I once dated a gal (we shall call her Elvira) who got offended if I said anything complimentary of someone she didn’t like. Since she didn’t like “Mary Sue,” it was my duty to hate Mary Sue. If I said that’s a pretty rose bush in front of Mary Sue’s house that was akin to saying “I hate you Elvira,” and I want to run off and marry Mary Sue. This is much the way the national news media and our idiot elites in Washington react when discussing Russia and Ukraine. If one does not goose step in total black and white agreement with their narrative, then one loves Putin and wants to marry him.
No problem in the history of the world has ever been solved without truth being the essential ingredient of the medicine that cures the ill. Rather than demonizing one side of history, it is important to understand what events influenced people to think and act the way they did. I am not mad at King George for the Royal Navy shelling my family’s house in 1812, I understand why this was done. In order to prevent actions we don’t like from happening again, we must understand why they occurred.
Let’s look at Ukraine and Russia. The Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, author of Dead Souls, is considered the godfather of the great Russian literary giants. There’s just one problem, he was not Russian, he was Ukrainian. Gogol personifies the historic, cultural and ethnic ties between Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire for 263 years. It was the land of the Cossacks. Before 1654, it was ruled by Poland. It asked to become a duchy of Russia and to be under the Tsar’s protection. The 1654 Pereyaslev Treaty granted these wishes as well as a large degree of autonomy. Gogol spoke Ukrainian and Russian. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Romanov dynasty and the Eastern orthodox church. He, as did many Ukrainians went to St. Petersburg to make his mark on the world. Ukraine was a cohesive cog in the Russian Empire until the 1917 Revolution when it broke off, but independence was short lived. Civil War broke out among its people. By 1922, Poland annexed half the country and the rest became part of the communist Soviet state. Before being swallowed up by the USSR, it had been known as the “bread basket of Europe.” It had a prosperous middle class, the kulaks, who grew grain and were proud owners of their own land. The Soviets (including Ukrainian Soviets) committed mass murder against the kulaks to get them off their land and if that wasn’t enough, proceeded to starve millions of other Ukrainians by purposefully manufacturing a famine. Millions upon millions died. The Soviets grabbed the other half of Ukraine during their domination of eastern Europe after WWII. Many Ukrainians treated the Germans as liberators in 1941 such was the hatred towards the Soviets.
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