Ukrainian identity and the coming Khokholodomor

An English couple, an American couple and a Ukrainian couple were dining in a high-end restaurant. The Englishman asks his wife: “Could you pass me the honey, honey?” A little later, the American asks his wife: “Could you pass me the sugar, sugar?” Upon seeing this, the Ukrainian says to his wife: “Pass me the bacon, you pig.”

The above joke is recited by the Ukrainians themselves, in jestful awareness of east-meets-west stereotypes. This essay is a short and unauthorized biography of the modern Ukrainian people, their mentality and some of their divergent traits. As such, it should be a corroborating conclusion to my earlier pieces on the history and ethnomorphosis of the early Slavs to Kievan-Rus and the Ukrainian state. As is often said in the East: Доверяй, но проверяй [Trust, but verify].

This contemporary foray into Ukrainian identity begins in the place that I think will provide readers with a relatable context — the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States. This population has contributed to America’s intellectual and social elite in quite remarkable proportions. Roughly 1.4 million Americans have Ukrainian ancestry compared with 2.5 million of Russian ancestry, though you wouldn’t know it from their respective share of eminent individuals. Perhaps the best explanation for this is that the Stalinist purges, forced collectivization and NKVD terror disproportionately befell Ukrainians post-World War II, rendering these surviving emigres the residue of a significant fitness filter.

Two prominent American Jewish intellectuals have Ukrainian roots — Noam Chomsky is fairly well known in this regard but the posthumously influential Milton Friedman is less so (on account of his Ashkenazi surname). Chomsky’s tempered analysis of the Ukraine war now sees even him branded a Putin Apologist. Chomsky was a college freshman during World War II, born before Martin Luther King Jr., but is still around to provide his awful recommendations of Yugoslav socialism and covid-19 police-statism.

The Biden administration had a tryzub of Jewish-Ukrainian appointees to prominent cabinet positions — Antony Blinken, Merrick Garland and Janet Yellen — though on the Hill there’s no shortage of those who might require yellow-and-blue-badging. Senator minority leader Chuck Schumer’s ancestors hailed from Western Ukraine while fellow anti-Trump Democrats Alexander and Eugene Vindman were born in Soviet Ukraine. The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Jewish-Ukrainian roots managed to counterbalance Elena Kagan’s Russian-Jewish roots on the Supreme Court, whereas, contrary to popular belief, the war-hawk and vulture Victoria Nuland has no ties to Ukraine.

Pop culture and the arts are where the Ukrainian diaspora has reached prodigious levels of overrepresentation. A number of comedians who got their start in the Borscht belt of Jewish resorts in upstate New York ended up becoming Hollywood royalty like Mel Brooks, Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar and Don Rickles. Jewish-Ukrainian-Americans also led the more conventional path to the silver screen, from method-acting pioneer Lee Strasberg to the classically trained Walter Matthau. It’s a tradition that never really ceased, considering the industry’s modern heavyweights like William Shatner, Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Steven Seagal, Peggy Segal, David Duchovny, Mila Kunis, Liev Schreiber and Seth Rogan. The somewhat camouflaged origins of director Steven Spielberg lie not in his namesake town in Austria, but in Western Ukraine. Even among Jews, the Ukrainians are overrepresented.

Among entertainers of varying levels of Ukrainian-Jewish admixture one finds Bob Dylan, David Copperfield, Alex Trebek, Barbara Streisand, Sylvester Stallone, John Stewart, Michael Bolton, Bruno Mars, Chris Jericho and Winona Ryder. Famous voice-actor from the Simpsons, Hank Azaria, is perhaps worth mentioning on account of being Sephardic Jewish while possessing a surname that signifies Khazarian-Jewish roots.

