My husband and I grew up in the countries that neighbor Russia. In this essay, I’m sharing how Russian colonialism and aggression personally affected us and our families.
Very sobering. Buried within the essay are some questions that all of us in the "west" should be asking. Even yesterday, in the New York Times, a letter was presented to its readership, co-written by several well known academics, that basically said Ukraine should surrender and that the "west" provoked Russia. As if Russia was provoked to invade Poland, Finland, Belarus, Estonian, Hungary, Checkoslavakia(?) etc...
For myself, the war has ripped the last veil from my eyes about the dangers of unchecked hubris. Thanks to the internet, essays like yours can reach more eyes instead of being filtered by the so called free press.
Many of boomers/Gen-x'ers grew up and watched the pre sanitized versions of videos taken after Auschwitz was liberated, scenes of battles of people and machinery on a scale that would even with today's graphics technology be difficult to reproduce. But, for many of us, the great wars and the economic maelstroms that surrounded them eventually gave way to a happy ending.
That kind of thinking is what I believe is behind the so-called peaceniks, they just don't understand, they want the happy ending to continue, return to business as usual and IMHO it has to take a massive amount of hubris to ignore the scale of suffering invoked and promoted by ruzzian imperialism and it needs to be stopped.
What's been missing, is people like yourself being heard. Modestly, it seems like eastern Europeans are way ahead of the curve about what needs to be done, and we in the west must finally stopped procrastinating when confronted with hypocrisy. Why was Russia allowed to head the UN security council, why is Switzerland manufacturing munitions with their well known neutrality stance. Maybe Merkel acted in good faith when committing Germany to Nordstream, but there is no doubt that liberalized trade does not lesson the harshness of authoritarian regimes. And, yet...no doubt , many ruzzians are banking that people like Elon Musk who wants access to ruzzian lithium resources will in the future repeat the mantra, like Friedman's McDonald analogy, repeatedly, and enough to potentially cause the "west" to forget what is going on today.
I've been thinking of your essays, very few of us can shape how events are shaped in the near term, but in a free society people can make a difference in the long term. It's extremely disturbing how close we are coming to a potential low grade nuclear war.
I read this quote by a Ukrainian government official, shortly after the start of the 2022 invasion
"you either have moral clarity around what needs to be done or you start to have moral culpability for the consequences of your inaction...."
My greatest concern is not Ukraine losing, but how many people just don't seem to understand the stakes. Last night, I got up in the middle of the night, walked into the living room and found my wife watching on Hula "Catherine the Great"...It's a parody type show, but still even a basic reading of her life history showed she was not so great, and that she promoted serfdom while claiming to support the enlightenment.
I wish I had the eloquence to reciprocate in kind the things you are showing, but all I can say is that it is making me "think" ....
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, David! I appreciate you changing your views and your openness about it, and willingness to learn more. As you said, many people in the west prefer to bury their heads in the sand shouting about “peace”, that in reality means more bloodshed, violence and abuse. I understand that there is so much work ahead to change this attitude, to educate people, to call out the never ending hypocrisy and fight against the propaganda machine that works 24/7. I see it as a lifelong work and sometimes I feel very discouraged when I understand the scale of everything. Many days it feels like 1 step forward and 2 steps back. However, reading comments from people like you, who tell me that my work makes a difference - it gives me hope. Thank you.
I hope we all, Russias neighbours in particular and you especially, get to experience a world without the cancer node of corruption and medieval mentality that Russia is. I had high hopes, after the USSR was no more, but the mafia state won. It seems that their citizens get an ego trip about scaring much of the rest of the world and that makes up for their shitty lives. Hopefully it won't last much longer.
I have a wet dream where they're forced to give up their atomic weapons, which of course is the core of their power. Without them I don't think the rest of the world would let them cause nearly as much damage as they have been, just as this war probably would not have happened if Ukraine didn't give up theirs for "security guarantees".
