To mark the anniversary of Putin launching a war on my birthday I wrote this: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/putin-marks-my-birthday-with-missiles-and-mobiki-37c55ed0a283
I took my first Russian history course at Georgetown in the summer of 1972 between my 3rd and last years of high school. My prof was David Goldfrank (https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/00336000014RWELAA4/david-goldfrank). My coursemates were CIA and defense intelligence analyst grad students. At the end of the course Prof Goldfrank told me he would have given me an A+ had he known I was still in high school.
My UCLA classmate Michael Gelb taught me about the inner workings of the Stalin regime purge apparatus after spending a year in Soviet archives in Leningrad in 1983 on a SSRC grant.
We both studied with Hans Rogger at UCLA: https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/march-2002/in-memoriam-hans-rogger
Since 1972 I've read a pile of Russian history books and journal articles that would stretch well into your retirement.
So if you try to pull academic rank on me, you'll lose. Last month I finished watching all 23 classes of Tim Snyder's Yale course, The Making of Modern Ukraine. (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tim+snyder+class+1). It's an evidence antidote to the teleological idiocy of Russian ethnonationalist mythologized
"history". Kyivan Rus wasn't Russian because the Scandinavian warlords and slave traders who founded it while Moscow was a swampy forest didn't know they were starting anything more than converting to Christianity and alliance with Byzantium to further a family business. Putin claiming Prince Vladimir (Voldemar) as Russian is utter fantasy. "Mala Rus" is a term of insulting bigotry. For Ukrainians it's like calling a Jew a kike. It's little better than "kholki", which is in constant use by Russia's genocidal legions.
When Azov and Girkin's neo-Stalinist thugs were fighting outside Mariupol in 2014, my attitude was the same as Harry Truman's on June 23, 1941: "it's a shame both sides can't lose." But Putin launching a genocidal war of extermination (just listen to Pavel Gubarev) changed my mind.
"bring ultranationalists to power": This is sampling error to the point of reality denial. The far right got 2.15% of the vote in 2019.
"Maidan coup": Even more surreal. Watch Netflix documentary Winter on Fire. Then revert back. If you want to find Nazis, start with Wagner Group founder, skinhead swastika tattoed Dmitry Utkin, who's been photographed together with Putin: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/guide-to-russian-useful-idiocy-e3b6fc9612aa
The Bandera Cult
My view of Bandera as an execrable and impotent fascist comes from reading Grzegorz Rosslinski's biography.
Heroes and myths hold together the imaginary communities we call nation states. Colonized or defeated countries with tragic histories always suffer from a shortage of morally unambiguous heroes and heroic stories. Just look at Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine problem and Germans’ reflexive embarrassment at nationalistic celebration outside football.
Ukraine is no exception Ukrainian nationalist leader and OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) founder Stepan Bandera was an avowed fascist and racialist branded by the Russians and the western anti-interventionist left as an SS Holocaust collaborator. Bandera was certainly as execrable a fascist as Putin’s favorite fascist philosopher, Ilya Ilyin. And mass Ukrainian collaboration in the massacre at Babi Yar and the rest of the Ukrainian Shoah is an incontestable historical fact.
But Grzegorz Rossolinski’s biography of Bandera shows he was not an SS Holocaust collaborator because he was imprisoned by the Germans from January 1942 to September 28, 1944:
“Bandera was released by the Nazis on a pledge to support and cooperate with them, which he subsequently did as head of the new organisation he formed, the OUN-B (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists— Bandera).”
Collaboration in the Shoah from Sachsenhausen was hardly possible.
“It is difficult to reconstruct the exact date from which Bandera was kept in Zellenbau. The divergent accounts suggest that he was moved from Berlin to Sachsenhausen several times. Stets’ko wrote in 1967 that Bandera came to Zellenbau in January 1942.[1383] In an interview in 1950, Bandera said that he was held in Berlin by the Gestapo until 1943 and was then moved to Zellenbau.[1384] In an interrogation in 1956 in Munich, he stated that he was relocated from Berlin to Sachsenhausen in the winter of 1942–1943.[1385] Bandera’s prisoner number 72192 was assigned to him in October 1943. His prison card shows that he was released on 28 September 1944.”
