Ukraine marked the 65th anniversary of the Allied’ victory in the European theater of World War II against the backdrop of an ignominious national defeat – the Kharkiv surrender which poses a real threat to the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Ukraine is going through a new historical “Berestechko.” The Russian troops marching ostentiously down Khreshchatyk are a glaring manifestation of this. Although the law demands that the appearance of any foreign troops in Ukraine be sanctioned by the Verkhovna Rada, this time the law was flouted. The Party of Regions could have repeated the dictum of a well-known French king:
“I am the state, I am the law.”
I must say that celebrating May 9 after all the years of Ukrainian independence provoked an eerie feeling that the Ukrainian state is abolished on this day and we are back in the Soviet Union ruled by Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Secretary General of the CPSU CC, Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and four times Hero of the Soviet Union. A great number of communist-regime red flags, hammers and sickles, red stars, and just a few scattered yellow-blue national flags and tridents.
Throw in Soviet-style rhetoric and mentality – all that we, Ukrainians, disparagingly call “sovok.” Back to the USSR? It is now quite obvious that Russia and Ukraine are striving to revive, at least on a selective basis, the “load-carrying structures” of the totalitarian past.
The signs and symbols that accompany this process are very easy to understand. The Kremlin needs to squeeze as much ideological profit as possible from the 65th anniversary, securing tacit agreement from the West (as compensation for the past historical merits in the anti-Hitler coalition) to Russia’s “special role” in Eastern Europe and in the post-Soviet space.
Therefore, one should not take at face value the torrent of words about a great victory and tremendous respect for war veterans found in the media. Political bargaining continues on the international arena. The parade on Moscow’s Red Square is just an element of governmental propaganda and geopolitical efforts. As for the new “Ukrainian” leadership, it is trying to prove that Ukraine is really sailing in the wake of “senior comrades,” and Moscow should have no doubts about this. To paraphrase an old joke, the “Ukrainian elephant” is the best friend of the “Russian elephant,” and we all know where the “birthplace of elephants” is now.
It is not surprising that nobody, except for a few enthusiasts, tries to reflect and find out what in fact happened 65 and 71 years ago, and what should be done to prevent this from happening again. Rolling drums, thundering salutes, blaring fanfares, and loads of eulogy are not conducive to reflections and search for the truth. Besides, it is a public holiday, so there is an occasion to knock back a glass or two…
And now let us see how Ukraine’s TV channels covered the event. The 1st National was dutifully performing its official functions, adorning the screen with a St. George’s Ribbon, a novelty that came from Russia. Ukraine very often thoughtlessly accepts foreign fads, without even trying to know what stands behind them, what their nature and genesis is. Meanwhile, in Romanov empire this ribbon was attached to an order, St. George’s Cross, which was usually conferred on those who have distinguished themselves in defending imperial interests on the battlefield. After 1917 a St. George recipient, who wore this order on his chest, could have been bayoneted by revolutionary soldiers or end up with a “cordial chat” in the Cheka, only to be exiled to “Gen. Dukhonin’s headquarters in Mogiliov gubernia” (the humor of those stormy years, which meant execution by firing squad).
When it came to the crunch for Comrade Stalin in 1941 and the global-revolution spirit had somewhat vanished, he immediately recalled Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoi, Aleksandr Suvorov and Pavel Nakhimov, and simply forgot Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. He recalled Saint George, too. This order’s ribbon began to be attached to the Order of Glory, a Soviet soldier decoration, and the notion “full holder of St. George Order” gave way to “full holder of the Order of Glory.” Comrade Stalin successfully merged the imperial and the communist ideas in this ribbon. But why should Ukraine use foreign symbols and traditions to the detriment of our own ones?
A few years ago in my native Sevastopol, the “coolest” anti-Ukrainian organizations began to hand out these ribbons to passers-by on a mass scale, while the local NTS TV channel, which excelled in the coverage of these actions, even requested this writer to comment. But I never mingle with this kind of the media as a matter of principle.
In his program “Big-Time Politics” on the Inter channel, Yevgeny Kiseliov tried to analyze the history of May 9 celebrations in the USSR, pointing out that in the Stalin era Victory Day was marked pompously in 1945 and 1946 only, and there was nothing of the sort for almost 20 years after that. It was not until 1965 that the then No. 1 war veteran Leonid Brezhnev exalted this holiday to an unprecedented height of propaganda. Why did not Stalin need the Brezhnev-type heroic ardor? Firstly, the people had lost some of their fear and sense of discipline during the war.
Indeed, it is not so simple to scare a person who has gone through the inferno of war, been wounded more than once, and seen thousands of horrible deaths. Besides, these people knew their true price, knew what the authorities owed them, and were not too reverent towards them. It happened more than once after 1945 that war veterans would come into district Party and executive committees and beat the snooty bureaucrats’ mugs with a crutch. What could you do to a legless cripple? Regular celebrations of May 9 would only provoke this kind of behavior. Moreover, war veterans had walked across half of Europe and seen the way people lived there. What they saw clashed with Comrade Stalin’s political teachings. How can you celebrate the feats of Lieutenant Berest, who organized and conducted the hoisting of a victory flag over the Reichstag, if the retired officer was doing time in a Gulag camp for a “terrorist act,” i.e., for throwing a snooty “rat,” who had grown fat in his bureaucratic chair, out of a second-story window – together with this chair, incidentally?
