Putin has supported these talking points by laying out his own version of Ukrainian history. In his telling, Ukraine has only been independent since 1991 and over the last 30 years has denied its true destiny: unity with Russia in a close but subordinate relationship. However, four revolutionary upsurges over the last hundred years in Ukraine refute this narrative: the war of independence in the years 1917–21, the struggle against Stalin’s regime in the 1920s and 1930s, the guerrilla war of the 1940s, and the Euromaidan protests of 2013–14. Ukraine’s current resistance to the Russian invasion draws on these revolutionary cycles and highlights a long, multigenerational drive for national self-determination in the face of claims by Russian supremacists.

Because of its rich “black earth,” one of the world’s oldest agricultural civilizations, the Trypillian, developed in Ukraine around 5,000 to 3,000 B.C. In the 10th to 13th centuries Kyiv was the center of a powerful state whose ruling family intermarried with European royalty, and in the 17th to 18th centuries it oversaw the flowering of unique baroque culture. In more recent times, the country’s struggle for statehood began near the end of World War I, with the establishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Initially carved from the Russian empire in 1917, the republic joined forces with the eastern half of Galicia in 1919, which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The republic was short-lived, however. Bolshevik armies invaded from Russia three times, and the country remained a hotbed of resistance until 1921, while armies and partisans contested Moscow-imposed rule.

Armed resistance to this rule in Ukraine only died down at the end of 1922 with the declaration of a Soviet Ukrainian republic, which promised political and cultural autonomy. At that point, some Ukrainian activists committed to the new state- and nation-building process. In 1923, when a policy of Ukrainization was announced, education, media, and government institutions moved toward using Ukrainian as their official language. By 1925, the policy had gained traction and launched a “cultural renaissance” in literature and the arts. It produced a plethora of brilliant Ukrainian writers, such as Mykola Khvylovy and Pavlo Tychyna, and an avant-garde movement in art, theater, and film, highlighted by internationally recognized artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Volodymyr Tatlin. This generation of creative figures rebranded the Ukrainian identity as modern, innovative, and European.

Stalin cut short this cultural renaissance when he unleashed what amounted to a war on Ukraine. Show trials of Ukrainian activists and cultural figures began in 1928 and forced collectivization of agricultural production in 1930. In 1932, he curtailed the Ukrainization policy, stifled the intelligentsia, and forced all writers and artists in major cities into one organization, even into one building—the “RoLit” in Kyiv and the “Slovo” in Kharkiv. Forced collectivization sparked thousands of revolts across the country, a resistance that was only crushed by mass arrests and the death of four million people during the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33.

Ten years later, during World War II, an armed underground sprang up in Ukraine to prevent the Soviet authorities from retaking control of the country. The resistance was long and stubborn, and had widespread support in the Western part of Ukraine. This part of the country had received its first taste of Soviet rule in 1939–41, during which time it witnessed the destruction of its institutions, the deportation of hundreds of thousands, and numerous other atrocities. In the post-war years, Soviet authorities killed an estimated 140,000 members of the Ukrainian underground, in both the cities and the countryside, from where guerrilla attacks were mounted. They also arrested and deported to Siberia as many as 400,000 people, including entire families suspected of aiding the fighters. In 1951, the resistance was finally crushed when its leadership was tracked down and killed.

During the Cold War period, much of the world ignored Ukraine’s existence. Western media was content to consider the country part of “Russia,” with no agency or identity of its own. However, in 1991, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukrainians again declared independence.

Ukraine’s most recent revolutionary cycle culminated in the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests, often referred to as the Revolution of Dignity. It began in 2004, when Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian sympathizer, tried to come to power. That year, Ukrainian protestors launched the Orange Revolution, a series of strikes, demonstrations, and sit-ins that eventually succeeded in dismissing Yanukovych’s fraudulent claim to have won the election.  Backed by Moscow, Yanukovych mounted a powerful media campaign and won the following election in 2010. Corruption immediately spread on a massive scale, as did Russia’s influence throughout Ukraine’s governing institutions and security structures. In 2013, Yanukovych suddenly reversed the policy moving Ukraine toward joining the European Union. All of Ukraine erupted in spontaneous protests, but the epicenter was at Kyiv’s Independence Square where special security forces violently attacked and shot protesters. When the protesters fought back successfully, Yanukovych fled the country. Ukraine once again moved toward establishing its independence and democracy, electing Petro Poroshenko as president, followed by current president Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin never forgot the failure to install Yanukovych as his puppet. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was, in large part, his response to the revolution that created this setback.

The People’s Friendship Arch in Kyiv. Courtesy of Flickr/Timon91.

Today Putin claims that his invasion is required in order to gather Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians into “one single geopolitical whole,” and solve “Russia’s main problem”—the Ukrainian question. In his mind, the idea of Kyiv as the capital of an independent Ukraine is a symbol of Russia’s national humiliation. He also recognizes that a prosperous, democratic, culturally vibrant Ukraine is a threat to his own rule. But beyond this he sees the crushing of Ukraine as the great opening salvo that will proclaim Russia’s challenge to the West for leadership of a new world order.

The citizens of Ukraine, however, reject Russian supremacy. An entire generation has grown up in an independent state. They speak its language, read its literature, and identify with its culture. In this time, monuments of Soviet or Russian rule have disappeared, including 17,000 Lenin statues and countless images of Stalin’s acolytes. The remaining symbols of the Soviet past have been refashioned—by painting them yellow and blue, renaming some, and metaphorically repurposing others. The People’s Friendship Arch in Kyiv, originally built in 1982 as a symbol of Russian-Ukrainian unity, has become a site of protest. In 2018, artists and human rights activists placed a sticker on it to resemble a crack—a sign of support for the political prisoners Russia had arrested in annexed Crimea. In Kyiv, the massive stainless-steel Motherland Monument, originally erected in 1981 to memorialize World War II soldiers, is now draped in a Ukrainian flag and wears a wreath. Its raised sword and shield have come to symbolize Ukraine’s resistance to all invaders.

Zombieland’s spin is facing a potent counter-narrative on the ground as Ukrainians once again reject attempts to erase their history, while they battle for their lives and country. There are echoes in today’s resistance of many past militant struggles, spanning different periods and generations. It is a history of continual and determined striving for human rights, democratic norms, and national survival.

The post In Ukraine’s Resistance, Echoes of Past Struggles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In June 1941, when German troops overran the country, Vilna was home to 55,000 Jewish residents and 12,000–15,000 refugees from German-occupied Poland. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the spiritual and academic center of Holocaust remembrance, described Vilna before the Nazis arrived as “the spiritual centre of Eastern European Jewry, the centre of enlightenment and Jewish political life, of Jewish creativity and the experience of daily Jewish life, a community bursting with cultural and religious life, movements and parties, educational institutions, libraries and theatres; a community of rabbis and gifted Talmudic scholars, intellectuals, poets, authors, artists, craftspeople and educators.”

The Nazis, with the help of some Lithuanians, destroyed all that. In September 1941, they imprisoned the Jews of Vilna in two separate ghettoes.

The smaller, filled with Jews deemed incapable of work, was liquidated after six weeks, with 10,000 of its residents massacred at Ponary, a forest just outside the city. The 30,000 Jews imprisoned in the larger ghetto were kept alive, barely, and sent off to work in nearby labor camps until September 1943, when the second ghetto was closed. Some 8,000 ghetto residents too ill to work any longer were sent to be shot at Ponary or to the Sobibor death camp to be gassed; a few thousand of the stronger men and boys were transported to suffer and be worked to death in Estonian labor and concentration camps; the strongest of the women and girls were sent to labor camps in Latvia.

What happened in Vilna was just a microcosm of atrocities committed throughout Lithuania. By the war’s end, 90 percent of the country’s pre-war Jewish population of a quarter million had been murdered. While it was the Germans who pulled the triggers, they were aided and abetted at every step by local Lithuanians, who sought out the Jews or gave names and addresses to the Germans, who invaded their homes, stole their property, and marched the Jews to the killing fields where they would be shot, and who stayed behind to bury them in mass graves.

In traveling to Lithuania, I had hoped to find that, as in Rome, the past remained present in some way; that I would be able to experience it in its absence, soak in what had once been there and now survived in the ruins and the memorials. But the Vilna and Lithuania that I wanted to visit was no more. It had been cleared of its Jewish population. There were no Jews left in Butrimonys, the small village where my maternal grandmother’s family had come from, and only a few thousand in all of Lithuania.

