The 20th-Century History Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

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The 20th-Century History Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

此片中文翻譯版見我的博客：https://blog.wenxuecity.com/myblog/11613/202203/6127.html

During WWII, Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as liberators from Soviet oppression. Now, Russia is using that chapter to paint Ukraine as a Nazi nation

The debate over how to remember Ukraine's World War II history, as well as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the current conflict.

Katya Cengel

Before Russian forces fired rockets at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv; seized Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident; and attacked Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin shared some choice words.

In an essay published on the Kremlin’s website in Russian, Ukrainian and English last July, Putin credited Soviet leaders with inventing a Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union in 1922, forging a fictitious state unworthy of sovereignty out of historically Russian territory. After Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, the president argued, Ukrainian leaders “began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united [Russia and Ukraine], and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation.”

The “historical reality” of modern-day Ukraine is more complex than Putin’s version of events, encompassing “a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples,” according to the New York Times. “[M]any conquests by warring factions and Ukraine’s diverse geography ... created a complex fabric of multiethnic states.”

Residents of Kyiv leave the city following pre-offensive missile strikes by Russian armed forces on February 24, 2022.

Over the centuries, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Poland, and Lithuania have all wielded jurisdiction over Ukraine, which first asserted its modern independence in 1917, with the formation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Russia soon wrested back control of Ukraine, making it part of the newly established Soviet Union and retaining power in the region until World War II, when Germany invaded. The debate over how to remember this wartime history, as well as its implications for Ukrainian nationalism and independence, is key to understanding the current conflict.

In Putin’s telling, the modern Ukrainian independence movement began not in 1917 but during World War II. Under the German occupation of Ukraine, between 1941 and 1944, some Ukrainian independence fighters aligned themselves with the Nazis, whom they viewed as saviors from Soviet oppression. Putin has drawn on this period in history to portray any Ukrainian push for sovereignty as a Nazi endeavor, says Markian Dobczansky, a historian at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. “It’s really just a stunningly cynical attempt to fight an information war and influence people's opinions,” he adds.

Dobczansky is among a group of scholars who have publicly challenged Putin’s version of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the years of Soviet rule it’s sandwiched between. Almost all of these experts begin their accounts with the fall of the Russian Empire, when tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought against the Bolshevik Red Army to establish the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Ukrainians continued to fight for independence until 1922, when they were defeated by the Soviets and became the Ukrainian Soviet Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). By leaving out Ukraine’s short-lived but hard-fought period of independence in the early 20th century, Putin overlooks the country’s sovereignty, says Dobczansky.

A nationalist rally in Kyiv in January 1917

Also omitted from this version of events are the genocide and suppression that took place under Soviet rule—most famously the Great Famine. Holodomor, which fuses the Ukrainian words for starvation and inflicting death, claimed the lives of around 3.9 million people, or approximately 13 percent of the Ukrainian population, in the early 1930s. A human-made famine, it was the direct result of Soviet policies aimed at punishing Ukrainian farmers who fought Soviet mandates to collectivize. The Soviets also waged an intense “Russification” campaign, persecuting Ukraine’s cultural elite and elevating Russian language and culture above all others.

When Germany invaded in 1941, some Ukrainians, especially those in western Ukraine, saw them as liberators, says Oxana Shevel, a political scientist at Tufts University. The Ukrainians didn’t particularly want to live under the Germans so much as escape the Soviets, adds Shevel, who is the president of the nonprofit educational organization American Association for Ukrainian Studies.

“The broader objective was to establish an independent state, but in the process, [Ukrainians] also engaged in participation in the Holocaust,” she says.

The question for Shevel is how to treat this history. From the Soviet point of view that Putin still embraces, it’s simple, she says: The Holocaust aside, Ukrainian nationalists were “bad guys” because “they fought the Soviet state.” Putin and other critics often draw on Ukrainians’ wartime collaboration with the Nazis to baselessly characterize the modern country as a Nazi nation; in a February 24 speech, the Russian president deemed the “demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine” key goals of the invasion.

Locals erect huge anti-tank traps during the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941.

From the Ukrainian side of the debate, the country’s wartime history is more complex. Are the nationalists “bad guys” because they participated in the Holocaust, Shevel asks, or “good guys” because they fought for independence?

For Putin, even raising this question is inflammatory. “Any kind of reevaluation of the Soviet treatment of history is what Putin would consider [a] Nazi approach or Nazification,” says Shevel.

