Holodomor

Last Saturday marked Holodomor remembrance day.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to understand the the long history of genocide and ethnic cleansing along the southern edge of the Russian Empire, which culminated in Stalin’s artificial famines that were intended to absolutely destroy Ukrainian, Kazakh and other non-Russian groups in Ukraine and Southern Russia.

Here are some maps and more context. And the relevant Wikipedia article.

Notice that the areas inhabited predominately by Ukrainians went well beyond the Soviet borders of Ukraine: Voronezh, Kursk and Kuban were all Ukrainian lands. The Holodomor wiped out much of the Ukrainian population, Russians were resettled there and the remaining Ukrainians were forcibly assimilated.

The story gets even darker, as Ukrainians had been settled in Kuban centuries earlier as part of Russian ethnic cleansing of the northern Caucasus.

This story constantly repeats itself in Russian history. Brutally eliminate peoples that can’t be russified or easily subjugated such as Crimean Tatars and Circassians, resettle and russify people from the Western parts of the Russian Empire such as Ukrainians, Belarusians, Baltic peoples, Poles, etc., or force groups into a sort of feudal servitude such as the Buryats, Chechnians and Dagestanis.

That last group is particularly tragic: Russians from the big cities are not affected by the imperial wars they overwhelmingly support. Instead the entire male population of villages of Buryats, Dagestanis, and Kalmychians have been conscripted to die in Ukraine.

It’s hard to overstate the trauma that the Holodomor still carries in Ukraine. Nearly everyone in their 30s and older from Central and Eastern Ukraine has a grandparent that survived the Holodomor.