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Stalin’s WarIn May 1941, in a room filled with military and Party officials at a banquet that followed Stalin’s speech to graduates of the Soviet military academies. In which Stalin dropped numerous hints as to the future war in Europe between Soviet Communism and the West. Mainly Germany….Lieutenant General A. K. Sivkov, had just toasted to Stalin’s peaceful foreign policy. To which Stalin intervened and spoke:“Allow me to make a correction. A peaceful foreign policy secured peace in our country. A peaceful foreign policy is a good thing. For a while, we drew a line of defense until we re-armed our army and supplied it with modern means of combat. Now, when our army has been rebuilt, our technology modernized, now that we are strong enough for combat, now we must shift form the defense to offense. In conducting the defense of our country, we are compelled to act in an aggressive manner. From defense we have to shift to a military policy of offense. It is indispensable that we reform our training, our propaganda, our press to a mindset of offense. The Red Army is a modern army, and the modern army is an army of offense”. –Stalin“On May 5, 1941 Stalin made it perfectly clear to his generals that there would be a war with Germany and that the Soviet Union would be the aggressor. It is interesting to note that a few days after the celebration in the Kremlin, Lieutenant General Sivkov, who made a toast to Stalin’s peaceful foreign policy, was discharged. “It was also in May of 1941 that the largest military in history that of the Red Army was being shipped by the millions to the Western border in Europe The trains ran day and night by the tens of thousands full of troops, tanks, guns, fuel, material in general for the war Stalin was planning. Stalin had mobilized 34.4 million people of the Soviet population for war and spent three five year plans in which the entire Soviet population had been literally enslaved from industrial serfs to agricultural serfs. For the purpose of building the biggest and most advanced war machine in history with the purpose of attacking all of Europe. This was the reason for the slave labour quota’s Stalin fixed for each year. That the NKVD would fill by kidnapping civilians off the streets, under false arrests. To beat them and break them in cells till they confessed to anything. To have the slave labour to work to death mining the gold and raw material from the earth needed to build Stalin’s war machine of the Jew. This was also the major motivation behind the Holodomor in the Ukraine. Which purposely exterminated around sixteen million people. To literally enslave the entire farming population of the Ukraine in a brutal, feudal serfdom owned by the Communist regime leaders. Total feudalism. The industrial workers were just as enslaved with twelve plus hour days six to seven days a week. Any accident on the lines, showing up even five minutes late, not working fast enough, or just about anything. Would end one up a place like Kolyma. Under charges of sabotage. Millions of people cruelly perished in the death camps of the Gulag’s, mass graves and firing squads, and in NKVD cellars.To understand the historic context of Stalin’s war, we most look back to the rise of the Jewish Bolsheviks regime in the last days of the Czar. The Jewish Warburg’s banking dynasty had just delivered their fellow Jew, Lenin through Finland to the capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg. Along with a criminal mafia of other Jews, such as Trotsky who the Jewish Rockefeller’s set up, Stalin who was recruited by the agents of the Jewish Rothschild’s and many other criminal Jews had been gathered together in the Russian capital for one purpose. To overthrow the Czar and install a Jewish dictatorship. The original Communist Government in Russian in 1918 was almost one hundred percent Jewish. With Jews in all the important and top level positions. And as recorded in history the entire Communist revolution in Russia was funded by the Jewish banking houses off Wall Street. Karl Marx and Moses Hess the two Jews of Rabbinical families who created the Communist manifesto for fellow Rabbinical class Jew, Leon Rothschild. Both wrote in their own works that Communism’s purpose was to create a global Jewish dictatorship over the earth and enact the Messianic Kingdom the Jews were promised in their Torah by their god. Moses Hess is the credited intellectual father of Zionism of which he wrote, Zionism is simply a global Jewish dictatorship ruled from Israel. Stalin created Israel and was the first world leader to recognize it as nation.This is the secret of the “Revolutionary Holocaust” Marx bragged of. The brutality of Communism is not in the fact of liberation by an altruist group of their fellow peoples. It’s the actual violent conquest of a group of people, by another people, an alien Jewish race that preaches nothing but hatred, murder and enslavement of the non-Jewish world. Calling non-Jews, cattle or Goyim in Hebrew.Let us examine the events in Europe starting in 1917 and up when the Jewish revolutionaries attacked Europe under the Bolshevik banner……In 1917 after the Communist coup in the Russian capital under the leadership of the Jews Leon Trotsky and Lenin. Lenin issued the peace decree Ending the war with between Russia and German and her allies. And the generous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. This was all a ploy to keep the war going in the West. While the Jewish Bolsheviks consolidated their grip on power and built up the Red Army and spread the Communist uprising to come…“Lenin’s plot was simple: let Germany and Austria fight against Great Britain, France and the United States. Let them ware out each other strengths. Most importantly, do not allow the flames of war to be extinguished. Russia would remain on the side and add fuel to the fire. While “peace” was being made on Lenin’s orders in Brest-Litovsk, intensive preparations for a revolt against the German government were under way in Petrograd. The revolutionaries published half a million copies of a Communist newspaper in German. Die Fackel [The Torch]. Even before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed in January 1918 a German n Communist organization, Spartakus, was formed in Petrograd. The newspapers Die Weltrevolution [The World Revolution and Die Tote Fahne [The Red Banner] were also born, not in Germany but in Russia under Lenin’s order, while holding peace with Germany’s government. Communism would become deeply rooted in Germany…”“Finally, World War I ended In November 1918 Europe’s condition was exactly what the Kremlin leaders had hoped it would be. The economic hardships caused by war had reached their limits in all the nations. Europe was facing an unprecedented crisis that encompassed all spheres of life, including the economy, politics, and ideology. Germany admitted her defeat. The monarchy crumbled. Anarchy and famine furled the land.”“Just, then, Lenin and Trotsky’s love for peace vanished. The government of Soviet Russia issued, on November 13, 1918 to the Red Army to begin offensive operations against Europe. ““A review of the protocols of any of the countless meetings and congresses of that period revels that the only question on the agenda was the World Revolution. The aim of the Soviet advance narrowed down to installing Communism on the European continent. In a few days the Red Army crossed into the Baltic countries. The Communist government of Estonia was formed on November 29, that of Latvia on December 4. Lithuania followed on December 8, 1918. On December 17, a manifesto published in Riga named Germany as the imminent object of the offensive. The most important goal of the operation: fuel a new world war. ““Lenin’s calculations were precise: Worn out by World War I, the German empire is unable to bear the pressures of another war. The ends with the crushing of the empire and is followed by a revolution. In war-torn Europe, on the remaining fragments of the old empires, Communist countries arise, remarkably similar to Lenin’s Bolshevik regime. Lenin was ecstatic: “We are at the doorstep of world revolution!”“In 1918 Communist parties formed in many European countries. In Kiel, German navy semen called a strike on November 3,1918. Two days later, the strike spread to all of norther Germany, and on November 7-8 it reached the main industrial regions of the capital city, Berlin. The strikes were suppressed. But in January 1919, a Soviet republic was declared in Bremen. The Hungarian Soviet republic formed in March. In April, the Bavarian Soviet Republic followed. These Communist nations formed Red Armies and secret police squads, which called themselves “extraordinary commissions in the struggle against counterrevolution.” These extraordinary commissions immediately instigated a reign of terror against all layers of society and the Red Armies threw themselves into revolutionary wars to “liberate” the neighboring nations. A part of the Hungarian Red Army marched into Slovakia and, on June 20, 1919, proclaimed the Slovak Soviet Republic. A Communist government formed immediately and declared a policy of nationalization of all private lands and annulment of private property. It nationalized all commercial enterprises, banks, and transportation systems. …. At the same time the Soviet Ukraine declared war on Romanian, and began preparations to advance west, to connect with Soviet Hungary.”This is why the Jewish elites had their Communist underlings pull this off it sabotaged the German offensive on the Western Front. That had won Germany the war in 1918. If Germany came out on top the whole scheme was over. The Communist uprising collapsed it, all led by Jews. The Jews then put Germany under conditions to weaken them for the Communist final strike.“In the Summer of 1920, the western front of the Red Army, under the leadership of the ruthless General Mikhail Tukhachevski, began to advance with the objective of crushing Europe. Excerpts from order #1423 given to the western front of July 2, 1920, announced: “Fighters of the Workers’ Revolution! The fate of the World Revolution will be decided in the West. The path of the world fire lies over the dead body of White Poland. We will carry happiness and peace on our bayonets to the working people of the world. To the West! To decisive battle and thunderous victories!”“In the days when the Red Army was advancing toward the Polish cities of Warsaw and Lvov, a second congress of the Comintern was taking place in Russia. The Headquarters of the World Revolution then issued a call:“On July 23,1920, directly from the Comintern congress, Lenin telegraphed Stalin at the Polish front: “Situation in Comintern is outstanding. Zinoviev, Bukharin, and I think that it would be proper to encourage a revolution in Italy. My personal opinion is that, to do so, Hungary has to be sovietised, possibly along with Czechoslovakia and Rumanina.” In the conversation with the French delegates to the congress, Lenin was even blunter: “Yes, the Soviet troops are in Warsaw. Soon, German will be ours. We will conquer Hungary again; the Balkans will rise against capitalism. Italy will tremble. Bourgeois Europe is cracking at the seams in the storm.”