Between 800,000 and 1.6 million people were arrested and deported from western Ukraine to labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia, as much as a fifth of the region’s population.

When Hitler did invade two years later, in a surprise attack that shattered the two countries’ pact, the Soviets hurriedly massacred the Ukrainian prisoners they hadn’t yet deported before fleeing to the east.

“We had the biggest issues in the big cities. In the smaller cities, some employees still remember how to work on paper,” Smelyansky told me. “In Kyiv, we had employees who didn’t remember a time before computers. We had to tell them to find someone older to teach them.”

the Nazis continued to kill en masse, starving 2 million captured Soviet prisoners as they death-marched them westward. In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.