Bandera and his brand of racialist Ukrainian nationalism were incubated in the Galizia and Volhynia part of Ukraine that was Austro-Hungarian before WWI and part of interwar Poland. There the Ukrainian language and cultural identity could be openly expressed and wasn’t forced underground, as in Tsarist and Bolshevik-ruled Ukraine.
Most people in the center and east of Ukraine hate the western Ukrainians’ Bandera cult, at least according to an American tech entrepreneur married to a Ukrainian from Zelenskiy’s hometown of Kryvih Rih. There national identity is de-ethnified and redefined as a belief in don’t tread on me bottom-up, contractual governance; as resistance to arbitrary authority. The Russian language is de-ethnified and detached from Russian national identity.
Here’s a nuanced analysis of the politics of the Bandera cult from a Ukrainian techie on Quora in 2019:
“If Zelensky really supported Bandera, it would mean his undoing. Zelensky is a comedian, speaking mostly Russian, and a Jew, they say. For Bandera those are enough reasons that Zelensky must not exist in Ukraine.
As far as I remember the poll of early 2019 or late 2018, a bit more Ukrainian citizens dislike Bandera than like him. Bandera support never wins you majority of Center, South, and East of Ukraine. They never needed Bandera, he is nothing for them at best, rather an enemy. Most of my family, except one insane alcoholic, never said a good word about Bandera or his followers. More to it, to stand for Bandera means to be at odds with every neighbor country of Ukraine — what most Ukrainians need not.
The more you support Bandera, the less votes you win in all-Ukrainian elections, as only in the West majority is really supportive of Bandera praisers.
Zelensky faces an impossible job: he tries to win support in different ends of Ukraine, which were and are antagonists in their political choices. He may say that he likes Bandera, but that will cost him votes, and if he really supported Bandera, he wouldn’t win the elections.
P.S. Disclaimer: I voted for Zelensky in presidential elections, but just to bring down Poroshenko. I don’t like Zelensky and I’m not going to vote for his party in the parliament elections.
If I believed that Zelensky really supports Bandera, I wouldn’t vote for him in any case.
What’s clear is that for a clear majority of Ukrainians and Ukrainian regions the Bandera cult is more of a deal-breaker than a deal-closer.
Maidan “Coup:” Upside Down Analysis of Bottom-up vs Top-Down
The long arm of an omnipotent Uncle Sam is always the only problem. If so, then let’s mindlessly adopt Russian ethno-nationalist fantasies about Ukrainian Russophobia and the Russkiy Mir fantasy about all Russian speakers being Russian nationals to prove it:
“Ukraine was merely the latest example in 2014 of US engaging in the overthrow of a democratic government with the eager aid of a willing proxy in the form of forces in the country ideologically conditioned to hate all things Russia for historical and cultural reasons…What should not be dismissed is the support for Russia in these cities and across the Donbass, Ukraine’s industrial heartland…In these parts of Ukraine — where the country’s sizeable ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking minority is based — Russia’s military campaign is widely viewed as a war of liberation not occupation.”
This screed swallows Putin’s Russian grievance-driven paranoia about Russophobia defines all Russian speakers top-down as having Russian national identity. My native Russian speaking Latvian-born wife and her totally bilingual children and nephews would laugh at the idea that they’re Russian because they speak Russian.
Putin hasn’t de-ethnified the Russian language, but its speakers in his imaginary Russkiy Mir in the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Kazakhstan certainly have. The Leninist antique who wrote this nonsense is a full useful idiot participant in Russians’ collective narcissistic projection of their own ethno-nationalism onto others.
The idea that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a native speaker of Russian who speaks flawed Ukrainian, hates all things Russian is beyond absurd. A single viewing of Zelensky’s TV series, Servant of the People in Russian tells you snarky slapstick Russian language Odesa-type humor is deeply Ukrainian — and Jewish — just as the Marx brothers, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Seinfeld, and Woody Allen are as American as apple pie.
From a simple query “2014 coup” by a physicist friend in Riga:
“I asked Chat Open AI: Was there a CIA organized coup in Kiev in 2014? There is no evidence to support the claim that the CIA organized a coup in Kiev in 2014. The events that led to the ousting of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 were the result of a popular uprising known as the Euromaidan movement, which was sparked by Yanukovych’s decision to reject a long-planned agreement to strengthen ties with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia.”
