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Talking Location With – Erin Litteken: UKRAINE and RUSSIA

25th May 2022

#TalkingLocationWith... Erin Litteken, author of The Memory Keeper of Kyiv.

Ukraine & Russia: This is Not the First Time

The bravery and strength of the Ukrainian people as they fight for their homeland has captivated the world, but to understand that passion, that willingness to die rather than surrender, you need to understand that today’s war is not the first time Russians have brutalized Ukrainians. This is not the first time they’ve shot innocent men, women, and children in the streets. This is not the first time they’ve closed off a village to food and supplies or shipped tens of thousands of Ukrainians to camps in Russia. And this is absolutely not the first time Ukrainians have needlessly died at the hands of a brutal dictator from Moscow who denies Ukraine’s right to exist.

Erin Litteken

For generations, Russia has sought to stamp out Ukraine—its culture, its language, its people. Ukrainian’s fiercely independent spirit is a threat to the Russian ideology of superiority and dominance. It flies in the face of Russia’s false assertations that Ukraine doesn’t have its own historical narrative separate from Russia, but Ukrainians have always had their own language, history, society, and, after centuries of struggle, finally, for the last thirty years, their own country. In 2014, Russia began this war by invading Crimea, and now, their attack has amplified to barbaric levels, echoing another tragic assault.

In 1928, Stalin initiated his first five-year-plan to collectivize agricultural regions in Soviet-occupied Ukraine and create state-owned farms. He executed and/or deported Ukraine’s leaders, academics, artists, and eventually, an entire class of successful farmers. When the strong-willed people of Ukraine resisted, Stalin tried to break them through a man-made famine of catastrophic proportions.

Erin LittekenDuring the Holdomor, or “death by hunger,” Stalin issued a series of devastating directives specifically targeting Ukraine. Blacklisted villages that didn’t meet their grain quotas were locked down so no food or supplies could come in. Borders were closed and a passport system prohibited internal travel, locking the country into one giant death camp. Groups of Soviet activists went door-to-door and forcibly removed every last bit of food, plunging metal rods into beds and the floor and ripping apart ovens and walls in search of any hidden stores. Resistors were shot. Starving men, women, and children were beaten, arrested, or killed for taking handfuls of grain from the very fields they sowed.

Parents watched their children starve, orphaned children were left to fend for themselves, and whole families perished together, entombed in their barren houses. Dead bodies littered the countryside as people fell over where they stood, scrabbling for food in fields.

Recent studies estimate roughly four million Ukrainians died. That’s not counting the hundreds of thousands more deported to labor camps and executed in later purges. Between 1932-1933, one in eight Ukrainians perished. At the peak of the Holodomor, in June 1933, 28,000 Ukrainians died each day—30% of whom were children.

Despite these horrifying numbers, the Soviet Union denied the Holodomor and it remained hidden behind the Iron Curtain for decades, existing only in the memories of Ukrainians. Russia still doesn’t recognize the Holodomor as man-made, but there were no natural reasons for this famine–no bug infestations, no poor weather conditions. Like today, there was only a brutal regime bent on destroying Ukraine.

Understanding this one facet of Russia and Ukraine’s complicated history is more relevant than ever. Grandmothers mouthing off to Russian soldiers, citizens kneeling before tanks, groups uniting to make Molotov cocktails as a last line of defense against an invading army all come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Ukraine’s history.

This fierce need to fight for their autonomy and survival has been necessary so often that it’s become part of Ukrainian’s internal make-up—the generational memories of what their ancestors endured, in part, fuels the fire driving them today.

Memories of grandparents and great-grandparents digging in their yards for earthworms to eat. Memories of grinding tree bark into “flour” and eating grass and weeds. Memories of searching through fields for bits of rotten potatoes while piles of good potatoes sat under guard at the train stations, waiting for transport out of the country.

Stalin tried to wipe Ukraine off the map back then. Now, Putin is attempting to do the same, so Ukrainians fight with a ferocity that’s hard for anyone else to comprehend.

But, Ukrainians remember, and the world must remember, too.

Erin Litteken

Erin Litteken is the author of THE MEMORY KEEPER OF KYIV, a novel about one family’s struggle to survive during the Holodomor, out May 16, 2022 from Boldwood Books

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