Andy Warhol, considered the most important American artist of the twentieth century on account of his revolutionary obscenity and pop art industrialization, belonged to the obscure minority group called Rusyns or Ruthenians whose language and culture are not recognized by Ukraine as separate. Michael Smerconish also descends from this semi-ethnicity, as did the paleoconservative virtuoso Joseph Sobran. Since the abode of the Rusyn highlanders left them straddled at the confluence of several Carpathian states, they are in a way the borderland of the borderland, and, frankly speaking, seem to have elevated levels of borderline personality disorder.

In the course of researching the general character of career engagements and civil entanglements of the Ukrainian diaspora, one facet that becomes almost immediately salient is the profusion of eccentricity, weirdness and even antisocial disposition. Libertarian and former candidate for president Gary Johnson (maternally Ukrainian) is on the milder side of this spectrum, while at the extreme end one finds the late Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in spite of having Jewish Ukrainian roots (Levey).

Some neural divergence may be an asset for artistic pursuits; alas for the Ukrainians it seems to bleed lymphatically into their craft and in their casting appointments. Author Chuck Palahniuk, famous for Fight Club, is a homosexual like Warhol who went on to publish highly questionable adult material under the pretense of being avant-garde.

In addition to Shatner, the cast of Star Trek included Leonard Nimoy as the iconically strange and detached Spock. Both of his parents came from Western Ukraine. Actor Marty Feldman was providentially cast as Igor in Young Frankenstein on account of his famously misaligned eyes, and only by chance did his Jewish-Ukrainian heritage match the character’s. Mary Shelly never included such a character in the original story. However later adaptations were inspired by the notoriety of Soviet scientific experimentation. The irony of such an operating theatre in current times is that Switzerland is where the living go to die and Ukraine is the failed experiment. As it happens, the man most responsible for the death of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachov, was originally from Ukraine and his surname means hunch-backed.

My own experience in dealing with Ukrainians and Russians is that tempers can be fickle, and there is a general elevation in cynicism and irritability. Relations can be warm and breezy until such a time that contact is suddenly severed, not because you have wronged them but because of a difference of opinion, at which point they no longer wish to breathe the same air as you.

In anticipation that such anecdotal observations might produce a strong allergenic reaction among the gallery of commentators, I checked what little empirical research is available. A 2007 study published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology included Ukraine among 56 countries surveyed for the Big Five Personality Traits. Scores were abnormal for three of the five. They were very low on Openness, with only Japan and Hong Kong lower. They were among the most introverted in Europe (France and Belgium scored lower but this was likely a language issue). Most tellingly, they ranked dead last on Agreeableness.

Suspecting more closeted divergences than data were readily available for, I then happened upon some interesting anecdotal evidence from historical accounts of masochism in the Slavic lands. The Russian Primary Chronicle, penned in Kiev in the 12th century, relates a much older account of the Apostle Andrew’s visitation to the Novgorod Slavs:

I noticed their wooden bathhouses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with an acid liquid, they take young branches and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and though tormented by none, they actually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves. — Russian Primary Chronicle

It may not be such a coincidence that the term masochism actually derives from the name of a half-Ukrainian half-Austrian writer: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Born in Lemberg [Lviv] in 1836, Sacher-Masoch was somewhat traumatized as a child, having witnessed police brutality and interrogation at the station his father was chief of. The Ukrainian mammy who raised him also had a profound influence. Though he moved to Austria as a teenager, his political works made it clear that he hated both the German language and German society, preferring the French language and the quaint Galician homeland that he was nostalgic for. His fictional works, inspired from his private life, revealed that he enjoyed humiliation and intense physical pain administered by his mistress. For these reasons psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term masochist, to Sacher-Masoch’s vocal opposition, but possibly also his secret indulgence.

Notwithstanding the heightened artistic and creativity apparent in Ukrainian cognition, natives excel in the rational and computational fields. According to IQ data, Ukraine ranks near the lower end of Europe (90), more than six points below Russia, however these figures may require adjustment. The country is an IT powerhouse—ranking highly in coding competitions, hosting R&D centers of tech giants, and developing startups like GitLab, Grammarly and cryptocurrency services.

