speak in Ukrainian, and then on the way out, my interlocutor would turn to his secretary and speak in Russian. Typical.”
Alex nodded.
Cerny continued. “How much do you know about the great famine of the 1930s in Ukraine-the so-called ‘fake famine’?”
“Again, I’m not an expert,” she said, “but I’ve read my history.”
In truth, she knew quite a bit. The 1930s were the bleakest years in Ukraine’s modern history. The famine of 1932 and 1933 killed up to ten million people. Largely unknown beyond Europe, the famine was still called the ‘fake famine’ by older Ukrainians. Fake, because it was manufactured in Moscow and didn’t have to happen.
The Ukraine had normally been a fertile agricultural region. But the harvests of those years were confiscated by the Soviet Red Army under orders from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Under the new policy of Soviet agricultural collectivization in the 1930s, all grain from collective farms in Ukraine was shipped back to Russia, leaving millions of Ukrainians to starve to death. It was part of a brutal campaign by Stalin to force Ukrainian peasants to join collective farms while local farmers resisted all such collectivization. It was an era when almost all food disappeared from the rural areas of Ukraine. Children disappeared as cannibalism became widespread. About a quarter of Ukraine’s population was wiped out.
The Ukrainian famine, or Holodomor, was one of the largest national catastrophes of the Ukrainian nation in modern history. While the famine in Ukraine was a part of a wider famine that also affected other regions of the USSR, the name Holodomor was specifically applied to the events that took place in territories populated by ethnic Ukrainians. It was sometimes referred to as the Ukrainian Genocide, implying that the famine was engineered by the Soviets, specifically targeting the Ukrainian people to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a political factor and social entity. Some modern-day revisionists and apologists suggest that natural causes such as weather, inadequate harvest, and insufficient traction power were also among the reasons that contributed to the origins of famine and its severity. Yet the truth was that Moscow initiated a policy of death by forced starvation, all for the greater glory of the godless Soviet Communism.
To Alex it was just one more example of the suffering and atrocities of that part of the world. The Nazis had killed nearly one and a half million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly thirty-four thousand Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history had gone untold. Alex shuddered. So much of the twentieth century had been a testament to man’s inhumanity to man, a complete loss of any moral compass.
Thinking about all of this today in a room with Michael Cerny, Alex felt her indignation rising, three quarters of a century later. Anyone could say or think whatever they wanted about Christians, but true Christians sent missionaries all over the world to help feed people, not starve or murder them.
“ Holodomor in Ukrainian means ‘death by hunger,’ ” said Cerny, bringing it back to the 1930s. “In central Kiev there is a monument to those who perished in the Holodomor. The president of the United States is going to lay a wreath at the base of that monument.”
“In my humble opinion, long overdue,” Alex said.
“It’s also a controversial gesture. The Russians still deny that the fake famine was official policy. Never mind the fact that there are documents in Moscow above Stalin’s signature ordering the Red Army to shoot anyone caught hiding food.”
It was hard to comprehend. The Soviet policy of that era was as mind numbing and satanic as the extermination camps of Nazi Germany or the attacks on the civilians at the World Trade Center on September
11.
Cerny leaned down to a briefcase beside him. “I’m glad you seem to be a sympathetic soul,” he said. “I’m going to give you some reading. For right here, right now,” he said. “The first thing you need to know is the current political situation vis-a-vis Ukraine and Russia. Under Vladimir Putin, who’s basically a gangster, Russia is under its worst dictator since Stalin.”
“You think he’s that bad? Worse than Khrushchev?”
“ ‘Vlad the Impaler Lite,’ we call him. Look, you be the judge,” Cerny said. “Putin has allowed Gazprom, the state gas company, to raise its own army. He had the editor of Izvestia fired for publishing accurate accounts of the Beslan school hostage crisis. And now he’s founded these ideological youth groups called Nashi to do the pro-Putin brainwashing of the first generation to come of age in post-Soviet Russia. They look like all those sick little Aryans in the Hitler Youth of the 1930s. On top of that, he’s out of official power as president, but still runs the country. You decide.”
“You make a solid case,” Alex said.
“But how does that affect us? Today. With the president going to Ukraine?” Cerny asked. “The Russians have never accepted the idea of an independent Ukraine. But Ukraine is about to join NATO. There are groups of fanatically pro-Russian, pro-Putin young Ukrainians who are opposed to this. They’ve vowed to cause trouble, probably when our president visits the monument to the victims of the famine. The president is visiting to maintain a visibility in support of the pro-Western elements, not the least of which are the members of the many Christian churches in Ukraine.”
