The Holodomor Anne Applebaum has won a number of prestigious prizes. Her book Gulag: A History won the Pulitzer Prize. The Holodomor is not a topic familiar to most in the West. Millions starved to death in Ukraine during a famine engineered by Stalin. Excerpt from an article on her lecture in Toronto on October 9th 2014: Losing Ukraine was unthinkable, and Stalin turned to the kind of extreme repressions he had deployed in Tsaritsyn. Soldiers were sent to villages to confiscate not only grain but vegetables, fruit and livestock. By the spring of 1933 whole villages had fallen silent as every single one of their inhabitants starved to death, she said. To turn Ukraine into a Soviet fortress entailed targeting not only the rural population but also the Ukrainian language and culture. A legacy of these policies is that many Russians were convinced that Ukraine was not a real nation and was not significantly different than Russia, Ms. Applebaum said. Turning to Putin, Ms. Applebaum suggested that Ukraine represents an existential threat for the Russian president, as it had for Stalin before him. According to Ms. Applebaum, Stalin understood that Ukraine, with a population suspicious of centralized authority and attached to its land and traditions, was different than Russia. Putin, on the other hand, is afraid because a country he sees as indistinguishable from Russia is promoting ideas of freedom, democracy, and the West. If Stalin feared that Ukrainian nationalism could bring down the Soviet regime, Putin fears that Ukraine’s example could bring down his own regime, a modern autocratic kleptocracy, she said. holodomor.powweb/news-and-events/ukrainian-famine-lecture.html
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 18:29:35 +0000
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