My wife’s parents escaped the Ukraine during the reign of Stalin and escaped to Germany. I once asked her father, “Why did you go to Germany and succumb to the German Holocaust?” He answered, “Because Hitler did not treat the Ukraine’s in the manner of Stalin.”
The following is posted in honor of my wife of over 51 years and her family. ~ Ed.
At the entrance to the memorial park in Kyiv, there is a sculpture of an extremely thin girl with a very sad look holding a handful of wheat ears in her hands. Behind her back is the Candle of Remembrance, a monument with details reminiscent of authentic embroidery that can be found on traditional Ukrainian costumes. This is a monument that commemorates a historical event known as the Holodomor.
What is the Holodomor?
After the end of the First World War, Ukraine was an independent state, but in 1919 the Soviet Union “sucked” it into the community of Soviet states. The Ukrainians, who even then considered themselves a Central European people like the Poles and not an Eastern European like the Russians, tried to restore Ukraine’s independence.
In 1932, not wanting to lose control of Europe’s main granary, Stalin resorted to one of the most heinous forms of terror against one nation. In the process of nationalization, he took away the grain-producing land from the Ukrainian peasants, but also all its offerings, thus creating an artificial famine. The goal was to “teach Ukrainians to be smart” so that they would no longer oppose official Moscow. Thus the people who produced the most grain in Europe were left without a crumb of bread. The peak of the Holodomor was in the spring of 1933. In Ukraine at that time, 17 people died of hunger every minute, more than 1,000 every hour, and almost 24,500 every day! People were literally starving to death in the streets.
Stalin settled the Russian population in the emptied Ukrainian villages. During the next census, there was a large shortage of population. Therefore, the Soviet government annulled the census, destroyed the census documents, and the enumerators were shot or sent to the gulag, in order to completely hide the truth.
World War. Their poison gas was hunger. Their Hitler was Stalin. Their Holocaust was the Holodomor. For them, fascist Berlin was Soviet Moscow, and their concentration camp was the Soviet Union.
Today, 28 countries around the world present the Holodomor as genocide against Ukrainians, which you could not learn about in school, because almost all evidence was destroyed and victims were covered up for decades, survivors were forcibly silenced by not having the right to vote until recently.
The Holodomor at that time broke the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine’s independence from Russia eternal.
~ Author Unknown
Thank You So Very Much for sharing this with the public, Sir. It’s a poignant reminder of all the Ukrainian people have suffered across the span of time, and it highlights the fact that Ukrainians have NEVER wanted to be a part of Russia or to live in subjugation as second-class citizens and serfs to the Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
These are proud and strong people who have long deserved to Live Free in a Free And SOVEREIGN UKRAINE, and what we see unfolding today is an unconscionable act of aggression and conquest perpetrated by an egomaniacal, murderous tyrant in Putin, who only seeks to grow his power and wealth and expand the territorial confines of Russia ever further westward to restore Mother Russia and the Russian Empire as she stood in her former glory days under the Czars.
In 2014, President Yanukovych’s arbitrary decision to nullify an economic agreement with the European Union (EU), with few strings attached, and accept a $15 billion aid package from Russian President Vladimir Putin was viewed with horror and revulsion. The specter of life under Russian influence and control surfaced, and this is a life that the majority of Ukrainians will never willingly accept again – something they will fight to the death before being forced once more down the road to serfdom.
From the first day of acquiring most of Ukraine from Poland, under the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), Russian Tsars sought to destroy any sense of national identity in the Ukrainian people. In 1876 Alexander II actually banned books from being published in Ukrainian and speaking Ukrainian in theater plays.
Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s first major poet (1814-1861), synthesized urban and rural linguistic usages with Church Slavonic to articulate a full range of ideas and feelings. Shevchenko railed against the autocratic Russian state in the name of “this land of ours which is not ours”. His nationalist verses reassured literate Ukrainians that they were at least a potential nation.
The Ukrainian people have never forgotten the millions of peasants who were murdered during the 1919 de-Cossackization of the Don region, they have never forgotten the 10 million Ukrainians who were starved to death by Stalin’s regime between 1932 and 1934, and they remember the forced exiles to Siberia during 1944-45. Their resentment and hostility towards Russia and communism/authoritarianism has remained into the present, and, in large part, this explains the anger Ukrainians felt towards the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych and his cozy arrangement with the former director of the KGB, Vladimir Putin and the anger they feel today over the violence directed at them and their country for the crime of Trying To LIVE FREE.
Ukraine is the key to restoring a Russian Empire that will be exponentially stronger than before the USSR, that will make Russia an even greater and exponentially more deadly existential threat to America and the entire globe. The Free World must not allow Putin to succeed in any permanent state of control over Ukraine, for the sake of the Ukrainian people and for the sake of America’s own national security interests, the same interests that must concern the entire world — for the sake of Freedom and Liberty everywhere.
~ Justin O Smith