Ukrainians Remember

          When I was a student in Belgium in the early 60s I became friends with two young men who spoke proudly of their Ukrainian heritage.  As children they had managed with their families to escape the repressive Soviet regime in the country of their birth and find refuge in America, one in Cleveland and the other in New York.  With the help of government grants, they were working toward university degrees that would enable them to lead productive lives in their adopted country.  What I remember most about my two friends was their hatred for Russia.  The history of their homeland was imprinted on their souls.

          As we contemplate the incursions of Russia into the independent nation of Ukraine, we must not forget the atrocities Ukrainians endured over the centuries, none worse than the one at the hands of Stalin in 1933.  That atrocity was forced starvation.

          It shouldn’t have happened in a land called “the breadbasket of the USSR.”  But in the 1920s Stalin had replaced the Ukrainian political and cultural elite with Russian cadres, liquidated the Orthodox clergy, and imposed collectivization of the farms.  The peasants who resisted were either killed or sent to Siberia to pay for their effrontery.  Russia then set farm quotas on the collectives, letting the Ukrainians keep whatever they produced above the quotas.  When the quotas became impossible to meet, the Ukrainians starved.  The famine resulted in the loss of 10 million Ukrainian lives.

          Then the Germans invaded Ukraine in 1941 on their way to Moscow.  The Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators, but the Nazis were less interested in making friends than in finding and killing one million Ukrainian Jews.  By the time the Russians, unforgiving of infidelity, swept back through Ukraine, another 7 million Ukrainian civilians and 1.7 million soldiers lay dead.

          After World War II, the Soviet Union transformed Ukraine into an important center for arms production, hi-tech research, and nuclear weapons.  Ukraine even gave the Soviet Union two important leaders in Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.  Tragically, in 1986 it also gave the world Chernobyl.

          Following the fall of Communism and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Ukraine regained its independence in 1991, but continued to rely heavily on Russia, especially for its energy.  But when Ukraine began to lean toward an economic alliance with Western Europe, Russia decided to put a stop to it.  We know the rest of the story.

          I still have a vivid memory of my Ukrainian friends giving passionate demonstrations of native Ukrainian folkloric dances, and today I marvel at the resilience and tenacity of a people who, through all the invasions, the slaughters, and the mass starvation, have managed to retain their language and their culture, not to mention their lasting enmities.  The question now is whether or not it will retain its independence.