Given the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the war in Gaza, you would be forgiven for having missed the fact that we are now in the middle of America’s annual Captive Nations Week. Every summer since 1959, the White House has invited the American people to observe the occasion with “appropriate ceremonies and activities,” according to the original law signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. On July 18, Barack Obama followed his predecessors and issued a proclamation calling on the American people to “reaffirm our deep ties to all governments and people committed to freedom, dignity, and opportunity for all.”
The captive nations legislation is a weird artifact of the Cold War. The original joint congressional resolution effectively committed the United States not just to the overthrow of communist governments around the world, a policy that was at odds with the doctrine of containment favored by contemporary strategists such as George F. Kennan. It also made the break-up of the Soviet Union, and indeed of Russia itself, an express goal of U.S. foreign policy.
The “imperialistic policies of Communist Russia,” the resolution read, had snuffed out the nationhood of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, and subjugated central European powers such as Poland and Hungary. The “liberation and independence” of all these “submerged nations” was deemed to be “vital to the national security of the United States.” These places did become fully sovereign in 1989 and 1991, with the demise of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, but the clarion call of liberty was meant to extend even further. The original resolution contained a list of other forgotten places in eastern Europe and Eurasia that today make it sound like a gazetteer of Middle Earth: Cossackia, Idel-Ural, Turkestan, White Ruthenia.
The captive nations concept is a quaint relic of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Like the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C.—a diminutive replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue from the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which was unveiled in a lonely spot off Massachusetts Avenue in 2007—Captive Nations Week is a testament to the power of lobbying and bureaucratic inertia. The goddess statue satisfied determined cold warriors intent on commemorating the victims of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al. The size and location of the statue managed to do that without creating a hiccup in relations with China. The annual captive nations proclamation likewise offends only those who regard tyranny and intolerance as political virtues. But it is also something more: an object lesson in the fact that even weird ideas can end up on the right side of history.