[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 54 (Thursday, April 3, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H2897-H2900]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        THE WORLD OF NATIONS HOLDS A MORAL OBLIGATION TO UKRAINE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Walorski). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 3, 2013, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. 
Kaptur) will control the remainder of the hour.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, I thank Congressman Murphy for yielding. 
You are such a refreshing, brilliant, positive Member of this House, 
and I thank the people of your State for sending you here.
  I thank you for all the citizens you are fighting for to bring new 
energy and to bring new vision to our country. Thank you so very much.
  Madam Speaker, I entitle my remarks this evening ``The World of 
Nations Holds a Moral Obligation''--and underline ``moral 
obligation''--``to Ukraine.''
  Seventy years after World War II, let us provide some historical 
context in which to view Russia's illegal invasion of Crimea and 
potentially other nations.
  Scholars, historians, and diplomats still are piecing together the 
annals of the horrific slaughter and political oppression of the past 
century that has plagued the region we call Central and Eastern Europe. 
The full truth of what happened remains to be told as far too much was 
locked behind the Iron Curtain.
  Masterful books like ``Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin'' 
by Dr. Timothy Snyder of Yale begin to present the unfathomable 
dimension of the horror.
  If there is any place on the Earth the world community of nations 
owes a moral obligation and should seek to pull forward, it is Ukraine.
  The suffering and death endured by millions of innocent people inside 
Ukraine and nations in her immediate environs had no equal any place on 
Earth. There, the crushing of human life and human spirit were so 
diabolical and of such gigantic proportion, it is hard for us as human 
beings to wrap our minds around it.
  With clarity, let us recall that American soldiers who liberated 
Europe during World War II never ventured far enough eastward into 
Soviet-held territory to witness the grip of that tyranny; thus, the 
West still holds some naivete about the depths of depravity to which 
millions of innocent civilian people--mothers, fathers, children, 
grandparents--fell victim.
  George Will quotes Dr. Snyder in a recent piece titled, ``Russia's 
brutality with Ukraine is nothing new.'' During the 1933 Stalinist-
forced famine--here is a quote from the book ``Bloodlands.''

       Boys from another school pulled out the severed head of a 
     classmate while fishing in a pond. His whole family had died. 
     Had they eaten him first? Or had he survived the deaths of 
     his parents only to be killed by a cannibal? No one knew; but 
     such questions were commonplace for the children of Ukraine 
     in 1933. Yet cannibalism was sometimes a victimless crime. 
     Some mothers and fathers killed their children and ate them. 
     But other parents asked their children to make use of their 
     own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child 
     had to tell a brother or sister: ``Mother says we should eat 
     her if she dies.''

  Additionally:

       In January 1933, Stalin, writes Snyder, sealed Ukraine's 
     borders so peasants could not escape and sealed the cities so 
     peasants could not go there to beg. By spring, more than 
     10,000 Ukrainians were dying each day, more than the 6,000 
     Jews who perished daily in Auschwitz at the peak of 
     extermination in the spring of 1944.
       Snyder is judicious about estimates of Ukrainian deaths 
     from hunger and related diseases, settling on an educated 
     guess of approximately 3.3 million from 1932 to 1933. He says 
     that when ``the Soviet census of 1937 found 8 million fewer 
     people than projected,'' many of the missing being victims of 
     starvation in Ukraine and elsewhere, and the children that 
     those adults did not have, Stalin ``had the responsible 
     demographers executed.''

  Ukraine was hell on Earth.
  With the able assistance of Ukrainian Museum and Archives in 
Cleveland, Ohio, and its incredible resident scholar Andrew Fedynsky, 
let us take a look back before we look forward.
  Beginning with the year 1933, as millions of Ukrainians were dying of 
starvation at the hands of their own government in its forced famine 
genocide, that terror has gone down in history as the Holodomor, murder 
by famine; yet few in America or anywhere noted them, even fewer spoke 
out, to condemn the extinction as American and other western companies 
were working with the Soviet Government to realize its 20th century 
industrialization campaign glorified recently at the Sochi Olympics.
  Soviet industrialization was paid for by the sale of grain brutally 
seized

[[Page H2898]]

from peasants--or Kulaks--who paid dearly for Soviet progress--so-
called progress--with their lives by the millions.
  Much of the U.S. media at the time either ignored the catastrophe or 
actually collaborated with Stalin to cover up that genocide. For this 
contortion of truth, The New York Times reporter Walter Duranty was 
awarded the Pulitzer Prize, one of the worst instances of the denial of 
truth in the history of journalism.

