From "Stettin in the Baltic . . .
The X Article, formally titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", was an article written by George F. Kennan under the pseudonym "Mr. X" and published in Foreign Affairs magazine in July 1947. Kennan, who was the Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR from 1944 to 1946, advocated in the article a policy of containment of the Soviet Union and strong anti-communism.
The Long Telegram
G. F. Kennan had rejoined the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as Chargé d'Affaires in July, 1945. Although he was highly critical of the Soviet system, the mood within the U.S. State Department was friendship towards the Soviets, because the Soviets were an important ally in the war against Nazi Germany. Kennan proposed a policy known as Containment.
In February 1946, the United States Treasury asked the U.S. Embassy in Moscow why the Soviets were not supporting the newly created World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In reply, Kennan wrote the Long Telegram outlining his opinions and views of the Soviets;
"According to Kennan, the Soviets' view of the world came from a traditional 'Russian sense of insecurity...'"
It arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946. Among its most-remembered parts was that while Soviet power was "impervious to the logic of reason", it was "highly sensitive to the logic of force"
The preface to the so-called Long Telegram includes the following comments:
Answer to Dept's 284, Feb. 3,13 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be a dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts...I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once.Kennan described dealing with Soviet Communism as "undoubtedly (the) greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably (the) greatest it will ever have to face". In the first two sections, he posited concepts that became the foundation of American Cold War policy:
- The USSR perceived itself at perpetual war with capitalism;
- The USSR viewed left-wing, but non-communist, groups in other countries as an even worse enemy of itself than the capitalist ones;
- The USSR would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies;
- Soviet aggression was fundamentally not aligned with the views of the Russian people or with economic reality, but rooted in historic Russian nationalism and neurosis;
- The Soviet government's structure inhibited objective or accurate pictures of internal and external reality.
In Section Five, Kennan exposited Soviet weaknesses and proposed U.S. strategy, stating that despite the great challenge, "my conviction that problem is within our power to solve—and that without recourse to any general military conflict". He argued that the Soviet Union would be sensitive to force, that the Soviets were weak compared to the united Western world, that the Soviets were vulnerable to internal instability, and that Soviet propaganda was primarily negative and destructive. Kennan advocated sound appraisal, public education, solutions of the internal problems of U.S. society, proposing for other nations a positive picture of the world the U.S. would like to see, and faith in the superiority of the Western way of life over the collective ideals of Soviet Communists.
George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, and became the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. That September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war".
On 6 September 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes admitted a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..."
A few weeks after the release of this "Long Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri.
The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic".
Only a week later, on 13 March Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying that Churchill could be compared to Hitler insofar as he advocated the racial superiority of English-speaking nations so that they could satisfy their hunger for world domination, and that such a declaration was "a call for war on the U.S.S.R." The Soviet leader also dismissed the accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries lying in its sphere. He argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, [was] trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries"
Poland and Ukraine confirmed the border on 18 May 1992. It is the longest of Polish eastern borders. The border became much more open compared to the Soviet times, when despite being part of the Eastern Bloc, crossing was very difficult. As the border was opened to mass traffic, the number of people crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border begun raising steadily since 1990, stabilizing around 2000s. Approximately 3 million Ukrainians crossed the border in the 1990s, annually. One of the peak numbers was recorded in 2001, with about 12 million people crossing the border.
The Poland-Ukraine border is the most often crossed eastern border of the EU.Most of the border traffic is generated by Ukrainian citizens. Small scale trade and shopping tourism were and still are driving much of the traffic, with migration for labour purposes being another significant factor. The border is heavily policed, as it is a major smuggling route into EU, both for goods and for illegal immigration.
Published on February 23, 2016 - Out of BMPU Media Monitoring:
They reported about the following. In the course of the last year the following number of persons was apprehended in the area of Chop Detachment: at Ukrainian-Slovakian border – 207 illegal migrants, and at Ukrainian-Hungarian – 40. Regarding Mukachevo Border Detachment, 508 persons were detained for attempt to cross the state border illegally. It is 8 times more in comparison with 2014. Mainly, these were the citizens of Afghanistan, Georgia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Russia, Syria, Somalia, etc. (Source)
There is a significant and endemic problem of corruption in all sectors of Ukrainian society, so the fact of it being reported is not surprising.
