Angry Planet - Bucha, Chechnya, and Russian War Crimes

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine are being revealed as its military is pushed back. In the Kyiv suburbs, evidence of summary executions, torture and rape are being revealed.All countries are guilty of crimes during war, but Russia deserves special mention for its actions in the last hundred years.At the end of World War II and the occupation of Germany after, at least 2 million German women were raped by Russian soldiers, along with other atrocities on the most brutal front in the war.In the Afghan war, Russia was infamous for using landmines that looked like toys for kids to pick up.And in Chechnya more rape, bombardment of civilians and executions.Joining us to talk about this cheery topic today is Professor Amir Weiner of Stanford. He studies the Soviet Union and Russia and their way of war.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Russia's war crimes in Ukraine are being revealed as its military is pushed back. In the Kiev suburbs, evidence of summary executions, torture, and rape are being revealed. All countries are guilty of war crimes, but Russia deserves special mention for its actions in the last hundred years. At the end of World War II and the occupation of Germany immediately thereafter, at least two million German women were raped by Russian soldiers. along with other atrocities on the most brutal front of the war.

In the Afghan war, Russia was infamous for using landmines that look like toys so that kids would pick them up. And in Chechnya, more rape, bombardment of civilians and executions. Joining us to talk about this cherry topic today is Professor Amir Viner of Stanford. He studies the Soviet Union and Russia and their way of war. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. The scenes from Boucha are so raw. Were you surprised by what you saw at all?

Not at all, regrettably. Not at all because these things happen, not necessarily because there is any genetic Russian code for atrocities, but very often this is what happens under two conditions. One, when your plan A is the only plan and it fails. and you are beaten up or at least have to withdraw and the frustration that builds up among troops that are also underprepared, certainly under-equipped,

and they also seems to be also hungry in some cases and the rage that are taking on the second condition of entanglement with civilians. It's a recipe for disaster for any army to fight among civilians, it is much worse when it happens when an army is not getting its goal, does not achieve its immediate delusional goal of a blitzkrieg, overwhelming the opponents, and that's what happened. What is more disturbing in this case, even more than the usual, is that these atrocities are partly started very early, very early. and that is something that sent chills in our spines,

that why it started so early this hatred towards a population that did not open its arms to you. That's something that is very disturbing. Was it premeditated or was it circumstantial? We still don't know, but the magnitude and the timing of it so early in the invasion is very troubling. Well, they've been, I would argue they've been primed for it by eight years of conflict in East Ukraine, right? Like this, yes, we're in the early stages of a new, of like an escalation of an extant conflict.

But I imagine, like, what has been going on in Russian media for the past eight years probably sets the stage for this kind of behavior, right? Certainly the issue of propaganda is one set that we have to pay attention to the fact that troops are being subjected to indoctrination just like the rest of the Russian population that Ukrainians are simply renegade a group who refuse to accept their destiny of being part of Russia, the fact that they do not deserve. they don't not merit the recognition of sovereign nation and sovereign state that already set a certain stage. Does it get to the minds of the 18, 19, 20-year-old kids in uniforms? It's difficult to say for us whether it was the propaganda or the circumstances, but certainly the propaganda

in the Russian Federation became more and more violent and aggressive, especially as we got closer and closer to the invasion. That is one thing. Second, in eastern Ukraine, which is some called it frozen war, the conditions there deteriorated on the ground on both sides, that it's not just the Russian military, the regular army, but it's basically militias on both sides of the separatists, supported by the Russian forces, and the Ukrainian militias, the battalions that were fighting there. And atrocities apparently were rolling on and on, quite ignored because it was basically quite except for certain eruptions when the Ukrainians tried to clear the region in 2015 and 2016 and were beaten back by.