.All of Europe was under assault by Jewish Bolshevism, trying to conqueror the whole of Europe by armed invasions and staged uprisings. Europe was falling under this storm and the attitude was Poland would fall and nothing would stop the Red Army from sweeping across Europe as they intended. But then by miracle something changed…….Tukhachevski’s Red army was annihilated in a surprise move by the Polish forces and what was left was driven back into Russia. Were massive uprisings of the Russian People against Communism then occurred and sucked the Red Forces into the civil war that ensued. While this was going on the rest of Europe was able to stabilize and anti-Communist forces took over in many nations. When Stalin became the leader of the USSR he spent the three five year’s plans building up an unstoppable force to carry on Lenin’s directive of a new world war to install Communist control over all of Europe. Stalin turned inwards and purged the Party, and somewhat the old leadership of the Army. But not as heavy as the propaganda lead people to believe. Just the failures like Tukhachevski. In this time Stalin was waiting and preparing.The war, the Jew Lenin declared on Europe, simply never ended. They just used a fake peace to build up a nation, industry and Armed Forces that could not be stopped. And to attack again later on. They lost a battle but not the war.Note these Communist revolutions were all planned and lead by Jews. Russian was already mentioned. The Spartacus revolution in Germany was led by the Jews, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Hungary Communist take was led by the Jew Bela Cohen. The leader of the Bavarian Soviet was a Jew, Levine. The list of Jews is almost endless in this.Note with the second war it was forced on Germany by International Jewish Elites as the book: ”Churchill And The Jews.” Wrote by a Jewish author shows. The Jewish Rothschild family put Churchill in office, he was not elected by the British people. For the sole reason of war with Germany. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was to stop the massacres of the German People which was reported by the International Red Cross, that the Poles were slaughtering the German People in Southern Poland at the time as was the case. This caused the war. The Polish government such at Broomberg wear in day 55,000 German men, women and children were murdered by Polish death squads on orders from the Polish government. This by itself is an act of war on the behalf of the Polish side. The Polish Army was bigger then that of the British Empires Armed Forces at the time and had been attacking the German frontiers for awhile. And had been illegally occupying German soil since 1919, Churchill and America’s Secretary of State: James Bacon. Later admitted Poland had been encouraged to engage in such behaviour by the Western Powers who wanted to cause a German reaction. So that they could then officially declare war on Germany. The International Jewish Elites were behind the scenes staging the whole thing against Germany.Hitler fought the entire war as the underdog, between Poland, Britain and France, German was outnumbered three to one at the start of the war. Hitler was declared war upon. The only reason the Soviet Union did not fall totally at the time was the Jewish elites in control of American banking, media and government used America resources to keep it going. The Global Jewish Elites declared war on Germany.The reason America came into the War was by that time the Jewish elite were in control of its vital networks and so did everything to push America into the War. Under crypto-Jew Roosevelt [of Dutch-Jewish ancestry ] and his staff with reads like a synagogue list. Roosevelt in a telegram to the French Premier Reynaud on June 15 1940. Promised to double American aid to France on the condition it continue the war against Germany. In December 19 1339 an American warship the Tuscaloosa maneuvered a German passenger vessel the Columbus in to the hands of the British navy while in the security zone. Of which was scuttled by the Germans. In January 1940 the American warship Treton in violation of internal law reported the movements of the German merchant ships Arauca, LaPlata and Wangoi to enemy naval forces. On June 27 1940 Roosevelt announced a limitation on the free movement of foreign merchant [Axis] vessels in American ports which is also in violation of internal law. In November of the same year Roosevelt allows for American warships to chase the German merchant ships Phrygia, Idarwald and Rhein. Which ended in all three ships scuttling themselves to avoid capture. This and its identical acts are all acts of provoked war against Germany. Helping enemy nations to attack their ships and citizens.Roosevelt also sent the OSS Chief colonel Donovan to start uprisings against Germany and Italy in Sofia and Belgrade.Roosevelt then permitted American citizens to join the RAF while also openly training RAF personal in America. In September of 1940 Roosevelt transferred fifty American destroyers to the British navy. In March 1941 Roosevelt imposed the Lend-Lease Act on America Which meant as President he could official furnish as much aid as he wanted to [at the tax payers expense] that he felt it was in American’s interest to defend such as the Soviet Jewion. This aid was the major reason the Red Beast was able to survive in the early part of the Eastern war.Roosevelt had also worked to block other nations from making peace or having any peaceful relations with Germany. Using economic policy as weapon against them. In 1940 he froze all Norwegian and Danish assets. Despite the fact Germany had not nor had the plan the loot or dictate financial policy to either nation. Later Belgian assets in America where also frozen [frozen=stolen] with Roosevelt recognizing nonsense panels of exiles from such nations as governments in exile. An act of blatant hostility towards Axis Europe. Roosevelt’s actions from even before the war showed he committed to warfare on any level against the National Socialist Nation in Europe.America:On April 13 1941 American ships where permitted to pass freely thought the Red Sea to supply British armies fighting in the Middle East. In March of the same year the Americans started to openly confiscate all German ships they could. While treating German citizens once again in violation of international law like prisoners. In another indictment two German officers that escaped from Canadian custody and fled to America. Where in violation of internal law return chained back into Canada which was at war with Germany. At the same time American naval ships started to increase patrols in the Western Atlantic reporting to the British navy on any observations. On Axis ships military or civilian. While repairing British naval ship in US ports. In May Norwegian vessels working for the British where openly armed and repaired in American ports. In violation of internal law. In June America troops arrived in Greenland to start building military air bases. Then on the 9th on the same month was a report from the British that Roosevelt had ordered an American warship to openly attack a German submarine off Greenland. Then German assets in violation of internal law in the same month in America where official frozen. Around the same time Roosevelt orders the recall of the German consuls and calls for the closing of the German press agency “Transocean” the German library of information in New York as well as the German national rail office [Reichbahn].In July of 1941 American armed forces under Roosevelt orders occupy Greenland which is in an area of German military operations. In a hope to force Germany into a war with America and attempt to influence the outcome of German U-boat operations. Against Germanys favor. As part of this on July 10th 1941 America Navy Secretary Frank Knox orders that all American warships are officially ordered to fire on all Axis vessels. That is another announcement of open war on Germany by the American government. On September of that year the US Warship Greer joins with British warships to attack German submarines in the Atlantic. Soon after a German submarine identifies American warships acting as open military escorts for British convoys.Roosevelt openly admits in a speech given on September 11 1941 he had personally given the order for American warships to fire on all Axis vessels and repeatedly given the order. On the 29th of the same month American warship patrols attack a German submarine off Greenland. On October the 17th the American warship Keanry acting on this order attacks another German submarine. Then in November of the same year American warships in violation of international law, capture the German ship Odenwald take it to an American port and imprison the crew.The American Government and its Jewish controllers had already declared war on Germany privately for years. The same methods where used against Japan to force them into a war as well. It’s no secret fact anymore the US government knew about Pearl Harbor months in advance and did nothing. As they wanted a official reason to do what they had been doing all along.Stalin’s Continuation Of The Communist Policy Of World War:“In 1927, a Five Year Plan for developing industry was adapted in the Soviet Union. This began the industrialization, over-industrialization, super-industrialization. After the first, the second Five Year Plan followed, and then a third one.