Ukraine and Russia: The Backstory

As readers all must know, there is at least some possibility that World War III will begin within the next few days or weeks if Russia invades Ukraine and NATO, including our own nation, rushes to its defense. As I write these words, that possibility still seems unlikely. But, of course, who wouldn’t have thought it unlikely a century and a decade ago that the assassination of a single Austrian man in 1914 would lead to a world-wide conflagration that would last for years and eventually cost the lives of well over 17 million people? What really will happen if Russian troops cross the border into Ukraine, I have no idea. I don’t think anyone really does, including not the Russians themselves. But what I want to write about today is not specifically about the various scenarios that could plausibly ensue if Russia attempts to annex, or even just temporarily to occupy, Ukraine. Instead, I’d like to talk about the shocking—to me, at least—lack of perspective even people writing in our most respected newspapers and websites seem content to allow to form the basis of their analysis of the situation.

To read most of the article and essays that I’ve come across about the Ukraine crisis, you would think that Russia and Ukraine are “just” two contiguous countries that happen to share a common border, like Bolivia and Peru or Italy and Switzerland. Starting from that vantage point, it is simple for authors to find the idea of Russia launching a full-scale invasion of its neighbor to the south inexplicable. But the reality is far more complicated than anyone seems to know. For one thing, the backstory goes back centuries. In other words, what we are watching on CNN these evenings is the thousandth page in a novel still being written. And just as one could hardly just jump into an unfinished novel on page 1000 and get the gist of what’s going on with any sort of accuracy, so is it not really possible to understand what’s going on between Russia and Ukraine without getting a running leap into the story by stepping back in history and attempting to understand today’s details in terms of the larger picture to which they belong. Of course, most American know more or less nothing about Russian, let alone Ukrainian, history. Maybe about the Russian Revolution a little. But the history of pre-Communist Russia is a mystery to most. And the even-more-obscure history of Ukraine is well known, as far as I can see, almost to none.

I begin more than a thousand years ago in the tenth century. Kievan Rus, compromising all of western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern Poland, is the largest nation in Europe. Its capital is in Kyiv, formerly known to most of us as Kiev, the capital of today’s Ukraine. The principal players—who set the table at which both Russians and Ukrainians still dine—are famous abroad but unknown here. Vladimir the Great, for example, reigned from 980 to 1015 and brought Christianity to his nation. His son, Yaroslav the Wise, ruled over the kingdom at the greatest limits of its power and size. But it wasn’t to last: the ethnic groups within the nation were too eager to assert their own autonomy and the unified nation had already begin seriously to disintegrate when the Mongol hordes arrived from the east and completely devastated the nation, burning Kyiv to the ground in 1240 and massacring its citizens.

There followed all sorts of attempts to recreate the original nation. There was no nation called Russia and none called Ukraine, but there were successor states to Kievan Rus that too appear to be unfamiliar to almost all today, including the columnists I read the most regularly.

Where Russia is today, there emerged something called the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which did not manage to achieve real independence until King Ivan III (called “the Great”) finally threw off all foreign domination and united most of today’s Russia under his rule. But it was his son, Ivan IV (called “the Terrible”) who first proclaimed himself czar in 1547 as a way of asserting his legitimate right to rule over his world as the emperor of Rome once did over his. (The Russian word tsar, written in English either as tsar or czar, is the equivalent of the Latin caesar, just as is the German equivalent, Kaiser.)

Where Ukraine is today arose a nation called Galicia-Volhynia. The rest of what had been Kievan Rus was united by a man called Danylo Romanovych into a country called Ruthenia with its capital at Kyiv, in its day the most powerful state in Eastern Europe. But this situation too didn’t last. King Casimir III of Poland invaded Galicia-Volhynia in the mid-fourteenth century and annexed those land to his own. In the meantime, the Lithuanians invaded Ruthenia and annexed it to its own nation. From that point on, the story becomes so complicated that it’s almost impossible to follow at all, let alone easily. In 1386, Poland and Lithuania joined together in something later called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and ruled over most of today’s Russia and Ukraine. In the meantime, the Cossacks began to form armed militias with the specific intention of wrestling control of the territory from foreign domination. But this was also the period when the Tartars began to invade from the east, taking huge numbers of Ukrainian and Russian peasants into the slave trade, eventually selling and deporting as many as two million peasants as slaves. Finally, in 1648, Bogdan Chmyelnitski and Petro Doroshenko led a massive revolt that resulted in the establishment, for the first time, of some version of Ukrainian autonomy. (It was also a terrible time for the Jews—who recall the years 1648 and 1649 as a time of mass slaughter of innocents on a scale that would only be matched three hundred years later during the Shoah.) But then, in 1654, Chmyelnitski offered to put his entire country under the control of Czar Alexis, who accepted only too gratefully. This led to another Russo-Polish War (there had already been several), as a result of which today’s Ukraine was split into two parts, leaving only the eastern part of the country under Russian rule.

