Stalin's revenge: another European country splits politically on ethnic lines

Ukraine in crisis as opposition leader declares himself president:
"The dispute has split this former Soviet republic down the middle, with the Ukrainian-speaking west mainly behind Yushchenko and the Russian-speaking east backing Yanukovich."

In an election which the OSCE and other foreign observers say was marked by fraud on the part of the ruling party of Leonid Kuchma which seeks to keep Ukraine in the Russian political orbit, the pro-Western candidate is reported to be losing by a three-point margin.

The alleged winner is from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. During the bad old days of the Soviet Union, an area like the Donetsk (heavy manufacturing, river and rail transport, access to year-round ports on the Black Sea) was considered too important to the empire to be left in the hands of colonial peoples. Great Russians were encouraged, as a matter of policy, to move there. You see a similar pattern in other areas of strategic importance to the old empire like Kaliningrad. In this way the dead hand of Stalin still reaches out from his grave to cause misery in his former dominions.