The Bloodlands

I should not be surprised to see the Ukrainian people fighting so bravely and standing up to Vladimir Putin as they are. But when the conflict began unfolding most people, myself included, figured this would be over in 48 hours just as it was when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. I should have remembered the history of these people and I would have understood their resolve.

Even though it started over one hundred years ago when the Communists took over Russia, the people of Ukraine most clearly remember the pain brought upon them starting in 1930 when Joseph Stalin took over the communist party of Russia and began his iron rule. We often speak of The Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews by Adolph Hitler and the Nazis but let us also not forget that the Russians under Stalin were even more murderous and brutal.

In addition to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis it is estimated another eight million people were murdered by Stalin and the Communists in a similar “ethnic cleansing” genocide. In his book “Bloodlands” author Timothy Snyder states “The place where all the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. During the consolidation of National Socialism and Stalinism (1933 – 1938), the joint German-Russia occupation of Poland (1939- 1941), and then the German-Soviet war (1941-1945), mass violence of a sort never seen before in History was visited upon this region. 

The victims of the “Bloodlands” region were native to this land; mainly Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians. Not a single one of these 14 million people were soldiers. They were mainly peasants and farmers who were stripped of their land, their possessions, and then forced into concentration and work camps and worked and starved until they died. These murders were not a quick bullet to the head. These were slow deaths over the course of a year or years as these people were tortured, starved, and worked into their grave.

Hitler was perhaps the worst evil the world has ever seen but Stalin and the Communists were no better.

May God bless the Ukrainian people as well as others being oppressed, tortured, and imprisoned by these Totalitarian regimes.