These words still resonate with me. They were writ large on a poster a woman was carrying on the famous New York peace march of 1982. My 13 years-old daughter Muriel and I were among the marchers. And I have been on so many peace marches since then – and WILPF has been struggling with this since World War I – and the alarm rings as high as ever again…
I’ve been a member of my local WILPF chapter in Tucson, Arizona over the years, let things lapse for some time, and am on board again. WILPF is of special interest to me for several reasons. The most immediate is, naturally, my gender identity: women’s voices are never heard without a struggle.
But struggle has defined my life in other ways as well: I was born in Former Yugoslavia in 1938 and still feel in my very bones the crashing of bombs into our Belgrade apartment building in 1941: war feels very personal to me. Is it a wonder that when NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999 I felt like I was bombing myself?
World War II has also precipitated my growing up on four continents: Europe, Africa, Australia, and, finally, North America. As it happens, my parents were what I like to call “professional refugees,” having started their peregrinations back in 1920: they had found themselves on the losing side of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War. My dad, born in Russia, was 20 years old at the time, and my mom, born in Ukraine, was 8 years old at the time. They met in Yugoslavia, married, and eventually produced me. This international identity of mine is another point of affinity with WILPF.
My life’s journey has witnessed world events from many perspectives. I am an immigrant who has learned from becoming an American, and an American who has struggled to remain a member of the world community. I have sought to articulate this in my memoir, The Door in the Nightmare: from the Russian Revolution to Pax Americana. My memoir was published in the spring of 2021, but the search for understanding never stops.
What is our score card, as women, in our work for peace and freedom? At least we have achieved voting rights in significant parts of the world. And despite recurring setbacks, women have gained leadership positions in civil and political affairs. Some names illustrate these achievements: Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton headed the State Department – and Hillary Clinton came close to winning the US presidency while Kamala Harris is our current Vice President; Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany; Ursula von der Leyen is the president of the European Commission; Christine Lagarde is president of the European Central Bank; Janet Yellen is US Secretary of the Treasury; Annalena Baerbock is Federal Minister for Foreign affairs in Germany; Marie Yovanovitch was ambassador to Ukraine; Sanna Marin was until recently the president of Finland.
But have these women demonstrated leadership in peace work? And even if they do represent advances in democracy, the practice of democracy as manifested in the exercise of free speech in our media is, to say the least, disappointing. Have the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Ethiopia – and now Ukraine, not been consistently presented as wars of liberation?
I have already mentioned that my dad was born in Russia and that my mom was born in Ukraine. I have not been able to stay in touch with any family members, but there must be family descendants that are likely fighting each other right now: once again the tragedy of war feels up close and personal to me. Unlike so many of my American and European friends who still trust the mission of our vaunted Fourth Estate, I feel I know better – not only due to my ethnic roots, but because my professional life was focused on the language and history of the region.
Thus, I know that the word “Ukraine” means borderland – and that for centuries the northern shores of the Black and Caspian Seas had been overrun by waves upon waves of invasions from Asia. I know that the names of Vladimir (Putin) and Volodymir (Zelensky) are slightly different versions of the same name, which stems from St. Vladimir. He was the prince of Kiev (now, to be politically correct – Kyiv) who caused “Rus” – later “Russia”- to accept Christianity in the 9th century. And when Russia and Poland began to define themselves as independent states after 250 years of Mongol rule, Ukraine was still a borderland, only now between Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia – and still a battleground.
In the 20th century Ukraine was just another state of the Soviet Union, the way Texas is a state of the United States. And just like Texas, which had been initially part of Mexico, and even briefly independent, and at odds with the North during the Civil War, Ukraine had its independence movements. This was a general trend in the Europe of the 19th century: while the great writer Nikolai Gogol wrote in Russian, the poet Taras Shevchenko used local varieties of dialect to form a Ukrainian literary tradition.
This nationalist Ukrainian movement used the German invasion of World War II to assert itself again. Some Ukrainian leaders, Stepan Bandera among them, adopted Nazi methods of extermination to cleanse Ukraine of Poles, Jews, and northerners identified as Russians. But the Soviet Union prevailed against the Germans, and Ukrainian nationalists became exiles first in refugee camps in occupied Germany and then in the US and Canada, where they formed powerful lobbies.
Ukrainian nationalism proved useful during the Cold War and underground rebellions in Ukrainian territory were supported by the CIA. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was instrumental in finally creating an independent Ukrainian state in 1991. But since the Russian Federation remained the major anchor state of the former Soviet Union, anti-Communism eventually morphed into anti-Russianism, and Ukraine remained a convenient center of Western anti-Russian activity. There was the Orange Revolution of 2003: President Yushchenko’s wife was a Ukrainian-American who had worked for the State Department. There was the invitation, in 2008, for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO.
Clearly, Ukraine was once again a “borderland” for competing interests. Duly elected President Yanukovych understood the historical, cultural, and economic ties of Ukraine and Russia, and resisted the invitation to join the European Union. This caused some popular resistance and things came to a head in 2014 on the main square of Maidan, when a peaceful demonstration escalated into a riot. Ukrainian super-nationalists, once again, resorted to violence and this resulted in their installing an unelected government in Kiev. Victoria Nuland, now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was overheard discussing with the American ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt about who was to be their favorite candidate to run the new show in Ukraine. She boasted that American NGOs had invested 5 billion dollars in preparing the ground for the Maidan events.