Thank you, Michael! I can’t wait to see the world free of this cancer. I agree that Russia giving up their nuclear arsenal would be the best possible scenario, but just as you, I don’t see how it could be achieved at the moment. I have very little hopes of Russian society evolving and changing towards democracy as well, because it requires a huge shift in mentality and accepting responsibility for their actions. Currently, they don’t show any signs of moving in this direction. But I hope that countries, who were swallowed by Russia, break free from colonial rule, regain their independence and the Russian empire will eventually collapse.
I'm not quite sure how to express this but your words express what so many of us feel. My mom's parents were refugees from Vietnam, but my great-grandfather on my dad's side was from the country outside of Lvov. He fought in the Polish Army at the start of WW2 and ended up in the Gulag, and then in the Anders Army in the Middle East. The rest of his family disappeared during WW2. Their farm, the house, every single person and all trace of them, all gone without a trace. He ended up in America post-war as a refugee, and all we have from his side of the family are some notes and drawings he did of his family and where they lived. My granddad went back after Russia opened up a little, but there wasn't anything traceable. So I know exactly how you feel about those losses and the destruction of that family heritage. The damage that Russia has done over the generations is heart-breaking and unforgiveable.
Thank you so much for sharing your family story! I can't imagine what it's like to draw your family and home in order to not forget them, in order to have anything that shows that they existed. The scale of pain that Russians brought and continue to bring to millions of families is beyond comprehension, and I wholeheartedly agree with you that it’s beyond forgiveness.
I have goosebumps and chills at just how much this story hits home for me. It’s strange to me when my American and European friends know so much about their ancestors, or have things/homes/land to inherit, or have old photographs. So much of our pasts were destroyed. My family had land before the USSR came to power, and then everything was taken from them and they were thrown into jail with small children. And it kills me to think how my grandmother tried to hard to not be Ukrainian after all of that so many years later. Like it was something to be ashamed of….
It is a beautiful essay, moving and brings you closer to the issue of Soviet oppression. You manage to write with subtlety and as if your heart is in your fingertips. I loved reading your texts. I hope you always produce, and God bless you.
Very sobering. Buried within the essay are some questions that all of us in the "west" should be asking. Even yesterday, in the New York Times, a letter was presented to its readership, co-written by several well known academics, that basically said Ukraine should surrender and that the "west" provoked Russia. As if Russia was provoked to invade Poland, Finland, Belarus, Estonian, Hungary, Checkoslavakia(?) etc...
For myself, the war has ripped the last veil from my eyes about the dangers of unchecked hubris. Thanks to the internet, essays like yours can reach more eyes instead of being filtered by the so called free press.
Many of boomers/Gen-x'ers grew up and watched the pre sanitized versions of videos taken after Auschwitz was liberated, scenes of battles of people and machinery on a scale that would even with today's graphics technology be difficult to reproduce. But, for many of us, the great wars and the economic maelstroms that surrounded them eventually gave way to a happy ending.
That kind of thinking is what I believe is behind the so-called peaceniks, they just don't understand, they want the happy ending to continue, return to business as usual and IMHO it has to take a massive amount of hubris to ignore the scale of suffering invoked and promoted by ruzzian imperialism and it needs to be stopped.
What's been missing, is people like yourself being heard. Modestly, it seems like eastern Europeans are way ahead of the curve about what needs to be done, and we in the west must finally stopped procrastinating when confronted with hypocrisy. Why was Russia allowed to head the UN security council, why is Switzerland manufacturing munitions with their well known neutrality stance. Maybe Merkel acted in good faith when committing Germany to Nordstream, but there is no doubt that liberalized trade does not lesson the harshness of authoritarian regimes. And, yet...no doubt , many ruzzians are banking that people like Elon Musk who wants access to ruzzian lithium resources will in the future repeat the mantra, like Friedman's McDonald analogy, repeatedly, and enough to potentially cause the "west" to forget what is going on today.
I've been thinking of your essays, very few of us can shape how events are shaped in the near term, but in a free society people can make a difference in the long term. It's extremely disturbing how close we are coming to a potential low grade nuclear war.
