This was Stalin’s so-called “revolution from above,” in which he crushed two elements inimical to the Soviet regime: the peasantry as a whole and the Ukrainian nation in particular. Stalin’s depredations would of course continue and grow to include vast purges of his own Communist party and the leadership of the Soviet military itself. This all put the Soviet Union (the Russian Empire, that is), so central to European destiny even as it was so fragile, in an extremely perilous state when Nazi Germany invaded Russia’s heartland in June 1941, penetrating hundreds of miles to the outskirts of
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