From Stalinism to Putinism
Ukraine recalled the fall of Nazi Germany this week. But the biggest threat to the country has always been Russia.
Lists of names created by Soviet secret police of some of the almost 1,700 Ukrainians they killed in June 1941 in a prison in Lviv, Ukraine. In 2009, the space was converted into a museum, where the display hangs. (c. Martin Kuz)
Olesia Isaiuk walked down a barren hallway lined with solid metal doors that opened to small concrete cells. Decades ago in this former prison, blood had streamed and pooled along the floors, the aftermath of a mass atrocity. The stains faded over time. The horror soaked into Ukraine’s collective memory.
From the time Josef Stalin rose to power in 1924 until his death in 1953, the Soviet dictator sought to crush the will of Ukrainians and their sense of nationhood. His secret police imprisoned, exiled and executed millions of “dissidents,” a catch-all label applied to anyone who believed in the idea of a sovereign Ukraine.
The majority lived in the country’s west, where resistance to Russia stretches back centuries. When German forces swept into the region in June 1941, two years after Adolf Hitler lit the fuse on World War II, Stalin chose to kill Ukrainians rather than resist the Nazis. He ordered his security services to execute tens of thousands of captive dissidents for fear that they would join the fight against the Red Army if liberated by the invaders.
The secret police killed an estimated 40,000 prisoners in six days in western Ukraine alone. Most were shot. Thousands of others were blown up, burned alive or bayoneted. The victims included women and children.
In the center of Lviv, the region’s largest city, Soviet authorities murdered nearly 1,700 people in a three-story prison on Lonsky Street. Ukrainian officials converted the block-long, mustard-colored building into a museum in 2009, and last summer, I went there to meet Olesia, a researcher and historian whose work focuses on Ukraine’s struggle for independence during and after WWII.
Archival photos that hang on the walls show residents searching for loved ones among the bodies laid out in the prison courtyard after German forces seized control of Lviv. Large frames contain dozens of sheets of yellowing paper with typed and handwritten lists of names that the Soviet police created to catalog their victims.
Olesia described Vladimir Putin’s wide-scale invasion as an extension of Moscow’s legacy of terror that during the Stalin regime gave rise to fierce armed resistance among western Ukrainians. Eight decades later, the enemy remains unchanged. “It is the same struggle, the same war,” she told me. “Ukraine is trying to get out from Russian domination and rule.”
This week Ukraine and Russia each marked the 79th anniversary of the defeat of the Third Reich. Ukraine moved the date and renamed its commemoration last year in response to Putin’s war; President Volodymyr Zelensky proclaimed May 8 the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in World War II 1939-1945. In a national address Wednesday, he drew a line from Hitler to Putin.
“Russia has brought the terrible past back into the daily news,” Zelensky said, “proving with each new crime that Nazism has (been) revived.”
The occasion’s emphasis on the triumph over Germany obscures a barbed truth: Before and after the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, Stalin, who conscripted millions of Ukrainians into the Red Army, posed the greatest threat to the country’s existence. His reign of genocide has resumed under Putin, who during Russia’s Victory Day parade Thursday hailed his troops as “our heroes” while they continue killing civilians across Ukraine.
Left: Photos of Ukrainian victims of the mass killing committed by Soviet secret police in June 1941 in a prison in Lviv, Ukraine. Right: A newspaper photo shows residents searching for loved ones among the bodies laid out in the prison courtyard after German forces seized control of Lviv. (c. Martin Kuz)
The renewal of Russian atrocities on Ukrainian soil should provoke an overdue reconsideration in the West of the country’s partisans who fought against the Soviets — against the Russians, more precisely. Western pundits, historians and journalists have tended to malign Ukraine’s WWII-era crusade for liberation from Moscow (and Berlin) as an ill-fated cause propelled by a feral strain of nationalism.
In that version of history, deeply influenced by the Kremlin’s post-war propaganda and embedded within the insidious myth of a “Great Russia,” Ukraine was a mere vassal state. The desire of its people for autonomy — and the suffering and terror they endured for the entirety of Stalin’s rule and until the Soviet Union dissolved — fell beneath the concern of Western leaders.
Putin’s war of choice validated the warnings that Ukrainians had implored the West to heed since before WWII: Russia seeks to destroy their land, their culture, their identity — and the very concept of democracy. Western intellectuals long have brandished “nationalism” as a slur against Ukraine, and without question, pogroms and other atrocities disfigure its past, as with every country in Eastern and Central Europe.
Yet Russia’s invasion magnifies the broader, often ignored context of Ukraine’s historical fight to survive. In that respect, it is nationalism — defined as resolute patriotism in opposition to Moscow’s virulent imperialism — that has enabled Ukrainians to withstand Putin, Stalin, Lenin and the czars before them. Only an irreducible conviction in the right to live free has prevented their extinction.
“There has been a tug of war for centuries between the truth and Russia’s distortion of truth when talking about Ukraine,” Olesia said. “We as Ukrainians know the truth. We hope the rest of the world is starting to see it.”
A few days ago, as Ukraine recalled the victory over Germany in WWII, Russia struck Lviv, Kyiv and other cities with more than 70 missiles and drones. The attack prompted Zelensky to refer to “Nazi Putin” on social media and offer another warning from Ukraine to the West. “The world must understand who is who,” he wrote. “The world must not give a chance to new Nazism.”
Or the same Stalinism.
Etc.
— Anne Applebaum examined the global rise of pro-autocracy, anti-democracy propaganda — fueled by Russia, China and far-right adherents in Europe and America — in an illuminating piece this week in The Atlantic.
— My thanks to Marco Badea and Florin Negruțiu with the Romanian news site Republica.ro for the chance to offer a few thoughts on Ukraine and the war. (You might need to rely on Google Translate to read the approximate English version.)
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