Flags and Flowers in the Ukraine.
Writing in today’s Telegraph,Charles Moore recalls how, as an 11-year-old, he heard the news that Russian tanks had moved into Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring of Alexander Dubcek.
It’s been much on my mind too.
As a teenager, in 1968, I organised my first public petition, stopping shoppers in our town, urging them to sign a protest petition to the Soviet Embassy. No one said no.
The brief crack that had appeared in Europe’s Iron Curtain in those pre-text, pre social media, days had allowed us to have Czech pen friends and with a girl in Prague I exchanged several innocent letters.
As the tanks trundled into that beautiful city such flirtations with the West were abruptly ended. Yet, despite the Kremlin’s best-efforts, on both sides of that hideous divide, embers had been lit in many hearts and minds. A lesson we should not neglect.
Nor should we forget the lesson about the sacrifice and the cost which comes from defending other people’s freedoms – and the failure to act when “far away countries about which we know very little” are menaced.
Thirty years before the tanks arrived in Prague, other teenagers – my father and his four brothers – didn’t have the luxury of collecting petitions but had gone to War over Poland, also having heard the news which was seeping out about Hitler’s extermination of the Jews.
One of the brothers lost his life and all were deeply affected by the horrors of war – including the Nazis’ ariel bombardment of the East End community where they had been brought up – and where they had lived side by side with many Jewish families.
By the 1980s I was a Member of the House of Commons representing a Liverpool Division and had become involved in campaigns about Soviet Jewry, Polish Solidarity, persecution of political and religious dissidents, and the unquenchable appetite of other Europeans for all the liberties and privileges which we enjoyed in the West. With Danny Smith, I launched Jubilee Campaign in Parliament – of which all four political leaders, Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, David Steel and David Owen, became patrons. It ran numerous campaigns for victims of Soviet Communism.
Most years there were functions organised by the Baltic Governments of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, all in exile and, having not forgotten what my father had told me about the battle of Monte Casino, I faithfully attended events organised by the Poles who had so bravely fought against the Nazis.
During the 1980s there were visits to the former Soviet Union and to many of the satellite countries which it had occupied.
On one visit to Moscow, I managed to get into the Kremlin to make a protest about Jewish and Christian dissidents whom I had visited. In Romania the release of a leading dissident was secured. Later, armed with a letter from Margaret Thatcher, I accompanied the first legally imported offset litho printing press to Moscow – which was promptly used by Alexander Ogorodnikov – one of the Russian prisoners whose release had been secured – to produce samizdat pamphlets and leaflets.
In 1989 I visited Poland and then, with two friends, the Ukraine.
The visit to Warsaw was for a conference of young parliamentarians from both sides of the Iron Curtain –at which I called for a new Marshall Aid Programme to rebuild Eastern Europe and the admission of the Soviet satellite countries to the European Community.
On the same day, exactly fifty years before our conference, Chamberlain had declared War on Germany. It followed Hitler’s invasion of Poland and was the day on which millions of other young Europeans were drawn into deadly conflict.
On that anniversary day in 1989 a recorded message was broadcast on giant screen in Warsaw’s Old City Square. It was from the Polish Pope urging us all not to “be afraid” in contradicting totalitarianism. It would prove to be the best possible riposte to Stalin’s miscalculated jeers about Popes and their battalions.
But, in 1945, it was indeed Stalin’s battalions, tanks and tyranny which replaced Hitler’s and tyranny. Vast tracts of Eastern and Central Europe were swallowed up by a dictator every bit as murderous as the one he replaced.
Subsequently, the Berlin Wall and the Brezhnev doctrine led to the strangulation of free expression, political dissent, and common movement, and to the brutal quashing, of freedom, in 1956, in Hungary, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and in 1981 in Poland. Stalin bequeathed ruthless oppression and economic stagnation.
But, as George Orwell foresaw in “Animal Farm”, the jackboot and iron fist can only be applied for so long.
We watched in awe as in Poland the solidarity of extraordinarily brave people took on the tyranny ultimately enabling Tadecsz Mazowiecki to become, in 1989, the first non-Communist leader in Eastern Europe since the War.
During that visit to Warsaw I had a private meeting with a group on exiles from Ukraine in a small flat on the southern side of the city.
Painstakingly they told me their story, including the suppression of their political and religious beliefs including the driving of their church underground. They described how illegal pastors had to lead double lives –workers by day and clergy by night; how two of their bishops had died in prison and others in labour camps. Churches had been used as factories, warehouses, museums, one turned into a “Cathedral of Atheism.”
They asked if I would visit Ukraine.
Later that month, with two friends, I did.
Throughout this tortured week that visit has been on my mind.
In September 1989 flights from Moscow had been suspended in order to stop journalists from reaching Lvov where Polish-style protests had been taking place.
So, our trio took a flight to Krakow, hired a car, and drove to Przemyśl in southeastern Poland. There we took a train to the Soviet border at Mostyska. Taken off the train, we were detained, briefly arrested, and early the next morning told we could go (“thanks to Perestroika”. We took a local train to Lvov.
Our bags had been emptied by the border police but curiously, although they confiscated my copy of The Liverpool Echo,and a book I had been reading about the life of Basil Hume, the ITN camera which we had been loaned was carefully put back into the bags, along with fifty Ukrainian prayer books (although a local woman, who had been sweeping up in the area where were detained, observed what has happened and asked us if she could be given one. We obliged).
