As I write these words, I’m sitting in the Bohemian Forest on the Czech side of the border with Bavaria. It is a deeply beautiful countryside of large rolling hills, cow pastures and evergreen forests. It’s also known historically as part of the Sudetenland, an area that played a significant role in the start of the Second World War. Famously, the region, populated by a German majority, was surrendered to Nazi Germany after Hitler threatened war. The Munich Agreement, signed by the leaders of Germany, France and Britain without Czechoslovakia, now epitomises the futility of appeasement.
Putin’s war in Ukraine is often compared to this incident. And it’s a fair comparison. Both the Czech lands and the Ukraine were territories that had, for generations, been part of empires. Both ethnicities fought and gained independence and had turned to democratic means of governance. The remnants of those empires deemed it important to annexe areas where the ethnic majority population spoke the empire’s tongue rather than that of the new states, challenging through force their sovereignty. Both attacking countries seemed to have little regard for democracy and human life and were, to varying degrees, welcomed by the indigenous populations (of the Sudetenland, Donbas and Crimea). They would both later invade the rest of the new states.
This is usually where the comparison stops. The outcome of appeasing Hitler led to World War 2 and the horrors of that conflict. To avoid such an outcome, it is evident that appeasement should be avoided at all costs and is why Russia must lose this war outright.
Without challenging that line of thought, there are further comparisons I’d like to explore, comparisons with similarly dark corners (though not on the same scale) that continue to affect the area I currently sit in.
At the time of the Sudetenland crisis, 29% of the population in then Czechoslovakia was German, numbering close to 3 million subjects. In the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region encircling Bohemia, the proportion of ethnic Germans was 80–100% in many parts. While it had historically been considered part of the Czech lands, Germans had migrated to the area for almost a millennium. Prior to Czech independence, all of the Czech lands had been under the administration of the various incarnations of German-speaking Austrian empire for centuries. Indeed, when you walk through the area, you are continually confronted with German architecture, German engineering, German houses. To live here, even today, is to live with that German legacy. In at least some sense, the Czech Republic is also a German country, a German country now by and large without Germans.
And so it goes in Ukraine. The Russian population in the country before 2014 was 17%, numbering close to 9 million—the largest community of Russians outside its borders. In Crimea, that number rises to 58-72%. Russians have for centuries been part of the ethnic mix of these lands. Moreover, there is no denying Russia’s central role in the territory it is now trying to occupy. Ukraine is both Ukrainian and Russian. It can be and is both.
I bring up this ethnic history and mix not to justify the invasion but to complicate how we picture the outcome, however it may transpire. Because if we return to the Sudetenland as a point of comparison, we can catch of glimpse of the future.
Just like the Ukrainians today, the Czechs were furious about the invasion and occupation of their country. Many had been expelled from their lands. Horrendous war crimes were committed. Children were deported and adopted into the families of the attackers. Families were broken apart, with many ending up in work camps. And just like the Ukrainians today, the Czechs sought guarantees that the Germans would never be able to perpetrate this crime again.
The ethnic makeup of the country became a major point of contention in guaranteeing this. How could they continue to have German people make up such a large part of the population were they to win their country back? To this, Edward Beneš, the head of the Czechoslovak government in exile, looked for a solution to what he called ‘the German question’.
The eventual answer would become a stain on the country’s history, a crime that was later named a genocide by many Sudeten Germans. Estimates vary, but anywhere between 15,000 and 250,000 Germans would lose their lives in the ‘wild’ expulsions that followed the Nazi defeat, either by death squad and murder or starvation and disease. Millions lost their ancestral homes and homeland. Businesses which had long been built and cared for were taken. Families that were often mixed would forever be broken apart. And while many had supported the Nazi regime in the annexation and occupation of the Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia, most were caught up in the hubris of empire, its propaganda, and its systems of power—I suspect as many Russians have been today.
This ethnic purification that so defined the Second World War is alive and well in today’s war. Putin calls for the protection of the Russian-speaking minority, just as Hitler did before him. And in reaction, we’ve seen policies that ban Russian-speaking schools, books and artists in Ukraine as it seeks to de-Russify its territories—a familiar solution to the ‘Russian Question’. History seems to be rhyming again.
Today, the German expulsion is regarded as one of sorrow and regret, an open wound that has no way to heal except through time. But it is etched into the landscape, into the German homes that still stand. They rest as a reminder of how badly human beings can act under the duress of war when neighbours start hating neighbours—centuries of comradeship undone in an instant. The Czechs by and large acknowledge the expulsion was wrong but also feel a sense of justification given what they had endured under Hitler. I don’t doubt the Ukrainians will feel similarly about Russian speakers still living in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Like the Sudetenland under German occupation, the area has been more or less emptied of Ukrainians, either through death, deportation or escape. The Russians living there have also faced shelling and war since 2014. They will not be greeting their compatriots as liberators should Ukraine and the West win—just the opposite, they know they are now considered the enemy, collaborators.
It is easy to imagine the future then, isn’t it? We can see the potential for another horror should Ukraine (and the West) ‘win’ all its territories back. In response to the truly horrendous crime being perpetrated by Putin, could we expect any less? Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt sanctioned Beneš’s expulsion. Will Biden, Macron and Sunak do the same today? Will Zelensky? Can we square our hatred of Putin and his accomplices and the malfeasance they are engaged in with another crime that would see the displacement of millions and the killing of thousands as retribution? How can we justify the families that will be destroyed because of a need for revenge?
It is not that the feelings are not justified. Of course, they are. Just ask the Ukrainian families who themselves have had to flee, had relatives murdered or had their children deported to Russia. It’s just that two wrongs don’t make a right. To do that is to create more pain, pain that lasts generations. We know this. It’s the story written into these hills.
In 1990, then President Havel apologised for the actions of his predecessors saying, ‘They went beyond the rule of law. It was not punishment but revenge.” Knowing this, how should we behave today and in the future? A grave injustice has been perpetrated by Russia. However, the West and Ukraine can still avoid contributing further to the horrors of this war. Ukraine has thus far been relatively careful in its attempt to conform to modern European norms and uphold the moral, democratic vision of Europe, despite what it has so far undergone (and under incredible duress!). They should be applauded and rewarded for this with our continued support. Nevertheless, given the demands of the West and Ukraine for a full victory, there are reasons to believe another horror is on the horizon—the Russian question is looming.
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