Putin's Genocidal Tendencies
One year into all-out war in Ukraine and it’s clear that Garry Kasparov was right all along: “Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world must be stopped.”
By Michael Judge
TFP launched just weeks before Vladimir Putin’s murderous and misguided Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine. This week we recognize the one-year anniversary of that strategic blunder and the great heroism and resilience of the Ukrainian people.
In the past 12 months, TFP, along with millions around the globe, have been given a crash course on Russia’s genocidal history in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s continued desire to stamp out not only the Ukrainian people’s independence, but also their language, their literature, their art—indeed, the very culture that defines them as a separate nation.
This genocidal instinct is, as the Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist Oksana Zabuzhko recently wrote in The New York Times, a “monstrously enlarged version of the Ukrainian purges of the 1970s” when “those who dared to speak Ukrainian in public could be at any moment humiliated with the Russian colonialist phrase “Govorite po-chelovecheski!” (“Speak human!”).
It wasn’t until launching TFP on Feb. 1, 2022, when I began interviewing Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American writers, poets, human-rights activists, refugee resettlers, and military historians, that I began to understand the generational suffering Ukrainians have endured at the hands of Russian colonialists and Soviet expansionists for centuries—and the historical lies and propaganda that perpetuate that suffering today.
But it’s also a return to the horrors of the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 that killed millions, and the crimes against humanity perpetrated in Ukraine by Soviet and Russian leaders as far back as the 19th century. Like most people outside Ukraine, I knew little of this history before Russian tanks and troops began their failed march to Kyiv last February.
I’d read Garry Kasparov’s Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, published not long after Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea. And I understood, as Kasparov told me in a 2019 interview, that “Putin’s dream” is “to drive a wedge into NATO and also the EU, as he’s done with Ukraine, to weaken the global system of alliances that arose to maintain stability during the Cold War.” And that Putin wants, in Kasparov’s words, “a return of the great power, regional power system that existed before WWII, and WWI.”
But I had little understanding of the cultural degradation and degree of suffering the Ukrainian people had endured before bravely declaring their independence from the USSR on Aug. 24, 1991—first via a vote in parliament (321 in favor, 2 against), and then on Dec. 1 via a national referendum in which 92% of the nearly 32 million Ukrainians who voted (84% of the electorate) voted in favor of independence.
It wasn’t until launching TFP on Feb. 1, 2022, when I began interviewing Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American writers, poets, human-rights activists, refugee resettlers, and military historians, that I began to understand the generational suffering Ukrainians have endured at the hands of Russian colonialists and Soviet expansionists for centuries, and the historical lies and propaganda that perpetuate that suffering today. Below are excerpts from those TFP interviews, as well as one from a recent TFP essay by the Ukrainian-American writer Askold Melnyczuk.
If they teach us anything, it is that, as Kasparov wrote, “‘Winter is coming’ is a warning, not an inevitable conclusion. The good thing about the seasons of political and social change is that we can affect them if we try hard enough. If we rouse ourselves from our complacency and relearn how to stand up to dictators and terrorists who threaten the modern world we have built, we can alter our course.”
From my Feb. 22, 2022, interview with Kateryna Babkina, Ukrainian poet, fiction writer and journalist, published just two days before the invasion:
The war between Russia and Ukraine isn’t about to start. It’s happening right now. It’s been happening already for eight years. It’s not a local conflict. It’s a war started by Russia when Ukrainian lands were invaded by Russia. [What Ukraine needs is] some real support … some real sanctions that would make Putin think twice about taking more Ukrainian land. But at least recognizing that this is not a ‘local’ conflict, that this war was started when Russia invaded Crimea and that Ukrainian territory is now illegally run by Russian authorities: that would be appreciated. I know that a lot of important issues, like trade and gas and oil, are involved. But Russia’s actions aren’t safe for the world. I’m not talking just about Ukraine now or Europe or Germany. The earth is very small, and Russia doesn’t play fair, and is a real threat. And the international community should acknowledge that. … Go and read Ukrainian books because contemporary Ukrainian literature is wonderful. Tell people to ask for more translations, seek out the poems and stories and books of contemporary Ukrainian authors, and you’ll know more, you’ll understand better.
