Veteran journalist and author
Joseph C. Goulden offers a review of Serhii Plokhy's Lost Kingdom and Anne Applebaum's Red Famine in the Washington Times.
In a European continent torn
by incessant warfare over the centuries, Ukraine deserves sympathy for its
most-abused-state status. As the real estate adage holds, “Location is
everything.” And Ukraine has the misfortune to be snuggled against the southeast
corner of Russia, historically its prime tormentor.
Two complementary books trace
Ukraine’s travails, climaxing with Russia’s brutal seizure of a Ukraine that
sought to become an independent nation after the 1991 collapse of communism and
the USSR. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin decreed otherwise, and the Red Army
crushed Ukrainian hopes for independence.
The Harvard historian Serhii
Plokhy, the leading Western scholar on Ukraine, details Moscow’s historic
insistence that Russia and its East Slavic neighbors occupy a joint historical
space, and essentially comprise a single nation — despite strong language,
cultural and religious differences.
Ukraine attempts to retain
its independent, medieval Kyvian state over the centuries had
off-again/on-again successes. At one point it was amalgamated into Poland.
In the 19th century Russian
imperial authorities compromised (in a sense) by creating a tripartite nation
composed of three tribes: Great Russian, Little Russian (Ukraine) and
Belarusian. Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917 destroyed the forced alliance,
and Ukraine was independent again until the communists seized power after World
War I. The “Lost Kingdom” of Mr. Plokhy’s title refers to its involuntary
incorporation into the USSR.
Although the reborn-state
received swift recognition from many European countries (plus the United
States) Lenin moved to reclaim it for the new USSR in January 1918. But would
the mostly-peasant regime mesh with the new communist regime? Karl Marx
considered peasants “at best an ambivalent asset.” In an 1852 essay he had
claimed they were not a class and hence had “no class consciousness”
Lenin was more pragmatic —
and even more so because Ukraine had agricultural resources needed by the rest
of the USSR. The area’s fertile land and mild climate permitted two grain crops
annually, far more than the rest of Russia.
The first scheme was to
convert private farms into collective agriculture, run by the state. Lenin put
it directly in a 1922 message to colleague Vyascheslav Molotov: “We must teach
these people a lesson right now, so that they will not even dare to think of
resistance in coming decades.” The dreaded Cheka, the secret police, aided by
the Red Army, slaughtered resistant rural leaders by the hundreds. But grain
production was not enough to alleviate national shortages.
Thus Stalin and the ruling
hierarchy in the early 1930s moved to a more draconian plan: to destroy what
remained of Ukrainian culture and to seize the land for the state.
Segue here to Anne
Applebaum’s gripping account of the grim years during which Moscow deliberately
sought to starve Ukraine into submission. Ms. Applebaum won a Pulitzer Prize
for an earlier book, “Gulag”, on the Soviet prison system. “Red Famine” relates
a story that is perhaps more cruel, an account of the misery the Communists
inflicted on an innocent populace.
The state-evoked famine that
stretched over two decades is well-known in USSR history. The consensus of
previous historians was that the primary reason for starvation was Stalin’s campaign
for collective farms. But having gained access to Ukraine archives, Ms.
Appelbaum relates an even more chilling story: that in its latter stages, the
motive driving “land reform” was in fact the deliberate obliteration of the
Ukrainian people.
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
