https://www.facebook.com/277485675628254/photos/a.280852841958204.66151.277485675628254/796869227023227/?type=1&theater
Monday, November 17, 2014
Ukraine's Holodomor Through An Austrian's Eyes
Alexander Wienerberger was recruited into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I. In 1915, he was taken prisoner in Russia and ended up staying in the U.S.S.R. until 1934. Later, he worked as a chemical engineer specializing in explosives, and he established chemical factories in the Soviet Union. In 1933, he was assigned as technical director of a synthetic factory in Kharkiv and became witness to the man-made famine orchestrated by the Soviet government, the Holodomor. His photographs -- made with a Leica camera -- are some of about 100 images verified to be authentic portrayals of those harrowing events. The captions are based on the photographer's own notes.
http://www.rferl.org/media/photogallery/holodomor-ukraine/25174454.html#galleryPhoto15
http://www.rferl.org/media/photogallery/holodomor-ukraine/25174454.html#galleryPhoto15
The Guide ~ "Поводир" will be presented in Chicago on December 5th at the Ukrainian Cultural Center.
The Guide ~ "Поводир" will be presented in Chicago on December 5th at the Ukrainian Cultural Center. This Ukrainian film, subtitled in English is Ukraine's nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for the 87th Academy Awards. Come to view this Oscar nominated film and meet Director Oles Sanin, 11 year old actor Anton Sviatoslav Greene and Professor Yuri Shevchuk from Columbia University. Tickets can be purchased at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art ~ 2320 W. Chicago Ave. ~ 773.227.5522 ~ or onlineuima-chicago.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guide_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guide_(film)
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Holodomor: The Secret Holocaust in Ukraine
When Ukraine resisted Soviet attempts at collectivization in the 1920s and '30s, the Soviet Union under Stalin used labor camps, executions, and starvation (Holodomor) to kill millions of Ukrainians.
In 1933, the recently elected administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt granted official U.S. recognition to the Soviet Union for the first time. Especially repugnant was that this recognition was granted even though Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had just concluded a campaign of genocide against Ukraine that left over 10 million dead. This atrocity was known to the Roosevelt administration, but not to the American people at large, thanks to suppression of the story by the Western press — as we shall show.
Ukraine's Untold Tragedy
The Ukrainian genocide remains largely unknown. After 76 years, the blood of the victims still cries for truth, and the guilt of the perpetrators for exposure.
Many Americans are barely acquainted with Ukraine, even though it is Europe's second largest country after Russia, and has been a distinct land and people for centuries. One reason for this unfamiliarity is that Ukraine has rarely known political independence; it was under Russia's heel throughout much of its existence — under Soviet domination prior to 1991, and under Czarist Russia before that. Many American students heard little or nothing of Ukraine in their history classes because the nation had been relegated to the status of a Russian "province."
Stalin accomplished genocide against Ukraine by two means. One was massive executions and deportations to labor camps. But his second tool of murder was more unique: an artificial famine created by confiscation of all food. Ukrainians call this the Holodomor, translated by one modern Ukrainian dictionary as "artificial hunger, organized on a vast scale by the criminal regime against the country's population," but often simply translated as "murder by hunger."
Ukraine was the last place one would have expected famine, for it had been known for centuries as the "breadbasket of Europe." French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère wrote in 1573: "Ukraine is overflowing with honey and wax.... The soil of this country is so good and fertile that when you leave a plow in the field, it becomes overgrown with grass after two or three days. It will be difficult to find." The 18th-century British traveler Joseph Marshall wrote: "The Ukraine is the richest province of the Russian empire.... The soil is a black loam.... I think I have never seen such deep plowing as these peasants give their ground."
In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ukraine became part of a bloody battlefield of fighting between the Bolsheviks (the group that eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Czarist Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists. Ultimately, of course, the Bolsheviks prevailed, but Lenin shrewdly recognized that concessions would be necessary to gain Ukraine's cooperation as a member of the unstable young USSR. To exploit Ukrainians' long-standing resentment of Czarist domination, he permitted them to retain much of their national culture. Ukrainians experienced a relatively high degree of freedom extending into the mid-1920s. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and non-communist Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were allowed to operate independently. However, as the Soviet Union consolidated its power, and Joseph Stalin ascended to the party's top, these freedoms became expendable, and Ukrainian nationalism, at first exploited, now became viewed as a liability.
Coerced Collectivization
Despite a communist push for collectivization, Ukraine's farms had mostly remained private — the foundation of their success. But in 1929, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party decided to embark on a program of total collectivization. Private farms were to be completely replaced by collectives — in Ukraine known as kolkhozes. This was, of course, consistent with Marxist ideology: the Communist Manifesto had called for abolition of private property.
Intense pressure was placed upon Ukrainian peasants to join the kolkhozes. Twenty-five thousand fanatical young communists from the USSR's cities were sent to Ukraine to compel the transition. These became known as the Twenty-Five Thousanders; each was assigned a particular locality, and was accompanied by a weapons-bearing communist entourage, including members of the GPU (secret police, forerunner of the KGB). A communist commission was established in each village.
Holodomor survivor Miron Dolot, in his book Execution by Hunger, describes what happened soon after a commission was started in his village by its Twenty-Five Thousander, Comrade Zeitlin:
We did not have to wait too long for Comrade Zeitlin's strategy to reveal itself. The first incident occurred very early on a cold January morning in 1930 while people in our village were still asleep. Fifteen villagers were arrested, and someone said that the Checkists [GPU] had arrived in the village at midnight....
The most prominent villagers were among those arrested.... This was frightening. Our official leadership had been taken away in one night. The farmers, mostly illiterate and ignorant, were thereby left much more defenseless.
The leaders of Dolot's village were never seen again.
Throughout Ukraine, the Twenty-Five Thousanders held mandatory village meetings in which they demanded that all peasants relinquish private farming and "volunteer" to join a collective. Most peasants fiercely resisted. In principle, of course, there is nothing wrong with farmers pooling their resources and efforts in a cooperative venture. But this was not what the communists meant by collectivization. On the kolkhozes, the government owned everything — the land, animals, equipment, and produce. The worker kept no fruits of his labor, and was at the state's mercy to receive a pittance of pay.
Soviet collectives never succeeded. As the eminent Sovietologist Robert Conquest noted of them, "Wherever they had existed they had, with all the advantages given them by the regime, done worse than the individual farm." On the kolkhozes, livestock, poorly cared for, easily died, and equipment fell into disrepair. This was because the workers did not own them, nor did they have any stake in the collective. This illustrated the conflict between Marxist ideology and the reality of human nature. Making matters worse, the collectives were organized by the Twenty-Five Thousanders, who, being urban youths, had no agricultural experience; their ignorance of farming basics often became the butt of jokes among local Ukrainians.
To force the villagers into collectives, the communists threatened them with being declared enemies of the state, to be dealt with by the GPU. Jails — unfamiliar to Ukrainian peasants — began appearing in every village. To instill additional fear, Soviet army units were brought in, lodging themselves in homes without permission. Torturous punishments were devised, such as "path treading," in which a resisting peasant would be forced to walk through the snow to the next village, there to be interrogated by its officials, and if he still refused to join a collective, walk to the next village. This would carry on until the peasant either died of exhaustion or bent to the state's will. A very effective method was to simply seize a family's food supply. Threatened with seeing their children starve, many peasants gave in. By the summer of 1932, 80 percent of Ukraine's farmland had been forcibly collectivized.
Scapegoat for Communist Failure
But since the kolkhozes failed to produce as predicted by Marxist theory, and with many peasants still refusing to join, Stalin sought a scapegoat. It was announced that the failure of collectivization was due to sabotage by "kulaks." These were the more prosperous peasants. Merely owning a cow, hiring another peasant, or having a tin roof (instead of the more common thatched roof) were all considered evidence that one was a kulak.
Of course, in any economy, some people thrive more than others. This is usually owing to industriousness and efficiency. According to Marxist doctrine, however, all wealthier peasants (kulaks) were "bloodsuckers" and "parasites" who had grown rich by exploiting poorer peasants and who were now subverting collectivization. Stalin announced that the solution to better grain production was to "struggle against the capitalist elements of the peasantry, against the kulaks," and he proclaimed the goal of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." In reality, however, Ukraine had never had a distinct social class of kulaks — this concept was a Marxist invention.
Those accused of being kulaks were either shot, deported to remote slave labor camps in Russia, or put in local labor details. Few survived. One could be accused of being a kulak on the flimsiest evidence. Some peasants accused others merely out of envy or dislike. As one Soviet writer later noted: "It was easy to do a man in; you wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows." Some very poor peasants were accused of being kulaks simply because they were religiously devout. And ironically, many of the "rich" kulaks earned less income than the communist officials prosecuting them! "Dekulakization" slaughtered millions.
Ironically, this process killed off the most productive farmers, guaranteeing a smaller harvest and a more impoverished Soviet Union. The remaining farmers did not dare take steps to improve their lands or prosper, for fear they would be reclassified as kulaks. But Stalin accomplished his true goal: destroying leadership that might oppose the complete subjugation of Ukraine.
This campaign extended beyond kulaks to broadly attacking all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. As Dolot notes, the Soviet Communist Party
sent [Pavel] Postyshev, a sadistically cruel Russian chauvinist, as its viceroy to Ukraine. His appointment played a crucial role in the lives of all Ukrainians. It was Postyshev who brought along and implemented a new Soviet Russian policy in Ukraine. It was an openly proclaimed policy of deliberate and unrestricted destruction of everything Ukrainian. From now on, we were continually reminded that there were "bourgeois-nationalists" among us whom we must destroy.... This new campaign against the Ukrainian national movement had resulted in the annihilation of the Ukrainian central government as well as all Ukrainian cultural, educational, and social institutions.
The Ukrainian Language Institute, Ukrainian Institute of Philosophy, Ukrainian State Publishing House, and countless other institutions were purged, their leaders murdered or imprisoned. So fanatical was the war on nationalism that even the colorful embroidered national costumes Ukrainians wore were seized. Eyewitness Yefrosyniya Poplavets recalls: "To save our embroidered shirts we put them on under our old ragged jackets. It didn't work! They undressed us and took the shirts to eradicate any national spirit in the household."Starving Ukrainians
But perhaps the most intense thrust was against the church, for it represented not only a form of Ukrainian solidarity, but the Gospel whose principles inherently oppose those of Marxism. The Communist Party declared: "The church is the kulak's agitprop." Priests were executed or sent to labor camps; church land was confiscated; monasteries were closed. The churches — some of them centuries-old national monuments — were either demolished, or turned into cinemas, libraries, barracks and other secular uses for the state. Church icons were smashed; books and archives were burned; church bells were even sold as scrap. By the end of 1930, 80 percent of all Ukraine's village churches had been shut down. These measures were applied not only against Ukraine's Orthodox churches, but against other denominations and religions, for as Marx had said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses."