not by the separatists, but basically by the Russian military. And since then it's been brewing on a low burner, but nevertheless civilians caught in the midst of these fighting. There were reports on deportation of people evacuated forcibly. There were reports on sexual violence. And when you look at the gallery of characters, who were, and I say who were because many of them died of the commanders of the paramilitary organizations on the Russian side, such a, these were no scout boys. These were rough and tough

semi-gainster characters. When you were talking about current events, and actually, I guess, along the eastern border as well, one of the things that has led to war crimes and, I genocide in the past is this concept of othering, you know, to basically think of another human being as not quite a human being. The reason why this seems a little different to me is Vladimir Putin arguing so violently, we're all one people. And I'm just wondering how different this situation is. And you said you were surprised by how fast that we, you know, had started. What do you think of that together? I have to admit that it baffles me, and I would dare say most of my colleagues, specialists in Russia, Ukraine, we were always trained to believe, and there are all of us who went to Russia so many times and to Ukraine, that if there is one thing that will prevent the former Soviet Union from exploding, especially during the collapse and after, is that

Russian and Ukrainians will not fight each other. The relations are so intertwined, the family relations, the history, that not necessarily a loving history, as the Russians would like to put it nowadays in their propaganda, but that basically the tomb close to each other to shed each other's blood. Now, there were incidents in history when they did shed a lot of blood, especially in Western Ukraine after the war, when the Ukrainian nationalist movement sought independence, and this was one of the bloodiest civil wars, post-war civil wars in Europe. But relations all in all were familial. And this is something that indeed surprised us the ferocity of hatred, especially

coming from the Russian side. With Putin, it's a... Of course, this is not only Putin himself. It is large part of the Russian elite. And when I say elite, not only the regime, but also large part of the liberal intelligentsia, there is a problem of accepting Ukraine as independent and Ukrainian nation as separate from the Russian nation. Even during the collapse when the Ukraine was beginning to bail out, and it was a very slow process, very opportunistic. The people who let Ukraine go, Yeltsin, Gorbachev,

the advisor around Gorbachev and Yeltsin after him, had difficulties to accept it. After all, as they said, this is us. My family is from Ukraine. How can we teach our own history without Kiev? They had problems of accepting it. And that brings to the other side, that the anger at Ukraine for bailing out, not accepting it.

And the concept that we hear more and more nowadays of the Russian world, Ruski Mir in Russian, that Putin became the chief proselytizer, the priest of it, but it's not, of course, his idea alone of the unity, the mythical unity of all Russian-speaking communities. That it is a holy mission to reunite them, to protect all Russian-speaking enclaves. When he gave his famous speech in 2005, and the world went berserk over the line that the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, people forgot to simply to listen to the following sentence where he said

the tragedy is of 25 million Russians step beyond the borders of their motherland. And that was already something that he hinted. He actually did it even before that it is their mission to protect all Russian-speaking

communities. And this brings us into this mix of Ukraine and otherness that the way he started speaking about Ukrainians, always dismissive, very, very antagonistic. Now, we can say that it is based on his opportunism because twice he was rebuffed in Ukraine in 2004 in the Orange Revolution and in 2014 when it was the so-called revolution of dignity. But the Ukrainian basically sent his

puppet person, Yanukovych, send him packing. And he, he was a so-called revolution. And he, he's a, That was a personal humiliation, but also strengthened his own convictions that it is the making of the West and their agents, so to speak, of inciting Ukrainian to separate and in antagonistic manner from Russia. So one thing that we have to remind ourselves, Putin has been telling us this story about Ukraine, his goals for Ukraine and his contempt for. Ukrainians who seek independence and sovereignty, he's been telling to us for 20 years. It is nothing new. Tyrants, by the way, always tell us what they want and what they are seeking to do. They always lie about how they are going to do it. But certainly they don't hide their dreams and delusions.

So we talked a little bit before we went on air about Chechnya. and Grosny and a comment that you had made that I think you said kind of set thoughts ablaze, that you were worried that we were going to see another Grosny. For audience members that may not be aware, can you tell us what happened there and how it is similar to what we're seeing now? Some profound similarities, also we have also to pay attention to the differences between Chechnya and Ukraine. The similarities, regions that were under Russian-Soviet domination for a long, long time, and sought independence.

