Russian Media Watch (RMW) would like to comment briefly on a recent article published in the New York Times on the visit to Ukraine by Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill I.
To be sure, the article is not the most egregious example of the U.S. mainstream media's bias against Russia, especially as compared to the lack of criticism of far worse regimes such as China, Cuba, North Korea, Africa, and the Muslim world. However, the article tips its hand in the headline which warns against the “dangers” of “Moscow-Kiev Ties,” implying that it would be better if the countries of these two culturally, linguistically, and historically fraternal peoples had few if any ties.
In addition, the article managed to address almost all of the issues complicating Russian-Ukrainian relations – the Black Sea Fleet, the Crimea, inter-church relations, and the interpretation of the late 1920s Soviet famine in Ukraine. These issues have been discussed in several other reviews and articles here at ROPV and do not need repeating here.
Most important, however, is
the glaring omission of the issue that is really dividing Russia and Ukraine as
well as creating divisions within Ukraine itself between ethnic Russians and
ethnic Ukrainians, putting the country’s interethnic comity and territorial
integrity at risk; that issue is NATO expansion.
Washington’s effort to bring Ukraine into NATO needlessly militarizes the issue of Western influence in Ukraine as well as efforts to democratize Ukraine. Growing Western influence and Washington’s democratization agenda is tainted in Russian eyes by the rest of the package – the expansion of world history’s most powerful military alliance to Russia’s borders.
This issue has been at the heart of U.S.-Russian relations for years, yet the New York Times’ Sophia Kishkovsky and editors managed to print an article on the subject without even mentioning this issue in passing. Instead, the article boiled Russian-Ukrainian tension down to Russia’s cultural and naval presence in the country and disputes over the proper interpretation of the 1932-33s famine.
In an apparent Freudian slip
while addressing the issue of the famine, Kishkovsky notes that “often regard
as genocide inflicted by Russia.”
Of course, few Ukrainian citizens or within the Ukrainian leadership
would ever state directly that “Russia” is responsible for what Ukrainains now
call the “Holodomor.” They refer
to Stalin’s famine or the Soviet communists’ famine. But Moscow has long suspected that the real purpose of the
Ukrainian leadership’s new interpretation that the famines was Stalin’s
(Russia’s) attempt to commit genocide of the Ukrainian people is to create an
anti-Russian Ukrainian identity based on the myth of numerous Russian crimes
against the Ukrainian people.
Never mind that Russians suffered as much if not more under Soviet rule.
Even during the Cold War,
Western historians emphasize that Stalin’s goal was the destruction of the
Ukrainian ‘kulak class’, and Ukrainian nationalism and that famine occurred at
the very same time in Russia and Central Asia. The West’s perhaps supreme historian of the period, Robert
Conquest, concluded that the first goal of the terror-famine was to destroy the
‘kulak’ class and complete the overall peasant class’s collectivization of
state farms; the destruction of Ukrainian nationalism not the Ukrainian nation
was a second goal. It needs to be noted
that ethnic Ukrainian communists helped implement the terror-famine and that
similar campaigns were conducted all over the USSR and were used against
national ‘deviationists’ in Central Asia and the Volga region [See Robert
Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3, 189-98, and 219]. An attempt to eliminate manifestations
of ‘nationalism’ or what we would call national identity does not constitute
genocide, as the Ukrainian government would have it.
Kishkovsky adds: “Mr.
Medvedev railed against the use of distortions of history that cast Russia in a
bad light. Kirill, however, visited the monument with Mr. Yushchenko, and used
pastoral intonations and personal history — he told of his family’s suffering under
Stalin — to cast Stalin’s crimes in a larger context, speaking of famine
killing millions across the Soviet Union.”
If the author understood that
the famine and Soviet rule was, as Kirill I intoned, a common tragedy, it is
likely that instead of writing that the patriarch sought “to cast” Stalin’s crimes
in a larger context, “speaking” of the famine killing millions across the USSR,
she might have written that Kirill stressed the historical fact that Stalin’s
famine killed millions across the USSR and his goal in Ukraine was something
other, but perhaps no less sinister than genocide of the Ukrainians. Unfortunately, the U.S. mainstream
media have a hard time agreeing with any point endorsed by Moscow, even if it is
demonstrably true.
THE ARTICLE IN QUESTION:
New York Times
August
7, 2009
Kirill's
Visit Exposes Dangers in Moscow-Kiev Ties
SOPHIA
KISHKOVSKY
MOSCOW — Wittingly or not, a
just-completed 10-day visit to Ukraine
by Kirill I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has exposed the
dangers lurking in relations between Russia and Ukraine, the two most populous
nations to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union.
It was Kirill’s first trip
to Ukraine since he was elected patriarch in January. The visit opened on July
27 with an affirmation of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood in Kiev, regarded as
the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy. Prince Vladimir adopted Orthodoxy from
Byzantium for himself and his subjects, who were baptized en masse in the
Dnieper River in 988.
“If you will, Kiev is our
common Jerusalem, from which our Orthodox faith came,” Kirill said after a
service dedicated to the prince, St. Vladimir. “Praying here, we, the heirs of
Vladimir’s baptism, living in different states, inviolately preserve the
spiritual unity bestowed by him upon us.”
But if the call to unity was
a constant theme, and Kirill even offered to take out Ukrainian citizenship, it
was clouded both by demonstrators hostile to a visit they saw as an attempt to
assert Russian domination, and by political, religious and military tensions
that have festered and in some ways grown since the Soviet collapse in 1991.
Top church officials at a
news conference in Moscow on Thursday depicted the trip as a triumph that
strengthened the transnational character of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Protesters represented marginal, isolated groups “that dislike the patriarch
simply because of their anti-Russian sentiments,” said Archbishop Hilarion of
Volokolamsk. “There is no real opposition to the Russian church today,” he said
of Ukraine.