Alex was always smart enough to listen to an expert on anything.
“Why would ethnic Ukrainians support the Russians?” she asked.
“While there are Ukrainians who are strongly committed to Ukrainian independence from Russian influence, there are others who actually regarded Ukraine’s past as one of partnership with Russia in what was a superpower,” he answered.
“Despite the famine?”
“Despite the famine,” Cerny said. “The Russians hoped to eventually turn the Ukrainians into Russians, something not all that difficult given the relative similarity of the languages and cultures, including the common Orthodox faith prior to the Russian Revolution. The Russians ruthlessly repressed any stirrings of Ukrainian nationalism but offered ‘little brother’ status in return. An ambitious young Ukrainian who bought into the concept could wind up in the Politburo in Moscow. Ukraine’s first president, Leonid Kuchma, was actually the boss of the factory that made the ICBM’s that were the Soviet
Union’s nuclear deterrent.”
“But there is Ukrainian nationalism? Right?” Alex asked.
“Absolutely. It is centered in western Ukraine, where the Austro-Hungarian Empire let Ukrainians be Ukrainians as long as they were loyal to the emperor in Vienna. But the tension between Ukrainian nationalists and ‘Russophiles’ is a basic fault line that runs through the country. And it has implications for the US. The Ukrainian nationalists want a Western-oriented Ukraine, one that joins the European Union and NATO. The Russophiles don’t necessarily want to reestablish the Soviet Union, but they want a close ‘special relationship’ with Russia.”
Cerny had organized some hard-copy reading for her. He had a briefing booklet, a blue-jacketed document of several dozen pages folded into something with a blue cover that looked like an old-fashioned examination book. He placed it on the table. Then he gave her another half dozen books.
She knew the drill. It was a day of background preparation.
“Choose a comfortable place to read,” he said, motioning to the sofa and the chairs. He glanced at his watch. “Take the rest of the day with this stuff. Let’s meet back here at 4:30 this afternoon, and we’ll speak further. How’s that?”
“That would work,” she said.
Alexandra broke the official seal on the table. She scanned the stiff opening pages that warned of dire legal sanctions for blabbing what she was about to read.
Cerny slid a paper along the desktop in her direction. “The confidentiality agreement,” he said. “If you please…”
He slid a fountain pen along with the paper.
She picked up the pen and looked for the space for her signature.
“You might wish to read it first,” Cerny said. “Always a good idea, you know.”
She was midway through the form already. At the top was the usual “steam-rollered eagle,” the flattened bird that was the Great Seal of the United States.
Olive leaves in one talon and the arrows in the other. Then the content:
I, Alexandra LaDuca, have today read the declarations of USSD Intelligence dossier UK-3-122a-2008.
I resolve and warrant that I will not divulge any part of this report…
Blah, blah…
She scanned to the end. The normal crap that no one paid much attention to. Probably everything in the documents had already been in the New York Times anyway.
She signed.
Cerny left the room. Alexandra stayed at the conference table and began to read.
TEN
A t first it was mostly issues of taxation, import fees and quotas and copyrights. Dull stuff, which she plowed through in the morning. Then she moved to the more incendiary stuff and started it during the afternoon.
A remorseless image of Ukraine came through: one of the most corrupt places on earth. Late in the day, one particular topic heading seized her, and the subsequent document seemed to sum up everything else she had read.
Partners in Extortion: Criminals and Public Officials
The most pernicious element of organized crime in Ukraine is the alliance among former Communist Party elite, members of the law enforcement, security apparatuses, and gangs of professional criminals. Much crime in Ukraine combines government officials’ access to information or goods with the use or threat of force by organized criminals.
Crime and corruption had soared in Ukraine over the past decade. Since gaining independence during the Gorbachev era, the corruption of the Soviet years had been replaced by energetic gangs of organized criminals.
In the summer of 2004, several American corporations had considered investing a total of two billion dollars in Ukraine, mostly in the appliance field. After investigating carefully, each of the corporations decided that the business environment there was fraught with both financial and physical danger.
Drug traffickers, particularly those involved with heroin, laundered money through casinos, exchange bureaus, and state banks.
The banks provided criminal groups with information about businesses’ profitability and assets, which the gangsters used to extort money from them.
Criminals and public officials often colluded. The extortion was imaginative. Criminals, for example, extorted money from businesses by threatening to sell the information they illegally obtained from banks to the tax police. In turn, tax officials sold their information about businesses with crime groups in return for a share of the money the crime groups extorted from the same businesses.
Alex continued reading.
