DETROIT – Back in the 1970s and 80s, when I traveled to the Soviet Union first as a graduate student and then a journalist, we were sternly advised not to call it “Ukraine.”
“It is ‘the Ukraine,’ a diplomat told me, a province or “republic” of the Soviet Union, not an independent country.
That all changed, of course, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and 1991, and Ukraine, like the other 14 former Soviet republics, got to be an independent country at last.
Nobody then had ever heard of a minor KGB official named Vladimir Putin, who would become president of Russia a decade later, and who now is waging a war of conquest against Ukraine.
That war is now the world’s top news story. But what may be less well known is that throughout the last century, Ukraine (the word means borderlands) a country slightly larger than France, and slightly smaller than Texas. has suffered far more than most nations.
The combined ghastly death toll over the last century is almost beyond comprehension. Several hundred thousand Ukrainians were killed in the Russian Civil War that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and thousands more died when Soviet authorities suppressed an independence movement led by the anarchist Nestor Makhno. But the real horror was yet to come.
As many as 10 million Ukrainians died of starvation or its effects during the great famine, or Holodomor, of 1932-33, a famine many historians believe was deliberately engineered or at least made worse by Joseph Stalin, in part to punish Ukrainian peasants for resisting the collectivization of their farms.
Following that, millions more died during World War II, and the infrastructure of the entire Ukraine was largely destroyed twice, when the Nazis conquered it in 1941 and Soviet armies liberated it in 1943-44, and once again put down an independence movement.
Many elderly Ukrainians today have vivid memories of violence and suffering; they have been there before, and while all that happened long before most of the 44 million Ukrainians were born, nearly all of them know their history, and have parents or grandparents who have endured horrors. Additionally, nearly all Ukrainian adults remember Russia’s seizing of the Crimea in 2014.
While there are millions of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, the vast majority of Ukrainians clearly want to be independent.
But what if they eventually lose? What if the Ukrainian military is ultimately overwhelmed by the vastly bigger Russian military machine? Will that mean Ukraine resisted in vain?
Not at all.
First of all, defeating a country on the battlefield is not the same as conquering it. You need to look no further than the United States’ speedy victory over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003. We crushed Iraq’s army almost effortlessly. President George W. Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” And then the real war started.
Sometimes the meaning of victory and defeat isn’t clear for years. In May, 1941, Yugoslav patriots overthrew a pro-Hitler government in a sudden coup. An enraged Adolf Hitler attacked Yugoslavia and swiftly defeated and occupied the country.
Germany had only tiny losses. But crushing Yugoslavia set Hitler’s timetable for invading the Soviet Union back five weeks – which may well have saved Moscow, and doomed Germany in the long run. Meanwhile, the Yugoslavs formed the most successful partisan movement of the war, tying down German divisions desperately needed elsewhere.
Hungarian freedom fighters unexpectedly rose up against their Soviet occupiers in 1956, a battle which took a dramatic turn when Imre Nagy, leader of Hungary’s puppet government, announced he was changing sides and Hungary would be a free and neutral nation.
An enraged Nikita Khrushchev sent his military to crush tiny Hungary, which they did after losing thousands of Russian soldiers, far more than they expected. Nagy was tortured and murdered.
But the event ignited a flame in Hungarian hearts. In 1989, as Kremlin control was weakening, the Hungarian parliament suddenly demanded his rehabilitation. Nagy and his supporters were unearthed from unmarked graves and given heroes’ funerals.
Hungary then opened its border with Austria. Soon, citizens of other Eastern bloc countries, especially East Germany, began going to Hungary and fleeing communism,
When East German leader Erich Honecker demanded Hungary again close the border, Hungary refused. When the East German boss went to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian told him “listen to the streets.” Soon, the Berlin Wall fell. East Germany ceased to exist, and within two years, so did Communism and the Soviet Union. Those who had valiantly fought and died for freedom decades before didn’t live to see it, but got their revenge.
We do not yet know the final outcome of the current war. But every day Ukraine holds out makse it more likely that in the long run — and maybe not even that long — Vladimir Putin will be the loser.
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