Vilna had been replaced by Vilnius, which, now, in the third decade of the 21st century, had branded itself as one of the most attractive, tourist-friendly cities in Europe, with wondrous shopping opportunities, magnificent parks, a picturesque old city, world-class hotels and restaurants, and a thriving night life.

On my arrival and for the next several days, I wandered and was escorted through Vilnius and its outskirts in search of Vilna and some vestige of the Jews who had once lived there. I walked the broad pedestrian-friendly streets of the Vilnius Old Town, where I was staying, past small shops overstuffed with antiques, designer clothing, handicrafts, linens, books, and amber jewelry. Outside the Old Town, I visited the beautifully designed and overflowing malls and markets and fashion houses. And all the time, I thought about how this city had once been a center of Jewish life and learning, all of it now vanished—105 synagogues and prayer houses, six daily newspapers, and dozens of active, thriving theaters, libraries, museums, hospitals, schools, universities, institutes, and publishing houses.

On my final day in Vilnius, I visited Ponary just outside the city, where, according to historian Timothy Snyder, 72,000 Jews had been shot, buried, and then, at the end of the war as the Soviets approached, had their corpses dug up by the Nazis and their local helpers and burned so that no trace of the atrocities committed there would remain. The scene I took in in 2019 was bucolic, with tamed forests, well-marked paths, and memorials along the way. One had to struggle with one’s imagination to link together the memorials to the dead with the still green, verdant parkland.

Having spent five years trying to distance myself from the horrors of the Holocaust in eastern Europe so that I could write my book and lead my life, I was now standing where the atrocities I had read and written about occurred. I had expected that the keynote of my visit to Vilna and Butrimonys, and Lithuania, then Latvia, would be an inescapable mourning. But I quickly learned how difficult, if not impossible, it is to mourn an absence.

I found myself grieving not only for those who had died in the past, but for the Jewish activists and educators who had done all they humanly could to resurrect the community that had been destroyed. At war’s end, a few thousand Lithuanian Jews who had escaped and survived the Holocaust—in the Soviet Union or in hiding, or who had fought as partisans in the forests—returned to Vilna. But their attempts to rebuild a Jewish community were thwarted by the Soviets, who feared any expression of ethnic pride or nationalism, other than reverence for the Soviet state and the Communist Party.

The Germans had murdered the Jewish people. The Soviets, through the 1950s and for the two decades that followed, engaged in another form of genocide, removing any remnant of the built community. Schools and shuls and libraries and theaters were destroyed or repurposed; the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery were removed, pounded into fragments, then used as building materials in the new brutalized, Sovietized streets and buildings.

By the early 1970s, increased Jewish immigration from Russia and Ukraine led to the expansion of the Jewish population to almost 20,000. But these migrants found it impossible to put down roots in the city and the country where so many of the previous generations of Jews had been murdered. When the establishment of an independent Lithuanian republic in 1991 enabled the Jews to abandon the Soviet bloc, they did so. Most migrated to the United States or to Israel, where they could be part of thriving, living Jewish communities.

For those who remained in what was now an independent Lithuania, there remained a glimmer of hope that the Jewish community, after five decades of occupation by the Germans and the Soviets, had a chance to finally be reborn. But it was not to be. Non-Jewish Lithuanians were more concerned with memorializing the suffering of their people under Soviet tyranny than they were in recognizing the destruction of the Jewish community by the Germans and atoning for the participation of some Lithuanians in the genocide.

There are today roughly 3,000 Jews still in Vilnius—many of them recent arrivals with no ancestral ties to the city. Those I met and talked with on my trip still held tight to their mission to revive a living Jewish community with cultural institutions, yeshivas, day schools, shuls, but I got the sense that they knew their cause was lost.

If a thriving Jewish community was out of reach in the present, there was among the Jewish activists I met, the hope that physical markers and memorials to the past might preserve the memory of the atrocities that had been committed in the vanished prewar city, that Vilnius’s and Lithuania’s school children might be educated about this stain in their national history, and reminded that their capital city had once been the capital city of Jewish thought and culture.

The Jewish activists are proud of the progress they’ve made since 1991—and the declaration of Lithuanian independence—in integrating the history of the Shoah in Vilna into the history of Vilnius and Lithuania, proud of the memorials that have been erected in the city and at the killing fields of Ponary, proud of and seizing on every opportunity to educate rising generations about the city’s Jewish past. Still, it is an uphill battle that they and other Jewish residents in eastern Europe are fighting. The inhabitants of today’s Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, do not want to be reminded of the sins of their fathers and mothers, or of the atrocities they witnessed or participated in. They would rather not revisit the past or, to be more accurate, they would rather revisit a sanitized past where Lithuanians were the victims of violence, not the perpetrators.

As a historian, I try to bring the past back to life because it is a vital part of our present. We live in a continuum of time—the past is with us, embedded in our present, and we must recognize it as such. But that past is difficult to locate and resurrect. It is a foreign country that we can visit, but never inhabit, never speak the language, eat the foods, worship and live and love as the departed once did. No amount of effort on our part, as historians, can bring it back to life. All we can do is struggle to re-present that past in words and images.

This is what I tried to do in writing The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. I wanted to recapture this forgotten chapter in the history of World War II, the Cold War, and the Holocaust. I wanted to instruct present generations to the reality that the suffering of the victims of war did not end with the cessation of hostilities. I wanted to show how 1 million refugees, 250,000 of them Jewish Holocaust survivors, were, after the German surrender, trapped in displaced persons camps in Germany for three to five years because their homes and homelands had been destroyed and no nation on earth would accept them for resettlement.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Lithuania’s Vanished Center of Jewish Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Originally from Alabama, a state with no shortage of divides, I have lived all over the world—four continents and counting. But I have never experienced a society so divided over the very nature of reality. As a country, Ukraine has seen three revolutions in the last quarter century, which has left an indelible emotional stamp on the inhabitants that manifests itself in unpredictable and creative ways on a daily basis. Spending much of my time here, I always feel like I am teetering between overbearing collectivism and out-of-control individualism, between the past and the present, and between Ukraine and a Russia that constantly meddles in internal politics.

With this uneasy reality as a backdrop, Ukraine struggles with COVID. After three quarantines and lockdowns and one of the highest infection rates in Europe, Kyiv is split between those who will wear their masks and think of their fellow citizens, and those who behave as if they are immune from the ravages of the virus, and call mask requirements an infringement of their rights. People here openly say that COVID is nothing more than a mass government attempt to control our minds.
 
Such attitudes, combined with Russian disinformation campaigns, have plunged public support for vaccinations here to record lows. Politicians have gained attention by playing on these public fears that vaccinations are unsafe; some fear is rational. Fake COVID tests have become commonplace, and many people see the haves vaccinating themselves, while the have-nots struggle to survive. At the current vaccination rate, Ukraine’s population of 43 million won’t be immune until 2030!
 
As an American living here, people assume two things about me: that I have money, and that I have some magical power to secure visas to the U.S., which became increasingly difficult to get during the Trump Presidency. My daily routine, when I am on the streets, involves explaining just how powerless we Americans really are in navigating the bureaucracy.
 
I have mostly avoided crowds during the quarantine. Rather than take mass transit, when I need to get around, my preference is to walk. A beautiful city on the surface, Kyiv’s infrastructure is a fragile and deteriorating holdover from the Soviet era. Gig companies like Uber prosper because you cannot count on the metro or the buses. I find it is easier—and often faster—to cover Kyiv on foot, given its terrible traffic jams.
 

Each morning, I walk to my favorite breakfast place, while watching the social structure of this city that was a Soviet Union gem until 1994 play out on the dilapidated streets of the city. One can’t help but notice the unusual number of Bentleys and high-end Mercedes Benzes speeding by, driving as if no laws can constrain them, next to the 30-year-old Russian-made Ladas that meander slowly, carrying their occupants to their jobs in the concrete jungle of Soviet-era office buildings. Likely, 75 percent of the cars I will see on my morning walk are from the U.S., totaled for insurance purposes with no chance of a life on the streets of most American cities. But given the horrendously low salaries of even Kyiv’s best and brightest, this is the only way to afford a dependable and respectable car in the country, since new cars are simply financially out of reach.