Over the last ten chess Olympiads, Ukraine has outperformed Russia, a long-time superpower in the sport. One of the veterans of the game is Vasyl Ivanchuk, a top player for decades and fan favorite on account of his authentic aloofness. In a recent event he burst into tears after a tough loss. The second strangest character on tour is fellow Ukrainian Anton Korobov, whose unique look and unfiltered way of communicating charms fans.

After Ukrainians and Russians, one can scarcely find people as direct in their apprehensions and laconic in their exchanges. This has its benefits and drawbacks, but in times of war gets to be harrowing. A year into the conflict and with large numbers of casualties mounting, prime-time Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov told viewers “life is highly overrated” anyway. More recently, a commander was filmed giving new soldiers a motivational speech in which he told them they were “all going to die” but that “flowers would be brought to all of their headstones for centuries.”

Ukrainian culture is considerably less Spartan, albeit in some ways more mafia-like, considering the recruitment of soldiers-by-abduction drive, the death (liquidation?) of writer Gonzalo Lira, seen as pro-Russian, and the extensive weaponry racketeering. Moreover, Ukraine has embarked on the kind of nationalist extremism and ethnic chauvinism that Russia could never afford to do given its plethora of minorities and semi-autonomous regions. I recall seeing this intolerance indoctrinated into children even on the national stage. Around 2012, a now deleted clip from Ukraine’s Got Talent showed six-year-old Diana Kozakevich reciting poetry and speaking on the need to linguistically de-Russify certain segments of the population. There can be little doubt as to which side disrupted the country’s homeostasis with a foolhardy attempt at cultural hegemony.

In addition to a certain cultural immodesty, one of the divergent traits of the Eastern Slavs appears to be a reduced ability at coping with excess and addiction, related to low-trust behaviors like kleptomania and megalomania. Reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, I was surprised just how much of the story reverberated around vice. It does, however, provide a backdrop to the grotesque materialism of some modern Russians and Ukrainians—the women often being worse—be it in London, Tel Aviv or Dubai. President Putin hasn’t exactly helped in this regard, saying in 2017 that “our [Russian prostitutes] are undoubtedly the best in the world.”

One need only look at the sight of the Russian president, solo at an immensely long table, to know that this is a man addicted to power. The Zelenskys, by contrast, have a coffee-table significantly more cluttered, but whatever the vice there is as always an ironic analogue from the pages of history. The man whose name both presidents carry, Volodymyr the Great, was one of the most vice-filled men of all time. The German chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg appointed him the Latin epithet “fornicator immensis” prior his miraculous conversion to Christianity and subsequent canonization:

He had three hundred concubines at Vyshgorod, three hundred at Belgorod, and two hundred at Berestovo. He was insatiable in vice. He even seduced married women and violated young girls, for he was a libertine like Solomon. —Russian Primary Chronicle

“It’s good to be the king,” as Mel Brooks famously said. Centuries later Christian mystic Rasputin found another way to live the lifestyle and follow in the footsteps of Saint Volodymyr, barefooted as was his style. Older and more conservative Russians no doubt look to the church-going Putin as a force for traditional mores and necessary authoritarian rule, protecting them from their own ancestral weaknesses, be they from pagan times or the recent communist-atheist epoch.

Ukrainians who moved to Russia decades ago complain of not being able to recognize their home country anymore, such has the profusion of American values altered the behavior and attitudes of the people. Therefore the ongoing conflict is understood as a culture war in addition to a geopolitical one. Among some of the harbingers is the influx of diversity and mixed marriages. One of the first Afro-Ukrainian marriages was personally blessed by then president of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko, although the couple separated after their first child. The country’s current top female athlete, Elina Svitolina, is wedded to Caribbean-French tennis player Gaël Monfils.

