14 million people

Edward Lucas suggests some background reading:

The first book on anyone’s reading list should be Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. This revisionist history, which explores the overlap between Nazi and Soviet atrocities in the “bloodlands” of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, shows that between 1930 and 1945 14 million people were shot, gassed or starved. The book is the best rebuttal to Putin’s Soviet-centred, cod-imperialist approach to the past displayed in his rambling essay last summer and his even more incoherent speech on Monday. It is also a corrective to the simplistic western-focused approach to history, which involves neat starting and finishing dates to the Second World War, and frames it as a simple contest between good and evil.

Also a corrective to the, how shall I say, the unconscious habit of just not really noticing that part of Europe all that much. I know it was a habit of mine, and I doubt I’m the only one. The point Snyder made that really jumped out and punched me in the face is that the vast majority of the WW2 deaths in Europe were in the Bloodlands.

Complementing this is Anne Applebaum’s gruelling Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, an account of Stalin’s mass-starvation programme in Ukraine. Only by understanding Ukraine’s historical trauma at Russian hands can western readers begin to appreciate the depth of the country’s desire for peace and sovereignty.

And the depth of the insult of Putin’s claims that Ukraine is and always has been part of Russia, as if it were a much-loved errant offspring.

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