Ukraine and Israel: Two Stalinist Remnants
We’re going to blow up the world for this?
By Richard C. Cook, Co-Founder and Lead Analyst, American Geopolitical Institute. Author, Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023)
September 20, 2024
Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill:
Toward the end of World War II, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin were the two most powerful men in the world.
It was the Soviet Union’s Red Army under Stalin that brought final defeat to the German Wehrmacht and had taken over almost all of Eastern Europe. Held back by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from launching its assault on France until D-Day, the U.S. Army nevertheless advanced to meet the Soviets at the Elbe River just west of Berlin.
Roosevelt was no friend of Churchill. Roosevelt saw the British Empire as a relic of history to be gotten rid of as soon as possible, with Britain soon being forced to grant independence to most of its colonies, including the imperial crown jewel of India.
Roosevelt and Stalin were as close to being friends as two such dissimilar figures could be. We know that Roosevelt’s administration was heavily staffed by Soviet sympathizers. Through Lend-Lease, the U.S. had quietly aided the building of the Soviet military machine so that it would be ready for Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion in June 1941.
Then in June1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, less than a month after D-Day, Roosevelt’s negotiators succeeded in making the U.S. dollar the world’s predominant currency, displacing the British pound.
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, not only did Roosevelt agree to meet on Stalin’s home turf in Crimea, but he also gave de facto recognition to the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe, though Stalin did promise elections that were never held. Another agreement at Yalta was to create the United Nations, where the Soviet Union was given a seat on the Security Council of equal status with the U.S., Britain, France, and Nationalist China. (In China, the government of Chiang Kai-Shek was overthrown by Mao’s communists in 1949.)
Meanwhile, all Churchill could do was watch and fume. This had not been the plan. Churchill had every reason to hope that when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the two totalitarian nations would destroy each other. Now Stalin stood like a colossus over half of Europe. And Roosevelt was going along.
Truman, Britain, and the National Security State
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, two months after Yalta and a month before V-E day. Now Harry S. Truman, a virtual unknown on the world stage, was president. In what was a virtual palace coup, the pro-British forces within the administration took over.
Truman was a cipher who first obeyed instructions in dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Before he became president, Truman had not even been told about the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb.
The purpose was not to force Japan to surrender—the Japanese were already prostate. Rather it was much more likely to warn and intimidate the Soviet Union. (After the war, a faction within the U.S. military wanted to nuke the Soviet Union immediately.)
Over the next three years, Truman enacted all of the measures needed to create what became the permanent National Security State, including formal establishment of the CIA through the National Security Act of 1947. But what many historians view as the start of the Cold War and U.S./British disengagement from the Soviets as erstwhile World War II allies, was Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri.
It was also the British who took the lead in prevailing on the U.S. to fund the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, including West Germany, starting in 1948 and in bringing NATO into existence as an anti-Soviet alliance in April 1949. Finally, in June 1950 came the start of the Korean War, with armed conflict between the West and the Communist Bloc now the focal point of worldwide geopolitical affairs from then on.
Stalin’s Reaction and the Creation of Ukraine
Stalin reacted to the U.S./British actions with near-panic. Elections in the occupied Eastern European nations were cancelled, with single-party governments under the various national communist parties installed. These were backed by Red Army occupational forces. Yugoslavia also became a communist state allied with the Soviets under wartime leader Josip Broz Tito. In Greece, a communist uprising led to civil war from 1946-1949, leading there to a pro-Western government but an armed conflict nonetheless, one that left Greece in ruins.
In reaction to NATO, the Soviets created their own alliance, the Warsaw Pact, fully in place by 1955. The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty established by the Soviet Union and seven other Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
The Soviets had already incorporated a tier of states along its western border that formerly had varying degrees of independence. These became “republics” within the overall framework of the USSR, including the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to the north, Belorussia, or White Russia, further south, followed by the vast region of Ukraine, then the smaller entity of Moldova. These were all countries that became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-1991.
