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Today is a good day to ponder Ukraine and take this assaulted nation seriously--something Donald Trump seems incapable of doing.
A bit of history helps. Yale professor Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands (2010) is highly recommended.
A bit of history helps. Yale professor Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands (2010) is highly recommended.
The systematic violence examined in Bloodlands began with the Russian Revolution of 1917. During the ensuing civil war, anarchists, Bolsheviks and Whites all commandeered food from peasant farmers. A national famine resulted in 1921. An estimated 1.5 people died in Ukraine.
With the launch of the first Five Year Plan in 1928, Joseph Stalin instituted “collectivization” of farms in Ukraine. Class warfare was declared against landowning “kulak” farmers.
Farmers who refused to join a collective, or who sold grain on the black market were arrested, shot, or deported to the Gulag. Bands of NKVD secret police, the forerunner of the KGB, sealed the borders, rendering Ukraine a vast death camp.
In the eerie calculus of survival, Snyder notes that cannibalism was “sometimes a victimless crime.” Some parents “asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. One Ukrainian child told her siblings: ‘Mother says that we should eat her if she dies.’”
In the cities, bread lines formed at 2:00 am in front of shops that opened at 7:00 am. Snyder relates the eyewitness account of a Welsh journalist: “Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them …
The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two … Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear.”
Journalist Arthur Koestler saw "hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment window their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles ...”
Ukrainians called their national nightmare “Holodomor”—death by hunger. There are no exact figures on how many died in the famine. Timothy Snyder’s educated guess settles on 3.3 million people.
Of the 41.7 million people living in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic before WWII, only 27.4 million were alive in 1945. Official data says at least 8 million Ukrainians lost their lives: 5.5 - 6 million civilians, and more than 2.5 million natives of Ukraine were killed in battle.
It would help immensely if the United States had a president who knew the history of Ukraine, its incalculable losses, and its complicated, brave struggle nowdays to stave off Russian aggression. Donald Trump is not that president. We deserve better. And so does Ukraine. -30-