And, finally, did Stalin himself consider it a victory in the light of his plans from 1941? It is not accidental that he refused to inspect the Victory Parade, instructing Marshal Georgy Zhukov to do this. Against the backdrop of the “father’s and teacher’s” global ambitions, Eastern Europe alone was a very modest trophy. As the Soviet Chief Marshal of Artillery Nikolai Voronov wrote in his memoirs, “we all dreamed of an early victory of the worldwide revolution.” The newspaper Izvestiya even wrote on June 24, 1941, that the USSR is home to proletarians of all countries and the war is patriotic because we must carry the flag of liberation to the potential republics of this homeland…
But there was mostly bombast and bravura, rather than serious attempts to analyze and reconsider things, on our television channels. Obviously, the 65-year-old events are being used today to gain fast political dividends, fight against opponents, and secure a foothold in the war veterans’ electorate. It is difficult to believe in the sincerity and political disinterestedness of the organizers of these noisy celebrations. Their interest in that war, that victory, and those veterans is very doubtful. Suffice it to compare the living standards of the defeated Wehrmacht veterans in Germany and Austria and those of the victorious veterans in this country to clearly see the degree of the authorities’ hypocrisy and cynicism. And St. George ribbons on Maybach and Mercedes cars save nobody and nothing here. The Russian humorist Mikhail Zadornov has commented rather bitingly and justly on this: “Can we possibly imagine that the US president has promised to provide the veterans who won the Great Victory of 1945 with housing by 2010? When approached by veterans with a request to be given the apartment promised by the president, local bureaucrats say: ‘So let the president provide you with one. If he is so willing, he can give you his own. We don’t have vacant apartments. We are building some and doing our best. And we promise for sure they will be available by 2020. Please come back!’”
So the authorities need May 9 to cover up these disgraceful practices. You can get off easily with yet some more word-mongering, compliments, and slogans… Ideological gabble is cheaper than social security for war veterans.
Many years ago I could still see true battlefield veterans and watch them at the company where I worked. They were modest people of few words. On May 9 they would put up their medals, drink a glass of vodka, and only swear and cry in response to all our requests to tell us about the war. I understood at the time that there are two truths about the war: the “truth” of the leaders and the truth of a frontline soldier. These are very different truths. I noticed one more particularity: veterans did not like watching Soviet war films – whenever this occurred, they spat in disgust.
This week Ukraine’s TV channels have spewed out all their stock of Soviet naive and Russian subtly cynical agitprop war films. To analyze these films is the same as to analyze Soviet ideology, any violations of which were rare and punishable at the time. Conversely, the present-day Russian agitprop is doing the same – but only in a “Hollywoodian” style: with bright colors, excellent camerawork and extravaganza. The form has changed, but the essence remains the same. Only the chauvinism is greater. Except for these nuances, all the rest is the same. Only in some cases, as, for example, in the film Battalions Are Calling for Fire on the 1st National or The Punishment Battalion on ICTV, could one see what is known as “battlefield truth.” Most of the films, however, were in the spirit of monumental propaganda. All the slabs of marble and granite, bronze and steel masses, and monuments recalling the pagan shrines of Mars, the god of war. Over the many past years I have managed to see only one monument that bears something human and touches the right chord. It is in Kyiv’s Borshchahivka: an old and weary soldier has sat down on a Willis bumper to have a smoke, relax after the hard and terrible frontline roads, and think about something personal. A very human and a very rare monument…
Yet I must give credit to the 1st National which still opted for some non-conformism by showing the documentary series I Was there against My Own Will about the destiny of a Ukrainian who was deported as slave labor to Germany, saw the Nazi occupation, and witnessed a great deal of other things. The serial exposed some pages of Ukrainian history, which are at variance with the official Soviet and current pro-Soviet historiography. For example, when the panic-stricken Soviet leaders were fleeing east, having abandoned the populace they were supposed to care of, Ukrainian peasants heaved a sigh of relief and could eat well for some time after customary Stalin-era famines. But very soon the new Nazi masters clamped down on them, using the Bolshevik collective farms as an ideal instrument to exploit the rural population. The TET channel beamed A Remote Shot, a very topical film for today’s Ukraine. Just fancy the scene: a Ukrainian, who served the German authorities during the war, is interrogating the arrested OUN member Andrii aka. “the Lightning” and says to him: “You’ll get no independence.” Incidentally, the Ukrainians who served Stalin thought in the same way. Both equally rejected the idea that inspired Ukrainian nationalists. “The Lightning” is sent to the detention basement, where the Red Army captive officer Oleh Krasnoshchok hurls accusations typical of the current anti-Bandera propaganda at him. When the escorts took prisoners to work, Krasnoshchok tries to kill “the Lightning,” the policemen intervene in the brawl, and everything ends with a shootout and the escape of the two antagonists who run for a long time from their pursuers down the forest trails, always afraid of getting a bullet from each other. Having escaped the pursuit, the two Ukrainians went away in different directions. The titles tell us of their further destiny: Oleh Krasnoshchok, who had escaped from captivity, was shot by a SMERSH (army counterintelligence) unit as a deserter, and Andrii “the Lightning” was killed in 1956 in a battle against the Soviet security forces.
