The mortal enemy of the United States on the day I was born was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

We were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. We were petrified that some nutty leader would attempt to nuke us into oblivion. 

In a few years, there was a space race to go with it. And the Soviets seemed determined to spread their influence around the globe.

But that nutty leader wouldn’t be Joseph Stalin, who died in 1953, the year before I was born. By April 1954, Nikita Khrushchev had assumed the important job of Communist Party Chairman. 

Any hope that Khrushchev would be a kindler, gentler Soviet leader were crushed in 1956, when he sent troops to end an anti-Communist uprising in Hungary, and vanished in 1961 when the Berlin Wall divided the occupied former German capital.

Every U.S. President from Truman to George H.W. Bush stood fast against the Soviets. In the case of John F. Kennedy, that meant taking us to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 when Khrushchev placed nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from this country.

It was during Bush’s presidency that the USSR crumbled. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet bloc states shed their totalitarian ways and there was a sense that the threat had abated. Now, we could focus on nut cases in the Middle East.

A former KGB agent – someone who was a toddler in Leningrad in 1954 – wended his way to power in Moscow. Vladimir Putin was a required to be a member of the Communist Party when he was serving the Soviets from New Zealand and East Germany. 

But, magically, he foreswore Communism for a form of Russian nationalism that included helping oligarchic capitalists and reclaiming territory that the Soviets controlled up until 1991.

And, from 2017 to 2021, it was no longer the United States standing up to the Russians. Putin had a buddy in President Donald Trump and laid the groundwork for further mischief.

There was however, one leader who was determined to stop him. A former comedian who ascended to the presidency of Ukraine – which had been the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office in 2019 – a year in which he had a very uncomfortable meeting with Trump, who was seeking dirt on potential presidential rival Joe Biden. The meeting led to Trump’s first impeachment, in which he was acquitted.

When Putin sought to expand his Russian empire by retaking Ukraine in 2022, Zelenskyy and the bulk of the Ukrainian people weren’t having it. Expected by the world to capitulate in days, the Ukrainians are still standing. Their courage – мужність in Ukrainian – should be an inspiration to all who believe in democracy and freedom.

It would have surprised my parents if you told them, in 1954, that a place supposedly part of the Soviet Union would stand up to the attempt to recreate something like it in the 21st century.

Here’s the part that would have stunned and saddened them – and most other adult Americans: With Ukraine fighting for its life, politicians in the United States – mostly Republicans following the Putin-apologist Trump – would work to stop providing aid to keep Kyiv fighting.

It goes to show that the Cold War was about fighting Communism, not the historically aggressive stance of the land mass that is Russia. When Russia turned to oligarchic capitalism, too many Americans were happy to support it.

My parents would be as angry as I am.