*Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation*

 [[{“value”:”By Yaroslav Hrytsak, I found this to be one of the very best overviews of Ukrainian history and certainly the most conceptual.  This passage concerns the 1914-1945 period and the frequency of change: In Lviv — eight [the nature of the regime changed eight times].  In Kyiv, the government changed hands eleven times and at
The post *Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

By Yaroslav Hrytsak, I found this to be one of the very best overviews of Ukrainian history and certainly the most conceptual.  This passage concerns the 1914-1945 period and the frequency of change:

In Lviv — eight [the nature of the regime changed eight times].  In Kyiv, the government changed hands eleven times and at one railway station in Donbas up to twenty-seven times during the first half of 1919 alone…

In just fifteen years (1932-1947) there were multiple genocides on Ukrainian lands.  (I use genocide here in the broad sense proposed by the creator of the term, Raphael Lemkin: acts of mass violence that threatened the existence of entire groups…)  Such genocidal acts included: the liquidatino of the ‘kulaks’ as a class in 1930-31; the Holodomor of 1932-33; the ‘Polish’ and ‘Greek’ operations of the NKVD; the Holocaust against the Jews; the elimination of the Roma; the Nazi destruction of Soviet prisoners of war (1941-44); attacks against the Polish population by Ukrainian nationalists (the Volyn massacre of 1943); attacks on Ukrainians by the Polish underground.  Also three mass deportations: of Crimean Tatars from Crimea (1944); of the Polish population from the western lands of the Ukrainian SSR and of the Ukrainian population from the southeastern lands of communist Poland.

…How can we explain the intensity of violence on Ukrainian lands in 1914-45?

Recommended, but of course this is not in every way a happy story.

The post *Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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