World Affairs Journal: Fixing Ukraine’s villages, one house at a time
If you’ve ever been to Ukraine’s countryside, you may have noticed that many villages look like holdouts from the late nineteenth century. Dirt roads are the norm, water frequently has to be hauled from wells, and outhouses abound.
Don’t blame the villagers for that. Put the blame squarely on Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party. Collectivization destroyed Soviet agriculture, while the forced starvation of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor, destroyed the Ukrainian peasantry. Nazi occupation policies during World War II only made things worse, while continued Soviet neglect of agriculture condemned the peasants to a nether existence up to the end of the Soviet Union. Collective farmers had a third-class status that some analysts even compared to modern-day serfdom.