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.

Russia has a problem. It’s not just a pariah state at this point. Its economy is slowly collapsing. No matter what Putin says, inflation is quite high. Bread is essential to keep the peace. He knows this, and I expect him to repeat the other nugget of Russian history. Soon we will see price support for bread.

To add insult to injury, Ukrainians are sent to the Far East. This is a 21st-century Gulag. According to CNN:

Rather than allowing safe passage out of the city, Russian and separatist troops are taking tens of thousands of civilians to so-called “filtration centers” in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in eastern Ukraine, which Moscow recognizes as independent, before moving them to Russia, according to Ukraine’s government, humanitarian watchdogs, and…