Belarus and Ukraine today

It would have been nat­ural, given that I've just trav­elled to these two rel­a­tively un­vis­ited coun­tries, to write a travel piece about them. About the safe streets of Minsk, for in­stance (the posh­est of which is named after Karl Marx) where the statue of Felix Dz­erzhin­sky (founder of the Cheka) rubs shoul­ders with Apple out­lets and lux­ury jew­ellers'; or about the de­li­cious­ness of kvas (a soft drink made from bread). And in Kiev I could have gone on (and on) about the beauty of its build­ings, the stun­ning­ness of the views over the Dnieper, and the glory of its vereniki (sump­tu­ously stuffed dumplings). Etcetera. But highly ap­pre­cia­ble though all these things (and many oth­ers) are, I went to the afore­men­tioned coun­tries for an­other rea­son: to see some of the places I've been read­ing about for the last 40 years due to an abid­ing in­ter­est in geno­cide in gen­eral and the Shoah in par­tic­u­lar. Places like The Pit in Minsk, in which 5000 Jews - in­clud­ing 200 or­phans - were shot in one day in March of 1942 (the mon­u­ment there shows a hud­dled, ter­ri­fied crowd clam­ber­ing down the slope that leads to the killing site). In the course of World War II, Be­larus lost a quar­ter of its pop­u­la­tion (in­clud­ing the near en­tirety of its Jew­ish com­po­nent), and mon­u­ments to this loss are every­where to be seen. As for Ukraine, its first mass atroc­ity took place cour­tesy of Stalin, who, in 1931, launched a pol­icy of grain con­fis­ca­tion to sup­ply the larger So­viet cities, which re­sulted in the Holodomor: a famine in which be­tween 3 and 5 mil­lion Ukraini­ans died of star­va­tion in one year. Later, in WWII, hun­dreds of thou­sands of Ukrain­ian Jews were shot into mass graves, in­clud­ing nearly 34,000 of them in just two days in Sep­tem­ber 1941, in the Babi Yar ravine (now part of a park in north­ern Kyiv: kids sled down the slopes). For­ward look­ing though Be­larus's and Ukraine's pop­u­la­tions are, they are both un­able and un­will­ing to for­get the hor­rors of the past. (In Ukraine, what's more, the hor­ror hasn't stopped: Tatars in oc­cu­pied Crimea are reg­u­larly kid­napped by Russ­ian-backed se­cu­rity forces and 'dis­ap­peared', and the war in the east - in which 9000 peo­ple have died - is still on­go­ing). Ac­cord­ing to his­to­rian Tim­o­thy Sny­der, the scope of the WWII atroc­i­ties in Be­larus and Ukraine was made pos­si­ble by the fact that for years every­one (ex­cept the peo­ple who lived there) did not re­gard them as se­ri­ous po­lit­i­cal en­ti­ties, obliged as they had been in the past to form parts of larger states, which meant they emerged only fleet­ingly on what is so pompously called the stage of his­tory. In other words, they were con­sid­ered fair game by those play­ing the lat­est ver­sion of the Great Game. As has, in­deed, been the case with Cat­alo­nia; al­though, by com­par­i­son, Cat­alo­nia would ap­pear to have got off fairly lightly.