ninme

The Times - Ukraine: Long Memories
The millions who starved under Stalin should not be forgotten

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the famine, known as the Holodomor, in which millions of peasants perished owing to Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture. Ukraine’s authorities are erecting a series of national monuments. Russia objects

Natch.

But if the effects of the famine were widespread and indiscriminate, the intent of Stalin’s campaign was deliberate and ferocious. It attacked the peasant’s ties with the land; and it attacked the Ukrainian peasant’s sense of national belonging. …

No one has illuminated this episode more than the historian Robert Conquest in his great work The Harvest of Sorrows. He recounts a pitiless use of starvation as a political tool to destroy a nation. Ukraine’s borders were sealed; Ukrainian peasants were repelled from Russian villages to starve. The word “genocide” is a postwar and sometimes politically charged coinage. As a description of Stalin’s assault on Ukraine’s peasantry, it is far from hyperbole.

It is not Ukraine that is pressing a nationalist agenda. Russia under Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev has consistently taken an overbearing and obstructionist approach to relations with the former Soviet republics. Obscuring the national character of the Holodomor is consistent with Russia’s meddling in Ukraine’s presidential elections in 2004, or its economic blockade of Georgia in 2006.

The reaction of Western democracies has been too accommodative lately, more doormat than sentry…

Case in point: Russia goes so far as to poison one of the presidential candidates, and we call to it “meddling”.

The struggle between East and West was neither an accident nor a mistake, but an inevitable outcome of the diplomacy adopted by Stalin during and after the wartime alliance. It was not only a competition for power, but also an argument over ideologies, a contest between the State’s authority and individual liberty.

It would be a betrayal of that record, and of history, if we were to temper our public understanding of Stalin’s crimes in the interests of an easier relationship with the Kremlin’s current occupants. Relations between states fluctuate; the victims of history remain.

(Holodomor sounds like something out of a Lord of the Rings novel, doesn’t it?)