Europe Dismantles Ukraine’s ‘Paper Curtain’
By ANDREW E. KRAMER JUNE 22, 2017
MOSCOW — Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, called it the collapse of the “paper curtain.”
Since June 11, when 30 European countries began waiving short-stay visa requirements for Ukrainians as an incentive for Kiev to pursue further reforms, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have flocked to those nations.
More than 20,000 Ukrainians have already seized on the rule change, some stepping out of airports at their destinations pumping their fists to celebrate putting the bureaucratic headache of visas behind them. On peak days, Ukraine’s border service says, about 5,000 of its citizens leave for the European countries.
They are not permitted to work, and can be required to show a return ticket. Still, the change is a rare bright spot for Ukraine, a country mired in war with Russia, plagued by economic woes and struggling to gain a sympathetic hearing from the Trump administration, which has sought closer ties with Moscow.
“It was all quite quick and comfortable,” Timofey Matskevich, a small-business owner, said of transiting with his wife, Daria, through an airport serving Barcelona.
Continue reading the main story
“They asked no questions, they stamped our passports and said, ‘Welcome to Spain,’ ” Mr. Matskevich said in an online chat from the apartment where he was staying, which he said had a marvelous view of the beach and the Mediterranean beyond.
“It’s a change in mentality,” he said. “You have more freedom to go somewhere, to see things. For the mentality of the country to change, to get rid of the Soviet legacy, you need to see other parts of the world.”
While the visa waiver for Ukrainians is the largest shift of the kind for former Soviet countries, most of Ukraine’s 45 million people cannot afford to go on vacation abroad. Citizens of Georgia and Moldova already qualified for short-term visa-free travel to most of Western Europe, and those of the Baltic countries, which are members of the European Union, can come and go as they please.
Mr. Poroshenko celebrated the change by opening a symbolic “door to Europe” that had been set up on a stage at a border crossing with Slovakia.
Mr. Poroshenko called the visa waiver “a final exit of our country from the Russian Empire,” and he joked that “the words ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ would be heard only listening to The Beatles.”
Three years ago, tens of thousands of Ukrainians, including Mr. Matskevich, took to the streets of Kiev to reject the pro-Russian government of the time, and to show support for a trade pact between Ukraine and the European Union called the Association Agreement.
Russia responded with a military intervention, annexing Crimea and deploying forces in two provinces of eastern Ukraine, in a war that has since killed more than 10,000 people. Amid this grinding crisis, the Ukrainian story line shifted to keeping Russia out, not to getting into Western Europe.
The European Union has kept pressing the government in Kiev to adhere to European norms, not only on technical matters such as agricultural standards but also by curbing corruption, to little effect.
In newspapers, disheartened Ukrainians read daily about members of Parliament or finance officials lining their pockets with public money.
The visa-rule change allowed Mr. Poroshenko to claim credit for one popular achievement of Ukraine’s shift toward the West, in the hopes more substantive measures will follow, said Kadri Liik, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“It greatly empowers the forces in society that push reforms,” she said.
“Visa-free travel is the first thing people received from the Association Agreement,” Mr. Matskevich said. “It’s a step by our country into the normal world, into normal society.”
The opening went smoothly, with a few exceptions. A woman who had no passport for her 8-year-old son tried to smuggle him over a land border with Poland in a suitcase. They were discovered, fined and deported.
Mostly, though, the change led to excited Ukrainians posting about their European vacations on Facebook.
“Hurray! It works!” one Ukrainian traveler, Ivetta Delikatnaya, wrote after sliding through passport control in Toulouse, France.
With the easing of travel restrictions, low-cost airlines are increasingly looking to Ukraine. Wizz Air recently began operating flights between Lviv and Berlin for as little as $22 each way. Ryanair is introducing flights to Kiev and Lviv.
Andriy Homanchuk, a veteran of the war in eastern Ukraine, posted on Facebook that he was, somehow, able to eke out a weekend in Brussels for less than $100, his first trip to Western Europe.
“The visa-free regime works,” he wrote excitedly from Belgium. “You don’t need documents, or even knowledge of any language. You can go for a weekend.”
Iuliia Mendel contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.
Men in suits!
President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine, right, crossed a symbolic “door to Europe” to join his Slovak counterpart, Andrej Kiska, during a ceremony on June 11. Credit Pool photo by Mikhail Palinchak. To help illustrate what lay to the west, the door was surrounded by walls depicting the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum in Rome, Dutch windmills and other European tourist sights.
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