No matter the driver or quality of the car, one must watch carefully crossing the street, since the green man signaling that it is safe to walk bears no semblance to reality. Cars here are notorious for ignoring traffic lights, and in a city where parking on sidewalks is the norm, pedestrians are simply viewed as the equivalent of a cockroach that must be crushed when they get in the way.

The Sikorsky Family home, Kyiv. Photo by M. Dane Waters.

I won’t disclose the name of where I eat my breakfast since, like many establishments in the city, it has put paper in the windows so as not to be seen as open for business during quarantine. I see the same papering-over when I go by the gym, try to get a haircut, or stop by a local store or mall.

This quasi-openness, especially of the restaurants for their regular customers, is possible because the local police reportedly receive a bribe to look the other way—most of the time just from the restaurant owner, but occasionally some overzealous officers target the patrons as well. In some cases, the show of law enforcement at a restaurant is not because of violations of the quarantine, but simply a continuation of the culinary war in the city between the restaurants backed by either a Russian or Ukrainian oligarch. But regardless of who the owner is, it must be noted that the quality of the food in Kyiv is some of the best in Europe. That fact alone warrants a trip to Kyiv and the occasional intrusion of a mafia-related culinary conflict.

The Russian and Ukrainian mafias here operate collaboratively—though when at odds, they have no problem showing their unhappiness with the people being the sacrificial pawns in the conflict. Wealthy oligarchs fund both legal and illegal enterprises, and toy with Ukraine’s future prospects, sometimes aligning with Europe to the West, and sometimes with Russia to the East, depending on what is best for their political and financial interests.
 
Prior to the pandemic, tourism to Kyiv was on the rise due to its close proximity to Chernobyl—the site of one of the worst nuclear power plant disasters the world has seen. Day trips to Chernobyl were easy from Kyiv, and the numbers were increasing daily given the success of the HBO series by the same name. The Chernobyl disaster, only 60 miles from Kyiv, could have wiped out this city of millions if the wind had simply been blowing in a different direction the week of the explosion. Chernobyl continues to be a gift from Russia that keeps giving: It has not only cost the country and the world billions of dollars to contain, but Ukrainians west of Chernobyl continue to experience cancer-related deaths at a higher rate than anywhere else in the country to this day because of the deadly radiation cloud from the disaster.
 
But Ukrainians are strong in will and spirit. They are some of the most adaptable to challenges that I have seen, having continued to be put through trials that show their resilience and desire to survive—from Stalin starving 10 million Ukrainians to death in the Terror-Famine of 1932 to the Revolution of Dignity, which took place in Maidan in the heart of Kyiv in 2014. This revolution pitted everyday Ukrainians—men, women, and children—against Putin-supported President Viktor Yanukovych. Before it was over, a hundred civilians in the city had been killed by Russian-trained snipers. But many argue that this revolution was what finally set the country on a path toward full Europe integration.
 
Since the revolution, Maiden has become the true heart of this sprawling capital city. It has been the major place for the citizens to hang out during the three COVID quarantines the city has imposed during the pandemic. It is a great place to find strength to weather the growing economic and emotional challenges caused by the seemingly never-ending pandemic.

While I want to believe COVID is in its waning days here, belief is no more a protection against COVID’s spread than hanging pieces of paper in your restaurant’s windows is. Eating my breakfast of eggs, potatoes, and the occasional vatrushka behind a thin piece of brown paper, I can temporarily forget the reality of the situation, but it’s reawakened when I hear another ambulance siren that is likely carrying a COVID patient to the hospital.

It’s a stark reminder of our obligation to the health and safety of each other. The best way to rid Kyiv—and the rest of Ukraine—from this deadly virus is to recognize the importance of keeping our fellow Kyiv residents safe by respecting the quarantines, the basics of wearing masks, social distancing, and washing our hands. But is it possible to get a place so divided culturally and politically that we no longer have shared realities to agree on this? Let’s hope!

The post A Letter From Kyiv, Where Reality Is Being Papered Over appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event, titled “What Would a New Cold War Mean for the World?” and part of a series on global challenges called “The World We Want,” offered a fast-paced look at dozens of aspects of the Chinese-American relationship, from their economic interdependence to their 5G networks, and from their military competition to the mutual hostility between countries that shows up in public opinion surveys.

The conversation also turned repeatedly to the possibility of military conflict of Taiwan, with two panelists suggesting China could move to reunite the island by force with the mainland in the next few years.

The event’s moderator, New York Times associate managing editor Philip P. Pan, who spent much of his career reporting in China, started the conversation by asking to what extent the features of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union can be seen in conflict between the U.S. and China today.

Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished University of Toronto historian and author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us, said that the two conflicts both involved two large powers with global ambitions and reach. “The United States and the Soviet Union claimed to be speaking for a better part of the world,” she said. “We have elements of that in the current tension between China and the United States.”

But, she suggested, it is the differences that matter more. The U.S.-China relationship, MacMillan said, is not as ideological as the old Cold War, and the U.S. has a much closer relationship with China, especially as a leading trading partner, than it did with the economically isolated USSR. Another crucial difference: The U.S. and the Soviet Union were such dominant superpowers that they were able to pressure other countries in the world to take their side, while today’s world is more multipolar, with other major powers having enough autonomy and weight not to be drawn in.

Still, MacMillan cautioned, the fact that the U.S. and China are inherently closer to each other might actually produce more friction.

She recalled that before World War I, Germany and Britain were each other’s largest trading partners; four members of the British cabinet had been educated in Germany, and the British royal family’s lineage was quite German. Despite these elite connections, MacMillan said, public opinion turned hostile in each country against the other as war broke out.

“That is what concerns me today,” said MacMillan, nodding to the increasingly negative public sentiment in China and the U.S. toward the other at present. “The historical record isn’t that reassuring.”

Another panelist, Oriana Mastro, an FSI Center Fellow at Stanford University, warned that popular comparisons of the U.S.-China conflict to the Cold War could produce flawed strategies for dealing with today’s problems.

China, she said, is a profoundly different rival than the Soviet Union in that it is not trying to turn democracies into autocracies, and is not perceived as a military or security threat to other countries. Because China is in Asia, the most dynamic and populous part of the world, “China doesn’t have to be a power elsewhere to be a superpower; dominating Asia is enough, and that’s where it is focusing its energies and its military.”

But that focus on Asia might make this conflict more dangerous in some ways than the Cold War. “The military confrontation between China and the United States is going to happen in Asia,” said Mastro. “This competition is much more likely to turn hot than it ever was with the Soviet Union.”

After Pan asked whether countries would be pressed to choose sides between two superpowers, as in the Cold War, Mastro, who is also a Defense and Foreign Policy Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that China is not going to form its own bloc because it does not want a coalition forming against it. She referred to writing from Chinese strategists noting that the U.S. already has locked up the best partners—the world’s democracies, and richest nations.

Instead, she said, China is turning its lack of coalition into an advantage in its contest with the U.S. While the American government makes heavy demands of partner countries (such as economic or democratic reform, or providing military bases), China typically asks other nations merely to choose neutrality in the U.S.-China conflict, and to avoid talking about sensitive topics like Hong Kong or Taiwan.

“When countries choose neutrality, when they choose not to take a side at all, in effect, they are choosing China,” Mastro said. “It’s very hard for the United States to build coalitions against China … because we ask so much more.”

Meanwhile, while China is more focused on economic issues than military ones, Mastro warned that the country is using its extensive economic and technological expertise to enhance the lethality of its military. And China’s ability to gather a lot of data through its technological expansion could allow it to target elites in other countries.

For instance, she said, “They could use targeted cyberattacks to disrupt someone’s life who says something bad about Taiwan.”

Striking a much more optimistic tone than the other two panelists, the third panelist, UCLA Anderson distinguished professor Christopher S. Tang, argued that China’s new trade agreement with the European Union—in which China expressed new willingness to cooperate on technology transfer and meeting international labor standards—might provide an opening for less conflict, and more peaceful cooperation between the U.S. and China.

Tang said the U.S. and other countries should say to China, “We embrace you, we recognize your success, but if you want to win respect in the world, you need to become a leader” in protecting the environment, workers, and intellectual property.

More broadly, Tang argued that the rest of the world needs the U.S. and China to set a strong example of peaceful cooperation. He cited four major global problems that threaten both countries that would be easier to solve if the U.S. and China worked together: COVID recovery and global public health, combating climate change, reducing poverty, and caring for the rapidly aging population

“I think there is a window,” said Tang, pointing to President Xi Jinping’s stated commitment, at last month’s World Economic Forum, to solve global problems. “Why not leverage this moment?”

