INTRODUCTION
Dr. Marci Shore teaches Russian literature at Yale University. The two books under review have been widely acclaimed, a position not shared by my own reviews. Particularly regarding her enthusiastic description of the Ukrainian “Revolution” of 2014, her narrative reflects an utterly naïve understanding of the geopolitical contexts of events.
THE TASTE OF ASHES – THE AFTERLIFE OF TOTALITARIANISM IN EASTERN EUROPE (2013)
by Marci Shore
Dr. Shore has studied Russian at Middlebury College, which may help with Czech, but her several stays in Prague in the mid-90s could have just as well relied on English. She mentions taking classes at the English-language University founded by George Soros to further, as she puts it, “benevolent social engineering.”
Just as helpful, she reports that there were some 20,000 young Americans looking for alternative lifestyles in Prague at the time. The model, she suggests, is the Paris of the 30s “with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein.” Going to Prague soon after a Grateful Dead concert, Marci Shore steps onto territory close to her generation. The Czech band of the Plastic People of the Universe and the various poetry readings she attends are a replay of the American 60s with Allen Ginsberg defending the Chicago 8 by reciting The Howl.
Dr. Shore calls the method she has chosen for her book a “subjective” one as she relates the stories of the “witnesses” she interviews. They trace their political rebirth to the Helsinki Accords of 1976. The human rights of the freedom of speech and conscience and religion – and the assertion of various identity issues – are very much the priorities of this newly discovered, Soros-sponsored, “Open Society.” This is most enthusiastically embraced by young people. They glory in the free-for-all the generation of their parents was denied in war time – nor could practice during the imposition of “social” rather than “individual” priorities that followed.
Marci Shore feels very much at home in this lively environment, but does devote a few lines to what she calls the “socialist esthetic.” She has rented a room from an elderly couple, and observes their struggle to survive on a severely diminished pension. Then a friendly, easy-going acquaintance reappears, now a national Slovak, in a fancy car and bankrolls lavish entertainment. The sources of his success are left to the reader’s imagination. Should we be drawing some conclusions about the “esthetic” of capitalism?
Dr. Shore’s “subjective” method leaves little room for analysis. After all, she does not claim to be a historian. She does, dutifully, remind the reader of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and of Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, the “rescue” of Bosnia or Kosovo by NATO in the 90s presumably does not qualify as a breach of the inviolability of borders also part of the Helsinki Agreement of 1976. Similarly, the relentless spread of NATO to the borders of the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation is of no special concern.
Other issues are of more concern. Dr. Shore had spent some months teaching English in a small provincial town. She recounts with dismay the rigid conformity of local ways and the scandalous episode when the principal of her school welcomes with much fanfare a visiting group of American evolution-denying Evangelicals. Those naïve provincial Czechs (surely qualifying as “deplorables”?) cannot tell the difference between the missionary zeal of Evangelicals bent on saving godless commies – from the ministrations of the Soros’ foundations for democratic enlightenment.
And the fact that the struggle for democracy has its casualties is not overlooked by Dr. Shore. There is the story of a young woman, Jamila, whom Dr. Shore calls “an early heroine of anti-government resistance in Prague.” She emigrates to the United States and ends up in an insane asylum. There is a passing reference to the possibility of her having been initially “mentored” by American spooks. She is threatened with deportation and “feels betrayed by America.”
Does the sad story of Jamila define the title of Dr. Shore’s The Taste of Ashes? Another tragic story actually “frames” the Czech section of the book. It is the story of another “witness,” her friend Oskar. His suicide had offered the dramatic opening of The Taste of Ashes, and now is evoked to close the narrative: he too had emigrated to the United States, taught at Stanford, then returned to Prague only to commit suicide.
The Polish section of Dr. Shore’s book, because it balances hearsay with archival records, particularly from the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, does offer more substantial historical resonance.
The Jewish Holocaust is an incontrovertible subject in any reference to twentieth century events in Poland. This history is, of course, well known: the German invasion of Poland, the Jewish ghetto uprising, the gas ovens at Auschwitz and Treblinka. What about the roles of the Poles? Dr. Shore reviews this controversial issue. Some Poles rescued and saved Jewish friends and neighbors. Some Poles denounced their Jewish neighbors and appropriated their possessions. Some Poles, as in the case of the little provincial town of Jedwabne, herded the local Jews into a barn, and set them on fire.
