This essay will attempt to trace a few sociological antecedents to Ukrainian independence and a modern version of Ukrainian identity. The attempt is to trace Ukrainian life from the 1870s to modern times in as brief a time as possible. The purpose of this is to trace, in a broad manner, the distortions that developed within Ukrainian economic and social life that led to the present crisis: a paralyzed Ukraine, split between east and west, without a stable identity, religion or cultural nexus. There are a few good references for some of this material, including the well written, Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR 1923-1934 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies), a work to which I am highly indebted in this piece.

1. In the 1870s, Russia and Austria, the two colonial powers over Ukraine, are dealing with a Ukrainian situation marked by mass peasant impoverishment. Some in the literature make the claim that this is the true genesis of Ukrainian nationalism in the political sense (as opposed to cultural traditionalism), in that a growing population, landlordism and land-hunger lead to a situation where peasants begin becoming politically aware. The dynamic element of the economy is being run in the cities by Russians and Jews, both groups operating against the interests of the rural sector.

Ukrainian industry is developing rapidly at this time, though almost exclusively as a foreign monopoly, relative to its rather non-existent beginnings. Ukraine is developing a the beginnings of a modern economy, though actual Ukrainians seem to have nothing to do with it, a concept that might be termed the first distortion in Ukrainian modern social development. Throughout the first third of the 19th century, there is a major gulf forming between “developed” Ukraine, urban, Russian, Polish and Jewish, and agricultural Ukraine. Increasingly peasants, driven off their land or otherwise fallen in to impoverishment, are streaming into a handful of cities where their identity will undergo a major and radical change. It is not until World War I were there is some sense of rural, Ukrainian identity. Prior to that, the literate sector of Ukraine is not Ukrainian at all. It is this schism that permits of a robust sense of Ukrainian nationalism to develop, though in a distorted manner.

2. Near the end of World War I, the Central Rada begins to develop, the first modern Ukrainian parliament, doomed to failure and disgrace. Again, the rural/urban divide is significant. Basically, Ukrainian liberal intellectuals come to control the political development of the nation, and will claim to represent it. Like the British parliament under Charles I, what amounts to a urban, tiny, literate Ukrainian bourgeoisie will come to identify the needs of the nation with itself and its interests. The Orange Revolution is yet another version of this deceit and is part of the same distorted social beginnings. In the latter case, a small group of billionaires, funded by the United States and Russian/Jewish oligarchs in exile, will claim to “represent the interests of the ‘Ukrainian People,’” a highly elusive concept to say the very least.

As a matter of course, the Rada at this early stage was made up of the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries who balked at any talk of collective landownership, or even to take drastic steps to redistribute land to increasingly hard pressed peasants. Actual Ukrainian parties did poorly in the cities, where Ukrainian was rarely spoken, and former peasants transformed into proletarians began to speak the dominant languages of the city, yet another distortion that enters Ukrainian life, only to grow at a fantastic rate under Bolshevik control. From 1880 to 1917, a radical transformation of Ukraine had taken place, but not nearly to the extent as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union manipulating Ukrainian identity for their own benefit.

The Rada satisfied nobody. There was no Ukrainian Cromwell to lead a military dictatorship and smash all dissent. As a small group of urban Ukrainians, frankly alienated from rural tradition, the Rada will be attacked from both the left, in their refusal to deal with peasant land hunger, and from the right, who viewed it as too republican and quasi-socialist. Ultimately, the Rada will be a complete failure, largely because of its refusal to deal with the land problem. Making matters worse, there was an extreme shortage of Ukrainian-speaking personnel that was able to 1) run a modern economy, 2) control budgetary procedure, and 3) to run any form of modern political or military apparatus. The Rada became more of a symbolic rallying cry than a functional institution. It is revered as more of a precedent creator than the actual, executor of policy. Its alienation from the peasantry as well as its inability to initiate policy make it a failure. Already, the distortions in Ukrainian development will permit the vat bulk of the population to be ignored and increasingly despised.

