A series of mythbusters for general public. 1) To those, who blame Russia for the crimes of Soviet Union, such as Holodomor: You are badly mistaken. Soviet Union and Russia are two different states, and what led the Communist authorities to do what they did was an ideology – a European one by the way – not the supremacy of the Russian people, who had to merge into the Soviet people. Being Russian does not mean being Soviet. The Holodomor was not a policy directed towards the Ukrainian people, but rather a combination of the tragic consequence of the collectivization of the agriculture in the Soviet Union (which involved all the populations of the Soviet Union including Russians) and the subsequent repression of the kulak resistance. Many landowners, for understandable reasons, did not want to relinquish their lands to the Soviets. The violence followed and the lack of stimuli for the land-workers to produce more crop caused a steep decrease in the harvest, which in turn caused a famine. This politically led atrocity involved several regions of the Soviet Union – not only Ukraine, but also several regions of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The food was scarce, because of the inhumane Soviet agricultural policies. The Soviet authorities deported and killed the kulaks, because of their social class and their opposition to Sovietization. The goal was to systematically destroy the human instinct towards property and entrepreneurship in order to build the Socialist society and create the so-called Soviet new man. 2) To those, who still call Russia – USSR, Soviet Russia, Communist State: Soviet Union is not Russia to a no lesser extent by which the Third Reich is not Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is neither Austria nor Hungary, or the Mughal Empire is not India. The Soviet authorities were made up of people of several nationalities, not only Russians. At least two general secretaries of the Communist Party were Ukrainian (Khrushchev and Brezhnev among others), and the most famous leader of the history of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, was Georgian. Do you distrust Georgia now? Furthermore, not all Russians wanted Communism. In the 1917 elections, which were held shortly after the October Revolution, less than 25% of the overall Russian population voted for the Bolsheviks, and many fought against the communists. Have you heard about the White Army? 3) To those, who think that Western Ukraine is representative of the entire Ukraine: Ukraine is a deeply divided country, as well as, for instance, Lebanon and Bosnia. In the Eastern and Southern regions, the population is Orthodox and is similar to ethnic Russians. If in Donetsk or Kherson Ukrainian is not spoken, it is because in these areas Ukrainians have close historical ties with Russia. The eastern borders between Russia and Ukraine dont have much sense: there is actually a dialect continuum between Ukrainian and Russian, and in some regions of South-Western Russia you can hear people speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent. The West of Ukraine, on the other hand, has closer ties to Poland and Austria-Hungary. It has received a strong European influence and is Catholic. The Ukrainian nationalism was born in Western Ukraine, while it was under the Habsburg monarchy, while in the other regions it has been rather scarce. Ukraine as a whole is not Western Ukraine. Thank you for your attention and I hope these will at least get you to start questioning perceived events.
Posted on: Wed, 07 May 2014 00:49:29 +0000
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