"Murder by Hunger"
Yet the worst still awaited Ukraine. By 1932, virtually all kulaks had been liquidated, but many of the remaining poor peasants still resisted communism and collectivization. Stalin now began war upon Ukraine's poorest — ironically those who, in Marxist doctrine, should have been esteemed as "the proletariat."
In 1932, Stalin demanded that Ukraine increase its grain output by 44 percent. Such a goal would have been unachievable even if the communists had not already ruined the nation's productivity by eliminating the best farmers and forcing others onto the feeble collectives. That year, not a single village was able to meet the impossible quota, which far exceeded Ukraine's best output in the pre-collective years.
Stalin then issued one of the cruelest orders of his dark career: if quotas were not met, all grain was to be confiscated. As one Soviet author much later wrote: "All the grain without exception was requisitioned for the fulfillment of the Plan, including that set aside for sowing, fodder, and even that previously issued to the kolkhozniki as payment for their work." The authorization included seizure of all food from all households. Any home that did not turn over all its grain was accused of "hoarding" state property. One villager recalled the process by which communist "brigades" invaded homes:
Every brigade had a so-called "specialist" for searching out grain. He was equipped with a long iron crow-bar with which he probed for hidden grain.
The brigade went from house to house. At first they entered homes and asked, "How much grain have you got for the government?" "I haven't any. If you don't believe me search for yourselves," was the usual laconic answer.
And so the "search" began. They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry and the cellar. Then they went outside and searched the barn, pig pen, granary and the straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded on the floor of the house, tramped the whole yard and garden. If they found a suspicious-looking spot, in went the crow-bar.
Miron Dolot recalls:
They measured the thickness of the walls, and inspected them for bulges where grain could have been concealed. Sometimes they completely tore down suspicious walls.... Nothing in the houses remained intact or untouched. They upturned everything: even the cribs of babies, and the babies themselves were thoroughly frisked, not to mention the other family members. They looked for "hidden grain" in and under men's and women's clothing. Even the smallest amount that was found was confiscated. If so much as a small can or jar of seeds was found that had been set aside for spring planting, it was taken away, and the owner was accused of hiding food from the state.
Of course, to avoid starvation, nearly every family did attempt to conceal food. But experience soon made the brigades proficient at detecting even the most clever hiding places.
The result was mass starvation that took millions of lives during the terrible winter of 1932-33. Food was nearly impossible to find anywhere. Many begged neighbors for potato skins or other scraps — only to find their neighbors equally destitute.
There was still some food on the collectives, which the communists did not deplete like households. However, in August 1932 the Communist Party of the USSR had passed a law mandating the death penalty for theft of "social property." Watchtowers were built on the collectives, manned by trigger-happy young communists. Thousands of peasants were shot for attempting to take a handful of grain or a few beets from the kolkhozes, to feed their starving families.
Unable to get food, many ate whatever could pass for it — weeds, leaves, tree bark, and insects. The luckiest were able to survive secretly on small woodland animals. American journalist Thomas Walker wrote:
About twenty miles south of Kiev (Kyiv), I came upon a village that was practically extinct by starvation. There had been fifteen houses in this village and a population of forty-odd persons. Every dog and cat had been eaten. The horses and oxen had all been appropriated by the Bolsheviks to stock the collective farms. In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied analysis. There were bones, pig-weed, skin, and what looked like a boot top in this pot. The way the remaining half dozen inhabitants eagerly watched this slimy mess showed the state of their hunger.
A few people even resorted to cannibalism, eating those who had died and, in some cases, murdering those still living.
Many peasants attempted to reach Ukraine's cities like Kiev, where factory workers were still allowed a little pay and food. However, in December 1932 the communists introduced the "internal passport." This made it impossible for a villager to get a city job without the Party's permission, which was almost universally denied.
Other peasants hoped to get to Poland, Romania, or even Russia, where there was no famine. But emigration was strictly forbidden. Ukrainian train stations were swamped with the starving, who hoped to sneak aboard a train, or beg in hopes that a passenger on a passing train might throw them a bread crust. They were repelled by GPU guards, who found themselves faced with the problem of removing countless corpses of the starving who littered these stations.
Horror of Genocide
British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who secretly investigated Ukraine without Soviet permission, was able to escape communist censorship by sending details home to the Manchester Guardian in a diplomatic bag. He reported:
On a recent visit to the Northern Caucasus and the Ukraine, I saw something of the battle that is going on between the government and the peasants.... On the one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldier members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.
At the famine's height, 25,000 people per day were dying. As the winter wore on, Ukraine became a panorama of horror. The roadsides were filled with the corpses of those who died seeking food. The bodies, many of which snow concealed until the spring thaw, were unceremoniously dumped into mass graves by the communists.
Many others died of starvation in their own homes. Some chose to end the process by suicide, commonly by hanging — if they had the strength to do it. "They just sat," writes Dolot of his fellow villagers, "or lay down silently, too feeble even to talk. The bodies of some were reduced to skeletons, with their skin hanging grayish-yellow and loose over their bones. Their faces looked like rubber masks with large, bulging, immobile eyes. Their necks seemed to have shrunk onto their shoulders. The look in their eyes was glassy, heralding their approaching death."
The communists, on the other hand, ate excellent rations, and party bosses even enjoyed luxurious ones. In Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow, we read the following account of the party officials' dining hall at Pohrebyshcha:
Day and night it was guarded by militia keeping the starving peasants away from the restaurant.... In the dining room, at very low prices, white bread, meat, poultry, canned fruit and delicacies, wines and sweets were served to the district bosses.... Around these oases famine and death were raging.
But perhaps the worst paradox: although much of the confiscated grain was exported to the West, large portions were simply dumped into the sea by the Soviets, or allowed to rot. For example, a huge supply of grain lay decaying under GPU guard at Reshetylivka Station in Poltava Province. Passing it in a train, an American correspondent saw "huge pyramids of grain, piled high, and smoking from internal combustion." In the Lubotino region, thousands of tons of confiscated potatoes were allowed to rot, surrounded by barbed wire.
All this underscores the true purpose of the food confiscation: genocide. Sergio Gradenigo, the Italian consul in Moscow, wrote in a dispatch to Rome on May 31, 1933:
The famine has been deliberately planned by the Moscow government and implemented by means of brutal requisition. The definite aim of this crime is to liquidate the Ukrainian problem over a few months, sacrificing from 10 to 15 million people. Do not consider this figure to be exaggerated: I'm sure it could even have been reached and exceeded by now.
While there is disagreement over how many lives the genocide claimed, Gradenigo's figures have turned out to be rather accurate. In Harvest of Sorrow, historian Robert Conquest, considered by many the leading authority on the famine, put the toll at 14.5 million. About half of these deaths represent the liquidation of the kulaks, via execution and slow death in gulags, while the famine itself claimed the lives of approximately seven million, including three million children.
Helping Stalin Hide the Holocaust
How did a holocaust of these dimensions remain unknown in the West? First, the Soviets suppressed all information regarding the famine. Russia's state-controlled press was prohibited from discussing it, and for ordinary citizens, just mentioning the famine carried a penalty of three to five years' imprisonment.
Although some Western observers did report the magnitude of the Ukrainians' plight, such comments were extremely rare. During the famine, the Soviets prohibited foreign journalists from visiting Ukraine. But just as significant was the cooperation of influential Western writers sympathetic to communism. The Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw, after receiving a tour carefully orchestrated by the Soviets, proclaimed in 1932: "I did not see a single under-nourished person in Russia, young or old."
But by far the worst offender was Walter Duranty, New York Times' Moscow bureau chief from 1922 to 1936. Duranty enjoyed personal access to Stalin, called him "the greatest living statesman," and even praised the dictator's notorious show trials. To call Duranty a Soviet sympathizer greatly understates his role. Journalist Joseph Alsop termed Duranty a "KGB agent," and Malcolm Muggeridge called him "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."
Duranty's published denials of Ukraine's Holodomor were perhaps the vilest acts of his career. In November 1932, he brazenly told his New York Times readers, "There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be." He denounced as "liars" the few brave writers who reported the famine, which he called "malignant propaganda." When accumulating reports made the massive deaths hard to dispute, Duranty switched tactics from outright denial to downplay. He wrote in the Times in March 1933: "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from deaths due to malnutrition."
Incredibly, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for "dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia."
Some will ask: did the Ukrainians resist the genocide? Yes! Throughout Stalin's war, hundreds of riots and revolts, on various scales, erupted throughout Ukraine. There are even a number of stories where groups of heroic women overran the communist-guarded kolkhozes and seized grain for their starving children. And it was not unusual for a village's local party tyrant to suddenly be found dead.
However, such resistance was brutally suppressed. The Soviets had passed gun registration decrees in 1926, 1928, and 1929, and few Ukrainians owned effective weapons. Resistance largely constituted pitchforks against machine guns. The GPU and Soviet army dealt with revolts; aircraft were brought in to suppress the more serious ones. And the famine of 1932-33 left peasants too weak to resist.
Triumph at Last, Tragedy Not Forgotten
The Holodomor stands as a permanent warning of what happens when unlimited state power destroys God-given rights. A cursory review of America's Bill of Rights demonstrates that virtually every right mentioned was trampled on by Stalin in Ukraine. Yet although the dictator used every means to eradicate the people's will, the national spirit lived on unbreakably, until Ukraine gained its independence in 1991.
Here in the United States, Ukrainian-American organizations such as the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation, and others work diligently to maintain awareness of the Holodomor. Last year, they helped commemorate the genocide's 75th anniversary. And largely thanks to their efforts, in 2008 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution deploring the genocidal famine. One of UCCA's ongoing campaigns — which The New American heartily endorses — is for the long-deserved revocation of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize.
the source: http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4656-holodomor-the-secret-holocaust-in-ukraine
In 1933, the recently elected administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt granted official U.S. recognition to the Soviet Union for the first time. Especially repugnant was that this recognition was granted even though Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had just concluded a campaign of genocide against Ukraine that left over 10 million dead. This atrocity was known to the Roosevelt administration, but not to the American people at large, thanks to suppression of the story by the Western press — as we shall show.
