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previous: Chapter 21 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know!

 p202  XXII

Ukraine and the East-West Conflict

On June 24, 1950, the army of the North Korean Republic which had been established and dominated by the Soviet Union in defiance of the strict terms of the agreements made with the democratic nations during World War II, crossed into Southern Korea with the purpose of setting up a Communist government by force of arms. Of course the invasion was attended with the usual Communist outcry that North Korea had been attacked by the undemocratic and warmongering government of South Korea. It was the same story which has been repeated in varying forms for over thirty years.

Then came the surprising and unusual turn of events. The United Nations which the Soviet Union and its satellites had been boycotting declared North Korea the aggressor and the United States and the other United Nations began to give active military aid to Korea, while Stalin and his associates declared that it was undemocratic and warmongering to assist persons and nations on the bad books of the Soviet Union to defend themselves. The world is waiting now to see whether an aggressive Soviet Union directly or through its puppets feels itself ready to complete its task of communizing the world by force.

What is the fate of Ukraine in this struggle? With the exception of a few rather small areas Ukraine is united under  p203 one government for the first time since the days of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the seventeenth century and a few months in 1919, but that government is not a government of Ukrainians, by Ukrainians and for Ukrainians. It is a government of Communist Russians, by Communist Russians and for Communist Russians; and even Communist Ukrainians cannot hope to find secure preferment in their Communist "Ukrainian" state.

Meanwhile there is a steady flow of Ukrainians to the Soviet paradise of Siberia and the frozen north, to the concentration camps, and to the grave. For those who were left under the satellite Polish government, there is exile and deportation to the new lands acquired by Poland in the West. For those who remain at home in both East and West Ukraine, there is only misery and persecution. In the words of Taras Shevchenko, "the people are happy, for they are silent," and they will remain so, in so far as the Kremlin can accomplish it.

Culture, language, traditions and institutions are being remodeled on the pattern of the Kremlin so that the Ukrainians may become worthy associates and followers of their Great Russian brothers. Their past is being rewritten for them, their present is being controlled, and their future is ultimate absorption or annihilation. The representative of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in the United Nations, Dmytro Manuilsky, speaks in the name of Ukraine but with the voice of Moscow.

Where, then, can we find the real Ukraine? First and loudest, it speaks today through the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which is carrying on its operations not only in Ukraine itself but within the borders of Poland and Czecho­slovakia and which has made itself the mouthpiece of all the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe. Now and then small groups of it appear, well-trained and well-disciplined, in the American zones of Germany and Austria. Now and then the satellite  p204 governments release a few notes about its activities, chiefly notices of executions.

Abroad there are the displaced persons, living under the most terrible conditions but still free to live and write. There is the flowering of a new, old literature. There is the attempt to continue the old Ukrainian tradition of scholar­ship. There is the newly organized Ukrainian National Rada, which is composed of all parties and which is in effect the same form of organization as was adopted by the Czechs and the Poles during World War I.

What can they accomplish? They can speak and act clearly and distinctly but they cannot reach the world if the world is unconcerned.

It was the same situation in the days of the Ukrainian National Republic, when the great powers of the West declined to consider the Russian situation, supported halfheartedly the White movement, and then allowed the Communists to remain the masters of the territory. The world has seen the results of that error, and now the shadow of the Soviet Union is falling over Europe and Asia and the threat which it offers to humanity is exercising the minds and thoughts of intelligent men on every continent.

We can hope that history does not repeat itself. Already the anti-Communist Russian imperialists, the remains of the monarchists, and Kerensky and his followers, are raising their voices to demand that with the overthrow of Communism there shall be restored the one and indivisible Russia. They are using the same slogans as the tsars, the intelligentsia, and Stalin, the same slogans that Taras Shevchenko and all the Ukrainians of the past cursed and opposed. They go still further and at a time when the British Commonwealth of Nations, the French Republic and the Dutch are working to extend liberty, they demand the inclusion in their Russia of all the territories that not only the tsars but Stalin has seized and dominated.

 p205  They advance the same arguments as before. Napoleon felt the weight of the power of holy Russia. Hitler tried to conquer the Communists and failed. All movements which refuse to recognize the power of Russia must fall. They overlook the fact that the White Armies in 1918, 1919 and 1920, by spurning the cooperation of the various nations which were struggling for independence and by insisting upon their indivisible Russian state and culture, doomed themselves to absolute and humiliating failure. They ignore the fact that Hitler in his insane racial theories deliberately spurned the help of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, and set himself to reduce them to slavery. They forget conveniently that the greatest danger to the advance of Moscow was the campaign of Charles XII of Sweden, when mere chance determined that he and the Ukrainian Kozaks under Mazepa did not become the victors at Poltava.

As opposed to this Great Russian theory, the Ukrainians and with them all of the oppressed nationalities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union appeal for a democratic solution of the problems of Eastern Europe. They believe that those great principles of respect for human dignity and human rights for which two world wars have been fought are more important to the world than the universalizing theories of a Belinsky or a Chernyshevsky, than the doctrines of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, or the mystic visions of a Third Rome and the universal dominance of Moscow, be it White or Red. They believe that the principle of self-determination enunciated by President Wilson, the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter outlined by President Roosevelt, can be made guides to a future warless world through the United Nations and that these doctrines have the same meaning to all peoples except Stalin and the imperialists of the Kremlin.