Chechnya was an autonomous region in the Soviet Union. During and after the Soviet collapse in 91, sought independence and achieved it de facto. And I said de facto because it was never recognized by Russia. Chechens are and were Russian citizens. So the independence movement gained sovereignty, de facto sovereignty, by beating the Russian military in the first Chechen war in 1994 to 1996. It was a very humiliating story for the Yeltsin government and for Russia in general that a regtag army of rebels basically. blocked, halted and brought down the invading Russian forces. And what happened was, and here we come to the first similarity, the humiliation. The humiliating factor that brings Chechnya

in Ukraine, just as Putin was rebuffed in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, so were the Russian government, and his predecessor, Yeltsin, in 94-96. Second similarity is the attempt to solve the issue by basically beating militarily the rebels and installing a puppet regime. Someone who would do Moscow's bidding, and it worked in the second Chechen war in 1999-200, actually in 99 to 2009 when it was completely ceased.

And they succeeded. They succeeded by finding the clan of Kadirov. He's the father of Kadirov, the current president and Ramzan Kamdirov, and who basically does the bidding of Moscow. They're in a very brutal manner. But this is the second gold that's very similar to what they wanted to do in Ukraine is invading, kicking out the Zelensky government and installing someone unclear whom they would have delusions that they would find in Ukraine who will accept them.

So here are certain similarities. Beyond that, there is also the history, beyond the domination that they were being part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, very bloody history. In Chechnya, in late Second World War, Chechens were deported in total by the Soviet regime accused of collaboration with the Nazis, with the Germans at the time. In Ukraine, more or less at the same time, mass deportations that lasted all the way to the end of the 1940s and of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian, mainly from Western Ukraine. and what it meant, that's the third similarity, a legacy of bitterness, brewing bitterness both in Chechnya and Ukraine against Soviet power, Russian power in this case. Of course, there are differences that we must pay attention.

Chechnya is a tiny region. I think it's even smaller than New Jersey. At the time of the Chechen wars in the 90s, it was more or less 1 million people. and Ukraine, of course, is so much larger country the size of France. Everyone now mentions Texas, the size of Texas, with 40 to 42 million people. And of course, the international community that lines up behind and surrounding Ukraine, something that at the time very few cared for Chechnya in the international arena. There were human rights, of course, when we watched what was done to Groening,

and to Chechnya in general, there was quite a horrified reaction with the scenes of Grosny that looked like Dresden in Germany after the bombing. But beyond that, there was no support because the Chechens were considered to be part of Russia,

that all Russian political landscape basically was unanimous that this should not be allowed to break away from the Russian Federation, and the flirtation that turned into much more evident and obvious of the independent movement with Islamic radicals, and the radicalization that we can say certainly that it was a product of the Russian invasion, the radicalization of the rebels that turned into radical Islam, and of course did not win many supporters in the West.

One thing you said about Ukraine was that part of the trouble might be how badly the Russian army has been faring. And wasn't that the same in Chechnya as well? I mean, that Russia never thought that beaten up so badly. In Chechnya, it was just as obvious. Of course, nowadays, we forget about Chechnya. It is withering away except what we hear about the Chechen support for the Russian support. army sending volunteers, etc. But yes, that was the, first of all, unlike today, there was dissent in the Russian military

about invading Chechnya after it declared independence. Russian generals resigned. They said we are not going to fight and kill Russian citizens. Chechens were Russian citizens. And indeed, it did not go done well. The Russian military was not prepared for a counterinsurgency. It was certainly not prepared for urban warfare. And the indiscriminate bombing started almost immediately.

Grosny was taken three times. They took Grosny and they were repelled. They took it again and were repelled. They took it again and were repelled. And that's a bad omen for the population there, the mass killings of tens of thousands of Chechen citizens in indiscriminate aerial bombing and artillery at the time. And the Russian army really looked bad. It looked bad at the time. The second time in 1999, the war that built Putin's reputation as effective, ruthless leaders who doesn't take prisoners and get the job done. The army did not look much better, but it was slightly better.