By 1918, the Bolshevik Red Army had invaded Ukraine, and likely the last real act of the Rada was to declare a symbolic independence. The German invasion from the Northwest saved much of Ukraine at the time, but the Germans soon were to wear out their welcome through a policy, soon to become familiar to all Slavs, of grain requisitioning, or the theft of grain from peasant stores to feed a large and tired army. Within this context came the Cossack coup of Hetman Skoropadskii, perhaps the only real chance of Ukrainian independence in the context of late World War I. The Hetman did perform certain positive services to Ukraine, including the rebuilding of the educational infrastructure, he was seen as a puppet of the Germans, an idea too exaggerated for consideration, but at the very least, was seen as a conservative alternative to the Rada, using German protection against Trotskii and the Red Army. As Skoropadskii began to apologize for grain requisitioning, his support even among conservative elements began to wan. This creates yet anther negative precedent, the use of foreign armies to gain independence ending in disaster. As in Ireland, the use of foreign soldiers was either too little and unimportant, or, as in the case of modern Ukraine, the Germans, in both World War I and World War II, used Ukraine as their bread basket, eventually alienating all possible support. In both wars, the Germans were first seen as liberators, only later to treat native Slavs as an inferior species. It was this that led to the fall of Skoropadskii.

Ukraine will completely break down at this period. Successive invasions of theRred Army, Poles who engaged in a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing in the northern region of the country, the whites who saw Ukraine (specifically the Black Sea port-city of Odessa) as a base of operations, as well as roving gangs, some criminal, some quasi-military, some ideological (such as the little-read Nestor Makhno’s anarchist movement) and some foreign, such as Allied forces attempting to “convince” Russia to reenter a war that already killed 20 million Europeans. It is likely that it was only Makhno and latter, the Bolshevkii, who alone had any sort of positive program for Ukrainian reconstruction. Like it or not, this is as much a reason for their success as military power. Unfortunately, the anarchist option, communal and humane, was an impossibility in Ukraine where roving armies and bandit gangs made any kind of real decentralization impossible.

The Orthodox church did more harm than good, and was itself a tool of foreign powers, and remains so today. In 1921 a group of Ukrainian clerics ordained themselves “bishops,” and called themselves the “Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.” They were not Orthodox in a strict sense, for they engaged in numerous anti-canonical practices (the fact that there were no bishops to consecrate them being the most important), declared their unity with the “Greek Catholic Uniats,” (a concept accepted by all Autocephalous groups in Ukraine today), attacked monasticism and permitted married “bishops.” Most of the Ukrainian groups today have not departed from this absurd model of church life. If anything, this sort of ecclesial fraud merely hastened the downfall of Ukraine and permitted these groups to be forcibly disbanded later.

By 1920, independent Ukraine, if it ever existed, was no more. The Rada had collapsed without a tear being shed. The whites were routed by a well-financed Bolshevik army, and the paramilitaries, legitimate or not, were disarmed. It did not take long for the Red Army to pacify a nation so confused, so suggestible under the chaos of numerous wars taking place on her soil.

3. The Bolsheviks merely needed a mop-up operation to bringing Ukraine completely under their control. As might be expected, the communist party functioned only in the cities, and promised the protection and promotion of Ukranian identity as a means of gaining support. Again, something as simple as that was completely lost on the Allies, whites or the Germans, who thought purely in Anglo-style colonial terms.

