Ukraine's blood-soaked history has strengthened its people's resolve

National Post, 20 March 2022

They know from the past that even in the bleakest situations, hope and courage are possible

Ukrainians are fighting and dying. They have learned to do both from history, the best but most bitter of teachers.

They are fighting and surviving. History has taught them that, too.

Six years ago, to teach Canadians about the brave witness of Ukrainians during the Maidan “revolution of dignity,” I invited the head of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv, to Kingston, Ont., to address our annual St. John Fisher Dinner. He accepted, but was represented by Borys Gudziak, the president of the post-independence Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, and then the Ukrainian Catholic bishop in Paris. Archbishop Gudziak is now the senior Ukrainian Catholic metropolitan bishop in the United States.

He told us the story of Ukraine in the 20th century; a story of death and resurrection. He spoke as a Christian disciple, to be sure, but also as a Ukrainian patriot. He came to bear witness that even in the bleakest situations, hope and courage are possible. Necessary, actually. Ukraine bore witness to this.

I’ll never forget his opening lines, meant to make clear to a comfortable audience how bleak and brutal circumstances can be — and were.

“From 1930 to 1945, Ukraine was the most lethal place on earth,” he said. “The likelihood of being killed was greater there than anywhere else.”

If Ukrainians seem rather more determined than others expected them to be, it is because the oldest of them remember what it meant to die in the most massive numbers in history — and still survive.

In the aftermath of the Great War, with the fall of the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the Ottoman sultan, Ukraine was fought over by all of its neighbours; Kyiv itself changed hands several times with months. When it was all resolved, what is now central and eastern Ukraine came under Lenin’s boot; the western part became part of Poland.

Then came Stalin. The Soviet collectivization of agriculture and Stalin’s determination to liquidate Ukrainian culture led to the Holodomor, death by starvation. Stalin’s terror famine killed 3.5 million Ukrainians at the low end of the estimate; other studies put it at more than five million.

Then came Hitler. During the Second World War the Soviet Union suffered the heaviest losses of the war in Europe, some 22 million to 24 million people; of those some seven to eight million were Ukrainians.

Westerners are likely more aware of the catastrophic losses in Poland, some six million (including three million Jews) dead during WWII, 20 per cent of the population of then 30 million. Next door in Ukraine the bloodshed, including the Holodomor, was still worse — more than 25 per cent of the population of 40 million.

That history is best told in Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Rarely has a title told so much of the story. Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia (Belarus) and the Baltic states are the bloodlands. Literally soaked in their own blood.

The bloodlands were geographically cursed, sandwiched between the thousand year reich and the evil empire. Snyder estimated 14 million noncombatant deaths during the period, two-thirds the responsibility of Nazi Germany, the remaining third that of the Soviet Union.

Moving eastward was the German lebensraum, the claim for “living space”; moving westward was Russian imperialism — Russkiy mir, or “Russia world,” as it is referred to today. Between the two lay the devastation of proud nations.

It is that history that runs deep in the veins of the peoples of the bloodlands. For Ukraine it has been only 30 years since they liberated themselves from the evil empire. Only eight years ago the empire struck back, invading, occupying and annexing Crimea. The time for fighting and dying and surviving had returned.

Continue reading at the National Post.