Martin Sixsmith and Daniel Sixsmith. Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War.

       

            A screed written by a Blair acolyte straight from the templates of the Goebbels propaganda. Only the Goebbels' staff probably learnt about the Jews more than Sixsmith, which is strange given that he spent a few years in Moscow as a BBC correspondent. Why his son, an archeologist, changed his calling into agitprop writing, in unclear. Unless, of course, he was an "archeologist" of the vintage Her Majesty's service sent to the East during the times of the Great Game, or that vicious agitprop pays much better these days. 

    Only one example: his derisive mentioning of Putin's supposed lies about Ukrainian history, Civil War in particular, can be attributed to the clichés of British propaganda [1]. Yet, his inability to explain the meaning of the Russian word (бандеровцы), he transcribes as banderovites or something, and considers an ethnic slur, testifies to his complete lack of interest to any thing Russian and Soviet. Shtepan Bandera who is now considered something like a patron saint of Ukraine and whose name is given to the streets, plazas and the state awards was a pre-war Polish terrorist. During the Second World War he became a chief purveyor of Nazi ideology in the occupied Soviet Ukraine. Unlike Croatia, which did not play much role in the Nazi plans and could be entrusted to a demented sadist like Ante Pavelic, and similarly to the oil-rich Romania, which could not be left in the hands of Sima Horia; Bandera, whose peasant bands did not only mass murdered the Jews and Gypsies but also Russians and Poles, i.e. non-Jewish technical and business class imperative for keeping its factories and railroads running, was too unstable for such an important task. So Germans tucked him in a Berlin hotel until 1944 when they had nothing to lose and replaced him with a reliable Hauptschturmfuhrer SS Shushkevich, also a mass murderer of the Jews and a revered figure in modern Ukraine, but without a popular following among the contemporary unwashed. 

  This mish-mash of lies, multiplied by woeful ignorance and arrogance does not deserve more. 

[1] British propaganda closely follows a revisionist history of Ukrainian nationalists. In fact, a dozen or so regimes changed on the territory of the modern Ukraine, few controlling more than 10% of the territory, which was claimed by the representatives of the Ukrainian People's Republic Government in Exile, formerly the Directory, at the Versailles Conference. This territory, never being a state, is considered by the post-Maidan regimes as its natural borders. Many regimes were foreign.  Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, but also Rusyns, Hungarians and Romanians fought on the different sides. The Jews were mostly the victims. The only autochthonic force was Makhno's army of anarchists, which never espoused statehood. So any story as a part of an interview is bound to cut the corners. Yet, during the Civil War these regimes generated a lot of jokes of the type: "In the car is our Directory, under the car is their territory", or "here the powers to be changed again today".