At the end of last week, the Holodomor was commemorated in Britain. There was a service at Westminster Abbey. But the chief point to notice is that no important British government or opposition representatives appeared. Nor, with the honourable exception of Stephen Fry, did any of the celebrities who infest causes such as ‘Free Palestine’. Almost everyone knows, thank goodness, what the Holocaust was. But even now, although Vladimir Putin is trying a small-scale repeat, have most people heard of the Holodomor? (If you haven’t, read Anne Applebaum’s astonishing Red Famine.) It was the largely deliberate starvation of about four million Ukrainians by Stalin in 1932-33, bringing death at a rate rivalling even that of the Final Solution. The failure of the West to remember this and other horrors of the Russian/Soviet empire explains the current failure of peace in Europe. I am glad to say that the newish Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism is making the recovery of memory its business.
A kind reader (whom I hereby thank because I have lost his accompanying letter) sent me a remarkable memoir, Arms of Valor by General Pavlo Shandruk, published in 1959. Shandruk fought for the Russian Imperial Army in the first world war. After the Russian Revolution, he joined the Ukrainian National Republic and fought against both the Red and the White Russians. When the republic failed, he was interned in Poland. In 1936, he joined the Polish army and fought against the German invasion which began the second world war, saving the 19th Polish brigade from a German trap which would have wiped them out. In the chaos of early 1945, he became commander of the Ukrainian National Army, reluctantly accepting German protection in order to resist Stalin’s advance.
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