In Gessen' version of history, after President Yanukovich fled, "the revolution was triumphant. And then little green men - Russians - appeared in Crimea." This distortion of well-documented events is so blatant that it calls into question the integrity of The New Yorker editorial board. Gessen's friend describes the events thus: "It was a very emotional moment. we were burying our dead"..and then Putin shows up"..like someone showing up at a funeral and demanding everyone's jewelry." (The Crimea is sometimes referred to as the crown-jewel of Ukraine")
Channeling the typical New Yorker reader who whines about not being able to keep up three vacations homes, Gessen lays it on thick: "'And on top of that it was spring! We'd got through this terrible winter, we'd got through the Maidan, and after all that, we thought, finally, we're going to live. Instead, we're preparing to die again.'" Gessen continues: "The day before Shvet and I met up, Putin had made a speech on the annexation of Crimea. It was a remarkably cynical speech, full of passionately uttered half-truths and lies." 'Cynical' and 'passionately' are not usually used together, but I shall not quarrel here with poetic license.
"The thing that kills me isn't the speech," Gessen goes on to say. "It's that so many Russians believe him-- people with university degrees"and they believe every word"".these new Russians - they're imperialists - and they're nasty."
Not even the fact that people with degrees think Putin is a better leader than Obama gives Gessen pause.
As for his friend, he seems extraordinarily naive for a journalist. Seeking to get across the idea that Ukrainians are fighting for democracy, he complains: "You in the West, you get your democracy just like you get your coffee and your morning paper. It's like water coming out of the tap. You don't have to think about it. It's going to come every day."
It's obvious he thinks all Americans start the day reading the New York Times with their morning coffee confident that all is well on the Beltway.
This starry-eyed picture of American democracy brings Gessen back to the subject he has been trying to avoid during the entire article: the Neo-Nazi thugs without whom Yanukovich would still be in office. Still determined to pass the Banderites off as harmless, he sidles up to the truth, again quoting Shvets:
"'It's interesting how the meaning of chants changed. For example, 'Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!' - that used to be the UPA chant." He was referring to the paramilitary Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which operated in Western Ukraine during the Second World War as the military wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. 'People were chanting it, and it changed its meaning. Because when they said 'Glory to heroes, they didn't mean Bandera anymore, or Shukhevich - the leaders of the OUN and the UPA who cooperated with the brutal German occupation of Ukraine, they meant the people in the square. These were the heroes. If you said that in the forest in 1944, it was an anti-Communist chant. Here it was different. It had changed.'"
Changed? Really? Gessen has not read/watched/heard the anti-Russian, anti-Communist, anti-Jewish invectives proffered by Julia Timoshenko, Dimity Yarosh, Oleksandr Muzychko, (the fat guy who irrupted into elected officials' offices fully armed, threatening them if they didn't resign - and who was mysteriously killed, probably on orders from the men in the black Mercedeses, for whom he was just too much of an embarrassment?)
Gessen does refer briefly to the endless videos on YouTube, yet he can't do without his pacifier. Again according to Shvets: "'Some other UPA chants didn't work - 'Glory to the nation! Death to its enemies!' That didn't work, because what 'nation'? We're all half Russian!'" True, however the UPA and OUN have been kept alive by whose who are not half Russian: the descendants of Ukrainians who fought with Bandera against the Soviet Union. And it is they who turned the progressive demonstrations in the Maidan into a right-wing coup, just as Dmitry Yaros explained in his Time interview.
Here Gessen goes into a long discussion of the language problem, saying that although Ukrainian and Russian are close, it takes work for Russians to learn Ukrainian: "If you are not willing to do that work, then you will think of Ukraine as a wayward cousin, or even brother, who just needs to be brought back into the fold." (Read, reunited with Russia.)
Gessen does admit that: "Urkrainianization has involved the proliferation of Ukrainian language schools and a particular narrative of Ukrainian history. (sic) Then, like a dog worrying a bone, he comes back yet again to what he knows is the crucial issue of the Ukrainian crisis, its uncomfortably brutal history:
"Perhaps the most painful node of this Urkrainianization, for Russian-identified people in Ukraine, has been the historical argument over the activities of the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the western part of the country during the Second World War. To many Russians these were Nazi collaborators who in their eagerness to establish 'facts on the ground' in Ukraine engaged in ethnic cleansing of Russians, Poles and Jews. (What else could they be called, other than Nazi collaborators?) As in Soviet times, they are referred to contemptuously as banderovtsy, after their wartime leader Stepan Bandera. But to many Ukrainians, especially the young, the UPA is an inspiration, because in the struggle for independence it fought off two of the most dictatorial regimes in history. (The UPA turned on the Germans after realizing that they were not actually interested in an independent Ukraine.) Arguments about the UPA become very emotional very quickly" because they are about peoples' grandfathers, who either were with the insurgents or were killed by them.
The worst thing about this article appearing in a publication such as The New Yorker, with its history of impeccable journalism is that the author appears not to know that many former Ukrainian Nazis were welcomed in the U.S., where they were instrumental in the birth of the Neo-Conservative movement. (Mark Crispin Miller was interviewed this week by Abby Martin on RT's Breaking the Set as well as by her colleague Thom Hartmann on The Big Picture about the e-book publication of five important books that have been scuttled by a paranoid publishing industry, under the title The Forbidden Bookshelf. These include Christopher Simpson's "Blowback", about Operation Paperclip, that brought high level Nazis to the U.S. to be used as assets in the incipient Cold War against the Soviet Union. (The only thing the public became aware of was the indignation that prevented the government from appointing John Yoo to help assess its own efforts at declassifying information about these programs.)
I am not going to dissect Gessen's entire 10,000 word article, but will end with his condemnation of Russia's increasing ability to stand up to the West, under Putin, whom he accuses of encouraging separatism through television newscasts and "documentaries" beamed into Ukraine.
If the documentaries Gessen is referring to are anything like the ones Americans can see on RT, Russia's twenty-four hour English language news channel, they document the historical background of the men who enabled the coup in Kiev: although Dimitry Yaros only got 1% of the vote in the presidential election, supporting assertions that his organization does not have broad support, the fact that any government would rely on openly Neo-Nazi fighters to take - and keep power - should trouble any journalist. At one point Gessen quotes Shvets saying 'Our army is nothing', and indeed it has been seen melting away. But that does not justify calling on Hitler-worshipping militias who curse Russians, Communists and Jews - or any other group - to get and keep power.
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