Many of us have been watching with awe the brave struggle of the people of Ukraine against the onslaught of Putin’s invading Russian military. We’ve watched as homes and apartment buildings, hospitals and theaters, have been bombed, and thousands of civilians have died and been wounded. Such has been the nature of this war.
The pain and suffering of the people of Ukraine is not unlike the pain and suffering of other peoples throughout the world, and throughout time. There is though, in my opinion, something of a greater historical significance about this particular conflagration.
This is not the first time in the last 100 years that a government centered in Moscow has brought death and destruction to the people of Ukraine. In the summer and fall of 1932, the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, sitting at his desk in Moscow devised a means of subjugating the people of Ukraine. Stalin did not like that Ukrainian farmers were not enthusiastic about his plans to collectivize all their small family sized plots of farmland and turn them into large, government controlled megafarms, essentially factory farms. Because of their resistance, Stalin decided on a course of action that was designed to break the Ukrainian will and push forward with his plan of collectivization.
Stalin decided that he would send armed men out into these small family farms in the fall of 1932, forcibly take all of the previous harvest, and even search out any food stuffs that may have been hidden, and leave the people of the Ukraine without food entering winter. Of course, the success of Stalin’s plan left millions of Ukrainian civilians to slowly starve to death that winter. To assure the people’s slow starvation Stalin ordered his forces to keep people from traveling to search for food. The of the Ukraine effectively had their will broken by the Russians under Stalin, and collectivization proceeded. Roughly four to seven million Ukrainians starved to death.
During all of this, Western media largely remained silent. One of the most prominent deniers of the genocide against Ukraine, the Pulitzer Prize winning Walter Duranty of the New York Times, even was praised by Stalin for telling the truth about the Soviet Union after his man-made famine. Duranty as a service to his craft attacked other journalists, notably Gareth Jones, who truthfully told of the widespread starvation of thousands in the Ukrainian countryside. Duranty ironically described Jones’ reports of famine as “malignant propaganda.”
The people of Ukraine would be subservient to Moscow’s rule for over 50 more years, until the fall of the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the breaking of the Russian yoke over so many of those under Russian hegemony, the peoples of Eastern Europe experienced a new chance for freedom. I think for those who have not lived through the Cold War it is hard to appreciate what the fall of the Iron Curtain meant. It meant much more than a huge “peace dividend” as the World’s governments could spend less on their military budgets. The end of the Cold War meant that the threat of nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries ended. The fall of the Soviet Union meant the end, for a time, of the overwhelming specter of nuclear holocaust from the World.
Forgotten in this history of de-nuclearization for most is the important role that the people of Ukraine played in slaying the specter of nuclear war. Before the Soviet Union collapsed Ukraine was one of the Republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After the collapse in 1991, Ukraine was an independent nation with hundreds of nuclear warheads on its territory and in its possession, roughly a third of the total of the former Soviet Union.
After extensive negotiation, through treaty, and through the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances signed in 1994, Ukraine gave up the third largest nuclear arsenal on the face of the earth in exchange for assurances by Russia, the United States and Great Britain of their new nation’s territorial integrity. Ukraine traded its nuclear weapons, a scourge upon the whole World, for peace, and a pledge not to be attacked. The people of the Ukraine traded the ultimate weapons of war for freedom, independence, and sovereignty.
Now, once again, Russia has sought to subject the people of Ukraine, culminating with the invasion of February 24, 2022. The people of the Ukraine have not fled. The people of the Ukraine, led by their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have stood up to Russia and fought for their freedom. They have set for the world, and especially the West an example of courage, steadfastness, and humanity. The people of the Ukraine have shown the World once more how to stand and fight against tyranny, and for freedom.
For these things, we owe the people of Ukraine.