My housemate wanted me to review this book by Mikhail Zygar. So I purchased it on Amazon. I spent more than half of August reading War and Punishment on my e-reader. I had hoped to read more books in August than I had in July, but it looks like my total will be three reads for this month.
Author Zygar says in the introduction that he feels partly responsible for the war in Ukraine. He states that for centuries Russia has suppressed and destroyed other countries and peoples. Zygar isn't afraid to offend other Russians. He is an opposition journalist who believes that nationalism is a disease.
In 2010 Zygar founded Dozhd, which was the only independent news channel in Russia. It was shut down a month before the Russian occupation of Crimea.
Zygar wrote an open letter against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Tens of thousands of Russians signed it.
In the 17th century Ukrainians were fighting against Poland. The Polish Kings were trying to annex Ukraine. Russians considered Ukraine their "breadbasket", so they couldn't lose Ukraine to Poland. This was also a struggle between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Poland is Catholic and Russia is Orthodox.
In 1656 negotiations began between Russia and Poland over Ukraine. There was no Ukrainian representation allowed. The Poles claimed that the Russian Tsar agreed to give Ukraine back to Poland. Given the importance of Ukrainian agriculture to Russia, I consider this highly unlikely. In 1667 Russia and Poland agreed to divide Ukraine between them. West Ukraine would belong to Poland, and East Ukraine would belong to Russia. The Cossacks of Ukraine, who wanted Ukrainian independence, were outraged.
The Russian Tsar known as Peter the Great, ordered Cossacks to build the city of St. Petersburg. Yet Catherine the Great turned out to be even more threatening to the autonomy of Ukrainians.
In contrast to the peasants of Russia, who were serfs, Ukrainian peasants had never been serfs. There was no serfdom or slavery in Ukraine. The Crimean Khanate participated in the slave trade. They kidnapped people and sold them. The Cossacks provided protection against slave raids which allowed most Ukrainian peasants to remain free.
Catherine the Great decided that free Ukrainian peasants were a threat. So she spread serfdom to Ukraine and destroyed the independence of Ukrainian common folk. This makes me feel pretty negatively toward Catherine the Great who I had considered to be an enlightened monarch.
At that point, I researched ethnic minorities in Ukraine and was particularly interested in the Gagauz people. They are a Turkic people who belong to the Orthodox Church. They speak their own Gagauz language. There is an article called Gagauzia on Wikipedia. Apparently, most Gagauz would prefer to be part of Russia rather than part of the European Union. I'd imagine that they feel close to Russian folk culture which may be similar to theirs, but they would certainly be better off in the European Union which has respect for cultural diversity.
Getting back to War and Punishment, when Catherine the Great annexed Poland, she informed the Jews of Poland that they could only live in an area that Catherine called the The Pale of Settlement. Most of the Pale was located in what is now Ukraine. It existed until 1915.
While reading my notes about the Russian annexation of Alaska, I found out that Siberian Cossacks discovered Alaska while on hunting expeditions and were very instrumental in the Russian colonization of Alaska in the 18th century. I found a link to an article on this subject here. I could only read the abstract, but that alone was fascinating.
I wanted to know more about Cossacks, and consulted the Wikipedia article on them here. As Zygar had implied, many of the Cossacks originally came from Ukraine. Catherine the Great ended the Cossack Warrior Host in Ukraine. She re-distributed Cossack lands in Ukraine to her officials. Zygar remarks that two hundred years later Volodymyr Zelensky, the current President of Ukraine, was born on former Cossack land.
In a discussion about name changes, Zygar tells us that an escaped slave named Frederick Bailey with fake documents falsely showing that he had been freed, changed his surname to Douglass. As Frederick Douglass he became a prominent abolitionist. So according to Zygar, Frederick Douglass was never officially freed. The name change obscured his origins. I consulted the Frederick Douglass Wikipedia article. It doesn't mention the fake freedom papers. I learned from this article that Frederick Douglass was the first African American to receive a vote to become President of the United States. This happened at the Republican National Convention in 1888.
I'm skipping to the 20th century when Stalin requisitioned the grain grown in Ukraine for export abroad. Stalin arrested 100,000 peasants who resisted the requisitioning of the grain, but more than a million people protested. He had taken their food to sell on the world market. The head of the Soviet parliament asked that the grain requisitions be suspended because of the famine. Stalin denied that Ukrainians were starving. He proclaimed that crops were state property and farmers can't use any portions of their harvests. It would be considered theft from the state. In 1932 4,500 people were shot for crop theft and 100,00 were imprisoned.
