As the Russian-Ukrainian War continues, now both in Ukraine and in Russia, the adage that history repeats itself is especially poignant, and I speak of long-term history. For the past five centuries, the Moscovite state has proceeded to see itself as the “Mother of the Slavs” and beyond the Slavic regions of Eastern and Central Europe, on to wherever it can rule, whether in Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus or, from Stalin down to 1991, even into the West with the occupation of eastern Germany.
In all of the areas that Russia has been able to conquer, rather than recognizing the indigenous populations, Moscow has sought to “russify” them by destroying their native cultures, forcing the inhabitants to speak Russian, controlling their means of production and the sale of their goods and seeing their religious faiths in the pure Marxian term as being the “opiate” of the people.
In 2014, Putin moved in to seize the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Encountering no significant opposition, he was encouraged to broaden his scope to include more of Ukraine. The Ukrainian steppes are analogous to the American Great Plains, namely the “breadbasket” for agricultural productivity. During the period of Soviet rule, the government operated under the system of planned economy, the brainchild of Stalin and his economic advisor, Veniamin Dymshits.
Following the Bolshevik seizure of power towards the end of the First World War, Russia underwent a severe famine, the suffering of which Western countries sought to alleviate by dispatching relief missions. The U.S. sent aid through the American Relief Administration under the direction of Herbert Hoover. European countries assisted in the effort, including the Pope who sent a Papal Relief Mission. The various aid packages kept thousands of Russians from starvation and gave Lenin and the Bolsheviks a breathing space to consolidate control over the disparate populations.
Under Dymshits’ direction, Planned Economy, especially in the realm of agriculture, was a colossal failure, leading ultimately to the necessity for the Soviet Union, despite its control over the vast plains of Ukraine, to need to buy wheat form the West, particularly from the U.S.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, 15 new nation states emerged from its former territory. Initially, they were termed “the Commonwealth of Independent States.” Today, Putin’s goal is to reunite those nations under the Russian umbrella. He has made notable progress in his goal of resubmitting Belarus and Georgia to Russian control. In 2014 Crimea was another step in that direction, and now Ukraine itself is on the platter.
As the present war progresses, thousands of Ukrainians have fled their homeland to neighboring countries, which have tried to give them asylum. In Poland, churches were being opened to provide shelter and food for the refugees. The conflict is the first land war in Europe since the end of the Second World War and many Europeans had come to think of the Cold War as now being a part of history, but as far as Ukraine is concerned, it is very hot.
In the 1970s when Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union, a popular tale concerned his conduct of the Politburo, the governing arm of the Communist Party. As the story goes, Brezhnev came into a meeting and said to his fellow Politburo members that he had experienced a terrible nightmare, to which they asked what it was. He replied that he had dreamt that the whole world had gone communist.
His colleagues responded that what he described was a beautiful dream as world communism was the goal for which they were working, and they asked why he called it a nightmare. He answered, “If the whole world goes communist, where will we buy our wheat?”
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My thanks to alert reader, Ted Munns, who noticed that I had referred to Gladys’ abode as a coup, rather than a coop. I could attribute the slip to being a typo, but I wonder if subconsciously, I was anticipating a potential revolt by her fellow feathered residents against her hegemony, or perhaps I only was thinking of “fowl play.”
