Ukraine starvation

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

Ukraine sits on some of the most fertile soil on earth, the deep black earth that made it the breadbasket of Europe. In 1932 and 1933, on that very soil, close to four million of its people were starved to death. The soil was as rich as ever. The famine was a decision. The decision was collectivisation. Stalin set out to abolish the independent farmer altogether, to end private land and private animals and drive every peasant onto a state-run collective farm. The man who owned a little, a few cattle, a horse, a plot worked by his own family, was branded a kulak, an enemy of the people, and marked for destruction. Stalin's instruction was to liquidate them as a class. The peasants saw what was coming, and many made a terrible choice. Rather than surrender their animals to the state, they killed them. Across the Soviet Union the herds simply collapsed. Around half the cattle, gone. Nearly half the horses that pulled the ploughs. Two-thirds of the sheep and goats. Tens of millions of animals slaughtered in a few seasons, a loss so total that the country did not rebuild its livestock to the old levels until the 1980s. A people who had fed themselves for a thousand years destroyed their own herds rather than hand them over, and the state called it sabotage. Then came the grain. The quotas were set impossibly high, and when the villages could not meet them, brigades went from house to house and took everything. The harvest. The seed saved for next spring. The last food in the pantry. And when the countryside had been stripped bare, the people were forbidden to leave in search of bread, sealed inside their own dying villages. So it was that in one of the richest farming regions on the planet, the men and women who actually grew the food lay down in the lanes and died of hunger, in their millions. Some, at the very end, ate things no human being should ever have to eat. Here is the lesson, and it is worth carving somewhere it cannot be forgotten. A man who owns his land and his animals can feed his family whoever sits in the palace. A man who depends on the state for his bread can be starved the day he steps out of line. That is why the independent farmer is always the first enemy of absolute power. Take his herds, take his fields, and you have taken the one thing that let him stand on his own. A population that cannot feed itself will, in the end, do as it is told. Destroy the farmer, and you hold the whole nation by the throat.