The Prime Minster Vyacheslav Molotov went to Ukraine to investigate conditions there. As a result, Molotov had the grain requisition reduced by 20%. He confiscated grain, cows, chickens and potatoes from peasants who weren't cooperating with the requisition.
In 1933 Stalin prevented peasants from leaving Ukraine to find food. Anyone who tries is called an agent of Poland. The Ukrainian authorities forbid starvation to be recorded as a cause of death, but there is a statistic that 2.9 million died of hunger in 1933. Maybe starvation statistics were no longer recorded after 1933.
This period was called the Holodomar which means Great Famine. More than 12% of Ukraine's population died. Peasants from Russia and Belarus were resettled in deserted Ukrainian villages. Prominent Ukrainians were committing suicide. The Holodomar isn't mentioned in newspapers or history books until the 1980's.
Stalin wanted to end any concept of Ukrainian identity. Ukrainian language schools were shut down and books in Ukrainian were banned.
The Chernobyl disaster is part of the history of Ukraine since Chernobyl is in Ukraine. I read an excellent article from National Geographic written two years ago that recounts the history of the event and the relatively current situation there. It's at Chernobyl article. There is a Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. People work there now, and some have moved back into the Exclusion Zone. There have been environmental groups that were launched as a result of the Chernobyl disaster.
I was disturbed when I read in this book that Russian troops were advancing toward Kyiv through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. How much time are these Russians spending in this radioactive zone? I don't like the fact that Russia has invaded Ukraine, but the soldiers are human beings who certainly weren't given a choice about fighting there. So I am concerned for them. I'm sure that Putin won't care about Russians who come home with radiation sickness.
The acting career of Volodymir Zelensky is discussed including the 2004 Ukrainian/Russian comedy remake of The Three Musketeers in which Zelensky played D'Artagnan, but the rest of the Musketeers were women. I thought it could be amusing, but I don't know Ukrainian and my knowledge of Russian is too limited to watch a movie with Russian dialogue. So I decided to give it a pass.
I was angry that Crimean Tatars were disenfranchised when Crimea was voting on whether to unify with Russia. Russians had settled in Crimea and the indigenous Tatars were no longer the majority. To make sure that Tatars didn't get a say, there were no polling places in Tatar areas.
Putin said in a speech that Kyiv is "the mother of all Russian cities". Zelensky, who was still only an actor, wondered in response why Russian news said such terrible things about their mother. When Zelensky arrived in Moscow to film, he announced that he's "now in the heart of Russia. If, of course, she still has a heart". In June 2014, Zelensky was sued in a Russian court. Zelensky decided not to film in Moscow anymore.
In 2014 Zelensky had to hire bodyguards after his car was set on fire in Kyiv. He wasn't in the car, but it was believed to be an assassination attempt.
I finally reached the chapter heading "How Volodymir Zelensky Stopped Joking". Then I realized he was making the transition from acting to politics. In 2015 Zelensky began to make that transition by starring in a series called "Servant of the People" in which an "ordinary guy" becomes President. He definitely far surpasses this character. The last thing I would call Zelensky is ordinary. He has become a leader of stature on the world stage. When he ran for President in real life his political party was called "Servant of the People". His victory was overwhelming.
When Zelensky first met Zygar, the author of this book, Zelensky said he read Zygar's book, All The Kremlin's Men,in order to help him understand Putin. My opinion is that you don't need a book to understand Putin. He's not a complex man. He wants all the power he can get, just like Stalin or any other totalitarian dictator.
In November 2021, Zelensky signed the anti-oligarchy law. Ukraine has a register of oligarchs. They have to declare how much money they have. They can't sponsor political parties and Ukrainian civil servants have to reveal any connection they have with an oligarch. Ukraine is trying to move away from an oligarch based economy, and substitute it with a market economy that welcomes foreign investment. I assume that an oligarch based economy is one in which oligarchs are favored and may even have monopolies.
I very much liked a Zelensky quote that I found in the footnotes.
"I can't become the President. Who will make the country laugh then?"
I hope that when Zelensky retires from politics, he can go back to making people laugh. Yet I fear that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. Vladimir Putin probably won't let Zelensky go back to his civilian life. So retirement won't be in the cards for him. He has become a prominent world leader who is widely admired. I respect him and Ukraine enormously for standing up to Russian power.
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