Regarding Ukraine, a group hug astride a memory hole

Following reports that Biden administration officials have privately urged Ukraine to show willingness to negotiate with Russia, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak recently told Italy’s La Repubblica, “Russia has invaded us with mobile crematoria and half a million body bags. If we stop defending ourselves, we will cease to exist. Literally. Physically. We will continue to fight even if we are stabbed in the back.”

As of this writing, with several key races still not finalized, control of the U.S. Senate was pending, though the House was leaning Republican. Regardless, as our opposite political extremes coalesce in their intended walk-away from Ukraine, we could do worse than consider an earlier joinder of Democrats and Republicans; it was not just a stab in Ukraine’s back but a case of strategic aphasia.

On Nov. 16, 1933, a thoroughly liberal President Franklin Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR, stamping affirmation and credibility onto a monstrous netherworld.  “Caligula” was now legit, leading a worldwide movement to destroy bourgeois capitalism helmed by the very host extending the invite. Moscow has been RSVPing for generations.

But there’s decidedly more. Joseph Stalin was concurrently starving Ukraine “to dispose of the Ukrainian problem.” Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” called it the classic case. Disbelief, horror and despondency choked the gulag — the American president actually had addressed the genocidaire as “Your Excellency”!

George Orwell would later write, “Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of Russophiles.”  Washington, however, was well informed of the Holodomor by its legations in Latvia and Greece, and also by the Brits, who already had their embassy in Moscow. The British Foreign Office knew of the “ghastly horror” in Ukraine and that Ukraine “has been bled white.” Admitting that the news was “hair-raising” and “horrifying,” a British internal memo wrote:  “We do not want to make [information about the genocide] public, however, because the Soviet Government would resent it and our relationship with them would be prejudiced. We cannot give this explanation in public.” 

Eight days after the reset of the century, the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria was packed. More than 1,200 Democrats and the titans of American industry and finance — most, if not all, of them staunch Republicans — jointly stood to lustily sing “L’Internationale,” the anthem of the World Communist Party. They weren’t greeting, but honoring, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. A spitting cobra, Litvinov had just charmed a thoroughly credulous American president and now mesmerized the audience. How not to believe Litvinov’s  condemnation of “the supremacy of some peoples over others, and the right of some peoples arising therefrom to dominate others or even to exterminate them”? Business was the dopamine.

Even before this recognition, American capitalism raced to weld the industrial and economic base for the proletariat. We cloned Ford’s massive River Rouge complex outside Detroit as the Gorky Auto Works (producing cars, including “Black Raven” death vans, for the OGPU/NKVD/KGB secret police), the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Ind., as the Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works, and the Muscle Shoals Hydroelectric Station of the Tennessee Valley Authority as the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station. Next to Stalin, the American engineer was god in the Soviet Union. 

Faculty club gentility has no place here. If ever there were a strategic monstrosity, Nov. 16, 1933, and its aftermath was it. Recognition and abject silence about Moscow’s genocide in Ukraine was more than a surrender of our moral sovereignty. We aided and abetted Russian occupation and control of the keystone “republic,” ensuring the viability of the USSR for generations, with all its consequences. It brought the world to the precipice, killed 100,000 of our finest, bled our treasury, introduced “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, to our thesaurus and taught our children to “duck and cover.” Politically and economically empowering an existential enemy was inane — full-throated and bipartisan. 

The Republican embrace of the Democrats on the issue continued into the 1950s. Coincidently, in 1955, a compilation of testimonies by Ukrainian refugees was published in Detroit. They were survivors of Stalin’s starvation politics, of Adolf Hitler, and then of the grisly forced repatriation by U.S. and British troops in post-war Europe. Republican Congressman Charles Kersten wrote in the introduction to the volume about the Holodomor:  “When an historian of the 21st century looks back to find the basic cause of the breakup of communist imperialism, he will very likely look upon the resistance in the Ukraine as a major factor. This book documents much of that resistance and will [be] valuable to the historian of the future to ascertain why communism failed.” 

You would have thought that today’s MAGA Republicans would have been the first to pick up on this, if only to castigate their political rivals on the left. While the recent letter by the House Progressive Caucus was retracted, appeasement remains the self-anesthetizing happy talk at that end of the spectrum. And, leaving aside febrile infatuation with Vladimir Putin, no “blank check” and “not another penny” for Ukraine is today’s clarion call of some of the right. 

What, then, is the value proposition of Ukraine? By one estimate, the Cold War cost us $13 thousand billion. Ukraine’s renewal of independence in 1991 ensured the fall of the “Evil Empire,” with the result that Ukraine helped “Make America Great Again.” The dissolution of the USSR halted America’s strategic retreat, allowing us to recoup a global primacy we hadn’t seen since the end of World War II. How much is that worth?

What’s the value of Ukraine battling the state that catalyzed “Islamic terrorism” against America? Our 20-year war on terror was another $8 thousand billion. Our aid to Ukraine doesn’t account for even a fractional percentage rounding error in those numbers. In our shambolic stampede from Afghanistan, it was Ukraine that pulled off a dramatic rescue that neither we nor NATO could or wanted to undertake.

And how is our global credibility affected by the Clinton administration having hectored Ukraine into giving (not just destroying) its nuclear arsenal to Russia, of all places? A bipartisan congressional campaign to strip Ukraine of its conventional weaponry followed, with a Democratic junior senator from Illinois standing in Donetsk and intoning, “For the safety of the Ukrainian people and people around the world, by keeping them out of conflicts around the world.”

What is Putin to make of our strategic acumen?

With Russia as the self-declared sole, celebratory legatee of the USSR, Stalin’s acolyte doesn’t need to divine a new Dante’s “Inferno” for Ukraine. We already have the screenshot from 1933.  A certain Prokopenko, a communist party plenipotentiary, was laconic: “The famine was brought about in Ukraine in order to reduce the number of Ukrainians, resettle in their place people from another part of the USSR, and in this way kill all thought of independence.”

What to do?

First, recognize the issue. For once, Litvinov’s successor, Sergei Lavrov, was not lying: “This is not so much about Ukraine, but about the world order. The current crisis is a fateful moment, an epochal moment in modern history, because it reflects the battle in the broadest sense of the word for how the world order will look.”

Second, redeem an infamy, prevent another, recoup our global deterrence credibility and save that order. 

Victor Rud is the past chairman of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and now chairs its Committee on Foreign Affairs. He is the senior adviser to the Centre for Eastern European Democracy in Toronto. The opinions expressed here are his alone.