It managed to get Grosny and hold it, and that was the major achievement, and Grosny in the capital of Chechnya. But the methods, there was no military finesse. There was no great maneuvers, and there was not amazing performance. It was simply grinding, grinding the rebels. And, of course, those who paid most were the civilians caught in between. So it became a sort of a method. And there's a warning also to others later on in Georgia and in Ukraine.

Don't mess with us. Don't mess up with us. Not because we are such amazing special forces that we are so great in combined operations, so on so forth, just because we can do to you what we've done to the Chechians. When we get down to business, we don't discriminate, we don't take prisoners. This is the message. It's a combination of psychological terror, but also the reality that the Russian army comes back again and again and again. Almost like tidal waves.

Ukraine is simply a different story really because it is so big because the Ukrainian army between 2015 and 2022, apparently did very impressive job in training and re-equipment, and it fights in a way that's shocked, not only the Russians, but also surprised us, to be frank. You make it sound then as if war crimes aren't a strategy. It's part of the strategy of the Russian way of war. Do you think that's accurate? I won't go that far to say that. This is the primary goal or this is part of the manual, part of the kit.

But I would say that psychological terror certainly, it is part of it. The plan was quite simple, and we know that this was indeed the plan. They thought that it would be a blitzkrieg, sort of shock and all, that Kiev will fall within more or less a week. We know that because we are. not we, the Ukrainians found on the bodies of fallen Russian soldiers, maps of Kiev with government buildings marked and targeted. So the goal was to capture Kiev, no matter how they repositioned themselves that they had plan B, plan C, and plan Y. The goal was to capture Kiev, which is the core of the country. If you capture Kiev, basically, Ukraine is fallen.

So that was the goal to do it in a very quick, efficient manner, which they did in Crimea. And I think that was the big miscalculation that it will be Crimea second round, round two. And this did not happen. So war crimes very often, as I said earlier, start when you are frustrated, when you have high casualty, a number of casualties, is when you will find yourself under-equipped and sometimes also underserved, that your logistics falling apart. So that is one. But at the same time, I agree with you that the timing, that the immediacy of the war crimes

raise a red flag, that they immediately started shooting and killing and raping Ukrainian citizens. This is something that we're only now beginning to investigate, but it looks very bad. Certainly, this is part of their psychological warfare against the Ukrainians. And we mentioned several times Chechnya. The mentioning constantly

of, we are bringing the Chechens. And by the way, there are Chechens now fighting in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian reports do talk about Chechen fighters as perpetrators of some of the worst war crimes. It is part of the psychological terror against the civilian population in Ukraine. The Chechens are coming. Something very similar in Russian history to the Cossacks. The Cossacks are coming.

Run away. Run to the shelters. The Cossacks are coming because these are the guys who do not discriminate in killing these are the frightening guys, and more or less this is the message there. Are they that effective in terms of fighters? I am a little bit skeptic, but they certainly sent the shivers in the spines of population. Another thing that's baffling me about all of this that feels new, and I'm probably wrong about that, you can tell me, is how it's being handled in the press in the aftermath.

And I'm speaking specifically what we know about what's happening in Russia. You know, the scenes are pretty stark that we've seen. Like it's, it there was, doesn't seem like there was much of an attempt to hide this stuff at all. And yet what we hear from the Russians is that that it's fake, that it's staged, et cetera, et cetera. And various different variations of that. Like, how do you square it being a psychological method, you know, this, in war and also denying it at the same time in the home front. The one thing that brings all together,

the Russian message to the Ukrainians and to the West and to their own population is fake. For anyone who has been following the Russian media over the last, I would say, 15 years or so, it would make a Georgia well look like a naive choir boy to see that is 1984 is simply implemented by the letter in Russian media.

Russian media basically sticks to the points of this is special operation, liberation of Ukraine from the neo-Nazis or the Nazis, and the criminals who took over Ukraine and try to separate it from Russia. And this is a very powerful narrative.

