Coursera has launched a free international course entitled ‘Famine as Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine’. And this is, without exaggeration, a landmark event. Not many people abroad know that in 1932–1933, an artificially organized famine raged in Ukraine. It was a deliberate policy of the Soviet authorities. Grain, livestock, foodstuffs, and every scrap of food they could find were forcibly seized from people’s homes. People were eating tree bark. Soon, adults and children, swollen from starvation, began to die a slow and terrible death. Historians still debate how many millions of people perished at that time. Stalin used the famine as a weapon to crack down on Ukrainians, whom he saw as a threat. He wanted to turn Ukraine into a model Soviet republic. Therefore, alongside the artificial famine to subdue the Ukrainian countryside, he launched large-scale repressions against Ukrainian communists and officials whom he considered insufficiently loyal. It was then that the killings and torture of Ukrainian artists, scientists, musicians, and writers began. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’, later described the events in Ukraine as a ‘classic example of Soviet genocide’. Interestingly, whilst 27-year-old journalist Gareth Jones was attempting to draw the world’s attention to the horror unfolding in Ukraine, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty—who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his complimentary reports on the Soviet Union and was living a lavish life in Moscow— began writing in leading media outlets that there was no famine and subjected his young colleague to scathing criticism. History is repeating itself. Putin, who claims that there is no Ukrainian nation, just as there is no Ukrainian language or culture, continues the very same genocidal policy. So, to better understand the reasons behind Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, I highly recommend taking this course: coursera.org/learn/holodomor