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By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ukrainians rarely saw the Jews as their most important rivals – Ukrainian poets and intellectuals mostly reserved their anger for Russians and Poles – but the widespread anti-semitism of the Russian empire inevitably affected Ukrainian-Jewish relations too.
Memorably (certainly later generations of Russian and Soviet leaders never forgot it), Ukrainian Cossacks joined the Polish army in its march on Moscow in 1610 and again in 1618, taking part in a siege of the city and helping ensure that the Polish-Russian conflict of that era ended, at least for a time, advantageously for Poland.
Instead, in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside and at the same time prevented peasants from leaving the republic in search of food.
As long as the USSR existed, it was not possible to write a fully documented history of the famine and the accompanying repression.
The Sovietization of Ukraine did not begin with the famine and did not end with it. Arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals and leaders continued through the 1930s.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word ‘genocide’, spoke of Ukraine in this era as the ‘classic example’ of his concept: ‘It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.’ Since Lemkin first coined the term, ‘genocide’ has come to be used in a narrower, more legalistic way
The use of the Cyrillic alphabet kept Ukrainian distinct from Polish, which is written in the Latin alphabet. (At one point the Habsburgs tried to impose a Latin script, but it failed to take hold.) The Ukrainian version of Cyrillic also kept it distinct from Russian, retaining enough differences, including some extra letters, to prevent the languages from becoming too close.
Ukraine – the word means ‘borderland’ in both Russian and Polish – belonged to the Russian empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
By the late Middle Ages, there was a distinct Ukrainian language, with Slavic roots, related to but distinct from both Polish and Russian, much as Italian is related to but distinct from Spanish or French.
Above all, the history of the famine of 1932–3 was not taught. Instead, between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place. The Soviet state destroyed local archives, made sure that death records did not allude to starvation, even altered publicly available census data in order to conceal what had happened.
Unable to watch what was happening, Mykola Skrypnyk, one of the best-known leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party, committed suicide in 1933. He was not alone.
But famine was only half the story. While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elites.
The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union. Among them were more than 3.9 million Ukrainians.