“We can judge the purpose of the Five Year Plans from the following fact. At the beginning of the first Plan, the Red Army had seventy-nine tanks; at the end it had over 4,538 http://tanks….In the first two fire-year intervals, 21,573 warplanes were produced.”The mark of all the war machinery Stalin had built was they were all purposely designed for an aggressive attack based on the strategic purpose of a first strike on Europe. Stalin forwent the price of building heavy bombers as the T-B7 which was capable of flying at an altitude beyond the reach of anti aircraft guns of the time. For small lighting attack planes such as the SU-2, planes which were “flying batteries” designed to attack ground targets mainly, like an enemy’s air force taken by surprise still on the airfield. Which gives your side air superiority. These types of machines were totally useless in a defensive war. The main tank arm was built to be medium assault tanks for fast moving warfare to penetrate deep into the opponents territory and link up with forward forces of airborne troops of which Stalin had two million airborne troops. He claimed only a million to hide the fact he was planning a war of aggression on Europe. Paratroopers are a purely offensive force not for a defensive war. I could go on and on, there literally has been a whole wrote on this subject. Stalin had also created a reserve force of eight teen million troops that could be mobilized and were mobilized in 1939 with the intent of fighting a war in Europe within two years as the mobilization guidelines stated.Stalin’s Aggression:In 1939 Stalin invades Finland and destroys the Pale Defense which was considered by military experts to be impregnable. This leaves Finland at the mercy of the USSR. Stalin also conquerors the Baltic states. In 1940 Stalin takes two important regions of Romania: Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. And Stalin’s taking of half of Poland. Stalin originally offered the Polish government an alliance against Germany. But on the condition he was allowed to build a military highway from the Russian border to the German boarder with major Red Army bases along such for an invasion route. The Polish government refuse as they knew this means Stalin will force Poland under his control as with the Baltic nations. So Stalin invades Poland to move his military borders that closer into Europe and towards Germany. After half of Poland and the Baltic states fall to Stalin. He them moves the Red Army out from behind their defensive positon’s and onto offensive positions on the border of East Prussia [Germany]. Which is why Stalin wanted the Baltic’s and Poland….. And also Romania. He was setting his pieces up for a check mate on Germany and Europe. He knew if Germany fell all of Europe would fall to him with ease.Note the importance of this.“In June 1940 neither Hitler nor his generals had any intentions or plans to attack the Soviet Union. The Oberkommando des Heers [OKH-German Army High Command] and the Oberkommando der Wehrmachet [OKW-Supreme Command of the Armed Forces] had neither rough drafts nor preliminary designs for a war against the USSR. They had no orders from Hitler in this regard. Not a word was said about war against the USSR.”“After the defeat of France, Hitler ordered a drastic reduction in German armed forces. This reduction was widespread and intense, for there were no plans, hints, or foresight indicating that a war against the Soviet Union might be approaching. And all at once came the Soviet strike against Romania. Oil is the blood of war. Without oil fighting becomes impossible. Stalin’s axe was raised over the oil production in Romania. ““In Berlin, it was finally recognized that the Soviet threat to Germany was lethal. Soviet tanks advanced to Romania, causing chaos in German headquarters: if the tanks did not stop, if they advanced another 180 km, then Germany would capitulate within the net few months. Romanian troops made no resistance and put up no obstacles to the Soviet advance. There were no German troops in Romania. It was impossible to quickly transfer troops from France. ““On July 21,1940 Hitler for the first time in a very tight circle uttered the idea of the “Russian problem” …“On June 21, 1941 Hitler wrote a letter to Mussolini: “Russia is trying to destroy the Romanian oil fields….The task of our armies is eliminating this threat as soon as possible”. Herein lays the cause of Hitler’s attack. This was not at all a struggle for Lebensraum.”Why Finland?Here we note the move into Romania was setting up a future attack on Europe by Stalin:“At the end of November 1939, Stalin launched a war against Finland. The victory in Finland was a second warning to Hitler that Stalin was approaching the Swedish sources of ore. The Red Army, acting on Stalin’s order, got through the Finnish fortifications and halted its advance. Finland without the fortifications was defenseless. At any moment, Stalin could have given another order and renewed the advance of the Red Army. From Finnish territory it could have bombed Swedish ore mines and railroads unhindered. No one could have impeded this. The seizure of the Aland Islands alone would have been enough to close off the mouth of the Gulf of Bothina, which would have meant an end to World War II with a Soviet victory.”“Germany had no nickel. It was impossible to fight without nickel-but the nickel supplies were in Finland.”Stalin had drawn up plans for a surprise attack on Germany using Finland, to be a major route when he launched his strike on Europe. He needed to open this corridor first:“This plan of action was given the “S.3-20.” The plan was to be put into action at the moment of receipt of a coded telegram with the signature of the chie of the general staff and the following contents: Commence execution of plan ‘S.3-20’.”“In this plan there was no mention of the fact that the Soviet Union would fight for the “guarantee of safety to the city of Lenin,” that is, Leningrad. And there were no hint that military actions must be initiated At any moment the Leningrad staff would receive a telegram from Moscow, and Soviet armies would advance to the Gulf of Bothnia, to the Swedish border, to the Aland Island!”“The plan “S.3-20 allowed the armies of the Leningrad and Arkhangelsk districts, together with the Baltic fleet, to deliver blows to Finland before the Red Army hit Germany , simultaneously, or slightly later.”As the Soviet documents show. Stalin’s plan was to let Germany and the West bleed either off in war. That is why Stalin removed the pale defensive in Finland but did not go much further after that. And why he took what he did in Romania but stopped were he did. He was setting up his pieces for attack on Germany and Europe. But he didn’t want to overly alert Hitler to this. Stalin was waiting till his whole forces were mobilized to spring on Europe from the East. And hoping Hitler was too bogged down in the West. To risk dividing his forces. Stalin though he had fooled Hitler with the phoney pact of peace he signed with Germany.The Red Army in early 1941 dismantles all its Pale Defensives all the boarder with Europe. From East Prussia to Romania. On the Romania boarder were Stalin planned one of the most important attack waves to come against the oil fields:“The border guards dismantled all mines and barbwire obstacles on the Soviet border, and left the borders themselves. On strips tens of kilometers long, in the palaces where the Soviet assaults were prepared, the border was opened, and the border guards had left, having handed the borders over the Red Army. The reconnaissance battalions of the Soviet divisions came out right up the borders.”This as millions of Red Army troops, trucks and tanks are hiding in the deep forests in Poland along the border. Along with thousand of heavy gun positions now built with detailed maps of were to launch their artillery bombardments on the German forces and positions on the border. And two million Airborne troops among all such, most have jump orders for deep in Germany. Of the 36 Armies of the Soviet Armed Forces 21 of them are now on the Western border with more on their way. Stalin has built new air fields full of thousand of full armed attack planes, new rail way tracks to bring all the material to the border, fuel dumps, camps and bridges and highways for the coming invasion. None of the bridges are wired to be blown up. Which is standard orders for a defensive position. This is for the coming total offensive.The Russian troops on the Western border were issued phase books of Russia to German which is practice for any invading Army:“The phrase book was composed very simply and intelligently: a question followed by the same question in German written in Russian letters, then in German in Latin letters. The answers were also printed in Russian and German with Latina Cyrillic letters…For example: Where is the water? Is it drinkable? Drink for yourself.” “What is the station called? Stop the broadcast, or I will shoot you! Bring the conductor! Where is the fuel? Where is the garage? “Gather and bring here [so many] horses [farm animals], we will pay!” “Where are the German soldiers hiding? Where is the Burghermeister?” ” Is there any observation point on the steeple? ” “You must not be afraid the Red Army will come soon.”A Burgermeister is the title of a chairman of the executive council (or cabinet) in many towns and cities in Germany. The Red Army was planning for an invasion of Germany and all of Europe.June 22, 1941 the events which happened on this day are obvious of what the Red Army was planning for the other side first. In how they reacted to the German attack:“Then the unexpected happened. The German army attacked. ““In the morning of June 22, 1941, the commander of the Northwestern Front, Colonel General F.I. Kuznetsov, without awaiting orders from Moscow, issued an order to his troops to attack Tilziet in Eastern Prussia. For the Northwestern Front’s staff, for the commanders of the armies and their staffs, this decision was not at all surprising: an attack on Tilizit had been worked out in training exercises just days earlier and “was very familiar” to the formations commanders and their staffs. Colonel General Kuznetsox simply put the prewar plans into action. On the evening of that same day, the Soviet high command, not yet knowing about General Kuznetsox’s actions, ordered him to do exactly what he had already begun doing to attack Tilzit in Eastern Prussia.”“The High Command also ordered the neighboring Western Front to carry out a powerful attack on the Polish city of Suvalki. This was no surprise to the Western Front commander General D.G Pavlov. He knew the objectives of his front long before the directives form Moscow arrived. And had already issued the orders to advance on Suvalki.”Right from the horse mouth, Stalin’s own son:“The commander of the 5th Battery of the 144th Howitzer Regiment of the 14th Tank Division of the 7th Mechanized Corps, Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili, son of Stalin, was taken prisoner, but at first he was not recognized. The senior lieutenant was betrayed by his subordinates. Stalin’s son was searched and questioned. A letter was found in his pockets, form a certain junior lieutenant in the reserves named Victor:“I am at the training camps, I would like to be home by fall, but the planned walk to Berlin might hinder this.”