Letters from Vienna #49
Rather than focus upon the foundation and reality as opposed to the myth of NATO (as I originally intended) I find myself forced to focus upon the question of Ukrainian membership of NATO. Before doing so I find it incumbent upon me to first deal with the vexed and extremely complex history of Ukraine.
It is a cardinal sin of any historian to use a single source but for the sake of simplicity I shall do so. The book in question is Timothy Snyder’s “The Reconstruction of Nations”, and, due to the fact that it is precisely that: a single source: it must be treated with considerable caution.
“For about two hundred years, most of the patrimony of Kyvian Rus’, including the lands we now call Ukraine, was divided between Lithuania and Poland. Before 1569, Lithuania had the lion’s share of the old Kyivan principalities, but Poland’s Galicia (the Rus Palatinate) was the most prosperous and advanced of these lands.”[1]
“Just as the history of medieval Rus’ begins with the Orthodox baptism of Grand Duke Volodymyr in 988, so the history of early modern Ukraine begins with the conversions of Ukrainian nobles to Western Christianity after 1569.”[2]
“Much of the Ukrainian gentry converted from Orthodoxy to several varieties of Protestantism in the sixteenth century; as in Poland, the children and grandchildren of such nobles in the Ukraine were drawn to the Counter-reformation and converted to Roman Catholicism. Polish and great Ukrainian nobles thus ended by sharing a religion, Roman Catholicism. Yet whereas the Counter-Reformation removed a new religious difference between Polish lords and Polish peasants, it created a new religious difference between Roman Catholic Ukrainian lords and Orthodox Ukrainian peasants.”[3]
“In the decades after 1569, a few Polish families gained enormous landholdings in Ukraine, and thousands of petty Polish nobles and Jews followed to work for the great lords…As gentry took on Polish ways and Jews took up their leases, the Orthodox peasantry was reduced from poverty to penury.”
Many of the impoverished peasants and minor gentry became Cossacks. “The richest Polish and Polonized nobles dominated local politics and sought to deny minor gentry (such as Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi) their traditional rights. Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi (ca. 1595-1657), a registered Cossack, fled to the Cossack headquarters after a Polish official stole his property, took his lover and murdered his son. Khmel’nyts’kyi became Cossack hetman and began the massive Cossack uprising of 1648…”
“After Khmel’nyts’kyi allied with Muscovy at Pereiaslav in 1654, his Cossacks helped Muscovy make war on the Commonwealth. This brought a series of calamities which killed perhaps a third of the Commonwealth’s population of ten million and began its fatal decline as a European power.”[4]
“Eight years after (the Union of) Hadiach (1658-59), Ukraine was split along the Dnipro River between the Commonwealth and Muscovy by the Treaty of Andrusovo. Today, the years between 1648 and 1667 are seen from a Ukrainian point of view as the time of a great Ukrainian rebellion against Polish oppression; or from a Russian point of view as the moment when the stray Ukrainian stream found its way into the great Russian river.”[5]
Gradually Russia absorbed much of the Ukraine and this process accelerated when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned in 1772, 1793 and 1795. “In right-bank Ukraine, in the tsar’s new Volyn’, Podolia, and Kiev provinces, about one-tenth of the population were Polish gentry, one-tenth were Jews, and most of the rest were Ukrainian peasants.”[6]
Russification began and by 1900 “only 3 percent of the population in the tsar’s Volhynian, Podolian, and Kiev provinces reported Polish as their first language. At this time, about four thousand Polish families owned as much land as three million former serfs.”
“These right-bank territories, where the gentry was Polish, were absent from Russian notions of “Ukraine” for much of the nineteenth century. For Russians, Ukraine was rather the left-bank absorbed by the empire in 1667.”[7]
Ukrainian nationalism, the kind we know today, which takes the shape of Neo-Nazism and which is the primary cause of the current war in the Ukraine, has its roots in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is curiously fitting that I am writing about these distant historical events while sitting in Vienna on a beautiful, bright Spring day. Vienna and Austria are ultimately the sources of the current discord.
“The lands of the Commonwealth seized by Austria in the partitions of 1772 and 1795, known as “Galicia and Lodomeria”, were home to more than two million East Slavic peasants. Catholic Poles were the available ruling class, and Galicia was left under the control of the Polish landholders. Although Poles were the majority in the western part of the province, where Cracow was the largest city after it was incorporated in 1846, and Ukrainians the majority in the eastern part, where Lwów/L’viv was the largest city, Galicia was a single province. By the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the population of the western half was perhaps 88 percent Polish and 7.5 percent Jewish, with a handful of German and East Slavs. The population of the eastern half of Galicia, by contrast, was perhaps 65 percent Ukrainian, 22 percent Polish and 12 percent Jewish.”[8]
It was clearly in Austria’s interests to foster a sense of Ukrainian “otherness” (other that is to its main imperial rival: Russia) whether it be in language, literature or sense of history. This is something Timothy Snyder implies but which needs to be categorically stated. The rise of nationalism and its corresponding demands were its inevitable consequences.
