A cease fire was signed this week known as the Minsk Agreement. The ink was not dry and the hostilities continued. So looking back on Ukraine’s history is a look at today and tomorrow.
After hours of beatings, the men in black took Lutsenko into the woods, put a bag over his head, made him kneel in the snow and told him to say his prayers. Then they walked away.
Not long after Lutsenko emerged, Verbytsky was found in the same woods, bound in duct tape, his ribs broken, internal organs smashed. An autopsy showed he froze to death. What is a cause of Putin’s military aggression over Ukraine?
Oil.
Nafothaz said late July 11 that the discovery was one of the largest oil fields found in Ukraine in some 15 years.
Naftohaz believes the Budishchansko-Chutovskoyefield in eastern Ukraine’s Poltava region, contains some 12.8 million tons of oil.
Naftohaz has been working the site since 2011 and the company’s public relations department said it was the first oil field owned solely by the Ukrainian company.
Ukraine’s government is attempting to wean the country off its dependence on Russian energy supplies. Kyiv has placed a priority on developing the country’s own energy resources and diversifying sources for importing energy supplies.
*** Yet Ukraine’s history is a look back at what is underway today.
Ukraine was formally incorporated into the USSR as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) in 1922.
The Communists were aware that resistance to their regime was deep and widespread. To pacify the Ukrainian people and to gain control, Moscow initially permitted a great deal of local autonomy to exist in the UkSSR. The
newly established Ukrainian Autocephalous (self-ruling) Orthodox Church and the new All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, non-Communist national institutions of great importance, were both permitted to continue their work
until the end of the 1920’s.
All of this changed once Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin wanted to consolidate the new Communist empire and to strengthen its industrial base. Ukrainian national aspirations were a barrier to those ends because even
Ukrainian Communists opposed exploitation by Moscow. In Stalin’s eyes, Ukraine, the largest of the non-Russian republics, would have to be subdued. Thus, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was
placed under the jurisdiction of the Communist-controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Ukrainian bishops, priests and thousands of Christian lay leaders were sent to Siberian labor camps, the so-called “Gulag.” Hundreds of
thousands, possibly over a million, of Ukraine’s intellectual leaders – writers, university professors, scientists, and journalists – were liquidated in purges ordered by Stalin. Not even loyal Ukrainian Communists were exempt
from Stalin’s terror. By 1939, practically the entire (98%) of Ukraine’s Communist leadership had been liquidated.
Hardest hit by Stalin’s policies were Ukraine’s independent landowners, the so-called “kulaks” (kurkuly in Ukrainian). Never precisely defined, a kulak was a member of the alleged “upper stratum” of landowners but in
reality anyone who owned a little land, even as little as 25 acres, came to be labeled as a kulak. Stalin ordered that all private farms would have to be collectivized. During the process, according to Soviet sources, which are
no doubt on the conservative side, some 200,000 Ukrainian families were “de-kulakized” or dispossessed of all land. By the summer of 1932, 69.5% of all Ukrainian farm families and 80% of all farm land had been forcibly
collectivized.
Stalin decided to eliminate Ukraine’s independent farmers for three reasons:
(1) they represented the last bulwark of resistance to totalitarian Russian control;
(2) the USSR was in desperate need of foreign capital to build more factories and the best way to obtain
that capital was to increase agricultural exports from Ukraine once known as “the breadbasket of
Europe”;
(3) the fastest way to increase agricultural exports was to expropriate land through a process of farm
collectivization and to assign procurement quotas to each Soviet republic.
During the collectivization process, Ukrainian farmers resisted vigorously, often violently, especially when the GPU (Soviet secret police) and militia forced them to turn their land over to the government. Thousands of
farmers were killed and millions more were deported to Siberia to be replaced by more trustworthy workers.
*** Fast forward to the 1980’s, were marked by increasing political impotence of Soviet leadership. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident of April 26,1986, brings back painful memories for all Ukrainians. This disaster caused tens of thousands of deaths and health related problems, and inflicted enormous ecological and economic damage. Chernobyl served to rock the Communist Party establishment with political fallout as the facts behind bureaucratic ineptitude, negligence, disregard for the ordinary citizens, and cover-up emerged and began to stir the minds of the people.
On July 6, 1990, the legislature proclaimed Ukraine’s sovereignty. In August 1991, a failed three-day military coup of the Kremlin’s would-be dictators led to the Declaration of Independence by the Verhovna Rada (Parliament) on August 24. On December 1, in a nationwide referendum, 93% of Ukraine’s citizens voted for an independent Ukraine and chose Leonid Krawchuk, former communist ideologist, as their first democratically elected President. On July 10, 1994, Leonid Kuchma, former director of the world’s biggest rocket plant, defeated Leonid Krawchuk to become the second President of independent Ukraine.