The most problematic of these newly-formed nations was Ukraine, cobbled together by the Soviets from 1922 to 1954 from various antecedents, including the original Russian homeland around the one-time capital of Kiev. Much of eastern Ukraine consisted of lands conquered by Catherine the Great and peopled with ethnic Russians.
The richness of Ukrainian farmland is legendary and long formed one of the great breadbaskets of Eastern Europe, regardless of who the rulers were. During the period of the Russian Empire, millions of prosperous peasant farmers formed the core of a stable society. Lying east of the line of the Great Schism of 1054 C.E., Ukraine’s population was largely Slavic and Orthodox.
During the 1930s, the Soviet government converted the vast agricultural domains of the Soviet Union to highly mechanized collective farms. The result in Ukraine was the Holodomor, literally “death by hunger,” or the Ukrainian Famine. The death toll is estimated today at around four million, with the Red Army being stationed at Ukraine’s borders to shoot those trying to escape.
The Holodomor saw peasant uprisings and a Ukrainian nationalist movement that continued to feed anti-Russian sentiment before and during today’s conflict. During World War II, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and by December 1941 all of Ukraine was under German occupation. Ukrainian nationalists welcomed the Germans as did some public figures and church leaders. However, most of Ukraine’s territory was transferred into a Reich Kommissariat Ukraine and placed under German martial law.
Germany had made seizure of Ukraine one of the main objectives of Operation Barbarossa, with the intent of having Ukraine’s abundant agricultural productivity available to support the growing German population which Hitler intended to settle on Eastern European land. Large numbers of Jews, along with Russians, Poles, and Belarusians, were subjected to massacres during the war.
Ukraine was also part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire, where Jews could live and work. Jews of Ukraine and Poland carried out large migrations to America, then to Israel, in the late 19th-20th centuries, lasting in Israel to the 1990s. As examples, many of the leaders of the Neocon faction within the U.S. are descendants of Ukrainian Jews, such as the Kagan family, as is the Illinois Priztker family that is prominent in Democratic Party politics. Former Department of State official Victoria Nuland is married to Neocon leader Robert Kagan, a founder of the Project for a New American Century.
In Western Ukraine are large numbers of people of Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, and other extractions, many becoming Soviet citizens only with the post-World War II redrawing of the map when Ukraine itself became a confusing mixture of nationalities, ethnicities, and religions.
In February 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union transferred the Crimean Peninsula from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
This was a measure said to be taken by Soviet Premier Khrushchev for “administrative” purposes. What it would later mean was that the giant Soviet Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol would be part of Ukraine when it gained its independence in 1991. Crimea would stay that way until Russia re-annexed it after the 2014 Maidan coup.
Today’s Ukraine Mess
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Ukraine, Ukraine quickly became a mess.
The various factions within what was now one of the largest and most heavily industrialized parts of Europe, along with a rich agricultural heartland, competed for dominance. This included Neo-Nazis left over from collaboration with Germany.
The lines of conflict were drawn partly along the lines of pro-Russian vs. pro-Western influences. In fact, from the very end of World War II, Western intelligence services were at work in Ukraine, trying to swing the country in their favor.
The West seemed to gain the upper hand through the U.S.-sponsored “Maidan” coup in 2014, leading to the creation of today’s regime. After 2014, with NATO arming and training the Ukrainian military, the situation soon devolved into an assault on the eastern Russian-speaking provinces, the Donbas.
Russia responded by invading Ukraine in its February 2022 Special Military Operation. The West came to the Ukrainian government’s aid with weapons, funding, and anti-Russian sanctions, all to no avail as Russia’s industrialized military machine is now close to defeating Ukraine’s forces. The West also suppressed any Ukrainian interest in negotiating with Russia.
Vlodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish and has said he wants Ukraine to become “the ‘big Israel’ with its own face.” Under his presidency, well over 100,000 Ukrainians, mainly gentiles, have died in the war. Some say the death toll is much higher—600,000 to one million. An additional six million or more Ukrainians have emigrated. Persecutions against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have also become common.