At the same time, there was something called the “Kievan movement” that few scholars have dealt with. This was a healthy, agrarian style socialism that was to replace the purely urban based, mechanized style of communism so dear to Lenin and Trotskii. The Kievan movement might easily be termed “national communism,” for it blended national and ethnic solidarity with collective ownership of farmland (though not to be closely identified with state ownership), something absolutely necessary to rebuild the shattered economy. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviki in Karkhiv rejected this “deviation” and demanded Soviet Marxism to be imposed on the people. This view, however, was rather articulately defended by Mykola Skrypnyk, who later was to regularly clash with Stalin over the “ethnic” question. What Skrypnyk demanded was a Ukrainian Communist Party, rather than the norm, which was the Communist Party of Ukraine. Skrypnyk was instrumental in increasing Ukrainian literacy through the rather common sense steps of promoting native literature to the general population, something that earned him great distrust in Moscow. Nevertheless, while Lenin was declining, he permitted the creation of a Ukrainian speaking set of ministries attached to the state, specifically, those of Agriculture, Justice, health and Education, but it became clear that these were merely palliatives of no significance. Ultimately, Skrypnyk killed himself before being purged in 1933. What became significant under Skrypnyk’s rule was that a connection was made between opposition to collectivization and the promotion of Ukrainian literature. The two were connected because the notion of “Kievan communism” sought to develop a plan of cooperatives outside the Stalinist model, based on the idea that Ukrainians had developed a more individualist culture than had the Russians, leading to a situation where Marxism needed to be imposed differently on different people, given these realities. In reality, only the Georgians were successful in creating some sort of “national Marxism.”

4. It was not until the 10th party Congress in Ukraine (1921) that it became clear that local problems needed to be dealt with through local agencies, though while still rejecting any kind of “national deviations.” If Ukraine was to become a part of the USSR in more than name, it must be Ukrainianized. This was the Soviet Party platform. Local languages and (non-religious) culture needed to be strengthened and promoted, while party structures themselves needed to become more Ukrainian in outlook, but again, with directives originating in Moscow. The Russian party then proceeded to condemn, as Lenin had done, any form of “Russian nationalism,” proving, time and again, that the Russian Party was not “Russian,” but “Soviet” in composition.

The period of “war communism” saw the centralization of all party and economic structures. Under this mentality, there was to be no regional differences, and the “New Soviet Man” needed to be created in its place. However, Lenin’s declining years saw a greater degree of regionalization, though despite his own wishes, and the desire, never to be fulfilled, of equalization of investment in the regions of the empire which was equated in Moscow with a frontal attack on nationalism. Since Marxist mythology equated nationalism with regional stratification and regional inequalities, they party then concluded that by equalizing investment, nationalism would disappear. The absurdity of this popular position (it remains the dominant position in American academia) is proven by the simple fact that those parts of the USSR that were the most successful, Georgia and Armenia, were the most nationalist of all the Soviet nationalities, and successfully united ethno-communism to successful economic performance.

Under the early Stalin, the “Kulakii,” or those peasants classified as “rich” by the party, were considered the creators of nationalism. Under Marxist mythology and mystification, only capitalism can create nationalism, and hence, if nationalism is a problem, then capitalism (sometimes reduced to mere “inequality”) must still exist within the USSR. The historical record is that the most organic and substantial forms of nationalism exist in small states long before any form of industrialization. Chief examples include Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Serbia and Ukraine herself. All of these were non-capitalist, all of these were agricultural, and yet, the strongest and most philosophically satisfying forms of ethno-nationalism developed there. Large state nationalism never fully developed, and was certainly an artificial aspect of development, and never quite capable of assimilation to an imperialist agenda, including Russia, Britain and France.

The Kulakii were an arbitrary category of Stalin’s revision to “war communism” in that very few were wealthy. Even the formal definition of kulak included only the ability to hire one extra laborer even part of the year. This definition includes peasants who were far from wealthy and was itself applied arbitrarily on the ground. Nevertheless, even if the party’s mystification was correct, the destruction of the “kulakii” would only eliminate the best and brightest of the farming class in Russia and Ukraine. Ultimately, all the agricultural failures of the USSR will be blamed on the amorphous “kulak,” and fresh persecutions would be launched. Party hacks at the local level will label “kulak” any one who seems to dislike party directives, any one in active rebellion against collectivization, those religiously inclined and those that the party simply did not trust.

