Peter Kadhammar
Ukraine is fighting Putin to prevent the 20th century from being repeated
PUBLISHED: TODAY 05.13
Ukrainian soldiers help a family with children cross a river in the city of Irpin.
Ukrainian soldiers help a family with children cross a river in the city of Irpin.
Photo: Emilio Morenatti / AP
COLUMNISTS
Under Stalin and Hitler, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the world, writes the American historian Timothy Snyder.
Ukraine is the field of death in Europe. The fat, fertile soil and the country's position between East and West, and as the cradle of the Russian Empire, is its misfortune. The furious opposition to the Russian invaders becomes more understandable if one sees it as a struggle against the past, a desperate battle to prevent yesterday from returning.
You can read tables of the country's misfortune, from the attempts to create an independent Ukrainian state after the First World War and up to our time. Letters are not really needed.
Deaths in the famine catastrophe created by the Bolsheviks 1921-23: estimates vary between 235,000 and 1,000,000.
Deaths in the Stalin-conscious famine of 1932-33: estimates vary between 3.3 and 10 million.
The famine was Stalin's response to peasant resistance to the collectivization of agriculture. Millions starved to death in "Europe's granary" because the Communists seized the crops and seeds. To prevent the peasants from fleeing to other parts of the Soviet Union, the borders of the republic were guarded, and peasants were not allowed to buy long-distance train tickets.
2,505 people were convicted of cannibalism in 1932-33. It gives an indication of the extent of the famine.
The communist journalist Arthur Koestler was invited to the Soviet Union and met this view of the train stations in Ukraine:
The women lifted their toddlers against the cabin windows; it was pitiful and pitiful kids with limbs like sticks, swollen bellies and big skull-like heads rocking on narrow necks. ”
They were refugees in their own country, victims of the sadist Stalin in Moscow. He saw the opposition of the Ukrainians as a personal insult. They would be punished.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Photo: Sergei Ilyin / AP
I look at the pictures of today's refugees, I read about someone who handed over his children to strangers before returning to the missile crevices and the whistling sound of grenades before they hit their targets. One cannot help but think of the new sadist in Moscow who sees the resistance of the Ukrainians as an insult. They should be punished. If the resistance does not end, he threatens to destroy them as a nation.
70,868 Ukrainians were executed in Stalin's purges of suspected political opponents in 1937-38.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they began systematically murdering Jews: 1.6 million in Ukraine.
200,000 Tatars on the Crimean Peninsula were deported by Stalin to Siberia and Central Asia. A whole people. He accused them of collaborating with the Germans.
Deaths in the famine created by the communists 1946-47: estimates vary between 100,000 and 1,000,000. The famine was caused because crops were seized.
The numbers shout out from the book pages.
Online I see reports from the city of Vinnytsia. Putin's soldiers shoot grenades. I look up Vinnytsia in a work on the Holocaust in Ukraine: 186,384 civilians killed during World War II. 93 percent of them were Jews.
So you can continue reading, let your index finger follow the numbers.
The massacres in the Soviet Union were largely hidden from the world. Stalin starved Ukraine into submission, but very few reports of the disaster reached the outside world. A communist like Arthur Koestler kept quiet, embellished, constructed excuses and twisted explanations.
Until the realization of what he experienced struck him and he changed sides.
Hitler's extermination of the Jews was also largely hidden.
After the war, many could say: We did not know.
But most of the time we know.
Statistics from the UN refugee agency UNHCR: On March 8, 2,011,312 Ukrainians had fled their country.
The Russian attack is the opposite of Hitler's blitzkrieg. The attack has been going on since 2014. In peace, Putin built up the invasion army, in peace he prepared for the final attack. He did not even talk about peace, he issued ultimate ones that he knew were unreasonable.
In a book on the Holocaust, "The Shoah in Ukraine", there are some strange lines by the historian Omer Bartov:
"We have just left behind the bloodiest century in world history and seem to be heading straight into one that may turn out to be even bloodier."
Ukrainians know. For 30 years, they have worked diligently to create a democracy from a legacy of oppression, war, murder, expulsion.
They know.
We also know.
What are we prepared to pay for the 20th century not to return?
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