As Putin’s columns move into Ukraine, some background on Russia’s relations with that nation may prove helpful.
In the winter of 1932, Robert Conquest outlines in Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin set impossibly high grain quotas and blocked all assistance from the outside. As a result, millions of people starved to death, with a high body count in Ukraine.
“I saw the ravages of the famine of 1932-33 in the Ukraine,” writes Arthur Koestler in his contribution to The God That Failed. “Hordes of families in rags begging at the railway station,” and starving