From that point on, the story becomes even more complicated. Cossacks, Mongols, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Genoans, Austrians and any number of others vied with each other to control some or another part of Ukraine. (There was no actual country called Ukraine, of course.) A period of history in the mid-seventeenth century called “The Ruin” featured a war between Russia, Poland, the Crimean Khanate (don’t ask where this came from), Cossacks, and the Ottoman Empire that brought death to hundreds of thousands and was only concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace (hah!) in 1686 that basically divided up today’s Ukraine between Poland and Russia. And mixed in with all of this are the three separate so-called Partitions of Poland that took place in 1772, 1793, and 1795, decisions forced on the Poles that brought half of today’s Ukraine under Austrian rule and the other half under the rule of Russia. Eventually, this led to Ukrainians entering the First World War on both sides: about 3.5 million Ukrainians fighting with the Russians and about a quarter-million fighting with the Austrians.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 freed the area from all foreign domination except by Russia. And then, and for the first time, a series of Ukrainian entities began to exist: the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, and several others. The Polish-Ukraine War of 1918 and 1919, ended with the so-called Peace of Riga according to which western Ukraine became part of Poland and the rest joined the USSR as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a theoretically independent nation that was actually a puppet-state totally and absolutely under the thumb of their Russia overlords. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the early 1990s, Ukraine finally—and one could even say for the first time—became an independent state in the way the term is normally used by most people today.

None of any of this appears to be known to the people whose political essays I read in the newspapers I read and online news sources I frequent, all of which seem to consider that Ukraine and Russia are “merely” neighboring states with no back history at all. You can trust me that I’ve only skimmed the surface here—the actual story is a thousand times more complicated and difficult to follow. (No wonder they don’t teach any of this in high school!) But the result is a nation of pundits, op-ed piece writers, and columnists attempting to analyze the events of the day almost in a vacuum.

The relationship between Russia and Ukraine is almost un-unravelable. No nation has ever been dissected so many times and by so many different peoples than Ukraine…or that would be the case had Ukraine ever actually existed. The Ukrainians clearly have the same right to self-determination that any nation has…but even that is a complicated thought since the world completely arbitrarily awards that right to some but not to others. (Oh yeah? Just ask a Chechen, a Basque, a Navaho, an Inuit, a Uighur, a Rohingya, a Lapp, or an Ainu what they think. Or, if it were only possible, ask any of the Jews interned by the Brits for the crime of wishing to live freely and autonomously in their own homeland before 1948.) The Russians’ interest here seems to be purely imperialistic: they wish to dominate a neighboring state because they deem that to serve their own best interests. But to leave it at that without considering carefully the thousand years of history that go into the reality we see on today’s map—that also seems a bit naïve.

To understand Putin’s thinking about Ukraine, you need to know the backstory. You can actually read an essay on the topic by Putin himself entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” that is posted on the website of the President of Russia. (Click here to take a look.) It is unconvincing, its logic self-serving and rooted in the past rather than the present. Or at least that’s how it reads to me. But Putin’s essay—which is certainly worth reading—is deeply rooted in the history outlined above, which is why I’ve chosen this week to write at least cursorily about the details hiding behind the story unfolding on our screens now daily. 

The Apartheid Canard

I wasn’t going to write about the latest Amnesty International report on the Middle East, the one that smears Israel yet again as an “apartheid” state, because it seemed so uninteresting to me: ho-hum, another Amnesty report veering into rank anti-Semitism, one that ignores the facts on the ground, that puts forward the same tired lies about Israeli society that even they themselves must know not to be true, that adheres to a kind of Marxist orthodoxy according to which living Jews are acceptable only as pre-dead ones, as creatures whose right to exist rests on their willingness to deny their right to exist. So what, I thought—another hate-filled screed to forget about as quickly as possible. But then I had second thoughts.

The definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is any effort to “[deny] the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is [by its very nature] a racist endeavor.” The British government has formally accepted this definition. Amnesty International is headquartered in the U.K. Why do I not expect the Brits to undertake legal action against Amnesty for promoting anti-Semitism precisely according to the definition formally accepted by its own government? Maybe I’ll be surprised. But I don’t think so.

There’s something weirdly fantastical about the whole apartheid canard, actually. Derived from the word in Afrikaans for “separateness,” the term was used in South Africa to denote the large complex of laws intended to keep the races apart. Black and white children could not swim in the same pools or play in the same parks. Interracial marriage was forbidden. There were no mixed schools in which children of all cultures and races could have attended class together…presumably because that could possibly have led to children of different races learning to like and respect each other. The thorny problem of people with dark skin but Caucasian features, like people from India, was solved by the bureaucratic invention of a third race, one almost benignly called “colored” but intended actually to make sure that the “real” white people were allowed to live their lives out without contact with people who were deemed white only on a technicality. It was, by all accounts, a pernicious system intended specifically to guarantee that numbers wouldn’t ever matter, that the roughly 8% of the population descended from Dutch or British Europeans would not be voted out of power by some lethal combination of the 80% of the population formally characterized as Black and the 8.8% labelled, as noted above, “colored.” Do I have to add that Black people were not enfranchised and could not vote at all, let alone as the powerful voting bloc they would have naturally constituted?

The use of “apartheid” to smear Israel goes back a long way and not just to Jimmy Carter, a man I once respected (and, yes, voted for), who viciously promoted it in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. And now I get to my point: since there are no obvious signs of apartheid culture in Israel to which any unbiased observer can point (Arab Israelis are allowed to vote, to attend university, to mingle freely with Jewish Israelis at swimming pools and in shopping malls, etc.) and since there are no Bantustan states that Israeli Arabs are forced against their will to populate, where does this whole fantasy come from? That is a far more interesting question to me than the details of the Amnesty International report, all of which we’ve seen before and none of which reflects the reality I see on the ground in Israel.

As an example of just how crazy its authors are, they point to Gaza as an example of how Israel segregates Arabs and makes them live in their own enclaves. The fact that Israel took Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war, attempted to rule over it as occupied territory (which is precisely what it was), and then formally withdrew to the pre-1967 line in 2005 seems unknown to the report’s authors. Nor do they seem to know that there is no Israeli military presence in Gaza and no civilian presence there either. There are, in fact, no Jewish residents in Gaza at all. Nor does the fact that the Arab residents of Gaza voted in a Hamas-led government devoted not to the welfare of its citizenry but to the pursuit of an endless war against Israel in which civilians are specifically targeted seem to be known to the authors of the Amnesty report. Or could it be that they know but just don’t care?

The situation on the West Bank is even less fairly represented. The Palestinians there, also living on Jordanian territory occupied by Israel in 1967, have elected government after government led by Fatah. They hardly require Israel’s permission to declare their independence: since more than 120 nations in the world have already recognized Palestine as a state, all they really need to do is to get to work building their nation and taking their place in the family of nations. That hasn’t happened, of course…but only because doing so would require coming to terms with the neighbors and living in some sort of peace with Israel. To describe Israel’s lack of interest in incorporated the West Bank into Israel as a kind of apartheid is to ignore the reality on the ground and, in fact, to cross the line into rank anti-Semitism.

Far more important to the future of Israel than having to deal with yet another hostile report by Amnesty International is the apparent willingness of a significant number of Arab and Muslim states to enter into peace agreements with Israel. Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrein, the UAE, and (sort of) Sudan lead the way. There’s constant chatter that the Saudis or the Omanis could be next. These people are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians but they seem more than aware that the Palestinians are their own worst enemies, and that if anyone is responsible for the West Bank and Gaza continuing to exist in political limbo it is the Palestinian leadership itself. This part of reality is, of course, anathema to the kind of people who support Amnesty. As also is, of course, the fact that Israel is a functioning democracy, that all citizens are enfranchised, and that the Arab citizens of Israel have far more freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly than do their co-religionists in any number of very populous Muslim nations.