He described the U.S-China rivalry as primarily economic, and compared it to a 50-year-long chess match. He described President Trump’s trade war as a middle game of this chess contest, which had failed to advance American economic interests, and suggested that President Biden could work to “keep it to a draw … so there will be no winners and no losers.”

The Zócalo/University of Toronto virtual event drew a global audience, and it concluded with questions from the YouTube chat room about whether the Cold War strategy of containment applies to China (not really, panelists said), how Canada should deal with China (carefully and in partnership with other countries, MacMillan answered), about technology’s role in the rivalry, and about how the U.S. should respond to any Chinese military aggression, especially against Taiwan.

On that last subject, both MacMillan and Mastro were emphatic that the threat of conflict over Taiwan is more serious and urgent than generally understood, in part because Chinese leadership is losing patience. Mastro pointed to opinion polls showing that a majority of Chinese citizens support armed reunification with Taiwan—and expect it within three to five years.

That could mean we’re heading toward a very hot U.S.-China war.

The post The U.S.-China Rivalry Isn’t a New Cold War; It’s Bigger Than That appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These aren’t my first protests—far from it. As the child of Polish American immigrant activists, I was raised on this form of expression. Even before I understood Polish politics or why we were marching, my community taught me to fight for freedom from tyranny.

But during these protests, my community has been silent. And that pains me tremendously. I find I can no longer reconcile the values I was raised with, with a lot of what I’m seeing in my community today.

I think back to my first protests, in search of understanding what went wrong.

*

I am 8 years old. It’s December, and the wind whips off Lake Michigan and snow crunches under my cold feet. Our small group slowly walks in a circle. The adults carry signs and chant in thick Polish accents: Stop Red Terror. We are in front of a gray stone building. All the curtains are pulled closed. Round and round we go.

My 5-year-old brother walks next to me. Sometimes we join in the chants and imitate the accents: Stop Ret Terro. Every once in a while, we get to warm up inside a van, where adults give us hot tea. And then back outside, back into the circle we go.

We return often to march in front of this building. It is called the “consulate.” Polish people work in it, but they don’t want Poland to be free. The Polish flag hangs outside, but the eagle that flies on it has no crown. It’s supposed to, though, my dad tells me. “The communists took the crown off the Polish eagle,” he says.

Martial law. I see the phrase in papers. I watch grainy footage of a balding man explain why it is necessary. I overhear things when the adults come to our house at night. “Arrest” and “show trial.” The adults are angry that the balding man lies so much.

In the spring, the protests get louder. By the summer, there are so many people that I get lost in the crowd.

Someone picks me up and hoists me onto a newspaper stand. There’s a bus stop sign above it that I conk my head on. When I start crying, a woman sees me and calls out: “Don’t cry, little one. Someday Poland will be free.”

That fall, an activist priest in Poland is kidnapped and killed by three police officers who are in the “secret police.” The next protest at the gray building is silent. People hold candles, and the priest’s photo.

The priest has a kind face. I look at all the faces around me. So many are crying.

*

Stop Ret Terro. Because terror it was. Life in post-World War II Poland was grim. One-fifth of the country’s citizens—mostly civilians—had perished during the war, including 90 percent of its Jewish population. Poland’s infrastructure was devastated: the capital, Warsaw, was bombed so heavily that it was nearly leveled. The economy struggled to stabilize.

The communist yoke, imposed by Soviet influence, never took. Anti-government protests and strikes began in the 1950s and intensified in the 1960s and 1970s. The more Poles protested, the more the Soviets clamped down. The economy bottomed out. There were regular power outages and shortages of everything, from food to manufacturing equipment.

My parents, who were born in Poland in 1943, were raised on a regular diet of propaganda about amazing Mother Russia, and terrible capitalist America. They met at music school: My father studied piano and jazz, and my mother musical theory. Artists got special privileges, including travel to places like Siberia and Sweden. And then, to America. My dad went first, traveling on an extended artist visa in the mid-1970s, to play in Chicago jazz clubs. My mom and I followed half a year later.

Politics were heating up back home, where an economic recession threatened to throw Poland into bankruptcy. Poland’s Solidarity movement, which emerged from the first independent labor union in the Soviet bloc and became a 9 million member-strong anti-communist social revolution, was in full swing, and striking workers demonstrated in the streets. In what would be their last-ditch effort to regain control, in December 1981 the communist government declared martial law and imposed severe restrictions on everyday life: no gatherings, no protests, no inter-city travel, wire taps in public phone booths, a complete media blackout, a curfew monitored and enforced by military tanks and military units. Thousands of activists were thrown into prison without charges. Some were killed.

When the authorities declared martial law, my parents were among the first protestors in Chicago. They had earlier started an organization, Pomost, which means “bridge.” Now, people were always at our house, talking into the night about who was arrested back home, who was freed, and who the communists were spying on now.

We marched and protested for two years, until martial law was lifted and Poland was free again. For years after that, we watched the country pursue a liberal, progressive, pro-democracy and pro-EU agenda, achieving economic stability and growth. Once an adult, I went to work for the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., launching a social media program that was rolled out to all the Polish diplomatic missions around the world—including the Polish consulate I’d marched under when I was a child.

I made videos, unearthed never-before-seen photos of the embassy at the Library of Congress, and interviewed all the interesting people—film director Agnieszka Holland, for one—who came through the embassy. I loved sharing Poland’s history and its innovative present, and poured myself into the work.

*

Today I watch Poland—my beloved, strong homeland that suffered, and fought and fought and fought, and finally broke free—slowly become the thing it once feared and battled against. I am outraged. And heartbroken.

There’s an election in 2015, and Poland elects a strongly right-wing government. The vote is pretty close, 52 percent to 48 percent, and pretty evenly split. Urban areas and western Poland (closer to Europe) vote for the progressive incumbent, while rural and eastern Poland (closer to Russia) vote for the conservative challenger, Andrzej Duda.

Duda and the ruling party preach strongly nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-woman, and anti-Other rhetoric. Their policies follow suit. Parliament proposes a strict anti-abortion ban in 2016. The ban does not pass—tens of thousands of women across Poland march in protest, holding wire hangers—but in fall 2020 the government issues restrictions on abortion anyway. Polish women around the world again take to the streets. As of this writing, they are still protesting.

Also in 2020, the loudly pro-Trump Duda declares in his re-election campaign that LGBTQ+ is an “ideology more dangerous than communism” that must be stamped out. Same-sex marriage and civil unions are illegal in Poland, but hate speech gets a free pass. Nearly 100 small cities across Poland declare themselves “LGBT-free zones.” “Beware the rainbow plague!” the Catholic archbishop of Krakow thunders.

Many people protest this, too. The EU chimes in, warning about the dangers of this rhetoric. Still, Duda is re-elected. The majority of Polish Americans with dual citizenship who participate in the Polish elections vote for him.

*

In America, we’re having our own issues. I march and protest—and this time I know exactly why and what for. As I kneel at a silent vigil for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in Brooklyn this summer, I watch as a mother cradles her young son. Tears stream down my face as I think about the people who want to harm him because of the color of his skin.

I obsessively scour for news of any response to BLM from the Polish American community. I see nothing until May 2020, when a monument of a Polish general gets defaced in Washington, D.C.

This general, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, was one of the good ones. In 1776, he escaped Poland and joined the American cause during the Revolutionary War, acting heroically at the Battle of Saratoga and designing the defenses at West Point military academy during the height of the Revolutionary War. He was a buddy of Thomas Jefferson who despised slavery; the two had a lengthy written correspondence, in which Kosciuszko tried to persuade Jefferson just how loathsome slavery was. In his will, Kosciuszko left his fortune to Jefferson and begged Jefferson to use it to free the enslaved people at Monticello. Jefferson, as we know, did none of that.

During anti-police brutality protests after George Floyd’s killing, some people spray paint Kosciuszko’s statue, as well as the other statues in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House. BLM tags, an anarchy symbol or two.

A Polish reporter tweets about it. He stands under the Kosciuszko monument and asks passers-by if they know who Kosciuszko is (they do not). His feed and a subsequent article race through the Polish American community—which loses its collective mind.