From my March 2, 2022, interview with Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, an international refugee resettlement organization:
[T]his is far beyond the worst-case scenario the U.N. had envisioned with its contingency planning. I think they were primarily thinking that there would be more displacement in the east with advanced aggression there, right? But not this four-front, national attack. And so they didn’t really anticipate huge refugee flows. They expected huge internally displaced person flows. But the massive outflow of refugees was something of a surprise. … Ukraine’s a huge country with 45 million people. And if all the women and children flee, that's going to be an awful lot of people to even give temporary refuge too. And it already is. It’s likely already in the millions. … [M]any in the U.S. believe this is something that Europe will take care of. And I think that’s largely true. But we’re not going to be able to just stand by and not respond. Poland and Hungary and Slovakia and Moldova are simply not going to be able to take in, even temporarily, the huge number of refugees that are coming. The U.S. will have to get involved. Many Ukrainians have relatives here. So we’re going to have to at least prioritize those people and bring them here, in addition to giving Europe whatever assistance we can.
From my March 15, 2022, interview with Kenneth Roth, then-executive director of Human Rights Watch:
Russia’s siege warfare is moving into war crime territory, in general, because of their refusal to allow for the safe evacuation of civilians or to allow humanitarian aid in. Thankfully, there is a mechanism for accountability in Ukraine, because of the role of the International Criminal Court, which we have not had in Syria because there hasn’t been jurisdiction there. The ICC recently launched an investigation into Russia’s reported war crimes in Ukraine. There are, I think, 38 governments that are formally backing it. I presume that they’ll provide resources. There’s a lot of active evidence collection. …[R]ather than give civilians warning and a safe passageway out, Putin besieges the city, shells it indiscriminately, prevents evacuation until people are utterly desperate. And then at the last minute, after much loss of life, he lets people leave. That's what he did in Syria. That was the pattern in Aleppo and the siege of Eastern Ghouta. And I think we're seeing that most acutely right now in Mariupol. … [T]his is a reminder of the dangers of autocratic rule. Because there is no way this war would've started had the Russian people been asked. Putin shut down the political opposition, and shut down the independent media, and barred protests, and created this empire under him as czar. …Putin had his reasons for wanting to pursue this war—whether it's historical delusions of grandeur, or just the hope for a nationalist surge to overcome his growing unpopularity. But he did it on his own. And that’s the risk you take, in Russia or anywhere else, when you have an unaccountable government.
From my March 18, 2022, interview with Eliot A. Cohen, military historian, author, and contributing writer at The Atlantic:
I think Putin made judgments about the United States being in decline, which were incorrect. I think he made a judgment about the departure of [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel, which was incorrect. And above all, he made judgments about Ukraine that were incorrect. He thought they were going to be welcomed. He thought he’d be able to brush aside the Ukrainian state and Ukrainians would want to be part of Russia. That’s the biggest mistake. I think he also came into this war with profound illusions about his own military. And so I think he felt he had all the pieces in place. But each of those assumptions was wrong.
From my March 23, 2022, interview with author and military historian Bing West:
Putin basically believed that the United States was a weak country that would cave. And that NATO was no longer NATO; that Germany was in his pocket. So he made a miscalculation; that’s clear. Now the question is, will NATO and the U.S. persist with the toughness that they've shown to date? Continuing, even if Kyiv falls? Remember, everything goes through Poland. And Poland is going to be threatened. Biden backed off with the MiG-29s. I hope that he’ll be stronger next time. The amount of power the president has as commander-in-chief is enormous. Congress can’t do anything. Congress can pass any resolutions they want, but all roads lead back to the president of the United States as the commander-in-chief.