Ukraine's Untold Tragedy
The Ukrainian genocide remains largely unknown. After 76 years, the blood of the victims still cries for truth, and the guilt of the perpetrators for exposure.
Many Americans are barely acquainted with Ukraine, even though it is Europe's second largest country after Russia, and has been a distinct land and people for centuries. One reason for this unfamiliarity is that Ukraine has rarely known political independence; it was under Russia's heel throughout much of its existence — under Soviet domination prior to 1991, and under Czarist Russia before that. Many American students heard little or nothing of Ukraine in their history classes because the nation had been relegated to the status of a Russian "province."
Stalin accomplished genocide against Ukraine by two means. One was massive executions and deportations to labor camps. But his second tool of murder was more unique: an artificial famine created by confiscation of all food. Ukrainians call this the Holodomor, translated by one modern Ukrainian dictionary as "artificial hunger, organized on a vast scale by the criminal regime against the country's population," but often simply translated as "murder by hunger."
Ukraine was the last place one would have expected famine, for it had been known for centuries as the "breadbasket of Europe." French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère wrote in 1573: "Ukraine is overflowing with honey and wax.... The soil of this country is so good and fertile that when you leave a plow in the field, it becomes overgrown with grass after two or three days. It will be difficult to find." The 18th-century British traveler Joseph Marshall wrote: "The Ukraine is the richest province of the Russian empire.... The soil is a black loam.... I think I have never seen such deep plowing as these peasants give their ground."
In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ukraine became part of a bloody battlefield of fighting between the Bolsheviks (the group that eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Czarist Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists. Ultimately, of course, the Bolsheviks prevailed, but Lenin shrewdly recognized that concessions would be necessary to gain Ukraine's cooperation as a member of the unstable young USSR. To exploit Ukrainians' long-standing resentment of Czarist domination, he permitted them to retain much of their national culture. Ukrainians experienced a relatively high degree of freedom extending into the mid-1920s. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and non-communist Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were allowed to operate independently. However, as the Soviet Union consolidated its power, and Joseph Stalin ascended to the party's top, these freedoms became expendable, and Ukrainian nationalism, at first exploited, now became viewed as a liability.
Coerced Collectivization
Despite a communist push for collectivization, Ukraine's farms had mostly remained private — the foundation of their success. But in 1929, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party decided to embark on a program of total collectivization. Private farms were to be completely replaced by collectives — in Ukraine known as kolkhozes. This was, of course, consistent with Marxist ideology: the Communist Manifesto had called for abolition of private property.
Intense pressure was placed upon Ukrainian peasants to join the kolkhozes. Twenty-five thousand fanatical young communists from the USSR's cities were sent to Ukraine to compel the transition. These became known as the Twenty-Five Thousanders; each was assigned a particular locality, and was accompanied by a weapons-bearing communist entourage, including members of the GPU (secret police, forerunner of the KGB). A communist commission was established in each village.
Holodomor survivor Miron Dolot, in his book Execution by Hunger, describes what happened soon after a commission was started in his village by its Twenty-Five Thousander, Comrade Zeitlin:
We did not have to wait too long for Comrade Zeitlin's strategy to reveal itself. The first incident occurred very early on a cold January morning in 1930 while people in our village were still asleep. Fifteen villagers were arrested, and someone said that the Checkists [GPU] had arrived in the village at midnight....
The most prominent villagers were among those arrested.... This was frightening. Our official leadership had been taken away in one night. The farmers, mostly illiterate and ignorant, were thereby left much more defenseless.
The leaders of Dolot's village were never seen again.
Throughout Ukraine, the Twenty-Five Thousanders held mandatory village meetings in which they demanded that all peasants relinquish private farming and "volunteer" to join a collective. Most peasants fiercely resisted. In principle, of course, there is nothing wrong with farmers pooling their resources and efforts in a cooperative venture. But this was not what the communists meant by collectivization. On the kolkhozes, the government owned everything — the land, animals, equipment, and produce. The worker kept no fruits of his labor, and was at the state's mercy to receive a pittance of pay.
Soviet collectives never succeeded. As the eminent Sovietologist Robert Conquest noted of them, "Wherever they had existed they had, with all the advantages given them by the regime, done worse than the individual farm." On the kolkhozes, livestock, poorly cared for, easily died, and equipment fell into disrepair. This was because the workers did not own them, nor did they have any stake in the collective. This illustrated the conflict between Marxist ideology and the reality of human nature. Making matters worse, the collectives were organized by the Twenty-Five Thousanders, who, being urban youths, had no agricultural experience; their ignorance of farming basics often became the butt of jokes among local Ukrainians.
To force the villagers into collectives, the communists threatened them with being declared enemies of the state, to be dealt with by the GPU. Jails — unfamiliar to Ukrainian peasants — began appearing in every village. To instill additional fear, Soviet army units were brought in, lodging themselves in homes without permission. Torturous punishments were devised, such as "path treading," in which a resisting peasant would be forced to walk through the snow to the next village, there to be interrogated by its officials, and if he still refused to join a collective, walk to the next village. This would carry on until the peasant either died of exhaustion or bent to the state's will. A very effective method was to simply seize a family's food supply. Threatened with seeing their children starve, many peasants gave in. By the summer of 1932, 80 percent of Ukraine's farmland had been forcibly collectivized.
Scapegoat for Communist Failure
But since the kolkhozes failed to produce as predicted by Marxist theory, and with many peasants still refusing to join, Stalin sought a scapegoat. It was announced that the failure of collectivization was due to sabotage by "kulaks." These were the more prosperous peasants. Merely owning a cow, hiring another peasant, or having a tin roof (instead of the more common thatched roof) were all considered evidence that one was a kulak.
Of course, in any economy, some people thrive more than others. This is usually owing to industriousness and efficiency. According to Marxist doctrine, however, all wealthier peasants (kulaks) were "bloodsuckers" and "parasites" who had grown rich by exploiting poorer peasants and who were now subverting collectivization. Stalin announced that the solution to better grain production was to "struggle against the capitalist elements of the peasantry, against the kulaks," and he proclaimed the goal of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." In reality, however, Ukraine had never had a distinct social class of kulaks — this concept was a Marxist invention.
Those accused of being kulaks were either shot, deported to remote slave labor camps in Russia, or put in local labor details. Few survived. One could be accused of being a kulak on the flimsiest evidence. Some peasants accused others merely out of envy or dislike. As one Soviet writer later noted: "It was easy to do a man in; you wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows." Some very poor peasants were accused of being kulaks simply because they were religiously devout. And ironically, many of the "rich" kulaks earned less income than the communist officials prosecuting them! "Dekulakization" slaughtered millions.
Ironically, this process killed off the most productive farmers, guaranteeing a smaller harvest and a more impoverished Soviet Union. The remaining farmers did not dare take steps to improve their lands or prosper, for fear they would be reclassified as kulaks. But Stalin accomplished his true goal: destroying leadership that might oppose the complete subjugation of Ukraine.
This campaign extended beyond kulaks to broadly attacking all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. As Dolot notes, the Soviet Communist Party
sent [Pavel] Postyshev, a sadistically cruel Russian chauvinist, as its viceroy to Ukraine. His appointment played a crucial role in the lives of all Ukrainians. It was Postyshev who brought along and implemented a new Soviet Russian policy in Ukraine. It was an openly proclaimed policy of deliberate and unrestricted destruction of everything Ukrainian. From now on, we were continually reminded that there were "bourgeois-nationalists" among us whom we must destroy.... This new campaign against the Ukrainian national movement had resulted in the annihilation of the Ukrainian central government as well as all Ukrainian cultural, educational, and social institutions.
The Ukrainian Language Institute, Ukrainian Institute of Philosophy, Ukrainian State Publishing House, and countless other institutions were purged, their leaders murdered or imprisoned. So fanatical was the war on nationalism that even the colorful embroidered national costumes Ukrainians wore were seized. Eyewitness Yefrosyniya Poplavets recalls: "To save our embroidered shirts we put them on under our old ragged jackets. It didn't work! They undressed us and took the shirts to eradicate any national spirit in the household."Starving Ukrainians
But perhaps the most intense thrust was against the church, for it represented not only a form of Ukrainian solidarity, but the Gospel whose principles inherently oppose those of Marxism. The Communist Party declared: "The church is the kulak's agitprop." Priests were executed or sent to labor camps; church land was confiscated; monasteries were closed. The churches — some of them centuries-old national monuments — were either demolished, or turned into cinemas, libraries, barracks and other secular uses for the state. Church icons were smashed; books and archives were burned; church bells were even sold as scrap. By the end of 1930, 80 percent of all Ukraine's village churches had been shut down. These measures were applied not only against Ukraine's Orthodox churches, but against other denominations and religions, for as Marx had said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses."
"Murder by Hunger"
Yet the worst still awaited Ukraine. By 1932, virtually all kulaks had been liquidated, but many of the remaining poor peasants still resisted communism and collectivization. Stalin now began war upon Ukraine's poorest — ironically those who, in Marxist doctrine, should have been esteemed as "the proletariat."
In 1932, Stalin demanded that Ukraine increase its grain output by 44 percent. Such a goal would have been unachievable even if the communists had not already ruined the nation's productivity by eliminating the best farmers and forcing others onto the feeble collectives. That year, not a single village was able to meet the impossible quota, which far exceeded Ukraine's best output in the pre-collective years.
Stalin then issued one of the cruelest orders of his dark career: if quotas were not met, all grain was to be confiscated. As one Soviet author much later wrote: "All the grain without exception was requisitioned for the fulfillment of the Plan, including that set aside for sowing, fodder, and even that previously issued to the kolkhozniki as payment for their work." The authorization included seizure of all food from all households. Any home that did not turn over all its grain was accused of "hoarding" state property. One villager recalled the process by which communist "brigades" invaded homes:
Every brigade had a so-called "specialist" for searching out grain. He was equipped with a long iron crow-bar with which he probed for hidden grain.
The brigade went from house to house. At first they entered homes and asked, "How much grain have you got for the government?" "I haven't any. If you don't believe me search for yourselves," was the usual laconic answer.
And so the "search" began. They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry and the cellar. Then they went outside and searched the barn, pig pen, granary and the straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded on the floor of the house, tramped the whole yard and garden. If they found a suspicious-looking spot, in went the crow-bar.
Miron Dolot recalls:
They measured the thickness of the walls, and inspected them for bulges where grain could have been concealed. Sometimes they completely tore down suspicious walls.... Nothing in the houses remained intact or untouched. They upturned everything: even the cribs of babies, and the babies themselves were thoroughly frisked, not to mention the other family members. They looked for "hidden grain" in and under men's and women's clothing. Even the smallest amount that was found was confiscated. If so much as a small can or jar of seeds was found that had been set aside for spring planting, it was taken away, and the owner was accused of hiding food from the state.
