[re: Ukraine; Sergei Roy] Response to Shenfield (JRL#77)

Subject: Response to Shenfield (JRL#77)
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2014
From: Sergei Roy <sergeiroy@yandex.ru>

First, I would like to thank all the nice people who have written to me to say all those nice words about my tour d’horizon “Ukraine: Triumph, Tragedy, or Farce?” – a comparison of certain features of the anti-Communist, anti-Soviet, democratic revolution of 1991 and of the recent nationalist coup d’etat in Ukraine.

Now for some critical comments on my piece by Stephen Shenfield. My impression was that this author carefully passed over the main burden of my essay, actually just skimmed through it, focusing on a few disjointed points that he found “objectionable” (not a nice word, objectionable, but let that pass). So, what were those offending aspects of my work?

1. “For one thing, it is one-sided,” says Shenfield. You know, I rather agree. I am firmly on one side, the side of rule of law; on the side of the people’s right to elect their government through a formalized democratic procedure, and to do so without brazen foreign interference, with foreign politicians and agents overtly and covertly aiding and abetting the overthrow of a lawfully elected government; I am against one tenth of one percent of a nation deciding the fate of the whole nation, especially when that tenth of one percent includes armed gangs of storm troopers with very distinct Fascist antecedents, ideology, strategy, fuehrers, and tactics. I just cannot be laidback and understanding about those storm troopers. My Uncle Pyotr fell in the battle of Kiev in 1941; now those swastika-flaunting Nazis rule the roost in Kiev, and not just in Kiev. Yes, I am very one-sided on this issue of Nazism. About as one-sided as the decisions of the Nuremberg tribunal.

Indeed, it all comes down to this: to the sides we take. The West has accepted the newly installed government in Kiev as legitimate, even if it came to power through a violent overthrow of the Yanukovich regime by the Euromaidan insurgency. However, there is this little matter of the anti-Maidan, of the rallies throughout the East and South of Ukraine in favor of holding referendums on the country’s federalization, against the oligarchs Kiev appointed as Gauleiters of these regions, against the armed gangs from the West killing and kidnapping anti-Maidan activists.

Why can’t Western politicians, media, and well-trained public opinion accept that these rallies, this whole anti-Maidan movement has at least as much legitimacy as the Maidan? Do we hear of any such broadminded and balanced approaches? No, we do not. A typical scene: a Maidan activist sticks a knife in an anti-Maidan activist, the young man dies, the killer is arrested, then quietly released – because he is a Maidan hero. Another scene in another city: a gang of Maidan activists open fire on anti-Maidan activists, kill two, hole up in a building, are besieged there, then arrested by the police – and quietly released. Anti-Maidan activists are arrested at night by either the police or some unidentified individuals in camouflage without any semblance of legality, no court order or anything; they are then brought to Kiev and thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of separatism.

If this isn’t Fascism, I wonder what is. If Russophobia and Anti-Semitism aren’t Fascism, what is? Do we wait until gas chambers go into operation before we recognize what’s in front of our noses?

Where there is Fascism, the response is anti-Fascism, that’s a law of political reality. The junta in Kiev ignores the outraged voices of the people of the South and East of Ukraine, their demands for federalization. What is the response of the Kiev junta? They send in police and Right Sector storm troopers to Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk. They call the anti-Maidan protesters separatists and terrorists, and they pass a law threatening the protesters with fifteen years or life imprisonment for such acts of protest. They’ve arrested 70 persons in Kharkov. Do they now intend to arrest 700 in Donetsk? Or 7,000? Do they intend to crush protests by violence alone, with the aid of private armies from the West if their own police refuse to shoot at their brothers? Academi mercenaries are already arriving at Ukrainian airports; they are there already, people talk to them, but they merely smile, as they speak neither Russian nor, still less, Ukrainian. A pertinent question: who is paying them their fabulous salaries? Not the junta, that’s for sure; Ukraine’s treasury has nothing but empty coffers. That means they are there as U.S. citizens about to start hostilities, with all that that will entail.

What are the junta’s next steps? Building concentration camps? Orders to the police, Right Sector bandits, and the mercenaries to start shooting to kill? That’s a direct route to suicide, and I don’t mean political suicide, either. They are sitting on a powder keg, and playing with matches. Only madmen do that; but the tragedy is, it’s not just madmen who get hurt by the explosion. There are ever so many of us innocent bystanders.

2. Shenfield further asks: “is it not worth considering what actions and statements on Russia’s part might have contributed to the war psychosis in Ukraine?” Really, Mr. Shenfield. Psychosis is a mental disorder, and its genesis is within the disordered brain, not outside. It was Timoshenko who swore to “leave no burnt-out field even” after her allies the world over attacked Russia with nuclear weapons. I mentioned that well-documented fact in my text. Another fact: it was Tyagnibok swearing to race through Red Square in a tank. A third fact: Right Sector swore more than once that it would start guerrilla warfare on Russian territory, something that its members had already done in Chechnya years ago. These escapees from a lunatic asylum clearly needed a cold shower, and it was duly administered by the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament at Putin’s request. What more needs to be said on this subject?