I read this quote by a Ukrainian government official, shortly after the start of the 2022 invasion
"you either have moral clarity around what needs to be done or you start to have moral culpability for the consequences of your inaction...."
My greatest concern is not Ukraine losing, but how many people just don't seem to understand the stakes. Last night, I got up in the middle of the night, walked into the living room and found my wife watching on Hula "Catherine the Great"...It's a parody type show, but still even a basic reading of her life history showed she was not so great, and that she promoted serfdom while claiming to support the enlightenment.
I wish I had the eloquence to reciprocate in kind the things you are showing, but all I can say is that it is making me "think" ....
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, David! I appreciate you changing your views and your openness about it, and willingness to learn more. As you said, many people in the west prefer to bury their heads in the sand shouting about “peace”, that in reality means more bloodshed, violence and abuse. I understand that there is so much work ahead to change this attitude, to educate people, to call out the never ending hypocrisy and fight against the propaganda machine that works 24/7. I see it as a lifelong work and sometimes I feel very discouraged when I understand the scale of everything. Many days it feels like 1 step forward and 2 steps back. However, reading comments from people like you, who tell me that my work makes a difference - it gives me hope. Thank you.
I hope we all, Russias neighbours in particular and you especially, get to experience a world without the cancer node of corruption and medieval mentality that Russia is. I had high hopes, after the USSR was no more, but the mafia state won. It seems that their citizens get an ego trip about scaring much of the rest of the world and that makes up for their shitty lives. Hopefully it won't last much longer.
I have a wet dream where they're forced to give up their atomic weapons, which of course is the core of their power. Without them I don't think the rest of the world would let them cause nearly as much damage as they have been, just as this war probably would not have happened if Ukraine didn't give up theirs for "security guarantees".
Thank you, Michael! I can’t wait to see the world free of this cancer. I agree that Russia giving up their nuclear arsenal would be the best possible scenario, but just as you, I don’t see how it could be achieved at the moment. I have very little hopes of Russian society evolving and changing towards democracy as well, because it requires a huge shift in mentality and accepting responsibility for their actions. Currently, they don’t show any signs of moving in this direction. But I hope that countries, who were swallowed by Russia, break free from colonial rule, regain their independence and the Russian empire will eventually collapse.
I'm not quite sure how to express this but your words express what so many of us feel. My mom's parents were refugees from Vietnam, but my great-grandfather on my dad's side was from the country outside of Lvov. He fought in the Polish Army at the start of WW2 and ended up in the Gulag, and then in the Anders Army in the Middle East. The rest of his family disappeared during WW2. Their farm, the house, every single person and all trace of them, all gone without a trace. He ended up in America post-war as a refugee, and all we have from his side of the family are some notes and drawings he did of his family and where they lived. My granddad went back after Russia opened up a little, but there wasn't anything traceable. So I know exactly how you feel about those losses and the destruction of that family heritage. The damage that Russia has done over the generations is heart-breaking and unforgiveable.
Thank you so much for sharing your family story! I can't imagine what it's like to draw your family and home in order to not forget them, in order to have anything that shows that they existed. The scale of pain that Russians brought and continue to bring to millions of families is beyond comprehension, and I wholeheartedly agree with you that it’s beyond forgiveness.
I have goosebumps and chills at just how much this story hits home for me. It’s strange to me when my American and European friends know so much about their ancestors, or have things/homes/land to inherit, or have old photographs. So much of our pasts were destroyed. My family had land before the USSR came to power, and then everything was taken from them and they were thrown into jail with small children. And it kills me to think how my grandmother tried to hard to not be Ukrainian after all of that so many years later. Like it was something to be ashamed of….
Thank you for sharing your story, Ana! All I can say: “I wish Russia was an island”, then all of us would have had absolutely different lives.
It is a beautiful essay, moving and brings you closer to the issue of Soviet oppression. You manage to write with subtlety and as if your heart is in your fingertips. I loved reading your texts. I hope you always produce, and God bless you.
Thank you for your kind words!
Touching, moving, wistful, sad. 😢
Multiplied by millions of similar tragic stories.
Thank you, Bill!