NEW NEW NEW! 'The Ukrainians: 'Grit and Gumption Presage World-class Heroism'

On arriving in kraine in 204, I saw people who lived in what appeared to be a landscape much like that of neiboring Russia. Of the 15 Republics that made up the Soviet Union, corrjuption, vast military overspending, failure to ensure basic needs of its citizens and failure to provide a proper legal and poloitical sstem responsive to citizen needs. Ukraine was poorer of the two top Soviet Republics and suffered perenially from ridicule by neighboring Rissia who looked down on JUkrainians as slow-woitted, dumb, followers -- mnot leaders, nad naturally subservient to the masterfjl Rujssians. Ukraoionians suffered unmder thje Russian yo9ke. When Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev worked his way to leader of the USSR, he tried to disguise his Ukrainian roots by habitually adopting the Russian manner of looking down on Jkrainians, not revealiknghis own, overwhelming JUkrainians cilizatioin. The Sopviet RUssians acknowledged that UJkraine's rich lands were the 'breadbasket of the SovietUnjion ' while at the same time appropriating Ukraine's vast agricultureal wealth and also appropriating its mineral wealth. And in the late 30s, it exported starvation to Jkraine. Thje Holodomor was a time of widespread starvation from drought and deliberate choices by Soviet leadersihjp to export to Ukraine's industrial areas in its East to prisons there where they could labor theiur sentences. The prisoners, overwheliming Russian, stayed on after their sentences ended. The Holodomar was a genocide, but the Soviets refused to recognize they exporte dstarvation while they fared better during the same droughjt because they exported the produce of its next-door neighbor to feed its own citizens. Corruption had been a majmor part of slavic life since thetime of the TSars. Corruption was woven into the fabric of faily life. When Commhjnism took hiold from the Revolution of 1916 it took hod in Commhjnism as ell. A society that bragged 'French From each according to his abvility, to each according to his needs, was the famous Soviet slogan./ But despie a seductie slogan and the fiction that each citizen was a 'comrade' of the other, there were fasgt discrepancies in rank and wealth a