To deny the claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state isn’t to downplay the Nazis’ wartime actions in Ukraine. Natalie Belsky, a historian at the University of Minnesota Duluth, points out that one of the biggest massacres of the Holocaust took place just outside of Kyiv. Between 1941 and 1943, the Nazis—aided by local collaborators—shot around 70,000 to 100,000 people, many of them Jews, at Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv. According to the National WWII Museum, one in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine.

While Germans often think of World War II as a fight against the Russians, the majority of the fighting actually took place in modern-day Ukraine and Belarus, as well as large parts of western Russia, says Dobczansky. Under the German occupation, several million Ukrainians were sent to Germany to work on farms and in factories. Still, because the Nazi racial hierarchy placed Ukrainians above Russians, the Nazis made a limited attempt to promote Ukrainian national culture in occupied territories—a move that, in turn, helped bring some of the Ukrainian nationalist movement to the German side.

“Those [nationalist] groups certainly had anti-Semitic elements,” says Belsky. “But [they] essentially felt that, or judged that, they were more likely to get Ukrainian independence under Nazi occupation than under Soviet occupation.”

Motorized infantry of the German armed forces advance into Ukraine during World War II.

The Nazis, she says, promised Ukrainian nationalists as much—at least after the war. But even before their defeat by the Allies in 1945, the Germans turned on some of their Ukrainian allies, including one of the country’s most famous independence fighters, Stepan Bandera. In his fight against the Soviets, Bandera aligned himself with the Germans, only to end up in a concentration camp after he refused to rescind a proclamation of Ukrainian statehood in 1941. Released in 1944 to help the Nazis battle the Soviets again, Bandera survived the war, only to be poisoned by the KGB in 1959. In 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of “Hero of Ukraine,” but the honor was annulled a year later.

“This [reexamination of Ukrainian participation in wartime atrocities] has prompted a relatively difficult dialogue in Ukraine about the issue of complicity,” says Belsky.

Putin has referenced Ukrainian nationalists in service of his own political agenda of portraying modern Ukrainians as Nazis. Prior to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, many Ukrainians viewed Bandera and other freedom fighters in a less favorable light, says Shevel. After, however, she noticed a shift, with these individuals, some of whom fought alongside the Nazis, being called heroes. The Soviets, once held up as liberators from the Nazis, were now the bad guys again.

Bandera may no longer be an official hero of Ukraine, but his memory and that of other 20th-century independence fighters endure. In 2015, Ukraine passed a series of decommunization laws calling for the removal of communist monuments and the renaming of public spaces in honor of Ukrainian nationalists and nationalist organizations, including those known to have participated in the Holocaust. The legislation has received pushback from scholars who see it as whitewashing, or ignoring the dark sides of these movements and their activities.

hevel agrees that a complete reversal in framing is “probably not the best outcome.” Although the previous Soviet narrative was very one-sided, she cautions against replacing it with an equally one-sided narrative that labels Ukrainian nationalists unconditional good guys. Either way, Shevel says, the issue is one that should be debated internally, not by a foreign invader: “It’s problematic, but it’s a domestic debate.”

Dobczansky, for his part, believes Ukraine is entitled to its own version of history and that Ukrainians should be allowed to choose how to present their own experiences. He praises local researchers’ efforts to study the Holocaust and open their archives and notes that Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.

“Ukraine has begun the process of confronting the darkest pages of its past,” he says.

In today’s charged atmosphere, saying anything critical about Ukrainian nationalism or calling attention to Ukrainian nationalists’ involvement with the Nazis can be seen as supporting Russia’s depiction of Ukraine as a Nazi nation, Belsky notes.

This Russian narrative is nothing new. Instead, says Dobczansky, it’s part of a long-term Russian information war on Ukraine. Putin’s ahistorical justifications of the invasion doesn’t surprise the scholar. What does surprise him is the outpouring of support he’s seen for Ukraine, with even “Saturday Night Live” paying tribute to the beleaguered nation.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-20th-century-history-behind-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-180979672/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

更早一些的烏克蘭曆史，以及烏克蘭的歐盟進程以及原因見下麵我的簡要總結：

烏克蘭曆史上就是比較悲催的地方, 與俄羅斯一樣同屬東斯拉夫人種, 在這一地區散居,後因內部紛爭,請來維京海盜來解決自己內部問題, 維京人就順便統治他們不走了, 建立基輔羅斯文化,也是烏克蘭文化的基礎,早於沙俄. 這個地區一直沒有真正獨立建國, 領主都是所謂大公, 即別的王朝的大臣. 曾被波蘭公國, 立陶宛公國,奧斯曼土耳其帝國,沙俄,以及蘇聯統治. 但後來烏克蘭人因不堪沙俄以及蘇聯的暴政,開始謀求民族獨立建國.

