I am one of many who regard Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a reminder of the evil that emerges irregularly but consistently throughout history, often led by authoritarian regimes and fueled by strong nationalist sentiment. My parents fell prey to such circumstances when Nazi forces invaded Western Ukraine in 1941. My mother was taken to Germany in her late teens to work on a farm and my father entered the war as a combatant to fight with the Poles in the British armed forces. He was wounded in Italy and ultimately made his way to England where he met my mother. She had entered an allied refugee camp as a displaced person and was brought to England through community sponsorship. The couple made their way to Canada where I was born.
I was raised within a tightly knit Ukrainian-Canadian community in which a majority shared similar experiences of hardship and the grief of lost relatives. All were bound also by the memory of the Great Famine, the Holodomor, of the 1930s imposed by Stalin when grain was systematically stolen by Russia to feed its cities and demonstrate to Western journalists, who were prevented from venturing into the countryside, how successful their newly established social order had come to be. All remembered the death from starvation of millions of Ukrainians and the brutality by which these policies were executed. All remembered the Great Terror that ensued in the late 1930s when a paranoid Stalin undertook sham political trials of members of academia, legislators, military personnel, attorneys and others deemed to be anti-Stalinist communists. An estimated 750,000 were executed and many others imprisoned in remote locations, few to return. All were aware of the Katyn massacre in 1940 when 22,000 Poles, mostly military officers and the intelligentsia, were executed by Russian officers at a time when Stalin had formed an alliance with Hitler before the outbreak of World War II.
Throughout my formative years, I recall a weekly Ukrainian-Canadian newspaper would arrive with news of Soviet policies pertaining to Ukraine during the regimes of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and others. There has been a long history of russification directed at Ukraine with its wealth of minerals, grain and industry in the hope that its union with Russia could be solidified. The policy extends back to the days of Imperial Russia and continued during the Soviet era in an effort to subdue Ukraine’s nationalist sentiment and ensure its continued alignment with Russia. Despite Ukraine’s declaration of independence and acknowledgement of its sovereignty by Russia, the desire to subjugate Ukraine has continued.
This angers me. So I choose to write to add my voice to others who have been similarly affected. My purpose will be to address a great many aspects of this conflict directly and provide some insight regarding the underlying history and cultural significance of certain events as they transpire. I hope you’ll stay with me.
Kost Elisevich, M.D., Ph.D
Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2022. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.