The question now is whether Ukraine and its Western sponsors will accept defeat and move to a settlement with Russia based on agreement that what is left of Ukraine will stay out of NATO as a demilitarized neutral state, or whether Ukraine’s backers, mainly in Britain and the U.S., will go off the deep end and continue provoking Russia until a hot nuclear war results in Europe or beyond.
The Soviet Role in Creating Israel
I have no intention of reprising the entire history of Israel here. I will touch on the pertinent highlights, but I will add that I do not believe in concepts such as the “Chosen People,” etc. which I view as totally imaginary. I believe that every human being on the planet is divine in their essence, though it is up to each of us to develop that potential, and that helpers have been sent, some of whom have lived in a mortal form, to assist. For more on this topic, See here.
I do not believe that an individual’s worth derives from his or her race, religion, nationality, level of education or income, social or occupational rank, or popularity. I believe one’s worth derives solely from one’s deeds. Thus a person who appears inconspicuous or unknown may objectively be worth more than a president, general, movie star, media personage, or billionaire.
Nor do I believe that past wrongs to my ancestors give me the right to exact retribution from others. I have Anglo-Saxon ancestors whose lands were stolen by the Normans in 1066. Do I have a right to attack the present King of England? I have Native American ancestors of whom millions died at the hands of European invaders. Do I have a right now to steal the property of these invaders’ descendants? I also have Jewish relations through my extended family, and I am glad that so many Jews have found their own “Promised Land” in America. I don’t expect any payback for that.
I am also very familiar with the history of the Zionist movement but wish to point out that it was the British during the 19th century who first came up with the idea of declaring Palestine a Jewish homeland. This was before Jewish Zionism even existed. The purpose was to gain control of the southern terminus of the “Mackinder Line,” extending from the Baltic Sea to the Levantine Coast, in order to have dominion over the Eurasian heartland. For more on this history, See here.
The Zionist movement picked up speed after the British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Britain obtained Palestine as a League of Nations “mandate” after the Treaty of Versailles brought World War I to an end.
The problem then for the Zionist leaders was that Jews did not want to move to Palestine. Conditions were not great for farming, there were no jobs, and the indigenous Arab population did not want them. So during the 1930s, particularly with the worldwide economic slowdown, the Zionist project was looking at failure.
In particular, American Jews, who had assimilated peacefully and happily in large numbers had virtually no interest in moving to Palestine, though some were willing to donate money to help European Jews who might emigrate. But even then, most European Jews who wanted to leave Europe were going to America. (When Hitler came to power he made an agreement with Zionist leaders to aid Jews in emigrating to Palestine.)
Then came World War II, during which large numbers of European Jews lost their lives. Note, however, that within the Soviet Union, far more Christians than Jews had lost their lives during and after the Bolshevik Revolution that was largely run by Jews. See here.
At some point toward the end of World War II, the decision was made for an army of Jews to travel from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to seize Palestine from its Arab inhabitants and establish the state of Israel. Because there were so few Jews remaining in Western Europe or living in America who wanted to move to Israel, those in charge resorted to scouring the refugee camps of Eastern Europe to find individuals who could literally be drafted and forced to go. See here.
The invading Jews first fought against the British who were still holding Palestine as a mandate, now under the UN, then seized the lands of the Arab occupants, massacred thousands, and drove 700,000 off their land into refugee camps. This is called the Nakba. It has been going on ever since but became much worse after the events of October 7, 2023.
A hypothesis
I now want to present a hypothesis, knowing it is just that—a hypothesis.
We know that at some point in the early history of the Soviet Union, Stalin decided to purge that element of the original Bolsheviks and their successors who favored worldwide revolution. One name for this faction was the “Trotskyites.” Trotsky himself, a Jewish leader of the Bolsheviks, was assassinated, presumably at Stalin’s direction, in Mexico in 1940. He had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. During the period between the revolution and Trotsky’s assassination, the influence of radical Jews in the Soviet government gradually declined. (Trotsky did become a mentor to a faction of Jews in the U.S. who later became part of the Necons.)
Also, in order to defeat Germany in World War II, the Soviets had to tap the deepest recesses of Russian national tradition, emotion, and inner strength. Russia became Russia once again, leading to the extraordinary development of science, scholarship, military prowess, and technology that has continued until today.
But the radical Jews had remained a revolutionary force. My hypothesis is that because Stalin still wanted to get rid of them, when the dust settled from World War II, he decided to send them to Israel. They went, not as migrants, but as conquerors.
It seems true that the most violent and extreme elements of the Israeli leadership have been Russian and East European Jews. The Soviet government assisted these people in getting to Israel and in drafting recruits from the refugee camps. They were also armed with weapons from the Czech munition plants then under the control of the Red Army. None of this could have been done without Stalin’s approval.
The Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948. This was followed quickly by the U.S., with Truman being the recipient of large wads of cash from American Jews for his presidential campaign that year. See here.
Nor did Stalin send them to become a Soviet fifth column in the Middle East. Israel quickly aligned itself with Britain, France, and the U.S., while the Soviet Union became partial to Nasser in Egypt and other anti-Western elements in the Arab world. The Non-Aligned Movement the Soviets supported drew heavily on these elements.
That’s the hypothesis.
Fast forwarding to recent years, no less an authority than former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has said that when he visited Israel in the 1990s, society there was moving toward a peaceful accommodation with the Palestinians that would eventually lead to the so-called “two-state solution.” Ritter says what then happened was that a new influx of Jews from Russia arrived on the scene with what seems to me the same kind of violent intolerance shown by the original terrorists who created Israel in the first place.
Ritter’s commentary is compelling. It was these new arrivals who began to take over the Israeli government and who are now the driving force in Netanyahu’s reactionary coalition that has conducted the Gaza/West Bank genocide and is agitating for an expanded war, starting with a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. This could readily escalate into a broader war involving the U.S. and Iran or a worse conflict with Russia, Iran’s ally.
The positive side, at least for Russia, is that Russia may now have rid itself entirely of its violent Jewish partisans. Russia has also gotten rid of or disciplined those Jewish oligarchs who took part in the looting of Russia in the 1990s. The Jews who have remained appear to be loyal, productive, law-abiding citizens who enjoy good relations with the Russian government.
Conclusion
World War III now threatens on two fronts—Ukraine and Israel. In both places, powerful forces are trying to draw the U.S. and the West into much larger conflagrations. In both places, a radical Jewish faction lurks behind the chaos—Zelensky’s government in Ukraine and Netanyahu’s in Israel.
But both conflicts can be seen as Stalinist remnants of World War II.
Why should the unfinished business of a long-dead Soviet dictator be allowed to determine the fate of the world today? Why can’t reasonable people from all sides now come together to repair these long-
simmering tragedies so that the world can move ahead in peace, cooperation, and understanding?
New eBook Available on Global Research
Richard C. Cook is co-founder and lead investigator for the American Geopolitical Institute. Mr. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an advisor to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack at
and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.
My remarks to my friend:
Richard:
This is an excellent piece of work and I wanted to thank you for it. It's SO important for people to know and understand this history. Of course very few among our fellow Americans do.
I do wish you had mentioned the role that Stalin's engineered famine in Ukraine played in this history. In recent years it has come to be known as the 'Holodomor', though when I learned about it as a child from my Ukrainian grandparents, and from other of my immigrant relatives, who barely spoke English, they never used that word, which I think was only fairly recent adopted, much as the word 'Holocaust' was steadily 'marketed' by Jewish propagandists. (In the 50s' 60s, and 70s, that word 'Holocaust' was virtually unknown).
My own relatives, whose beloved family members I never knew, (though I've seen pictures of them) had suffered so horrifically at the hands of Stalin, were resentful of the Jewish 'marketing' of 'the Holocaust' for social gain, contending that the death toll from Stalin's deliberately engineered famine in Ukraine was much higher than Hitler's deadly persecution of Jews.