Not because a man was murdered by police. Not because a woman was shot to death in her own bed. Not because the president of the U.S. uses the same authoritarian tactics they once fled: tear gas, overzealous police in riot gear, a staged photo op in front of a church. Not because the people being targeted are our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, our family.

No, Polish Americans are upset that this monument—“Our monument! Our compatriot! Our hero!”—got spray painted. They have a lot to say about it. I see countless social media posts, emails, and news articles complaining about “desecration.” There are condescending denunciations of the American educational system: “What are we teaching our youth if we aren’t teaching them about Kosciuszko and his values?”

The Polish ambassador piles on via Twitter. The Embassy of Poland in the U.S. retweets and agrees. When I worked at the embassy, I started that Twitter feed to highlight the embassy’s diplomatic work, and to share interesting Polish cultural and historical tidbits—photos from events, gorgeous artwork and furnishings from the embassy building. Now I scroll through the comments and see hatred and condemnation for the protestors. I feel nauseated as I see the n-word, over and over again.

I try to engage with people on Facebook, gently attempting to steer the conversation toward the ideals he fought for and his anti-slavery stance. But most people cannot connect what is so clear for me: Kosciuszko hated slavery. What’s happening now is an extended form of slavery. Kosciuszko would have spoken out against it. We should too.

Many Polish Americans support Donald Trump, joining a number of immigrant groups who embrace his rhetoric. Many come from communities for whom the word “communist” is anathema, and Ronald Reagan was a saint. These groups readily believe messaging that Democrats will usher in socialism—a concept which remains murkily undefined, but is irrefutably Bad and Wrong.

To me, what’s truly Bad and horribly Wrong is turning a blind eye toward the suffering of oppressed groups and individuals, and undermining the foundation of American democracy. I learned my ideals from my parents and their protester friends; from Polish scouts, Polish-language school, Polish books and movies and conversations. Truth above all. Freedom and honor. Worth based not on religion or race, but in how you move through this world. The right to dissent; the right to speak out. The courage to stand up to hatred and bigotry. The fortitude to help others: to not just empathize with those who suffer, but to help them in their struggle. To protest and march with them, like we once did. To fight against authoritarianism, like we once did.

I cannot reconcile my community’s past and its present. BLM protests continue, and the Polish American community remains silent, hiding inside that gray building, curtains tightly drawn.

Outside, people are protesting and screaming. Human rights are being trampled. But the tags and graffiti are gone from the monuments in Lafayette Park. The statue is clean.

The post The Damning Silence of Polish Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Global domination was indeed Moscow’s declared aim. The issue, however, was whether this goal was at all practicable.

The Red Scare blended neatly with popular hostility to mass immigration in America, particularly against a surge of Jews fleeing the anti-Semitic heartlands of Eastern Europe. Responding to hostility, many Jews embraced the inclusive internationalist ideals of Communism rather than the outlandish idea of building a Jewish state in the deserts of British-controlled Arab Palestine. But they were a minority, drawn in by radical idealism and anti-fascism. And the American opposition to wider Jewish immigration from these areas was clearly colored by racism, especially the anti-Semitism of the time.

Although there was little justification for the scare-mongering, the hysteria was enough to spur the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which put a halt to the inflow of immigrants without visas. Fears began to dissipate. The 1927 execution of Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchist immigrants accused of murder on doubtful evidence, marked the high tide of the irrational anti-red (and mostly anti-foreigner) hysteria in American life.

Ironically, it was around this time that real dangers actually began to emerge. But, having cried wolf once too often, doomsayers then faced an uphill task through the ‘30s trying to convince the government and the American public that Communist threats of any kind actually existed.

Fear of Communism and fear of Soviet espionage were closely entangled because a few members of the miniscule American Communist Party were, in fact, involved in spying for Moscow. Most adherents had no idea this kind of thing was going on—the practice was confined to the shadows, restricted to a few specially chosen for what they had to offer. But, as was the case with Communist Parties elsewhere in the world, those recruited saw it as their duty to serve. And recent archival revelations from Moscow show just how persistent the Kremlin was in its attempts to penetrate the American system.

Initially the civilian branch of Soviet intelligence—OGPU, then NKVD—had little luck recruiting American spies. Yuri Markin (codename Oskar), the illegal “rezident”—as the Russians called their station chiefs—from from 1932-1934, was murdered by persons unknown, the victim of a violent encounter in a New York bar. His replacement, Boris Bazarov (codenames, Kin, Da Vinci, Nord), worked in tandem with the ‘legal’ rezident (who was under diplomatic cover), Pyotr Guttseit (codename Nikolai). He had much better luck, including recruiting sources with direct access to the State Department and one connected to President Franklin Roosevelt’s inner circle. But the successful spy was recalled to Moscow in 1937, where he became a victim of Stalin’s paranoid purge of those seen as connected to foreigners (mass executions that included even George Kennan’s dentist at the American embassy). His successor, Ishak Akhmerov (codename Yung), took over and married a distant relative of Communist Party chief Earl Browder. Browder himself ensured that ties to Soviet intelligence became indistinguishable from Party work; his wife, Kitty (‘Gipsy’) Harris, worked for the Soviets and assisted (and slept with) their British spy Donald Maclean in London and then Paris in the late ‘30s.

The most successful operation at that time, however, came from a group of covert operatives organized by the American agriculturalist Harold Ware. The ring included Alger Hiss, Donald, and other federal officials who were convinced that the need to confront the threat from fascism eclipsed all other loyalties. They believed that the road to socialism was inevitable, and that the socialist-leaning policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal were merely the taste of things to come. This operation came under Soviet military intelligence, known as the Fourth Directorate, the NKVD’s main rival. Although their infiltration went deep, none of it added up to much—it was simply ‘music of the future’.

The stakes were raised, however, when the U.S. entered WWII in December 1941—and the Americans joined the British to develop the atomic bomb. Soviet focus on scientific and industrial intelligence (NTR), which had its own section within the NKVD, switched abruptly from London to Washington. Though intelligence boss Lavrenty Beria dragged his feet on the issue, the NTR foresaw the significant role the bomb would play and pushed it to the forefront of their priorities. Once the directive was set by Stalin in 1942, Soviet efforts knew no limits. Operation Enormoz, directed at uncovering the secret of atomic bomb construction, took high priority. The Kremlin was looking ahead to the aftermath of war. The balance of power could ultimately depend who had the bomb. And those who volunteered for the cause were putting their lives at risk, as they were soon to find out.

The American authorities had absolutely no idea what the Russians were up to until very late in the game. Good liberals scoffed at the idea that Moscow could be spying on a wartime ally, even as some of their best friends were actually secret members of the Communist Party and spies for Russia. The Roosevelt administration declined to follow up on tips about suspected infiltration. It wasn’t until the very public defection of a Soviet Embassy cipher clerk, who snuck out documentation showing the magnitude of Soviet atomic espionage that had been going on, that the issue finally came to a head. Soviet spy networks were quickly rooted out. The consequences proved cataclysmic for Americans caught serving the Communist cause. Among those swept up were Julius Rosenberg, an engineer who handed Moscow classified information about the U.S. atomic program, and his wife Ethel (against whom there was little solid evidence).

By the early 1950s, when the Rosenbergs were executed, Washington was again gripped with widespread hysteria about Communist penetration of American society and government.

The Russians, meanwhile, had been closing down all operations in the late 1940s in order to save their agents; and only well after the death of Stalin in 1953 were they able to begin seriously rebuilding their networks in America. But these networks never acquired the significance they had once had. Atomic espionage in the United States, carried out by misguided idealists who saw in the Soviets a progressive force, proved the high point of Russian intelligence operations targeting America.

Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, followed by the Soviet intervention in Hungary, destroyed any remaining allure Moscow may have held for young idealists in the West. Thus, although President Lyndon Johnson dearly hoped to uncover Moscow’s clammy hand at work behind the protest movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, no amount of effort by the FBI and CIA could uncover anything of significance. International communism, whatever challenges it still posed overseas, no longer posed the threat of creating a fifth column at home.

Though the Russians did have dramatic success in penetrating both the FBI and CIA in the 1980s, it didn’t impact the American psyche as they would have two decades earlier. Yes, they were serious security lapses, but they involved lone, disaffected or greedy double agents like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. There was nothing idealistic, nothing connected to a larger Soviet appeal, in their betrayal.