Of course, to avoid starvation, nearly every family did attempt to conceal food. But experience soon made the brigades proficient at detecting even the most clever hiding places.
The result was mass starvation that took millions of lives during the terrible winter of 1932-33. Food was nearly impossible to find anywhere. Many begged neighbors for potato skins or other scraps — only to find their neighbors equally destitute.
There was still some food on the collectives, which the communists did not deplete like households. However, in August 1932 the Communist Party of the USSR had passed a law mandating the death penalty for theft of "social property." Watchtowers were built on the collectives, manned by trigger-happy young communists. Thousands of peasants were shot for attempting to take a handful of grain or a few beets from the kolkhozes, to feed their starving families.
Unable to get food, many ate whatever could pass for it — weeds, leaves, tree bark, and insects. The luckiest were able to survive secretly on small woodland animals. American journalist Thomas Walker wrote:
About twenty miles south of Kiev (Kyiv), I came upon a village that was practically extinct by starvation. There had been fifteen houses in this village and a population of forty-odd persons. Every dog and cat had been eaten. The horses and oxen had all been appropriated by the Bolsheviks to stock the collective farms. In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied analysis. There were bones, pig-weed, skin, and what looked like a boot top in this pot. The way the remaining half dozen inhabitants eagerly watched this slimy mess showed the state of their hunger.
A few people even resorted to cannibalism, eating those who had died and, in some cases, murdering those still living.
Many peasants attempted to reach Ukraine's cities like Kiev, where factory workers were still allowed a little pay and food. However, in December 1932 the communists introduced the "internal passport." This made it impossible for a villager to get a city job without the Party's permission, which was almost universally denied.
Other peasants hoped to get to Poland, Romania, or even Russia, where there was no famine. But emigration was strictly forbidden. Ukrainian train stations were swamped with the starving, who hoped to sneak aboard a train, or beg in hopes that a passenger on a passing train might throw them a bread crust. They were repelled by GPU guards, who found themselves faced with the problem of removing countless corpses of the starving who littered these stations.
Horror of Genocide
British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who secretly investigated Ukraine without Soviet permission, was able to escape communist censorship by sending details home to the Manchester Guardian in a diplomatic bag. He reported:
On a recent visit to the Northern Caucasus and the Ukraine, I saw something of the battle that is going on between the government and the peasants.... On the one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldier members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.
At the famine's height, 25,000 people per day were dying. As the winter wore on, Ukraine became a panorama of horror. The roadsides were filled with the corpses of those who died seeking food. The bodies, many of which snow concealed until the spring thaw, were unceremoniously dumped into mass graves by the communists.
Many others died of starvation in their own homes. Some chose to end the process by suicide, commonly by hanging — if they had the strength to do it. "They just sat," writes Dolot of his fellow villagers, "or lay down silently, too feeble even to talk. The bodies of some were reduced to skeletons, with their skin hanging grayish-yellow and loose over their bones. Their faces looked like rubber masks with large, bulging, immobile eyes. Their necks seemed to have shrunk onto their shoulders. The look in their eyes was glassy, heralding their approaching death."
The communists, on the other hand, ate excellent rations, and party bosses even enjoyed luxurious ones. In Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow, we read the following account of the party officials' dining hall at Pohrebyshcha:
Day and night it was guarded by militia keeping the starving peasants away from the restaurant.... In the dining room, at very low prices, white bread, meat, poultry, canned fruit and delicacies, wines and sweets were served to the district bosses.... Around these oases famine and death were raging.
But perhaps the worst paradox: although much of the confiscated grain was exported to the West, large portions were simply dumped into the sea by the Soviets, or allowed to rot. For example, a huge supply of grain lay decaying under GPU guard at Reshetylivka Station in Poltava Province. Passing it in a train, an American correspondent saw "huge pyramids of grain, piled high, and smoking from internal combustion." In the Lubotino region, thousands of tons of confiscated potatoes were allowed to rot, surrounded by barbed wire.
All this underscores the true purpose of the food confiscation: genocide. Sergio Gradenigo, the Italian consul in Moscow, wrote in a dispatch to Rome on May 31, 1933:
The famine has been deliberately planned by the Moscow government and implemented by means of brutal requisition. The definite aim of this crime is to liquidate the Ukrainian problem over a few months, sacrificing from 10 to 15 million people. Do not consider this figure to be exaggerated: I'm sure it could even have been reached and exceeded by now.
While there is disagreement over how many lives the genocide claimed, Gradenigo's figures have turned out to be rather accurate. In Harvest of Sorrow, historian Robert Conquest, considered by many the leading authority on the famine, put the toll at 14.5 million. About half of these deaths represent the liquidation of the kulaks, via execution and slow death in gulags, while the famine itself claimed the lives of approximately seven million, including three million children.
Helping Stalin Hide the Holocaust
How did a holocaust of these dimensions remain unknown in the West? First, the Soviets suppressed all information regarding the famine. Russia's state-controlled press was prohibited from discussing it, and for ordinary citizens, just mentioning the famine carried a penalty of three to five years' imprisonment.
Although some Western observers did report the magnitude of the Ukrainians' plight, such comments were extremely rare. During the famine, the Soviets prohibited foreign journalists from visiting Ukraine. But just as significant was the cooperation of influential Western writers sympathetic to communism. The Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw, after receiving a tour carefully orchestrated by the Soviets, proclaimed in 1932: "I did not see a single under-nourished person in Russia, young or old."
But by far the worst offender was Walter Duranty, New York Times' Moscow bureau chief from 1922 to 1936. Duranty enjoyed personal access to Stalin, called him "the greatest living statesman," and even praised the dictator's notorious show trials. To call Duranty a Soviet sympathizer greatly understates his role. Journalist Joseph Alsop termed Duranty a "KGB agent," and Malcolm Muggeridge called him "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."
Duranty's published denials of Ukraine's Holodomor were perhaps the vilest acts of his career. In November 1932, he brazenly told his New York Times readers, "There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be." He denounced as "liars" the few brave writers who reported the famine, which he called "malignant propaganda." When accumulating reports made the massive deaths hard to dispute, Duranty switched tactics from outright denial to downplay. He wrote in the Times in March 1933: "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from deaths due to malnutrition."
Incredibly, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for "dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia."
Some will ask: did the Ukrainians resist the genocide? Yes! Throughout Stalin's war, hundreds of riots and revolts, on various scales, erupted throughout Ukraine. There are even a number of stories where groups of heroic women overran the communist-guarded kolkhozes and seized grain for their starving children. And it was not unusual for a village's local party tyrant to suddenly be found dead.
However, such resistance was brutally suppressed. The Soviets had passed gun registration decrees in 1926, 1928, and 1929, and few Ukrainians owned effective weapons. Resistance largely constituted pitchforks against machine guns. The GPU and Soviet army dealt with revolts; aircraft were brought in to suppress the more serious ones. And the famine of 1932-33 left peasants too weak to resist.
Triumph at Last, Tragedy Not Forgotten
The Holodomor stands as a permanent warning of what happens when unlimited state power destroys God-given rights. A cursory review of America's Bill of Rights demonstrates that virtually every right mentioned was trampled on by Stalin in Ukraine. Yet although the dictator used every means to eradicate the people's will, the national spirit lived on unbreakably, until Ukraine gained its independence in 1991.
Here in the United States, Ukrainian-American organizations such as the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation, and others work diligently to maintain awareness of the Holodomor. Last year, they helped commemorate the genocide's 75th anniversary. And largely thanks to their efforts, in 2008 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution deploring the genocidal famine. One of UCCA's ongoing campaigns — which The New American heartily endorses — is for the long-deserved revocation of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize.
the source: http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4656-holodomor-the-secret-holocaust-in-ukraine
Friday, June 27, 2014
Ukraine’s enduring Holodomor horror, when millions starved in the 1930s
Ukraine, a fertile provider of food, almost died 80 years ago – of starvation. In the village of Targan, 120 kilometres south of the Ukrainian capital Kiev [Kyiv], half the people died from hunger in 1932-1933.
Oleksandra Ovdiyuk, 92 today, survived what Ukrainians call the “Hunger-extermination” – not insufficient food, but deliberate policy imposed by the Soviet dictator Stalin.
She said: “The Bolsheviks had special brigades of seven men that would sweep through the villages in wagons and confiscate any hidden beans, grain or other food from the farmers’ homes.”
Opinion has remained divided for many decades whether the mass death was the result of a deliberate drive to kill an entire people, because Ukrainian nationalism was on the rise, or the unintentional effect of misguided mismanagement by Stalin in his quest to feed rapid industrialisation elsewhere. Millions fell, mostly in rural Ukraine. Cannibalism was documented.
Survivor Olena Goncharuk felt the terror: “We were afraid to go out in the village, because people were starving and they hunted children. My neighbour had a daughter, who disappeared. We went to her house. The head was separated from the body, and the body was cooking in the oven.”
Stalin’s forces in 1932-33 requisitioned food stores, deported peasants or forbade them from leaving the land, carried out mass executions and put people in prison.
Olena Goncharuk relives the horror: “There was a man who went into a woman’s house to take the body away. But she was still alive. She asked the man: ‘Don’t take me, I’m still breathing.’ And he said: ‘One way or another you are going to die, and I don’t want to have to come back for you tomorrow!’”
Cherished sites today belie the great nameless burials. Stalin’s reign of terror would claim many victims in other terrible actions too, aimed at consolidating power – his purges, for example. And information about death tolls and nationalities of who died where and how – by firing squad or famine – was guarded, repressed, denied or distorted with propaganda pseudo-justification.
Historian Volodymyr Serhiychuk told us: “There was famine in other USSR regions, in Kazakhstan, for instance, but Kazakhs could go and seek food in neighbouring Russian regions, or in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Ukrainians, in contrast, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, couldn’t go to Belarus or Russia, because the borders were closed and there were no railway tickets for them.
“Ukrainian farmers didn’t want to join collective farms, they didn’t want to give the Bolsheviks their produce. That’s why the Bolsheviks killed them with famine.”
Then more millions were killed in World War Two. It was only many years later that light could be shed on the Holodomor. After independence in 1991, a law in Ukraine made it a criminal offence to deny that the Holodomor was pre-meditated genocide.