It should be noted at this point that the Soviet economy was completely propped up by western capital. Few scholars dare to ask the simple question of the source of food and money in a country without a functioning economy, with most of its infrastructure destroyed and its best young men dead. They will not ask this question because the answer destroys the central tenets of both liberalism and Marxism, namely, that western powers financially assisted the Bolsheviki and essentially consolidated their power in the USSR. After the civil war, the United States and Great Britain sent large amounts of grain to the Soviet Union. Afterwards, the Red Cross sent mountains of medicine and foodstuffs to the USSR. For the first several years of the USSR’s life, it was almost completely dependent on food imports from the west, given the ravages of both World War I, Soviet mismanagement and the Civil war itself. This pattern will occur time and again, where an allegedly “anti-communist” west will bail out a failing Soviet economy. This occurred under Lenin, it occurred in spades under Stalin, where American imports rebuilt the Soviet economy after the war. It will occur against under Khrushchev, with the failure of his Virgin Lands program, which itself could have brought down the USSR. Under Khrushchev, the USSR found itself facing massive crop failures and famine, while the US government again, as well as the Canadian, fed the Soviet population. Ironically, it was Con-Agra and Archer-Daniels-Midland who brokered the deal between the US and the USSR over food imports, who at the time they were propping up a failing Soviet economy, were actively destroying the American family farm. The myth that the US was “anti-communist” should be put to sleep. It was not Marxism that the US opposed, but nationalism, the idea that nations and peoples can control their own economic life outside of the dollar or Anglo-American regulation.

Cooperation between the US and USSR was the rule, confrontation the exception. The problem the US had with the USSR was not Marxism per se, but the fact that the Soviets were creating an alternative economic bloc. While nations such as Sweden and Switzerland were installing fully socialist economies with US blessing, the US was allegedly “fighting communism” in Latin America. The US supported the development of socialist states in the Spanish Civil War, early 20th century Mexico and late 20th century South Africa. Yet, it was not the ideology, which was already implemented in parts of Europe, but rather the interference in an area traditionally considered part of the “American near abroad.” Support of Lenin’s government through food donations, support of Stalin both before and after the war, the continued rescuing of the Soviet economy in the 1950s an 60s were all the creation of western capital in union with their respective governments. The USSR could not have survived the generation after the civil war without American assistance. This does not include billions in loans and grants under Stalin, and also not including billions in military equipment, high-tech imports and technical assistance to Stalin before, during and after World War II. And most shocking of all, the allegedly “anti-communist” Henry Ford built a multi-million dollar truck plant in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s. The textbooks need to be rewritten. Nationalism, not Marxism, was the enemy, then and now.

Regardless, the notion of “national communism” remained strong in the Ukrainian countryside, represented by the Borot’bist movement, considered a “bourgeois deviation” from the Soviet model. For the peasantry, the question was land ownership, subsistence and national tradition. It was a very conservative mode, of agrarian economics born out of the experience of the trauma of civil war, foreign invasion and ideological manipulation. This is why the Soviet model never took in the countryside, and the Soviet collective farm model led to uprisings, riots and other forms of refusal, ultimately to be solved by the liquidation of a sizable portion of agriculture in Ukraine by the 1940s. Again, the US was on hand to take up any slack. The USSR was recognized by Roosevelt in the 1930s, and was on the American dole from that time forward.

At this stage in Ukrainian history, the major issues that should be noted are the disintegration of Ukraine during the civil war. Ukraine was, so to speak “put back together” by the constant bargaining between Skyrpnyk and the “national communists” on the one hand, and the Soviet party apparatus in Moscow and Karkhiv, on the other.