From my April 29, 2022, interview with Ukrainian-American writer and translator Askold Melnyczuk:
Over the last couple of centuries, Russia has several times forbidden the use of Ukrainian in anything it printed. Ukrainian books have been proscribed. The language has been proscribed. I’m actually working on a piece called “The Dangerous Tongue,” because I’m simply trying to sort out what it is that people might find so threatening about an indigenous language. Ukrainian is the indigenous language of the people in that area and has been for hundreds of years. But it would not become a widely published written language until the early 19th century. And that was when Russia began to clamp down on it, because it was a language of the serfs in Ukraine, who were the slaves in plantations of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian magnates, as they were known. Who wants to hear what your slaves have to say to you? I think that is an attitude that has remained a dominant one in Russia. It’s quite shocking actually, when you think about how little dialogue has taken place, even in the West, between Russian intellectuals and scholars and Ukrainian intellectuals and scholars. There is a kind of incredible arrogance on the part of native Russian speakers toward the language itself. People feel hunted in Ukraine, because they are. For Russians like Putin, Ukrainians should not exist. They’re somehow an insult to him. It’s a typical imperial attitude.
From my Aug. 29, 2022, interview with Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina:
[Eradicating Ukrainian culture] is actually one of the crucial goals of the Russian regime. Putin, infamously, has said this—that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” This is what he claims. And this is one of the reasons they would always say, if you have a culture, show it to us, even as they were executing Ukrainian intellectuals. “We have great Russian culture, what do you have?” While they were responsible for wiping much of it out. They didn’t even start in the 20th century; they started long before. Our main poet, Taras Shevchenko [1814–1861], spent years in the Russian Army being punished, and it was forbidden for him to write or draw. So, this was a method of punishment for him for writing in Ukrainian, and for representing the Ukrainians as a separate people. So, this was happening all the time. Then, in the 1930s, with the “Executed Renaissance,” Russia literally executed an entire generation of very talented Ukrainian avant-garde writers. This was the culmination of something that was going on for decades, but it didn’t stop there. The 1980s, for instance, were relatively good years for Russian writers. Some freedoms, like Glasnost, had come. But for Ukraine it wasn’t like that. For example, my favorite poet, the very famous Ukrainian poet, Vasyl Stus, was murdered in a Russian camp in 1985. There were many arrests in the ’70s and ’80s in Ukraine. This fight never stopped for Ukrainians.
From Askold Melnyczuk’s Jan. 19, 2023, TFP essay “I Was a Pacificist—And Then They Came to Kill My Family”:
My parents were Ukrainian refugees who fled Eastern Europe under the threat of death in 1944. They spent five years in a refugee camp before finding a sponsor who enabled them to come to the United States. A war doesn’t end when treaties are signed. In my family the effects of war trauma have played out across several generations. A heightened awareness of the evils of war led me to attend antiwar marches every time the U.S. pursued another miscalculated foreign mission—in Vietnam, in Central America, in Iraq. U.S. interventions in those countries were aggressive and often uninvited. The situation in Ukraine, which has been invaded by a neighbor with a history of attempting genocide against it, is entirely different. Those urging Ukraine to cede territory to Russia either have no idea of the fate to which they are consigning those trapped by Russian occupiers—rape, abduction, Siberian exile, torture and, of course, execution—or they don’t care about the consequences of their ignorant advocacy.
In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik observed that Japan was pushed into a militarist posture by a minority of nationalist extremists because of “the universal inability of decent people to respond to violence when subjected to it.” Pacifism in the face of tyranny will only encourage, not halt its spread. Pacificism in the face of tyranny doesn’t work unless you are willing not merely to exchange liberty for slavery, freedom of thought and expression for a soul-withering silence, and suppression of all natural human responses to brutality: You also consent to the destruction of your culture.
Putin's Genocidal Tendencies
Great article. The sickness of the megalomaniac Putin and his cronies is real and hopefully will not be forgotten when they are tried for crimes against humanity in international tribunals!
Thank you. Harrowing and brutal reminder of Ukrainian reality - not for a year, or nine - but centuries of a people being dehumanized and deculterated. I know these things are true, yet how painful to hear those who do not understand, who dismiss & deny the realities, cultural & personal. (Yes, I’m speaking to you MTG and all your Putinesque allies & naysayers, Carlson too. Despicable & intentional ignorance.)