Ninety Years ago the Soviet Union
under then-new leader Joseph Stalin
started to electrify Russian factories,
and collectivised farming in Ukraine.
Between them, the oppressive Soviet State
and a feckless and untried Soviet agri-science
created what became The Holodomor in which
millions of Ukrainians starved as crops failed,
those who survived it felt that they were unlucky.
How bad was it? Ukrainians cooked and ate
their domestic pets and even boiled shoe leather,
and, shoeless, searched for something more to eat.
What we see now under a newer Russian Czar
is not on the scale of absolute suffering of the past,
there are several differences between now and then.
What we see now is played out through a divided media,
amid new divisions in world energy politics,
but the suffering and deaths remain real enough
whether they are of unprepared Russian conscripts,
well motivated Ukrainian soldiers or civilians.
Whether it is more of The Holodomor
or the start of the third World War
matters not, the upheavals of the future
are going to be global and painful
and make the rich richer and the poor poorer,
where the poor remain glad to be alive at all.
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