The reason why is because I felt that even though I thought that Stalin was a tyrant (I don’t believe this anymore, obv), he was genuinely devoted to Marxism and its principles, so the idea of him deciding to wipe out the Ukrainians out of bigotry or whatever just kinda didn’t make sense to me.
Yep. Little known fact actually. A lot of people like to talk about Ukrainian history and identity with reference to various Cossack polities but that’s kind of a distraction, because the real crux of the issue is the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Galicia and subsequent radicalization of West-Ukrainian nationalists under Polish occupation in the 20s and 30s.
I did not know that. TIL.
Ironic because Cossacks were the muscle that expanded Russia into Siberia and the Pontic Steppe.
Yeah it was at the tale end of ww1, Germany and the Ottomans started to butt heads due to various ideas on how to split the Caucasus, especially who gets to control the baku oilfields. Ludendorff also went megalomanic and wanted to expand into central asia and divided russia into even more statelets. Didnt stop german imperial politicians from wanting to team up with the soviets for Operation Schlußstein, though.
Exactly. National identity was very nebulous on the steppes, for centuries allegiance was very fluid, and there was a lot of ethnic and linguistic diversity because the steppe frontier attracted people from all around the more settled communities, including many Russians.
It’s hard to argue that such “shifting sands” can constitute a solid historical foundation for the formation of a unifying national identity unless you engage in serious historical revisionism. Which is what modern Ukrainian nationalism unfortunately does, mythologizing Cossacks as a homogenous ethnic group when that could not be further from the truth.