“The letter is dated June 11,1941 The contents of this letter was reported to Hitler personally; he mentioned it on May 18, 1942. In June 1941, German intelligence officers showed the letter to Yakov Dzhugashivili and asked him to clarify the statement about the “planned walk to Belin,” The questioning protocol recorded Stalin’s son’s reaction. He read the letter and quietly muttered” “Damn it!”This is why the millions of Red Army troops sent to Poland didn’t plan for winter camps, the attack on Europe was scheduled to start around the 10 of July, 1941 when the final mobilization was finished. In Stalin’s speech to the heads of the Soviet Union held in private on August 31, 1939 he told them the war on Europe would come soon. This was the summer of 1941.Hitler understanding this, knew the only chance of survival Europe had was to strike first when the Red Army was not expecting it. Hitler’s forces were not strong enough to survive the coming Soviet attack. So they had to move first.The Truth:“During the first week of the war, Stalin herded his troops into an attack. He should have been giving orders for defense, but he resisted. Finally, on June 28, he found out the Western Front was surrounded, the 4th Army was destroyed, and the 3rd, 10th, and 13th armies were encircled. Only then did Stalin finally understand that his plans for the “liberation” [conquest] of Europe were over. When he arrived at the People’s Commissariat of Defense on June 29, Stalin learned the true dimensions of the utter failure of the Western Front. There, Stalin exploded in anger at Timoshenko and Zhukov, bringing the latter to tears. Anastas Mikoyan recollected; “Stalin was despondent. After leaving the Commissariat. He said: “Lenin left us a grandlegacy, and we, his followers, flushed that legacy down the toilet,”“Stalin realized that he could not fix anything. The socialist country was capable of crushing others, but it couldn’t compete with other countries in peacetime. From June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union was destined for demise. Sooner or later, it was bound to collapse. It could survive only by consuming everything around it. Otherwise, it was doomed. The Soviet Union could exist only if the Soviet people would have no opportunities to compare their lives with the lives of people in surrounding countries. Here fore, Stalin’s main idea was to destroy the capitalism surrounding the Soviet Union. All of Stalin’s plans were simple, logical and understandable: complete victory was only possible on a global scale.”“Hitler understood this as well: “The Bolshevized world will be able to hold only if it encompasses everything.” On June 22,1941 Hitler delivered a lethal attack on Communism. No matter how events unfolded afterward, Stalin could no longer conquer the whole world, which was the equivalent of his demise. On June 30, 1941, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and others entered Stalin’s room in his dacha. Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Stalin’s Politburo, left a wonderful description of this episode:“We came to Stalin’s dacha. Found him in the small dining room, sitting in his armchair. Upon seeing us, he seemed to shrink into the armchair, then look at us questioningly. Then he asked: “What did you come for?” He had a wary, strange look on his face-and the question he asked was no less strange. As a matter of fact, he should have summoned us all himself. I had no doubts: he had decided that we had arrived to arrest him. Molotov, speaking for us all, said that power had to be concentrated if the country were to get back on its feet, and that a State Committee of Defence had to be created. ‘Who’s in charge?” asked Stalin. When Molotov answered that he, Stalin, was in power, the latter looked at Molotov, with surprise, but said nothing, “Fine,’ he eventually pronounced.”“The members of the Politburo hadn’t come to arrest Stalin. They needed Stalin as a symbol, a flag around which the remnants of a crushed division would rally around in battle. They talked of saving the country, but Stalin did not listen to them. Without taking Europe, without expanding the Soviet Union’s borders. The USSR would sooner or later crumble. Stalin had lost the country founded by Lenin. In 1941, only Stalin could appreciate the full weight of the German invasion. In 1941, the members of the Politburo could not fully understand that Hitler’s invasion meant death for the Soviet Union. The Politburo favoured Stalin to resume power, and Stalin, with a careless wave of the hand, returned, fully ware that the cause he had worked for his whole life was dead.”One hundred million people were murdered in the Jewish dictatorship of the USSR. Hitler saved the rest of Europe and the free world on June 22, 1941. He destroyed the USSR and in doing so saved the rest of civilization. The Jewish race have never forgave Hitler for doing this and have heaped never ending lies and slander upon him. Hitler arrived at the 11th hour and gave humanity a pardon from the execution awaiting it as the hands of the International Jew.All quotes from the book:The Chief Culprit, Stalin’s Grand Design To Start World War Two. Viktor Suvorov.

A Peace Corps Volunteer’s Incomplete Introduction to Ukraine’s Troubled HistoryDuring my first six months as a Peace Corps volunteer, I lived with my host family just outside Lviv. Walking along Shevchenko Street to my classes at Lviv Polytechnic I passed the site of the former Janowska concentration camp.Janowska was across from the railroad tracks along Shevchenko St. and was the transit point during World War II for people passing through Lviv on their way to the Bełżec death camp. Nothing is left from those times, nor is there a marker indicating what was once there. I had to research old maps from the time period to discover its location. Janowska was also a slave labor factory and minor death camp, although most of the Jews of Lviv were simply taken to the Piaski ravine to the north of the city and shot. Some were tortured to death, frozen in barrels of water or nailed to crosses, others killed for sport, as when toddlers were tossed in the air and shot for target practice. Although Auschwitz is only a few hours away by train, few were actually sent on to the large death camps in Poland.The kindergarten where I volunteered on Wednesdays is in the heart of what was once the Jewish ghetto from the Nazi occupation. At the war’s start the Jewish population of Lviv was nearly 100,000. When the Nazis invaded Poland, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees flooded into the city. By the end of the war fewer than 1,000 remained, among them, Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter. A Ukrainian militiaman helped him escape the day before he was scheduled to be shot.Nearly a fifth of the Jews who died in the Holocaust came from Ukraine - 1.6 million people, although, as I mentioned, most did not die in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factories. The Nazis wiped out the Jewish population of the country through old-fashioned murder at the end of a rifle barrel. French Catholic priest, Father Patrick Desbois, who located many of the massacre sites and mass graves in Ukraine, calls this the “Holocaust of bullets.” At the Babi Yar massacre, outside of Kyiv, nearly 34,000 Ukrainian Jews were shot to death or buried alive in two days.Another difference of the Holocaust in Ukraine was that while those who helped Jews in the West were arrested, Ukrainians giving aid to their Jewish neighbors were shot, along with their families. Even so, Ukraine is ranked third among countries recognized by the State of Israel as “Righteous Among Nations” for the number of people who sheltered and protected Jews during the Holocaust.Nor were Jews the only Ukrainians to suffer at the hands of the Nazis. Ukrainians initially saw the Germans as saviors come to liberate them from the oppressive Soviet regime, which only a few years earlier created a famine resulting in death by starvation of 3½ - 4 million Ukrainians. However, they soon learned the Nazis had no intention of playing the role of national liberator and actually had a different plan for Ukraine, seeing its population as nothing more than Slavic sub-humans, fit only for slave labor or death. The Reichkommisar of Ukraine, Erich Koch, once said, “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.”Almost 7 million Ukrainians, or about 16% of the country’s population, were killed between 1939 and 1945. Nearly 2.2 million people, 80% of Nazi Germany’s slave labor, came from Ukraine. Those who survived that horror were then treated as traitors by the Soviet Union and sent to gulags in Siberia at war’s end. Until 1980, Soviet citizens had to answer a question on official forms asking if they or any member of their family ever lived in German-occupied territory. It was part of a series of questions about a person’s criminal record.That is one part of Ukraine’s tragic history during the war. There is another.A five-minute stroll from my university is the former Łąckiego Street prison, now a museum of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Several times I accompanied students on tours and it is truly a chilling place, the walls adorned with photographs of brutalities and the names of people murdered. Prior to retreating from Lviv before the advancing German army in 1941, the Soviets first murdered 7,000 Ukrainian and Polish prisoners.What they don’t talk about on the tour is that upon taking the city, the Nazis laid out the bodies and told the people of Lviv it was the work of Soviet Jews. In the pogrom that followed, Ukrainian nationalists murdered 4,000 of their Jewish neighbors, as the Nazi occupiers mostly stood by and observed. Women had to wash and kiss the decomposing corpses of the Soviet victims. Others were stripped naked before rabid mobs, raped, beaten, and then killed. Jews were forced to pick up shattered glass from the streets on hands and knees, wash paving stones with their handkerchiefs, gather up horse manure in their hats, and use their clothes to clean toilets, while crowds beat them with cables and cudgels. A few weeks later, encouraged by the Nazis, local Ukrainian nationalists murdered another 5,000 Jews in a three-day rampage called the "Petliura Days," named after a nationalist leader murdered by a Russian Jew. Cruelties were again repeated, often with Lviv’s passers-by stopping to look and laugh as the crowd humiliated or beat Jews in the street. Many Ukrainian peasants journeyed from surrounding villages with carts to loot and plunder Jewish homes.A radical group called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera faction (OUN-B), and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), used the Nazi occupation to rid Western Ukraine of its Polish population. The leader of the OUN-B was Stepan Bandera, whose statue I walked by every day on my way to Lviv Polytechnic, Bandera’s alma mater, which is on Stepan Bandera Street. The massacre of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia that was carried out by his supporters between 1943-1944 cannot be called anything but ethnic cleansing. Ukrainian nationalist killed 50,000-70,000 Poles, brutally and sadistically; children cut in two, pregnant women bayoneted, Ukrainian men married to Polish women ordered to murder their families. Nationalists attacked Polish villages on Sundays, locking parishioners in their churches and throwing in grenades or burning them alive. Using methods learned from the Nazis, they had Poles dig trenches and shot them en masse. Orthodox priests sometimes blessed knives, axes, pitchforks, and scythes used by Ukrainian peasants to kill their Polish neighbors. “Death to Poles” became a popular everyday greeting in Lviv.So, how to tell the history of Ukraine? Victims of brutal neighboring states or victimizers of their fellow citizens?