Volodymyr Kish
This past January 29, Ukraine sadly commemorated the tragic Battle of Kruty which took place on January 29, 1918. By the standards of military history, the battle was more of a skirmish. It took place in the little railway junction town of Kruty located some 130 kilometres northeast of Kyiv. As a threatening Red army of some 4,000 soldiers was approaching Kyiv, a hastily assembled defensive force of some 400 Ukrainians was sent to intercept their advance. Despite a heroic stand by the overmatched Ukrainian defenders who saw half of their number killed, the issue was never really in doubt, and the Reds triumphed as expected, though experiencing significant losses themselves.
Although the delay of the Red forces was ultimately of some strategic importance to the beleaguered Ukrainian government of the day, that was not the main reason why the memories of Kruty are so revered to this day. The significance arose from the fact that most of the Ukrainian defenders at Kruty were students and cadets in their teens, barely out of childhood. The death of so many youngsters was a particularly heavy burden to pay for the defense of the homeland. It is a tragic psychological and emotional weight that we bear even a century later.
It was neither the first nor last time that Ukrainians suffered and died at the hands of ruthless invaders. There is a long history of crushing sacrifices inflicted by the cruel fates of history upon the Ukrainian populace.
In the thirteenth century, the Mongol hordes under Batu Khan swept through the lands of Kyivan Rus, inflicting much death and destruction in their wake. In December of 1240, they breached the walls of Kyiv, laid waste to the city and killed off most of it 50,000 inhabitants.
In succeeding centuries, the Kyiv Rus empire was dismembered and divided amongst the Tatar descendants of the Mongols, the ascendant Poles in the west and the growing imperialistic Russian empire in the north. The Ukrainian population was effectively enslaved and ruthlessly exploited. There was no shortage of uprisings and rebellions, whose success was never more than short-lived, and during which large numbers of Ukrainian peasants and Kozaks perished.
During this time, tens if not hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians were captured and sold into slavery in the Ottoman empire to the south, often with the amoral assistance of Genoan and Venetian traders who had established bases in Crimea. Thousands of young Ukrainian boys in their early teens or younger, would be kidnapped and shipped off to the Ottoman Sultan where they would be brainwashed and molded into elite military units called Janissaries that formed the Sultan’s bodyguard.
As nasty and brutal as these times were, the worst was yet to come. It was not until the twentieth century that the full fury of cruel fate befell on Ukraine. During World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution that it spawned, it is estimated that some 1.5 million Ukrainians perished. But even that could not foreshadow the horrors that were to follow.
The early 1930’s saw the deliberate extermination by Stalinist induced famine of some ten million Ukrainian peasants. This was shortly followed by the horrors of the Second World War. It is little recognized that most of the death and destruction on the Eastern Front took place on the territory of Ukraine. Although exact statistics are hard to pin down, most historians agree that there were somewhat in the vicinity of 2.5 million military and 4.5 million civilian Ukrainian deaths as a result of the war. To this must be added the tragedy of some 2.3 million young Ukrainians who were taken into slave labour in Germany. Many were killed during the Allied bombing campaign on Germany and many more were executed or sent to almost certain deaths in exile in Siberia when they were repatriated back to the Soviet Union after the war. Only some two hundred thousand of them managed to find sanctuary in Allied countries after the war. One of those fortunately, was my mother.
The end of the war brought no respite for Ukrainians. In the decades that followed, millions more Ukrainians perished in the gulags for their continued defiance of Russian and Communist rule. Merely voicing one’s desire to be recognized as a Ukrainian, could earn you a bullet to the back of the head or decades, and often fatal hard labour in the extremes of Siberia.
And now we find ourselves in 2016, and nothing seems to have changed. The Russian hordes are again at the gate, and Ukrainians continue to die simply because we want to be Ukrainians and control our own destiny. Yet, despite the crushing weight of all this history, we will not be cowed. We did not give up during the past thousand years of our history and we will not give up now. It is time the world recognized our right to exist and helped us achieve what is our right – to be masters in our own land.
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