The letter below was sent on February 11 to Father Jeffre von Arx, S.J., president of Fairfield University, which hosted Stephen Cohen as its keynote speaker on February 5 as the university celebrated the anniversary of the Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies Program. The author of the letter, Alexander B. Kuzma, chief development officer of the Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation, has yet to receive a response to his concerns. (The letter was sent c/o Father Charles Allen, S.J., special assistant to the president and university chaplain.)
I find it deeply disturbing that Fairfield University would invite Stephen Cohen as its keynote speaker to mark the anniversary of your Russian and East European Studies program.
Cohen has been a shameless apologist for the brutal regime of Vladimir Putin as Putin has systematically crushed dissent and academic freedom in his own country. He has been even more outspoken in support of Putin as Russia invaded and re-annexed Crimea and waged a war of aggression against Ukraine that as of last week had already claimed over 5,300 lives.
For 300 years, Russian autocrats – whether tsarist or Soviet – have repeatedly waged campaigns of repression and genocide against the Ukrainian people.
• They have enslaved millions of Ukrainians as serfs.
• They have deported hundreds of thousands to the Siberian gulag.
• By conservative estimates, they starved 3.3 million Ukrainians to death in the Holodomor of 1932-1933; (Raphael Lemkin called the Famine a “classic case of genocide” – a genocide that Putin continues to deny).
• Stalin liquidated the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and drove the Catholic Church into the underground.
• The Soviets shot and tortured Catholic priests, nuns and bishops (in 2001, St. John Paul II beatified 28 of the most notable Ukrainian martyrs that defied Soviet and/or Nazi tyranny, but these constitute only a tiny fraction of the thousands of Ukrainian Catholic clergy and laity who were annihilated).
• They brutally murdered Ukrainian poets, scholars, songwriters and artists.
Rather than make amends for this horrific history, Vladimir Putin has lamented the demise of the Soviet Union as a national “disaster” and has now mounted a re-invigorated campaign to restore the “glory” of Russia’s empire.
One can imagine the international uproar if Angela Merkel began to express fondness for Hitler, or if she declared the demise of the Third Reich a “national disaster.” Yet Cohen seems to feel that Putin’s yearning and nostalgia for the Soviet police state is perfectly reasonable.
In a stunning example of twisted logic, Cohen basically told his audience last week that Putin was justified in his invasion of Crimea and his aggression against Ukraine because NATO “forced his hand.”
Prof. Cohen is fond of parroting Putin’s bigotry and demonizing all Ukrainians who oppose his brand of tyranny as “fascists.” The fact is that the percentage of Ukrainians who supported far right parties in the last year’s election (2 percent) was tiny when compared to the robust percentages that far right parties received in the latest elections in Hungary (Jobbik – 15 percent), France (Front National – 25 percent), Denmark (Dansk Folkeparti – 27 percent) and Greece (Golden Dawn – 10 percent). Ironically, these are the very parties that Putin is courting to drive a wedge between European allies. These are also the elements that have expressed open admiration for Putin’s “strong man” posture, his Russian supremacist ideology, his primitive imperialism and his suppression of dissent.
This bizarre fusion of the extreme Left and extreme Right should not come as a surprise to scholars familiar with the history of Eastern Europe. After all, this was the nature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop “Non-Aggression” Pact that enabled Hitler and Stalin to dismember Poland in 1939. The “non-aggression” did not apply to Poles or Ukrainians who were deported en masse to Siberia, the thousands of Polish POWs who were shot in the Katyn Massacre, or the first contingents of Jews that Stalin was only too happy to deport to Hitler’s Germany following the 1940 conference at Zakopane.
As a venerable Catholic-Jesuit institution, one would think that Fairfield University remains committed to a zealous search for truth, not a stretch for what comedian Stephen Colbert refers to as “truthiness” – a devious, marginally plausible contortion of the facts designed to persuade the naïve or reinforce misinformation.
As a brazen proponent of Putin’s imperial agenda, and as a willing participant in Russia’s well-financed global propaganda campaign, Cohen has brought new vitality to the concepts of “blaming the victim” and Orwellian doublespeak. In the process, he has brought sophistry to new heights while bringing scholarly integrity to new lows.
At a bare minimum, Prof. [David] McFadden [director of Russian, East Europian and Central Asian Studies] owes his students and the university community a chance to hear the alternative views of respected scholars like Yale’s Timothy Snyder (author of “Bloodlands”), Anne Applebaum or Dr. Alexander Motyl of Rutgers. I would gladly introduce you to Prof. Myroslav Marynovych, the Vice-Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University, a celebrated author and human rights champion and a former political prisoner who spent seven years in one of the deadliest camps in the Soviet gulag (Perm 36).
Cardinal [Timothy] Dolan and other Catholic prelates hailed last year’s Maidan uprising in Ukraine as a “Revolution of Dignity.” If you prefer to give credence to Prof. Cohen’s assertion that this was a “fascist putsch,” I would urge you to read the statements of Ukraine’s Chief Rabbi Yaakov Bleich and other Jewish leaders who have become staunch defenders of the new government in Kyiv and fierce critics of the pro-Russian “separatists” and their blatant anti-Semitism. (As a case in point, last week, Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic – the war criminal that Putin has insisted Angela Merkel negotiate with, denounced the Poroshenko government in Kyiv as being run by “miserable Jews.” How Prof. Cohen can find sympathy or common cause with such people is beyond me, but it certainly begs the question of his credibility and judgment.)
I would respectfully request an opportunity to meet with you and if possible, to include a small delegation including Bishop Paul Chomnycky of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Stamford [Conn.], and Ms. Roma Hayda, a prominent lay leader in Fairfield County, so that we might discuss these concerns in greater detail.
In the meantime, I ask for your prayers for the thousands of Ukrainians and Russians who have already perished in this vainglorious war that Putin has unleashed, for the thousands more wounded, and for the nearly million internally displaced refugees now facing a very bleak future.