The historical and ideological roots of Kiev’s enmity towards Moscow
Over generations Ukraine’s rich dark soil and vast steppe has provided Europe with the grain required to feed its burgeoning peoples, with the country’s status as the ‘breadbasket of Europe’ more than deserved in consequence. In Tsarist times, as part of the Russian Empire, Ukrainian grain and wheat was Russia’s primary export commodity, helping to fund the exorbitant lifestyles of the Tsar and his extensive court camarilla.
When Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union in 1922, the country’s vast agricultural resources were husbanded in large-scale collective farms. The famines which swept through the vast rural plains of the Soviet Union in 1932–33 were a direct consequence of the social convulsion caused by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization and grain requisitioning, undertaken in a panicked response to the disruption of the food supply to Soviet cities in the wake of the disastrous harvest of 1927–28. The proximate cause of the poor harvest was the severe drought which afflicted the land in the summer of 1927, leading to a poor winter tillage.
The resulting inability to feed the cities threatened the very survival of the Soviet system, especially with the emphasis that had been placed on hyper-industrialisation, fuelled by Stalin’s obsession with catching up to the West. It was the driving…
