Family history collides with current events in Ukraine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is not only ongoing but with every passing day is revealing further and worse atrocities by the invaders, is a torment for most Americans, who feel the unjustness of the invasion and the horrors that Ukrainians are going through.  Few things have united Americans, these past few years, as much as the current disapproval of Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Russia’s neighbor, and also a concurrent appreciation for the strength and courage of Ukrainians in resisting one of the world’s mightiest armies.

The Ukrainian crisis reverberates with me especially, on several grounds.

The first is that my paternal grandparents were both born near Kyiv in the 1880s, and came of age there before fleeing to America, where they met and married in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1905 and produced five children.  When today I see the televised and still photos of current-day Ukrainians, I find strong resemblances to my paternal cousins.

But there is more to that connection, for me.  Oizer and Polya behaved in America as most immigrants of that era did, working hard to assimilate and evincing no nostalgia for the old country. For instance, in their Midwest home they refused to speak Russian in front of the children, only English, to make sure that it became the children’s native tongue.

The second connection, for me, is that my grandfather, Oizer Shachtman, became a noted anti-Communist, in the 1920s, way ahead of when most other Americans did so.  A fur-cutter by trade, he had risen to become international president of the Fur-Workers in 1926 — only to be immediately immersed in a battle, tied to a long strike, in which the union was taken over by Communists, led by a man named Ben Gold.  A quarter-century later, Gold would admit to having been not only an American Communist but also a member of the international governing board of the Communist Party, headquartered in Moscow. The Fur-Workers strike of 1926 held the headlines for many weeks, to the point that Oizer became a named figure in them.

Those stories did not say so, but I later learned that Oizer had clashed with the Communists before, as a teenager in Kyiv, when he was a member of the Bund, an international workers union that eventually fell afoul of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

Soon after the 1926 strike was over, Gold’s band deposed Oizer as head of the union, and proceeded to make the Fur-Workers into one of the most left-leaning in the U.S., one that seemed very good to its workers but from which Gold and others, including gangster Lepke Buchalter — the head of Murder, Inc. — took a lot of money.

In 1927, as a result of Oizer’s losing the power struggle, he became an avowed anti-Communist, remaining so through the rest of his life.  He had many clashes with his children on that score, well before Soviet massacres and exterminations became public knowledge; and he also clashed with another Shachtman, Max Shachtman, who in the 1930s became the leader of the Trotskyites. It was with bitter amusement that Oizer watched the brilliant Max move steadily from hard-core Communism to become the leader of the intellectual groups who in the 1950s became vociferously anti-Stalin and eventually, full anti-Communists.

As I grew up and became somewhat liberal in my understandings of the world, I never forgot my grandfather’s insistence on the evils done by Communism.

My third story involves Edmund Pope, a retired Navy veteran who as a specialist in transfer of technologies between the former Soviet Union and the West was on his umpteenth visit to Moscow in the summer of 2000 when the new Russian leader, the former KGB man Vladimir Putin, had Ed arrested and put on trial as an American spy — a show trial, if there ever was one. Ed was convicted, but through the efforts of many Americans in the intelligence community, plus public pressure, was released on humanitarian grounds, as Ed had a rare cancer. I was introduced to Ed as he came home, and we quickly wrote a book together.

As Ed made very clear to me, Putin had not been after him, per se, but had put this Russian-loving American on trial as a way of unifying Russians against Americans and providing a path to even greater accumulations of power to resurrect the Stalin-era reach of the Soviet Union. As Ed emphasized to me last week in an email, it is not simply Putin’s terrible invasion of Ukraine that is at stake in the current conflict, it is his attempt to use the subjugation of Ukraine as a path to restoring Russian power over all of Eastern Europe, in a way not seen since the last of the czars.   

Tom Shachtman is the author of more than a dozen American and world histories and of documentaries seen on all the major networks. He lives in Salisbury.