During the Middle Ages the Ukraine had flourished as an independent kingdom, but it did so in the shadow of its powerful neighbor to the north, Russia. Russia also took an interest in the nations of the Caucasus, and Russia and the Ottoman Empire both sought to gain power over Armenia,
Controlled by the Ottomans after the 1600s. In 1915 the Ottoman Turks, attempting to crush Armenian hopes of independence, rounded up millions of Armenians and moved them to concentration camps in the Syrian Desert.
Joseph Stalin sent millions of peasants to slave-labor camps for their refusal to give their land to the government. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.
There, more than 1.5 million Armenians were starved to death, the first instance of large-scale genocide (JEN-uh-side) in history.
Genocide is the systematic (that is, planned) murder of a whole group of people on the basis of race, class, or nationality. Though there had always been cruelty in the world, only in the twentieth century did nations have the power to commit wholesale acts of genocide. Although the massacre of the Armenians was the first, it was far from the last. The most famous instance of genocide, or course, was the Holocaust, the killing of six million Jews by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and the Nazis in Germany during World War II (1939-1945). But a crime on an even greater scale has barely received any attention by historians: the massacre of some 10 million people in the Ukraine and Caucasus by Josef Stalin (STAH-lin; 1879-1953), dictator of Soviet Russia.
In 1917, Russia experienced a revolution, a political uprising to bring about rapid social change. The revolution and its aftermath, which established communism in Russia, was a violent one. Communism is a political and economic system that calls for the joint ownership of all property by the people of a nation; in practice, however, Communist governments— which are controlled by a very small group of leaders—own everything. Stalin, who was a Georgian, took power over the Soviet Union in 1929. He demanded that the peasants of the Ukraine and Caucasus give up their land to the government. They refused, so his troops sent millions of them to slave-labor camps, where they died. Stalin starved millions more by withholding food from them.
World History