Secondly, the experience of rapid and artificial industrialization in the northern and eastern parts of Ukraine is another aspect of the “putting Ukraine back together” program. The landscape of the country between 1870 and 1930 became unrecognizable. Ukraine was forced into a Soviet model of heavy industry, agri-collective existence, and tight centralization at the price of millions of lives. Ukrainian industrialization was peculiar in that it was directed from Moscow, with orders being sent to the Party in Kharkiv. It was artificial because it was so rapid, and so few Ukrainians had anything to do with it. It increased the number of Ukrainians in the cities, which created a Russified Ukrainian proletariat, some of whom began speaking Russian, or a pidgin Russo-Ukrainian dialect that only alienated them from their roots further.

It is for this reason that modern “Ukrainian nationalism” is so shrill and aggressive. It is an artificial construct of the Soviet government, gradually “Ukrainiazation” the Soviet Party into a system that itself was a forcible program of rapid industrialization and urbanization run from GOSPLAN, not from Ukraine. The lack of a mature Ukrainian national and political tradition is the result of this artificial imposition. In addition, the continued urban/rural split helped destroy any sense of a united Ukraine, and increased the intensity of the class nature of Ukrainian society. This is manifest today through Orange Ukraine, where a tiny, wealthy urban elite (this time westernized rather than Russified) began to speak for the “whole nation” and engaged on a program of westernization completely alien from the bulk of the population outside of the cities.

This is underscored by the fact that the land question, the main peasant demand, was closely linked with the development of a rural, agrarian Ukrainian nationalism. Because of the fact that the cities were never Ukraine-friendly, either before or during the Soviet era, there was always two Ukraines, the one looking outside the country, either to the USSR or to the west, and the other, inarticulate and disorganized, based in the countryside and demanding peasant control over land and a strong Ukrainian populist mentality, existing in skeletal form in Ukrainian national communism of the Kiev circle. This mentality has not yet found a voice.

Unfortunately, the only real stable source of rule in Ukraine since the days of Yaroslav have been under the Bolsheviki. Otherwise, Ukraine has been a foreign colony, either under the Poles, the Russians, the Austrians, the USSR or the IMF. This has distorted the Ukrainian mind. Today, the major anti-Russian parties in Ukraine are financed and equipped by the United States, the Russian oligarchs in exile, or the Old Money leftist foundations in New York, all in the name of “democracy” and “independence.”

Ultimately, the urban stereotype of the ethnic countryside has been one of the country bumpkin; ignorant and useless to the building of “socialist Ukraine.” Nothing has changed. Around he world, the last refuge of the pathological hater has been rural folk. In America, the major controlled media heap unspeakable contempt on the America farmer, “cracker, redneck, hick” and other dehumanizing names only permit a true cultural genocide to take place. It is no different in Ukraine, leading to a situation where the Ukrainian agriculturalists coming to the cities to find work very quickly sought ways to acculturate themselves to the new order, to self-consciously abandon their roots, again, leading to a distorted national mind and alienation from tradition.

As far as the church is concerned, here, more than in any other element in Ukrainian history, has the distortions introduced into Ukrainian life in the 20th century manifest themselves. The attempt at autocephalicity was stalled at the farce of the “1921 Sobor” under Lypnskii, eventually murdered by the NKVD. Nevertheless, this organization continued to grow under Lenin’s NEP, and reached an estimated 4 million members. Only here was there some return to a normal existence in Ukraine, and a limited recovery in agriculture. It lasted only as long as Lenin did. Under Stalin, the Uniats and the UAOC (largely identical in faith, involving themselves in regular and uncanonical intercommunion, which has not ceased) were brought under the fraudulent “Moscow Patriarchate,” itself a creation of the Soviet state. Only the saintly +Mstyslav retained any legitimate succession. For the record, +Mstyslav was consecrated bishop by bishop +Dionysii of Poland, as well as +Polykarpos, both of who were consecrated in 1913 at the Pochayev Lavra, by Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, including the famed Blessed Metropolitan +Antony (Khrapovitskii.) Thus, while the Patriarch of Antioch assisted in the consecrations, Poland was still considered Russian territory.

Nevertheless, those independent Ukrainian Orthodox groups that derive from retained a succession from +Mystslav are legitimate from a canonical point of view, and +Mystlsav is also responsible for consecrating the last legitimate Patriarch (to date) of Ukraine, +Volodymyr, a catacomb priest in Ukraine, and a former inmate of the camps. Afterwards, the synod fell to pieces, and no actual canonical life exists on Ukrainian territory. Other segments of this movement living abroad were brought under the Masonic Patriarchate of Constantinople, and hence enjoyed a canonical standing that, putting it mildly, was highly irregular. Only a handful of Old Rite settlements in remote parts of the country did the Orthodox life survive, as well as in the catacomb churches. Nevertheless, the legitimate UAOC organization continued to function underground.

Making matters more complicated, the scandal of Andrei Pratskii further damaged the image of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church. Pratskii, an open homosexual, when his patron +Gregorii of Ukraine (who did not know of the latters’ perversion, or at least refused to believe it) died, the local parishes, to a man, defected from Pratskii. Without parishes, Pratskii traveled the globe, consecrating bishops, creating the numerous illegitimate “UAOC” groups that exist today. From a canonical point of view this is illegal, since one cannot be a bishop without parishes. Hence, most of the “Ukrainian Orthodox” groups in America and Canada. derive from this faulty lineage, such as the “UAOC” in Cleveland (who, in turn, created “Patriarch Moisei”) and the other assorted tiny “autocephalous” groups, and hence are in schism. The result is the almost complete lack of any canonical order in Ukraine, since the current “Patriarch Philaret” is a married man, and himself has created a schism in Ukraine. The result is chaos, and the Ukrainian factions in western Ukraine are isolated. The bulk of the Ukrainian and Carpatho-Rusyn parishes in America are under the Masonic Phanar, and hence themselves, are illegitimate. The only Orthodox in Ukraine who maintain the ancient traditions are to be found among the Old Believers under Metropolitan +Joseph, who currently rules over 60 communities throughout the country.

5. Nevertheless, Ukraine was transformed. Nowhere is this transformation more obvious than in the cities themselves. Within eastern Ukraine, the population of urban industrial centers more than doubled in the first 20 years of the USSR. Major economic dislocation in Ukraine from both the civil war and then the purges later caused millions of Ukrainians to abandon the agricultural life and join the filthy and dangerous industrial centers in Kharkiv and elsewhere. Furthermore, the failures of collectivization also increased this exodus, leading to a situation where cities became overcrowded, disease filled and were work was plentiful, but wages were barely existent.

Even as Stalin’s plans developed in the cities, more and more labor was needed, and Stalin began to force farmers to the major industrial centers both within and without Ukraine. By 1930, Ukrainians went from 2 or 3% of the urban population to over half. As a result of Stalin’s most desperate need at the time–literacy, specifically, technical literacy–the Ukrainian population became more literate and more mobile.

Ukrainians began to identity with their social betters in the dangerous, alien and exploitative environment of the industrial cities. Many began to speak Russian because it was not the language of the country idiots, but was the language of the literate, the technicians, the wealthy party members and the managers of the new plants. And as always, the state of radical disorientation that the cities usually give to its new arrivals just heightened their suggestibility to new influences, for better or worse, with the added problem of a massively increasing population which in turn depressed wages and living conditions to an intolerable level.

6. There is some theorizing in the literature here that the acceptance of industrialization, and the “culture” it created in the cities is itself an acceptance, for lack of a better word, of the USSR as a whole, since the two are rightly considered basically synonymous. The Soviets, in order to create a balanced economy, began major investments into Ukraine and other “regional” centers in the 1930s and after. There was an attempt to create an economy that took advantage of the essential foci of the regions that was able to extract the best performance possible given the location and natural endowments of the regions. Ultimately this was a failure, but it was the mentality that increased the level of GOSPLAN investment in eastern Ukraine. With this came a regular “upgrading” of skills, since the industry that was providing the new jobs was of a technical nature, and a large degree of literacy was necessary, which became a problem in that most of the new arrivals were illiterate.