The camera enabled David Campanale, one of my companions, to film the gathering of thousands of protestors who gathered in the heart of Lvov for an illegal open-air Mass, speeches calling for democracy and human rights, and readings of Ukrainian poetry. BBC Newsnight and international news networks subsequently broadcast the footage.
Two of the leaders were Ivan Gel and Bishop Vasylk – with whom I had met the night before for supper at Gel’s flat.
Both had spent the best part of two decades in the notorious “death camp”, the Soviet prison at Perm – part of the gulag system in which an estimated 1.7 million “enemies of the State” died over a period of forty years.
We met a young man (a boiler stoker by day, a priest by night) who had been sent to Chernobyl to clear radioactive waste as a punishment for being caught celebrating the liturgies.
Even while we met at Gel’s flat the KGB came to check out the company he and tq and were living days that were numbered.
We visited a church which forty years earlier Stalin’s “false Synod” had closed when he claimed that the Greek Catholic Church had “liquidated itself.”
I wrote a piece for The Independent about “Flowers in the Ukraine” – having observed people laying flowers in front of the doors of that closed building. They had done so every day for the intervening forty years and, every day, the Soviet police came to remove the both the flowers and the crown of thorns nailed to the railings. And every day that followed the flowers and crown of thorns would be placed there again.
I was given a secret document of the Communist Party which bitterly complained that despite all of their attempts they had been unable to eradicate the “Uniates” and, even worse, “a large proportion of the youth”were taking part in its illegal activities.
Defiance, hunger strikes, and demonstrations had become regular occurrences. Imprisonment and torture were routine.
Putin, who is said to greatly admire Stalin, should take note that it proved impossible, even for that monster, to destroy the human spirit. Despite their best efforts Ukraine has subsequently tasted more than thirty years of freedom and Putin will never be able to erase that from the collective memory.
Just like the people we met in 1989 who had never forgotten what happened to their families, in the previous generation, when loved ones starved to death in Stalin’s Holodomor, the man-made famine that convulsed Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 and led to millions of deaths.
Holodomor is a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death.
Paradoxically, today many countries rely on Ukrainian wheat to feed their people.
No doubt food scarcity and higher prices for bread will be yet another consequence of the infamies of February 25th, 2022, when Ukraine’s independence and sovereign rights to exist were once subjected to violence and suppression.
There’s another message for Putin. too.
In 1989, as 250,000 people gathered for the protests in Lvov bright yellow and blue flags – the traditional colours of the Ukrainian State – fluttered everywhere.
But other flags appeared too.
The flags of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia, and Moldova were carried through the crowds and the people applauded because the Ukrainians knew that their struggle was also theirs.
In 2022, what Putin has done to Ukraine could be the fate of millions of other people too – but human solidarity and resistance is born out of suffering and his failure to understand that will prove to be his undoing as he unites political forces and nations against him.
As we left Lvov in 1989 the people were making ready to place candles in their windows and to switch off their lights for thirty minutes. This was to mourn the loss of their national identity, the loss of free speech, the loss of religious freedom.
As a result of their bravery Ukraine began to replace pain with hope and by 1991 it had formally declared its independence – with an overwhelming majority of 92.3% of voters approving the Declaration of independence made by the Verhovna Rada on August 24th 1991.
Today we express shock and indignation at the cruel asphyxiation of Ukraine’s freedoms – and we worry for the future of other free people at risk from tyrants, not least the 23 million people who live in Taiwan and who are threatened on a daily basis by the Chinese Communist Party.
And we worry that in his new Cold War Putin, as he seeks to recreate his version of a Russian Empire, will now menace other nations in Europe and Asia.
And we must consider what the consequences will be if, by design or by accident, his threats about the use of weapons of mass destruction are given effect. It was Khrushchev who once said that if in an orgy of mutually assured destruction – with the apposite acronym MAD – nuclear weapons are used, the living would envy the dead.
And, as we look in horror at the exodus of refugees, knowing how Putin and his puppet, Lukashenko, in Belarus, use refugees as cannon fodder, our hearts should be broken and our anger roused.
We see thousands of people carrying backpacks and dragging suitcases to the Ukrainian border – wickedly adding to 82 million displaced worldwide. The International Rescue Committee and the UNHCR have warned of “devastating humanitarian consequences”. The US has predicted that the War could displace up to 5 million people and Poland alone is preparing to receive up to 1 million refugees – a human catastrophe. This is Putin’s new Europe.
As we see and hear stories of the dead, the dying, and injured – including attacks on children’s nurseries and schools and civilian’s homes – and reports of mobile crematoria ready to destroy the evidence of bodies – we must demand justice for the victims of Putin’s war crimes.
He and those who authorised this orgy of devastation must be brought to justice as the war criminal that they are.
However long it may take, if judicial action is taken by the International Criminal Court, it will have consequences even more significant than economic sanctions. It will demonstrate that in the face of criminality, the free world, has not given up on the rule of law.
I have never forgotten the anger I felt on hearing about the tanks entering Prague. Nor have I forgotten the people I met who suffered under the Soviet yoke – including many fine Russians – and I haven’t forgotten the people I met in the Ukraine in 1989.
I have never forgotten the sheer courage and determination of those pro-democracy activists I met on the streets of Lvov, who were risking their lives to throw off the shackles and chains of the Soviet Union – and whose descendants are now doing it all over again. During this time of trial we must be steadfast in our solidarity and in making new sacrifices to defend their freedoms and our own.
Putin – in his version of Mein Kampf – ludicrously, outrageously, suggests Ukraine never existed and should no longer exist. However long it takes, we must prove him wrong.
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