By the 1980s, the issue of socialism in American political life had become completely divorced from the issue of relations with the Soviet Union. And as the USSR dissolved from within and came to an end in 1992, the long dark shadow it cast over America finally passed forever.

Even when revelations of post-Soviet Russian spying reemerged in more recent years; most Americans just shrugged their shoulders, or met the news with a nostalgic chuckle and a mention of the good old Cold War days. Other challenges, most prominently 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, had reconnected domestic internal security concerns with international relations in an even more dramatic manner. And as the generations move on, distant memories grossly exaggerated fears recede from our shared consciousness.

The post The (Actual) Communist Agents Who Lurked Among Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kennan arguably played a larger role in shaping the U.S.’s view of a major foreign power, and thus our relations with that power, than any other American in modern history. That the power in question was the Soviet Union, and the time in question the crucial period after World War II, made his outsized influence all the more remarkable.

He brought an authoritative blend of scholarship and experience to posts as diplomat, ambassador, State Department policy adviser, and Princeton-based professor—exerting his influence on American strategy from both inside and outside the government. For an entire generation of U.S. officials who guided the nation’s foreign policy in the Cold War, Kennan became the preeminent guide of all things Russia. His main legacy: Advising Americans how best to restrain the Soviet threat.

Yet despite the key role he played on the U.S. side of the adversarial relationship, Kennan was deeply enamoured with Russia. In diplomatic postings across Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s, he mastered the language – “No American spoke Russian the way George did,” according to one colleague. Over the course of his long life (Kennan died in 2005, aged 101), he read and re-read the great works of 19th-century Russian literature and travelled the country as frequently and extensively as he could. While in London in May 1958, he went to see a performance of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and recorded a powerful reaction in his diary:

Seeing The Cherry Orchard stirred all the rusty, untuned strings of the past and of my own youth: Riga, and the Russian landscape, and the staggering, unexpected familiarity and convincingness of the Chekhovian world—it stirred up, in other words, my Russian self, which is entirely a Chekhovian one and much more genuine than the American one—and having all this prodded to the surface in me, I sat there blubbering like a child and trying desperately to keep the rest of the company from noticing it.

His Russian self and American self would make for uneasy Cold War companions. And although Kennan profoundly admired the nation, his heart ached for how Lenin and Stalin had so brutally altered its path.

Kennan’s warm feelings toward Russia were even known by Mikhail Gorbachev, who met Kennan in 1987 in Washington, D.C. and told him, “We in our country believe that a man may be the friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you.” This recognition by an adversary made for a moment of profound personal satisfaction for the former diplomat.

Kennan was best known to most Americans as the Cold War’s Paul Revere who sounded the alarm in 1946 that the Soviets were coming (into Central and Western Europe). Frustrated by the Truman administration’s inability to appreciate the magnitude of the threat posed by Stalin’s Soviet Union, the then American chargé d’affaires in Moscow cabled Washington in what was to become the most famous communication in the history of the State Department. In his nearly 6,000-word “long telegram,” the diplomat emphasized that the Soviet Union saw no path to permanent peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. Stalin—fuelled by nationalism, deep-set fears of external attack, and Marxist-Leninist ideology—was determined to expand his nation’s power. But, Kennan explained, the Soviets were weak, and if the Western World made it clear they would put up a strong resistance at any incursion, the opportunistic menace could be contained.

The telegram’s impact was profound. Circulated quickly and widely, it was read by the secretaries of War and the Navy, and later by President Truman himself. It became required reading for senior members of the armed forces and was also cabled to America’s embassies and missions abroad. The sheer force of the argument persuaded many in power in part, as one Truman aide remarked, because “Kennan tied everything together, wrapped it in a neat package, and put a red bow around it.”

Kennan was recalled to Washington in May 1946 and made Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs at the National War College. Ten months later, writing anonymously under the letter “X,” Kennan published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” that elaborated on his long telegram’s diagnoses and recommendations, this time for a public audience. Mr. X, as the author became known, compared the Soviet Union to a wind-up toy that would move relentlessly in a particular direction unless a barrier was placed in its way. He pulled from his extensive knowledge of Russian history to create a psychological profile of a totalitarian regime where truth was fluid and worldviews were informed by “centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast fortified plain” and assaults over the centuries from Mongol hordes from the East and Napoleon’s and Hitler’s formidable armies from the West. These memories of death and destruction melded with an expansionist communist worldview. The result was a state determined, no matter how long it took, to amass a powerful empire that would protect the motherland from any enemy. In other words, there was to be no meaningful engagement with this Russia for a long time to come.

To restrain Moscow, Kennan advised that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” This sentence was to become his policy legacy. Finally, here was a compromise between an all-out war of superpowers and a passive peace strategy that would invite opportunistic Soviet aggression. Be patient. Show strength. Wait for the inevitable fall. In addition to then President Truman, who put this strategy into full force as the Cold War began, eight more presidents would go on to subscribe to variations of this seminal policy.

Although he continues to be best known for his advocacy of containment, it is important to note that Kennan largely intended it to keep communist incursions out of Western Europe and Japan via non-military means: economic aid, propaganda, political warfare. This vision was played out in policies such as the Marshall Plan, which he played a key role in designing as the first-ever head of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. His narrowly tailored vision of containment, as we now know, didn’t last. From the end of the Korean War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kennan consistently criticized the ways in which his policy was hijacked—from justifying militarized containment of low-stakes countries like Vietnam to defending the anti-Russian flames fanned by demagogic McCarthyites to being used to rabble-rouse ordinary Americans into supporting the nuclear arms build-up under Reagan. Though he continued to weigh in on major foreign policy debates from posts as U.S. ambassador and as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, he lost most of these battles.

Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kennan continued bemoaning what he considered the misappropriation of his views. In an op-ed for The New York Times in 1997, for example, Kennan prophetically warned that Bill Clinton’s eastward expansion of NATO would be a fateful error. The move to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in the Cold War-era military alliance, he wrote, would only serve “to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”

Kennan correctly surmised that NATO expansion would sour future U.S.-Russian relations. Although the man had many blind spots, particularly in his elitist and ethnocentric resistance to a more democratic and heterogeneous vision of America, his read of how Washington’s actions would be perceived in Moscow was almost always on point. And it was probably Kennan’s “Russian self”—his deep knowledge and empathy with the history, language, land, and literature that animated the Russian people—that made him so much more adept than his American-minded contemporaries. George Frost Kennan may be remembered as the architect of Western “victory” in the Cold War, but he was also one of the most empathetic American friends Russia has ever had.

The post The Man Who Explained the Soviets to America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of course that American ambivalence towards things Russian eventually changed, and we know exactly when it did: November 7, 1917, the day the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and the American idea of “Communist Russia” was born.

Though Lenin quickly irked the West by pulling out of World War I, Communist Russia was hardly a great boogieman to ordinary Americans. Thousands of justifiably anti-Communist Russian emigrés tried to convince them otherwise. They told Americans that Russia was no longer an obscure country “overseas”; rather, it was a vehicle for the spread of international communism and, therefore, a real threat to the United States. During the first “Red Scare” immediately after the war, American politicians took up this same argument, and they even arrested—in manifest violation of the Constitution—a bunch of American radicals and not-so-radicals. But, among ordinary Americans, the “Russians are coming” cry fell largely on deaf ears. The Bolsheviks couldn’t even hold Warsaw, let alone Washington. They were, well, all bark and no bite.

But while Americans weren’t worried about a Red invasion, per se, they were horrified by what the Bolsheviks were doing inside Russia. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolsheviks dispossessed, dislocated, and discombobulated millions of their own in the name of communism. To Americans reading about these inexplicable horrors in the newspaper, what the Bolsheviks were doing in Russia became synonymous with communism itself.

After Hitler foolishly declared war on the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Stalin became America’s ally against the Nazis. Propagandists in Washington and Moscow worked night and day to make sure that frightening “Communist Russia” became friendly “Russia” in the eyes of Americans. The murderous Stalin underwent an image makeover to become “Uncle Joe.” It worked for a time, though of course the Bolsheviks were no less frightening during the war than they were before or after it.

