Russia Erects Stalin Statue in Occupied Ukraine

[riversedge]

Way to rub it in!




Russia Erects Stalin Statue in Occupied Ukraine

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/russia-erects-stalin-statue-in-occupied-ukraine/ar-AA1EuEsJ

Story by Anna Hartz • 20h

As Russia continues its war in Ukraine, it’s also pushing forward a version of history that many Ukrainians and others find deeply painful.

One recent example? A statue of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator responsible for some of Ukraine’s darkest chapters, has just been unveiled in the occupied city of Melitopol, report the Kyiv Independent.

On May 8, the Communist Party of Russia put up the statue to mark Victory Day, which celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

A plaque on the monument calls Stalin the “organizer and inspirer” of the Soviet victory, and credits him as a hero “from grateful descendants.”

The event was held with some ceremony. Russian-backed officials showed up, along with schoolchildren from the area. Flowers were laid at the base of the statue.

Melitopol has been under Russian control since March 2022, after being seized early in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. ..................




Visegrád 24
@visegrad24
The Russian occupiers have unveiled a new monument of Stalin in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol

Link to tweet

[riversedge]

1. Good drone target tomorrow.

Good drone target tomorrow.

Link to tweet

[Irish_Dem]

2. In the 1930's Stalin deliberately starved 4 million Ukrainians to death.

He stole all their food.

[Igel]

5. Yes, for a few reasons.

One was ideological--needed to nationalize things, centralize power.

But another was because the Party's power-base was workers and the urban population, which had more easily been made dependent on the government. (Lenin backed off mandatory creches, apts. without kitchens, that sort of thing, although he opened some of the most deadly and profitable penal colonies to dispose of enemies that he really couldn't abide.)

The urban workers, factory workers, needed the food. Stalin obliged. Shored up his blue-collar support and party faithful with stacks of dead kulaks and other agrarian workers. It was a poly-fer. Centralize the state, maintain party and worker loyalty, keep the party-faithful and party-dependent alive, get rid of pesky landholders who were nearly self-sufficient and didn't need the State. (If you were autonomous under Stalin, that was anomalous and short-lived.)

The CP USA had no problem with it. Nor did they have a problem with the alliance he had with Hitler--until he switched course. Then, like a herd of sheep school of fish they immediately swiveled.

[mitch96]

3. I agree, a new bomb/drone target... nt

[yellowcanine]

4. Yes bc Stalin treated Ukrainians so well they welcomed the Germans

as liberators.

[Igel]

6. And had a larger percentage of their population killed

in the war, mostly as soldiers in the Red Army, than Russia. They had more battles and lost more civilians due to the actual war than Russia did.

Putin claims the Red Army as the "Russian Army." It was a Slavic army: Heavier, percentage-wise than you'd expect, Ukrainian than Russian. That's a truth that Putin's history cannot ever allow. It was, the story goes, Russians sacrificing for the "lesser Slavs," big brother Russia fighting for their "little brothers"--Poles, Czechs, etc. Somehow the Ukrainians got lost in the shuffle, "Russian" until 1991 and invisible in the official history in Russia after that (to the extent they weren't sanctified by the spilling of Russian blood in defending them). I mean, in the '50s and '60s some war novels had Ukrainians resisting the Germans but if you looked at the same novel 10, 15 years later all the characters were suddenly just plain Russians. (Fortunately I did my shopping in person at a Russian bookstore that had gotten books in the '50s into the '00s, seldom sold all of them, so if you dug you'd find books for $1.25 that were from the mid-late '50s and unrevised/censored--and unobtainable in the USSR.)

Some Ukrainians welcomed the Germans during the war. They had fought the Russians before the Germans arrived, they fought the Russians after the Germans arrived, they continued fighting the Russians after the Germans left. Why? Because they wanted the Russians gone, not the Germans present.

Some anti-Russian fighters sided with Hitler overall. Mostly they retreated with the Hitlerian forces.

Some participated and sided with the Germans in killing Jews. Some had, prior to German presence, been killing Jews. Some were killing Poles--we hear less about them, but Poles were a non-trivial presence because of centuries of Polish "settler-colonialists" having the upper hand. Hard to forget that kind of oppression, I'm told. Some killed both. Some killed just Jews or just Poles. Some killed neither. Just fought Russians.

One group--there were so many and they kept splitting and merging--continued to fight and retreat. But had the iron-clad edict not to fire knowingly on Western Allied forces. And when they retreated far enough back that the advancing Western Allied forces met them, simply lay down their arms. Nobody trusted them to continue to do what they'd been doing, fight the Russians.

[yellowcanine]

7. There were Mennonites in Ukraine who had been invited there

By Catherine the Great. They had their own autonomous colonies and were excused from military service until the late 1800s, at which point many emigrated to Canada and the U.S. But many stayed and got caught up in civil war and the famine which followed in 1920. They were also German speaking so it is understandable that they at first saw the Nazis as liberators. Many followed the German army retreat in 1945. The Soviets caught many and sent them to Siberia. A few lucky ones migrated to Paraguay and other places.