***I see history as a story, told through common themes, and teach it accordingly. For me, anything else becomes a list of random facts and unrelated events. I believe a coherent narrative helps students better understand the big picture, which in turn makes it easier to understand the little pictures that are part of it. It is also the oldest method of teaching history, stretching back to our earliest ancestors telling stories around a campfire or illustrating those stories on cave walls.From my limited perspective, Ukraine’s history is the story of a divided people who live in a crossroads region of the world, struggling to form a national identity in the face of conquest and persecution by more powerful neighbors. However, it is not a simple David and Goliath story, with the plucky underdog wearing a white hat, although too often Ukraine has been surrounded by a bunch of black hats twirling their mustaches diabolically. Still, the country has some dark chapters of its own, which it has not fully addressed or come to terms with. It is a past that is sometimes difficult for me to reconcile with a people with whom I’ve come to feel such affinity.***The first thing to know about Ukraine is that while the nation is only 29 years old, as an inhabited region, it is ancient. Neanderthal people lived here nearly 50,000 years ago and archaeologists have found the ruins of huts made from mammoth tusks. The horse, an animal that transformed human history more than any other, was first domesticated on the steppes of Ukraine. Somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago the single ancestor of every person in the world with blue eyes was born on the northwest coast of the Black Sea. Since one out of every six people in the world today has blue eyes, that means nearly 17% of the planet’s population has a common ancestor from Ukraine.The land that is now Ukraine was first mentioned in the original history book, Herodotus’ Histories. Book four of the work deals with the land and people of the Pontus, the northern shore of the Black Sea. “The Father of History” tells of a place inhabited by Scythians, a war-like Iranian Indo-European nomadic tribe. The Scythians had replaced another ancient people called the Cimmerians, who we know best today as the tribe led by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian. The Cimmerians gave us the name, Crimea, the region of southern Ukraine. From the Scythians, we get the legend of the Amazons. Supposedly those fearsome warrior women were so committed to combat they burned off their right breasts in order to more accurately use their bows.It turns out that even in ancient history the women of Ukraine were renowned throughout the world, although in my reading of Herodotus I’ve not come across any mention of Wonder Woman.Herodotus and other early historians saw Ukraine as the border between Europe and Asia. It was a crossroads between East and West, with Greek and later Roman colonies established to facilitate trade. From a European point of view, it was the hinterland. The Roman poet, Ovid, banished to “the Scythian marshes,” wrote dejectedly, “I am at the end of the earth!”The barbarian tribes who brought an end to the Roman Empire and harassed Europe for centuries all passed through the steppes north of the Black Sea; the Goths, Huns, various Turkic tribes, and later the Mongols. One group who stayed originated in the Prypiat Marshes on today’s Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Herodotus called them Neuri, although he didn’t know much about them. Today they are known as the Slavs and inhabit over 50% of Europe.By the era of the Byzantine Empire the Slavs had an unusual political structure for the time. A historian from Byzantium wrote, “they have lived from old under a democracy and consequently everything…is referred to the people.” Another unusual feature of the Slavs was related by a Moorish Jew from Cordoba, Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub. He wrote that Slavic women do not commit adultery, but were free to have sexual encounters before they were married. In fact, a sexually experienced wife was the preferred norm, and virginity something to be shunned. He stated, “if a husband marries a girl and finds her to be a virgin, he says to her, ‘If there was something good in you, men would have desired you, and you would have found someone to take your virginity.’ Then he sends her back and frees himself of her.” In addition, those early Slavs had already established a common feature of modern Ukrainian life, the banya or bathhouse, where people lashed their bodies with branches and luxuriated in the heat, something they still do today, as I can attest through first-hand experience.Democracy, free-love, and saunas. What’s not to like? Unfortunately, it didn’t last long.In the early 600s the Slavs were conquered by a Turkic group called the Avars, and then later by another called the Khazars. It was the Khazars, who in the 700s or 800s, build the city of Kyiv on the Dnipro River. The Dnipro is an important river in Ukrainian history. It was a link to trade with the Byzantine Empire, the route that brought Viking conquerors from Sweden, and the dividing line between Left Bank Ukraine (the steppes of the east) and Right Bank Ukraine (the forests of the west). These divisions, along with the southern coastal region along the Black Sea, were first described by Herodotus 2,500 years ago and have defined Ukraine throughout its history to this day.***I won’t go through a century-by-century narrative of the region, although if you wish to know more a book that has been helpful to me in understanding Ukraine’s history is The Gates of Europe, by Serhii Plokhy. For more recent events I’ve relied on a biography, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe. They go into topics I will not be discussing, such as Cyril and Methodius bringing the Cyrillic alphabet to the Slavic world, the rise of Kievan Rus, the Mongol invasions, the impact of Nazi and Soviet secret police, and the leadership of various Vladimirs, Yaroslavs, and Olegs.In keeping with my theme, though, I would like to focus instead on Ukraine’s struggle with its two most powerful neighbors, Russia and Poland, and the effect they had on creating a divided country.Also, I have been using the term Ukraine for the sake of convenience. Traditionally, it has meant “borderland,” although some modern scholars say it can be interpreted as “homeland.” It was occasionally used in the past, but became more common closer to the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, coinciding with the rise in nationalism throughout Europe. The land previously went by various names, most notably the Pontus, Ruthenia, Kievan Rus, and later, “Little Russia.” The term Ruthenian was sometimes used collectively for the people of what is today Ukraine and Belarus. My part of Ukraine, in the west, is a recent addition to the country and is called Galicia. For our purposes, I’ll mostly stick with Ukraine and Ukrainians, unless other terms are needed for clarity.***In the mid-1300s, as Europe was undergoing trial by plague, Ukraine came under the control of the Grand Duchy of Lithuanian and then later the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth, one of Europe’s Great Powers until the 1700s. In the south, the Ottoman Empire encroached upon Crimea and the lands along the Black Sea, and in the east a new power would soon throw off the yoke of the Mongol Horde and have a profound impact on Ukraine for centuries – Russia.When Ukraine was absorbed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth there began a period of Polonization resulting in a ruling class of Catholic Polish gentry overseeing an Orthodox Ukrainian population. Without Ukrainian nobles to protect them many serfs looked for support from bands of horsemen living wild on the steppes, called Cossacks. Some serfs even left their Polish estates and joined the people of the steppe, living without government, landlords, or masters.Tatars from Crimea often raided Ukrainian villages, capturing people for the slave markets in the Middle East. In all they kidnapped and sold into servitude two million Ukrainians and Russians. Many people looked to the Cossacks - Turkish for “free man” - for protection. In the 1500s the Cossacks were organized into a fighting force by a Ukrainian noble, carrying out frequent raids on the Tatars living in the Ottoman territories of Crimea. By the early 1600s they were even attacking towns outside Constantinople and once forced the Sultan to flee the city.When told to submit to Turkish authority, the Cossacks responded with what in Ukraine is the legendary “Reply of the Zaporozhin Cossacks.” In this letter to the Sultan they delighted in coming up with as many foul names for the Ottoman leader as they could, calling him a “Turkish devil,” “secretary to Lucifer,” “son of a whore,” “goat-fucker,” “the crick in our dick,” “Pig's snout,” and “mare's arse,” inviting him to “screw thy mother,” and ending with the ever popular and eternally classic, “kiss our arse!”I wonder how they teach that important historical document in school?The Cossacks eventually became enough of a force to threaten Poland. In 1648, when the rest of Europe was concluding the Thirty Years War, a Ukrainian hetman (leader) of the Cossacks, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, turned the tables on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and made an alliance with the Crimean Tatars, leading the largest of the Cossack rebellions, called the Great Revolt. Much to his surprise, Khmelnytsky’s alliance of Cossacks and Tatars quickly wiped out the Polish army. What had been a simple rebellion, become a revolution. Khmelnytsky captured Kyiv and established the Ukrainian Hetmanate, a proto-Ukrainian state.This initial stage of fighting also saw another common theme in Ukrainian history – a pogrom against the Jews. Ukrainian peasants, especially those in the Right Bank, saw their Jewish neighbors as enemies co-equal with the Poles and proceeded to murder between 14,000-20,000 of them, a rather large number for such a sparsely populated country.For two years the Cossacks achieved victories over Poland and consolidated the Ukrainian state around the cities of Kyiv, Chernihiv (where I did my Peace Corps training for ten weeks), and Pereyaslav. These victories were made possible because of the alliance with the Crimean khan, whose khanate was a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, as were other Black Seas states, such as Moldova and Wallachia (today part of Romania). As the Cossack state was drawn closer into the Ottoman sphere they considered joining these other Ottoman protectorates, but found their Crimean allies untrustworthy. Although they helped achieve initial victories over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Tatars were primarily interested in a stalemate that would leave both sides weakened and allow them to carry on with their primary economic activity, slave raiding. In one important battle the Tatars abandoned the field just as hostilities were