Before withdrawing from the smoldering cities of Bucha and Borodyanka in the first week of April, Russian soldiers raped, tortured and massacred countless civilians. Upon inspection of the carnage in those cities, yesterday, International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan declared the obvious: "Ukraine is a crime scene."

Civilian deaths in those two locations alone are in the thousands, among them a poet in Borodyanka shot in the head by a retreating Russian invader.

There is something about poets, perhaps their gentle sensitivities, that makes them favorite targets of fascist and communist brutality. Like canaries in the dark mine of history, poets are often the first to smell the deadly fumes of violence and war; they stop chirping, and pandemonium ensues.

Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was among the early victims of Spanish fascism. He was executed point blank in 1936 by a fascist insurgent who put a bullet through his bulbous, verse-filled head, not before telling him why he did it: "for being red and gay" (expletive used).

Four years later, with Gen. Francisco Franco's regime firmly in place, a fascist judge sentenced to death another Andalucian poet, Miguel Hernandez, who had regaled Spain with some of the most tender (also trenchant) verses ever written, among them the poem "Menos tu vientre" (except for your womb), inspired by his wife's pregnancy; and verses to his unborn child whom he anticipated "clenched fisted will be born." His execution commuted, Hernandez died in prison consumed by tuberculosis in 1942. He was 31 years old.

Nazis sprouting from the same soil as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke silenced European poets wholesale, brutally so. Take the case of Russian Jewish poet Elena Shirman. In July 1942, Nazi soldiers captured her and her family in Rostov; killed her parents in front of her; and ordered her to undress and bludgeoned her to death with the shovel she had used to dig her parents' and her own grave.

Hungarian fascists forced captive fellow Hungarians to mine copper to feed the Nazi war machine; among the thousands of conscripts was poet Miklos Radnoti. "I'm a poet and nobody needs me," he wrote while on a forced march, "prying devils will sing relentlessly." Too exhausted to be of any use, in November 1944, Hungarian devils shot him along with 20 others, then shoved their remains into a mass grave.

Also in 1944, German poet, journalist, and satirist Erich Knauf roused the ire of none other than Dr. Joseph Goebbels. The Third Reich's infamous propaganda minister hand-picked a Nazi judge who convicted Knauf of "denigrating the Fuhrer," and had him guillotined at the Brandenburg-Gorden Prison. Judicial authorities presented Knauf's widow with a bill for court and execution costs.

Russian poet Ioseb Jughashvili was born in 1878. Under the pen name Soselo, he wrote romantic poems about nightingales and the moon (spreader of light upon the earth). He later assumed another nom de guerre (Stalin). He is estimated to have been responsible for 40 million deaths, 10 million more than Hitler. But who is counting? As the former poet put it lyrically, "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic."

Call them tragedies or statistics, in 1952 Stalin ordered the killing of 13 Jewish intellectuals, four of them poets (Peretz Markish, David Hofstein, Itzik Feffer and Leib Kvitko). Following years of imprisonment and torture the 13 were executed on "the Night of the Murdered Poets," Aug. 12.

Sensitive and tender as they may be, poets (like everyone else) have moral blind spots of their own. Bafflingly so, some of the Spanish-speaking world's best poets wrote odes to the poet/seminarian turned mass murderer. In the poem "Russia," Miguel Hernandez sang praises to Stalin, under whose command the Andalucian poet wrote "huts were transformed into granite houses." In 1941 with World War II underway, Afro-Cuban communist poet Nicolas Guillen wrote an ode to Stalin entitled "Stalin Capitan." Hands down, his worst poem ever. And upon learning about Stalin's death in 1953, future Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda credited the Russian tyrant with "peopling (Russia) with schools and flour, printing presses and apples."

But dissident Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko knew better. In his elegy to the deceased dictator, "The Heirs of Stalin," he warned: "No, Stalin has not given up/He thinks he can cheat death/We carried him from the mausoleum/But how remove Stalin's heirs from Stalin?"

To be continued next week.

Luis Martinez-Fernandez is the author of "Revolutionary Cuba: A History" and "Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba." Readers can reach him at LMF_Column@yahoo.com. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www. creators.com.

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