Holodomor
Holodomor. It’s not a place in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter’s world – it’s the name for the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine that killed 3.9 million people by one of history’s most prolific murderers – Joseph Stalin. At the time, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia and not going back to starve under Russian domination may be the reason that the Ukrainians fight so hard today.
Holodomor is a Ukrainian word that combines “starvation” and “to inflect death.” One University of Pittsburgh historian describes Stalin’s goal as, “transforming the Ukrainian nation into his idea of a modern, proletarian, socialist nation, even if this entailed the physical destruction of broad sections of its population.”
Stalin replaced privately owned farms with state-run collectives and, when the peasants or kulaks (wealthier farm owners) resisted, they were shipped to Siberia. Stalin took forty-four percent of grain production so that there was not enough left to feed the Ukrainian people. If they tried to keep even a handful of grain, they could be executed. Condemned to starvation, they ate leaves, flowers, bark, their pets and some even resorted to cannibalism.
Some U.S. journalists, such as Walter Duranty of The New York Times, were willing co-conspirators with Stalin. Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, denied there was a famine and hero-worshiped Stalin and the Soviet Union saying that, “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” It wasn’t just him, Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times.
Today, Putin admires Stalin and still refuses to acknowledge the genocidal Holdomor. Stalin himself believed that people would forget his evil deeds as one of his colleagues recalled. In fact, one of Stalin’s colleagues recalls hearing Stalin talking to himself looking at a death list muttered, “Who’s going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one.”
Among a penchant for violent nationalism, Stalin and Putin share an interesting characteristic, they made billions as government employees. Stalin was one of the most successful socialists of his time – he was the 11th richest person in the world – worth an equivalent in today’s dollars of $380 billion. Other than being a clerk briefly, he had never worked outside of government.
Similarly, Vladimir Putin has always been in the government, mostly as a KGB officer. Like Stalin, he is worth billions and some believe he may secretly be the richest man in the world. He is said to own a 190,000 square-foot mansion on top of a cliff overlooking the Black Sea.
If Putin is looking to add to his wealth, it doesn’t make sense to go after a poor country. For example, over 3 million people have fled the failed socialist economy of Venezuela despite, like Duranty, two English journalists describing it as a “paradise.” They had to acknowledge that even Venezuelan criminals were leaving as “there’s not that much to rob.”
But Ukraine has been known as “the breadbasket of Europe” given that it is home to a quarter of the world’s super-fertile black soil. Currently, it is only cultivating80 million acres out of over 100 million acres and is one of the top three grain exporters in the world. That leaves an area about the size of South Carolina (w/o the roads) that could be used to grow an amount of wheat equivalent to 40 percent of the U.S. crop. With a fast growing world population, an increase of two billion people in the next 30 years, it’s no wonder that Putin sees a prize to add to his already considerable wealth and power.
Of course, he may also feel that Russia and Ukraine are “one people,” despite the Ukrainian people voting overwhelmingly for independence in 1991. The Ukrainian people on the other hand apparently, remember their history of the terrors of socialist collectivism under Russian domination.
Unfortunately for the Ukrainians, there’s a lot to rob and Putin knows it. Ukrainians will either fight and win or possibly suffer another Holodomor despite being the “break basket of the world.”