By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, April 28, 2022
Russians are renewing a vicious tradition: starving
Ukrainians to death.
The legislature of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region has
voted to “expropriate the excess harvest” of farms in
Russian-occupied Ukraine, reports Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street
Journal.
This is a policy that has some precedent.
The Ukrainian language has a word for carrying out
political mass-murder by means of starvation: Holodomor. This word exists as a name for what the
Russians did to the Ukrainians in 1932–33, when Ukraine was a not-entirely
willing constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Socialist
central planning achieved in Soviet agriculture what it achieves everywhere —
shortages caused by the misallocation of resources — resulting in a collapse of
the grain and potato harvests in the early 1930s. The socialist rulers in
Moscow saw both a potential threat to their regime and a political opportunity,
and so food was taken away from Ukrainian-populated areas and redirected toward
Russian cities. The Russian elites and urban populations were fed, and the
man-made famine was used as a political weapon to crush independence-minded
anti-Soviet movements in Ukraine.
Nobody knows how many millions of people died in that
famine. Estimates run as high as 10 million.
Some 200,000 people were imprisoned for “theft” under a
special law adopted at the time; their “crime” was searching through
agricultural waste for anything edible. Entire municipalities and regions were
stripped of everything from grain to livestock as punishment for trumped-up
political crimes. Moscow introduced a new internal-passport system to keep
those being starved to death from leaving their towns and villages to seek
food. Ukrainians attempting to flee the artificial famine zone were gunned down
by Soviet troops. Soviet propaganda insisted that the Ukrainian farmers were
dangerous traitors who were sheltering “kulaks,” Moscow’s all-purpose label for
political enemies in the peasant classes.
The German-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler was on the
scene, having been granted permission to travel through the Soviet Union for
the purpose of writing a pro-Soviet propaganda novel. What he saw was desperate
mothers trying to pass their cadaverous, starving children through the windows
of trains to strangers in the hope that they might be carried off to some place
less hellish than the workers’ paradise.
(You can read about this and much more in Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine.)
The Soviet Union was committed to the worldwide workers’
revolution for about five minutes, after which it became what Russia still is
today: a grotesque police state organized around Russian nationalism and
kleptocracy, whose rulers rely on murder, torture, and state terrorism to
maintain their power. Moscow isn’t Ukraine’s enemy or NATO’s enemy — Moscow is
the enemy of all civilized peoples and countries. The Holodomor of the 1930s
was intended in part to wipe out Ukrainian identity as a political force, and
the current war in Ukraine has much the same goal, as Putin himself has so
eloquently explained. There is no Ukraine and there are no Ukrainians, as far
as he is concerned.
Perhaps it is only symbolic that the Krasnoyarsk
legislature should so obviously evoke the Holodomor —
approvingly — as Russians once again do their worst in Ukraine: murdering,
raping, torturing, stealing, burning. But symbolism matters, and here, it
speaks to intent.
Ukrainian forces are conducting operations inside Russia,
as of course they should be, and are having more success in their efforts than
the Russians would like to admit. The United States and our NATO allies should
be clear-eyed about the fact that the weapons and intelligence we are providing
to the Ukrainians are being used in that way, and should understand that sooner
or later, Vladimir Putin and his wretched junta will decide that this amounts
to a plain act of war and respond in some way that seems fitting from Moscow’s
depraved and isolated point of view. We should be ready for that, and we should
think carefully about what our own response is going to be.
President Joe Biden has pledged to defend “every inch” of
NATO territory — and Putin already has made it clear what he will do if given
an inch. President Biden is going to be tested, but he does not have a great
deal of credibility in this matter, and neither do his Republican rivals: They
remain committed to Donald Trump, who could not have made more plain or
emphatic his contempt for NATO and its underlying principles of collective
defense. If the world is looking to America for leadership in this crisis, the
world is likely to be disappointed. We have the great luxury of not having been
forced to learn the lessons that the Ukrainians have learned.
They are lessons we keep failing to learn, a fact in
which there is both discredit and danger.
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