Iryna Gibert, from euronews headquarters in Lyon, spoke about this with André Liebich, a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
He is a historian whose speciality is the countries of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.
euronews: “Ukrainian law defines the Holodomor as a genocide against the people of Ukraine. More than 20 countries recognise this. But many people consider that the term ‘genocide’ does not say enough. Why is this?”
André Liebich: “It is in fact a poorly chosen term. When we think ‘genocide’, and certainly in the context of the 1930s, we think foremost of the Holocaust. The difference is that the Holodomor did not only affect the Ukrainian people but also other peoples within Ukraine and outside it: in Kazakhstan and in Russia. In addition, the Holocaust was a campaign whose intention was to exterminate a people while the Holodomor was not conceived to eradicate the Ukrainian people, even though there were undeniably millions of victims. It was the result of a brutal, inhumane policy led by Stalin, who didn’t care how many died because of him. But his first intention wasn’t to eliminate the Ukrainians but rather to realise his programme, whatever the cost, even if it meant millions of peasant victims especially – peasants who often were Ukrainians.”
euronews: “The criminal code in Ukraine provides for prosecution for public denial of the Holodomor. Doesn’t that stifle debate on the subject?”
Liebich: “Absolutely. It is not up to the state to decree what is true, or to put a stop to discussion. The fact that the Holodomor is contested by some people only makes the debate more real and necessary. It is by showing what happened and discussing the number of victims that we manage to establish the truth. It’s not for the state to legislate what is true and not true, and to stop discussion.”
euronews: “The reality is millions of individual deaths – even if the numbers vary. Isn’t it fair to count this tragedy on the scale of a crime against humanity, as is the case for the Holocaust?”
Liebich: “Entirely so: as a crime against humanity – not as a crime against a particular people. If we conceive of the Holodomor as a crime that affected millions of individuals across the former USSR, we have the foundation for a common commemoration, a reconciliation between the Russians and the Ukrainians and other peoples. If we portray the Holodomor as exclusive, as a purely Ukrainian tragedy targeting only them, we only create conflicts with others who were also victims of that tragedy.”
euronews: “Ukraine is often criticised for competitively inflating the death toll. What’s your opinion on that?”
Liebich: “There is, effectively, an overstating of the number of victims which doesn’t help anyone. The lowest we can give for the Holodomor is 2,000,000. If we add those who died of illness, of famine-induced weakness, add the birth deficit, we get a figure of several million – but we don’t get the 10,000,000 that we sometimes hear, and maybe not even the 6,000,000 that is the standard figure for the Holocaust, to which some seek to compare the Holodomor.”
the source:
http://www.euronews.com/2013/11/22/ukraine-s-enduring-holodomor-horror-when-millions-starved-in-the-1930s/
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Holodomor: Memories of Ukraine's silent massacre
Eighty years ago, millions of Ukrainians died in a famine that many label a genocide by the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. As Ukraine prepares to embark on its annual memorial events, the BBC's David Stern finds that memories of the massacre are undimmed for many.
Nina Karpenko, an energetic 87-year-old, demonstrates what it took to survive Ukraine's Stalin-era famine, known as the Holodomor, or "death by hunger".
Some cheap cornmeal, wheat chaff, dried nettle leaves and other weeds - this was the essence of life during the horrific winter and early spring of 1932-33 in Ukraine.
As Ms Karpenko tells her story, she kneads the ingredients into a dull green mass, adding water and a little salt, which she then fashions into a patty. She calls it bread, though it barely fits this description.
Then she spreads wax shavings on a pan to keep the patty from sticking and burning, and places it in an oven.
Ms Karpenko's father died early on. His legs swelled up and he expired when trying to consume a small amount of food - a common occurrence among those close to starvation.
Her mother walked 15km (nine miles) to a nearby town to see if she could obtain something to eat for Ms Karpenko and her brother and sister. She exchanged her earrings and a gold cross she wore around her neck for about 2kg of flour.
Ms Karpenko takes the bread from the oven when it is ready. It is tough and tastes like grass.
But thanks to this weed loaf, and a horsehide that her mother cut into pieces and boiled for soup, the Karpenko family managed to survive until the spring, when they could forage in the nearby forest.
Others in their village, Matskivtsi, in central Ukraine, were not as fortunate.
"There was a deathly silence," she says. "Because people weren't even conscious. They didn't want to speak or to look at anything."
"They thought today that person died, and tomorrow it will be me. Everyone just thought of death."
Silent wasteland
Ukrainians mark a Holodomor Remembrance Day every year on the fourth Saturday of November.
Some historians, like Yale University's Timothy Snyder, who has done extensive research in Ukraine, place the number of dead at roughly 3.3 million. Others say the number was much higher.
Whatever the actual figure, it is a trauma that has left a deep and lasting wound among this nation of 45 million.
Entire villages were wiped out, and in some regions the death rate reached one-third. The Ukrainian countryside, home of the "black earth", some of the most fertile land in the world, was reduced to a silent wasteland.
Cities and roads were littered with the corpses of those who left their villages in search of food, but perished along the way. There were widespread reports of cannibalism.
Ms Karpenko says that when school resumed the following autumn, two thirds of the seats were empty.
But the pain of the Holodomor comes not only from the unfathomable number of dead. Many people believe the causes were man-made and intentional. A genocide.
They say that Joseph Stalin wanted to starve into submission the rebellious Ukrainian peasantry and force them into collective farms.
The Kremlin requisitioned more grain than farmers could provide. When they resisted, brigades of Communist Party activists swept through the villages and took everything that was edible.
"The brigades took all the wheat, barley - everything - so we had nothing left," says Ms Karpenko. "Even beans that people had set aside just in case.
"The brigades crawled everywhere and took everything. People had nothing left to do but die."
Genocide row
As the hunger mounted, Soviet authorities took extra measures, such as closing off Ukraine's borders, so that peasants could not travel abroad and obtain food. This amounted to a death sentence, experts say.
"The government did everything it could to prevent peasants from entering other regions and looking for bread," says Oleksandra Monetova, from Kiev's Holodomor Memorial Museum.
"The officials' intentions were clear. To me it's a genocide. I have no doubt."
But for others, the question is still open. Russia in particular objects to the genocide label, calling it a "nationalistic interpretation" of the famine.
Kremlin officials insist that, while the Holodomor was a tragedy, it was not intentional, and other regions in the Soviet Union suffered at that time.
Kiev and Moscow have clashed over the issue in the past. But Ukraine's present leader Viktor Yanukovych echoes the Kremlin line, saying it was "incorrect and unjust" to consider the Holodomor "the genocide of a certain people".
Mr Yanukovych's government still takes care to commemorate fully the destruction that the famine wrought.
This year's Remembrance Day will feature a number of different ceremonies and prayer services, as well as the world premier of a Holodomor opera, Red Earth Hunger, by Virko Baley.
Mr Baley, an American composer who was born in Ukraine, supports efforts to have the Holodomor recognised internationally as genocide.
"You have to admit that it was done, if you want to have any kind of human progress," he says. "You can't wrap it up and say that it wasn't."
the source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25058256
Nina Karpenko, an energetic 87-year-old, demonstrates what it took to survive Ukraine's Stalin-era famine, known as the Holodomor, or "death by hunger".
Some cheap cornmeal, wheat chaff, dried nettle leaves and other weeds - this was the essence of life during the horrific winter and early spring of 1932-33 in Ukraine.
As Ms Karpenko tells her story, she kneads the ingredients into a dull green mass, adding water and a little salt, which she then fashions into a patty. She calls it bread, though it barely fits this description.
Then she spreads wax shavings on a pan to keep the patty from sticking and burning, and places it in an oven.
Ms Karpenko's father died early on. His legs swelled up and he expired when trying to consume a small amount of food - a common occurrence among those close to starvation.
Her mother walked 15km (nine miles) to a nearby town to see if she could obtain something to eat for Ms Karpenko and her brother and sister. She exchanged her earrings and a gold cross she wore around her neck for about 2kg of flour.
Ms Karpenko takes the bread from the oven when it is ready. It is tough and tastes like grass.
But thanks to this weed loaf, and a horsehide that her mother cut into pieces and boiled for soup, the Karpenko family managed to survive until the spring, when they could forage in the nearby forest.
Others in their village, Matskivtsi, in central Ukraine, were not as fortunate.
"There was a deathly silence," she says. "Because people weren't even conscious. They didn't want to speak or to look at anything."
"They thought today that person died, and tomorrow it will be me. Everyone just thought of death."
Silent wasteland
Ukrainians mark a Holodomor Remembrance Day every year on the fourth Saturday of November.
Some historians, like Yale University's Timothy Snyder, who has done extensive research in Ukraine, place the number of dead at roughly 3.3 million. Others say the number was much higher.
Whatever the actual figure, it is a trauma that has left a deep and lasting wound among this nation of 45 million.
Entire villages were wiped out, and in some regions the death rate reached one-third. The Ukrainian countryside, home of the "black earth", some of the most fertile land in the world, was reduced to a silent wasteland.
Cities and roads were littered with the corpses of those who left their villages in search of food, but perished along the way. There were widespread reports of cannibalism.
Ms Karpenko says that when school resumed the following autumn, two thirds of the seats were empty.
But the pain of the Holodomor comes not only from the unfathomable number of dead. Many people believe the causes were man-made and intentional. A genocide.
They say that Joseph Stalin wanted to starve into submission the rebellious Ukrainian peasantry and force them into collective farms.
The Kremlin requisitioned more grain than farmers could provide. When they resisted, brigades of Communist Party activists swept through the villages and took everything that was edible.
"The brigades took all the wheat, barley - everything - so we had nothing left," says Ms Karpenko. "Even beans that people had set aside just in case.
"The brigades crawled everywhere and took everything. People had nothing left to do but die."
Genocide row
As the hunger mounted, Soviet authorities took extra measures, such as closing off Ukraine's borders, so that peasants could not travel abroad and obtain food. This amounted to a death sentence, experts say.
"The government did everything it could to prevent peasants from entering other regions and looking for bread," says Oleksandra Monetova, from Kiev's Holodomor Memorial Museum.
"The officials' intentions were clear. To me it's a genocide. I have no doubt."
But for others, the question is still open. Russia in particular objects to the genocide label, calling it a "nationalistic interpretation" of the famine.
Kremlin officials insist that, while the Holodomor was a tragedy, it was not intentional, and other regions in the Soviet Union suffered at that time.
Kiev and Moscow have clashed over the issue in the past. But Ukraine's present leader Viktor Yanukovych echoes the Kremlin line, saying it was "incorrect and unjust" to consider the Holodomor "the genocide of a certain people".