If this result represented the legitimate striving of the Ukrainian population to join the Western model of democracy, why were the putschists wearing swastikas on their uniforms? Why did they demolish War memorials to erect, instead, a statue for their Nazi hero Stepan Bandera? Why did they ban the use of the Russian language? Why did they burn an Orthodox church in Lvov/Lviv on Easter Sunday in 2023?
Is it surprising that a large swath of the population resisted these changes? That the people of Crimea speak Russian is no surprise. Crimea had been the historical prize wrestled from the Tartar-Turkish alliance by Catherine the Great back in 1783. And as a key to open navigation for a largely landlocked Russian state it was fought over again against the British and the French in 1854-56. And if the Ukrainian-born Nikita Khrushchev (who had been the General Secretary of the Soviet Union the way some of our US presidents happened to be Texans) did transfer Crimea to the then State of Ukraine in 1954, it was a purely administrative adjustment that made geographical sense. Again unsurprisingly, the events of 2014 in Kiev caused Russia to reclaim Crimea after conducting a popular referendum. After all, American nuclear-armed submarines were ominously present in the Black Sea at the time.
I happened to visit Odessa, which is part of Ukraine proper, during a Black Sea cruise I took in 2008. I noticed that while all the street names were spelled out in Ukrainian, every single person on those streets spoke Russian. This is also the case, among others, in the Donbass region of Ukraine. Its inhabitants, often referred to as “ethnic Russians” because Russian is their historical language, identified themselves nevertheless as Ukrainians at the time of the 2014 Maidan coup. They merely insisted on the right to a voice in the formation and policies of their government.
There were two agreements negotiated by Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Russian representatives in 2015 in the Belarus capital of Minsk to accommodate these demands. They were ignored by the new Ukrainian government even though Volodymir Zelensky had been elected on a peace platform in 2019. Instead, the Donbass region was mercilessly shelled since 2014, resulting in the death of 14,000 people. This escalated the conflict into a civil war.
But as noted earlier, this Ukrainian civil war had been triggered by geopolitical interests all along. The agreements between Mikhail Gorbachev and State Secretary James Baker that in exchange for the Soviet evacuation of East Germany, NATO was not to move and inch past the new German border were not respected. As we know, NATO has since incorporated the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia – and just recently Sweden and Finland.
The dismantlement of the Soviet Union in 1991 had weakened the Russian Federation to the point that it could only voice protests against NATO’s relentless march to its borders. However, when the final takeover by the government of Kiev of the Donbass region, prepared all along by NATO training, intelligence, and arms supplies was about to begin in 2022, President Putin declared this plan to be an existential threat to the Russian Federation. And when instead of dialogue the Western response was a set of economic and financial sanctions, Russian troops initiated the Special Operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
What the Russians call a “Special Operation” has been defined by Western leaders as the brutal invasion of a sovereign country. Yet the “sovereignty” of Ukraine is highly questionable. It has little base in history, and even since its official foundation in 1991, has it not been utterly dependent on the repeated “sponsorship” of the United States, finally culminating in the regime change of 2014? Had President Biden not been personally involved at the time of his Vice-Presidency under President Obama?
Why is the United States so interested in supporting the independence and now the terribly costly war – costly to the Ukrainians in blood and to the Americans in treasure? Is it a matter of ideology – of Capitalism vs. Communism? This contest, started because of the Communist Revolution of 1917, and after a brief alliance during World War II, resumed during the Cold War, has been real enough. But if NATO was first organized as a defensive alliance against a perceived Communist threat, did this not become irrelevant after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its “conversion” to Capitalist forms of enterprise in 1991?
As it happens, this victory of Capitalism resulted in rather mixed blessings for the former Soviet states. It was extremely profitable to the newly baked oligarchs who allied themselves with international monopolies to gain private ownership of former state enterprises. However, it proved devastating to the general population which suffered inflation, unemployment, rising crime, and a general evisceration of social benefits. While these changes had taken place under the presidency of President Yeltsin, the accession of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of the Russian Federation in 2000 initiated some pushback.
Is this why the name of Vladimir Putin soon joined the gallery of earlier villains like Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, Slobodan Milosevich of Yugoslavia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muamar Qadhafi of Libya, Bashar al- Asad of Syria… and then there is Xi Chin Ping of China… Does this mean that ideology has been replaced by old-fashioned colonial power struggles over resources – power struggles with shifting alliances and power plays?
The Soviet Union, having suffered, unlike the United States, the devastation of its territory and the loss of 27 million people during World War II, turned out to be easy enough to pull apart. And for some years the Russian Federation was “but a gas station” with a minimal GDP. But it pulled itself together, and poor Ukraine, the perennial borderland, finds itself stuck in a proxy war between the two nuke-superpowered contestants.
So here we are, back in the 80s, but where is the one-million New York peace march? Instead, my peacenik friends are waving the Ukrainian flag in support of the brave fighters for liberty and justice in distant, mysterious Ukraine. Sadly, there is no mystery in death on the battlefield, but the siren song of the official and alternative media hold captive the imagination of the well intentioned. My hope is that WILPF at least will be open to my dissenting voice.
Rise and Shine: Galina DeRoeck's Website 