                              {time}  1715

  During this fateful period, the United States chose to recognize the 
Soviet Bolshevik Government. It was not until 50 years later, through 
legislation I introduced as a first-term Member of Congress in 1983 in 
this House, that Congress authored the creation of the Commission on 
the Ukraine Famine to finally acknowledge and recognize the extinction 
of millions of innocent lives in Ukraine. That ink remains wet on the 
pages of history.
  But to return to the World War II years, by 1938, when Nazi Germany 
forcibly annexed Austria, in what was termed the Anschluss, too many in 
the West took at face value Adolph Hitler's assurances that he was 
merely reuniting German-speaking people.
  That same year, Nazi Germany proceeded to annex Czechoslovakia's 
Sudetenland, as the West negotiated what was called ``Peace in Our 
Time,'' accepting Hitler's assurances that this was the extent of his 
ambitions. When his militarized Wehrmacht took over the rest of 
Czechoslovakia, there was no security response from the West, only 
petulant words.
  Then came 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly 
invaded neighboring Poland in September of that year. Verbally, France 
and Britain condemned the aggression, but then did nothing. It was only 
after Hitler turned against his Soviet ally in 1941 and invaded France 
that the West took the threat seriously. By that time, hundreds of 
thousands had already been killed. Millions more would die as Nazi 
Germany and Soviet Russia divided Poland, killing 20 percent of its 
people, a higher percentage than any other nation engaged in World War 
II, and began the outsized carnage that carved up Europe between their 
dictatorships.
  By 1944, in a valiant fight to the death struggle, the Polish Home 
Army, the Armia Krajowa, rose up in a 63-day heroic battle to liberate 
Warsaw from Nazi occupation. Across the Vistula River, the nearby Red 
Army refused to join the struggle and instead stood by as Poland's 
hopelessly outnumbered warriors died. This June in Poland will mark the 
70th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising.
  Then, in 1945, immediately after the end of World War II, the United 
States, France, and Germany withdrew their recognition of the long-
suffering Polish Government in exile, which had been established after 
the Nazi-Soviet invasion in September 1939. The West opted in favor of 
recognizing the Soviet-imposed government that would forcibly rule half 
of Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, after which began 
a disassembly of that brutal system of Soviet human domination. And I 
might add, it was Poland and her spies that broke the Nazi code, and 
yet this is what the governments of the West did to Poland.
  At the end of World War II, in 1945, at the Yalta Conference, 
ironically held in Crimea, the heads of governments of the United 
States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, headed by Franklin 
Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, met for the purpose of 
determining Europe's postwar configuration. Their fateful agreement 
cordoned off and consigned Central Europe to the yoke of oppression for 
half a century more, subjugating millions. How many tens of thousands 
more died within the confines of the Soviet Union? Only God knows.
  In furtherance of repressive rule, between 1945 and 1948, the Soviets 
forcibly imposed puppet regimes across their captive nations like 
Poland, absorbed them into their empire, and repeated this pattern in 
nearly a dozen other Central and Eastern European countries through 
military occupation, government censorship, mass arrests, and rigged 
elections as an Iron Curtain separated the free world and the 
subjugated. That was the world that I and millions of liberty-loving 
people grew up in.