Mr Yanukovych's government still takes care to commemorate fully the destruction that the famine wrought.
This year's Remembrance Day will feature a number of different ceremonies and prayer services, as well as the world premier of a Holodomor opera, Red Earth Hunger, by Virko Baley.
Mr Baley, an American composer who was born in Ukraine, supports efforts to have the Holodomor recognised internationally as genocide.
"You have to admit that it was done, if you want to have any kind of human progress," he says. "You can't wrap it up and say that it wasn't."
the source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25058256
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Friday, June 20, 2014
More quotes about Holodomor:
Those who survived knew that the famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine was a deliberate, politically engineered catastrophe whose victims numbered in the many millions yet few dared even whisper about this devastation of their nation to others in the generations following. It was not until the late 1980s as the Soviet empire stumbled into the dustbin of history and an independent, internationally recognized Ukraine re-emerged in Europe that restored freedom allowed for the truth to be set free. Until then those who had endured the horror now known as the Hololomor remained trapped in the very place where it could not be spoken of.
…Ukraine was known for its fiery nationalism and its dominant peasant class. In such circumstances, collectivization meant crushing the peasantry, "traditional cradle of Ukrainian nationalism"..
''The Japanese consul in Odesa, who made an extensive journey throughout various regions of tke USSR in June 1932, wrote:
- "Ukrainian peasants, compared to the peasants in other republics, create a pitiful impression with their ragged clothing, emaciated bodies, and requests for alms. Even in large train stations, farmers and their wives and children stretch out their hands for alms and beg for bread.''
..."I do believe that Communist Party organs and organs sympathetic to the Communist. Party were, a large degree, controlled by agents of the Soviet Union in this period. There's a great deal of evidence to that effect. Another sort: somewhat sympathetic press organs, they seem to have been more easily manipulatable either because of those who determined editorial policy or wrote for such journals, or because the Soviets were able to influence what correspondents in Moscow could publish..
..The press dispatches going out from Moscow were subject to censorship, but the Moscow policy, naturally, was to convert the correspondents themselves to public relations people for the Soviet Union, when that was possible. A major success along this line was achieved in the case of the New York Times correspondent, Mr. Walter Duranty. Mr. A.J. Klieforth, of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, in his memorandum of June 4, 1931, reported a conversation he had, in the course of which:
"... Duranty pointed out that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own." (exhibit P-48, p 174)
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of the Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong. This trend probably explains the extent of Moscow's intervention, if not its methods, from 1930 onwards.''
''The city of Vinnitsa might well be called the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91 graves there lie the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. Among the gravestones or real cemeteries , in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937 until their discovery by the Germans in 1943. Many o f the victims had been reported by the Soviets as exiled to Siberia.''
...In 1920, 1926, and again in 1930-33, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the Ukrainian Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in 1931 along. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is conservatively estimated that at least 75% of the Ukrainian intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians (ibid., Summer 1949)..
''Many of us have by now read the depressing stories of mass starvation that have consequently been numbed by the statistical data on the numbers of dead—all in "peacetime"—whose estimates range from four million towards of ten million. ''
The famine was certainly man-made in the sense that its immediate origin lies in human behavior - first and foremost, the grain procurements - and not, for example, in climatic conditions or in natural catastrophes, i.e.
...The disaster might be interpreted as a series of tragic coincidences, but the Petitioner, backed by many witnesses and experts, goes much further. In fact, the applicant reproaches the Soviet authorities with having in essence, orchestrated the famine to ensure the proper implementation of their policies, even at the cost of indescribable sufferings. It is the Petitioner's contention that collectivization, dekulakization and denationalization expressed in different ways the unequivocal determination of the Soviet authorities to destroy the Ukrainian nation and that - in the last resort - the famine was the final, particularly abominable, instrument of policy execution...
Soviet authorities used the famine voluntarily, when it happened, to crown their new policy of denationalization.
great words : '' ''A world that indulges historical amnesia or falsification is condemned repeat its worst mistakes.''
Of course, the famine led some Ukrainians to flee the disaster zone, to Russia and Belarus, but most of these refugees had to return to Ukraine quickly since their illegal migration status (linked to tрe passport requirement imposed in 1932) prevented them from living and working outside Ukraine.
In December 1932 farmers were ordered to surrender all grain reserves for next year's wing, the authorities being afraid that the starving people would eat the seeds. On 1 January 1933, Stalin addressed the Ukrainian farmers with instructions to surrender all hidden grain and threatened them with punishment if they did not comply. As almost all of the collective farms were in arrears, the implementation of this order took the form of a house-to-house search for "hidden grain.' Party activists seized everything they found and left the farmers to starve.
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.''
...Like many other peoples throughout the world, Ukrainians have had their bare of tragedy and suffering, most particularly in the twentieth century..
''As the disturbances spread, the authorities called in the army to guard the stocks and the soldiers, usually Russian or at least not Ukrainians, did not hesitate to use their arms to safeguard the procurements. By virtue of the decree of August 7, 1932, on the safe guard of socialist property, provision was made for very heavy penalties, including death and the confiscation о f all possessions, against those who tried to get hold о f the grain or other food belonging to the state.''
..''I recall the great indignation with which a well-informed and renowned Ukrainian poet told me personally about mass deaths and suffering from hunger of the swollen children. He was an ardent supporter of the Soviet government, but nevertheless, in strong words he accused the Soviet clique of Stalinist leadership of having "organized the famine". He told me that in the future, the history will forgive them for many mistakes and sins against living people, perhaps it will forgive them even the anti-humanitarian methods of dekulakization, and deportations, and firing squadrons - but it will never forgive them and should not forgive them the deaths and suffering of the masses of children, tormented by famine…
...Dr. Conquest asserted "there were arrests for saying that the famine "had taken place.. '
...Scrutinizing the documentary evidence of Stalin's intentions to commit genocide against Ukrainians, Hiroaki Kuromiya recently argued that it is not possible to "conclude that Stalin intended to kill millions of people through famine. Nor did he propagate the famine-terror'. On the contrary he did it. It is likely, however, that Stalin originally intended to use the famine on a limited scale as political terror."
''Stalin used famine as a cheap alternative to deportation.''
''The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1934 was far more brutal than the last great famine in Europe, which occurred in Finland in 1868. And the most astonishing is that such a famine resulted from deliberate human action, not from climatic hazard.''
''Tо facilitate the collectivization of peasantry in Ukraine, Stalin decided to split the Ukrainian society and eliminate its elites. In the fall of 1929 OGPU arrested 700 intellectuals accused of connections with the movement for the Liberation of Ukraine" (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy - SVU), in March-April 1930 put 45 of its fictitious members on trial for spiracy against the Soviet state. Among their crimes was setting up cells for the peasantry with the aim of separating Ukraine from tke USSR. Tke purpose of what was the first major Soviet show trial was to terrorize the Ukraiman intelligentsia, prevent them from taking up the cause of the peasants, and provide leadership on the national level. Other trials followed, first against Ukrainian nationalist elements, and by the time of the Great Famine, against disenchanted Ukrainians in party and administrative positions. At the same time, the regime deprived the villages of their natural leaders. The fall of 1929 witnessed the first phase of dekulakization, or the removal of "rich peasants" (Russian —kulaks; Ukrainian — kurkul ). Some of the confiscated kulak property went to the special cadres made up of city workers (the "25-thousanders') and rural indigents who helped with the confiscation, the rest was turned over to the collective farms. The dispossessed farmers were then driven out of their villages, exiled to Russia's northlands or resettled on poor land, in remote regions of Ukraine. A second wave of dekulakization took place a year later. In this way Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of its best farmers, many of whom died in transit or as a result of the harsh conditions prevailing in their places of resettlement. Those who survived formed a valuable work force and their children provided new citizens for the Russian republic''
....Peasant unrest in Ukraine had national overtones. The GPU picked up fliers with such inscriptions as ''Time to rise against Moscow's yoke" and "Petlura told us the time to wake up, time to rise."
....Stalin wrote, "Ukrainian affairs have hit rock bottom. Tilings are had with regard to the Party [...] bad with the Soviets [...] bad with tke GPU." The 500,000 strong Communist Party of Ukraine was full of rotten elements, infiltrated with "conscious and unconscious Petlura adherents". Stalin cautions: "as soon as things get worse, these elements will waste no time opening front inside (and outside) the Party, against the Party. ' And he warned: 'Unless we begin to straighten out the situation we may lose Ukraine. "
Nikita Khrushchev, "was fond of saying that every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist."
''A criminal law was adopted to force peasants to sell their reserves to the state. Those who refused to sell grain or other agriculturalal products at low prices were charged with speculation, sentenced to prison and their property was confiscated."
''In strict Marxist logic, nationality is meaningless because the proletariat on whom the construction of a perfect society rests is by definition stateless. Consequently, Lenin considered nationalism as the sign of conservative "petit bourgeois" capitalism which must be destroyed, even though it might he temporarily used to advantage to topple the regimes in power and install Bolshevik power.''
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of tke Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong.''
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.
The testimony of the witnesser of how the peasants, who make up 80% of the population enjoy the "freedom and equality" from the Soviet Bolsheviks.
In order to forcefully keep the peasants in the villages, they have introdused the passport system in the cities, while the inhabitants of the countryside not received passports at all, thus absolutely preventing them from leaving the countryside, to search of work or to purchase bread. They must die of starvation at home. That is how they wish to force the peasants to work the fields and give all the fruits of that work to the state. That is how the peasants, who make up 80% of the population enjoy the "freedom and equality" from the government. People are forced to work, having no (not benefiting from) civil rights. It can be compared to the situation before the revolution when the Jews were not allowed to live in the cities. This is how the peasants are treated presently in the USSR. A peasant - kolgosp member, receives the pay of 35-38 kopeks for a trudoden, while a spool of sewing thread costs 1 rb. and 1.50, or a pound of bread costs 3 rubles,thus making it impossible for the peasants to buy it in the market or make a profit.
Presently, there are great number of cases, when for stealing kolgosp bread, starving peasants are sentenced to be shot or to serve 6 to 10 years in labor camps in Siberia. The families of those poor peasants remain in the claws of hunger and death. No one pays any attention to them since nobody can provide even for iimself. The crops in kolgosps are down to a minimum level: 15-20 poods for every hectare. Such crops do not fulfill the "needs of the state" (since the needs of the state also include grain exports abroad).
the testimony of the witnesser
..the decree "forbade any private grain or bread trade; this made it impossible for peasants to buy bread." Petitioner has asserted tbe existence of a blockade of the Ukrainian-Russian border for the purpose of preventing the entry of food into Ukraine. The evidence establishes that there was indeed a secret order to this effect, by AA. Andreyev, Commissar of Transport, to the railway officials. "Train tickets were sold only to those who had written permission to travel". Those without travel permits were travelling "unlawfully" ..
