Sixty-six years ago, on April 2, 1951, The Ukrainian Weekly wrote about Russian imperialist propaganda and American Russian advisors.
The article cited four varieties of propaganda based on anti-Communist Russian imperialism – the extreme right monarchists, Russian Social-Democrats, Mensheviks and Russian nationalists. In the first few months of 1951, through the American press, radio and other media, as well as university chairs and scholarly publications, there was an observed increase in the message of Russian imperialism, The Weekly noted.
“In this vociferous clamor to preserve ‘Holy Mother Russia,’ we see almost every Russian political group and party, such as the extreme rightist Monarchists, who dream of the return of Czardom, and the moderate Russian Social Democrats who, while championing self-determination of the Asiatic peoples, are against the self-determination of the non-Russian peoples, enslaved by Moscow. […] Russian Nationalists… planned to erect a Russian nationalist empire modeled upon that of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Today, they too have donned the democratic garb and are making much clamor in the United States with the assistance of those upright but naïve Americans who do not always discriminate with respect to those they support.”
Russia, the article continued, could not be watched from the sidelines in the hope that the Stalin regime would change on its own from within. “Nothing could be more dangerous than the cultivation of this wishful thinking with respect to Soviet Russia,” the article underscored. “Unfortunately, they [the people of the Soviet Union] must be first liberated, fed and restored to normalcy before they can become a decisive factor in the struggle against communism.”
“Hundreds of thousands of Russian specialists, advisers and secret service men run the occupied countries and the satellite states; Russians plan and execute deportations of the non-Russian people from Ukraine, the Baltic states, the Caucasus; Russians impose and press Russification policies in such countries as Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, etc.; Russians plan the conquest of Europe, Africa and the great Asiatic mainland; and Russians, in pursuance of their political aggression, resort to the policy of genocide, that is, killing the non-Russian people in order to make room for the supposedly superior Russian race.”
Influential U.S. policymaker George F. Kennan, former chief of the Policy Planning Board of the State Department and, at the time, professor at Princeton University, was the creator of the so-called “containment policy” with regards to the Soviet Union. (Mr. Kennan served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in May-September 1952, and as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia in May 1961-July 1963.) Mr. Kennan believed that if Russia was left alone, it would eventually “burn” itself and be consumed by its own forces. The Korean war and other events proved Mr. Kennan wrong.
Later, Mr. Kennan wrote an article “America and the Russian Future” that appeared in the April 1951 issue of Foreign Affairs (Vol. 29, No. 3), that listed three prerequisites for a future Russia with which the United States could live peacefully: 1.) Russia must be “tolerant, communicative and forthright in her relations with other states and other peoples”; 2.) Russia must have a government which will not enslave her own people; 3.) Russia must refrain from pinning an oppressive yoke on other people who have the instinct and capacity for national self-assertion.
However, in light of Ukraine, Mr. Kennan wrote: ”The [sic] Ukraine, again, deserves full recognition for its peculiar genius and abilities of its people and for the requirements and possibilities of its development as a linguistic and cultural entity; but the Ukraine is economically as much a part of Russia as Pennsylvania is a part of the United States. Who can say what the final status of the Ukraine should be unless he knows the character of the Russia to which the adjustment will have to be made.”
The article commented that Mr. Kennan’s perspective echoes that of the Russian imperialists, and reinforces the propaganda line to “keep Ukraine in perpetual slavery of Russia.”
The article concluded: “Ukraine in Russia’s enslavement, Mr. Kennan should further observe, has not improved the economic lot of the Russian people – nor that of the Ukrainians to be sure. Its enslavement has merely served as a geographical and economical basis for the perennial Russian aggression.”
Source: “Russian imperialist propaganda and our American Russian advisors,” The Ukrainian Weekly, April 2, 1951.