Viktoria Ivanova was a child when the WWII suffocated Europe. It was 1941, the Nazis had entered Kiev and she, innocently, was walking down the street when she came across a poster in which the Germans asked the Ukrainians to gather at a specific point with warm clothes. “The Jews who read it thought they were not going to be executed. That they were going to be evacuated to another place, that they were going to be transferred. They were very obedient, of course, and followed orders », she recalled.
But reality soon dealt a blow that shattered that illusion. At the end of September, they took the crowd that showed up to the Babi Yar ravine and carried out a massacre. I know
they lost more than 33,000 souls.
Some of Viktoria’s relatives were shot to death on that bitter day. A sad ending for a family that, barely a decade earlier, had suffered in their guts from the lack of food caused by the madness of Iósif Stalin. Nearly four million Ukrainians died at that time in a famine known as Holodomor and which, according to the producer, historian and expert on the Holocaust Laurence Rees on ‘hitler and stalin’ (Review), was “caused both by the Stalinist desire to impose agrarian collectivization, and by the dictator’s insistence that food be diverted from the Ukraine to feed the rest of the Soviet Union.” “They seized everything: flour, cereals… anything that was in a jar,” revealed Olha Tsymbaliuk, one of the victims of that red madness.
Parallel lives
These examples, included in the new essay by a heavyweight like Rees, demonstrate two things. In the first place, that Hitler and Stalin subjected the same Ukraine that today is suffering from Putin’s siege to similar barbarities. But also that, although the Supreme Comrade has enjoyed a certain propagandistic goodness until very recently for having been part of the winning side in World War II, he was just another dictator similar to the one who dined on vegetables and cursed almost two thousand people in German. kilometers of distance. That of two comparable dogs, but with different collars. Two bloodhounds convinced that God was dead and that, in return, he would be replaced by a mass ideology. His, if we sharpen the dart more.
As the Greek Plutarch did in the second century with the Roman emperors, Rees analyzes in his extensive essay the «parallel lives» from the ‘Hun’ and the ‘Hotro’, in Unamonian terminology. The many similarities and not a few differences of two dictators who rose above the rest almost by chance.
Because, although it may seem so from the vantage point offered by the passage of time, the historian insists that “they were not predestined to do so”, but instead took advantage of two European conflicts – the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution– to settle into the easy chair. Although also, and respectively, in ideas such as the primacy of the Aryan race and in the showcase social revolution; the one that well-wishers show from the outside.
ukrainian example
What is striking is that Rees structures the text on a thousand unpublished testimonies such as those of Viktoria or Olha. Thanks to them we can travel to Ukraine and understand the current conflict; one gestated in the heat of the barbarities of Hitler and the outrages of Stalin. Through his eyes it is possible to understand that, after years of famine and exploitation, the kulaks of Kiev – peasants whom the Bolsheviks persecuted and expropriated their lands – positioned themselves on the German side after Operation Barbarossa,
“We saw the Germans who were fighting against the USSR as allies, especially when everyone believed that they would establish the Ukrainian state,” said Alekséi Bris, a native of the region who, shortly after, began working as an interpreter for the troops of the Third Reich.
The work also allows us to glimpse that the wolf did not take long to show its paw under the door. Thus, Hitler went from viewing Ukraine favorably (before the start of hostilities he had confirmed that he needed it so that “no one can get us out of the war through hunger”), to using torture, deportation and mass murder to subjugate a population that he considered inferior. So much so, that society was subjected to the same penance it had suffered in the twenties and thirties under the communist regime. Inna Gavrilchenko, fifteen years old in 1941, recalled in this sense that the arrival of the invaders was characterized by “three or four days of incessant theft” that caused a deadly famine during the winter of 1941.
The conclusion is that, whether on one side or the other of the world, Adolf Hitler and Iósif Stalin treasured a series of similarities that ended up condemning a Europe already limping after the First World War. The differences, in return, were rather personal and aesthetic. One of them, as Rees recalls, that the Supreme Comrade had a much thicker mustache than his colleague ..