...''It also appears that it was in Ukraine that collectivization provoked the fiercest resistance. This could be explained by the objective resources which only Ukraine had at its disposal. However, it seems tkat more fundamentally the Ukrainians have always manifested great individuality, a fact which explains, in essence, their natural resistance to any form of collectivization. It should be noted here that Ukraine never knew the semi- collective (collectivist) formula of the "obshchina" which were practiced in Russia under tke Czarist regime.''
Victor Yushchenko about Holodomor:
''Seventy-five years ago the Ukrainian people fell victim to a crime of unimaginable horror. Usually referred to in the West as tke Great Famine or the Terror Famine, it is known to Ukrainians as tke Holodomor. It was a state- organized program of mass starvation that in 1932-1933 killed an estimated seven to ten million Ukrainians, including up to a third of the nation's children.''
And here is how the "Virus of Bolshevism" dealt with prosperous peasants who were called ''kulaks''.
The first category was composed of kulaks who, reputedly active counterrevolutionaries, should arrested immediately and imprisoned or, more frequently, shot without any form of trial.
The kulaks of the second category were to be subject to deportation to Siberia or the Arctic regions, after confiscation of their property.
The less prosperous and least influential kulaks formed the third category. Reputedly, they were, normally, simply expelled from collective farms, after partial confiscation of property and dispersed within the province, where they would be asked either to tend the rest land or to carry out menial jobs.
The criteria for distribution among the categories were particularly that type, which reinforced the arbitrariness of the authorities. Tke kulaks who escaped death were deprived of practically all their rights. Access to schools was denied to their children; tkey were largely refused the benefits of state services. No recourse was offered to them against the treatment, however contrary to the law, to which they were subject.
“At this point the question of Ukraine is the most important. The situation in Ukraine is very bad. If we don’t take steps now to improve the situation, we may lose Ukraine. The objective should be to transform Ukraine , in the shortest period of time, into a real fortress of the U.S.S.R.”
Stalin’s letter to Lazar Kaganovich, Sept. 11, 1932
"Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence."
Leon Trotsky
“On the battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty.” In Soviet Ukraine, people were “dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously ...trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-away capital around conference tables ... The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles... Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.”
Victor Kravchenko
"Farmers present by themselves the basic force of the national movement. Without farmers there can be no strong national movement. This is what we mean when we say that the nationalist question, is actually, the farmers’ question.”
Joseph Stalin
“The Terror-Famine of 1932-33 was a dual-purpose by product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw.”
Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford
Sir Winston Churchill to Joseph Stalin:
“...Have the stresses of war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of Collective Farms?”
Stalin:
“ - Oh no, The Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle... Ten million (he said holding up his hands). It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary.”
“Ukrainians are an ethos, with their profound religiosity, individualism, tradition of private property, and devotion to their plots of land, were not suited to the construction of communism, and this fact was noted by the high-ranking Soviet officials.”
V. Ovsiienko
(human rights activist in Kharkiv)
“The intrusion of history is not just theoretical. It is also the legacy of being an accomplice or a victim, or just an onlooker. In each case, history entails the uncomfortable presence of earlier unresolved roles.”
Charles S. Maier
"Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Lance Morrow - journalist
“This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling powers. The savage combination of words for the designation of a crime - an artificial deliberately planned famine - is still incredible to many people throughout the world, but indicates the uniqueness of the tragedy of 1933, which is unparalleled for a time of peace, in the number of victims it claimed.”
Wasyl Hryshko
“Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger.”
Soviet writer, Kossier Izvestiia, December 2, 1933
"I remain convinced that for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem. Such a policy is Genocide in the classic sense of the word."
James Mace Holodomor Scholar (USA)
"The Stalinist totalitarian regime tried hard to ensure that everyone kept silent about the Holodomor, even people who had survived it, as well as their children and grandchildren; so that no one knew about this genocide abroad, and if they found out about it, they would keep silent.”
"Under the direct leadership and directions of the Central Committee pf the Communist Party and personally of comrade Stalin, we smashed the Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolution."
Pavel Postyshev, 1933
“Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.”
Joseph Stalin
“Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.”
George Orwell
…Ukraine was known for its fiery nationalism and its dominant peasant class. In such circumstances, collectivization meant crushing the peasantry, "traditional cradle of Ukrainian nationalism"..
''The Japanese consul in Odesa, who made an extensive journey throughout various regions of tke USSR in June 1932, wrote:
- "Ukrainian peasants, compared to the peasants in other republics, create a pitiful impression with their ragged clothing, emaciated bodies, and requests for alms. Even in large train stations, farmers and their wives and children stretch out their hands for alms and beg for bread.''
..."I do believe that Communist Party organs and organs sympathetic to the Communist. Party were, a large degree, controlled by agents of the Soviet Union in this period. There's a great deal of evidence to that effect. Another sort: somewhat sympathetic press organs, they seem to have been more easily manipulatable either because of those who determined editorial policy or wrote for such journals, or because the Soviets were able to influence what correspondents in Moscow could publish..
..The press dispatches going out from Moscow were subject to censorship, but the Moscow policy, naturally, was to convert the correspondents themselves to public relations people for the Soviet Union, when that was possible. A major success along this line was achieved in the case of the New York Times correspondent, Mr. Walter Duranty. Mr. A.J. Klieforth, of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, in his memorandum of June 4, 1931, reported a conversation he had, in the course of which:
"... Duranty pointed out that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own." (exhibit P-48, p 174)
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of the Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong. This trend probably explains the extent of Moscow's intervention, if not its methods, from 1930 onwards.''
''The city of Vinnitsa might well be called the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91 graves there lie the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. Among the gravestones or real cemeteries , in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937 until their discovery by the Germans in 1943. Many o f the victims had been reported by the Soviets as exiled to Siberia.''
...In 1920, 1926, and again in 1930-33, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the Ukrainian Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in 1931 along. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is conservatively estimated that at least 75% of the Ukrainian intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians (ibid., Summer 1949)..
''Many of us have by now read the depressing stories of mass starvation that have consequently been numbed by the statistical data on the numbers of dead—all in "peacetime"—whose estimates range from four million towards of ten million. ''
The famine was certainly man-made in the sense that its immediate origin lies in human behavior - first and foremost, the grain procurements - and not, for example, in climatic conditions or in natural catastrophes, i.e.
...The disaster might be interpreted as a series of tragic coincidences, but the Petitioner, backed by many witnesses and experts, goes much further. In fact, the applicant reproaches the Soviet authorities with having in essence, orchestrated the famine to ensure the proper implementation of their policies, even at the cost of indescribable sufferings. It is the Petitioner's contention that collectivization, dekulakization and denationalization expressed in different ways the unequivocal determination of the Soviet authorities to destroy the Ukrainian nation and that - in the last resort - the famine was the final, particularly abominable, instrument of policy execution...
Soviet authorities used the famine voluntarily, when it happened, to crown their new policy of denationalization.
great words : '' ''A world that indulges historical amnesia or falsification is condemned repeat its worst mistakes.''
Of course, the famine led some Ukrainians to flee the disaster zone, to Russia and Belarus, but most of these refugees had to return to Ukraine quickly since their illegal migration status (linked to tрe passport requirement imposed in 1932) prevented them from living and working outside Ukraine.
In December 1932 farmers were ordered to surrender all grain reserves for next year's wing, the authorities being afraid that the starving people would eat the seeds. On 1 January 1933, Stalin addressed the Ukrainian farmers with instructions to surrender all hidden grain and threatened them with punishment if they did not comply. As almost all of the collective farms were in arrears, the implementation of this order took the form of a house-to-house search for "hidden grain.' Party activists seized everything they found and left the farmers to starve.
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.''
...Like many other peoples throughout the world, Ukrainians have had their bare of tragedy and suffering, most particularly in the twentieth century..
''As the disturbances spread, the authorities called in the army to guard the stocks and the soldiers, usually Russian or at least not Ukrainians, did not hesitate to use their arms to safeguard the procurements. By virtue of the decree of August 7, 1932, on the safe guard of socialist property, provision was made for very heavy penalties, including death and the confiscation о f all possessions, against those who tried to get hold о f the grain or other food belonging to the state.''
..''I recall the great indignation with which a well-informed and renowned Ukrainian poet told me personally about mass deaths and suffering from hunger of the swollen children. He was an ardent supporter of the Soviet government, but nevertheless, in strong words he accused the Soviet clique of Stalinist leadership of having "organized the famine". He told me that in the future, the history will forgive them for many mistakes and sins against living people, perhaps it will forgive them even the anti-humanitarian methods of dekulakization, and deportations, and firing squadrons - but it will never forgive them and should not forgive them the deaths and suffering of the masses of children, tormented by famine…
...Dr. Conquest asserted "there were arrests for saying that the famine "had taken place.. '
...Scrutinizing the documentary evidence of Stalin's intentions to commit genocide against Ukrainians, Hiroaki Kuromiya recently argued that it is not possible to "conclude that Stalin intended to kill millions of people through famine. Nor did he propagate the famine-terror'. On the contrary he did it. It is likely, however, that Stalin originally intended to use the famine on a limited scale as political terror."
''Stalin used famine as a cheap alternative to deportation.''
''The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1934 was far more brutal than the last great famine in Europe, which occurred in Finland in 1868. And the most astonishing is that such a famine resulted from deliberate human action, not from climatic hazard.''
''Tо facilitate the collectivization of peasantry in Ukraine, Stalin decided to split the Ukrainian society and eliminate its elites. In the fall of 1929 OGPU arrested 700 intellectuals accused of connections with the movement for the Liberation of Ukraine" (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy - SVU), in March-April 1930 put 45 of its fictitious members on trial for spiracy against the Soviet state. Among their crimes was setting up cells for the peasantry with the aim of separating Ukraine from tke USSR. Tke purpose of what was the first major Soviet show trial was to terrorize the Ukraiman intelligentsia, prevent them from taking up the cause of the peasants, and provide leadership on the national level. Other trials followed, first against Ukrainian nationalist elements, and by the time of the Great Famine, against disenchanted Ukrainians in party and administrative positions. At the same time, the regime deprived the villages of their natural leaders. The fall of 1929 witnessed the first phase of dekulakization, or the removal of "rich peasants" (Russian —kulaks; Ukrainian — kurkul ). Some of the confiscated kulak property went to the special cadres made up of city workers (the "25-thousanders') and rural indigents who helped with the confiscation, the rest was turned over to the collective farms. The dispossessed farmers were then driven out of their villages, exiled to Russia's northlands or resettled on poor land, in remote regions of Ukraine. A second wave of dekulakization took place a year later. In this way Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of its best farmers, many of whom died in transit or as a result of the harsh conditions prevailing in their places of resettlement. Those who survived formed a valuable work force and their children provided new citizens for the Russian republic''
....Peasant unrest in Ukraine had national overtones. The GPU picked up fliers with such inscriptions as ''Time to rise against Moscow's yoke" and "Petlura told us the time to wake up, time to rise."