engaged, resulting in a terrible defeat for Khmelnytsky’s army.The Cossacks needed a new ally.Which brings us to a fateful date in Ukrainian history - 8 January, 1654. It was on this date, in the city of Pereyaslav, the Cossacks swore an oath of allegiance to Tsar Alexei Romanov of Muscovy, father of Peter the Great, forging the first link in a centuries long chain binding Ukraine to Russia. From the point of view of the Cossacks they were entering into a mutually binding and reversible agreement, offering loyalty and service in exchange for Russian protection and military support in the war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Tsar of Russia, however, does not negotiate, enter into binding agreements, or make oaths. From his perspective, he had gained new subjects and lands.He did however join the fight against Poland, with spectacular results. This began a period in Polish history known as “the Deluge.” Weakened by rebellion in Ukraine and now war with Russia, Poland was then invaded by Sweden, which emerged from the Thirty Years War as a Great Power. What Sweden did not conquer, the Russians did. “The Swedish Deluge” in Poland resulted in the compete destruction of 188 cities and towns, the loss of 1/3 of the population, and the reduction of Poland to a minor power status, completely disappearing from the map of Europe within a century. Poland became a “cultural desert” as the invading Swedish army carted away anything and everything of value, including the contents of 67 libraries, 17 archives, books and manuscripts from Polish universities, artwork from castles and palaces, the contents of churches and cathedrals, and even the state records.To this day these treasures have never been returned, remaining a bone of contention between Poland and Sweden.In Ukraine, the protection of the Tsar soon became overlordship. As the Poles experienced “the Deluge,” this period in Ukrainian history is known as “the Ruin.” Their charismatic leader, Khmelnytsky, died leaving as heir an epileptic 16-year-old son who found his leadership quickly usurped. The Cossacks, with their near anarchistic ideas of freedom, were ill-equipped to run a state, and were constantly fighting among themselves. The Orthodox Church in Ukraine favored closer ties with Moscow, but the new hetman believed Russia broke its agreement and began negotiating with Poland. The serfs and the poor did not trust the Ukrainian nobility and offered little support to either side. Cossack Ukraine descended into civil war, switching allies repeatedly in an attempt to play all sides against the middle. At one point, they signed a treaty with Poland to become the third member of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but it never went anywhere as pro-Russian Ukrainian leaders rebelled and Russia launched a massive invasion. This common theme of Ukrainians forced to look to the lesser of their enemies for allies is repeated throughout its history, including during both world wars.War between Russia and Sweden allowed a truncated Poland to re-assert itself and in 1667 Russia and Poland signed the Truce of Andrusovo, dividing Ukraine at the Dnipro river, with Russia getting the Left Bank (and Kyiv) and Poland the Right. In a last-ditch effort, the Cossacks turned to the Ottoman Empire for help and for a short time this strategy worked. The Sultan’s troops made significant inroads against Poland and forced a retreat of the Tsar’s armies, but harsh treatment of Ukrainians by their Ottoman allies eventually led to a rebellion and the end of the alliance.The Sultan never really saw Ukraine as a viable client state, but rather more as a frontier border between his Empire and his northern neighbors. The Crimean khan simply wanted to resume kidnapping Ukrainians for the slave trade and none of the competing sides was interested in a strong, united Ukraine. In the end, the Sultan retreated, holding onto Crimea and the lands along the Black Sea. As the power of Poland and the Ottoman Empire declined over time, the vacuum was increasingly filled by the ever growing might of the Russian Empire.Dreams of a Ukrainian state disappeared until the early 20th century.***One of the noticeable changes in Ukraine from when I was here over 15 years ago, are the visible signs of Ukrainian nationalism. I see the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag everywhere; on buildings, people’s tee-shirts, on the dashboards of marshrutkas, and the antenna of cars. Buildings, playground equipment, and fences everywhere sport these colors, which represent the Ukrainian sky and fields. People here now rival Americans for flag waving enthusiasm. Vyshyvankas can be commonly seen on school children and businessmen, and tee-shirts sporting the Ukrainian gold trident are ubiquitous. Since the “Revolution of Dignity” and the ensuing invasion of Donbass and annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, many Ukrainians have discovered a sense of patriotism I didn’t see when I was here in 2000.To some extent it has to do with where I am. Back then I was visiting the city of Sumy, which is on the Russian border in the east. Now I live in Lviv, which is less than 100 kilometers from Poland and is a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism. I talked to a Peace Corps friend who is serving in Sumy and he said almost no one speaks Ukrainian on a daily basis, preferring either Russian or Surzhyk, a Russian-Ukrainian hybrid. Strangely enough, he is giving Ukrainian language lessons to the Ukrainian kids in his host family. Here in Lviv I rarely hear Russian and some Leopolitans pretend they don’t speak Russian when encountering Russian tourists, although most Ukrainians are bilingual.Don’t get me wrong, patriotism is strong among all language groups, with Russian speakers as loyal to Ukraine as their Ukrainian speaking countrymen. I spoke with one native Russian speaking student in Chernihiv during my training who gave up the language after the start of the war and now uses Ukrainian exclusively. Lviv in particular is known for its nationalism and is often a target for anti-Ukrainian propaganda. One story from Russia is that every family in Lviv owns two Russian slaves. I’m still waiting for mine. Russian propaganda is pretty ham-handed, but apparently some people buy into it. Russians are told that if they visit Lviv they will probably be killed and perhaps even eaten. One Ukrainian television crew followed a Russian tourist around the city to get his reactions, including the numerous phone calls he got from his mother, nervously checking in to see if he was still alive.Leopolitans find this pretty amusing and I have yet to witness any hatred or prejudice against Russians. There is, however, a palpable sense of Ukrainian patriotism here. It should be no surprise, then, that it was in Galicia, and Lviv in particular, where the modern Ukrainian state was born, although it was initially short lived.***After World War I Eastern Europe found itself tangled in numerous wars, not unlike the period of “the Ruin.” There was a Polish-Ukrainian War, a Polish-Soviet War, a Ukrainian-Soviet War, and wars involving Austria, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania. Winston Churchill said at the time, “The war of the giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies begins.” From this chaos an independent Ukraine emerged, although as with the first Ukrainian nation under the Cossacks, it was eventually absorbed by its more powerful neighbors.The roots of this would-be nation were put down more than a century earlier. About the same time a new country was fighting for its independence in North America, an old country, Poland, was being divided by its neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. In the late 1700s western Ukraine (Galicia) was awarded to Maria-Theresa, the empress of the Hapsburg Empire, with the capital, Lviv, sporting yet another new name, Lemberg. Lviv was still dominated by a Polish aristocracy and its population was largely Polish, although the surrounding country-side of Galicia was predominantly Ukrainian. The city also had a significant Jewish population, the second largest ethnic group after the Poles.In Russian Left-Bank Ukraine the Cossack’s relations with the Tsar were turbulent, at best. The decisive battle of the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden was actually fought on Ukrainian soil, with Cossacks on both sides, although far more opposed to Peter the Great than supported him. The Russian victory meant “Little Russia,” as Left-Bank Ukraine was often referred to now, found itself increasingly under the thumb of Moscow.During the 18th century Cossack uprisings gradually diminished and Ukrainian nationalism survived mainly in its literature. Russification and restrictions on the Ukrainian language created an exodus of intellectuals, academics, and writers to Austrian controlled Right-Bank Ukraine.In the mid-19th century there were a number of uprisings of Polish nationals against Austrian rule in Right-Bank Ukraine, but the Ukrainian peasantry saw little benefit in supporting Polish aristocrats, so there were also a number of Ukrainian peasant rebellions against their Polish landlords. After the Hapsburg Empire reorganized as the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the mid-1800s Vienna dealt with the unrest in Galicia by granting the province greater autonomy. Although essentially putting the Polish aristocracy in charge, the Habsburgs also gave greater freedom to Ukrainians to form their own schools and universities, publish books in Ukrainian, and have greater control over their cultural affairs. A result of this more liberal policy was that it allowed Ukrainian nationalist groups to consolidate support in opposition to the ruling Polish aristocracy.It was during this period of Austrian rule that some of the most beautiful buildings in Lviv were built, including the Opera House, which to my mind, is the heart of the city. This architecture has given Lviv a unique look, more akin to Krakow or Prague than other Ukrainian cities.In 1914 “the war to end all wars” began and Galicia became a battle ground between Russia and the Central Powers, variously under the control of Austria, Germany, and Russia. It is important to remember that of all their overlords - Poland, Russia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany - the people of Galicia found the rule of the German speaking countries the most benign. This helps explain their initial optimism when the German army returned 25 years later.As the war drew to an end the West Ukrainian People’s Republic was declared in Lviv, under the banner of the blue and yellow flag that today flies over Ukraine. After the first revolution in Tsarist Russia a Ukrainian People’s Republic was also declared in Kyiv, using the same flag. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional government in St. Petersburg, the Ukrainian government in Kyiv declared its opposition to the Communists and successfully put down a pro-Bolshevik insurrection. While it would have been logical for the two main Ukrainian governments to unite, the leaders in Lviv, schooled in the parliamentary system of the Austrian Empire, saw their Ukrainian counterparts in Kyiv as disorganized and too revolutionary. They also saw the Poles as their primary enemy, whereas the government in Kyiv believed Poland was a potential ally against the threat of newly formed Soviet Russia. The Ukrainian War of Independence began, with one half of Ukraine fighting Poland and the other half Russia.Sound familiar?The Ukrainian-Soviet War, Polish-Ukrainian War, and Polish-Soviet War, all occurred simultaneously between 1917 and 1921, concurrent with the Russia Civil War. For Lenin, an internationalist, it was essential the communist revolution spread to Europe, especially Germany. To do so meant going through Poland. “The road to Berlin is over the corpse of Poland,” was the Soviet propaganda of the time. However, the Russians were stopped at the Battle of Warsaw, in part because Stalin led a losing attack against Lviv, refusing to join the greater Soviet army deployed against the Polish capital. The failure of the Soviets to defeat Poland may have changed the fate of Europe, as the international revolution was put on hold.For nine months, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic fought the Polish army, but was ultimately defeated and absorbed into the new Polish nation, created at the peace conference in Versailles. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian People’s Republic, led by Symon Petliura (remember the “Petliura Days”?) continued fighting the Russian Red Army, but was hampered by uprisings of Bolshevik Ukrainians and the lack of support from the better armed and trained Galician forces. Petliura lost Kyiv, then retook it, with the help of German and Austrian troops, then lost it again. When Germany signed the armistice ending the war, hope of an independent Ukraine also ended. Nationalists fought on for two more years, but eventually the Ukrainian troops were forced to retreat to Galicia, where they were arrested by the Poles and put into internment camps. Left-Bank Ukraine was rechristened the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and incorporated into the Soviet Union. Galicia once again became part of Poland.***There is a joke, typical of Ukrainian humor, which tells of a Ukrainian man who buys an old Crimean brass lamp at the bazaar. As he is polishing the lamp a genie appears in a great cloud of blue smoke.“You have three wishes,” he tells the man.The Ukrainian thinks for a moment and then says, “I wish for a terrible war between Finland and Japan.”This is an unusual request, thinks the genie, but grants it and a bloody war ensues, with much devastation and loss of life. The genie then asks for the man’s second wish.“I wish for a terrible war between Belarus and North Korea,” the Ukrainian man says.“What a strange use of your wishes,” the genie says, “but you are the master.” So, a vicious war breaks out between Belarus and North Korea and the land is laid waste.“And your final wish?” the genie asks.“I wish for a terrible war between Germany and China.”The genie, no longer surprised, quickly grants the wish, creating the most destructive of the three wars. Before returning to the lamp the genie asks, “I’m curious. Why did you wish for nothing for yourself, as most people do, but instead asked for three terrible wars? Do you hate these countries so much?”“Oh no,” the Ukrainian man replied, “but I knew that for the belligerents to get to each other all three wars would have to be fought on Russian soil. Let them see what it is like for their country to be a battle field for a change.”***Unlike “the Ruin” of the 17th century, when Ukraine was divided between Russia and Poland, Ukraine at the end of the Great War was divided between Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. The breakup of the ancient European Empires at Versailles gave rise to many new states, but Ukraine was not one of them. Its neighbors were just too powerful and the Ukrainian nationalist movement was too divided and underdeveloped. During this period, the great ideological forces in Europe were nationalism and communism and Ukraine was affected by both.In the Ukrainian SSR, there was, initially, a nod toward greater Ukrainian self-expression. Lenin believed that a union of sovereign soviet republics would expand to include Germany, France, and the United States, as well as India and China, and saw Ukrainization as a way to demonstrated all nations could live in what he hoped would be a world-wide union of soviet states. In truth, the Communists were more concerned with Russian, rather than Ukrainian, nationalism in this new multiethnic union.At least initially. When Stalin came to power things changed.With the end of the war, Poland once more took control of Galicia and Volhynia in the west. This created problems for the new Polish state, in that, while the city of Lviv had a predominantly Polish population, the rest of Polish Ukraine was overwhelmingly Ukrainian, and anti-Polish, to boot. The increasingly dictatorial government of Poland initiated a policy of Polonization that included closing Ukrainian schools and universities, banning Ukrainian cultural events and political parties, and settling hundreds of thousands of Polish farmers and military servicemen in what they now referred to as “Little Poland.” Polish neglect of the Ukrainian economy also resulted in a mass exodus of Ukrainian peasants to the United States, Canada, and Argentina.With most moderate and legitimate Ukrainian political and cultural institutions closed or banned, the vacuum was filled by a new secretive and violent political party, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Like many nationalist political parties of the 1920s and 1930s, they were fascists and embraced the cult of personality. Their goal was an independent Ukraine and they were not averse to using terrorist tactics to achieve it.In 1933, they assassinated a Soviet diplomat in Lviv, in revenge for the Great Ukrainian Famine, imposed by Stalin. A year later they assassinated the Polish minister of interior in retaliation for the forced Polonization of Ukraine. Both assassinations were organized by a student from Lviv Polytechnic named Stepan Bandera.Although a student, he quickly rose through the ranks of the OUN, becoming the leader by 1933. After the assassination of the Polish minister he was arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In September, 1939, when Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them, Bandera was able to escape and resume leadership of the OUN.The Romanians followed a policy similar to the Poles in their section of Ukraine, banning the Ukrainian language, declaring Romanian the official language, restricting Ukrainian cultural and political organizations, and resettling Romanians in Ukraine.As Poland, Romania, and the other newly created Eastern Europe states drifted toward dictatorship between the wars, only Czechoslovakia remained a functioning democracy. While their rule of the Transcarpathian region of Ukrainian was more tolerant, they also used their Ukrainian territory to resettle Czechs and Slovaks.The most significant event in any of the four foreign controlled regions of Ukraine between the wars took place in the Ukrainian SSR in the early ‘30s. Stalin abandoned Lenin’s policy of Ukrainization and forced the largely agricultural nation to collectivize its farms. Ukrainians responded with mass uprising, killing dozens of Soviet officials, and beating hundreds more. Stalin then sent in the army and the secret police, deporting 75,000 Ukrainian families to Kazakhstan and Siberia. When Ukrainians adopted a policy of passive resistance, growing only enough food to feed their families and killing their livestock so it couldn’t be confiscated, Stalin responded by seizing all foodstuffs in the country, even the seed grain for the following year’s crop.The ensuing famine of 1932 and 1933 completely broke Ukrainian resistance and the farms were collectivized. Between 3½ and 4 million Ukrainians starved to death, although as with other tragedies in this region and during this time, estimates vary among historians. What is not in dispute, is the effect the Great Ukrainian Famine, or Holodomor, had on the country. Those who did not starve to death quickly learned that total obedience to Stalin and the Party was the only key to survival.The Holodomor was followed shortly after by the Great Purge, in which a quarter million Ukrainians were arrested, half of them executed. Half of all Communist Party leaders in Ukraine were immediately murdered, while the ones who remained loyal to Stalin were executed later, so no one would be left who knew about the events of 1932-33.***One of the cultural traits I have noticed about Ukrainians is a passivity and resignation to the idea they have no control over their country’s future. It is a characteristic many Ukrainians have also commented upon to me. To my mind, it is the single greatest thing holding Ukraine back, even more than corruption and an ailing economy.They recognize and admire the gumption and venturesome spirit possessed by many Americans, but so many Ukrainians have difficulty finding it within themselves. A fellow volunteer from Group 49 who works in youth development was telling me about building up the youth center, starting a community English speaking club, organizing a poetry workshop, starting a girl’s empowerment writing project, and a number of other activities which she helped initiate and organize, but which were largely carried out by Ukrainians. When she asked her Ukrainian co-workers about the future of the youth center and the many projects they have implemented together once she leaves, she was told that without her they would probably cease to exist.Of course, there are many exceptions to this generalization. Almost all of the Peace Corps staff, instructors, and managers are Ukrainians who have tremendous drive and ambition. My own regional manager, Oksana Shabas, is one of the most positive and upbeat people I know. However, the optimistic belief in the ability to make one’s own future is not a common trait among most of the people I’ve met.I have to believe the events of the Holodomor and 70 years of Soviet rule went a long way toward extinguishing that flame in the general population, whether by eliminating from the gene pool those with an entrepreneurial spirit, or creating an environment that has simply taught generations that no matter what you do the system will beat you down in the end. Whatever the answer, it is not an easy barrier to overcome. During the Euromaidan rebellion in 2014, also called the “Revolution of Dignity,” a common protest sign read, “Europe Starts with You,” a tacit admission that the greatest challenge to creating a new Ukraine is the creation of a different kind of Ukrainian.