By any standard the number of victims was very large: in the course of two years, 1932 and 1933—the years of the famine—the same Soviet secret police responsible for overseeing the hunger in the countryside would arrest nearly 200,000 people in the republic of Ukraine.38 But even this figure, as large as it is, underrates the catastrophic impact of this targeted purge on specific institutions and branches of society, especially education, culture, religion and publishing. In essence, the 200,000 represented an entire generation of educated, patriotic Ukrainians. In the Ukrainian context this
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