America’s professional Russia-watchers—men like the diplomat George Kennan—knew this well. They told their American political masters the truth: the Russian alliance with the “capitalist powers”—as the Bolsheviks called them—was simply a tactical move required to beat the “arch-capitalist” Nazis. The USSR’s strategic goals remained the same: a completely communized Russia and world revolution directed from Moscow. Inside Russia, radical social engineering continued during the war: Stalin moved millions of ethnic minorities around the USSR like so many chess pieces. And yet, as of February 2, 1943, the day the German Sixth Army surrendered to Soviet forces at Stalingrad, it became evident to anyone paying attention that the Soviet Union would defeat Hitler largely on its own (an uncomfortable truth for the Western allies), and emerge from the Second World War as one of only two “superpowers.”

The overwhelming nature of the Soviet victory over Hitler had a massive impact on the American view of Russia. Suddenly—and particularly after the USSR developed (stole, really) the atomic bomb in 1949—Communist Russia was a real danger to the United States. Just as they promised, Lenin’s successors had begun the process of spreading communism throughout the world: they had helped themselves to a “liberated” Eastern Europe, they were threatening Western Europe, and they were deeply involved in so-called “Wars of National Liberation” all over the globe. American concerns over Soviet ambitions and its leaders’ regrets over not having stopped Hitler early on led to Washington’s obsession with the domino theory, the idea that if you give in anywhere to your nemesis, you might as well succumb everywhere. And so it was that countries like Greece, Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and many other, lesser known places became strategically vital to American policymakers.

But Americans didn’t only contain the Russians, they also studied them for the first time in American history.

And this is where I come in. I was one of those people trained by the government to study them. Though I was much more interested in basketball than books in high school, I happened to read George Kennan’s turgid Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin. Just why my father had a copy I’ll never know; he wasn’t much of a reader (duck hunting was his thing). But it was the only read available when I was bed-bound with mono. Later, I mentioned that I’d read it in some college application materials and, lo and behold, the college of my choice assigned a Russian historian to be my freshman advisor! He essentially “sold” me Russia as a career. When, four years later, I told my duck-hunting father that I was going to grad school to study Russian history, he thought I’d lost a screw. But I explained to him what I’d been taught: the Soviet Union was hugely important to the U.S.; we had to know everything about it. For much of the next decade I studied Russia, largely on the government’s dime. Then in the following decade or so, several posh universities hired me to teach America’s youth what I’d learned.

Looking back, what I find most remarkable about the salad days of “Russian Studies” is how fascinated ordinary Americans were with the USSR. During the Cold War, Americans wrote about Russia, discussed it, and fought about it to a degree that is, even today, completely unimaginable. You could have a good conversation about Russia in a bar. In the course of this completely unprecedented national discussion, ordinary Americans developed rich, sometimes sophisticated views about Russia. The essence of what Americans believed about the USSR remained the same throughout this discussion: it remained, as always “Communist Russia.” But the American image of Russia was no longer crude and monolithic; rather, it became subtle and varied, and more accurate. People argued over terms like détente, and over whether Pershing missiles in Europe or Olympic boycotts would make things better. I can remember NFL broadcasts being interrupted for updates on the Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev.

Then, on December 26, 1991, it ended: the Soviet Union collapsed and with it most of what mattered about Russia to ordinary Americans. Americans stopped talking about Russia in bars. My classes got smaller. Russia became again what it had always been in the American mind: someplace else. Insofar as ordinary Americans think of Russia—and mostly they don’t—they see it much the same way their forbearers did before and after the Cold War: huge, cold, ruled by despots, and peopled by the downtrodden.

Of course, the “Communist Russia” legacy can still be sensed in the contemporary American understanding of Russia. Vladimir Putin, like the General Secretaries of old, is still sitting atop a pile of nuclear weapons as he attempts to spread Russian influence. He’s somewhat menacing, but my sense is that ordinary Americans think Russia’s nuclear weapons, much like its society and economy, are somehow broken.

Russia’s days of being our all-consuming nemesis aren’t likely to ever return. The two forces that brought Russia into the forefront of American consciousness during the Cold War—Bolshevism and Russia’s superpower status—are gone. And good riddance to all that, I say, even if it means my fellow citizens won’t pay as much attention to me as I go on and on talking about Russia.

The post Russia Has Been Many Things to Americans, Except an Ordinary Country appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Noel Field was such a man–and for that reason his story is relevant for our troubled times. The mystery at the core of Field’s life is how an apparently good man, one who started out with noble intentions, could sacrifice his own and his family’s freedom, a promising career, and his country, for a fatal myth. His is the story of the sometimes-terrible consequence of blind faith.

The power of an Idea—be it a Holy Crusade, Fascism, Communism, or Radical Islam that promises a final correction of all personal, social, and political injustices can be compulsive. Some movements add the lure of “immortality.” They prey on questing, restless, dissatisfied youth who are gradually persuaded to surrender their freedom to a “higher” cause, an all-knowing Master. In this submission, there is relief from soul searching. At last there is an answer to every question. Once he surrenders, the convert feels a rush of relief—his existence now has meaning beyond himself. With the conversion he gains a fraternal comradeship, a family of the like minded. For this rapture, he yields moral responsibility, the duty to think for himself. The global crusade—and its master in the person in the Commissar or the Caliph—knows best.

Communism was one such messianic global crusade able to recruit the likes of Field and many others. Its seductive lure is one reason the Soviet Union proved such an unnerving Cold War adversary during the second half of the 20th Century. Great powers have always faced the danger of having traitors in their midst—citizens or officials who offer their services to rival powers, for money or petty personal grievances. But the Soviets, as the self-professed vanguard of an international revolution that would render nationalism and injustice a thing of the past, could count on a ready-made Fifth Column, especially among the intelligentsia, almost everywhere.

This was especially true in the 1930s, when Field, a young Harvard-educated State Department employee, was first approached by the Soviets. Field’s betrayal of his country and his family for the promise of Communism was not merely motivated by his deep longing for a life of significance. As was true for so many children of the Depression, disillusionment with democracy, capitalism, and the West’s appeasement of Hitler were strong motivations in signing up with Moscow. For these discontents, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat seemed to offer the only alternative to the West’s breadlines and mass unemployment, as well as opposition to the Nazis’ aggression and racism. That Stalin would later make his own deal with Hitler, that there were breadlines in Russia, that reality deviated from the Communist Manifesto—these were all facts. But what concerned Field and his compatriots were not the facts but the Cause.

Field, a sensitive, self-absorbed idealist-dreamer, was both an unlikely revolutionary and an ideal target for conversion to a powerful faith. In the 1930s, he joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement. It was a time of national collapse: 10 million unemployed, rampant racism and, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Washington parched of ideas. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs. To Field, World Revolution and the violent overthrow of his own government seemed a necessary price to pay for the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Strict discipline and sacrifice for a cause beyond his person were expected of Field and his fellow recruits. Noel Field may never have hoisted an AK 47, nor strapped on a suicide vest, because he was never asked to. But his commitment and his submission to his cause were total and ultimately as destructive as those of today’s ISIS recruits.

But Field’s conversion wasn’t entirely political—his was a convergence of personal needs and political rationalization. What he and thousands of others like him had no way of knowing is that their recruitment was managed and manipulated by hardboiled cynics, skilled at spotting society’s vulnerable and promising youth. Nor did they suspect how far the reality of the Workers’ State would be from the promised Utopia.

Field was tapped as a potential spy in his time at the State Department—offering reports on colleagues and stealing documents from the West European Division—and continued when he took up a position in Switzerland for the League of Nations in 1936. He was lured to Prague in 1949, where he was arrested. He was then interrogated and tortured, his “confessions” manipulated and manufactured by Stalin to usher in the show trials that brought about the eventual murders of party members across the Eastern Bloc.

Field was not one of Stalin’s master spies. He lacked both the steel and the polished performance skills of a Kim Philby or an Alger Hiss. Field’s betrayals nonetheless cost lives. Above all, however, Noel Field’s story reveals his master’s boundless cruelty and sinister disregard for human life—including the life of his own faithful. Like thousands of others, Field was used—then, having served his purpose, he was discarded.

Communism tempted many of Field’s generation. Most, having observed the chasm between its promise and brutal reality, eventually moderated or abandoned their early zeal. Not Field. Though the dream of a triumphant working class soured and turned murderous, he stayed locked to his faith. He did not die a martyr in battle, but eventually he embraced a form of the martyrdom of innocents—his own among them—because that is what his master, Stalin, ordained.