A paragraph or two would have fit nicely after the second paragraph of the section entitled 'The Ukrainian Mess'. It's my understanding that Stepan Bandera's and his followers' (now known as the Ukrainian "neo-Nazis") collaboration with Hitler's Germany was motivated by the hatred for Russia engendered by Stalin's intentionally engineered mass starvation in Ukraine. As you well know, Richard, People have LONG memories, handed down from one generation to the next. Thus does human tragedy beget more tragedy, as the sins of the dead are blamed on the living, who had no part in them.
The CIA was quick to recognize the possibilities of exploiting that residual hatred of Russia, and of Russians, by Ukrainians. Ukraine was recognized as Russia's vulnerable 'soft underbelly' at least as far back as Napoleon, (and probably longer). The CIA was facilitating the 'importation' of Bandera's followers into the US and Canada as early as the late 1940s, as one of the then nascent CIA's earliest priorities.
I myself first saw the famous portrait of Bandera in the basement of the Ukrainian Orthodox church, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, as a young teenager in the early 1960s, when a roofer named Romanchuk pulled out his wallet to show it to me, as I was subjected to a recruiting pitch to become a 'follower'. The CIA was importing these neo-Nazis into the US and Canada right after WW2, helping them to get settled among communities of immigrants, like my own relatives in the Roxbury section of Boston, who had fled the gathering storms of war and revolution in the early 1900s. (My grandparents immigrated around 1912).
There was a very good recent film about how the US press cooperated with Stalin in trying to bury word of the famine getting out. The film, Mr. Jones, contends that NY Times' Moscow Bureau chief and Pulitzer winner, Walter Duranty, whom the movie depicts as a sexual pervert hosting orgiastic sex parties in Moscow, tried to discredit Welsh reporter Gareth Jones when the latter was trying to 'break the story'. Orwell, a colleague of Jones, appears briefly as a minor character in the movie.
The film contends that the rumor was circulating widely that "Stalin's Gold is grain", as unbeknownst to people in Moscow, or in the Western nations, millions of people were dying in Ukraine. According to my relatives, Stalin stole the grain because he desperately needed cash to buy industrial tools to modernize Soviet industry. It was a 'two birds one stone' deal, since he also wanted to collectivize the Soviet agricultural industry, much as was done at that SAME time in the 'Grapes of Wrath' US Dustbowl, (which both John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, and many others, of course, chronicled with such passion). Moving small peasant farmers off their land, to convert to highly capitalized farming with large machinery, was a motive shared by both the Marxist Stalin and Big Capital in the US Heartland.
Stalin stationed the Red Army on all the roads to prevent escape, and it was illegal, of course, (enforced by quick bullets to the head), to travel in or out of Ukraine. But Gareth Jones managed to get in, and then barely escaped with his life. He then had to crusade for the next several years before he could get any Western Press outlets to run the story, after the powerful NY Times, under Duranty's Pulitzer-reinforced influence, discredited Jones' story.
But my immigrant relatives told me, as a boy sitting at the knees of my own family elders, that despite the truth not being able to get out, the southerly spring breezes blew the stench of death all the way to Moscow, reinforcing the proliferating rumors that "Stalin's gold is grain".
That account, especially the contention of cooperation with Stalin by major US Press figures like Walter Duranty, dovetails with your account of Roosevelt's informal alliance with Stalin, over Churchill, at Yalta.
Anyway... Your article is a superlative piece of work and I heartily thank you for it.
Hope all is well down your way...
RZ
As the most moral army in the world is busy attacking Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen we must sympathise. It is incredibly taxing to organise all that funding from friends in the Slave Colonies and simultaneously ensure that the missiles are covered in childish graffiti by fresh faced joyous recruits. Then there is the logistics of sending senior politicians out into the world to put the frighteners on anyone who has recovered their eyesight.
Burying Ukrainians in unkempt farmland is such a struggle! Then there are all the disgruntled Israelis who are migrating into the country to take over the abandoned homesteads. Will Yiddish make a come back? Who will teach their kids Ukrainian?
So much to do.....