(thanks, Elmer)

http://www.sofmag.com/russia%E2%80%99s-war-ukraine

On the periphery of most peoples’ awareness, Ukraine is the largest country in Europe by territory, located in the geographic center of the European subcontinent. It is the land, wrote English historian Norman Davies, through which most peoples passed on their way to settle the rest of Europe, and to become the nations and countries that we know today.

In the Middle Ages, the Kyivan Rus’ (not Kyivan “Russia”—more below) Imperial Dynasty was the largest political entity in Europe. Following Kyiv’s adoption of Christianity from Byzantium, the precursor of modern Ukraine became a powerhouse of intellectual discourse, religion, and cultural life. In its size, grandeur and advancement of education (mandatory for women), in its equal rights for women, in the arts and the sciences, Kyiv eclipsed other European cities such as Paris and London. European kings and the English monarchy married into the Kyivan Dynasty. Among them, King Henry I of France married Princess Anna of Kyiv; she signed her name to the marriage document, he used an “X.” The Gospel she brought from Kyiv was used in the coronation of French kings for centuries. The French historian Levesques wrote about the marriage, quoting Bishop Gautier Saveraux who was King Henry’s envoy to Kyiv: “This land is more unified, happier, stronger and more civilized than France itself.” The trident was the official state insignia of Kyivan Rus,’ stamped on its coins, and continued as the national symbol of modern Ukraine through the intervening 1,000 years (the significance of this appears below).

“Russia” at that time did not exist, and had as its antecedents Finno-Ugric tribes that separately evolved into scattered principalities in the north that rejected Kyiv’s dominion. Most telling was their sacking and rejection of Kyiv in 1169 that was not matched until the city’s destruction by the Mongol Horde a hundred years later. The Kyivan Rus’ Empire collapsed with the latter onslaught, but in the process shielded the rest of Europe from the same fate. . . .

On May 31, 1933, Gradenigo, the Italian consul in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv during the height of the man-made famine, reported to the Royal Italian Embassy in Moscow his discussion with a senior OGPU secret police officer who advised that 10-15 million starvation murders were required to tame, in the OGPU’s words, Ukraine’s “ethnographic material.” Not a nation. Not people. Not human beings. Just “ethnographic material.” Hitler’s term was untermenchen.

Reporting further, Gradenigo said the government strived to ensure that “Russians would constitute the majority of the population” in certain regions of Ukraine, and thus assure that potential political difficulties would be removed. The Italian consul concluded: “However monstrous and incredible such a plan might appear, it should nevertheless be regarded as authentic and well underway…The current disaster will bring about a predominantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon, one will no longer be able to speak of a Ukraine, or a Ukrainian people, and thus not even of a Ukrainian problem, because Ukraine will become a de facto Russian region.” It is the offal of that tectonic ethnic cleansing that underlies the “split” in Ukraine, mouthed with such obliviousness as to its cause. . . .

Moscow was ecstatic: “We have annihilated the nationalist counter-revolution during the past year we have exposed and destroyed nationalist deviationalism…1933 was the year of the overthrow of the Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolution.” More: “Acknowledging the great amount of work put…into the fight against Ukrainian nationalist and other counter-revolutionary elements, work which has not ceased and which shall not cease, we must say that of course we gave the nationalists a beating, a good one, as the saying goes, we hit the spot.” Is this the “common history” between the Kremlin and Kyiv that today the media and others put forth as underpinning Russia’s claims to Ukraine?

. . . .

Wikipedia claims it: The first Ukrainian immigrant to America, Ivan Bohdan, sailed with John Smith to the Jamestown colony in 1607. Bohdan met captain Smith during the time when the latter had fought the Turks, was captured, and escaped captivity by fleeing through Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and other countries.

But his name doesn’t seem to appear on the lists of original settlers:

http://apva.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=30

http://www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/the-first-residents-of-jamestown.htm

But:

Bohdan arrived in 1608, a year after the founding of Jamestown. He and several other men, noted as Poles and Germans, were recruited by Capt. Christopher Newport at the behest of Capt. John Smith, then president of the Jamestown colony, because they possessed a variety of practical skills lacking among the English settlers who were struggling to survive. Bohdan, for example, was described as an expert in making pitch and tar necessary in the building and repair of wooden boats back then. Others were talented in making glassware, an important industry in the colonies.

Smith may have learned first-hand about the industrious Poles and Germans – and Ukrainians – in yet another possible connection with Ukraine. Serving as a mercenary, Smith fought in wars against the Ottoman Turks but was wounded, captured and sold as a slave. His escape route may have taken him through parts of what is now Ukraine, including Crimea, and then through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

While I could not find much more information about Ivan Bohdan via the Internet, I wondered if he was part of the contingent of Polish workers who staged America’s first labor strike in 1619, a colonial example of democracy in action. The Virginia colony was about to hold its first election, but the English political leaders denied voting privileges to the Poles and other non-British settlers – despite their important contributions.

The Poles, however, decided to strike and took up the slogan, “No vote. No work.” The tactic worked, and English soon changed their stance on who could vote in America’s first legislative election.

http://mikeknepler.com/?p=48

http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BD_%D0%86%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD

Dissident 19th-century nobleman philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev called serfdom “a terrible ulcer” and asked: “Why … did the Russian people fall into slavery only after having become Christian? … Can [the Orthodox Church] explain why it did not raise its motherly voice against the repulsive violence committed by one part of the nation against the other?”

My answer: because, Christianity destroyed old tribal power structures in just a couple generations. (See Francis Fukuyama)

The rest of the article is a pretty damning look at Russian history:

In the late 18th century, nobleman Aleksandr Radishchev was exiled to Siberia for publishing his critique of serfdom. At one point in the book, Radishchev’s stance seems at odds with Zorkin’s that it was the abolition of serfdom that produced revolutionary unrest in Russia. It was serfdom itself.

“Tremble, cruel-hearted landlord! On the brow of each of your peasants, I see your condemnation written,” Radishchev wrote.

In 1847, literary critic Vissarion Belinsky penned his famous letter to Nikolai Gogol, in which he wrote that Russia “presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men without even having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man.”

Russia is “a country where there are not only no guarantees for individuality, honor, and property, but even no police order, and where there is nothing but vast corporations of official thieves and robbers of various descriptions,” Belinsky wrote.

http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-judge-praises-serfdom/26616056.html