Thread by @LivingSamsara

No longer the monster of the gulags and purges that killed millions, Stalin now looms in the national consciousness as the giant who defeated the Nazis in World War II.

Thread: newrepublic.com/article/145953…; w/ other resources. #Stalin #Putin #Ukraine #Russia #Holodomor

Meanwhile, not only has Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Ukraine’s eastern regions, its military adventurism has also extended to Syria.

Putin, who once described the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, looks determined to avenge the humiliations of Russia’s post-Soviet implosion.

Integral to this endeavor is not just to flex the country’s geopolitical might in the present but to re-write its past.

👉Re-writing its past: theguardian.com/commentisfree/… (July 2019)

At least 5 million people died from starvation in the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1934 - including 3.9 million Ukrainians. And, despite the contentions of certain historians of the Soviet Union, Applebaum argues that these deaths were no accident.

👉history.com/news/ukrainian…

“The Soviet Union’s disastrous decision to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms; the eviction of “kulaks,” the wealthier peasants, from their homes; the chaos that followed”—these policies were “all ultimately the responsibility of Joseph Stalin (...)

(...) Joseph Stalin (...) the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.”

The famine had been designed to destroy Ukrainian peasant opposition to Soviet power; it was not the result of “natural causes” but was deliberate and imposed.

👉Holodomor - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Moreover, they were—along with the persecution of intellectuals and officials who had even the flimsiest connection to Ukrainian nationalism—part of a systematic assault not just on Ukraine, but on the very idea of Ukraine.

And so silence marked the years that followed the famine. Ukrainians were prohibited from speaking of or writing on it: Soviet authorities expunged all traces of it from official accounts.

👉The foreign press corps helped cover up the catastrophe. theatlantic.com/international/… (2017)

(...) made it easy for Soviet officials and historians to label anyone talking of a deliberate famine against Ukraine as “fascists” and “Nazis” spreading “Hitlerite propaganda.”

Much how Trump admin decries #FakeNewsMedia #FakeNewsCNN #FakeNews; Russian playbook #propaganda.

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