It is a very powerful narrative that does resonate with large part of the population for two main reasons. One, most of the Russian population to date gets it information from TV, not from the internet. There is some generational aspect to it because this is an older generation, not the young techies, professionals who live in the computers with the VPNs, etc. But watch the state media. And the state media is simply happy, go lucky, special operation. Ukrainians are welcoming us, et cetera. There's been slight change in the last few days, admitting for more casualties.

is the spokesperson of the Kremlin, Admitted Beskoe, who is simply when you listen to him, there's nothing to react to it. It's simply a different world and in different language. He admitted, I think, two days ago in an interview to Sky News in Great Britain, that we suffer heavy casualties, and it is a tragedy for us. second feature about the mass media is the elimination of all independent media sources. And this the crackdown that started several years ago, but was completed over the last

months of closing down, shutting down the only independent TV channel, Doge, Rain, and the liberal media outlets like newspapers all the news magazines and radio talk shows like

Ejo Mosquee shut the down completely so those who get the different, the alternative story that's what we read and what we watch whether it's BBC CNN etc there are quite a number of Russians who do

get it. They manage to download VPNs and there are ways to break through the so-called firewall that the Kremlin imposed. But the problem is that these are

mostly young people with already liberal or pro-Western convictions, mainly in the cities and there are in small numbers. There are not the majority. Make no mistake that this is not the majority of the population.

There's a great mistrust in the government news. Russians don't trust the government. There are many occasions for this. But on this one, it seems that maybe there is not such a major enthusiasm for this war. But we still don't see the cracks. We don't see major crisis. We say, aha, we managed to break this wall of lies. It is not there yet.

I'm slightly more optimistic than most on this one because if the West will continue to hold its ranks together and stick with the sanctions. And the Ukrainians will continue to fight the way they've been fighting so far with the constant supply of weapons for us. And the toll on Russia is growing. Now, people tell us all the time that this is a regime that doesn't care about the suffering of the population. That is true. But it goes beyond just the suffering of ordinary men and women. It goes basically to shattering the Russian economy and the entire governmental structure. This elite that is not just Putin and his family and Putin and faulty people.

it's the entire system that is built on it is beginning to suffer. The point is to keep to stick to it, not to crack, not to allow the Germans to get cold in the winter and the Germans and the Italians and all other European countries who are dependent on Russian gas and oil, to keep it together. And I think we will have to see if it works, the sanctions and the,

Ukrainian fighting successfully. And I am slightly optimistic about that. But again, things change drastically every day. We still don't know what is the next step of the Russian military. We don't see any changes now, any cracks inside the Kremlin. But we will have to see. Wait and see. I had a question about information that Russians have been getting more long term.

And what I mean is the history books. Have they been rewritten as well from the Soviet era? What's the party line, so to speak, with history books now and how they deal with Ukraine and places like Ukraine outside the Russia now? Oh, there's been a major rewriting of history books. The one that attracted the attention of historians, and it's regrettably, It's only historians who follow this business, is the revising of especially the Stalinist terror and the Second World War. What's changed there mainly is not necessarily denying the atrocities of the Stalinist era. There I mentioned that there was the great terror, et cetera.

But it's the emphasis over, okay, Stalin did some bad things, also the guy who modernized Russia, built industry, industrialized Russia, and most important, played a major role in turning it into a superpower with a great victory over the Nazis in the Second World War. So Stalin as a good manager suddenly became a mantra in the history textbook. And of course, it tracked the iron and the wrath of many liberal historians, There were commissions for right history appointed by the former president, Dmitry Medvedev, who is considered to be slightly more liberal than open-minded than Putin. That was under him.

Nothing much came out of all these commissions, et cetera, but there are things that they are simply not giving an inch the issue of the famine, the great famine, of the early 1930s. It cannot be called genocide, as the Ukrainians call it, the Holodomor. Certainly no ethnic aspect to it, that it was anti-Ukrainian or anti-Kazark, by the way. The Kazakhs, it's another sleeper in this story of Ukraine. We can get to it in a second. But never mentioned the word genocide.