“Ukrainian demands to Vienna were a partition of Galicia and Ukrainian autonomy in the eastern part; proportional representation in the Galician and Austrian parliaments; and the Ukrainization of Lwów University. The long-term goals were the creation of a Ukrainian nation and the establishment of a Ukrainian state with “ethnic” borders.”[9]
“During the First World War, in which Austria fought Russia, Vienna persecuted Galicians it regarded as pro-Russian, indirectly aiding the Ukrainian cause. Galician Ukrainian politicians in Vienna favoured the establishment of an independent Ukraine in lands taken from the Russian empire, with close associations with a newly autonomous eastern Galicia.”[10]
It is of interest at this juncture to refer to letter #32 and the remarks of Webster Tarpley: “The main impulse behind Ukrainian independence came from the German general staff and its cynical geopolitical machinations during World War I. The German general staff transported Lenin back to Russia from Switzerland, had Hitler on its payroll, and also called modern Ukraine into existence.”
“…the Germans…identified about 50,000…POWs who based on their birthplaces and dialect might be convinced to become Ukrainians, separated out the officers and sergeants, and put the remaining proto-Ukrainians in special reeducation camps. These proto-Ukrainians were exempted from work, given better treatment, and put into classrooms, where they were given intensive courses in Ukrainian national identity, farming techniques, and the need for socialist revolution. (All of this was provided courtesy of the same Imperial German general staff which hoped to use communism and socialism to overthrow the Tsar and create chaos, hopefully knocking Russia out of the war.)”
In the event the attempt to create an independent Ukraine ended in ignominious defeat: “…the West Ukrainian Republic was defeated by July 1919 and forced to establish a government-in-exile in Vienna. The war cost Galician Ukrainians fifteen thousand men, created a generation of frustrated veterans, and confirmed a prevailing belief that Poland was the main enemy of the Ukraine. The war’s end left L’viv/Lwów and eastern Galicia inside Poland and made about three million Ukrainian speakers and just one million east Galician Jews citizens of the Second Polish Republic.”[11]
Poland emerged triumphant: “As a result of its victory in two eastern wars, the first against the West Ukrainian Republic (1918-19) and the second against Bolshevik Russia (1919-20), Poland absorbed Galicia and most of Volhynia.”[12]
“Pressured by the Entente powers, Poland promised political autonomy to the formerly Austrian territories of Galicia, though not the formerly Russian territories of Volhynia. In the early 1920s, Polish policy was to treat its Ukrainian citizens well enough that the Entente powers would recognise the Polish claim to eastern Galicia, which they did in 1923. The situation of Ukrainians left in the Soviet Union by the Treaty of Riga was at first in some ways much better, and then in every way much worse. Whereas Polish democracy was alien, unrepresentative, and eventually curtailed, Soviet communism was brutal, totalitarian, and eventually genocidal.”[13]
“…Soviet Ukraine suffered more from Stalin’s rule than any other European part of the USSR. Five million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in the Great Famine of 1932-33.”[14]
Timothy Snyder fails, regrettably, to provide sufficient background about the foundation of the OUN in 1929. Who funded it? Whose interests did it serve? At a guess it might be surmised: Deep State Austrian and German interests but the question remains unclear.
The OUN is of such importance that it will receive considerable attention: “The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Nationalistiv, OUN) was founded by Galician Ukrainian veterans of the West-Ukrainian-Polish war in Vienna in 1929. Although it included exiles from central and eastern Ukraine, its orientation was Galician…Its goal was an independent Ukraine to include all Ukrainian territories…Its first congress, in 1929, resolved that “Only the complete removal of all occupiers from Ukrainian lands will allow for the general development of the Ukrainian Nation within its own state.” The last of the OUN’s “Ten Commandments” is also clear: “Aspire to expand the strength, riches, and size of the Ukrainian State even by means of enslaving foreigners.”