What the Amnesty Report was really about was the right of self-determination. Contrary to popular opinion, the Jewish people didn’t learn any startling new truths from the Shoah. That the position of Jews in the nations of the world, including the most liberal ones, is at best precarious is an unpleasant fact known to all. (That Franklin Roosevelt was afraid that vigorously attempting to rescue the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe would make the war effort less, not more, popular is a fairly good illustration of just how true that point is.) In fact, the notion that Jewish people have a natural right to live freely in a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland—a right awarded without a moment’s hesitation by the world to the Finns of Finland, the Japanese of Japan, and the Estonians of Estonia)—that notion is what the Amnesty Report is all about: at its core lies the notion that Jews lack the basic right to live in peace in their own space and according to their own lights, a right awarded without a moment’s thought to the citizens of any other nation (including those founded by European imperialists who simply seized other people’s property and invented countries for themselves in those places).

We are not without friends. The Biden administration formally rejected the report as biased and false. The British government formally rejected the report and specifically the use of the term “apartheid” to characterize Israeli policy towards its Arab citizens. The German government responded similarly, as did any number of other nations. Not at all surprisingly, I have not been able to find any formal response from the United Nations.

In the end, Dara Horn was right in her recent book, People Love Dead Jews. The world can’t get enough of the Shoah. But dealing with a dynamic, vigorous Jewish state populated by living people who do not seem to require the approval of others before doing what it takes to make their own children safe and to safeguard the future of their own country—that is something those very same people find intensely irritating. To wave the Amnesty report away as obnoxious and false is simple enough. Addressing the underlying prejudice that motivated its composition, on the other hand, is an entirely different challenge.

Being Upset Is Not Fatal

 I responded with some combination of outrage and slight sympathy when I read last week that the school board of McMinn County in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban Art Spiegelman’s two-volume work, Maus, from its eighth grade classrooms. Outrage, because there is something grotesque about the notion that it is more important to shield fourteen-year-olds from some foul language or the depiction of some hand-drawn nudity in one of the books’ most searing scenes than to exploit the brilliance of Spiegelman’s work to bring home to young readers the brutality and depravity that characterized the Germans’ treatment of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. But there was an ounce of sympathy in my response too: to want to shield young people from the truth about the depths to which human beings can sink when they embrace depravity, wickedness, barbarism, and an absolute degeneracy of the spirit feels natural to me. When I was a young parent, I wanted to shield my own children from those truths as well! Fortunately, I got over it. And the gatekeepers in McMinn County need to get over it as well.

The first volume of Maus came out in 1986. The term “graphic novel” was not yet in use; the book was mostly referenced as a comic book, including by people who found the use of the word “comic” to describe a book about Auschwitz as tasteless as it was slightly amusing. The second volume came out five years later and it was the year after that, in 1992, that Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize for his work.

By any reasonable yardstick, Maus is an unusual book. I was drawn to it, at least in part, because it is set in Rego Park, the Queens neighborhood adjacent to Forest Hills where I grew up. And the people in the book—in the part of the book set in Queens—were all familiar types to me, people who resembled—some with almost remarkable precision—the parents of friends of mine from back then or friends of my parents. But most of the book is an extended flashback to pre-war Poland and then, once the war begins, to the series of ghettos and labor camps in which the author’s parents were interned before being sent to Auschwitz.

The McMinn Board of Education issued a clarifying statement to address the huge brouhaha their initial decision prompted. They were not opposed, they said, to teaching “about” the Shoah, only to Spiegelman’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” In other words, they were okay with Anne Frank—whose diary ends before she and her family were sent to Auschwitz and which therefore has no scenes in it that depict the fate the people sent to there or to any of the other camps (including Bergen-Belsen where Anne and her sister died)—but not with a book like Maus that is depicts graphically (for once to use the word literally) the noose tightening around the Jews of Poland as the day-to-day brutality intimated, albeit mutely, what the Nazis had in mind as the “real” solution to the Jewish problem in Poland. Also making the book confusing—at least to some, I imagine—is the fact that Spiegelman does not depict any human beings in his story: the Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, the Poles are pigs, the French are frogs, and the Americans are dogs. Fans of Aesop and George Orwell’s Animal Farm will get the point easily: when describing a situation in which most of the players behave like animals—either hunters or the hunted—it feels natural to depict them that way. But it does require an extra dose of interpretative effort to follow the story without being distracted by the animals. And there was another point to the animal symbolism: in an interview published in the New York Times in 1991 (click here), Spiegelman said that his use of animals was “a way to distance myself from this intensely personal material so that I could understand it better, so that the reader could come closer to it.” Nor is it unimportant to note that one upshot of Spiegelman’s decision to populate his book solely with animals is that the nudity that so offended the gatekeepers on McMinn County consisted, therefore, solely of naked mice.

