Someone was going on about Ukraine having the right to self determination and i’m just like “which ukraine, the nazis in Galacia or everyone else? Which one gets to decide?” And they just start dissembling, because all it’s really about is russia bad, and russian speaking ukrainians are just secret russian orcs or some shit, slobber ukraini, we have to let the 50% of ukraine that’s nazis wipe out the 50% that isn’t because national right to self determination or some bullshit.
“Bu-but the Russians overthrew the legitimate Ukrainian People’s Republic and imposed the SSR on them!” is another one I’ve heard. As if the UPR under Petliura (the second incarnation of it after the Krauts destroyed the first one which was ironically established by the Bolsheviks, I mean) didn’t shoot itself in the foot by reversing course to the right, giving Ukrainian Bolsheviks the legitimacy to overthrow the Central Rada with support from the Russians.
“why did the Ukrainian SSR commit genocide against itself?” should be the armor-piercing question that starts a crack in the Holodomor narrative, and yet.
The idea that all Communists were a handful of somehow super-competent mind-controlling Russians and one Georgian everyone thinks was Russian is so frustratingly impenetrable.
It was called the All-Union Communist Party for a reason. Part of what made the Bolsheviks able to unite a bunch of territories amidst a civil war against dozens of adversaries is because their party ran the breadth of the old empire across different ethnicities whose cadres wanted it dismantled . The idea that the Russians alone were able to subjugate Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Baltics and so on entirely against their will, after a disastrous series of wars and catastrophes which severed the colonial apparatus of the old Empire no less (first beginning with the February Revolution), is deeply insulting to the agency of those nationalities. Not at all surprisingly given how local nationalists have done their best to spread this narrative to decouple and “purify” their countries from participation in the Soviet project while Westerners cynically propagate it in a cynical appeal to national liberation.
Now this is not to say the Soviet Union didn’t have cultural/structural holdovers of the old empire and would go on to foster Russian Chauvinism later on which came to a head in 1991, but there’s a world of difference between looking at that more critically and thinking there’s an unbroken line from the Russian Empire to the USSR to the current Federation.
Someone was going on about Ukraine having the right to self determination and i’m just like “which ukraine, the nazis in Galacia or everyone else? Which one gets to decide?” And they just start dissembling, because all it’s really about is russia bad, and russian speaking ukrainians are just secret russian orcs or some shit, slobber ukraini, we have to let the 50% of ukraine that’s nazis wipe out the 50% that isn’t because national right to self determination or some bullshit.
Another friend “a lot of the Ukrianians i know hated the Ukrainian ssr and the cccp”
“Aren’t you Canadian?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Same energy as when lib Eastern European younger millennials and zoomers talk about living through the horrors of communism lmao
“Bu-but the Russians overthrew the legitimate Ukrainian People’s Republic and imposed the SSR on them!” is another one I’ve heard. As if the UPR under Petliura (the second incarnation of it after the Krauts destroyed the first one which was ironically established by the Bolsheviks, I mean) didn’t shoot itself in the foot by reversing course to the right, giving Ukrainian Bolsheviks the legitimacy to overthrow the Central Rada with support from the Russians.
“why did the Ukrainian SSR commit genocide against itself?” should be the armor-piercing question that starts a crack in the Holodomor narrative, and yet.
The idea that all Communists were a handful of somehow super-competent mind-controlling Russians and one Georgian everyone thinks was Russian is so frustratingly impenetrable.
It was called the All-Union Communist Party for a reason. Part of what made the Bolsheviks able to unite a bunch of territories amidst a civil war against dozens of adversaries is because their party ran the breadth of the old empire across different ethnicities whose cadres wanted it dismantled . The idea that the Russians alone were able to subjugate Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Baltics and so on entirely against their will, after a disastrous series of wars and catastrophes which severed the colonial apparatus of the old Empire no less (first beginning with the February Revolution), is deeply insulting to the agency of those nationalities. Not at all surprisingly given how local nationalists have done their best to spread this narrative to decouple and “purify” their countries from participation in the Soviet project while Westerners cynically propagate it in a cynical appeal to national liberation.
Now this is not to say the Soviet Union didn’t have cultural/structural holdovers of the old empire and would go on to foster Russian Chauvinism later on which came to a head in 1991, but there’s a world of difference between looking at that more critically and thinking there’s an unbroken line from the Russian Empire to the USSR to the current Federation.