Why Shouldn’t They Be Free?
Posted by jaybeacham on 07 Apr 2022 | Tagged as: blog
4/7/2022
Why shouldn’t they be free?
Should we in the United States of America still be British, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian?
Should Ukraine stay Polish, Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman?
I’ve heard a lot of talk recently about how the Ukrainian people are really Russian, and that Russia is only trying to reclaim it’s territory in it’s unprovoked war.
And about the aggressor being a lily white saint compared to the corrupt Ukraine government and people.
Maybe this is because they believe in slavery, or maybe they just don’t know history well enough or maybe they believe a land and people should be killed on the whim of a wicked man.
Let’s look at a little history.
A chaotic period of warfare ensued after the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The partially-recognized Ukrainian People’s Republic emerged from its own civil war of 1917–1921. The Soviet–Ukrainian War (1917–1921) followed, in which the Bolshevik Red Army established control in late 1919. The Ukrainian Bolsheviks, who had defeated the national government in Kyiv, established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which on 30 December 1922 became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union.
Initial Soviet policy on Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture made Ukrainian the official language of administration and schools
Policy in the 1930s turned to Russification. In 1932 and 1933, millions of people, mostly peasants, in Ukraine starved to death in a devastating famine, known as Holodomor. It is estimated by Encyclopædia Britannica that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians. Nikita Khrushchev was appointed the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1938.
Major causes include the 1932–33 confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities which contributed to the famine and affected more than forty million people, especially in the south on the Don and Kuban areas and in Ukraine, whereby various estimates millions starved to death or died due to famine.
But most scholars agree that at least 2 million Ukrainians died of starvation between 1930 and 1933. However, during any famine, the number of people who die from starvation isn’t the best way to determine the total death toll. The stress of long-term hunger makes people more likely to develop deadly illnesses like typhus and cholera.
Bol·she·vik
[ˈbōlSHəˌvik]
NOUN
Bolsheviks (plural noun)
historical
a member of the majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which was renamed the Communist Party after seizing power in the October Revolution of 1917.
synonyms:
Marxist · socialist · leftist · collectivist · radical socialist · anticapitalist · Marxist–Leninist · Leninist · Soviet · Bolshevist · neo-Marxist · Trotskyist · Trotskyite · Maoist
Russification (Russian: Русификация, romanized: Rusifikatsiya), or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, give up their culture and language in favor of the Russian culture and the Russian language
In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia, aimed at Russian domination and hegemony.
he·gem·o·ny
[həˈjemənē, ˈhejəˌmōnē]
NOUN
leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others:
“Germany was united under Prussian hegemony after 1871”
synonyms:
leadership · dominance · dominion · supremacy · ascendancy · predominance · primacy · authority · mastery · control · power · sway · rule · sovereignty · predomination · paramountcy · prepotence · prepotency · prepollency
Stalin’s extremely brutal 30-year rule as absolute ruler of the Soviet Union featured so many atrocities, including purges, expulsions, forced displacements, imprisonment in labor camps, manufactured famines, torture and good old-fashioned acts of mass murder and massacres (not to mention World War II) that the complete toll of bloodshed will likely never be known.
In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule ”Those numbers include my father.”
Medevedev’s grim bookkeeping included the following tragic episodes: 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ”Great Terror” of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various “political crimes” from 1946 to 1953. mounted to some 20 million lives
Indeed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the literary giant who wrote harrowingly about the Soviet gulag system, claimed the true number of Stalin’s victims might have been as high as 60 million.
Why would Ukraine want to stay a part of the Soviets?
Ukraine became independent again when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. This started a period of transition to a market economy, in which Ukraine suffered an eight-year recession. Subsequently however, the economy experienced a high increase in GDP growth. Ukraine was caught up in the worldwide economic crisis in 2008 and the economy plunged. GDP fell 20% from spring 2008 to spring 2009, then leveled off.
Again I ask:
Why shouldn’t they be free?
Should we in the United States of America still be British, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian?