USSR Intent is also implicit in the Soviet government’s vehement denials of the
existence of famine at the time it occurred and its rejection of all famine relief
offered by private individuals and organizations, as well as the export for sale
abroad of roughly 1.7 million metric tons of grain at the height of the mass
starvation.

Ukraine and the Ukrainians

Ukraine, presently constituted as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
(UkSSR), has a territory of 232,000 square miles, slightly more than that of
France, and in 1979 had 49.6 million inhabitants, of whom 73.6 percent were
Ukrainians. Ukrainians speak a Slavic language, as do most other East
Europeans. The Ukrainian language differs from Russian and Polish about as
much as Portuguese does from Castilian Spanish. Ukrainians possess a
distinct national culture and historical experience. The total number of
Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, according to the 1979 Soviet census, was 42.3
million. This makes the Ukrainians the most numerous of all the Slavic nations
except for the Great Russians (137.4 million). The UkSSR is located north of
the Black Sea and borders (clockwise from the Black Sea) on the Moldavian
SSR, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Belorussian SSR, and
the Russian SFSR (RSFSR). It is one of the USSR’s 15 constituent Soviet
Socialist Republics and has a seat in the United Nations.

The World War I ended in the successive collapse of the dynastic states
which had for centuries dominated Eastern Europe: Imperial Russia, Ottoman
Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Germany. (Just as Russians were a relatively
small minority in Western Imperial Russia, the Germans were a minority in the
eastern borderlands of the German Empire.) As each of these states disinte-
grated in turn, nations between the Russians and Germans which had not
enjoyed political independence for centuries reasserted themselves. Imperial
Russia collapsed first in 1917, and such hitherto foreign-ruled peoples as the
Finns, Poles (who were also divided with Germany and Austria-Hungary),
Baltic nations, Belorussians, nations of the Caucasus, and Ukrainians set up
national councils that moved toward complete national independence. Such
movements differed very little from their more successful counterparts to the
west, which arose in the wake of the 1918 upheaval.

It seemed that each people had a different idea of what a nation could
legitimately claim. No one could agree on where the borders between nations
ought to be drawn. Conflicts were inevitable. Many Poles, for example,
understood Poland as a historico-cultural community that ought to extend
eastward far beyond the point where Poles constituted the majority of the
population. They believed that the territories that were part of the “historic”
Poland before 1772 ought to be part of the reborn Polish state. Others argued
on the basis of strategic or economic imperatives. The Czechs, for example,
argued that Czecho-Slovakia (only later was the hyphen dropped) could be
viable only if it included the mountainous western rim of Bohemia, the
population of which was overwhelmingly German, and certain ethnically Polish
coal-mining border regions.

Ukrainians, though more numerous than any of the East European
peoples who did achieve independence, were hampered by the fact that
Ukraine’s cities were largely inhabited by non-Ukrainians. In Western Ukraine,

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