The world lost a giant when Zbigniew Brzezinski died last month. America lost a statesman; Ukraine lost a friend.
I first became aware of Dr. Brzezinski in the early 1970s, reading his commentaries in Newsweek. That was during the depths of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union – with a vast military, nuclear arms, barbed wire borders and massive walls, transmitters jamming short-wave radio, an army of censors screening every word, every image, even musical notes and a network of agents, informants and listening devices spanning two continents – looked like it would last a thousand years.
Across a 45-year divide, I don’t remember the specifics of Dr. Brzezinski’s columns, but I read them religiously. Having grown up in ethnic Cleveland, I didn’t find his name unusual, although I admit I found its Slavic derivation attractive. When he became President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, hardly anyone considered it odd that he spoke English with an accent. So did the national security advisor and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Henry Kissinger, as did their Soviet specialist Helmut Sonnenfeldt and a whole team of NASA scientists and engineers.
As far as I know, Dr. Brzezinski was the first Slavic American to lead American foreign policy. There were others who exercised considerable influence – House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Clement Zablocki, UCCA President Lev Dobriansky or Gerald Ford’s Special Assistant for Ethnic Affairs Myron Kuropas – but “Zbig,” as he was affectionately known, was not only in the room when momentous decisions were made, he presided. His portfolio included: relations with China, confronting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, peace between Israel and Egypt and, for perhaps the first time, Ukraine. No surprise that he knew that issue in depth.
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw in 1928. His father, Tadeusz, was a Polish diplomat who took his family to various posts abroad and then stayed in Canada when Hitler and Stalin jointly invaded his country in 1939.
Tadeusz, born to a nation partitioned for centuries among three empires and then serving as a diplomat for a country revived after World War I, no doubt instructed his son about the complicated relationship involving Poland, Russia and Ukraine, a geostrategic interplay Zbigniew highlighted in his book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives:” “…without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” and thus, he wrote, moves the Russian threat to the border with Poland and other neighbors.
As national security advisor (1977-1981), Dr. Brzezinski, was the architect of the human rights campaign that targeted the Soviet Union on its treatment of dissidents and citizens over all. Millions throughout the world rallied to that cause. For me, it gave purpose and led to a career on Capitol Hill, but in a much larger sense the policy changed the course of history. Robert Gates – defense secretary to both Democrats and Republicans – wrote that President Carter’s human rights focus cast a spotlight on the Soviets’ greatest vulnerability. [Carter] “was the first president during the Cold War to challenge publicly and consistently the legitimacy of Soviet rule at home… the first steps toward the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.” Credit Dr. Brzezinski for giving Mr. Carter wise counsel and the president for accepting it. The president announced in his 1977 commencement address at Notre Dame that U.S. policy toward communism would no longer be based on fear and then proceeded to aggressively act on the new approach.
In the 1960s and 1970s, only a handful of Soviet citizens had the fortitude to stand up to their country’s tyranny: Jewish refuseniks seeking to emigrate to the West were well known; Ukrainian or Baltic political prisoners less so, campaigning as they did for the right to cultural and national expression. To Moscow, this smacked of separatism, which it was. For administration policy makers in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Soviet Union was a permanent fixture, so speaking out on Soviet dissidents – whether they were Ukrainians like Valentyn Moroz or Nobel Prize winners like Alexander Solzhenitsyn – was considered “interference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union” and was therefore avoided.
Remember Moroz? An obscure historian, he was first arrested in 1965 and upon release wrote several powerful essays condemning KGB repression. For that, he was re-sentenced in 1970 to 14 years of prison and exile. In July 1974, he began a hunger strike which the Ukrainian diaspora seized upon, producing bumper stickers, posters and articles, and in the process turning Mr. Moroz into a symbol of resistance. Young people were just beginning their summer vacations and several launched solidarity hunger strikes at the doors of Soviet Embassies in Washington and Ottawa. The Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Vatican Radio, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc., notwithstanding Soviet jamming, broadcast the news to Soviet Ukraine.
I was in my 20s during the Moroz campaign and was often frustrated when it seemed we were in an echo chamber where only Ukrainians heard the message. But, as it turned out, Dr. Brzezinski was also listening. In April 1979, he negotiated a stunning exchange of five political prisoners, including Mr. Moroz, for two Soviet spies: a huge victory for Ukrainians everywhere but also others – Helsinki groups, Poland’s Solidarity, Lithuania’s Sajudis, Jewish refuseniks. President Ronald Reagan, who followed the Carter administration, continued the campaign against “the Evil Empire,” which we know ended up cleaving along the national fault lines which Dr. Brzezinski had so presciently recognized and adroitly exploited.
For him, Ukraine was central to European and global stability. He said as much many times in his articles, books, media appearances and to me personally in the years following his government service. He, of course, had played on a much broader chessboard and his sage advice spanned every region, every continent (N.B.: especially his warning against the 2003 invasion of Iraq).
Today, Russia is forcing itself on other countries and peoples, as it has throughout centuries, employing a variety of aggressive measures: the military, social media trolls, blatant lies, assassination; you name it. Ukraine has been the major target. And yet, as Dr. Brzezinski noted, the country whose independence he helped bring about, is here to stay and has been more than holding its own.
So, farewell and thank you to a good and decent man. We could use his wisdom today.