The years are 1933-1945, Stalin and Hitler are both in power, and Ukraine is, as historian Timothy Snyder puts it, a “heart of darkness” – so dark it’s better to look the other way.
In those years there were more deaths in Ukraine than anywhere else. Snyder: “There was no more dangerous place on earth.”
Few know this story. Because Ukraine disappears after the Second World War, behind the Iron Curtain and in the Soviet Union.
A look back at these tragedies and beyond, to 500 BC, when the “black earth” doomed the great Athens.
Stalin’s “internal colonization”
Such a tragedy ends in the worst man-made famine in history. Three to four million people die in the “Holodomor” – Ukrainian for “dead of hunger”.
According to historian Snyder, Joseph Stalin wanted “internal colonization”. Because you have no outside colonies that you could exploit – unlike the great colonial powers.
That, according to Snyder, is the logic of Stalin’s first five-year plan in a nutshell. This plan has been painful throughout the Soviet Union. But one of the main goals is control over Ukraine’s fertile black soil.
Because that’s the focus, the goals are particularly high – the methods particularly brutal. More grain needs to be brought in. “Dekulakization” is even more difficult. Kulaks are farmers who own private property. Lenin called them “leeches and vampires.”
Under Stalin “the kulaks as a class must be liquidated” – meaning expropriated, shot or deported.
This collectivization of agriculture fails, the first people starve. Stalin needs guilty ones.
The lie was invented in the power apparatus, Polish spies are behind it. The inventor of this lie is later punished with death by the Soviet bureaucracy – he did not do enough against the Polish spies.
Above all, Stalin blames Ukraine, saying that Ukrainian nationalists are sabotaging reforms. Stalin unleashes his apparatus of repression.
More grain will be confiscated; even when it is clear that hundreds of thousands or millions will die. Later, the peasants are forbidden to go to the cities to beg. No one is allowed to leave Ukraine.
According to Snyder, it will be a kind of prison. “Millions die who should not have died.”
Hitler’s slaves in “Lebensraum Ost”
Like Stalin, German dictator Adolf Hitler understood Ukraine as a “breadbasket”, according to Snyder. “As a place that can feed an entire continent.”
For Hitler, Ukraine was the territory Germany had to control in order to survive the “Jewish World Conspiracy” and become a world power.
At the same time, Hitler envisions the world in a final battle of ruling races over scarce resources. Germany must strike before other races do, and therefore conquer the “living space East” – largely present-day Ukraine.
The Ukrainians should work for the Nazi Germans on this ground. Hitler’s role model was the US, or at least what he gathered from their history.
In the US, people from sub-Saharan Africa worked as slaves. For Germany – in the words of Hitler – the Ukrainians would be the “N****”.
After World War II, misconceptions about World War II spread in the West, Snyder says. For example, that the majority of murdered Jews lived in Nazi Germany.
In fact, many more Jews are dying in the area Snyder calls “Bloodland” in the book of the same name: roughly what is now Ukraine and Belarus, Poland and the Baltic States.
The simple reason for this is that before the outbreak of the war, many more Jews lived in this area than in Germany. As Snyder points out, 165,000 German Jews are murdered, which is a heinous crime in itself.
At the same time, it represents only a small part of the tragedy of European Jews: less than 3 percent of all 6 million deaths in the Holocaust.
The black earth becomes the downfall of the empire of Athens
Thousands of years ago it showed how important it was, this black soil of present-day Ukraine.
The year is 479 BC, the Persian wars are over. An alliance of Greek city-states led by Sparta and Athens won. The great empire of Persia, the superpower at the time, was lost.
Athens triumphs, enjoying some five decades of prosperity before disaster strikes, in which Ukraine’s black soil is crucial.
The Greek city-states remain divided after their great victory, many of them having fought on the side of the Persian Empire. And this kingdom does not give up.
His chance came when Athens exaggerated its power expansion, Sparta felt threatened and eventually provoked the Peloponnesian War.
Both Athens and Sparta ask Persia for support. So Persia can divide and conquer.
It supports the Spartan fleet of ships, which Sparta can then use to defeat Athena at the Hellespont – the gateway to the crops of the Black Sea region.
After that, Athens is defenseless because Sparta blocks grain supplies from the Black Sea region – on which Athens largely depends. Athens must admit defeat.
The Greek city-states fought each other for decades afterwards. Athens tries in vain to regain control of access to the Black Sea region.
At some point, the Greeks will reach a “balance of impotence”, as British historian Roderick Beaton writes in the book “The Greeks – A Global History”. Persia had an easy game for a long time.
The historian Beaton calls what the Greeks were doing then “depressing”. But another story is passed on to posterity – including through texts that have survived to this day: “The Persians” by Aeschylus, “Histories” by Herodotus.
According to Beaton, the story of a supposedly vastly inferior underdog’s heroic struggle against invasion by a great empire and the threat of a tyrant resonates to this day. (aargauerzeitung.ch)
Soource :Watson
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
