SOME TRUTHS ABOUT THE RUSSIA/UKRAINE ISSUE
by John McLean.
Ukrainians are not Russians. It is not possible to understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without knowing something of the historical background. At their meeting in Alaska in August, 2025, Putin told the gullible and unintelligent Donald Trump that Ukraine is Russia’s “brotherly nation”. Not so.
Ukraine came into the Russian empire not by the will of its people but by force; by the late 18th century the last remnants of Ukraine’s autonomy were abolished. In 1783 Russia annexed Crimea and began settling it with Russian people. In the 19th century a Ukraine nationalist movement began but it faced political repression as well as restrictions on the use of the Ukraine language. Its expansive fields became the breadbasket of the Tsar’s empire and its farms were the most modern and efficient in that rather ramshackle empire.
After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the new authorities in Moscow set up a “Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic”, which was strongly opposed by the people of Ukraine. The problem was Moscow’s demand for the “collectivisation” of Ukraine’s agriculture. Because Ukraine had been such a bountiful source of supply for grain, sugar and other agricultural products the Communist Party in Moscow made very heavy demands on Ukraine’s farmers – higher than for other areas – to provide food for the rest of the nation. To have met these quotas would have condemned thousands of villagers to certain starvation.
Since tens of thousands of Ukrainians had become militarised in the First World War against Austria and Germany it is not surprising to record that they formed themselves into guerrilla forces to resist Moscow’s “food requisitioning teams”. By 1919 these forces numbered more than 100,000 well-armed peasants and they captured many towns in southern Ukraine. In April, 1919, they set up an interim independent government.
In retaliation Moscow’s new and brutal Red Army burned hundreds of Ukraine’s villages and executed without trial thousands of people whom they deemed as “bandits” or “deserters”. This war between the Red Army and the Ukraine peasants lasted from 1920 to 1922 and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides.
In Kharkov, Ukraine’s second largest city, the Russians carried out between 2,000 and 3,000 executions of “the possessing classes” between February and June, 1919. When the town was retaken in December of the same year another 1,000 to 2,000 were executed. Between mid November and the end of December, 1920, more than 50,000 people were shot or hanged by the Soviet authorities in Crimea.
Ukraine’s so-called “bourgeois” (middle class) were put into concentration camps while their property was looted, the loot going into the pockets of the local agents of the CHEKA, the early Soviet secret police and the forerunner to the KGB which later produced the “nice” Mr. Putin. To humiliate them further, middle class women were forced to clean toilets in Red Army barracks and many of them were raped by the Red Army, especially during Moscow’s recapture of the Ukraine in 1920.
One of the reasons why Ukrainians in the 21st century are so resistant to having Russian control of any part of their “brotherly nation” is because the Russian Army has a long tradition of raping those in areas that it occupies. Russia has always been a barbaric country (and still is) and never more so than in raping women – and sometimes men – in newly acquired territories.
In the Second World War Russian soldiers raped large numbers of women in Rumania and Budapest as its army rolled westward. Between 70,000 and 100,000 Austrian women were raped in Vienna alone. However, this was only the “curtain-raiser” for what happened when Soviet armies entered German territory. There the Russians raped thousands of women from 8 years old to 80 – especially in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Some women, especially young, attractive ones, were raped 60 or 70 times.
In the words of the eminent Second World War historian, Antony Beevor, it was “the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”. In total it has been estimated that some two million German women were raped by the invading Soviet troops. The rapes continued in Soviet controlled East Germany until the winter of 1947-8.
And the reaction of the Russians? Stalin, their supreme warlord, declared, “One should understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle”. In the present war in the Ukraine there have been reports of several rapes by Russian forces of both men and women, – hardly surprising in view of the entrenched tradition of rape in Russia’s armies.
By 1922 the Russians had prevailed in their military conquest of Ukraine and so Mr. Putin’s “brotherly nation” was incorporated into the Soviet Union by force and against the wishes of its people, thereby creating a long term and justified grievance.
In the 1920s the rule of the Communist Party was as brutal in Ukraine as it was in other parts of the Soviet Union under the “iron rule” of the party-state – a new form of slavery. In 1920 the State embarked on a campaign of assaults against Ukraine’s intelligentsia, who were accused of “nationalist deviations” from the Party line.
In the newly collectivised of the confiscated and now nationalised farms the State began to take an ever increasing share of the collective harvest, thus threatening the peasants’ very survival. In 1930 the State took 30% of Ukraine’s agricultural productions but then, in 1931 when the harvest was smaller, it took 41.5%, leaving an inadequate amount for the peasants themselves, for the cattle to eat, for sowing next season and for selling to the local area.
On 7th August, 1932, the party issued an edict executing or imprisoning in labour camps anyone whom they alleged had “committed theft or damage of socialist property” (holding back some grain to feed one’s hungry family). Between this date and December, 1933, more than 125,000 people throughout the Soviet Union were convicted under this law, including 5,400 sentenced to death.
Molotov, the thug sent by Moscow to enforce its will in Ukraine, blacklisted all districts in which the demanded quotas were not met. Of course, this did not increase production and so Stalin decided on a war against Ukraine’s peasants/farmers to starve them out. This particular form of genocide began with the Party’s demand for ALL the grain of a district, including reserves that were being kept back for sowing in the following year. Thus did he deliberately create a man-made famine.
Starved of food, rural people flocked to Ukraine’s cities. However, to combat this and to ensure that they would starve to death, the party introduced new and compulsory identity papers plus the obligatory registration of all citizens. This was a death sentence for millions as they were escorted back to their farms and villages to die. They were tortured to hand over any remaining supplies in this carefully planned genocide.
To underline the man-made nature of this famine one only needs to record that in 1933, while millions were dying of starvation in Ukraine, the Soviet Union continued to export grain in order to get foreign exchange.
The whole of Ukraine was a hunger zone and the total death toll from this man-made famine has been estimated at four million by the multi-authored and well researched Black Book of Communism while other estimates have put it at five million. Is it any wonder that the people of Ukraine to-day do not want a bar of any Russian occupation of their territory? The historical background of this issue between Russia and its “brotherly nation” of Ukraine makes all the more odious Donald Trump’s efforts to paint the Ukrainians as “”wrongdoers” and even “aggressors” and his Russian friends as much deserving invaders.