Show description

That involved carrying oversized luggage filled with such goods across the border into Poland, Russia, or Romania to sell at a profit. Some of these suitcase traders would cross the border ten or more times each year. And while suitcase trading was illegal, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were desperate enough to engage in the practice. ’”27 44 Cars drive over large potholes on a road near Ukraine’s capital city of Kiev in 2013. The country’s infrastructure of roads, bridges, and railways has suffered because of ongoing economic difficulties.

Ask a Ukrainian when he stopped believing in communism,” says Anna Reid, “and the answers vary. . ’ . . ” Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000, p. 194. Moscow. Thus the challenge was to create a new government by and for Ukraine—a government that would decide everything from how to pass new laws to how often elections should be held. Under Ukraine’s constitution, ratified in 1996, the new government consisted of a president, a 450-member legislature called the Verkhovna Rada, (sometimes just called the Rada), and a supreme court.

In 1932, when Stalin learned that the yield would fall far short of the goal, he orchestrated a punishment against the peasants. First he sealed Ukraine’s borders so no one could leave, and then he starved them to death. The famine that Stalin set upon Ukraine is known as the Holodomor, or Great Hunger. Between 1932 and 1933 Stalin’s police forces and Communist Party officials stormed the countryside, seizing crops, stores of grain, and seeds set aside for the next planting. With nothing to eat, peasants starved.