Though most wouldn’t know it, American celebrity Kendra Wilkinson is half-Ukrainian—not that it had anything to do with being pimped by the polite society of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy brand. There is little doubt as to why she was heavily promoted with her own cable TV spin-off after her engagement to NFL star Hank Baskett. In her youth, Wilkinson wanted to be a marine biologist, but instead ended up a self-pitying “mud shark” as the racialists would say—an epithet that has completely changed meaning since Frank Zappa’s 1971 song of the same name.

The argument that Ukraine, a socially tolerant country, harbors a resurgent Nazi movement beyond football hooligans and army-patch enthusiasts is a silly notion but the Russians are sticking to it since the global propaganda economy is silly enough to buy it. Both Ukrainians and Russians effectively practice the proposition nation, as these respective identities are more about language and culture, thus making them available to anyone who wants them from the many and growing gradations of Eurasian pedigrees. The resolution of race in the East is quite different from that of the United States, where racial clustering involved large degrees of separation. Similarly, Western Europeans historically understood nation as a subtaxon of race. My own take is that it’s somewhat inverted in Eastern Europe, where national identities are monoethnic syntheses of multiracial components.

An onomastic analysis of Ukrainian surnames reveals the predominance of classic Slavic suffixes like -—enko and —ich, however there is also a large minority (perhaps 20%) who have the —ak or —uk suffix of Turkic grammar. This was a hallmark of titular names like Cossack, Kulak, Hayduk and Mamluk, as well as of personal names of the Huns (Mundiuk, Ernak, Dengezikh); Bolgars (Asparuk, Omurtak) and Cuman Khans (Atrok, Tegak, Konchak). Since tribes and nations acquired their names through a similar process, the majority of Turkic ethnonyms follow this rule: Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Kalmyk, Kipchak, Patzinak (Pecheneg) and the ancient Türük (Turk). Modern surnames often have the suffix hidden in the middle because assimilation at some point truncated them with Slavic suffixes (cf. Yanukovych, Kubrakov, Karjakin, Nabokov).

Slavic contact with the Turks occurred so long ago that the linguistic appendage in question is common to all Slavic tongues and only weakly correlated with Turkic familial lineage. Among the Western Slavs, it was adopted as a diminutive early on and underwent a vowel shift, giving us such names as that of economist Friedrich Hayek and philosopher Slavoj Žižek. However, Slovenia in the previous decade had a most peculiar succession of presidents when, in 2012, incumbent Danilo Türk was followed by Borut Pahor—whose name is indeed a local variant of Borat. Other first names of Turkic provenance that Eastern Europeans continue to dispense in general ignorance include Boris, Denis, Taras, Boyan and Damir [Temur].

One of the standouts of the distribution of Ukrainian surnames is the high frequency of color anthroponyms, in particular for the color black: Chernenko, Chorniy, Chervan, Chervinsky, Cernovich, Korobov, Khara, etc. What this shows is that black-haired and swarthy phenotypes were exotic to the region, such that the pre-existing majority named dark traits as new and distinguishing features. The writers of antiquity only mentioned fair-haired nations inhabiting Pontic-Caspian region, though my earlier summary of these sources could have also mentioned the Albani, a white-haired race, described by Isigonus of Nicaea (1st century BC), Gaius Solinus (3rd century) and Isidor of Seville (6th century).

The incursion of black phenotypes can therefore be attributed to three main groups: Greeks, Gypsies and Turco-Mongols. If the alleles for black hair were amplified in a heterogeneous setting, it was because of sexual selection. Professor Edward Dutton explains that in a sibling group darker hair is associated with higher testosterone, elevating apparent physical fitness, although women are unable to decouple this from race. It’s probably not down to chance that most of the Soviet Union’s arch villains had black hair: Trotsky, Stalin, Yagoda, Beria, Yezhov and the “Black Tornado’ Lazar Kaganovich.

