peasement mentality continues among many in high places in the West-and even in
our own community. All too many say, “That was Stalin. That was fifty years ago. Things are different now.” Were that but true!

Fifty years ago, more than seven million Ukrainians were killed in Stalin’s massive Holocaust, which in numbers and terror far exceeded that of Hitler, whose name now symbolizes the term. But for Ukrainians, the Holocaust continues today. Systematic purges of anyone expressing any views of nationalism or freedom take place continually in the Soviet Union. In 1968, when many Ukrainians began to identify with their neighbors to the west, with the freedom being expressed in the famous “Czecho-Slovakian Spring”, many hundreds, even thousands of Ukrainians who spoke or wrote of freedom were summarily seized and with or without trial were sentenced to long terms of prison, slave labor and exile. Many did not survive. Today, well authenticated reports show that of the political prisoners, inmates of the Gulag Archipelago system of slave labor camps, the largest numbers are Ukrainians who ask only freedom for their own land and people.

For those unfamiliar with its meaning, the word “Russification” may sound a little too nice to be what it actually means in human terms. Russification has been and remains the policy of Moscow and Russia toward the Ukrainians and all other national minorities in the country. In 1870, Minister of Education Lev Tolstoy said: The ultimate goal in the education of the non-Russians must be their Russification and assimilation within the Russian nation.”

A few years later, the famous Russian novelist, Feodor Dostoyevsky, wrote: “All people should become Russian, and Russian above all else, because the Russian nationall idea is universal…”

One hundred years later, we hear another famous Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from his exile in America, saying much the same things in his dream of a future Russia—his Russia.

For Yuri Andropov and the Russian rulers in the Kremlin, any manifestation of nationalism is viewed as a direct and serious threat to Russian communist ideology— the evil mortar that keeps the whole structure of communism together. Nationalism is a basic threat because it denies the idea that communism is an international unifying force. More simply, as long as there is one Ukrainian nationalist anywhere making a claim for his nation and its rights, communism is threatened. In a moment of unusual candor, Lenin said, “Scratch a communist, and you’ll wound a Great Russian chauvinist.” Today, as for well over three hundred years, there is but only policy for the Moscow masters-crush the Ukrainians and Russify them!

That is the fact, the truth, the terrible reality of life in Ukraine today.

I do not feel that you invited me in order to hear either vacuous platitudes or wildly optimistic forecasts about freedom for Ukraine. As something of a concerned specialist, and one who watches the pattern of world events fairly closely, I would be less than candid were I to say that today there is a bright light at the end of the long dark Ukrainian tunnel There are many negative signs, perhaps the most important, the destruction of the Helsinki Watch Committees.
On the other hand, slowly but surely there is among Americans and others in the free world a growing recognition of the fact that in the freedom and independence of