Carnage returns to the Bloodlands

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/05/2022 (911 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My maternal grandfather, Sam Kliman (originally Shaul Klejman), was born in 1902 in Mezerich (also Mezhirichi or Międzyrzecz), 300 kilometres west of Kyiv, a Ukrainian — and, at various times, Russian and Polish — town celebrated as the home of great rabbis and scholars. The family’s roots in the area can be traced back to 1765.

Sam’s teenage years were harrowing. He was 12 years old when the First World War broke out, 15 when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia, and 19 when the Russian civil war and the Polish-Soviet war ended.

The unrest in the region during the period from 1918 to 1921 was marked by brutal pogroms inflicted on Russian and eastern European Jews. More than 100,000 men, women and children were killed.

Jews were regarded as a pro-Bolshevik threat by Ukrainian and Polish nationalists seeking independence from Soviet control. As a propaganda tool and a scapegoat for Bolshevism, Jews were an easy target. The looting, burnings of homes and synagogues and slaughter were a prelude to the horrors of the Holocaust that was to come two decades later.

My grandfather was able to escape the economic hardships and persecution by immigrating to Canada in 1921, along with his siblings. But the vast majority of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Russians and other national groups were trapped in the large geographic area from western Russia to the Baltic states dubbed “the Bloodlands” by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder in his bestselling 2010 book of the same name.

Snyder described the various linkages between the brutality and carnage inflicted by communism and Nazism and their respective totalitarian dictators, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. He confined his study to the period from 1933, when Stalin subjected Ukrainians to the mass starvation of the Holodomor, to 1945, when the gruesome and tragic reality of the Holocaust perpetuated by Hitler and his Nazi regime was laid bare.

Upwards of 50 million civilians and soldiers were killed during these 12 terrible years.

Yet the term “Bloodlands” could aptly describe the wars, mass murder, deportations and torture suffered by Russians and eastern Europeans in the region going back to the mid-19th century and earlier. Certainly, during the years of the First World War and the Russian revolution and its aftermath, when Lenin and Stalin effectively used mass terror to extend their control, millions also perished.

Now, with the atrocities perpetrated by Russian soldiers on Ukrainian civilians near Kyiv, Mariupol, Bucha and other cities, Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again reignited the horrors of the Bloodlands.

And to what end?

Apart from his exaggerated fear of NATO encroachment on Russian territory and his personal quest for power and narcissistic need to make himself more relevant on the world stage, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine to achieve his so-called “noble” objectives has been governed by two other factors — both based on his perception of history.

First, in the years before the First World War, Ukraine — or “Little Russia,” as it was called — was widely seen in czarist Russia as a part of the greater Russian empire. The Ukrainian language and national identity were regarded as fabrications to undermine Russian rule.

This is a belief Putin still holds; indeed, in a major address he delivered at the end of February, he claimed that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by … Communist Russia.”

Second, his firm conviction is that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” as he put it in 2005. He has spent the past two decades or more strategizing how to re-establish the Soviet empire, with seemingly no thought or consideration as to how conflict and violent attacks would impact civilian populations.

In his book, Snyder explains how both Stalin and Hitler “pursued transformative agendas with no concern for the lives of individual human beings.” Their chief objective, Winston Churchill had suggested in 1939, a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, was to “build up a society on a basis of lives which are meant to be sacrificed.” And sacrifice them they did.

With this latest act of treachery, Vladimir Putin will be linked forever with both dictators for also bringing death and destruction to the people of the Bloodlands.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.