The Maidan “Coup” fantasy falls apart when it fails to distinguish bottom up from the top down overthrow of governments, which turns the Maidan Coup thesis completely upside down. Coups are top down with no associated popular movements: the American-sponsored coups in Iran 1953, Guatemala, 1954, Vietnam against Diem 1963, Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Argentina 1976.
There was nothing revolutionary about any of them. Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922 was a stage-managed coup covertly endorsed by Italy’s monarchy, military and business elite, not a popular revolution. It was like a pre-packaged political bankruptcy in which the judge, the creditors and the debtors knew the outcome in advance.
Here’s the difference as described on Wikipedia:
“Revolution, rebellion
A revolution or rebellion can have the same outcome as a coup, in that a ruler or government can be replaced by unconstitutional means. However, while a coup is usually made by a small group and planned beforehand, a revolution or rebellion is usually started more spontaneously and by larger groups of uncoordinated people. The distinction is not always clear. Sometimes, a coup is also labelled as a revolution by the coup makers to try to give it a form of democratic legitimacy.
The bait and switch Bolsheviks called their October 1917 coup that stormed an empty Winter Palace a revolution. The 10000 Kronstadt sailors they massacred in 1921 for resisting their one party dictatorship knew better. Only Russia’s lefty useful idiots like Code Pink can’t see the difference.
Georgia’s Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Maidan in 2013–14 were the exact opposite of the cold war era American-sponsored coups from 1953–76: they were spontaneous revolutions started by large groups of people from different social sectors not centrally coordinated from the top down.
The real coup was Yanukovych joining Putin’s Eurasian Union instead of signing the EU Association Agreement the Rada had voted 85% for. When a popular revolution triggered its failure, Putin annexed Crimea and sent his FSB agent Igor Girkin to stage a Russian-backed coup in the Donbass. Pre-war opinion surveys and interviews with Russian nationalist DPR leader and FSB agent Igor Girkin belie the Maidan Coup nonsense:
Former Russian separatist leader Igor ‘Strelkov’ Girkin has claimed “personal responsibility” for starting the deadly conflict in eastern Ukraine, in an interview with imperialist rightwing newspaper Zavtra. Strelkov, who declared himself Minister of Defence of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said that he “was the one who pulled the trigger of war”. If our unit had not crossed the border, everything would’ve come to an end, like in Kharkiv [Ukrainian city], like in Odessa,” he said, in a translation by the Moscow Times. “There would have been several dozen killed, burned, detained. And that would have been the end of it. But the flywheel of the war, which is continuing to this day, was spun by our unit. We mixed up all the cards on the table.” A veteran of both the Soviet and Russian armies, Strelkov has been described as a covert agent of Russia’s GRU military intelligence. Called “one of the most powerful separatist figures in eastern Ukraine,” Strelkov is a suspect in the downing of the Malaysian Airlines MH17. He resigned from his post earlier in August.
The real coup was Putin’s Little Green Men in Crimea and Girkin’s failed coup that became a Russian-backed war against Ukraine to preserve Russia’s dying sphere of influence in an imaginary “Russkiy Mir” melting away under the heat of a Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jewish comedian’s jokes.
Where the Real Nazis Are
Russia’s lefty useful idiots are ultimately on the side of the Russian leaders’ avalanche of genocidal rants:
https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/, only one sample of which is the openly exterminationist DPR leader Pavel Gubarev:
“We aren’t coming to kill you, but to convince you. But if you don’t want to be convinced, we’ll kill you. We’ll kill as many as we have to: 1 million, 5 million, or exterminate all of you.”
A substantial part of Russia’s invasion is run by a mercenary PMC founded by a skinhead neo-Nazi who named it for Hitler’s favorite composer. So lefty useful idiots who legitimize Russia’s de-nazification fantasy by looking for Nazis in Ukraine are like the Nazi ark hunters in Raiders of the Lost Ark: looking in the wrong place. Why? Their Russia as victim of Russophobic Ukrainian Nazism fantasy is inseparable from the Ukrainians as Little Russians and Ukrainian language as peasant dialect nonsense.
“Putin to the West: Hands off Ukraine” — Time Magazine (May 25, 2009) Relations between “Big Russia and Little Russia — Ukraine…have always been the business of Russia itself.”
