Another point: most people currently in power in Russia and Ukraine were either members of or had strong connections to the communist party. You can change the form of government all you want but if you don't change who is in power can you really expect different results?
Finally, it is extremely important for Ukraine to break away from Russia and define its own identity. It is hard to provide an adequate metaphor for what 70 years of communism did to Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a people. As one example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor. If Ukraine was to give in and be absorbed by Russia, the Ukrainian identity would be destroyed. I do not see that kind of ambition coming from the EU, which is why I am in favor of more close relationships with the west.
As for myself, my grandfather was a Ukrainian with the surname Kozak, while my grandmother was a Russian by the name Svistelnikov. All the relatives I know were born in Ukraine, including those pre-dating the October revolution.
Furthermore, you mention Holodomor- yet this was allegedly the fault of Stalin, head of the SOVIET state. Are you implying Stalin didn't kill Russians? That Russians somehow benefited from Ukrainian misery? Or, that Russians also didn't starve during those difficult times?
> Are you implying Stalin didn't kill Russians? That Russians somehow benefited from Ukrainian misery? Or, that Russians also didn't starve during those difficult times?
He did kill a fair share of them, but yes that is exactly what I am saying. Stalin wanted to assimilate the rest of the soviet republics into one homogenized Russian-based people. Holodomor was a part of it. Re-read the Wikipedia article and the primary sources.
Re. Stalin: Let's not re-write history. USSR was Russia and Russia was USSR. No other country really mattered under Stalin and it was the Russian way or the highway.
I ask, what is its identity? Because historically it has close ties to Russia and a shared history with all Slavic people. In fact, how do we define what Ukraine was over history, since if that image I posted is correct most of it's territory was given by the Russian empire or Soviet leaders. Furthermore, Kiev was just as much the birthplace of Russia as Ukraine- current Russia and Ukraine were once indistinguishable as the principality of Kiev: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rus_de_Kiev_en_1237.png
>Stalin wanted to assimilate the rest of the soviet republics into one homogenized Russian-based people. Holodomor was a part of it. Re-read the Wikipedia article and the primary sources. Re. Stalin: Let's not re-write history. USSR was Russia and Russia was USSR. No other country really mattered under Stalin and it was the Russian way or the highway.
Perhaps I am not familiar enough with it. Nonetheless, interesting how the hundreds of years of years of shared history should be disregarded because of the actions of one man who was ethnically neither Ukrainian nor Russian, and yet, according to you, killed Ukrainians in the name of Russians.
No, you are not. Nothing further to say about it.
> I ask, what is its identity? Because historically it has close ties to Russia and a shared history with all Slavic people...
This is exactly the patronizing point of view that the Russians take of the Ukrainian identity: that it does not exist or that Ukraine is simply a part of Russia. This is exactly what the protesters are fighting. The fact that there are protesters on the streets right now is proof enough.
Moreover, any cultural identity does not exist in a vacuum. By your logic we can argue that the US has no identity of its own and is still just a breakaway British colony that is due to join the UK any day now. Just because one country invades another and subjugates its people for a period of time, does not make the occupied country a part of the occupying country. By that logic Poland has nearly as much claim on Ukraine as Russia does. Or, and I really like this one, Russia is just a part of Ukraine, and should immediately surrender all of its territories to Kiev immediately. After all Kiev was where Russia came from when Moscow was an insignificant fortress in the north.
Personally I believe Ukraine and Russia should be equals in whatever future association they make. I see nothing wrong with saying Russia should equally be a part of Ukraine. It is just easier to imagine the opposite because Russia is bigger.
>This is exactly what the protesters are fighting. The fact that there are protesters on the streets right now is proof enough.
There are all sorts of protesters out there, and I have read that most of them are protesting corruption, not the trade agreement or East vs West. Anyway, let the elections decide.
>Just because one country invades another and subjugates its people for a period of time, does not make the occupied country a part of the occupying country.
Except Ukraine willingly joined the Russian empire in 1654. And again, many Ukrainians would like closer ties to Russia.
>Moreover, any cultural identity does not exist in a vacuum. By your logic we can argue that the US has no identity of its own and is still just a breakaway British colony that is due to join the UK any day now.
The similarity is that the US and the UK have very strong relations, and a difference is that many hundreds of years have elapsed since the American revolution. But, similarly, during the American revolution, there were royalists, and a foreign power (the French) did intervene to defeat the British. The point is that many Ukrainians would like closer ties to Russia, particularly those in the East.
