The “human trafficking” moral panic is racist and ugly propaganda. The last time this moral panic rolled through, it was called “white slavery,” and carried the same connotation of swarthy foreign men stealing away blonde-haired, blue-eyed white women.
The current population of Ukraine was not its original contingent. After Peter the Great finally conquered the Cossacks, they had been so fierce and had cost him so many resources and so many men, that he got the bright idea to use them as a shield. He picked up three entire tribes of Cossacks, moved them to Ukraine, and bid them be fruitful and multiply. He knew that anyone from Europe trying to invade Russia would have to fight their way through the fiercely war-like Cossacks first. And indeed, this worked perfectly, but ended up biting the Czarists in the ass.
After the Russian Revolution, Lenin signed away Ukraine to Germany at the Treaty of Brest-Livosk in exchange for peace with Europe. Nestor Makhno, the great Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and my personal hero, had been freed from prison during the general amnesty for political prisoners. He returned to Ukraine, raised an army of 30 men and precisely one gun. He and his met crept into a nearby town square under cover of darkness, set up his gun, and proceeded to massacre the 1000 sleeping German soldiers bivouacked there. The few who escaped were hunted down by townsmen with gardening implements and killed. Not one single German escaped. Ukraine rose to join Makhno after this and the anarchist Black Army of Nestor Makhno, the Makhnovshchina, was born.
The Makhnovshchina never had more than 50,000 men at its largest, and they had no equipment other than what they could capture from the enemy, yet they managed to defeat 600,000 German soldiers and drive them out of Ukraine. Then the White Army—the Czarist forces in Europe trying to overthrow the Soviet Union—tried to march on Moscow and got stopped dead in their tracks by the Makhnovshchina, who cut off their supply lines and caused their defeat.
After saving the whole Soviet Union, they were ordered by Trostky to lay down their guns. The Makhnovshchina responded by having the Bolshevik messanger shot. The Soviets invited the officers of the Makhnovshchina to Crimea for peace talks and then machinegunned the whole lot of them, hoping to break the back of the organization. A single man escaped on horseback to tell the tale of what had happened. Makhno never trusted the Bolsheviks and hadn’t gone to the supposed peace talks. When the Soviets invaded Ukraine with millions of soldiers, Makhno began a spirited defence. Unfortunately, after four years, Makhno simply ran out of men and was forced to flee to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life.
Makhno and the anarchists terrified Stalin so badly that he proceeded to murder 10 million Ukrainians to keep the Makhnovshchina from reforming. The net result is that an entire generation of Ukrainian men were exterminated, and those who live in Ukraine today are the descendants of those who were either too cowardly to fight or sided with the foreign invaders or both. This is why Ukraine has become Russia’s punching bag.