There is something that sent the Russian berserk in their reaction to history. And of course there's the second element in the Russian rewriting of history is the what about. So whenever there is the stuff, yes, we did some, maybe, there were some mistakes, there were some bad things, etc. But who are you to lecture us? Who dropped the only nuclear bomb in history? You Americans, not us. And atrocities in Afghanistan. What about Vietnam?

So the water baptism is a major, it's a mantra in Russian discussions of history or the official stuff. I don't want to denigrate the work of some very good Russian historians. There are many great Russian historians who do decent work and do not tell the line, etc. But the issue, of course, is what kids are being taught in schools, what kids get on TV, etc. and this is an increasingly nationalist line that tends to smooth over the wards of the Soviet regime. We just teased something that I know absolutely nothing about. How does Kazakhstan fit into all of this? Kazakhstan and basically every other country that was a former Soviet republic is shaking in its woods right now.

For the very simple reason, there is a significant Russian minority inside Kazakhstan, in northern Kazakhstan. And the message, the tacit message from this war to all of them, you may be next. Don't challenge us too much. You do not support the Ukrainians, not openly, no tacitly, no nothing. because just like the allegation that there is a Russian minority in Ukraine. And it doesn't matter, by the way, if this Russian minority is actually very Ukrainian patriotic. They tend to speak Russian at home. They are culturally russified, but they don't see themselves as Russian citizens.

They don't want to be part of Russian. But in Kazakhstan, we hear more and more, more. Moldova nowadays. And we have already heard about Georgia. And Georgia, in this case, is very interesting. There is total resentment towards Russia in Georgia. The popular resentments because of slicing two provinces in 2008. Again, with the same thing, protecting ethnic Russians from genocide, et cetera,

which was, of course, bogus, et cetera. but the Georgian government does not condemn anything. They are quite scared, and they have all the reasons to be wary of this. See Armenia, which always have traditionally a very good relations with Russia, and you see the neighborhood, the Armenian small country, that the neighbors are Turkey, Iran, and Russia. I mean, it's not Lichten, and Luxembourg surrounding it, and they are very careful.

They are very careful about it because the Russian card, we will always protect Russian minorities or diaspora minorities. Russia, in this case, is acting like a diaspora empire. We have diasporas. They are under constant threat of genocide. They love to use the war genocide, not the way we use it, but the way they use it. And very often, it's actually, it's always fake.

There is no threat to Russian minorities. But in Kazakhstan, which is a very important country, it's very big. And of course, the energy there. So they know what they should not do, the Kazakhs. So I would simply advise our listeners to follow from time who follow this issue. Pay attention from time to time to what you don't hear from Moldova, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and other countries. All those who do not enjoy the protection, the umbrella of NATO.

Because the same story we could have said about the Baltic states, the three tiny states in Northern Europe, where it used to be Soviet republics, but they are now inside NATO and they can sleep somewhat more confidently and quietly. night. There is this conflation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, especially when we look at their atrocities. Why do you think there is this need almost? It feels like to compare, compare feels like the wrong word. Conflate feels like the right word. Like, why do you think we do this?

Between the Soviets and the Nazis and the Nazis, Soviets specifically. Well, certainly the There have been profound similarities coming from the philosophical foundations of these two regimes, the belief that you can mold societies, which mean human beings like Plato from the individual to the collective, based on your utopian goals, whether it is classless society from the Soviet side or racially based. society from the Nazi point of view, and the fact that violence is a legitimate tool. Violence is constructive for these two regimes. It is not vengeful only. It is not just in terms of policing and control.

It's also restructuring society. So when they were talking both about violence, they were celebrating violence. They were not hiding it. So that is one thing that certainly brought them together. they were immortal enemies and they talked constantly about their conflict but there was a point which i pointed to it in earlier writings where the soviets came very close to the nazis they claim they came very close to the nazis in the mid of the second world war and its aftermath when they started targeting entire collectives entire populations in total undifferentiated, regardless of their service to the Soviet state, and they targeted them for indefinite eternal punishment, which almost made them racial entities. And the Chechens, by the way, were part of it. Ukrainian nationalist were part of it. They were all deported en masse

in total. And in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their punishments, their penitents, their penalties was converted from term sentences into eternal exile. That was very, very close to racial understanding of your enemy. They stepped back. They stepped back and immediately after Stalin, there was a major change in these policies, rehabilitation, mass rehabilitation of nationalities and the so-called punished people of the Second World War. So they stepped back from the brink, from the oblivion. Second, and this is a major debate nowadays among historians, maybe it's not that important.