But the subject most thoroughly researched and commented on by Dr. Shore concerns the communist period of Polish history. As a Jewish-American Dr. Shore was raised on “secular Jewishness” – whose values are, as she defines them, “liberal, tolerant and pluralist.” She admittedly struggles – to the point of tears – fathoming the various commitments of Polish Jews to the Yidishness of the Bundists vs. the Zionism of the Hebraists, and, most of all, to their “faith” as Communists. Unsurprisingly, her conclusion is that the Jews of Poland finally understood “that communism and fascism are alike.”
The closing section of Dr. Shore’s book is, in fact, titled “Tragedy and Romance.” Her book had received an enthusiastic reception in Poland, where at a conference on the Polish New Left a young man expresses his gratitude for her work, calling her book an inspiring “romance.”
AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF REVOLUTION (2017)
If Dr. Shore’s The Taste of Ashes could be characterized as a romance, her next book, An Intimate History of Revolution (2017) is indeed a romance, even a medieval one. There are knights in shining armor riding into battle. There are monsters to be slain. And there are damsels in distress to be rescued.
The knights in shining armor are mostly young men, students, professors (also young), a popular singer, an ecologist, a fledgling businessman. Women are also on board, but their role is a supporting one (they help making Molotov cocktails, but they don’t throw them). These young people are given to various statements about the meaning of Maidan (the name of the square where people gathered in protest in November 2014): “Ukraine is a postmodern country: everything is possible… Maidan was the return of metaphysics … Maidan was an experience of real democracy… Maidan was shared desire.”
Dr. Shore, respectful of “revolution as an assertion of subjectivity” practices the “dialectics of transparency” by letting the people “tell their own story.” One story she omits is the visitation of Maidan by our own Joan of Arc distributing magic cookies – Victoria Nuland. She and the American Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt are overheard discussing their favorite candidates to take over Ukraine from among the available parties.
The parties of Svoboda (Freedom) and of Pravyi Sektor (Sector of the Right) are the latest incarnation of a long historical undercurrent. The two names most notable in the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the twentieth century are Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed.
When the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 divided Poland, East Galicia and Volhynia devolved to the Soviet Union. Once the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Ukrainian nationalists saw their chance of independence in an alliance with Germany. This involved cleansing the area of Jews: Mykola Lebed was trained by the Gestapo and obliged with relish.
Stepan Bandera eventually rebelled against German occupation and organized a guerilla force to fight Germans as well as Soviets. He too participated in the extermination of the Jews: when the Soviets reconquered East Galicia in 1944, most of the Jews were dead.
When the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union heated up after World War II, Western intelligence agencies saw the benefit of recruiting Ukrainian nationalists among the exiles who could establish communication networks with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. Bandera was sponsored by the British and later the German intelligence services while the CIA focused their support on Mykola Lebed.
Lebed received U.S. citizenship and proved effective in establishing clandestine operations in Ukraine. Soviet counterespionage, however, eliminated these networks, and starting in 1953 the CIA sponsored The Ukrainian Institute in New York under Lebed’s leadership. This study group was formally incorporated in 1956 as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing Association.
Radio programs, leaflets, newspapers, journals, and books by nationalist Ukrainian writers were distributed in Ukraine. The CIA also financed trips of scholars, students, and artists to various cultural events. These travelers were debriefed upon their return, and provided information on Ukrainian politics, dissident writers and military installations. President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, impressed by the “dividends” of the program, expanded its operations. (1)
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 eliminated the need of Prolog’s covert activities in Ukraine, as there was now direct access to its politics. Dr. Shore does not address any aspects of U.S involvement in Ukraine before or after the collapse of 1989. Given her focus on the fate of the Jews in The Taste of Ashes, her casual reference to the revival of the cult of Stepan Bandera is also noteworthy. The fact that the Jewish “oligarch” Ihor Kolomoyski is favored by the new government proves that all is well now. He has financed a menorah-shaped complex of buildings housing a Holocaust Museum. Bands of young revolutionaries are wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the word “Zhidobandera” (Bandera Yid).
