Holodomor…Redux?

We have a new, not surprising, development in occupied southern Ukraine. Mind you, when Russia says that Ukraine is a brotherly nation, this is not how you make friends. They have authorized the expropriation of last year's and this year's harvest.

This has the ring of 1932–3 because this is exactly what Joseph Stalin ordered and what led to mass starvation. Mind you, Stalin feared losing Ukraine, and some of those policies came from that. He also hated that Ukraine’s Communist Party tried to stand up to him.

For Stalin, these policies were not just punitive for wayward nationalists who dared try independence at the end of World War One. It was colonial policy. Most importantly, it was about feeding the core of the Soviet Union because revolutionary fervor came from hunger, as was exploited in 1917.

Stalin read all events from strict Marxist ideology and the party created the fiction of rich farmers, Kulaks, who were against the Revolution. In the end, anybody could be called one and sent to the Gulag. Vladimir Putin is repeating the same exact pattern. This is why some of the pro-Russian propaganda channels invoke the name of Stephan Bandera as well. He was the last nationalist to stand up to Russians and was ultimately killed by Russia.

Murdering enemies of the state abroad is not a modern innovation.