A Bitter Legacy

The Suffering of Ukraine

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine remain high.  The animus goes back a long way--as is the case with many national rivalries in that part of the world.

A recent article in the Daily Mail details the horror of the years of famine caused by Stalin and his maniacal communism.  Ukraine used to be the bread-basket of Eastern Europe.  Under Stalin's tender embrace it turned into an agricultural desert.  Millions died.  In the West the story has never really been told.

The Daily Mail article is written by Dominic Sandbrook; it has been prompted by the publication of a new book by Anne Applebaum entitled Red Famine.  Sandbrook writes:

The famine that struck Ukraine in late 1932 and 1933 was one of the most lethal catastrophes in European history.  In the West, it is nowhere near as well-known as it should be.  In Ukraine itself, however, the Holodmor — literally, ‘hunger extermination’ — is often seen as the equivalent of the Holocaust, a gigantic, man-made operation to murder millions of people.

And behind it was not just one man — Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-Twenties to 1953 — but an entire warped ideology which sought to remake a peasant society according to a Utopian Communist blueprint.  Even now, in an age when we are regularly assailed by images of horror and suffering, the details of the Holodmor are heartbreaking.  Starving children, mass graves, vigilantes, even cannibalism: the famine saw human nature stripped to the bone.

Millions died.  But what are few deaths when one is in the vanguard of a revolution that will bring a Marxist utopia to the world.  You cannot make an omelette without breaking the odd egg, eh.

Russia, the shrunken-down former Soviet Union, has never fronted up to this genocidal, Soviet-caused catastrophe.  There have been no public acknowledgements.  No Truth and Reconciliation process.  Only obfuscation and denials.

Russian hatred of the Ukraine showed up in other ways as well.  Stories such as those told by Anne Applebaum of the mistreatment of Ukrainian prisoners by their Russian guards during the Second World War are unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry in that part of the world.  Once again, in the West they have never really been told.

When Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin decided that a tactical withdrawal was required.  Industry needed to be relocated East of the Urals to continue the manufacture of tanks and aircraft.  Slave labour camps also had to be moved rapidly to the east.  Anne Applebaum records what happened with one group of Ukrainian prisoners being herded eastwards.  They were told by their guards that they had no transport.  They were all going to walk.

Walk they did--although the journeys of many were cut short.  The rapid advance of the Germans made the NKVD nervous and when they became nervous they started shooting.  On 2 July, the 954 prisoners of the Czortkow gaol, in West Ukraine, began their march to the east.  Along the way, the officer who wrote the subsequent report identified 123 of them as Ukrainian nationalists and shot them for "attempted rebellion and escape".  After walking for more than two weeks, with the German army within 20-30 kilometres, he shot those still alive."  [Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 379.]

To this day there are those in the West who are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.  They deny that anything bad happened in the Ukraine because--well, communist leaders would just never have done such a thing.

As Applebaum writes, as late as 1986, when the great historian Robert Conquest published a groundbreaking book on the famine, entitled Harvest Of Sorrow, the Left-wing London Review of Books ran a scathing review dismissing it as yet more anti-Communist propaganda.

Even today, shamefully, there are those on the Left who still make excuses for Stalin.  Chief among them, almost unbelievably, is Jeremy Corbyn’s sepulchral press chief, Winchester-educated Seumas Milne, who has rarely missed an opportunity to defend the Communist dictator.  According to Mr Milne, people should stop banging on about the victims of Stalin’s regime. Instead, they should remember ‘communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality’.

By any standards, this is a grotesque insult to the millions who died in the Ukrainian famine. The fact that it comes from Jeremy Corbyn’s official spokesman is simply disgraceful — and tells you all you need to know about the Labour leadership’s moral compass, or lack thereof.

From a Christian perspective, we at this blog are cheered to read of a growing hunger amongst Ukrainian people for the Gospel of God's grace in Christ Jesus.  May the tide of God's mercy upon a suffering people run high, deep, and long.