Field never publicly spoke nor wrote candidly about his terrible choices. As Hungarian journalists working for American wire services in Budapest in the 1950s, my parents covered Field’s arrest by Soviet authorities, as well as the show trial that followed. Then, my parents were themselves arrested, and my father shared Field’s interrogator before his own fake trial for espionage. Moreover, my father was held in the same cell the American had previously occupied, both had been “Prisoner No. 410” for a period. Then, during the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, my parents located Field and his wife, and conducted the only known interview with them. Those are the circumstances that led me to write a book about him.

The post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin is a craven, sly player on the international stage—a ruthlessly self-interested authoritarian, nationalistic project. Any pretense or sense of romance or idealism about Moscow’s role in global affairs is long gone, and so it is sometimes hard to remember now the power Russia once wielded in subverting some of our best and brightest through its appropriation of the socialist ideal.

But history—and a certain human vulnerability toward messiahs of all stripes—makes clear that there will be other waves of fanaticism in the future. They may be as dangerous and hard to control as the movement that now captures fighters for militant Islam, or the one that once held Noel Field. And Americans must always ensure that their own ideals are maintained and renewed, to withstand these external threats and misguided betrayals from within.

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It was the early 1980s and Robert Massie had just published his riveting Peter the Great biography (I devoured it on a family cruise, which surprisingly didn’t impress the teenage girls onboard); Warren Beatty had produced his magisterial (super long) Reds; and the ABC TV network broadcast The Day After, a movie about a Soviet nuclear strike that millions of high schoolers across the land, myself included, were encouraged to come together to watch, and then discuss. Because, you know, that really could happen. And so, the adults wanted to know, how did that make us feel?

Well, it made me feel like this Russia, land of despotic czars, earthshattering revolutions and missiles targeted our way, was a pretty happening place. And that’s even before getting to what was on the nightly news. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and shot down a Korean airliner. President Reagan was calling them an evil empire and threatening to build a space-based anti-missile defense system in response to that movie we’d all seen on ABC. The Soviets were threatening to boycott our Olympics, as we had done theirs. The New York Times, meanwhile, spent a lot of newsprint trying to divine the intention of otherwise inscrutable Soviet leaders by their wardrobes. The nattier their suits, went the dubious logic, the greater the likelihood of a peaceful understanding between the two superpowers.

Back then, everything about Russia seemed massive, extreme and epic; contradictory and opaque. Russians had withstood centuries of unimaginable hardship to find themselves the improbable standard-bearers of a global cause that promised universal redemption, but delivered instead a rather grim version of purgatory on earth. Comrade, gulag, Siberia—single words dripping with vivid associations conveyed the price individual Russians had paid to preside collectively over one of two global power blocs: Team Red. The Russians had defeated Napoleon and Hitler; given humanity the gifts of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky; launched the first satellite in space; kicked ass at every Olympics (now we know how); and obsessed weirdly over ballet and chess.

So naturally I said “sign me up” when I had an opportunity to visit the Soviet Union for two weeks while still in high school, as part of a cultural exchange. It was a trippy voyage to an alternative reality. With any genuine revolutionary zeal long extinguished by decades of living under the soul-crushing dictatorship of the proletariat, Moscow, Leningrad, and Minsk—their inherent March grayness still festooned with exhortative propaganda banners—felt like a kitschy totalitarian amusement park. Almost. There was nothing faded or fake about the palpable fear of ordinary Russians you’d meet with late at night under the statue of Yuri Gagarin to trade a Sony Walkman or jeans for KGB Border Guard hats or coats.

College deepened the seduction. I was completely in awe of the troika of Yale historians who brought the Soviets’ dramatic backstory to life: Firuz Kazemzadeh, who spiced his telling of the Romanovs’ three-century-long soap opera with vivid imagery of the empire’s Caucasian borderlands; Paul Bushkovitch, who handed out shots of vodka on Lenin’s birthday at our Russian Revolution seminar; and the ever-theatrical Wolfgang Leonhard, the former East German communist intellectual raised in Moscow who had turned on the DDR regime he had helped consolidate in its earliest days. As if the history weren’t enough, there was the brilliant literature and the challenging language, with all those declensions and the funky blending of those sh, ch and jr sounds, and the elongated mix of vowel sounds playing like a string quartet.

Best of all, none of this intoxicating immersion in all things Russian could be dismissed as an esoteric indulgence. Russia mattered; understanding Russia mattered. Couldn’t you see the breathless coverage those Reagan-Gorbachev summits were getting on TV? Know your enemy, and all that. It’s the same reason I see many young ambitious people nowadays rushing to study Arabic. It’s patriotic, career savvy, and intellectually satisfying, given the richness of the underlying culture.
 

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Now don’t get me wrong. No other power has since replaced the USSR as a proper antithesis to the United States. China is a potent commercial competitor and a wary rival for influence in Asia, but its reach and ambitions aren’t expansive enough to turn the entire globe into a bipolar zero-sum face-off, as the Soviets once did. And more immediate threats loom elsewhere, across a series of smaller countries and terrorist groups.

The undeniable nostalgia for the Cold War in American culture is a hard thing to fathom, and it is one of the animating mysteries behind this week’s Inquiry at Zócalo. That confrontation came with a heavy price for Americans, and an even heavier price for people in many parts of the world who were treated as pawns in the two superpowers’ global chess match. And to the extent that after so much sacrifice and effort we’d already “won” it (a regrettable attitude that has gotten in the way of a more constructive relationship with Russia), why would Americans want to go back to the Cold War?

Let’s face it, the alternative to a Cold War with the Russians, has proven less appetizing than we might have expected. It’s not easy being the sole “hyperpower” responsible for all things. And the Soviets were formidable in a way that our more amorphous all-out enemies today—a shifting amalgam of unstable regimes and loosely affiliated transnational terrorist groups—can never be. Extremist Islamist groups aren’t competing head-to-head with our best and brightest to explore space, to cure cancer, to win over hearts and minds in Western Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, or to win Olympic gold.

And yet today’s less worthy opponents are more dangerous because they lack a superpower’s rationality and investment in a bipolar status quo. In our age of asymmetrical warfare and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, you don’t need a Russian-sized nuclear arsenal to pose an imminent threat to our way of life. No enemy we face again will likely have at its disposal the destructive force the Soviets could command, but plenty of enemies we face today and will face in the future are far more likely to unleash whatever destructive force they can muster. There was much to abhor about our Soviet nemesis during the Cold War, but deep down, its leaders never wanted us all dead.

With the Russians, you always felt that if aliens from another galaxy attacked earth, the American president could pick up his red phone and get Moscow to set aside their differences with us and join forces on Team Humanity. When it comes to the likes of ISIS, good luck with that.
 

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The Russian-American rivalry has been playing itself out for one year shy of a century. It was in 1917 that both gigantic nations burst onto the global stage to offer a war-weary world competing visions of an alternative tomorrow. Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin appeared on the destroyed imperial scene as messianic figures, one peddling the possibility of national self-determination to all peoples through his Fourteen Points, the other carrying the torch for the international proletarian revolution that would render nationalism, and social classes, obsolete.

With all its flaws and heinous behavior, the USSR, much like the United States and contrary to most other modern nation-states, was predicated on a universal ideal that people anywhere could rally around. The Soviets’ project was also— again, despite its flaws—a forward-looking one, unlike those of our current enemies who desperately want to turn back the clock.

The formal demise of the USSR in 1991 ostensibly ended the Cold War, and historians will long debate the extent to which the ensuing few years constituted a missed opportunity on Washington’s part to recast U.S.-Russian relations on far friendlier ground. But whether you believe the fault lies primarily with our missteps or inevitable Russian yearnings to remain an antithesis to the West, the fact is that the Cold War antagonism is back.

That’s both maddening and comforting. Russia is less of a global player than the Soviet Union, more of a “normal country,” and it must now share the other end of the proverbial seesaw from us with other U.S. antagonists. So the stakes may not be quite as high, but Vladimir Putin is doing his darnedest to play the part.

The Russians are back, in time to mess with our presidential election, both as a befuddling topic and a devious protagonist. It’s hard to imagine a more Cold War-ish form of belligerence than cyber warfare, and the hacking of our electoral process and of our leaders’ private communications, with an eye towards their public dissemination. Such attacks are a sophisticated technical challenge, no one gets physically hurt, but the mere possibility of these hacks wreak havoc on our nerves, and incite waves of insecurity and paranoia, as well as calls for retaliation and escalation.

The seductive chess match is back on.

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