I know you’re watching the chaos created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so I don’t have much to add … except a reflection on the horrors of the Holodomor.
The short version is that the Holomodor was an enforced famine imposed by Joseph Stalin, the Russian leader during the early 1930s. Russia sent troops to confiscate food from Ukraine families across the country resulting in the starvation of 4 million Ukrainian people. (Some of the pictures taken during this period are horrific and I’ve chosen not to include them.)
“Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food. Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food. Despite growing starvation, food requisitions were increased and aid was not provided in sufficient quantities. The crisis reached its peak in the winter of 1932–33, when organized groups of police and communist apparatchiks ransacked the homes of peasants and took everything edible, from crops to personal food supplies to pets. Hunger and fear drove these actions, but they were reinforced by more than a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric emanating from the highest levels of the Kremlin.”
It seems man’s inhumanity to man knows no bounds.
“Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).”
