Welcome back, I'm Julia Ioffe.
Every day dawns worse than the one before. The war in Ukraine continues to drag on. Russia continues shelling Ukrainian cities and Ukrainians continue resisting. As of this writing, more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees have fled west in the first 12 days of the war. According to the United Nations, 406 civilians have been killed in Ukraine, including at least two dozen children, and 801 civilians have been injured, though the U.N. warns that the real numbers are “considerably higher.” The Russian Ministry of Defense has admitted that it lost 498 men in its invasion of Ukraine, though Ukraine claims that the real figure is as high as 11,000. U.S. intelligence puts the number between 2,000 and 4,000. Last week, Vladimir Putin called French president Emannuel Macron, and the conversation left the French leader with the same impression that pretty much all Russia watchers have: Putin won’t stop until he conquers all of Ukraine and that the worst is yet to come.
It’s no surprise, then, that the third round of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia came to naught. As with so much of this war, history hung heavy here, too. The talks took place in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, the very spot in Belarus where, on December 8, 1991, the leaders of the Soviet Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian republics signed an accord that split the U.S.S.R. into 15 individual countries. Their signatures killed the union the Bolsheviks had cobbled together in 1922. It is the very agreement that Putin has, for all these years, has been trying to undo. Now, three decades later, he has waged a war to force Ukraine back into the fold it left that December day in a Belarusian forest.
Today, I wanted to take you down another historic rabbit hole that might help you understand this war better. It will also give you a glimpse into how many people from Russia and Ukraine see it, through the prism of a painful history that is still always reminding them of its presence, even decades later.
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The anniversary of Stalin’s death last week was a cruel reminder inside Russia that history frequently repeats itself—and that toppling Putin wouldn’t necessarily put an end to his totalitarian politics, either. On Saturday, March 5, millions of Russians solemnly marked the 69 years since Joseph Stalin died of a massive stroke, an event portrayed with surprising historical accuracy in the comedic film The Death of Stalin. This date has always been an important one for liberal Russians, people who hate Vladimir Putin and want their country to look more like Western Europe than the Soviet Union. Many of them have ancestors who were among the millions that vanished during Stalin’s Great Terror. But most Russians—and Ukrainians—were touched in some way by the terror, simply because of its vast scale. Exact numbers are hard to come by but according to historian Robert Conquest, in just two years, 1937 and 1938, some 7 million Soviets were arrested as “enemies of the people,” one million were executed, and 8 million more were sent to the camps. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, about 20 million people had passed through the Gulag.
When the dictator’s death was announced, millions genuinely grieved the passing of the Father of Nations, and hundreds were trampled to death in the crush of his public funeral. But many others quietly celebrated his death...
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