They understand today — and it is time for the democratic world to join them in this — that the steps which have been  p206 taken to reduce the countries on their western border to the position of satellite states are nothing new. The world has seen with amazement mixed with unbelief the process whereby Poland, Czecho­slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania have been brought under the power of an organized group of men, trained in the Russian Communist schools in Moscow and sent into those lands during the period of nominal alliance with the Allies, to worm their way into key positions of government and then take over. It is only in Yugoslavia that Communists like Tito who have some interest in their own country are carrying on a success­ful resistance to the demands of Stalin, while in the other satellite countries, the native Communists are being marched to prison or the gallows at the orders of the Kremlin, exactly as were Skrypnyk and his companions in Ukraine. The civilized nations are still scarcely able to credit the steps that were taken in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to reduce them to Soviet republics and admit them into the Soviet Union.

The Ukrainians understand all this, for they have seen how the process was worked among them in 1918, 1919 and 1920. They have seen how the way was prepared by appeals for assistance against the imperialists, how it was carried on slowly but methodically during the period of Ukrainization, and how it was accomplished during the period of collectivization. They have seen it and felt it for over a quarter of a century, and they have seen how it was applied when the Red armies invaded West Ukraine in 1939 and again in 1944 and 1945. They have seen the same process as it was developing in the other peoples of the Russian Empire, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

It is all the same process and Ukraine has been the great testing ground for the new methods of Soviet imperialism, not only under Stalin but under Lenin. The Russian Communists have made temporary truces with the capitalists, the Fascists, the peasants and the nationalistic workmen of each country which they wished to conquer and have continued them only  p207 so long as it served their nefarious purposes. Western thought will do very wrong, unless it too learns that the process of 1950 is but a refined version of that which was worked out in 1918 and 1919 and improved in 1944 and 1945.

It was a bitter blow when democratic statesmen were forced to realize that their compromises with the Soviets and their abandonment of the governments in exile advanced Soviet power into the heart of Europe and put it in a position to threaten France and Italy. It was a sad blot upon their principles when they accepted the Soviet interpretation of the Yalta agreements and returned to deportation or death millions of wretched men and women who had succeeded in escaping outside the Iron Curtain.

Today the democratic powers have gone further. They are intent upon stopping the extension of Communism. They are trying desperately to keep it from conquering Greece and Turkey. They are hoping that it can be held in check in Italy and they are actively working to maintain some touch of freedom in Germany and Berlin. They are offering refuge to democratic leaders from the satellite states but as yet they have not ventured to form a plan to liberate their populations, while the Soviet colossus swallows China and advances throughout Asia.

Again and again in the patient discussions of the foreign ministers, the angry exchanges in the Security Council and the United Nations, the Western Powers have stressed the fact that they do not want to take from the Soviet Union what is rightfully her own. It is a noble sentiment. There is only one question more that should be asked: What is rightfully her own?

In view of the situation in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1917, it might be held that the Great Russians have chosen Soviet rule. This cannot be said of any other people within the old Russian Empire and it can even less be said of any of the recent acquisitions. The world knows today the meaning of Soviet elections, where almost the entire population votes  p208 in open ballot for the program dictated by their masters — or else. The world knows today how the Red army and the secret police, be it called Cheka, OGPU, NKVD or MVD, work to carry out that "or else." The world knows today, as it never knew before, how the Red army and armed forces of various kinds can be called into action to support the Soviet Union. It knows the significance of the Soviet fifth columns in all the countries of the world.

All this is nothing new for Ukraine. The people there have seen the flowering of this system. They have seen it from the very beginning and it is their certainty that there is no hope of change that has led to the development of the Ukrainian insurgent army and the desperate struggle of the Ukrainian people. They prefer death as free men to death as slaves.

One leader after another who has awakened from the mirage of the past years is calling upon the democratic world to take the lead in a positive message to the world, in formulating a program which can rally all men to their cause and arouse an echo even within the Iron Curtain. That problem is simple. It is to offer true democratic liberty to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union, to the people of the satellite states as distinct from their puppet governments, even if they temporarily look askance at the Cominform. It is to offer just as certainly the same democratic liberty to the peoples of the oppressed republics of the Soviet Union, to demand that they be represented in the United Nations by people chosen by themselves in a democratic way and not picked by the Kremlin.

It is idle to put forward the plea that in the new democratic world Russia must exist in the boundaries of 1914 and of 1920. The very statistics put out by the Soviet Union emphasize that the Asiatic renaissance, the development of the eastern spaces of the Russian Soviet Republic, can supply satisfactorily all the needs of the Great Russians. They show conclusively that the satellite republics are doomed to a lower standard of living to furnish the Russian war potential in good measure. If Ukrainian grain is to be used solely for export by Moscow,  p209  why should not that grain bring in return for the Ukrainian people? Why should the Ukrainian peasant be expelled from his fields and subjected to famine, in order that the masters of the Kremlin should secure the means of spreading their propaganda?

Ukraine has always maintained close connections with the West. She has never voluntarily merged her fate with the East as has Moscow. Every attempt at the liberation of the country has approached the West and the West has not listened. Today the West is threatened as never before. It is but the part of prudence for it to open its ears and eyes and recognize the efforts of the Ukrainian people to shake off the yoke that has lain upon them for centuries, to assist them in their struggle, and to admit them to the new Europe and the union of free and democratic nations.

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