Another voice

Thoughts on the Ukraine

Auberon Waugh

My unavoidable absence in New York last week kept me from the Fortieth Anniversary meeting of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations in Hammersmith Town Hall. It promised to be quite an exciting affair, with a programme of insurgent songs by the choir of the Ukrainian Youth Organisation, dancing and folk music from Latvian, Lithuanian and Croatian groups to intersperse orations from Mr Y Stetsko, President of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Na- tions, Mr K Glinski, national chairman, and various others.

Its first meeting was held on 21-22 November 1943 in the forests of Zhytomr, a region of the Ukraine which had temporari- ly been liberated from German Nazis and Russian Bolsheviks alike by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It was summoned as a Conference of Subjugated Nations by the Commander- in-Chief of the UPA, General R. Shukevych-Taras Chuprynka and the leadership of the OUN, headed by Stepan Bandera. At that time, it was understan- dably as much concerned with the threat of German imperialism as it was by the pro- spect of Soviet imperialism. Its first manifesto ends with the ringing battle cry: `Forward! Freedom for the subjugated na- tions! For the creation of national indepen- dent states! Death to Hitler and Stalin.'

That first meeting was attended by representatives from 12 nations, all then under occupation by either Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. Since then it has grown to represent 28 nations, all of them under the communist yoke, including exiles from Albania, Bulgaria, Cuba, Croatia and Slovenia, Chechia and Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Roumania — as well as the familiar list of republics which have been more or less absorbed into the Soviet Union.

Perhaps the meeting in Hammersmith Town Hall did not quite live up to the grandeur of the ABN's aspirations, There is always something a little pathetic about these meetings of exiles, although it would be as well to remember that it was from such meetings as these, held in unlikely

Swiss gasthauser that Lenin emerged to lead the Russian empire into the most hideous

passage of its short black history. The ABN claims — with whatever degree of truth to be most active behind the Iron Curtain.

`Utilising the various means at its disposal, the ABN ... has been systematically preparing and mobilising the nations sub- jugated by Russian imperialism and com- munism for the final stage of the national liberation struggle.'

It is encouraging, of course, to think of all those Armenians, Byelorussians, Cos- sacks, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Georgians getting together with dish- faced, slant-eyed Tartars, Turkestanians and former inhabitants of the Idel-Ural in Hammersmith Town Hall to mobilise each other. But the most serious component of the ABN is undoubtedly the Ukrainians, of whom over three million live in northern America and a surprising number are to be found in Paris and northern England. Despite having lost some 20 million of its inhabitants by violence or deliberate starva- tion since the October Revolution, the Ukraine now has 47 million people living in it of whom over 42 million are still Ukrai- nians.

If the Ukraine were an independent na- tion, as it has always aspired to be, it would be the largest country in Europe after the Soviet Union itself (and the Russian Soviet Republic). It is also one of the ten most economically developed countries of the world, producing over one fifth of the Soviet Union's industrial output and one quarter of its grain.

Perhaps the noises heard in Ham- mersmith Town Hall were no more than a squeak when set against the noises heard at Greenham Common or at the various anti- nuclear demonstrations in West Germany and Holland. But it was a squeak emerging from a very big animal indeed, and one which the chancelleries of the free world have been deliberately ignoring ever since Yalta.

Some years ago, I remember hearing Mr Healey say that in his view the greatest threat to world peace came not from any confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, but from the disintegration of the Soviet Empire itself. Nothing was more dangerous than this, he said wisely, as one who had watched many Empires disintegrate and often remarked how such shifts in the proper order of things led to war. The Russians might do anything if they saw their Empire collapsing around them, he hinted.

At the time I thought this sentiment historically unsound and mildly fatuous. Brooding about it since, I find it rather sinister. Plainly this view is what passes for conventional wisdom in the State Depart- ment and Foreign Office, with the excep- tion of their more or less disreputable, clandestine elements, who have been per- mitted to give only ineffectual encourage- ment to nationalist movements inside the Soviet Empire, at any rate until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I wonder whether this policy — which has never been declared, let alone discussed — is the pro- duct of an intelligent assessment of risks, or whether it was wished upon them by some anonymous Soviet sympathiser within the Northern Department 40 years ago and has never been seriously re-examined ever since.

It was enshrined in the Yalta agreement, of course, but any notion of 'spheres of in- fluence' which that shameful document defined has long since been overturned by the Soviet penetration in Cuba and Latin America, not to mention all the casualties of 'Jimmy' Carter's brief but terrible presidency — the Horn of Africa, Yemen and Afghanistan itself.

Any usefulness which the Yalta agree- ment might have had must surely be replac- ed now by an awareness that so long as the Soviet Empire exists it is bound to present a hostile and expansionist front; and that so long as the logic of nuclear deterrence is ap- plied to this confrontation between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world — it is quite plainly the only logic which can ap- ply — the risk of some unspeakable error will always be with us.

Yet it must be obvious even to the most half-witted Marxist ideologue that the Soviet empire cannot last forever. No em- pire ever has. So long as it continues to exist, the arms race is bound to accelerate because it is the only logic which the Soviet Union understands. If I am right, the way out of the deadlock must be to encourage and assist those pressures within the Soviet Empire which will eventually bring about its disintegration: the defection, under na- tional leadership, of the satellite armies (such as failed to happen in Czechoslovakia in 1968) and the mutiny of Russia's colonial troops recruited from her occupied pro- vinces in the Ukraine, Georgia, Byelorussia, Estonia, Latvia etc and for all I know Turkestan.

Such defections and mutinies are bound, eventually, to arrive, and they are bound to come as a result of civil unrest brought about by hunger. While the United States and Argentina continue to sell corn to the Soviet Union, they are quite simply feeding the arms race. There is no conceivable reason in logic or normal human psycho- logy why the Soviet Union should react to internal collapse by loosing off its missiles at the West, and it is the voice of stupidity and cowardice which pretends this is the case. It is quite simply untrue that a fat Rus- sian is less to be feared than a thin one.

Perhaps we shall never know what secret assurances were given to the Russians in 1968 which emboldened them to invade Czechoslovakia. Whatever they were and they have never been revealed or discussed — they may prove to have been the worst diplomatic error ever made. But if only a quarter of the misplaced enthusiasm for unilateral disarmament could be directed towards stopping sales of corn to the Soviet Union, human intelligence might have contrived a solution to the deadlock, or at least pointed towards the one glimmer of hope in the encircling gloom.