Putting Ukrainian losses into perspective...

Edgar Snow, in his "The Pattern of Soviet Power" (New York: Random House, 1945):

"... Yet it was not till I went on a sobering journey into this twilight of war that I fully realized the price which 40 million Ukrainians paid for Soviet - and Allied - victory. The whole titanic struggle, which some are apt to dismiss as "the Russian glory," was first of all a Ukrainian war. No fewer than 10 million people had been "lost" to ... Ukraine since 1941, I was told by a high Ukrainian official. That excluded men and women mobilized for the armed forces.

"A relatively small part of the Russian Soviet Republic itself was actually invaded, but the whole Ukraine, whose people were economically the most advanced and numerically the second largest in the Soviet Union, was devastated from the Carpathian frontiers to the Donets and Don rivers, where Russia proper begins. No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry, its farmland and its humanity."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 5, 2002, No. 18, Vol. LXX

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