Such are the symbols of Ukrainian fate. Is it not high time Ukrainians stopped going to the opposite sides of barricades? But there are so many of those who want Ukrainians to hate each other. This was confirmed by Savik Schuster’s new program, in which he assigned the role of a debate moderator to Mr. Tabachnyk who made it clear that Stalin was a great general and even the benefactor of the Ukrainian people because he, unlike Hitler, allegedly had no malicious plans towards Ukrainians. In other words, he used to wipe them out without any plans, ex-tempore, in which he, according to the Yanukovych government minister, positively differed from his Berlin ally of 1939-41. And the genocidal Holodomor is just an innocent joke. The mass-scale repressions of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s do not count either, similarly to the attempt to deport Ukrainians who lived under German occupation (the vast majority of the people). Incidentally, after the war, in a conversation with the writer Felix Chuyev, the former People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of Soviet Ukraine Riasny said that he had personally received a deportation order signed by top USSR leaders from Moscow, and even managed to form two trainloads of deportees before the order was canceled.
Tabachnyk was making customary accusations against the UPA, while Schuster occasionally switched to live broadcasts from various cities of Ukraine, which finally prompted the MP Filenko to say: “Instead of reconciling people, we are reopening our old wounds.” And his parliamentary colleague Taras Chornovil even tried to leave the studio. On my part, I thought that as long as the Kremlin was carrying out a deep ideological penetration and interference in Ukraine, there would be no reconciliation. The Kremlin and its confidants on our territory do not need a reconciled Ukraine. We must learn to resist this penetration. Unfortunately, in the five years of his presidential term, the “great patriot” Viktor Yushchenko did not lift a finger to defend Ukraine in this respect.
When Sevastopol was shown in the studio, we heard an 88-year-old veteran say that “OUN-UPA members were politically ignorant.” I wonder where he learned about the level of Ukrainian insurgents’ political competence. Then a group of professional criers chanted with a voice well trained at all anti-Ukrainian rallies: “Russia! Russia!” Why did they not chant “Party of Regions! Party of Regions!”? Black ingratitude! Naturally, there were also other people in Sevastopol. But no one wants to see them.
Meanwhile, Yevgeny Kiseliov’s Inter channel program showed the “great” Nikita Mikhalkov on a TV bridge from Moscow, who began to lecture “dull-witted Little Russians” about good and bad. The tide of his empty rhetoric was stemmed by Andrii Ilienko from the all-Ukrainian association Freedom, who said – with enviable bluntness and convincing arguments – that the latest “pearls” of Soviet and post-Soviet historiography were “the empire’s last myth.” As Mr. Mikhalkov displayed “paucity of philosophy” in his arguments, he called Mr. Ilienko a “fool” without further ado. Indeed, why should one stand on ceremony with these “Little Russians?” True Muscovite civility, isn’t it?
There are other things in store for “Little Russia.” Watching all these political shows causes a sensation that somebody is deliberately splitting this country, implementing a project similar to PISUAR [South-Eastern Ukrainian Autonomous Republic. – Ed.]. The MP Boldyrev called for regionalism and federalism in Ukraine. Maybe, the current government is also going to play this dirty trick on Ukraine, by fomenting dissent and whipping up passions. A major role in this has been assigned to Moscow television guest stars. What the current government has begun to carry out especially actively is the Moscow plan of “two Ukraines” and “two peoples in Ukraine.” Mr. Kiseliov, too, could not help making his contribution by asking “simple-heartedly”: “How can Bandera and Stalin monuments stand side by side in the same country?” How? And how can rapacious oligarchic capitalism in Russia stand side by side with the Lenin mausoleum from the top of which wealthy governmental officials inspect the Victory Parade? How can monuments to Kirov, Budionny, Voroshylov, Frunze, and others get on with the solemn reburial of General Denikin in Moscow? And how can the red flag of the Russian Army stand side by side with the imperial White Army tricolor under which, incidentally, General Vlasov’s “Russian Liberation Army” fought? How can the city of Petersburg get on with Leningrad oblast and the city of Yekaterinburg with Sverdlovsk oblast? How can Chekists get along with White Army men? But they do, and no one says that this will cause Russia to break up. According to some well-known Moscow institutions, it is Ukraine that is going to break up. They are not only thinking so but are also actively putting their ideas into practice – with the help of the current government in Ukraine which no one will dare call Ukrainian and with the help of the people who persistently position themselves as “democrats” and “advocates of the freedom of expression.”
