Overlooked in my favourite Caffe’ Nero today, a Daily Mail reader with her double page spread detailing what is going on in Kiev, Ukraine, with the headline, The Return of the Evil Empire, I guess a referral to Ronald Reagan’s comments about the long dead Soviet Union.
One Redux [ee] filled me in on the gist of things in her excellent account of her trip to Kiev in the earlies [1989 to around 1991].
The gist on Ukraine, as set out by Zofia Shah is
- That Ukraine is wholly in Europe
- That it is bigger than France, and 246,578 square kilometres bigger than Germany, and about the same size as Texas
- That Ukraine has a population of 47.5 million about the same as Spain (California has 38m, New York State 20m, Australia 23m)
- That Kiev the capital city has a population of, 2.75m the same as Chicago, more than Houston, slightly less than Los Angeles
- That Kiev is the birth town of ‘all the Russia’s’ in the same vein that the Tzar was Tzar of all of the Russias
- in AD 988 Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to Christianity
- He chose Christianity for him and all his subjects because he did not want his people scattered throughout the lands like the Jews, and did not want to swear off the booze like Muslims
- In the 20th century in Ukraine, during the famine known as the Holodomor (the holocaust of hunger) during 1932, 5 million Ukrainians starved to death
- In World War II from 1941 (the Soviet entry) to 1945 about 7 million Ukrainians were killed
- There is still argument about the amount of Ukrainian dead in Stalin’s death camps, the G.U.L.A.G., though Solzhenitsyn gives a total Soviet population throughput of 50 million people, all who lived in appalling conditions, many of who were Ukrainian and many of who died there. Many others have tried and found themselves almost inadequate when set against this bureaucratic horror, including Martin Amis, Anna Applebaum and Robert Service, the latter two giants of modern Russian history.
This evening the number of men and women killed in the anti-government protests is 31.
There are reports that some of the dead protesters died from single bullet wounds to the head and that the bullets came from government snipers.
The statue of the Rodina Mat’ in Kiev is 102 m (335 ft) tall (ground to tallest point)
The Statue of Liberty is 93 m (305 ft) tall (ground to tallest point)
Inaugurated in 1886 the Statue of Liberty is UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Inaugurated in 1981 the Rodina Mat’ is not a UNESCO site, although Leonard Brezhnev did attend the ceremony.
jjberlin 