Infiltration by criminals into Ukrainian legislatures remains rampant. More than thirty members of the Parliament might be tried on criminal charges if they were to be stripped of their governmental immunity. Fifty-four legislators, at minimum, elected to local political bodies, also have criminal backgrounds. The problem of corruption extends to the highest levels of government in Ukraine. Ukraine’s prime minister in 1996-97, reportedly made tens of millions of dollars annually through his company’s license to import natural gas and oil.
[Case officer’s note: The former prime minister is also suspected of having stolen $2 million in state funds and stashed some $4 million in a Swiss bank during his premiership. In February 1999 Ukraine’s Supreme Council stripped the former premier of his parliamentary immunity, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He is currently incarcerated in the United States. See also, UK-2-356-2006.]
Alex moved along. There was a section on the growing narcotics problem in the newly independent state.
Ukraine has become a significant conduit for Afghani and Southwest Asian heroin bound for European and American markets…
A dismal feeling started to creep over her. Ukraine made Lagos look like Disneyworld. Why was she spending her life with such things?
She flipped to the final pages, absorbing quickly.
The main trafficking routes are (1) the seaports of Odessa and Sevastopol; (2) Transdniestria is often mentioned as a high-risk region for drug trafficking. The drug is stockpiled in this region for further trafficking to Ukraine and Romania. The drug continues by air from the military airport next to Tiraspol or by trucks toward the north of Moldova and then continues to Poland, Lithuania, or Latvia. The route continues in Transdniestria, reenters Ukraine at Chernivtsy to move westward to Hungary and Romania. (3) There is an important transit from the eastern border of Ukraine with Russia. The trucks from Northern Caucasus cross the border at Taganrog, Luhansk, and Kharkiv en route to Hungary and Slovakia. (4) Another transit route goes through the eastern border of Belarus with Russia since there is no control of this border with Russia…
Ukraine lacked adequate law enforcement and an independent judiciary which might be able to block the influence of organized crime. Alex’s eye settled on a concluding sentence, a masterpiece of understatement.
Institutionalized Ukrainian corruption is perceived as the worst in the world. This is no small accomplishment.
Nigeria, but worse. Oh, Lord…
She finished the document. She closed the briefing book and settled back to think. A few moments later, the door opened and Michael Cerny reappeared.
He poured himself a fresh container of coffee and sat down. “Now I need to mention something else,” he said. “ Ask you, actually. Up until this moment in time, have you ever heard of something called ‘The Caspian Group’?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he answered. “But that’s why you’re here. They’re based in Kiev. They’re a private equity firm. Almost all of their investments are related to government contracts in Ukraine and in the United States. They cozy up to the proper people in both governments, take a financial position in an industry, then move into the industry.”
He took a long drink of coffee.
“Let me illustrate to you how it’s structured,” he continued. “Picture a triangle with the three corners anchored by the politicians on one, the military on the second corner, and the oil and gas industries on the third. Then picture a second tr
iangle, interconnected with the first. Concentric perhaps. Now assume that one triangle is an American one and the second is Ukrainian. Then figure that the two triangles, for financial purposes, are interlocked and service each other. Any corner can connect with any other corner. Follow?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “But what’s the big deal? The world runs on the oil and gas business. I’m sure the triangle is filled with venal overpaid self-serving people making their fortunes off the backs of ordinary folks. Deplorable, but nothing new.”
He broke open a new file, which he pushed before her.
“I’m going to give you this to take away,” he said. “An FBI dossier on Caspian Industries. Examine what Caspian Industries is doing. A lot of money and a lot of product disappear into thin air, escaping taxation completely. See the problem?”
“Yes,” she said.
“When you go to Ukraine,” he said, “you’re going to meet this man.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a picture. He handed her the photograph. “Say hello to Yuri Federov.”
Alex looked at an eight-by-ten surveillance shot of three men, all of whom had the Russian wise-guy look to them. They were seated at a table in a night club. There were women at the table who looked as if they were being paid to be there, one way or another. Everyone was smoking. The men had short haircuts, almost shaved heads, and wore silk suits with open collars. A Eurotrash night out. There was a stage show going on in the background. More women, but not much clothing.
Cerny leaned forward and pointed an index finger at the man in the center.
The man was a thick-browed thug with wide shoulders, a lantern jaw, and a hard dark pair of eyes. He wore some sort of a medallion at his open neck. Alex could see that it was no companion piece for the gold cross she wore around hers. She fingered her own neckwear for a moment.
“Yuri Federov is probably one of the most dangerous men in the world,” Cerny said. “And certainly no friend of the United States.”