I do not believe that the Soviets were genocidal. They always kept certain differentiation with their enemies, those who could be rehabilitated, those who were on our side, etc. The Nazis were genocidal a priori. there was no good Jew, semi-good Jew, bad Jew. It was all Jews that they could lay their hands. Now, of course, there were many who fell in between the cracks.

Some leading Nazis protected individual Jews that they knew. We know about the German generals and marshals who were of Jewish descent and they were protected by, for instance, Herman Gehring, for his own agenda, personal agenda. but in general there was no differentiation in the Soviet Union despite the horrendous atrocity and it was a regime that committed crimes against humanity on right and left and the recklessness and with the Ukrainian famine and in Kazakhstan which suffered by all in terms of share of population Kazakhstan suffered more than any other Soviet republic in terms of the

share of victims of the population. Nevertheless, there were Ukrainians who were on the Soviet side, Ukrainians in the cities, who suffered less. It was more or less on political class-based, and that is the difference. Now, it did not help much about three and a half million Ukrainians who stout to death in this criminal episode. in the early 1930s. It did not help anything for the Kazakhs who died, et cetera. So this is, but you might say that this is more semantic differences, et cetera, but I would say it is important in the understanding of a regime,

whether it can integrate its, and part of its enemies, rehabilitate some and those who give up completely on them a priori. This is my understanding. and I am very well aware that there is a debate raging among historians. Why it is, I would say, as a final word, why is it burning so much for the Russians nowadays, the Russian Federation, the key legitimizing factor in history is the Second World War, which in Russia is still referred to as the Great Patriotic War.

This is the victory over the Nazis. And there's no coincidence there that Putin is using constantly the terms denazification, referring to the Ukrainian government and as a Nazi gang, etc. Of course, there's a little problem that Zelensky, he's Jewish, that his family, part of his grandparents, a part of his grandparents, a family died, were murdered in the Holocaust. and the other part fought in the ranks of the Red Army against the Nazis. So there is a little problem there.

And the Prime Minister who was Jewish and all this. So, of course, we should not take it seriously in terms of validity. But it does resonate very strongly, especially with certain generation in the Russian Federation, that we are fighting the demons of these Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis. who exterminated our POWs and Jews and all the stuff, and everything is fruit salad. It does resonate very, very powerfully in a country that its entire foundation of its legitimacy,

now the historical foundation, is now centered over the great victory, its moment in the sun, of the victory in the Second World War. And I would simply, I don't make any predictions. I'm an historian, so I'm very cautious. But I would simply advise us, take a look of how May 9th Victory Day will look in Moscow. What kind of message will come? What speech Putin will deliver on this day? And whether there will be a parade and what kind of parade will be there in the Red Square in front of the Kremlin on this occasion of the victory over the Nazis.

That would be quite an intriguing exercise of how the war is being interpreted in Russia. And in this war, of course, we don't know what next week we look like. So talking about May 9th this year may look like talking about the next millennium. but let's watch indeed how it will work out. You have a, you're working on a book? Yeah, I'm editing now the book on the KGB. The title is at home with the KGB. And then you're a history of the organization.

And it's indeed a history of the organization from Plato to NATO, which means from 1954 to 91 with an epilogue about the legacy of the KGB. and its impact on the security organs nowadays. We'll have you back. Oh, we'll definitely have you back for that. Amir Viner, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners.

Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. As always, if you like the show, please leave us a rating, drop us a line. It helps other people find the show. and go to angry planetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com. Sign up for nine bucks a month. It helps keep the show going. You get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes, and you get bonus episodes every month. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

Stay safe until then.