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Let's sweep away Vladimir Putin's mind games - the supposedly threatened Russian bases, the supposedly threatened ethnic Russians, the supposed humanitarian crisis, the supposed illegitimacy of the government in Kiev (with its 82 per cent parliamentary backing) - and be clear the fight in Crimea is about a simple issue: the freedom of Ukraine to set its course as a European democracy governed by laws rather than an authoritarian, undemocratic, lawless society of Moscow-backed oligarchs in the "fraternal" grasp of Russia.
That would be the fraternity of Budapest (1956), Prague (1968), Kabul (1979) and Grozny (1999). Ukraine shares with the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia the fate - eloquently described by the historian Timothy Snyder in his powerful book "Bloodlands" - of being among the worst killing fields of World War II, bounced back and forth between Stalin and Hitler. Now the spread eastward of NATO and the European Union - the greatest of post-Cold-War achievements - has allowed the Baltic states to begin disentangling truth from lies in the carnage of their histories.
That is what westward-gazing Ukrainians are fighting for at the most basic level: truth over lies. They want a life based on facts rather than fabrications, institutions rather than provocations, laws rather than cash-filled envelopes.
Last month my colleague Alison Smale filed a piece from Lviv in western Ukraine. It began: "Under a leaden sky that wept intermittent rain, this fiercely proud city bade farewell on Saturday to one of its sons, a 28-year-old university lecturer killed by a bullet on Thursday in Kiev in the carnage on and around Independence Square."
Lviv was called Lwów and was in eastern Poland before the Hitler-Stalin pact and World War II. It was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Nazis. Its prewar population of Jews and Poles was murdered or deported. After the war, the city was incorporated into Ukraine - and of course the Soviet orbit.
The reason people in this part of Europe crave the framework of NATO and the European Union is for security and prosperity, of course. Above all, however, they seek a guarantee that the torment of their history, with its lies, is behind them.
My family came from Zagare in northern Lithuania. The Soviet Red Army occupied the town in 1940, was driven out by the Nazis in June of 1941, and fought its way back in 1944.
Like Lviv, Zagare was thrice occupied. When Soviet forces reached the town in 1944, they found a mass grave in the woods. A Soviet Special Commission examined the remains and determined that there were 2,402 corpses: 530 men, 1,223 women, 625 children and 24 babies. This accounting showed a small discrepancy from the numbers given by SS Standartenführer Karl Jäger, who in a report dated December 1, 1941, from the Lithuanian town of Kaunas exulted that 2,266 Jews (663 men, 1,107 women and 496 children) were executed in Zagare on October 2, 1941. A Soviet sign was put up in the wood: "Memorial to the victims of Fascism." It hid the truth, as was the norm in Moscow's empire.
The Soviets found the human remains but had scant interest in an accurate identification of them as Jews. Stalin's aim, as Snyder explains, was to forge Homo Sovieticus, not to reinforce Jewish identity. The Holocaust had to be managed within the Soviet political agenda.
A cornerstone of this was that the war had begun in 1941 with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, rather than in 1939 with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the joint Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland.
Hitler had managed to blame the Jews for communism. Stalin, the communist, nursed his own hostility. Jews would become the "rootless cosmopolitans" of his postwar propaganda. Jews, rather than victims of Nazism, became agents of an imperial conspiracy against communism.
Stalin had to conflate Jews' particular suffering into the immense general (read Slavic and Russian) sacrifice of the "Great Patriotic War" against Hitler. So the Jews in the Zagare ditch or Ponary forest near Vilnius, and in countless other pits across the "Bloodlands," were identified, if at all, as "Soviet victims of Fascism." Today, according to Putin, the "Fascists" are in Kiev. His schooling was, of course, in fabrication.
Only with Lithuanian independence from Moscow in 1990 was a memorial detailing the Nazi crime in Zagare put up in the woods. It reads: "In this place on October 2, 1941, Nazi killers and their local helpers killed about 3,000 Jewish men, women and children from the Siauliai region." In 2012 a similar plaque was placed in the middle of town.
Ukraine is fighting for its right to remember, accurately and truthfully, that 28-year-old Lviv university lecturer killed in the fight for its freedom. No right should be more important to the United States and Europe. Societies based on lies fail.
© 2014 The New York Times News Service