在被波蘭公國統治期間,因烏克蘭領主被波蘭貴族欺壓,起義造反,戰爭陸陸續續打了100多年, 輸輸贏贏, 最終因勢衰,此時的克裏米亞半島已經被奧斯曼土耳其帝國占領, 無力奪回, 其時為了謀求新出路對抗波蘭, 他們覺得選則新的主人去投靠, 因奧斯曼土耳其是伊斯蘭教, 烏克蘭人決定投靠,文化,宗教相近的俄羅斯帝國. 當時的沙皇是葉卡捷琳娜二世. 沙皇答應了烏克蘭的要求, 去攻打波蘭,並從奧斯曼土耳其帝國手裏奪回克裏米亞. 沒想到的是俄羅斯給烏克蘭帶來了比波蘭人更深重的災難, 波蘭人統治烏克蘭,還在經營這個地方,給烏克蘭領主發錢, 出錢養烏克蘭軍隊, 俄羅斯人隻有掠奪.

俄羅斯帝國崛起後, 烏克蘭還屬於散居狀態,很多崇尚自由的人都跑來這裏定居,沒人管轄, 他們管自己叫哥薩克, 意思是崇尚自由, 與我們理解的哥薩克不同, 被沙俄接管後, 葉卡捷琳娜二世強征哥薩克人為其打仗, 組建哥薩克騎兵,這是我們知道的哥薩克, 雍正乾隆年間的與沙俄的兩場戰爭都有大量哥薩克騎兵參戰.

然後葉女皇一邊打波蘭人,趕走土耳其人一邊把俄羅斯人移民到烏克蘭, 從東部一路到克裏米亞半島. 這就是烏東親俄的基礎, 大多數都是俄羅斯族.

蘇聯十月革命後,烏克蘭人又造反,此時要獨立, 後被蘇聯打敗, 斯大林命名此時的烏克蘭,叫烏克蘭蘇聯民主共和國. 附屬國或殖民地吧. 30年代, 蘇共采取實現共產主義,農業合作化. 就像中國的大躍進, 造成農民積極性下降, 趕上天災, 烏克蘭糧食大減產, 斯大林則認為是農民反對合作化,把糧食藏起來, 最後強行搜走烏克蘭農民的所有糧食包括種子. 致使3百90萬烏克蘭人餓死大饑荒,占烏克蘭總人口的13%, 很多烏克蘭人認為這是俄羅斯人的故意種族滅絕而不是失敗的經濟政策. 這是30年代烏克蘭大饑荒的史實.

然後二戰爆發, 烏克蘭民族主義者想趁機謀求民族獨立建國,於是加入了納粹,參與了對猶太人的屠殺, 希特勒也答應了烏克蘭民族主義者,戰後允許烏克蘭獨立, 後來又不允許,征用烏克蘭人去德國勞作,地位高於俄羅斯人, 二戰末期又重新啟用的烏克蘭民族主義者給希特勒當炮灰.

戰後,赫魯曉夫期間清算了斯大林, 赫魯曉夫主動把已經屬於俄羅斯的克裏米亞劃歸烏克蘭, 克裏米亞地理位置非常重要,是俄羅斯的黑海出海口, 如果還是一個國家並無所謂, 但兩個國家屬於敵對. 所以普京在2014年,突然出兵占領克裏米亞,號稱兵不血刃.

烏克蘭是歐洲第二大國, 是歐洲最大的農業國, 號稱歐洲的糧倉, 指的是烏克蘭西部, 東部是蘇聯時期建立的工業區. 隨著烏克蘭與歐洲走的越來越近, 矛盾就出現了, 東部是完全蘇聯的工業體係與歐洲不兼容, 加入歐洲就要推倒重來,沒有任何好處. 東部就不願加入歐盟, 況且俄羅斯人多, 所以就發生了反叛, 兩個地區要求獨立建國並被俄羅斯支持. 而西部加入歐盟, 其農業收入可以得到歐盟的支持, 每畝地可以補償大600-700歐元, 是實實在在的實惠, 所以烏克蘭特別想加入歐盟.

因為烏克蘭政府腐敗, 腐敗程度超過俄羅斯, 是歐洲第二最腐敗的國家, 入歐盟資格一直沒有被通過. 如今北約更不敢直接接收它, 因為加入北約的條件是與其它國家沒有邊界糾紛.

所以你看,戰爭的原因不是什麽文化,宗教,主義, 完全就是為了利益. 東烏反叛是為利益, 烏克蘭加入歐盟也是為利益, 老百姓隻要安居樂業, 有利益可得就行.