In 2016, I saw in person a famous man who died 98 years ago. He was a short, bald man in dark suit lying on his back in a glass cabinet. I was surprised at his orange beard and moustache. He was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, usually known as Lenin. He was the father of all modern tyranny, a gigantic and malign force.
Taking over Russia in a bourgeois coup in October 1917, he turned it into an enormous dictatorship, based on terror and constructed with modern technology and political organisation. His faithful disciple, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, better known as Stalin, carried on his program but lived much longer and so made it even more vast and terrible. In Germany, the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, copied his ideas and methods but expanded on them, and committed the worst crime in history. Russia and its empire became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It was accurately described by President Reagan as an “evil empire” since it subjected a large number of colonies in the enormous surrounding area. Perhaps the colony that suffered most was the Ukraine, blessed by nature and cursed by history.
Ukrainian suffering
In The Daily Friend, John Kane-Berman has recently given an excellent but grim account of the suffering of the Ukraine under the Soviet Union. The Ukraine, located on Russia’s south-east border, is a huge country with rich soils and a favourable climate, superb for agriculture. Nonetheless, Marxist Russia managed to force a terrible famine on it in 1932, which killed millions of her people. Despite having some good engineering and a sound and safe VVER nuclear power reactor, communist Russia managed to design the appalling RBMK reactor, and built four of them in Chernobyl in the Ukraine, resulting in the worst ever nuclear power accident in 1986. The Ukraine has good reason to hate Russia, although her Russian population, about 13% of the total, seems not to.
In 1989, under the reforming Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, communism in Russia suddenly and peacefully collapsed. The whole Soviet Union disintegrated fairly quietly within two years, with each member, including the Ukraine of the Marxist Empire becoming an independent nation. To almost everyone’s surprise, Russia allowed East and West Germany to reunite despite the fact that the German invasion of Russia in 1941 had cost the lives of probably over 10 million Russians and caused economic devastation. (It must be noted that Stalin was quite happy to help and supply Hitler up until the day of invasion).
I’ve spent a total of one week in Russia, in June 2016, and in Moscow only, which is not typical. I thought Moscow was wonderful. It was spacious, attractive, clean, safe, efficient and friendly. Everything worked well, including ATMs, shops, restaurants, traffic, and the superb underground railways with their palatial underground stations. It was full of interest, full of history. To my surprise I noticed far more churches there than in any Western city I’ve visited, orthodox churches with golden cupolas. I saw the extraordinary sites of the Kremlin and the even more extraordinary Church of St Basil (right on the perimeter of Red Square!), perhaps the most extraordinary building in the world.
The rumour that Russia has the world’s most beautiful women seemed true in Moscow; on every street there was a procession of the most gorgeous women I have ever seen. I was very lucky to have a Russian friend, a loyal Muscovite, who kindly devoted a whole day and night to showing me around the city. I told her I thought it was wonderful. She said it was now but had been dreadful 20 years before. I asked her what had made the dramatic improvement. She answered in a word: “Putin”.
Collapse of communism
The collapse of communism in Russia did not lead automatically to democracy, free markets, and prosperity in Russia, any more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to these good things in Iraq. Initially post-communist Russia was a mess, with widespread corruption, chaos and economic decline. Putin came to power in 1999. He is a KGB-trained thug but he is clear-sighted, confident, consistent, and able.
Somehow, he brought order to Russia and helped her out of her misery. He did a great job for about ten years but has since rather stalemated himself, so that the Russian economy is not nearly as good as it could be. He has done some awful things, such as assassinating opponents at home and abroad.
He annexed the Crimea after a referendum, probably genuine, showed that most people in Crimea, being Russians, wanted to rejoin Russia. He was brutal in Chechnya. His democracy is a bit of a sham. But I don’t see in him any intention to make trouble in the West or try to regain the former Soviet colonies for Russia, including the Ukraine. I am sure he just wants to feel safe, secure and respected in his own backyard.
Very alarming rumblings of war over the Ukraine are now sounding from the USA, from the Republican neo-cons and the progressive Democrats (remarkably alike in foreign affairs). They scare me. The Ukraine has had an unfortunate history of confusion, corruption and ethnic strife since the fall of the USSR. NATO was established to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union now.
NATO should be disbanded. Instead it has advanced aggressively eastward, causing obvious concern to Russia. There have even been rumours of the Ukraine joining it, which would be dangerously provocative. Putin is now building up a huge Russian military force on the Ukrainian border. This also scares me. There is wild talk that he might stage a bogus attack on Russia by the Ukraine to justify a Russian invasion. Probably nonsense; I hope nonsense. I don’t know what Putin is playing at but guess he is bluffing.
Most scary of all is the fact that the USA, by far the world’s greatest military power, is now led by a weak, dishonest, and inconsistent president, who might be losing his faculties and whose popularity is plunging in the polls. A feeble Biden is more frightening than a strong Putin. He might suddenly decide on something really stupid to distract attention from his many failures and establish himself as an all-American macho-man. Russia and the USA both have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. This crisis will probably peter out quietly, but if it doesn’t ….
I know exactly what Trump would do about the Ukraine if he were president now. Nothing. He would be right. The USA has no interests in the far away Ukraine and should not risk blowing up the world to meddle there.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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Image: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons