WALL STREET JOURNAL Column: …Across Ukraine, statues of Lenin are falling. A few pro-Russian towns are holding out, but 22 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse—an entire generation—there’s a previously missing consensus about the disastrous toll from Moscow’s domination over the past century. Millions of Ukrainians were killed in Stalin’s man-made famine in 1932-33. The language and culture were decimated as well.
Vladimir Putin’s television channels call this awakening “neo-fascism” and “ultranationalism” and a threat to Russians here. The Kremlin won’t accept the fluidity and diversity of Ukrainian identity. A local channel last weekend started running short films of famous and random Ukrainians, speaking in Russian and Ukrainian about their backgrounds. At the end, all hold hands while standing on a bridge and say in unison: “We are one country.”
Repeated assertions of the need for national unity come from anxiety over Russia’s intentions. The Maidan uprising stopped the Kremlin from steering Ukraine away from the European Union and into Mr. Putin’s Eurasian Union, otherwise known as the club of corrupt autocrats. His failure last week set in motion the contingency plan for Crimea, Ukraine’s sole majority-Russian region.
Crimea has been the dog that barely ever whimpered and never bit after the Soviet collapse. Aside from a large bastion of Russian Black Sea Fleet servicemen in the port of Sevastopol, the ethnic Russians in Crimea are mostly retirees and cranks—not exactly a rebel vanguard. The hardest-working and most organized ethnic group is the Crimean Tatars. On Wednesday, they held a large pro-Ukrainian counter protest in Simferopol, the regional capital. The Tatars were expelled from their homeland en masse by Stalin and returned only in the past two decades. Like the ethnic Ukrainians, they have reason to fear an assertion of Russian influence… (more)
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