As one young man Dr. Shore quotes puts it, “ideological incompatibility takes a back seat to fighting the state.” Well then, here we have at last the unveiling of the enemy: the state and those who represented it are the monsters the revolutionaries tilt their lances against. But there are states and there are states. Who exactly are the villains? The defunct Soviet state? The new state of oligarchs (Kravchuk? Yushchenko/ Timoshenko? Yanukovych? Poroshenko? Zelensky?) Yushchenko and Timoshenko, though the winners of the Orange Revolution of 2004, are dismissed as failures. Yanukovych is repeatedly condemned as “a criminal,” apparently having been jailed for stealing hats. Dr. Shore’s purpose is not to document such claims.
The main point, however, is that these are not the ways of the West, which are described as about “values” and “civilization,” which is why Ukraine yearns to be part of Europe. Dr. Shore refers, among others, to Oleg, “who enjoys being a businessman, the competition of the market… and is against bribes. He wants to be a Western-style corporate executive operating in a rule-of-law state.“ Tell it to the Occupy Movement.
The latter did suffer police brutality, and Dr. Shore reports on the Ukrainian police brutality. But there are also very convincing reports that the snipers who shot at peaceful protesters – and the police – from the roof tops were old-fashioned provocateurs bent on causing enough mayhem to topple Yanukovych’s, after all duly elected, government. (2) And they succeeded. What about the next oligarch, the “chocolate king” Poroshenko? His approval rate was under ten percent.
But then there is Putin. Focusing on him clears up any possible confusions about heroes and villains. Dr. Shore cites the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova referring to Putin as “Caligula at the Gates.” She also cites a young man called Ruslan who puts it less poetically: “Putin wants us to be like the former Soviet Union… I grew up in a free country. I grew up with Donald Duck, with Tom and Jerry, with video players and cars and all these things… I don’t want to work in a factory from morning to night like a slave… If we win, we’ll have democracy.”
It’s all about Putin, and the gullible people of the Donbas. Dr. Shore knows about the region from a book she read by the Japanese writer Hiroaki Kuromiya. She calls Donbas “a cocktail of nostalgias – saints and tsars and Bolshevik leaders.” And of course (as one of her “characters” puts it) “it’s very hard to talk to them on an intellectual level.” No wonder Putin has “zombified” them.
Dr. Shore’s sensibilities, however, are perfectly tuned to the right pitch: Dnipro and its wide streets signify that it is a nice “postindustrial city.” But the wide streets of Moscow are “terrifying.” Lenin in his tomb “looks like a vampire.” The beheading of Lenin’s statue in Dnipro is “celebratory.”
And Crimea? Apparently, the equivalent of the “Temple Mount in Jerusalem.” Setting up such a context is rife with possible ironies. Dr. Shore’s sympathetic description of Misha, a boy whose grandfather was Jewish, “throwing stones at the police” evokes parallels with Palestinian boys throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.
And now Ukraine needs saving: this is the damsel in distress (like Afghanistan, or Former Yugoslavia, or Iraq, or Libya, or Syria). We train Ukrainian “freedom fighters” in Texas and send them home fully armed to fight for democracy, and, incidentally, free markets. Because democracy and free markets are one and the same. Obviously. And liberal values of human rights and neo-liberal economics are one and the same. Obviously. That Ukraine’s economy is bound up with the Russian Federation is not an issue. That the majority of Ukrainians speak Russian is not an issue. NATO, of course, is not an issue.
But then again, Dr. Shore knows her audience, and her audience welcomes the romance of it all. One of Dr. Shore’s public lectures on Ukraine culminates in the triumphant strains of Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy. A full orchestra had played the hymn on Maidan – at least during the early days of the peaceful protest. But is Victoria Nuland, hiding in Joan of Arc’s armor, not rather the Wicked Witch of the West? Were the cookies she peddled on Maidan not poisoned with the seeds of civil war? The young people on Maidan didn’t know any better, and neither do we. Ukraine, after all, is so far away.
- My source for the information on the history of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) in Ukraine and in emigration is Hitler’s Shadow by Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda. They have based their book on recently declassified documents, which deal with Nazi war criminals, U.S. intelligence and the Cold War.
- The untold story of the Maidan massacre by Gabriel Gatehouse (BBC program of February 12, 2014).
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