Theme: Crisis

RUSSIA/UKRAINE: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE CONFUSED

A 6th Grade Explanation of Russia vs Ukraine.

0) An early baltic trade route city of Novgorod was one of the early large cities in europe. This city was conquered, and then conquered the southern (Ukrainian) city of kiev, creating the Kievan Rus, and forming the basis of the eastern slavic civilization. The mongols conquered Kiev, destroyed it, and for the next seven hundred years, she was a protectorate (serfdom) of everyone from the Duchy of moscow to the lithuanians to the poles. And during the Russian industrial revolution kiev prospered. The west of ukraine was germanized under the Autrian-Hungarian empire. Particularly Lviv (the territory called ‘Galacia’ today. Photos from the 1800’s and pre-soviet era of Lviv and Kiev show a beautiful happy prosperous people looking quite indistinguishable from Americans and less urbanized germans. As the mongols weakened the grand Duchy of moscow succeeded in taking over the empire of the golden horde (mongols). And unfortunately for everyone involved, this included destroying novgorod and its culture. Most russian expansion has been good to the north, south, and east, into more primitive territories, but tragic for everything west of moscow into more civilized regions – in many cases setting back civilization for more than a hundred years. And by importing a peasant underclass, and occupying Koenigsberg into the eastern baltic, the damage may never be repaired.

Now let’s move forward:

1) Under the Soviets, Moscow forcibly relocated many russian peasants into central european nations because they were easier to control, because they had never had civilization like the polish, lithuanian, and austrian empires had provided to eastern europe.

2) these people form a labor underclass, very much like moving black people into northern states from the south.

3) The donbas river valley feeds into the black sea where russia hd it’s only warm water port in the conquered territory of Crimea.

4) There is coal in the eastern ukrainian region surrounding the donbas valley.

5) Russia build it’s primary military production facilities in the donbas valley near the coal and river, and used the relocated people for labor. Then expanded its Black Sea Fleet.

6) To quell the rebellious Ukrainians, russia forced a genocide upon her starving and killing millions (a number which I find inestimable but is in the single digit millions somewhere). Then imposed military rule on Ukraine like it did everywhere else, and sent people to siberia and made people disappear in the night, and killed them if they could, and even did horrible nonsense like building tombs over existing ukrainian tombs. Prosecuting church goers, and all the other typical communist nonsense.

7) The soviet political structure was very analogous to the previous political structure under the ‘nobility’ (russians had only the monarchy as german nobility, everyone else was a ‘boyar’ – predator. There is no history of Christian Monarch for the benefit of the people in Russia – other than perhaps Nicholas.)

8) When the soviet union collapsed as it must from the combination of entrenched corruption and economic backwardness – and the forgotten but most important bit of knowledge: loss of craftsmanship (which you can see everywhere starting in the 50’s and 60’s and in the crumbling work of the 70’s) the heads of the Districts: Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, (I am not sure about Kazakhstan), basically got together and conspired to take over the government before all the gangsters (regional politicians) lost their ability to profit from the domination of the people.

9) In the horrible 90’s all the people of the post soviet union suffered as not only did the central states collapse, and all teh government sponsored workforces and industries collapsed, but because the oligarchs (gangsters) stepped in (with corrupt officials) and just turned the russian empire into fucking criminal chaos. And if you can imagine being a teenager or in your early twenties and watching your civilization come to an horrific end, you can understand the current russian mind. “we can’t fucking let that shit happen again’”

10) Now we can look at Russia, Eastern Russified Ukraine, and Western, Westernized ukraine.

In Russia, (thankfully for russians) putin (who is imperfect, but a very smart man who loves and lives to serve his people) incrementally restored russian civilization. And it is very hard not to appreciate all he has done. And how wrong we have been most of the time for not understanding what he had done.

If you were a worker in donbas – basically the soviet military industrial complex – and you were a laborer, or a miner, or – as the ukrainians will tell you in detail – a career criminal under the protection of the donbas region, you went into deep immediate poverty.

THe city people (Kharkiv) slowly did fine. But the people from the industrial towns did not. They had nothing. And they looked across the border into russia where they would get pensions. (subsidies) and protection, and be in the majority.

The rest of ukraine, particularly kiev and west, did two things: 1) everyone who had any skills left the country if at all possible, leaving no professional or middle class. 2) the remaining people, one generation from the farm, tried to exist on food from the village, and used the vacuum of departure as opportunities.

The rest of ukraine, slowly did fine, (they are very poor). But they looked West into Poland, and saw the dramatic transformation of life in poland from poverty to plenty – leaving them behind.

So ukraine was split like north and south were in the civil war, with a communist and criminal east, and liberal and middle-class envious west. And the voting records looked like two different countries. ( During the revolution, I watched ordinary people destroy the communist headquarters in Kiev, right around the corner from my house. )

11) The right wing in russia wanted to restore the Soviet-now-Russian empire for very practical reasons: when the Soviets started, it took 250M people and 4T to be a world power, and today it takes about 500M people and 10T dollars to survive as a world power. So russia cannot be a world power without her reliance upon resource revenues without it. And the right wing cannot fulfill the Russian Mission as the Center of a Restored Orthodox Civilization (including Constantinople if not all of Turkey, and the caucuses. (we were wrong to stop the russian from taking the black sea territories and restoring orthodox civilization, and russia was wrong to expand into (more developed) germanic/slavic lands.

12) The russians cannot employ maneuver warfare like the west can (low trust peoples have this problem) so their strategy is always to wait on a border for an opportunity because of weakness (like the muslims do) and the seize it. And the russian economy was too weak to absorb both Belarus and Ukraine as well as the Caucuses. (20 years from now that will not be the case, and russians are patient warriors). But the russian general staff (all major militaries have general staffs that produce plans) developed an emergency plan for the retaking of ukraine and this was refreshed (updated) in the summer of 2013 (as far as I know).In the interim, (as putin has described I believe) they bought off the president of Ukraine (a criminal tyrant if there ever was one), who incrementally defunded the military, and stole billions from the people (I watched his presidential plane on radar fly from Kiev to Dubai Airport on the night he left – they left the transponder on the entire way.)

13) the people are fully aware of their condition, and their poverty, because they look across the borders. Russia funds the separatists, and kiev cannot lose access to the black sea, and is fearful if they give up an inch of territory this will only justify the russian aggression against them. So sentiments against russia made a NATION out of ukrainians. So a people who had lost their identity now have one. But just as TURKEY is a torn state (in three pieces) ukraine is a torn state between a “sliver actually” russified east, and a european west. With kiev as the border between the two sets of influences. Realistically you can ‘feel’ that you’re leaving europe when you’re about an hour or two east of L’viv and you move from the rolling forested hills of europe onto the ukrainian-southern-russian plain, just as you can when you drive into nebraska heading west in the states.

So the answer is that ukraine is two different countries: a small russian-conquered east, and a majority ukrainian-polish west, and until the strategic problem for russia is solved (access to ports in the black sea, and western ‘permission’ to fuflill her destiny as restoring constantinople, the problem cannot be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev Ukraine