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.

The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Lakeville Journal and The Journal does not support or oppose candidates for public office.

Latest News

All are welcome at The Mahaiwe

Paquito D’Rivera performs at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington on April 5.

Geandy Pavon

Natalia Bernal is the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center’s education and community engagement manager and is, in her own words, “the one who makes sure that Mahaiwe events are accessible to all.”

The Mahaiwe’s community engagement program is rooted in the belief that the performing arts should be for everyone. “We are committed to establishing and growing partnerships with neighboring community and arts organizations to develop pathways for overcoming social and practical barriers,” Bernal explained. “Immigrants, people of color, communities with low income, those who have traditionally been underserved in the performing arts, should feel welcomed at the Mahaiwe.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Living with the things you love:
a conversation with Mary Randolph Carter
Mary Randolph Carter teaches us to surround ourselves with what matters to live happily ever after.
Carter Berg

There is magic in a home filled with the things we love, and Mary Randolph Carter, affectionately known as “Carter,” has spent a lifetime embracing that magic. Her latest book, “Live with the Things You Love … and You’ll Live Happily Ever After,” is about storytelling, joy, and honoring life’s poetry through the objects we keep.

“This is my tenth book,” Carter said. “At the root of each is my love of collecting, the thrill of the hunt, and living surrounded by things that conjure up family, friends, and memories.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Beloved classic film ‘The Red Shoes’ comes to the big screen for Triplex benefit
Provided

On Saturday, April 5, at 3 p.m., The Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington and Jacob’s Pillow, the dance festival in Becket, Massachusetts, are presenting a special benefit screening of the cinematic masterpiece, “The Red Shoes,” followed by a discussion and Q&A. Featuring guest speakers Norton Owen, director of preservation at Jacob’s Pillow, and dance historian Lynn Garafola, the event is a fundraiser for The Triplex.

“We’re pitching in, as it were, because we like to help our neighbors,” said Norton. “They (The Triplex) approached us with the idea, wanting some input if they were going to do a dance film. I thought of Lynn as the perfect person also to include in this because of her knowledge of The Ballets Russes and the book that she wrote about Diaghilev. There is so much in this film, even though it’s fictional, that derives from the Ballets Russes.” Garafola, the leading expert on the Ballets Russes under Serge Diaghilev, 1909–1929, the most influential company in twentieth-century theatrical dance, said, “We see glimpses of that Russian émigré tradition, performances we don’t see much of today. The film captures the artifice of ballet, from the behind-the-scenes world of dressers and conductors to the sheer passion of the audience.”

Keep ReadingShow less