  In 1956, the Hungarian people became the first to bravely rise up to 
cast off the boot of communism and assert their human rights. The 
Soviet Union dispatched armed tanks, brutally invaded, and imposed mass 
arrests and executions. You can still see the shots in the buildings 
inside of Budapest when you travel there. You can see the marks of what 
those tanks did.
  Roman Catholic Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty was forced to take 
protective refuge in the U.S. Embassy, where he remained for 15 years 
in Budapest as a global symbol of noble defiance against Soviet 
repression and a distant hope that life could change for the better.
  The ugly pattern of national theft repeated in 1968 when the Czechs 
and Slovaks moved to restore freedom in their country. The Soviets 
invaded again with mass arrests and reimposed their brutal rule.
  Starting in 1959, throughout this era of forced nationhood, U.S. and 
Western support for shortwave Radio Free Europe broadcasts across these 
captured nations gave hope to the people of Central and Eastern Europe, 
held as prisoners in their own lands.
  When, a decade later, in 1978, Roman Catholic Cardinal Karl Wojtyla 
of Poland was elected Pope, he became the first non-Italian Pontiff 
from Central Europe, taking the name John Paul II. His incredible life 
story in building a religious alternative to the communist dictatorship 
in his homeland reawakened the worldwide effort to defeat Soviet 
communism.
  An enlivened Solidarity movement that had begun during the 1950s in 
Poland through courageous labor activists spread to Lithuania's Sajudis 
and Ukraine's Helsinki Monitoring Group. America's AFL-CIO, along with 
united bipartisan support of our government, our Atlantic allies in 
NATO, and the American public who understood liberty's struggle hung in 
the balance, remained firm as the cold war tested our resolve.
  In 1986, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Ukraine, exposed the 
incompetence and bankruptcy of the Soviet system as the Soviet 
Government ordered hundreds of unprotected workers into that 
radioactive zone, consigning them to certain death. The work of a few 
brave activists from that horror evolved into a citizen's movement that 
matured into a forum for popular expression.
  By 1989, as the Soviet economy finally collapsed, propelled by its 
ill-fated decision to wage war in Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall dividing 
East and West came crashing down as students from Europe danced on the 
wall, and we could see Central and East European nations one at a time 
begin to regain their independent, sovereignty, and chance--chance--for 
freedom.
  Then in 1991, 46 years after the end of World War II, the Soviet 
Union itself collapsed. And in its Ukrainian Republic, more than 90 
percent of Ukrainians voted to become an independent nation, including 
over half of the people in Crimea.
  In an act of complete demilitarization in 1994, independent Ukraine 
gave up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Inasmuch as 
these weapons were intended to be used against the United States and 
other Western countries, this gesture immeasurably enhanced American 
security and world peace. In return, the United States, the United 
Kingdom, and Russia provided assurances for Ukraine's independence, its 
territorial integrity, its freedom and economic viability contained in 
the operative document known as the Budapest Memorandum.
  For two decades, the people of Ukraine, digging out of deep 
repression, have fought to build forward a nation that can govern, 
feed, and educate its people. They surely dream of becoming the great 
nation of which they are fully capable, a borderland nation reaching in 
all directions, west and east and south and north. Ukraine's potential 
is unlimited. She is already the third largest exporter of grain on the 
face of the Earth.