Here’s an example of how genocidal denial of Ukrainians’ existence seeps into the Russian victimhood-peddling American left:
Why it’s true: Ukrainian Nationalism = Ukrainian Nazism
How a schismatic population, a misguided yearning for nationhood, and manipulation by Great Powers led to a modern day revival of Nazism in its most odious forms….Firstly, we must realise what “The Ukraine” is. When I was younger, we always referred to the country we now call Ukraine as “The Ukraine.” that is because the word “Ukraine” comes from the Slavic word “Ukraina” — which means “borderlands” (the word is the same in both Russian and Polish). So it was never really its own country. Both the Russians and the Poles called it “the borderlands”. — Joe Brunoli, Medium
In Russia’s and the Russian useful idiots’ reality distortion field Lavrov the Liar is right when he says Russia didn’t attack Ukraine because what doesn’t exist cannot be invaded. Adding “the” to Ukraine turns a sovereign Ukraine into a borderland to be colonized, which is why Ukrainians find this “na Ukraina” so insulting. With Germany out of the picture since 1945, anyone who resists Russian colonization of Ukraine and definition of Ukrainians as “Little Russians” is therefore a Banderite “Nazi”.
But their estimates of “Bandera’s progeny” in Ukraine is pure sampling error. The far right in Ukraine got 2.2% in the 2019 election. Jewish Zelenskiy got 73%. My babushki and grandpas from Rivne, Chmelnitski and Vinnitsya, whose letters sent to Brooklyn in Old Russian from 1913–21 we’re currently translating, would be tickled. Unlike Nancy Pelosi, faux peacenik Code Pinkos shouting about Ukraine’s Nazis don’t know how to count, but might want to try it.
If fascist voters justify an invasion, Russia should have put Hungary (Orban’s 53%), Italy (25%), Sweden (20.5%), Germany (13%), Poland, Spain (15%) and France (45%) ahead of Ukraine in the queue.
Nazi infiltration in Ukraine’s military: Azov and Right Sector
Code Pink and America’s leftist political fossils such as Medium’s John Wight are looking in the wrong place for Nazis, just as Swiss disinformation warrior Jacques Baud did.
Wagner PMC was named for Hitler’s favorite composer by Dmitry Utkin, its neo-Nazi founder. His photo is in this article from The Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/archive/how-accurate-is-jacques-bauds-analysis-of-the-war-in-ukraine/):
in 2020 he (Baud) went on Russian state TV to say there is “no history of poisoning by the Russian secret services”, that the Skripals simply had a bad case of “food poisoning” and that Alexei Navalny was poisoned not by the state but by some “mafia” people around him. He wasn’t challenged on any of these controversial claims…
To legitimize Russian de-Nazification requires some very fuzzy math that lumps all Ukrainian national guard and paramilitaries in with “Nazis”. That would define my Ukrainian tech entrepreneur friend who organized 500 people in the territorial defense of a network of 11 villages west of Kyiv a Nazi:
A key claim made by Baud….is that Ukraine’s armed forces have been thoroughly infiltrated by ‘far-right’ ultra-nationalists, and consequently that Russian ‘denazification’ was and is a legitimate Russian goal. Baud cites Reuters as having said there are 102,000 ‘far-right extremists’ in the Ukrainian armed forces, a figure that he appears to have considered ‘too good to check’. The Reuters article in fact says there were 102,000 ‘paramilitary’ soldiers in 2022, which isn’t quite the same as ‘far-right extremists’. The ultimate source for this number, of which Baud is seemingly unaware, is the 2022 edition of IISS’s Military Balance, which makes an estimate of 102,000 troops in the Ukrainian ‘Gendarmerie and Paramilitary’ forces, which consist of the National Guard (60,000) and the Border Guard (42,000).
The National Guard was formed from a core of 33,000 Internal Troops personnel in 2014 and was later expanded to include some volunteer battalions, including the Azov Battalion (with pre-war numbers perhaps approaching 2,500 troops) and the Donbas Battalion (~900), although not the ‘Right Sector’ (~5,000 strong). Of course we know that some members of Azov (at least) are far-right or neo-Nazi, but Baud is essentially making the ludicrous claim that everyone in every unit of the National and Border Guard has ultra-nationalistic, far-right political beliefs.
