Of Father’s Day and fascism

Drawing strength from my late dad’s fight against Russian tyranny as America plunges into autocracy

Eugene Kuz in his first weeks of fatherhood, holding his daughter, Annette, in South Dakota in 1962. A native of Ukraine who escaped the Soviet Union, he had arrived in America seven years earlier.

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The education my father gave me about the need to resist autocracy began during his lifetime. He told stories about joining the struggle to free his native Ukraine from Russia’s shackles in the years that Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union and killed millions of Ukrainians. But I absorbed only some of what he shared, too ignorant and lacking in curiosity to grasp the larger meaning of his memories, too removed from the horrors he survived as a boy and young man.

The decade since he passed away has imparted a deeper understanding of his experiences and warnings. The “credit” for that awakening lies with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and American tinpot despot Donald Trump, authoritarian playmates whose obsessive desire to bury democracy matches a pathological impulse to inflict suffering.

In 2014, Putin annexed Crimea and invaded a swath of Ukraine’s southeast, launching his forever war on my father’s homeland. As the invasion continued the following spring, Trump announced his candidacy for president, lighting the fuse on American fascism.

By then, Eugene Kuz had reached the final months of his life, and he died in fall 2015 at age 92. His decades-long fight against declining health reduced neither his powers of observation nor his abiding love for Ukraine. Soon after Putin rose to power in 2000, my father, who knew a tyrant when he saw one, branded the new Russian president another Stalin, a label that Putin has come to embody during a quarter-century reign steeped in the blood of innocents.

In the years after arriving in America in 1955 on the Queen Mary, Eugene married, started a family, established a solo medical practice and earned U.S. citizenship. In the 1980s, he supported Ronald Reagan, a Republican president who recognized the threat that communism posed to democracy worldwide and who never blinked in staring down the Kremlin. His steadfast pressure on Russia in that pivotal decade hastened the Soviet Union’s implosion in 1991. My father greeted the moment with a sense of triumph tempered by twin concerns that Moscow might reanimate and Kyiv remained in peril. Personal history had taught him that Russians regard their nation’s imperialism as a birthright, handed from each credulous, manipulated generation to the next.

Eugene had landed in America with a credo he repeated the rest of his life to anyone within earshot: “Never trust Russia.” His sentiment captured the consensus in America before Trump’s emergence in 2015. Ten years later, I’m certain he would be at once dismayed and furious that much of the country embraces a Republican president who enables Moscow’s brutality while plunging America itself into autocracy. I can imagine his disgust at Trump’s feckless betrayal of Ukraine and spineless eagerness to unleash the U.S. military on the nation’s own people. And I suspect he now would recite a second credo: Never trust America.

Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s return to the White House have crystallized my father’s tutorials about the fragility and sanctity of liberty. In 1943, as a young man a few months shy of 20, he made the brave choice to enlist in Ukraine’s fight against the Soviet Union during World War II. He served as a field medic with the Galicia Division, a unit assembled under German command, applying skills he had gained as a medical student in Lviv before the war interrupted his studies. As the unit battled the Red Army across Slovenia, Slovakia and Austria, he mended the broken bodies of soldiers who, like him, sought nothing more than to live in a free Ukraine.

Their dream ended with the division’s surrender to Allied forces in 1945. Only the intervention of British, Polish and Vatican officials — who defied Stalin’s demands to repatriate the Galicia soldiers — spared them from certain execution. Eugene felt forever indebted to the West for his reprieve, and the opportunities he later found in America nurtured a devotion to his adopted homeland almost as intense as his bond with Ukraine. He saw the United States as the keeper of the democratic flame that Russia prevented his homeland from lighting until 1991 — and that Putin seeks again to extinguish, aided by Trump’s indefensible and nauseating indifference.

On this Father’s Day, with Ukraine under siege from Russia and the United States under siege from within, I remember Eugene and draw strength from his courageous refusal to bow down to tyrants. Dad, I’m sorry it took me so long to get it. Thank you for teaching me. I will never forget.

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— I grew up in Minnesota, where early Saturday a crazed Trump supporter shot and killed a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband and wounded another Democratic legislator and his wife. I hesitate only slightly to say “crazed” is an unnecessary adjective when describing MAGA voters for the simple reason that political violence is not an aberration in Trump’s America. Those who support him have helped him foster a climate in which such depraved acts against Democrats are commonplace, even encouraged. There’s a word for that: fascism.

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