Holomodor

I opened an academic book for the first time in months today. I’m reminded of Stalin’s transgressions against humans. It’s not something that’s typically far from my mind. He killed millions in his gulags (prison camps), millions more in the forced starvation of holomodor. Or the Ukranian Famine.

The book I happened to pick up was focused on said famine. This is a topic I feel passionately about because it was so purposeful. Stalin stole food from the Ukrainians. Stole it from the ground and from the wagons. As a result somewhere close to four million people were killed. Wikipedia says that was about 13% of the country’s population.

This is a number that’s never covered in the classroom growing up. None of the numbers killed by Stalin were covered in my classrooms growing up. It’s only by chance I got turned on to Soviet history. We were assigned Night by Elie Wiesel in middle school and I read it voraciously. Then I wanted to read more. And I stumbled upon One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (a little light reading for this eighth grader).

It was early on in college that I took a class on the Russian Revolution. I followed that with more classes studying Eastern European history. I knew I wanted to know more about Stalin and write a book about him that would be able to be read by a non-academic. But I wanted it to be accademically sourced and cited.

This is where my ADHD kicks in. It’s tough for me to read academic books because my focus fails. Hence right now instead of reading my book about Holomodor I’m writing a blog post bemoaning our education system.

Be looking for more posts about Stalin, though. I want to start doing this again.