“Although in principle the OUN’s enemies were all of the states that included territories inhabited by Ukrainians (the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia), in practice it operated within and against Poland. By murdering respected Ukrainians willing to cooperate with the Polish state, and by murdering Polish officials intending to help Ukrainians, the OUN divided Ukrainians from Poles, and provoked Polish retaliations that seemed to justify its radical stance.”[15]
“The OUN counted on German help, since in the grand endeavour of building a Ukrainian state from Polish, Soviet, Czechoslovak and Romanian territories, Germany was the only possible ally. Like the Italians and other European fascist movements, the OUN in the 1930s included leaders who sympathised with Nazi Germany and who believed Adolf Hitler would aid them for ideological reasons. The late 1930s found the OUN collaborating with the Abwehr, the intelligence service of Nazi Germany.”[16]
“Everything changed when the Polish state was destroyed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. For two years Poland’s territory and citizens were divided between Hitler and Stalin. Between 1939 and 1941, while the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact held, most of Poland’s Ukrainians fell under Soviet rule, while most Poles were ruled by the Nazis. In June 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, occupying Galicia, Volhynia, and the Soviet Ukraine along the way.”[17]
“In spring 1941, the OUN split into two branches, the OUN-Bandera and the OUN-Mel’nyk…After the OUN-Bandera defeated the OUN-Mel’nyk in a fratricidal war, the Nazis decapitated the OUN-Bandera. Bandera was arrested by the Germans after his OUN declared Ukrainian independence in L’viv in June 1941; perhaps four-fifths of the OUN-Bandera leadership were killed by the Germans in 1941-42.”[18]
Those who remained were young and relatively inexperienced. “When in April 1943 OUN-Bandera leader Mykola Lebed proposed “to cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population…” he was thirty-three years old.”[19]
“The OUN-Bandera’s tactic of ethnic cleansing was part of a strategy meant to further the goal of national liberation after the German defeat at Stalingrad.”[20]
“In March 1943 it created the UPA, tasked to fight the Germans, defend Ukrainians from the Soviets, and cleanse all Poles from the Ukraine.”[21]
“In spring 1943, the UPA gained control over the Volhynian countryside from the Germans, and began the murder and expulsion of the Polish population…”[22]
“Ukrainian partisans and their allies burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. Churches full of worshippers were burned to the ground. Partisans displayed beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disemboweled bodies, to encourage remaining Poles to flee.”[23]
Yet many Poles couldn’t believe what was happening to their neighbours and considered the tall tales they heard “conspiracy theory”. They stayed and were slaughtered.
“Just before dawn on 29 August 1943, UPA partisans and Ukrainians from neighbouring villages surrounded Gleboczya and moved to murder all of its inhabitants. Farmers already in the fields were surrounded and killed by blows from sickles. This alerted their wives, who were killed with bullets or farm implements or both. This made enough noise to give warning, and a few individuals escaped. At least 85 Poles were murdered. Some were decapitated, some were hanged, some had their skin torn from their muscles, some had their hearts gouged from their bodies, some were set aflame. Many were hacked into pieces with farm implements. Some suffered many, most, or even all of these tortures. The village was destroyed, and of it today there is no sign.”[24]
Altogether Snyder estimates that “the UPA killed forty to sixty thousand Polish civilians in 1943”.[25]
Should the heirs of the UPA and OUN, which is what the Ukrainian nationalists essentially are, be permitted to join NATO? Should they be equipped with nuclear or biological weapons? To quote a joke doing the rounds on social media:
Day 1: “There are no Nazis and no biolabs.”
Day 5: “Maybe there’s a few Nazis.”
Day 10: “Okay, yeah, there’s a ton of Nazis. But they’re good Nazis. And still no biolabs.”
Day 15: “Okay, maybe there are a few harmless biolabs.”
Day 20: “What’s your problem with Nazi biolabs?”
If Oleksiy Arestovych[26] is to be believed then the whole object of the exercise, the whole war, has the ultimate aim of facilitating NATO membership for the Ukraine. Is the death of so many men, women and children, the violence, the appalling destruction, the horror, really worth it?
[1] p. 105 The Reconstruction of Nations, Timothy Snyder
[2] p. 106 Ibid
[3] p. 111 Ibid
[4] p.114 Ibid
[5] p.117 Ibid
[6] p.119 Ibid
[7] pp.120-121 Ibid
[8] pp.122-123 Ibid
[9] p.129 Ibid
[10] pp.133-134 Ibid
[11] p.138 Ibid
[12] p.140 Ibid
[13] p.141 Ibid
[14] p.142 Ibid
[15] P.143 Ibid
[16] pp.143-144 Ibid
[17] p.154 Ibid
[18] p.164 Ibid
[19] p.165 Ibid
[20] p.165 Ibid
[21] p.167 Ibid
[22] p.168 Ibid
[23] p.169 Ibid
[24] p.171-172 Ibid
[25] p.170 Ibid
[26] “In an interview with Ukrainian news channel “Apostrophe.ua,” Arestovych asserted that Nato accession was Ukraine’s only hope of securing its independence. “If we don’t join Nato, it’s gonna be absorption by Russia within 10-12 years,” he said.
However, the choice was not simple and Ukraine has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place, while also stating that any talk of Ukrainian accession to Nato would “provoke Russia to launch a large-scale military operation against Ukraine.” Ukraine’s price for joining Nato, he claimed, would be large-scale war with Russia.”