Putin

Stalin and the Stalinists saw themselves as social engineers. A class that obstructed progress was ultimately no different from an outcropping that impeded the flow of a river needed for hydroelectric power. The solution was the same in both cases: remove the obstacle.

The Russian peasants were forced to collectivize in the early thirties, moving from small family plots to large collective or state-run agricultural enterprises. A special solution was created for the peasants of Ukraine—artificial famine, known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor, “murder by hunger.” The peasants’ food stocks were confiscated, roads were blocked at the beginning of winter, and in the spring the bodies were simply collected, with no damage done to property.

Because of the dishonesty of Soviet statistics and the execution of many statisticians in Stalin’s time, we don’t have a very exact number of how many Ukrainians perished during the Holodomor. As an example of shifting Soviet statistics, until the time of Gorbachev the figure for Soviet war dead was twenty million, a number that had acquired the tragic charisma of the six million Jews. Suddenly, and without even much fanfare, the official number was changed to twenty-six million. Where had that New York’s worth of the dead been all those years?

Some of the same holds true for the Holodomor as well. Making use of census data and the statistics that weren’t prohibited, like the production of various shoe sizes, scholars have constructed a general numerical picture of five million victims in Ukraine. Whatever the exact number, there is no doubt that the Holodomor qualifies as one of the great crimes of the twentieth century, that is to say of all history. The fact that this crime is largely unknown in the West and the wider world makes the pain of its memory all the keener.

In June 1941, some ten years after the millions of Ukrainians were starved to death, Hitler’s armies attacked the USSR with a three-pronged blitzkrieg strategy of taking Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. But Leningrad held off the invaders in what would become a nine-hundred-day siege; Moscow, reinforced by an early winter and Siberian troops, halted the onslaught on the outskirts of the city; Kiev fell. Many Ukrainians went over to the German side on the assumption, reasonable but wrong, that nothing could be worse than Stalin.

The Germans, however, failed to capitalize on Ukrainian sympathy. Erich Koch, head of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, considered Ukrainians untermenschen, “niggers” fit only for “vodka and the whip.”

For all the bad blood between Moscow and Kiev, less than ten years after the end of the war, to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the union of Ukraine and Russia, Nikita Khrushchev made Ukraine the magnificent and meaningless present of Crimea. The gift had no more significance than taking money from one pant pocket and putting it in another. Ukraine’s “ownership” was largely nominal. It was all one Soviet Union ruled by Moscow, and that Soviet Union would last forever, or at least until the attainment of the ultimate goal of Marxism—the withering away of the state. Still, just to be on the safe side, the city of Sevastopol, where the Black Sea Fleet was stationed, would remain under control of the city of Moscow. The only problem, of course, was that the state did in fact wither away, not in some unimaginably distant future in which people had evolved enough to live without laws and police, but a mere thirty-seven years later, and it didn’t so much wither away as suddenly collapse like a building stripped from within by thieves.

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On December 1, 1991, more than 90 percent of Ukraine voted for independence from what one legislator called “probably the worst empire in the history of the world,” though one might ask how bad an empire could be if you could vote your way out of it.

Impoverished, corrupt, ill-prepared for the real rigors of statehood, Ukraine was now, whether Putin or any of his ilk liked it or not, a real country, a state. Not only that, with its some 4,500 nuclear missiles, Ukraine had suddenly become the world’s third-largest nuclear power, in a league with Russia and the United States, far ahead of China, England, and France. Ukraine, however, did not possess operational control over the missiles—the launch codes remained in Moscow. Still, the nuclear warheads or nuclear material could be reconfigured into other sorts of weapons, and if nuclear material fell into the wrong hands there could be serious trouble, as would become all too apparent in November 1995, when Chechen rebels planted cesium-137 in a large Moscow park, then alerted the media.