Posts Tagged ‘war crimes’

The Long Recent History Of Russian Brutality

Monday, April 4th, 2022

Hungarian-born Imre Nagy had been a committed communist since shortly after the Russian revolution of 1917. From 1933 to 1941, he served the Soviet NKVD secret police as an informer. During that period, he denounced more than 200 colleagues, who were then purged and arrested.  Fifteen of them were executed. Nagy was no Mother Teresa.

The Soviets installed Nagy as Chairman of Hungary’s Council of Ministers in 1953, and over the next two years, beginning to recognize the repression of which he had long been a part, he tried to reduce the harsher elements of communist rule. The Russians could not tolerate this, and they ousted him in 1955.

On 23 October 1956, the people of Hungary declared independence from the Soviet Union and threw out Russia’s puppet government. They then named the sixty-year-old Nagy Prime Minister. In something akin to a Road to Damascus conversion, the now reformist Nagy took full control of the government, admitted non-communist politicians, dissolved the ÁVH secret police, promised democratic reforms, and unilaterally withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact on 1 November. On 4 November, the Soviets launched a massive invasion, swiftly regained control, and deposed Nagy, who took refuge in the Yugoslavian embassy. Two weeks later, after giving assurances for his safety, the Russians lured Nagy out of the embassy and immediately arrested and deported him to Romania. Two years later, he was tried for treason, found guilty (there’s a surprise), and immediately executed.

In the 66 years since Russia obliterated the freedom dreams of the Hungarian people, the Kremlin has repeatedly demonstrated that its approach to putting down dissent in Hungary was not an anomaly; it was the rule. Since then, it has been swift and brutal in crushing any action it interprets as a threat to its hegemony. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 offers another example.

In early 1968, the Russian puppet leader Antonin Novotny was deposed as the head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and was replaced by Alexander Dubcek. The Dubcek government ended censorship in early 1968, and this new freedom resulted in a public expression of broad-based support for reform in which government and  Communist Party policies could be debated openly. In April, the Czech Government issued a formal plan for further reforms.

Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union’s General Secretary, could not allow this, and on 20 August Warsaw Pact forces invaded and occupied Prague. Over the two days it took to destroy the Prague Spring, the Russians killed 137 Czechoslovakian civilians and seriously wounded 500. The Kremlin justified the use of force in Prague under what would become known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that Moscow had the right to intervene in any country where a communist government had been threatened. This doctrine also became the primary justification for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the nine-year war it eventually lost after seeing 15,000 of its troops killed and 35,000 wounded. Two million Afghans died during the the war.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing, the people of Chechnya, which the USSR had controlled since 1921, broke away. Russia invaded and began the brutalization of the Chechen people and the destruction of the capital city, Grozny. In 2003, the United Nations called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth.” The Russians killed between 5,000 and 8,000 civilians in a little over a month.

After the fall of communism in 1989, and with the exception of the Chechnya invasion, the evil Genie was crammed back into its bottle for the next 11 years, during which capitalism and democracy emerged and the oligarchs were born. This ended when Russians elected Stalin doppelganger Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000.

As I have written previously, over time it has become more and more easy to mistake Putin for a modern-day Ivan the Terrible. On his watch and at his direction, Russia invaded the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 2008, tore off a part of the country, and invented the “states” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in the process destroying towns and murdering civilians before withdrawing most of its troops. Next came the Syrian city of Aleppo, which Russia reduced to dust in 2016. There, Russian troops destroyed hospitals and schools, choked off basic supplies, and killed aid workers and hundreds of civilians in just a few days.

Does any of this sound familiar?

And now we have Ukraine, where the world seems amazingly surprised to see Putin’s Russia trying to eliminate an entire country using the same barbaric methods it has employed so often since 1956.

It appears Vladimir Putin sees his mission in life is to recreate Imperial Russia with himself as Tsar. His tactics are not new. As Ukrainian President Zelenskyy says, Putin will throw soldiers at Ukraine “like logs into a train’s furnace.”

The world did nothing to punish the Soviet Union for Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Afghanistan. It did nothing, absolutely nothing, to punish Putin for Grozny, Georgia or Aleppo.

The Ukrainians are fighting with patriotism, bravery, and incredible determination. Ten million have been displaced. Russian forces have blown to oblivion cities, hospitals (at least five of them), schools and theatres. Just as in Grozny, when Russian troops withdraw they leave the bodies of dead civilians lying in the streets for the world to see. Yesterday we learned about the atrocities in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, where, after the Russians withdrew, Ukrainians found more than 400 innocent civilians who had been killed, some with their hands tied behind their backs. These are war crimes, and after World War II, we executed German commanders for doing that sort of thing.

Neither the U.S. nor NATO will put a single soldier on the ground or a single plane in the air to overwhelm what appears to be an inferior Russian army. Instead, we send weapons and supplies. I’m of two minds about that, but I understand the argument that joining the fight might make a terrible situation worse, if that’s possible. Moreover, public support for that just isn’t there. Seventy-five percent of Americans are against it.

So, we are reduced to fighting with sanctions as our weapons. To me, that seems like throwing a strawberry at a battleship expecting to sink it. But right now, what do we have except the strawberries?