The Reverend Vsevolod
Chaplin said that what he called Kirill’s pilgrimage underscored that the
church extended far beyond geopolitical borders or terminology. “We are not the
church only of the Russian Federation , nor only, as sometimes said, of the
Russian people,” he said. “‘Russian’ in the name of the church refers not to
the ethnic definition ‘Russian,’ but to the concept ‘Rus,’ which is not
political but rather spiritual.”
He said Russia and Ukraine
were vital parts of Europe but should not compromise their values and
identities to integrate into the modern European system.
By contrast, Mykola Tomenko,
vice chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament, said in a statement Thursday that
Kirill was hijacking the idea of Rus and that he had used his to “test out the
idea of a new ideological doctrine of Russia.”
Russia’s president, Dmitri
A. Medvedev, has yet to visit Ukraine since he took office 15 months
ago. Most pointedly, Mr. Medvedev refused an invitation last year from
Ukraine’s president, Viktor
A. Yushchenko, to the unveiling of a monument to the millions who
died in mass famine under Stalin in the 1930s, which Ukrainians call Holodomor
and often regard as genocide inflicted by Russia.
Mr. Medvedev railed against
the use of distortions of history to cast Russia in a bad light. Kirill,
however, visited the monument with Mr. Yushchenko, and used pastoral
intonations and personal history — he told of his family’s suffering under
Stalin — to cast Stalin’s crimes in a larger context, speaking of famine
killing millions across the Soviet Union.
“This is the common tragedy
of our entire people, who lived in that time in one country,” Kirill said at
the monument, according to the Patriarchate Web site. “That’s why there’s
nothing surprising in the fact that we are praying for innocent victims, that
we are remembering those who died.”
Underscoring the importance
of Kirill’s trip, Mr. Medvedev received the patriarch Thursday to discuss it.
“We’ve had rather
complicated relations recently, and we are not happy about this,” Mr. Medvedev
said of Ukraine. “That’s why I’m interested in your evaluation.”
Mr. Yushchenko has irked
Russians by seeking support from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, with which
the Russian church jockeys for power, for a unified Ukrainian Orthodox church
free of Moscow’s control.
Traditionally, religious
conflict between Russia and Ukraine has centered on the Uniates in Ukraine,
especially its western region, who observe the Byzantine rite but are loyal to
Rome. Those tensions have abated but have flared between the rival Orthodox
churches. During his tour, Kirill rejected demands for formal independence of
the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which accounts for
over one third of the Russian Orthodox Church, noting it has near total autonomy.
The “Orange Revolution” in
Ukraine in 2004 and its turn toward Europe have alarmed the Russian church and
the Kremlin. Speaking at a monastery near the border with European
Union member Poland, Kirill took care to address Europe, warning it
against repeating the Soviet experiment of living without God.
His trip took him right across
Ukraine, a country of some 46 million roughly the size of France, traveling
from Kiev to Donetsk, a mining hub in the east, where many Russian speakers
live, to Crimea and to western Ukraine.
Perhaps the greatest
Russian-Ukrainian tension centers on Crimea, where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is
based at Sevastopol. There, laying a wreath at a war memorial, Kirill struck a
slightly more ominous tone.
Crimea was part of Russia
until the Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev bestowed it on Ukraine in 1954. When the Soviet Union
crumbled, this left Russia’s Black Sea fleet in a different country. Ukraine
would like it out after its lease expires in 2017; just days before Kirill’s
visit, Russia acknowledged that it had violated treaty stipulations by
transporting cruise missiles near the base.
At the war monument, as
Russian and Ukrainian naval officials listened, Kirill spoke of the potential
for escalation and commonalities that might prevent it.
“As a result of historical
events about which we know and remember, it turned out that there are two
fleets here, and not one,” he said. “But in these two fleets serve brothers —
brothers in faith, heirs of the Holy Equal-to-the Apostles Prince Vladimir. And
today it is my fervent prayer that never and under no circumstances should
brothers take aim at each other, because nothing divides brothers so much as spilled
blood.”
Old Russian saying...You can tell same lie 1000 time but not change truth!
Difference between USSR Communist media and USA "mainstream media"
In Russia government make media say what they want - even if lie.
In USA "mainstream media" try make government what they want - even if lie..
.....eventually they become same thing?!
I Igor produce Obama Birth Certificate at www.igormaro.org
Posted by: Igor Marxomarxovich | August 12, 2009 at 04:22 PM
I agree with the review, while second guessing the prioritization of focussing attention on that particular article.
As suggested in the beginning of the review, Kishkovsky's article isn't the worst out there.
On Kirill's recent visit, there're a good number of articles out there which are more questionable than hers. Why then go after that piece and not some others?
One also wonders about what kind of editing process is done at The NYT in relation to what's originally presented by the writer?
ROPV makes a point of going after big fish like The WaPo, WSJ, NYT and to a lessor but noticeable enough degree Stratfor.
Has ROPV offered any criticisms of material appearing in RFE/RL, RP and TMT? They're all listed at JRL's site, unlike the previously mentioned four. RFE/RL, RP and TMT periodically give space to the court appointed Russia friendly advocates. It appears generally assumed that the seemingly well funded JRL has an influential reach vis-à-vis English language speaking individuals interested in former USSR issues.
A managed (somewhat muted) criticism of the media coverage isn't a complete approach. Rather, this methodology serves as a less beneficial way of improving upon the existing situation.
There's some great talent out there not being properly utilized by those purporting to seek a change for the better.
Posted by: Righteous Advocate | August 12, 2009 at 09:41 PM