Also, why pick the US when you can pick Canada- the Queen still comes by to visit, we have a governor-general, we are part of the commonwealth, and so on. A lot of people here feel close ties to the UK because of their British heritage.
Close relationships? Sure. Visa-free entry? Sure. Trade agreement? Sure. Exclusive one way relationship and political meddling in another country's dealings? No way.
What are you trying to say? Mexico and the United states are very different countries with distinct cultures and ethnicities. Ukraine and Russia are both Slavic nations with very similar cultures, traditions, languages, and histories, and I mean in many ways they are indistinguishable. Now, this doesn't mean I'm saying "Ukraine doesn't exist, or is a part of Russia"; I could equally be saying Russia doesn't exist and is a part of Ukraine.
>Close relationships? Sure. Visa-free entry? Sure. Trade agreement? Sure. Exclusive one way relationship and political meddling in another country's dealings? No way.
I disagree how? I don't think that Ukraine should be assimilated into Russia, or that Russian should be taught in Ukrainian schools even. I just think that the ties between Russia and Ukraine should be preserved, especially because so many people have roots in both countries.
The EU is offering Ukraine neither. Also, many Ukrainians do not want to join the EU.
>It should also have no issue with Ukraine having its own democratic elections that do not include a puppet from Moscow.
Are you implying the last elections were rigged?
Except it really hasn't. During the Kievan Rus era, there was no distinction between Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine was the frontier region (hence the etymology of the word from old Slavic), and it's been contested by Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Austro-Hungary, Tatars, etc... After centuries changing hands, Ukraine was eventually held by the Russian empire (who had by then moved its capital from Kyiv to Moscow), and Ukraine only became a country briefly from 1917 to 1920. Then again in 1991.
To say its been a country 'for a very long time' is patently false, and revisionist history.
> USSR was Russia and Russia was USSR.
This is again false. When they murdered the royal family, suppressed the Church, and murdered millions of Russians, they ceased to represent the Russian people. They were a cabal of communists who oppressed Russians and many other peoples.
So that's one way to look at it. Here's another. It's Ukraine vs Russia. Ukraine has a culture, a history, a language. That culture, history, and language is UKRAINIAN. Not Russian.
During the USSR, Ukrainian was essentially taught as a second language. Russian was more cosmopolitan. That's like having English taught as a primary language in Paris.
After the fall of the USSR, Ukraine started clawing back its own heritage and of course, there is friction. You're witnessing that friction.
And to be fair, there is some truth in framing the debate as Russia vs. Europe/US (as opposed to Russia vs. Ukraine). Despite the fact that signing a trade agreement with the EU is hardly "joining the west," Ukraine will go bankrupt if they're not bailed out or supported by either the West or Russia. Selecting one or the other implies alliance and political (if not economic) debt.
> After the fall of the USSR, Ukraine started clawing back its own heritage and of course, there is friction. You're witnessing that friction.
<irony>So Russians don't want Ukrainians to speak the Ukrainian language and to have their own culture, now? That's really evil. I didn't know that.</irony>
Bookmarking.
This seems to be the thing most Westerners find hard to grasp. For many people communism was good.
If you didn't want too much you would get everything you wanted without struggle, which for many was heaven.
Sure, there might have been people that had it "ok." But my family, all of my relatives, all my Russian friends that immigrated from the USSR/Russia (except for a few die hard Russian patriots that wouldn't admit any fault in Russia even if it put their family to death) all have the same, general opinion of it.
And yes, there were the lazy drunks that loved the fact that they could drink on the job all day, not do a single thing, and never get fired. The incompetent idiots that got jobs in positions they had no clue about, I'm sure they loved their job security. But for the average hardworking people that were trying to create the best life for their families, it was pretty shitty.
Such is life.
It's also good to keep in mind that when you get most of your information from people who chose to leave the selection bias is rather high/peculiar.
This is naive. Please don't pay too much attention to those who weren't there.
It was heaven for Russians, because a nation that has been historically at the bottom of the ladder, got to play in the big leagues. Who cares if your standard of living sucks? It always sucked.
> If you didn't want too much you would get everything you wanted without struggle, which for many was heaven.
If you want to find out how Communism gives "to those according to need and from those according to ability", then I urge you to visit North Korea.
I assure you, that is exactly how communism worked in the past and continues to work today.
For anyone interested what Ukrainian nationalists have to do with this, this is an example of their thinking.
I assure you it is not.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_leap_forward * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_revolution * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_spring * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_rouge
There are many more of course, too numerous to put here. Mass starvation and death is not the exclusive domain of communism for sure, but communist societies of the past sure seem to have been prone to it. The "Communist" countries today that aren't complete shit-holes (like China and Vietnam) are the ones that have moved away from strict command economies and allowed markets to form.