The only other aspect of East Slavic HBD perhaps worth noting is the range of body builds and craniometrics. The tall and gracile type is most common, which is why Ukrainian athletes dominate disciplines like high jump and pole vault, while at the other end a profusion of extremely thick-set ectomorphs is present. For this reason Eastern Europeans have dominated weightlifting—combining the Caucusoid qualities of strength and stature with the Altaic traits of burliness and lower center of gravity. Large torsos and short legs were ideal for horse warfare. As to the bulbous, pumpkin-like crania of Eurasian provenance, I can only imagine that that’s what Jordanes referred to in the 6th century when describing the heads of the Huns as “a sort of shapeless lump.” We now understand that ancestries tracing back to the Turco-Mongoloid homeland of Siberia naturally evolved skulls of minimal profile and maximum volume to surface area ratio so as to better conserve heat in extreme cold.

Omeljan Pritsak (1919–2006): Ukrainian-born Harvard Professor of Slavistics and Oriental Studies

My own experience travelling to Western Ukraine last year is that the population is virtually indistinguishable from that of Prague or Ljubljana, and not much like the ambiguous types I had seen profiled by Western media outlets during coverage of the war. It then dawned on me that the individuals included in those reports were fleeing the Eastern regions of Ukraine where the frontline is. It’s reasonable to assume that in Ukraine there is a West to East cline in Eurasian physiognomy, with the Dnieper historically functioning as a significant barrier to gene flow. Some media bias isn’t out of the question, but for the most part the Eastern part of the country appears to host a fantastic array of combinatory phenotypes that one is unlikely to see anywhere else.

Eastern Ukrainians featured by the BBC

From the city of Donetsk hails one particular individual who has a gleaming aura about him that accompanies his status as Ukraine’s richest man and one of the richest in Europe. There cannot be many blond-haired blue-eyed Muslim Tatars around but Rinat Akhmetov is one of them. That seems to be the extent of his Europeanness, because everything else from his mafia-enforcer past to shady business dealings are very much of the Eastern tradition. Akhmetov entered politics in 2006 but didn’t show up for 529 out of 530 parliamentary sessions. Readers can rest assured that he is indeed for helping the common man: he managed to get his former chauffeur elected to parliament alongside himself.

The number one reason to continue backing Ukraine, we are constantly told, is that this is “a war between autocracies and democracies.” But Ukraine isn’t a good advertisement for democracy. Per capita GDP of $5,500 and unemployment at 9.4 percent ranks much worse than Russia, while even “Europe’s last dictatorship” Belarus was ranked as less corrupt than Ukraine over the last decade. Transparency International, which runs the Corruption Perceptions Index, flipped the two country’s ranks only last year. For Ukrainians to be inspired by their sense of Western values rather than anti-Russian fervor will make for a sobering realization in their postbellum reflections.

In my lifetime, all that Ukraine has been known for is Chernobyl, parliamentary brawls, and the place that David Duke got his doctorate from. The stigma of war will saddle whatever rump state remains for decades to come—but who wants an identity mired in victimhood and potentially guilty victimhood? Even in staunch ally Poland, sentiments are changing. My own sympathies have changed too, after being reminded that 73 percent of Ukrainian voters chose Zelensky. But the people also vote with their feet, and a quarter of the population has left—including 3 million to Russia. Ukraine is now sustained by the charity of Western interests, while internally this democracy is considering drafting women and 18-year-olds. Perhaps Ukrainians are starting to realize that they’re not mere victims simply “fighting against aggression,” but that their side was the aggression—geopolitically (on behalf of NATO) and culturally (clamping down on language rights and Orthodox churches). All this for a European Union that meddles in foreign elections, and will one day request that Ukraine elevate the minority rights of gays, and trans, while inundating them with Muslims and Africans. The 16th–century prophesy of Moscow as the third and final Rome doesn’t look so obscure now, but what is often forgotten about Rome’s founding myth is that Romulus killed his twin-brother Remus. So it has come to pass with Moskal and Khokhol.