So I imagine that when the CIA bosses called on Anna Applebaum of "Washington Post" fame and advised her to marry heavily drinking and philandering Pole from an illustrious family, Radoslaw Sikorski, they promised her that she will soon become a Queen of Poland and, after the conquest, the Empress of Russia. Sikorski, indeed, became the Foreign Affairs Minister for the Polish Republic. But after a drunken obscenity-driven escapade in a posh restaurant filmed by Polish investigative journalists, he had to retire. To compensate for her disastrous married life, she became a fury, an embodiment of Polish nationalism so extreme that sometimes, in her zeal to chastise the Russians, she is oblivious that her Jeremiads acquire anti-Polish and anti-Semitic accents.
I mention first her scurrilous book "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine", heavy on plagiarism as most of her opuses and heftily reliant on sources provided by Nazi collaborators, who settled in Germany after the Second World War under the protection of Anglo-American allies--a favorite company of her main interlocutor, Serhii Plohii. [2] Let me be clear: nobody, except some crazy Stalinists denies the horrors, which befell USSR after the "collectivization" of the Soviet agriculture, which some call another serfdom for the peasants. [3] The first problem with the book, which obviously does not bother her, is that in 1933-1934, Ukraine was not a nation but an artificial construct cobbled by the Kremlin chiefs from Russian Malorossia, territory of the proto-fascist 1919 Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), which never controlled but a sliver of the territory of modern Ukraine [4], largely Rusyn lands of Subcarpathian Rus and other disparate pieces. But the fact that Ukrainian nationalists of the time, largely operated on the territory of Poland and wanted to carve their nation-state out of the body of Poland, does not bother her in the least as a born-again adept of Polish nationalism.
Their desire to carve mainly Poland rather than USSR was a consequence of an obvious reason that majority of the populace of the "Soviet Ukraine" did not support (or even understood) their agenda. Moreover, Ukrainian pre-war nationalists--many future accomplices of Adolf Hitler and enthusiastic murderers of Jews and Poles--were organizing terrorist acts in the territory of interwar Polish Republic and were persecuted for this by the secret police. But, maybe, she just internalized too deeply a perennial illusion of the Polish elites that if Ukrainians (Hungarians, Czechs, etc.) hate Russians, they must madly love (and, somehow, slavishly obey) Poles.
Anna Appelbaum is completely impervious to the facts, quoted by her, which contradict her narrative, obviously thinking that nobody with elementary knowledge of Soviet history would read her book. For instance, in the beginning, she recognizes that the confiscatory policies imposed by the commissars on Ukraine were first tried and tested in Russia proper. She accuses Pyatakov, himself the victim of the Great Purges in exporting "collective farming" to the early Soviet Ukraine. Certainly, Pyatakov having his brother murdered by the Ukrainian "freedom fighters" and observing mass pogroms in the wake of their takeover, had very little sympathy to the peasantry. Another blooper is that she mentions that only one of the three top Ukrainian leaders: Petrovsky, the head of the UkrSSR Supreme Soviet, protested to Stalin about confiscation of grain and agricultural animals (see also my ref. [3]). Yet, the other two, Kosior and Chubar' who complied with Stalin's policies were later shot, while Petrovsky not only survived but was buried at the Kremlin Wall, next to Stalin. This hardly testifies to the deliberate planning of the famine to kill Ukrainian peasants unless Stalin planned to kill Russians, Kazakhs and others, and for what?
Another opus, in recent "Atlantic" compares Republicans who support Trump despite all his real and imaginary failings, with 1) Vichy Nazi collaborators, 2) Russian soldiers raping German women (but not, for instance, Ukrainian or Polish who also came with the Soviet Army--no account of the WWII should be without it--obviously, in her view, American soldiers treated Japanese women in a chivalrous and gentlemanly way, and the revenge exacted by Poles on Germans being deported in the wake of war was legendary in its cruelty, and 3) East Germans informers of Stasi, who, according to her statistics were 99% of the total population. I wish Bundeskanzlerin Merkel corrects her with a heavy walking stick at some meeting.
What is really surprising in all this drivel--is not her hatred of Russians--that is what she is paid for, though mad hatred rarely helps to understand even real and assumed enemies, but AA's reckless abandonment of both her Jewish heritage and her adopted religion of Polish nationalism. Now she joins the pack (parliament, murder) of the hate-filled harridans: Ann Coulter, Masha Gessen, Christiana Amanpour who are so much boiling with ill-will that like proverbial mad dogs they snap at everyone--friend and foe alike.
[1] Willy Lehmann, unemployed Weimar-era policeman recruited by the GPU, who became a mid-ranking but highly placed apparatchik of the SS economic division was the primary candidate but there were many others: Isai Borovoi, Alexander Korotkov, Norman Borodin, Yankel Chenyak, brothers Agayants etc. etc. For censorship reasons he was given an impeccably Russian pedigree.
[2] Most of the correct facts in her book about Gulag were lifted from the book by O. V. Khlevnyuk, "The History of the Gulag" and she freely borrowed from Solzhenytsin's classic "Gulag Archipelago". And yet, she received Pulitzer for this work of rank plagiarism.
[3] Applebaum's attempts to portray the Great Famine of 1933-1934 as an act of "ethnic cleansing" are highly counterfactual. Disastrous policy of "Collectivization" of Soviet Agriculture--the main cause of the famine--was spearheaded personally by Josef Stalin, a Georgian-Ossetian, sometimes over heavy objections by the Politburo. The largest proportional population losses were suffered by Kazakhstan. The chief of NKVD at the time was Menzhinsky, a Pole, with G. Yagoda, a Jew, as his acting deputy. People's Commissar for Agriculture, Yakovlev, was also Jewish. Local Ukrainian Soviet leadership was also heavily international: V. Kossior, head of the Party--a Pole, Vlas Chubar'--head of the Government, Ukrainian, head of Ukranian NKVD--Balitsky, Ukrainian, etc. etc. The only ethnic Russian in the first line of directors of collectivization was Politburo member Pavel Postyushev, later shot by Stalin, as were all of the above personalities except Menzhinsky who died from progressive paralysis in 1934.
[4] A term "proto-fascist" is somewhat misleading. The author would suggest the term "sado-terrorist" for the regimes, which do not have--in contrast to German Nazism and Soviet/Chinese Communism, or Pinochet in Chile, any positive development agenda besides terrorizing the population: Khmer Rouge, Idi Amin of Uganda, Bocassa of CAR, "Dirty War" regime in Argentina or von Ungern "Khanate" in Mongolia--but one can argue that some regimes (Franco, in Spain for instance) evolve into something more positive-minded, if not more humane.