The response to the school board’s decision has been interesting to watch. A bookstore in Knoxville negotiated a special deal with Random House to procure 500 copies of the book at a very low price so that the owner could just give them away to high school students. Effort are underway to procure another thousand copies, all to be given away for free to Tennessee teenagers. The book is currently no. 23 on the amazon.com bestseller list, which is amazing given the fact that the books are more than thirty years old. Most meaningful of all, at least to me, is the response of one Scott Denham, a professor of German Studies at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, who has launched a free online course about the book specifically aimed at eighth graders and older high students who live in McMinn County. How many young people are signed on, I don’t know. But the fact that the ban has effectively been thwarted by one single individual possessed of the strength of his own convictions is very moving to me. I can’t help adding that if the late Irving Roth were here to put his two cents in, he would surely applaud Professor Denham’s effort personally to stand in the breach and personally to make a difference. That one individual can make a profound difference was the guiding principle of Irving’s life and this would just have been another example, and one he would have liked very much, of how that can work when someone is simply not prepared to look away.

Not all books are appropriate for young people of all ages. I get that. And I support that idea as well: like every parent, I also controlled the books my children read when they were very young or I tried to. But—and this is key—the criterion in place when deciding if a child should or shouldn’t read a book should be whether the child will be able to understand the book without being confused or overwhelmed. Being upset by upsetting things is part of becoming an educated person, part of preparing to live in the world by learning more of what the world is, of what its people are capable of, of what it means—positively and negatively—to be a human being. There are no books that accurately depict the lives of slaves in our nation before the Civil War that aren’t by their very nature upsetting. There are no books about the Lodz ghetto or about Treblinka that aren’t upsetting. There are no books about the Rape of Nanking or the Rwandan genocide that are not violently upsetting. Nor should there be! And from that come some basic truths about education. Being upset is not fatal. Knowing terrible things about the world is part of engaging with the history of humankind. Understanding Nazism is the greatest and most effective bulwark against the kind of mindless fanaticism to which Germany fell prey…and to which every country risks falling prey if fails to teach its children the lessons of the Shoah, the lessons of slavery, the lessons of Nanking, the lessons of Rwanda, etc.

I close with a personal story. When I was a child, I attended Hebrew School at the Forest Hills Jewish Center, a huge synagogue on Queens Blvd. known to many of my readers. The school entrance was on the side of the building: you entered and went up a flight of stairs, then either turned left to enter the Sanctuary or right to enter the school wing. But also to the left was a small room that served as the synagogue library. And it was there that I hung out and read when I came early to school. (The alternative was playing foosball in a much larger room called “The Game Room” that also featured an ice cream machine. But I liked the library more.) The books were organized by subject. Most were in easy reach, but the books about the Shoah, deemed too terrible for children to chance across, were kept on the top shelf where no young person could reach. But there was also a step ladder in the room and I, then as now attracted to books people try to keep me from reading, used to wait for the librarian to absent herself for a moment, then use the stepladder to reach for the books on that forbidden shelf. And so I entered the world in which I still live by reading, first of all, The Black Book of Polish Jewry, written by Jacob Apensziak and several others and published in English in 1943. The Shoah was still in progress as the book was written. They missed a lot. (Auschwitz-Birkenau is not mentioned.) But the authors knew enough of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor to present a remarkably accurate description of the death camps, plus a very accurate account of the so-called Holocaust of Bullets describing the mass murder of entire Jewish communities across Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. I was a little boy, just 11 or 12. I was a good reader. And I understood all too clearly why this book and the others on that top shelf were kept out of the reach of children. I never could read more than three or four pages before the librarian returned. It took more than a year for me to read the whole thing. (You can read the whole book online if you’d like: click here.) I had nightmares for years because of that book, some passages of which I came eventually to know almost by heart. No one ever found out: not the librarian, not the principal, not my parents. Only me…and now all of you. But to be shaped by history is not be ruined or wrecked by the past: it is to be made aware of what the world is so that you can find your place in it not accidentally but purposefully and meaningfully. That is how I became who I am now, the Jewish man I grew into, the rabbi I trained to be, the father I eventually became. Eventually I read Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s parallel volume, The Black Book of Russian Jewry, written in 1944 and, if it were only possible, even more hair-raising than the book about the Jews of Poland. I hated reading both books, but I survived the experience. Exposing children to the world through books is the ultimate step towards setting them on the path to becoming civilized adults. Being upset is not fatal. It’s being ignorant that is.