  But in this new century, the same country of Ukraine found itself in 
a timeless struggle to elect honorable public officials that would 
treat people with dignity. Those who assumed power too often stole from 
the people. Others like President Victor Yushchenko were poisoned as he 
tried

[[Page H2899]]

to transition Ukraine to a modern state. Other leaders were imprisoned. 
And the latest kleptocratic government, just deposed, stole billions 
from its own nation, threatening economic growth and democratic 
progress.
  As negotiations to include Ukraine in an economic trade union with 
Europe were nearly complete last year, the now-deposed, disgraced 
President Viktor Yanukovych rejected the agreement, triggering mass 
demonstrations across the nation. The only power the people there have 
is to stand up and speak out for themselves.
  So, in 2013 and this year, we saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians 
begin demonstrating when their government, reacting to Russian economic 
and political coercion, reneged on its commitment to sign the 
Association Agreement with Europe. I say to the American people, if you 
had lived the lives of their great-grandparents, their grandparents, 
their parents, would you have had the courage to stand in the 
Euromaidan, would you have had the courage to stand there against the 
Berkut, against the police that had weapons and you had nothing, 
nothing but your voice?
  The peaceful Euromaidan movement was shattered by government-led 
violence, scores of deaths and injuries, the ultimate impeachment of a 
corrupt President who fled his post and his country when mass killings 
made it impossible for him to stay. His kleptocratic thievery from his 
own people disgraced him and his administration for all the world to 
see.
  Under Ukraine's constitution, Ukraine's legislative branch, their 
Rada, their congress, passed succession legislation to elect a new 
President, a new Prime Minister, and a speaker on an interim basis 
until free elections can be held this May 25, not long from now.
  With Ukraine's eastern region of Crimea now invaded illegally by 
Russian aggressors, with its sovereignty and territorial integrity 
violated, and with Crimea forcibly annexed by Russia through a phony 
election, one must ask why the Atlantic Alliance and NATO, for two 
decades, left Ukraine largely undefended without a military security 
umbrella.
  What is liberty worth? Have too many people become too middle class 
to understand the principle of liberty? She stands atop the dome of 
this Capitol, the Statue of Freedom. It is more than a statue. It is 
how we live. It is what we stand for. It is why the world respects us.
  Is Ukraine to be a nation perpetually stuck in a time warp of history 
repeating itself? How many more have to die? Do the Budapest Accords 
mean nothing? Do the words mean nothing on the pages on which they are 
written?
  This past week, this House distinguished itself by passing two 
measures relating to Ukraine that place our Nation squarely in 
liberty's corner at this time of testing. Make no mistake; this is a 
time of testing. Yet the United Nations, our world's institution 
charged with assigning peacekeeping forces to troubled hotspots, seems 
frozen due to the power of Russia's veto inside the Security Council.
  Can our world community of nations muster the will to meet this 
latest threat to liberty? The question is: Can a dictatorship acting 
unilaterally overrule the aspirations for liberty?
  American and international commitments have to mean what they say. 
History shows us that ignoring the word and substance of those precious 
documents leads to ever greater challenges ending with potential 
catastrophe. But international agreements aside, it is a moral 
obligation of our world community of nations to stand with Ukraine 
based alone on her tragically brutal history to which her people were 
subjected over the last century. No people on Earth, no place on Earth 
suffered more.
  So I say to the world community of nations and liberty lovers 
everywhere: Where do you stand? Where do you stand diplomatically, 
economically, politicly, and militarily? I say to the world community 
of nations and liberty lovers everywhere: Where do you stand?
  A new diplomatic and security architecture is needed to strengthen 
Ukraine's precarious situation. Her people long for liberty. They have 
sung to the world, yet they remain undefended against the worst 
aggression since the fall of the communist empire.

                              {time}  1730

  Ukraine--her people--have earned her right for a better day. It is 
not only in Ukraine's interest, it is in our interest. It is in the 
interest of what we stand for as the oldest democratic republic on the 
face of the Earth, yet one of her youngest nations.
  William Faulkner's writings remind us:

       The past is never dead. It is not even past.

  So I say to those who are listening this evening that Russia's 
brutality with Ukraine is nothing new. The question for us is: What do 
we stand for? What does this country stand for? What can our leadership 
provide to the world community of nations to give this great country of 
Ukraine, whose potential is unlimited, the chance for liberty in this 
new millennium?
  May God bless America, and may God bless those who understand the 
price of liberty.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 17, 2014]

             Russia's Brutality With Ukraine Is Nothing New

                          (By George F. Will)

