Inside Ukraine: Reader Who Speaks Ukrainian and Russian Challenges Western Media View of Events

I received an interesting email regarding Ukraine from reader Jacob Dreizin, a US citizen who speaks both Russian and Ukrainian.

The last Ukrainian government was awful, but as someone who speaks the language and has been reading the local news for hours each day, I want you to know there are two sides to this story.

The Western media is not reporting accurately and in a balanced way as to what’s going on in Ukraine, both in the run-up to the fall of the regime, and now, in the aftermath.

Offices and even private homes associated with the former ruling party and its communist allies have been ransacked or burned by militias...

Other pro-Russia citizens have been rounded up and taken away by militias, with no warrant. We have no idea if, how, or where they are being held.

The ultra-nationalist umbrella groups that direct the militias have just announced they will essentially take charge of Central Elections Commission HQ and monitor its work during the upcoming national vote. How fair will the vote be?

Also, one of parliament’s very first post-revolution decisions was to revoke the right of local governments to do business in non-Ukrainian languages, such as Russian. Another law has been proposed to effectively ban the broadcast or rebroadcast of television or radio from Russia. There are still other proposed bills aimed at provoking and oppressing the Russian or Russian-speaking population.

It’s much easier to pretend this is about democracy, human rights, the peoples’ choice, etc. while looking the other way now that “our guys” have won. We have seen this movie before.

Poland-Lithuania didn't come up to present-day standards of liberty and democracy and self-determination, but no state back then did.

Actually, P-L came pretty close. Very high personal, political and religious freedom. Very proud of it they were, too. They called it their "Golden Freedom."

Unfortunately, this freedom was solely for the szlachta, or nobility, who were perhaps 10% of the population. A major part of their "freedom" consisting of freedom to tyrannize over those who were not szlachta.

Much as in ancient Sparta or Rome, where being a citizen meant you could stomp all over those who weren't. Or the pre-war US South, where freedom and whiteness constituted a kind of rank in society.

The Golden Freedom of the szlachta of course meant they were also incapable of combining, even with each other, much less with their subject peoples, to resist subverson and/or invasion by better-organized, though less free, neighbors.

Some of the interest may relate to 20th century history. It's hard to think of anything the "First Polish Republic" (or the Second) did to Ukrainians and others that was worth than the Communist-created famine of the 1930s. Based on 20th century history it wasn't hard to conclude that Russia was authoritarian and autocratic at its core and that any more Western-oriented regime would have been better. That's ahistorical -- people living in the 16th or 17th century had no idea of what might possibly happen 300 years later, and it's possible that Russia might have followed a different trajectory -- but it's also fully understandable in light of what actually happened in history.

While I think you have a point about aristocratic republics, I think "imperialistic" doesn't quite fit in this case -- not in the sense of classical imperialism anyway. The original Lithuanian state (if I remember correctly) was largely an East Slavic country. It was joined to Poland in marriage, and (as Poland was more populous and developed) Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian landowning elites gradually became "Polonized" without much difficulty. Much of the talk about ethnic conflict and "subject peoples" -- at least in the early days -- had more to do with class, with resentment about the burdens landowners imposed -- than with nationalism. There were similarities to the situations in Ireland, Bohemia, and elsewhere, but the situation didn't entirely correspond to classical models of imperialism.

I do agree that it would have been very difficult for a nation run like the old Rzeczpospolita to survive, but (as in the case of Russia) one can ask whether things were necessarily fated to develop as they did or whether history might have taken another course given different contingencies.

I cheerfully agree that history of Ukraine can be viewed as one of nations contending for dominance (or freedom) only by imposing a present-day, or (more accurately, a 19th-century) version of history on the actual events.

To your admirable summation I’d like to add that there was often a strong religious component in the hostilities, with the lower classes Orthodox and the Catholics making resented headway among the upper classes due to the process of Polonization you describe.

There was a great deal of anti-Semitism in the mix, too. While deplorable, it is too seldom recognized that the peasantry had quite legitimate grievances against the Jews they dealt with, who were mostly the agents by which the Polish or Polonized aristos actually implemented their oppression.

IOW, it’s complicated. Any attempt to turn it into a simple story of good guys vs. bad guys must mutilate the actual events until they fit.

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