Pope Francis has just compared Putin’s war on Ukraine with the genocidal terror-famine (“Holodomor”) that Josef Stalin inflicted on Ukraine and adjacent agricultural areas in 1932–33, making a statement timed to coincide with the annual memorial observations in Ukraine (on the fourth Sunday of every November) of this man-made catastrophe. We now have available in English authoritative accounts of the vast, tragic scope, malice, and destructiveness of the terror-famine, particularly Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017). We also now have a lucid, distinguished body of journalistic and scholarly writing on the history of Ukraine and its current affairs: for the scholarly writing, the Harvard Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015) and his The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present (2022), and for literary journalism, the Russian-Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov’s Diary of an Invasion (2022) and the newly updated edition of the British journalist Anna Reid’s Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine (1997; revised, 2022).
The interpretation of the causes, scope, and effects of Stalin’s assault on the traditional, productive agriculture and industrious peasant farmers of Ukraine in the interests of forced Communist collectivization of farms and the export for hard cash of Ukrainian grain to Western countries was a major controversy until the fall of Russian Communism in the early 1990s, and apologists for Putin’s regime still deny its uniqueness, scope, and significance — indeed, its very existence as a historical fact. The history of the interpretative controversy is itself a vitally important chapter and case study of international modern politics, with many fools, many villains, a few heroes, and probably five million Ukrainian victims in 1932–33, and with many hundreds of thousands of subsequent Ukrainian victims — including Ukrainian Jews — at the hands of Stalin and his Communist apparat throughout the later 1930s, then of Nazi occupiers, 1941–44, then of the returning Communists, eager to exploit the idea of Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans. Social Darwinist, Nazi German treatment of Ukrainians and other Slavs as subhuman “Untermenschen” was documented briefly and lucidly in English in Bohdan Wytwycky’s The Other Holocaust (1980) and at more length in Plokhy’s more recent volumes. (Wytwycky estimated in 1980 that the Nazis had killed 9 to 10 million Slavs and Gypsies in addition to their millions of Jewish victims.)
Comments