What began to happen is that within industry in Ukraine, half-trained workers were running huge factories specializing in oil refining, mining, iron production, and tractor production, and all the complimentary industries that undergird these. The result was disastrous: tens of thousands of injuries and deaths on the job, absurdly shoddy production and regular plant failures. The coercive nature of Stalin’s incentives only exacerbated the problem. The city, as is often the case, became a death trap.

When the men were either starved in the countryside, maimed in the cities or simply not sufficient to fill the needed slots, Stalin suddenly became a feminist. Posters went up all over Ukraine showing muscular women holding pikes, shovels and sledge hammers. Women were encouraged to “flee the family” so as to be “fulfilled” in building the “new Soviet economy.” The fact that no parallels are ever drawn with the same experiment in the United States is testament to the corruption in American academics. In order to depress wages and eliminate labor solidarity, the American government, along with the billion-dollar Ford Foundation, in the 1960s, created the “feminist movement.” As American wages continued to climb, capital needed methods by which the rates could be more competitive relative to Korea, Germany, Taiwan or Malaysia. Feminism and open immigration were the cure.

According to Japanese statistics (these should be used to avoid any American bias), the middle class earnings peaked at 1973, and began a (real) decline afterwards. It is not an accident that this is precisely the era where feminism became mainstream, and where immigration began to increase at huge rates since the repeal of the older immigration laws in 1964. As women entered the workforce in huge numbers, wages naturally declined in real terms. Some statistics show a gradual growth in household earnings, but this is easily explained by the increasingly common two income household, a situation that only benefitted capital in that more and more workers were now competing for the same jobs. American wages skyrocketed in the 1950s and 1960s, leading capital to worry about “competitiveness.” Several solutions were implemented in the 1970s: feminism, open immigration and outsourcing, and all of this became increasingly necessary during the American credit crunch of the late 1960s. In the 1960s, American management became unable to control skyrocketing wages (cf. Rosenbergs, American Economic Development Since 1945) and unions were able to reassert themselves. Hence the development of “feminist theory,” and open immigration. It is precisely at the time of the 1970s where American capital, and the state, were openly debating the nature of American relative decline to the Newly Industrializing Economies, that feminism became mainstream, and women entered the workforce in large numbers to be “fufilled” and “empowered.” In a recent review of Rosenberg’s book, Gene Smiley writes:

The 1970s were also a time of "economic and political stalemate" according to Professor Rosenberg. Unions made gains in achieving higher wages leading to a growing gap between union and non-union wages. However, increasing legal and illegal efforts by employers led to declining union membership. Attempts at reforming the rules of labor-management relations, guaranteeing family incomes, and having government ensure that everyone who wanted to work had employment by having government become the employer of last resort were met by the strong opposition of business interests and were defeated or watered down. There was a stalemate in welfare reform and equal employment opportunity and affirmative action were turned into zero-sum games. Professor Rosenberg argues that the 1970s showed that the only way out of the stagflation morass was to promote economic growth and reduce the competing claims on economic production.

In other words, capital was becoming desperate. Workers were making huge gains in wages and benefits, and unions were demanding more comprehensive employment policies, including but not limited to, lifetime employment and universal health care. This is the only rational reason as to the mainstreaming of feminism, integration and open immigration. These all occurred simultaneously, and as a result, cannot logically be considered coincidence. These movements in American political life were designed to destroy labor solidarity and depress wages. And in this they succeeded, with no end in sight.

Nevertheless, this digression was necessary to show the extent to which Stalin’s model was universalized, where “social movements” come into existence not to make life ore “humane,” but rather to solve glaring social problems (as seen by the state), the labor shortage in Ukraine under Stalin, high wages and union demands in America. The movements were identical in rhetoric and aims.