***The 1939 Nazis and Soviet partition of Poland united Ukraine into one country, although firmly under the control of a foreign power. The Soviets quickly moved to extinguish nationalist movements, confiscate church lands and arrest nationalist leaders, focusing especially on Bandera’s OUN. Many of them, including Bandera, fled to Germany.When Hitler inevitably betrayed his ally and the blitzkrieg swept through the Soviet Union, many people in Ukraine welcomed them as liberators. In fact, a battalion of Ukrainian troops made up of OUN members were part of the German forces that were the first to enter Lviv on the heels of the retreating Soviets. Almost immediately, the OUN declared an independent state, loyal to Hitler and operating within the new German European order.The Nazis had other ideas and were not amused.They arrested Bandera and his two brothers, both of whom were sent to Auschwitz where they died, while Bandera himself was placed in a German concentration camp. Hundreds of OUN leaders were shot. Hitler had no intention of creating a Ukrainian state, since the land was integral to his plan for greater “living space” for the German people. Some Ukrainians would be kept for slave labor, but most would be eliminated as a sub-human race.I’ve already described the losses the Ukrainian experienced during the war. Ukraine’s Jewish population was almost completely wiped out and the Ukrainian Jewish culture disappeared altogether. As I mentioned at the beginning, Ukrainians murdered tens of thousands of their Jewish and Polish neighbors, although the Germans, ever more efficient, tallied their body count in the millions, including Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians.As in every occupied country, there were collaborators, but more Ukrainians fought and died for the Allies against Nazi Germany than the French, British, and Americans combined. Putin often calls Ukrainians “Banderists,” fascists, and Nazi-collaborators, but during World War II, of the minority of Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, far more were communists than nationalists. More than 3 million Ukrainian soldiers were killed fighting the Wehrmacht and another 3½ million Ukrainian civilians were murdered during the Nazi occupation.When the war was over Stalin resolved any remnants of ethnic problems in Ukraine by simply moving the entire Polish nation westward, at the expense of Germany, and the Polish people with it, forcing Poles living in Ukraine to move west to the Polish satellite state. While the countries of the east were cut off from the rest of Europe by the Iron Curtain, Ukraine disappeared altogether into the Soviet Union. Ukrainian nationalist movements ceased to exist and Bandera was assassinated in Munich by the KGB in 1959, on the orders of Khrushchev.I’m not going to go into events in Ukraine after World War II and before independence, since that is really a history of the U.S.S.R., not Ukraine. However, I do want to point out one event of the era that had later significance. In 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union issued a decree transferring the Crimean Oblast to the Ukrainian SSR. After the breakup of the Soviet Union the Russian Federation reaffirmed the transfer, signing a treaty with Ukraine in 1994 and 1997 recognizing Ukraine’s borders and accepting Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea. In 2014 Vladimir Putin disregarded Soviet, Russian, and international law and annexed Crimea to Russia.Much has happened since the independence of modern Ukraine, but those events are so recent that they straddle the line between history and current events.In 1990, as eastern Europe was breaking free of Moscow and the U.S.S.R. was breaking up, over 300,000 Ukrainians formed a human chain from Kyiv to Lviv, calling for independence from the disintegrating Soviet Union. A year later Ukraine declared its independence, supported by a referendum in which 90% of Ukrainians voted to sever their ties with Russia.Almost immediately, Ukraine was faced with the same issues which haunt the country today; massive corruption at all levels of society and a struggling economy. In addition, Ukraine had to decide where its future lay, within the Russian sphere of influence or as European nation with ties to the West? This last question was answered definitively in 2013-2014 when then President Yanukovych, reneged on a promise to sign an agreement formally tying Ukraine politically and economically to the European Union, choosing instead to pursue closer ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.In what has become known as the “Revolution of Dignity” students and people from all levels of society occupied Maiden Independence Square in Kyiv, waving both Ukrainian and European Union flags. After the government sent in troops, killing protesters, the rebellion quickly spread to the rest of Ukraine. In the west, the Lviv Oblast declared it would no longer follow directives from the government in Kyiv. It was a true expression of popular will and a fascinating series of events, carried out mostly by young people. If you have Netflix, I strongly encourage you to watch Winter on Fire for a riveting account of the Euromaiden movement.A couple of weeks after Yanukovych fled to Russia, resulting in victory for the forces supporting a European Ukraine, Putin annexed Crimea. The next month “little green men” - Russian troops dressed in uniforms without insignia or rank - instigated the invasion of Eastern Ukraine, which has claimed the lives of 10,000 Ukrainians thus far.Even with the final achievement of independence, Ukraine’s centuries old problem of encroachment by its powerful neighbor continues.***This is far from a complete history of Ukraine, even as a simple overview. Among the many missing gaps is any discussion of the complex role religion has played in Ukrainian society or the social, artistic, and literary history of the country. I’ve also provided scant information about the first millennium of the Common Era, nothing but a passing reference to the Mongol invasions, and no mention of the Golden Age of Chernihiv, my Peace Corps training city, when it was the leading power of Rus. There is nothing about the Crimean War of the 1850s or the industrialization and urbanization spurred by that humiliating defeat, resulting in Russia’s sale of Alaska to help pay for modernization, and the influx of people moving to Ukraine to take advantage of new industrial job opportunities, including the Khrushchev and Brezhnev families. There is no information about the Ukrainian SSR, which was a founding member of the United Nations, although still controlled by the Kremlin, nor are events since independence dealt with thoroughly, although to be fair, I’ve never been a big fan of trying to shoe-horn current events into discussions of history.As I mentioned in the beginning, my purpose is to look at the story of a divided people who live in a crossroads region of the world, struggling to form a national identity in the face of conquest and persecution by more powerful neighbors. My other purpose is to try and come to terms with Ukraine’s checkered past.There is one of those wonderful Japanese Zen proverbs Buddhists are so good at coming up with, which tells of two monks on their way to the monastery when they encounter an attractive young woman at the river’s edge.She beseeches the monks, “can you help me across?”The older monk gladly obliges, so she hikes up her kimono and climbs on his back, wrapping her attractive young legs around him. He carries her across and then resumes his journey with his younger companion.“You should not have carried her across the river,” the young monk rebuked.“Are you still carrying her?” the older monk replied.Somehow things sound so much wiser when put in the mouths of Zen Buddhist monks, don’t they? Still, the proverb makes me wonder about our obligation to carry the past with us. What debt do we owe history and when is it okay to lay that burden aside?I mentioned earlier that all blue-eyed people in the world are descendants of a common ancestor who lived in Ukraine 6,000-10,000 years ago, making them kind of an extended family of one-and-a-quarter billion folks. Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and Adolf Hitler were all part of that family. Do blue-eyed people today bear a particular burden of history because of that relationship? Of course not. Do the people of modern day Germany? That is a trickier question. Obviously, people today cannot be held accountable for the actions of their ancestors from 75 years ago. However, do they still have some responsibility to their nation’s past? Do we? And how far back do the “mystic chords of memory” stretch?Ukrainians today are not the people who perpetrated pogroms against their Jewish neighbors or massacred their fellow Polish citizens. However, neither have they fully acknowledged those tragedies in the way the German people have their terrible past. There has never been an investigation into war crimes committed by Ukrainian collaborators, nor any prosecution of war criminals. Monuments to their victims are small, vaguely worded, and largely hidden. Certainly, nothing to rival the statue of Stepan Bandera on Stepan Bandera Street in Lviv, a figure who, along with his nationalist fighters, is venerated throughout western Ukraine. There is significant evidence that Bandera’s followers carried out the most horrific torture and murder of Jews and Poles, though Bandera himself did not. People today are not responsible for the horrendous deeds of their forbearers, but surely, we have an obligation to the memory of those who suffered and died at their hands.Like those other righteous victims of history, the Israelis and Palestinians, many Ukrainians cannot see beyond their own tragic past as victims, to recognize the role of their ancestors in tragedies equally as cruel as any Ukrainians have suffered. This young nation is trying to create a sense of nationalism in a bilingual country that still has a fundamental east-west divide. More often than not history here is enlisted into the service of nation building, rather than a commission on truth and reconciliation.Which leads to the larger question. Just what is the purpose of history? It is a question I’ve often asked myself since I was a first-year teacher listening to more than one student complain, “why do we need to know this stuff?” I still haven’t answered it to my satisfaction and maybe never will. I know, however, we humans, perhaps alone of all the creatures on the planet, have developed an awareness of our place in time that allows us to mentally travel into our past, as well as forward to possible futures. We are the product of that past and how we understand it and share it with each other not only shapes the world of the present, but will determine the shape of the world we create in the future. I hope someday Ukraine rises above the many wrongs it has endured at the hands of others and becomes a nation strong enough to wash the blood from its own hands, by acknowledging its entire past.