       ``Boys from another school pulled out the severed head of a 
     classmate while fishing in a pond. His whole family had died. 
     Had they eaten him first? Or had he survived the deaths of 
     his parents only to be killed by a cannibal? No one knew; but 
     such questions were commonplace for the children of Ukraine 
     in 1933. . . . Yet cannibalism was, sometimes, a victimless 
     crime. Some mothers and fathers killed their children and ate 
     them. . . . But other parents asked their children to make 
     use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one 
     Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: `Mother says 
     that we should eat her if she dies.' ''
       --Timothy Snyder, ``Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and 
     Stalin'' (2010)
       While Vladimir Putin, Stalin's spawn, ponders what to do 
     with what remains of Ukraine, remember: Nine years before the 
     January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the Nazis embarked 
     on industrialized genocide, Stalin deliberately inflicted 
     genocidal starvation on Ukraine.
       To fathom the tangled forces, including powerful ones of 
     memory, at work in that singularly tormented place, begin 
     with Timothy Snyder's stunning book. Secretary of State John 
     Kerry has called Russia's invasion of Ukraine ``a 19th-
     century act in the 21st century.'' Snyder reminds us that 
     ``Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific 
     numbers in the middle of the 20th century.'' Here is Snyder's 
     distillation of a Welsh journalist's description of a 
     Ukrainian city: ``People appeared at 2 o'clock in the morning 
     to queue in front of shops that did not open until 7. On an 
     average day 40,000 people would wait for bread. Those in line 
     were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling 
     to the belts of those immediately in front of them . . . . 
     The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. . . . 
     Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would 
     echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of 
     thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental 
     fear.''
       This, which occurred about as close to Paris as Washington 
     is to Denver, was an engineered famine, the intended result 
     of Stalin's decision that agriculture should be collectivized 
     and the ``kulaks''--prosperous farmers--should be 
     ``liquidated as a class.'' In January 1933, Stalin, writes 
     Snyder, sealed Ukraine's borders so peasants could not escape 
     and sealed the cities so peasants could not go there to beg. 
     By spring, more than 10,000 Ukrainians were dying each day, 
     more than the 6,000 Jews who perished daily in Auschwitz at 
     the peak of extermination in the spring of 1944.
       Soon many Ukrainian children resembled ``embryos out of 
     alcohol bottles'' (Arthur Koestler's description) and there 
     were, in Snyder's words, ``roving bands of cannibals'': ``In 
     the villages smoke coming from a cottage chimney was a 
     suspicious sign, since it tended to mean that cannibals were 
     eating a kill or that families were roasting one of their 
     members.''
       Snyder, a Yale historian, is judicious about estimates of 
     Ukrainian deaths from hunger and related diseases, settling 
     on an educated guess of approximately 3.3 million, in 1932-
     33. He says that when ``the Soviet census of 1937 found 8 
     million fewer people than projected,'' many of the missing 
     being victims of starvation in Ukraine and elsewhere (and the 
     children they did not have), Stalin ``had the responsible 
     demographers executed.''
       Putin, who was socialized in the Soviet-era KGB apparatus 
     of oppression, aspires to reverse the Soviet Union's 
     collapse, which he considers ``the greatest geopolitical 
     catastrophe of the [20th] century.'' Herewith a final 
     description from Snyder of the consequences of the Soviet 
     system, the passing of which Putin so regrets:
       ``One spring morning, amidst the piles of dead peasants at 
     the Kharkiv market, an infant suckled the breast of its 
     mother, whose face was a lifeless gray. Passersby had seen 
     this before . . . that precise scene, the tiny

[[Page H2900]]

     mouth, the last drops of milk, the cold nipple. The 
     Ukrainians had a term for this. They said to themselves, 
     quietly, as they passed: `These are the buds of the socialist 
     spring.' ''
       U.S. policymakers, having allowed their wishes to father 
     their thoughts, find Putin incomprehensible. He is a 
     barbarian but not a monster, and hence no Stalin. But he has 
     been coarsened, in ways difficult for civilized people to 
     understand, by certain continuities, institutional and 
     emotional, with an almost unimaginably vicious past. And as 
     Ukraine, a bubbling stew of tensions and hatreds, struggles 
     with its identity and aspirations, Americans should warily 
     remember William Faulkner's aphorism: ``The past is never 
     dead. It's not even past.''

                          ____________________