The other method Stalin used to fill jobs has its parallel in American immigration. In Stalin’s case, less skilled positions were to be filled either through forced immigration to the cities, or in using peasants as part time unskilled or semi-skilled labor. The peasants, working part time and then tilling their fields, were exploited, had a high rate of death and injury on the job, and had the highest rate of absenteeism due to alcoholism and other issues. In the Ukrainian cities, alcohol become the drug of choice, and Stalin was faced with a deteriorating health crisis in eastern Ukraine. As a result, these new immigrants worked mostly in the most dangerous sector of all, the mining sector, which also could function with the least amount of skilled labor in contrast to oil refining or iron production.

Ukraine is rejecting the Bolshevik experiment in the only way they can. Labor slowdowns and refusal to work. The situation in the Ukrainian cities by 1935 was desperate. Alcoholism was decimating the new arrivals from the countryside. Labor was clearly not ready for their new jobs, and shoddy production and the constant missing of quotas were the result. Most research at this time focus on the purges and the genocide in the Ukrainian countryside. Few deal with the equally abhorrent situation in the cities, where the genocide was just as effective. The “assembly line” style labor, adapted from America, and Henry Ford’s substantial influence on the party, was rejected by the peasantry, who rightly viewed this sort of work as mindless. There is a clear hostility to the communist party among the new arrivals, and, as a result of all this, “Ukrainian” industry failed, while “Russian” industry, i.e. industry dominated by Moscow, developed quickly.

In addition to the newly minted “feminist agenda,” and the importation of part-time peasants, the Kosmonol was also mobilized to form “labor armies” to take up the slack. In addition, the increasingly large concentration camps were also doing manual labor, though most of these were outside Ukraine. As the labor situation in Ukraine grew more grievous, work was now packaged as “patriotic.” And young school boys were given days off to work for a week or so in the mines and factories as part of their “education.”

The fact remained, that, as far as Moscow was concerned, the peasantry was proving themselves intractable and unassimilable. They were viewed more and more as counterrevolutionary. The Party’s absurd ideological dogmatism was rendered laughable when they referred to these impoverished peasants as “bourgeois nationalists.” It was clear from the mid 30s onwards, that the relationship between Ukraine, at least rural Ukraine, and the USSR was not to be one of cooperation.

As the 1930s drew on, complaint became louder and louder that in Ukraine the party was becoming “infected” by “non-party” elements. This complaint derives from the fact that the new influx of native Ukrainians into the city, when successful, became party members and hence created a situation where the “Ukrainian party” was actually becoming Ukrainian, rather than the Soviet Party in Ukraine. There was always to be a sizable faction of the CP-USSR that rejected the idea of a “Ukrainian party.”The complaint was formally based on the idea that since these new members from Ukraine were just peasants a generation ago (or less), they are not schooled sufficiently in party dogma. Since they came from poor farmers, the party concluded, they must be “bourgeois, nationalist kulakii.” The party was concerned that the old party cadre, those active in the Red army occupation, were being diluted by these “non-party” elements.

The urban party, mostly of Russian or Jewish origin, were ordered from Moscow to create an intensive propaganda campaign among the peasants in and out of the cities. The failure of this ham-handed drive is one of the reasons for the purges in Ukraine and the forced starvation, and the resultant liquidation of much of the peasantry. It should be noted that even in rural districts, the party was still well over 50% Jewish or Russian, and hence, Ukrainians were alienated from it. What began to develop is a Judeo-Russian Marxist alliance against the “bourgeois, Ukrainian kulak” that will develop throughout the 20th century. The fact remains that the Communist Party, either of Ukraine or the USSR, never succeeded in penetrating the countryside to any significant degree. The party’s support derived from a thin column of Jews and Russians in urban areas. Hence, the party was correct–this ethnic divide meant that being Ukrainian meant being “anti-party.” About the only Ukrainian the party trusted was a small group of Ukrainians who were high skilled and well placed in the economy. However, it became clear that this tiny segment normally did not stay Ukrainian in a cultural sense for very long.

Genocide became the final solution to the “kulak” problem.