Author Archives: RomanInUkraine

Ukrainian Defence Concern represented a new «Hopak» rifle

hopak-rifle

New operational and portable rifle “Hopak”, developed by JSC “Plant“Mayak”, was represented during the XII International Trade Fair “Arms and Security 2015” on September 22-25. The new development is to pass state test before it will go into service of the Ukrainian army.

Rifle caliber – 7,62×39, its weight is less than 5 kg, firing rate – 30 rounds per minute. ‘Hopak” can be equipped with special silencer, if necessary.

New UKROBORONPROM leadership managed to increase production of military equipment by 36 times, compared to the previous period.

http://defence-blog.com/army/ukrainian-defence-concern-represented-a-new-hopak-rifle.html

Putin gives Islam legal protection

Vladimir Putin’s call to put Holy Books beyond the reach of Russian courts was clearly intended to solve the political problem created by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s objections to the decision of a court in the Russian Far East finding verses from the Koran to be “extremist.”

But Putin’s move not only highlights Russia’s moves away from a secular state toward an Orthodox-Muslim one but also calls into question the entire logic of Russian legislation that allows for courts and other officials to ban anything they object at any particular time to as extremist. . . .

Indeed, it is “obvious that there was a secret pact between the Kremlin and the Kadyrov administration after the second Chechen war,” one in which “in exchange for colossal subsidies from the Kremlin ‘Allah,’ the Chechen leadership began to position itself as enthusiastic patriots of Russia and its protects by threatening activists of the opposition.”

But even that accord might have not been enough to push Putin to act had it not been for the support Kadyrov’s position received from the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who speaks for Patriarch Kirill, called for ending court cases against “holy texts” (newsru.com/religy/11sep2015/chaplin_hl_schriften.html).

http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/10/putins-call-to-put-holy-books-beyond.html

The Atlantic on Jews in the NKVD

The Soviet Union was a multinational state, using a multinational apparatus of repression to carry out national killing campaigns. At the time when the NKVD was killing members of national minorities, most of its leading officers were themselves members of national minorities. In 1937 and 1938, NKVD officers, many of whom were of Jewish, Latvian, Polish, or German nationality, were implementing policies of national killing that exceeded anything that Hitler and his SS had (yet) attempted. In carrying out these ethnic massacres, which of course they had to if they wished to preserve their positions and their lives, they comprised an ethic of internationalism, which must have been important to some of them. Then they were killed anyway, as the Terror continued, and usually replaced by Russians.

The Jewish officers who brought the Polish operation to Ukraine and Belarus, such as Izrail Leplevskii, Lev Raikhman, and Boris Berman, were arrested and executed. This was part of a larger trend. When the mass killing of the Great Terror began, about a third of the high-ranking NKVD officers were Jewish by nationality. By the time Stalin brought it to an end on 17 November 1938, about twenty percent of the high-ranking officers were. A year later that figure was less than four percent. The Great Terror could be, and by many would be, blamed on the Jews.

To reason this way was to fall into a Stalinist trap: Stalin certainly understood that Jewish NKVD officers would be a convenient scapegoat for national killing actions, especially after both the Jewish secret policemen and the national elites were dead. In any event, the institutional beneficiaries of the Terror were not Jews or members of other national minorities but Russians who moved up in the ranks. By 1939 Russians (two thirds of the ranking officers) had replaced Jews at the heights of the NKVD, a state of affairs that would become permanent. Russians became an overrepresented national majority; their population share at the heights of the NKVD was greater than their share in the Soviet population generally. The only national minority that was highly overrepresented in the NKVD at the end of the Great Terror were the Georgians—Stalin’s own.

I don’t know. The structure of the argument seems like apologism/justification. It also fails to mention many of the top leaders, like Lazar Kaganovych who masterminded Holodomor.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/grappling-with-holodomor/282816/

Author- Ta-Nehisi Coates

Soviet Union’s Operation “West” – the deportation of Western Ukrainians

A forcible eviction of the Ukrainian people from the territories of Western Ukraine under code name the Operation “West” was initiated by the Soviet government on October 21, 1947. Over 76 thousands of Ukrainians were deported to Siberia during a day. The main objective of the operation was to weaken the Ukrainian national-liberation movement at the Western Ukraine’s territories and further assimilation the Ukrainian people with other nations of the USSR to create so-called a “Soviet man.”

http://ukrainiancrusade.blogspot.com/2015/10/operation-west-another-attempt-to.html

The Kremlin’s other separatist projects in Ukraine

1) Kharkiv/Sumy: “The Kharkiv Partisans”
2) Odesa: “Odesa Underground / Odesa Fraternity.”
3) Also Odesa: “Bessarabian People’s Rada” A political front for a new People’s Republic in a good location
4) Chernivtsi: “Assembly of the Romanians of Bukovina” A propaganda project to promote the fiction of
5) Romanian separatism: The “Republic of Budjak”

http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/10/26/the-kremlins-other-separatist-projects-in-ukraine/

Joseph Stalin’s deadly railway to nowhere

“She got 10 years hard labour for that supposedly political crime,” explains Lyudmila, “but what did it have to do with politics?”
Image caption Nadezhda Kukushina (right) was sent to work on the railway after rats ate money in her employer’s safe

Lyudmila has many such stories. At the Salekhard museum where she used to be the director and now a retired senior researcher, she shows me a picture of a young woman with dimpled cheeks and curly brown hair.

Nadezhda Kukushina was a book-keeper at a state enterprise in Ukraine. When rats got into the safe and chewed up some banknotes, she was accused of embezzlement and sent to work on the railway.

Other prisoners had already endured German prisoner-of-war camps. When they eventually returned home to the Soviet Union, the authorities branded them traitors and sent them to the Arctic.

According to some estimates 300,000 prisoners were enslaved on the project and nearly a third of them perished in the process.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18116112

The Daily Beast: Russia Denies Holodomor

>ehem< How about the NY Times? How about the Village Voice? How about countless American University professors?

Full-throated apologetics for Josef Stalin are not part of the standard fare. But last week, Sputnik ran a feature that offered exactly that—along with what can be reasonably called genocide denial.

The title of the article, by one Ekaterina Blinova—who has no bio on the site, but describes herself on Twitter as an “independent political analyst”—speaks for itself: “Holodomor Hoax: The Anatomy of a Lie Invented by West’s Propaganda Machine.” The Holodomor, roughly translated as “murder by starvation,” is the Ukrainian term for what the late Robert Conquest called “the Terror-Famine”—the devastating, human-made hunger epidemic that killed as many as seven million Soviet peasants, most of them Ukrainians, in 1932-33.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/31/russia-denies-stalin-s-killer-famine.html

Ukraine bans workplace discrimination against gays

I agree with the sentiments of this laws supporters, but:

1) An affront to democracy, and typical EU hooliganism: Force people to vote again and again until they get the result they want.

2) An affront to private property. Businesses should be treated like private property where the owners decide who can enter.

3) The EU hates traditionalism. This is reminiscent of how the EU recently told Poland to do more abortions and abandon traditional gender roles.

http://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-bans-workplace-discrimination-against-gays-164531019.html