Anyone interested in understanding the Ukraine today should read Timothy Snyder's 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The book is also available in German translation and is especially recommended to all the Putinversteher in Germany today.
The bloodlands refers to the region which today would include St. Petersburg and the western rim of the Russian Federation, most of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine. This is where the systematic mass murder of the Nazi and Soviet regimes overlapped and interacted. While the perpetrators generally acted separately and at different times with different motivations, the outcome was the same: death to millions of civilians on a scale never imagined before. And the two regimes could act in tandem to achieve their strategic objectives: the Soviets and the Germans cooperated in the destruction of Poland and of its educated classes, killing some two hundred thousands people between 1939 and 1941.
With respect to the Ukraine, I don't believe that current siutation can be fully understood unless one takes into account the Famine of 1932-33, engineered by Stalin as part of his Farm Collectivization scheme. It is conservatively estimated that 3.5 million Ukrainians died as a result of Stalin's deliberate policy of mass starvation.
"Hunger was far worse in the cities of Soviet Ukraine than in any city in the Western world. In 1933 in Soviet Ukraine, a few tens of thousands of city dwellers actually died of starvation. Yet the vast majority of the dead and dying in Soviet Ukraine were peasants, the very people whose labors had brought what bread there was to the cities. The Ukrainian cities lived, just, but the Ukrainian countryside was dying. City dwellers could not fail to notice the destitution of peasants who, contrary to all seeming logic, left the fields in search of food. The train station in Dnipropetrovsk was overrun with starving peasants, too weak even to beg. On a train, Gereth Jones met a peasant who had acquired some bread, only to have it confiscated by the police. "They took my bread away from," he repeated over and over again, knowing that he would disappoint his starving family. At the Stalino station, a starving peasant killed himself by jumping in front of a train. The city, the center of industry in southeastern Ukraine, had been found in imperial times by John Hughes, a Welsh industrialists {...}. The city had been named after Hughe; now it was named after Stalin. (Today it is known as Donetsk.)"
The Famine is just the first chapter in Snyder's bloody history. Fourteen million people were killed in the bloodlands by the purposeful policies of mass murder implemented by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
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