As Russian president Vladimir Putin pursues his bloody campaign to re-subjugate Ukraine, we measure success in territory gained or lost. But for Putin, seizing land is an enabler as he pursues deeper goals—not least among them the annihilation of Ukrainian culture. As he seeks to rebuild the czarist (not the Soviet) empire, he’s willing to do all the killing required, but he’d rather exploit a defeated, abject Ukrainian population under conditions of soft-core slavery. Russia needs more living bodies, not just corpses.
Putin’s insistence that there is no such thing as Ukraine or Ukrainians requires him to live up to his beliefs, to suppress the Ukrainian language and exterminate Ukrainian culture and historical memory. As for the latter, resistance to Putin has been so impressive specifically because of historical memory…of Czarist conquests over centuries, of the Ukrainian language treated as no more than bastardized Russian, and—not least—the starvation deaths of approximately four-million Ukrainians in the Holodomor, the “Hunger Death,” Stalin’s 1932–33 famine-by-design in which Russian thugs literally took the food from the mouths of Ukrainian babies to break the independent spirit of the population (many Ukrainians had sided with the Whites, not the Bolshevik Reds, in the complex civil war that left in its wake a victorious, gutted, paranoid Soviet Union). Stalin’s secret police even executed Ukraine’s bandura-playing folk musicians in mass.
Ukrainian resistance continued, nonetheless. Soviet-Russian brutality, not a penchant for Nazism, even led Ukrainians to side, initially, with the invading Germans and fight against the Red Army in a desperate attempt to drive out their Soviet overlords. And after Russia’s “Great Patriotic War” ended, Ukrainian partisans fought on into the 1950s, ever fewer—and frequently betrayed by Kim Philby’s grotesque clique of Soviet sympathizers in British Intelligence.
We would be hard pressed to find a single Ukrainian family that did not lose multiple relatives to Moscow’s savagery before, during, and after the Second World War.
And Ukrainians remember. And now it has begun again.
What we are witnessing today is yet another Russian attempt at cultural genocide—not the genocide-without-modifiers extermination of a people, faith, or ethnicity, as in the Holocaust (though the Holodomor came close), but the suppression and forced conversion of a population with a distinct identity and a deep national culture. In the Holocaust, mass murder was the goal; in Ukraine in 2024, the killing is a tool of persuasion.
Throughout history, this merciless form of aggression has most often been directed not against distant enemies but toward neighbors, whether the Japanese assaults on the culture of Korea or centuries of English attempts to “civilize” the Irish. It has also been applied to internal minorities with dissident cultural values: To our shame, the United States Government attempted to erase the culture of Native Americans in its now-infamous Indian boarding schools (pleading yesteryear’s good intention does not get us off the hook). Today, the Chinese are at it in Xinjiang; the Pakistanis in Baluchistan; and Arabic-speakers in Sudan against those who speak tribal languages and have slightly darker skin. And let’s not forget the Kurds…
Thus, the three target groups for cultural genocide tend to be either neighbors who insist on their right to decide their own future; irksome internal minorities; or rebellious imperial subjects. But neighbors excite the most enduring hatreds.
When Hitler implemented the Final Solution, he intended to exterminate Jews; in his grim success, he incidentally obliterated the marvelous Yiddish culture of Central and Eastern Europe. Putin’s priority is cultural destruction, to do to Ukraine’s cultural DNA what Stalin did to Russia’s, to eliminate the possibility of creative genius then fills the void with compliant mediocrities. To that end, he’ll kill whoever looks faintly able to cause trouble. Were Kyiv forced to surrender tomorrow, tens of thousands of Ukrainians would be executed in the following months. For a start.
Regarding the Holocaust, we long parroted the slogan “Never again.” Well, it’s “again,” and what are we doing? Putting Ukraine on a military starvation diet to quiet our consciences and camouflage our cowardice when it comes to stopping Putin.
While we obsess about wars over resources, trade, shipping lanes, and retaliation against fanatics—classic struggles in hi-tech guise—or prognostications about climate wars to come, another type of war rages with rabid savagery: wars to erase birthright identities, cultural genocides that threaten to ultimately drop the modifier. Such conflicts are not resolved by deals, treaties, compromises, guarantees, or neutral status. In some cases, it appears they may never end, but only go into a light slumber that reawakens in nightmares.
Humans are far better at hating their neighbors than at loving them.