As for Holodomor, I was just pointing that out because we're talking about Ukraine here. Whether through malicious intent or incompetence and mismanagement, Stalin's regime was still responsible for countless needless deaths.
Furthermore, socialism is inevitable. Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best.
The leaders were driven by the ideology. Their actions were driven by a desire to achieve their vision of a communist utopia. People went along with these plans because the ideology promised them a better life. By your logic, was National Socialism not evil because the Holocaust was the fault of Hitler and his Lieutenants?
> Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
I'm not criticizing socialism, I am specifically criticizing hard-line communism as practiced in the past by the Soviet Union and in the present by nations like North Korea and Cuba. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed and the People's Republic of China moved away from orthodox communism is an indication of how valid that ideology was.
> My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best
And that's what we have today in most western countries. In fact, that's what we had in the west even during the Cold War. Again, not saying that any semblance of socialism is inherently bad. I'm saying that orthodox communism has, does, and will always, lead to suffering for the general population.
While you find them in every system, you find them more frequently in totalitarian ones.
> Furthermore, socialism is inevitable. Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
Yes, but less socialist than 50 years ago, which suggests it's an ebb and flow type of deal, rather than some death march toward communism.
> My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best.
My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe capitalism is best.
And please take note, it's impossible to speak for a group of people or boil down what's happening to anything concrete when it's very disparate and unique to each individual. But I'll point out a few trends I've seen.
For some background, eastern Ukraine is very pro-Russian, and was (and is) very pro-Yanukovytch. The majority of the people I talked to pined for the days of the Soviet Union, when bread was cheap, everyone had what they needed, etc. They viewed the fall of the soviet union as a psychological infiltration from the west, and, apart from a short rendezvous to defeat Hitler, the west is still the enemy and full of corrupt capitalist blood suckers (which, to be fair, can be not-too-far from the truth at times). It's hard for most westerners to imagine that many of the major cities in Ukraine have a 30 ft + statue of Lenin or that many of the major streets are named "Lenin" street, but it's not uncommon for me to see poems or images praising Stalin from my Russian Facebook (or Vkontakte) friends. The Soviet Union was the good ol' days, not grouped together with pre-WWII Germany as it often is in the States. Stalin is decidedly not Hitler. I include this information not to say that anti-protest comments come from Soviets/Communists, but the influence of the Soviet Union and how information was relayed still lingers, even today.
When most of the people there, especially the older generations, talked about the media, they would often reference a transmission from Moscow (передача из Москвы) as the only source of reliable information. Think of it as "published in the New York Times." And bear in mind that the New York Times has been just as involved in Propaganda as was Pravda in its heyday.
The battle, in the mind of Russians, is one of information, and of each side trying to deceive the other. Americans look at pro-Communist posters as "propaganda" but at the western side's as simply "promotional posters." Russians see it as an ideological battle being fought with information.
For many Russians this is the same battle being fought. It's not revolutionaries vs. evil dictator, it's east vs. west. It's Russia vs. the Europe/United States. And when a battle of information leads to such sharp contrasts, you defend your side, in a similar way to how Republicans defended George Bush when he did stupid things and Democrats defend Barack Obama when he does stupid things. It's not about the particular circumstance, it's about ideology. You'll notice a common thread of "Well, sometimes Russia sucks, but America sucks sometimes too." Which, again, is completely fair. And again, this is not something that only happens in Russia.
But this leads to trying to sway the facts in favor of one side, and that often leads to gross misinterpretation of what is actually going on. Russia Today and Pravda are state-sponsored PR organizations dressed up as journalistic institutions. When the protests began, according to RT it was "a handful of people" gathered, angry at "a failed trade law," and not the bubbling over of frustration as a completely corrupt President threw his enemies in jail and deepened relations with Putin.
Take, for example, the naked protestor who was mocked by police, photographed, slapped, kicked, and put in a van (graphic video:) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSt4kAItj4Q. Many of my Russian friends would tell you he was trying to set himself on fire, the police saved him, took pictures "in memoriam," gave him a few friendly slaps, and let him go. They would leave comments like "Let him burn next time!" or "Be careful, police, you're only giving the terrorists more psychological ammunition!"
So, to answer your question, in the mind of a Russian it's because we're still fighting a war of information, and the west likes to deceive and destroy Russia psychologically. They defend their ideology the same way we defend ours, and sometimes information and facts are left out to dry.