By Yaroslav Hrytsak, I found this to be one of the best reviews of Ukrainian history and certainly a good idea. This episode covers the period 1914-1945 and the frequency of change:
In Lviv – eight [the nature of the regime changed eight times]. In Kyiv, the government changed hands eleven times at one railway station in Donbas up to twenty-seven times in the first half of 1919 alone…
In just fifteen years (1932-1947) there were many genocides in the lands of Ukraine. (I use genocide here in the broad sense proposed by the creator of the term, Raphael Lemkin: acts of mass violence that threaten the existence of all groups…) Such acts of genocide included: the liquidatino of the ‘kulaks’ as a class in 1930-31; the Holodomor of 1932-33; the ‘Polish’ and ‘Greek’ operations of the NKVD; the Jewish Holocaust; the elimination of the Romans; the Nazi extermination of Soviet prisoners of war (1941-44); attacks on Polish people by Ukrainian nationalists (Volyn massacre of 1943); the attack on the Ukrainian people by the Polish underground. And three major deportations: of Crimean Tatars from Crimea (1944); the Polish population from the countries west of the Ukrainian SSR and the Ukrainian population from the countries south-east of communist Poland.
…How can we explain the intensity of violence in the Ukrainian lands in 1914-45?
Recommended, but this is not a happy story by any means.
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