Sandworm

Between 800,000 and 1.6 million people were arrested and deported from western Ukraine to labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia, as much as a fifth of the region’s population.

When Hitler did invade two years later, in a surprise attack that shattered the two countries’ pact, the Soviets hurriedly massacred the Ukrainian prisoners they hadn’t yet deported before fleeing to the east.

the Nazis continued to kill en masse, starving 2 million captured Soviet prisoners as they death-marched them westward. In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.

The Nazis rounded up 2.8 million Soviet citizens, more than 2 million of whom where Ukrainian, and shipped them to Germany to work in factories for slave wages.

The historian Anne Applebaum’s book on the Holodomor, Red Famine, documents stories of desperate peasants resorting to eating leather and rodents, grass, and, in states of starvation-induced mania, even their own children. All of this occurred in one of the most fertile grain-production regions in the world.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost forty-nine relatives in the next decade’s Holocaust and went on to coin the term “genocide,” later cited the Holodomor in a 1953 speech in New York as a quintessential example of his neologism. “This is not simply a case of mass murder,” Lemkin said. “It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of

When Hitler seized Poland in 1939, the region of western Ukraine known as Galicia that had until then been under Polish control suddenly fell to Moscow. Stalin and his Ukrainian Communist Party subordinate Nikita Khrushchev wasted no time in purging the region of anyone who might possibly fight the Soviet Union’s annexation: farmers who resisted co