Oh yes, those Russian troops that “are occupying not only Crimea but also adjacent parts of Kherson Province.” Before the March 16 referendum Russian troops were stationed in Sevastopol in strict accordance with a treaty between Ukraine and Russia. After that date, it’s no one’s damned business what Russian troops are stationed where on Russian soil. Especially as that particular bit of Russian soil has been saturated with Russian blood over centuries.

Then there are the Russian troops “in Kherson Province.” Do us a favor, Mr. Shenfield: do not repeat Ukrainian media’s canards, okay? Who saw those troops? What are their numbers? What cities or villages have they seized? How far have they penetrated into Ukrainian territory? Twenty kilometers? Ten? A hundred meters? Ten meters? The truth of the matter is that the border between the Crimean and Kherson regions was an administrative border; that is to say, there was no border there at all. Now it’s a border between two different states, and it will have to be demarcated. There may be some shifting back and forth, I just do not know any details. All I have heard on the Net was truck drivers crossing the new border expressing their views on the new order in Truckdriver language. Incidentally, they were talking to Ukrainian customs officers, not Russian troops.

3. Next charge: “official Russian political discourse” conjures up an “imaginary mass of refugees flooding into Russia from Eastern Ukraine.” Lord, this is simply childish. Human beings are not driven from place to place, from country to country, by “political discourse.” Especially not when their access to such political discourse in the neighboring country is blocked by their government banning Russian TV channels, by government persecution of journalists at home, by wholesale ownership of the media by the oligarchs, and so on.

And even all this is by the by. People are driven from place to place in search of work, security, health services, education for their children, and so on. All Europe knows that. We in Russia know that even better, perhaps. As I putter about in the garden at my dacha, I have to answer about half a dozen times a day questions from behind the fence from passing Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, etc. in broken Russian: “Rabot yest?” To soften the blow, I make a feeble joke in a mixture of broken Russian and Turkic: Rabot bar, tanga yok. “I have work, but no money.” Nothing illusory about these people. Nothing illusory about thousands of Ukrainian citizens queuing up to receive Russian passports. Nothing illusory about that chap Victor from Odessa who is coming next week to do some work on our house; especially not him – he weighs about 120 kilos. Nothing illusory about those three and a half million other Ukrainian citizens coming to work in the RF annually. Each of them is counted at the border, you know. At the end of the year, we will know just how the figures have risen. In the meantime, Stephen Shenfield is free to ask his cute questions; not much harm in that, if not much sense, either.

4. The language issue, now. Shenfield asserts that “the harsh and aggressive form often assumed by Ukrainian nationalism” has something to do with (is explained by?) the fact that “Russian speakers, in Russia and in Ukraine itself, hold the Ukrainian language in disdain.”

This analysis of the current language situation in Ukraine stands in about the same relation to reality as the tales in Ukrainian school textbooks about the Great Ukrainian Empire which has existed for forty thousand years and of which Rome was scared to death.

Seeing other people’s languages as inferior to their own is a very common occurrence, of which every linguist worth his salt is aware; linguists, if they are professionals like myself, are least affected by such prejudices. Shenfield attributes such a disdainful attitude to me simply because I described in outline the rise of Ukrainian from a patois to the status of a literary language, largely through the efforts of Ukrainian Communists. Well, this charge is best left on Shenfield’s conscience, while I continue to hum Ukrainian ballads to Shevchenko’s lyrics, especially my favorite Dyvlyus ya na nebo, ta dumku gadayu: chomy ya ne sokil, chomu ne letayu, Chomy meni, Bozhe, Ty kryla ne dav… and so on, to the end, then start another. In fact, those were the first songs that our music tutor, a fat Jewish woman from Odessa, taught my sister and me at a very impressionable age, and I may yet die with those lines on my lips.

Now, some Russians may hold Ukrainian in disdain; they were poorly educated, they do not realize that Ukrainian is not a distorted version of their own Russian but just another branch out of the same Slavonic root. Their attitude is not too different from some speakers of British English disliking American English for its nasal twang (“It’s as if they all had adenoids”), while speakers of American English perceive British English as sounding supercilious (a character of Graham Greene says exactly that). Similarly, speakers of Hochdeutsch are prone to regard Germany’s innumerable dialects as somewhat inferior to their own mode of speech. There’s any number of similar examples.

All this is true, but the real question is, How relevant such attitudes are to the language situation in Ukraine. Was it Russians disdainful of the Ukrainian language who abrogated the “European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages”? Or was it the ruling ultra-nationalist Ukrainian junta disdainful of all human rights? Do disdainful Russians forbid the use of Ukrainian in administration, the courts, the army, the educational system, etc. etc.? Or is it the Russian language that is fiercely stamped out in all these spheres? Is it Ukrainians who are beaten up in the street for speaking their native tongue, or is it Russians?

Truly, if Stephen Shenfield uses as an argument the disdainful expression of Russian lips, then his “political discourse” looks very much like grabbing at straws…