‘Simultaneous attacks from the great powers and nationalist uprisings of all stripes challenged Ukraine’

• I WAS glad to read Clem Alford’s response to Ann Connolly (With Ukraine you know how difficult it is to get to the truth, May 26), especially his statements about maladministration and relations with Russia.

I too visited Ukraine during the Mikhail Gorbachev era and found the same distaste for Russia.

Disappointed with the failure of Gorbachev’s attempts at finally sinking Stalinism at the time, I lost interest in what I guessed was yet another stampede to the west’s “greed is good” propaganda model.

The invasion and tales of Russian thought control shocked me into obsessive study.

Ukraine as a nation came out of extremely chaotic struggles of the civil war / western intervention following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

With the tsarist armies no longer in World War I, nor indeed tsarist, simultaneous attacks from the great powers and nationalist uprisings of all stripes challenged Ukraine.

Ultimately the Ukrainian Bolsheviks prevailed, free to develop their own republic after the Peace of Riga mostly settled western attacks.

Ukraine became, alongside Russia, a union republic of the Soviet Union in 1922.

Under Stalin’s regime after Lenin’s death, even the union republics lost most of their authority to the party (CPSU) bodies at the centre, but the worst for Ukraine was the Holodomor of 1932-1933, a colossal famine caused by forced collectivisation that killed between six and nine million people, most of them Ukrainian peasants.

With such treatment, old nationalism led some Ukrainians to welcome German invaders in World War II as liberators.

Most Ukrainians fought the Germans, contributing 4.5 million soldiers to the Red Army and mounting numerous resistance efforts, but the earlier infidelities gave Stalin and more recent leaders an excuse to further mistreat uppity Ukrainians.

Russian education reformers decided that Russian workers helping rebuild depopulated Donbas after World War II need not let their children, nor any others, learn Ukrainian language in school, not popular with resident Ukrainians.

Nothing need be said about Vladimir Putin’s “de-nazification”.

RICHARD REED
Belsize Grove, NW3