TWO

A MORE recent forebear, Boris Bibikov, had been a leading member of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and was one of those who made the fateful decision to speak out internally about the horrendous suffering inflicted on Ukrainians as a result of Stalin’s brutal application of “agricultural collectivisation”, in which up to 7 million starved to death: Boris Bibikov, holder of the Order of Lenin, met his own end in Stalin’s purge of the Communist party in 1937.

It is the memory of the mass starvation of the 1930s – the Holodomor, as it is called in Ukraine – which helps explain the ferocity and passion with which the nation is resisting Moscow today.

Within Russia, the so-called “special military operation” has been described by Putin and his propagandists as an attempt to rescue Russian-speaking Ukrainians from “Nazis” – playing on the fact that many in Ukraine celebrate the memory of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who had seen the Nazis as allies in the fight for independence from Moscow.

However, as Matthews points out, not only is Ukraine’s president Zelensky Jewish, with family members exterminated by the Nazis, but he also records the head of a “major Russian TV Channel, who has worked with the Kremlin for over 20 years” describing Zelensky to Matthews as “an annoying little Jew playing at politics”.

And disturbingly, the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-funded private army now at the front line in Ukraine, was founded by Dmitry Utkin: a Russian who sports Nazi eagle tattoos and who chose the name [of the group] because Richard Wagner was Hitler’s favourite composer. Last May the German Federal Intelligence Service revealed that the Wagner group had extensively recruited “Russian right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis”.

Yet, most Russians – whose sense of national pride understandably rests on their country’s military role in the annihilation of the Third Reich – seem to swallow Putin’s lies whole. They need to believe them.

This causes Matthews anguish. He writes: “Putin’s propaganda machine did work – at least in so far as it produced a wide, publicly accepted consensus in favour of the war.

“The simple truth is that Putin did speak for most Russians. That might be depressing for me, my Russian wife and most of my Russian friends. But the fact that we wished it were not true did not make it so.”

Hitherto, the book was written before the extraordinary late autumn counter-attack, when Ukrainian forces swept east at high speed and even recaptured Kherson, the only regional capital which had fallen to Moscow in the initial invasion.

Many people may suspect that the majority of Russians, while now probably much more anxious about the progress of the war, will still feel that the action was justified against the non-existent Ukrainian “Nazis”.

Later in the book, Matthews similarly recounts a meeting with a Russian state TV editor, Anna Bondarenko (which is a Ukrainian name), in which she “seemed to blame me personally for sanctions and for provoking the war”; and when he asks Bondarenko about her relatives in Ukraine, she retorts: “Oh, they’ve all become fascists.”

There will be many more books on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but Owen Matthews’ extraordinary perspective has produced an interim account of special value.