To smear everyone in the Ukrainian National Guard in this way is like the BBC’s smearing of UKIP as a ‘far-right’ organization. Even if we just consider the so-called volunteer battalions (perhaps a few thousand in total), the notion that anyone volunteering to defend their country must be ‘far-right’ or ‘ultra-nationalist’ (rather than just patriotic or nationalist) isn’t credible…
However, let’s try to establish the true extent of far-right ‘infiltration’ of the armed forces of Ukraine. We can do no better than by digging up the only other source that Baud makes reference to, which is a Jerusalem Post article that itself references a George Washington University report focusing on a far-right group called ‘Centuria’ that has supposedly infiltrated the Ukrainian armed forces. Baud calls this ‘disturbing’, but I have to admit I didn’t read the full 93 pages because I was disturbed by a spontaneous fit of giggles halfway down the first page. Perhaps I can illustrate my misgivings with some quotes:
[Centuria …] has attracted multiple members, including [some] now serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. That’s multiple members — more than one. And some are in the military. One apparent member of the group […] attended an 11-month Officer Training Course at […] Sandhurst […]. Another apparent member […] attended the 30th International Week held by the German Army Officers’ Academy […] in Dresden. That’s exactly two with a military background.
Despite this, Baud goes on to make claims about the power of these supposedly ‘far-right’ Ukrainian paramilitary forces in influencing and coercing Zelenskyy’s Government against seeking peace with Russia through threats of a coup or assassination. I’m intending to address these claims (as well as those surrounding Maidan 2014) on another occasion, but suffice it to say they also border on fantasy.
It’s worth noting here that the coalition of ‘far-right’ political parties garnered only 315,568 votes in the 2019 parliamentary elections in Ukraine (2.2% of votes cast, 0.9% of registered voters), gaining a total of one seat for the leader of Svoboda, whose paramilitary Sich Battalion has a total of 50 members. The threat from the Ukrainian far-right is not zero, but even if one doesn’t consider Putin himself to be the arch ultra-nationalist, we should bear in mind that Russia has its own far-right problems, and ironically the founder (and still apparently the leader) of the Wagner Group, which was sent to assassinate the notably-Jewish Zelenskyy, looks to have Nazi sympathies himself.
Considering all of this, I find Baud’s assessment to be misinformed and misleading. The fundamental problem is that he’s clearly an intelligent and articulate man who can string together factoids into a coherent and persuasive-sounding whole — which is pernicious, when those facts are wrong. But I would still urge readers to listen to the interview: it’s informative for its clever-sounding, insidious mendacity.
Insidious mendacity cloaked in pseudo-scholarly “history” is the stock in trade of Baud and the other useful idiots cited above. This is how they’re more dangerous than the Lindbergh descendant America First ranting rightists chanting Putin! Putin! Putin! at Nick Fuentes’ AFPAC (America First Political Action Conference).
Baud may be cynically hoping that critics of Western foreign policy won’t be bothered to do their own research and will simply nod their heads sagely, feeling themselves privy to secret knowledge and safe in their titanium-lined bunker of naïveté. Sadly, it’s not clear that’s a bad strategy. But with events like the massacres in Bucha (which Baud has also denied), the rapes, forced deportations and the deliberate bombardment of non-military targets, it’s reached the point where those too cocksure to examine the facts look a lot like a modern-day Walter Duranty, albeit without the Pulitzer and with only the stench of death surrounding them.
No amount of sanctimonious anti-imperialist perfume can cover up the stench of genocide apology from Code Pinkos and other lefty faux-peaceniks. The Daily Sceptic reporter’s parallel to the now disgraced New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who hid the Holodomor from the American public, is instructive. He at least had the excuse of being blackmailed by Stalin’s NKVD due to an affair with a Russian woman. Baud, Wight and Brunoli and the Code Pinkos have no such excuse.
"Russophobia", "fraternal peoples": Orwellian doublespeak that inverts reality. Russia starves 4m Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932-33, invades its neighbors and deports 1/2m people from the Baltic States, 250k from Poland in 1939-41 and 4m Ukrainians since a year ago, including 14000 forcibly abducted and adopted children, and you're talking Russian victimhood and "fraternity"!
This is pure geopolitical sociopathy and projection.