....Stalin wrote, "Ukrainian affairs have hit rock bottom. Tilings are had with regard to the Party [...] bad with the Soviets [...] bad with tke GPU." The 500,000 strong Communist Party of Ukraine was full of rotten elements, infiltrated with "conscious and unconscious Petlura adherents". Stalin cautions: "as soon as things get worse, these elements will waste no time opening front inside (and outside) the Party, against the Party. ' And he warned: 'Unless we begin to straighten out the situation we may lose Ukraine. "
Nikita Khrushchev, "was fond of saying that every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist."
''A criminal law was adopted to force peasants to sell their reserves to the state. Those who refused to sell grain or other agriculturalal products at low prices were charged with speculation, sentenced to prison and their property was confiscated."
''In strict Marxist logic, nationality is meaningless because the proletariat on whom the construction of a perfect society rests is by definition stateless. Consequently, Lenin considered nationalism as the sign of conservative "petit bourgeois" capitalism which must be destroyed, even though it might he temporarily used to advantage to topple the regimes in power and install Bolshevik power.''
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of tke Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong.''
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.
The testimony of the witnesser of how the peasants, who make up 80% of the population enjoy the "freedom and equality" from the Soviet Bolsheviks.
In order to forcefully keep the peasants in the villages, they have introdused the passport system in the cities, while the inhabitants of the countryside not received passports at all, thus absolutely preventing them from leaving the countryside, to search of work or to purchase bread. They must die of starvation at home. That is how they wish to force the peasants to work the fields and give all the fruits of that work to the state. That is how the peasants, who make up 80% of the population enjoy the "freedom and equality" from the government. People are forced to work, having no (not benefiting from) civil rights. It can be compared to the situation before the revolution when the Jews were not allowed to live in the cities. This is how the peasants are treated presently in the USSR. A peasant - kolgosp member, receives the pay of 35-38 kopeks for a trudoden, while a spool of sewing thread costs 1 rb. and 1.50, or a pound of bread costs 3 rubles,thus making it impossible for the peasants to buy it in the market or make a profit.
Presently, there are great number of cases, when for stealing kolgosp bread, starving peasants are sentenced to be shot or to serve 6 to 10 years in labor camps in Siberia. The families of those poor peasants remain in the claws of hunger and death. No one pays any attention to them since nobody can provide even for iimself. The crops in kolgosps are down to a minimum level: 15-20 poods for every hectare. Such crops do not fulfill the "needs of the state" (since the needs of the state also include grain exports abroad).
the testimony of the witnesser
..the decree "forbade any private grain or bread trade; this made it impossible for peasants to buy bread." Petitioner has asserted tbe existence of a blockade of the Ukrainian-Russian border for the purpose of preventing the entry of food into Ukraine. The evidence establishes that there was indeed a secret order to this effect, by AA. Andreyev, Commissar of Transport, to the railway officials. "Train tickets were sold only to those who had written permission to travel". Those without travel permits were travelling "unlawfully" ..
...''It also appears that it was in Ukraine that collectivization provoked the fiercest resistance. This could be explained by the objective resources which only Ukraine had at its disposal. However, it seems tkat more fundamentally the Ukrainians have always manifested great individuality, a fact which explains, in essence, their natural resistance to any form of collectivization. It should be noted here that Ukraine never knew the semi- collective (collectivist) formula of the "obshchina" which were practiced in Russia under tke Czarist regime.''
Victor Yushchenko about Holodomor:
''Seventy-five years ago the Ukrainian people fell victim to a crime of unimaginable horror. Usually referred to in the West as tke Great Famine or the Terror Famine, it is known to Ukrainians as tke Holodomor. It was a state- organized program of mass starvation that in 1932-1933 killed an estimated seven to ten million Ukrainians, including up to a third of the nation's children.''
And here is how the "Virus of Bolshevism" dealt with prosperous peasants who were called ''kulaks''.
The first category was composed of kulaks who, reputedly active counterrevolutionaries, should arrested immediately and imprisoned or, more frequently, shot without any form of trial.
The kulaks of the second category were to be subject to deportation to Siberia or the Arctic regions, after confiscation of their property.
The less prosperous and least influential kulaks formed the third category. Reputedly, they were, normally, simply expelled from collective farms, after partial confiscation of property and dispersed within the province, where they would be asked either to tend the rest land or to carry out menial jobs.
The criteria for distribution among the categories were particularly that type, which reinforced the arbitrariness of the authorities. Tke kulaks who escaped death were deprived of practically all their rights. Access to schools was denied to their children; tkey were largely refused the benefits of state services. No recourse was offered to them against the treatment, however contrary to the law, to which they were subject.
“At this point the question of Ukraine is the most important. The situation in Ukraine is very bad. If we don’t take steps now to improve the situation, we may lose Ukraine. The objective should be to transform Ukraine , in the shortest period of time, into a real fortress of the U.S.S.R.”
Stalin’s letter to Lazar Kaganovich, Sept. 11, 1932
"Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence."
Leon Trotsky
“On the battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty.” In Soviet Ukraine, people were “dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously ...trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-away capital around conference tables ... The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles... Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.”
Victor Kravchenko
"Farmers present by themselves the basic force of the national movement. Without farmers there can be no strong national movement. This is what we mean when we say that the nationalist question, is actually, the farmers’ question.”
Joseph Stalin
“The Terror-Famine of 1932-33 was a dual-purpose by product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw.”
Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford
Sir Winston Churchill to Joseph Stalin:
“...Have the stresses of war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of Collective Farms?”
Stalin:
“ - Oh no, The Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle... Ten million (he said holding up his hands). It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary.”
“Ukrainians are an ethos, with their profound religiosity, individualism, tradition of private property, and devotion to their plots of land, were not suited to the construction of communism, and this fact was noted by the high-ranking Soviet officials.”
V. Ovsiienko
(human rights activist in Kharkiv)
“The intrusion of history is not just theoretical. It is also the legacy of being an accomplice or a victim, or just an onlooker. In each case, history entails the uncomfortable presence of earlier unresolved roles.”
Charles S. Maier
"Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Lance Morrow - journalist
“This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling powers. The savage combination of words for the designation of a crime - an artificial deliberately planned famine - is still incredible to many people throughout the world, but indicates the uniqueness of the tragedy of 1933, which is unparalleled for a time of peace, in the number of victims it claimed.”
Wasyl Hryshko
“Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger.”
Soviet writer, Kossier Izvestiia, December 2, 1933
"I remain convinced that for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem. Such a policy is Genocide in the classic sense of the word."
James Mace Holodomor Scholar (USA)
"The Stalinist totalitarian regime tried hard to ensure that everyone kept silent about the Holodomor, even people who had survived it, as well as their children and grandchildren; so that no one knew about this genocide abroad, and if they found out about it, they would keep silent.”
"Under the direct leadership and directions of the Central Committee pf the Communist Party and personally of comrade Stalin, we smashed the Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolution."
Pavel Postyshev, 1933
“Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.”
Joseph Stalin
“Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.”
George Orwell
here are some more interesting quotes and expressions:
I spent some time in the library, and I read the collection of articles about the Holodomor, and scanned some of them(but probably still needed to know about the authors of these statements.)
here are some more interesting quotes and expressions:
…Ukraine was known for its fiery nationalism and its dominant peasant class. In such circumstances, collectivization meant crushing the peasantry, "traditional cradle of Ukrainian nationalism"..
''The Japanese consul in Odesa, who made an extensive journey throughout various regions of tke USSR in June 1932, wrote:
- "Ukrainian peasants, compared to the peasants in other republics, create a pitiful impression with their ragged clothing, emaciated bodies, and requests for alms. Even in large train stations, farmers and their wives and children stretch out their hands for alms and beg for bread.''
..."I do believe that Communist Party organs and organs sympathetic to the Communist. Party were, a large degree, controlled by agents of the Soviet Union in this period. There's a great deal of evidence to that effect. Another sort: somewhat sympathetic press organs, they seem to have been more easily manipulatable either because of those who determined editorial policy or wrote for such journals, or because the Soviets were able to influence what correspondents in Moscow could publish..
..The press dispatches going out from Moscow were subject to censorship, but the Moscow policy, naturally, was to convert the correspondents themselves to public relations people for the Soviet Union, when that was possible. A major success along this line was achieved in the case of the New York Times correspondent, Mr. Walter Duranty. Mr. A.J. Klieforth, of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, in his memorandum of June 4, 1931, reported a conversation he had, in the course of which:
"... Duranty pointed out that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own." (exhibit P-48, p 174)
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of the Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong. This trend probably explains the extent of Moscow's intervention, if not its methods, from 1930 onwards.''
''The city of Vinnitsa might well be called the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91 graves there lie the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. Among the gravestones or real cemeteries , in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937 until their discovery by the Germans in 1943. Many o f the victims had been reported by the Soviets as exiled to Siberia.''
...In 1920, 1926, and again in 1930-33, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the Ukrainian Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in 1931 along. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is conservatively estimated that at least 75% of the Ukrainian intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians (ibid., Summer 1949)..
''Many of us have by now read the depressing stories of mass starvation that have consequently been numbed by the statistical data on the numbers of dead—all in "peacetime"—whose estimates range from four million towards of ten million. ''
The famine was certainly man-made in the sense that its immediate origin lies in human behavior - first and foremost, the grain procurements - and not, for example, in climatic conditions or in natural catastrophes, i.e.
...The disaster might be interpreted as a series of tragic coincidences, but the Petitioner, backed by many witnesses and experts, goes much further. In fact, the applicant reproaches the Soviet authorities with having in essence, orchestrated the famine to ensure the proper implementation of their policies, even at the cost of indescribable sufferings. It is the Petitioner's contention that collectivization, dekulakization and denationalization expressed in different ways the unequivocal determination of the Soviet authorities to destroy the Ukrainian nation and that - in the last resort - the famine was the final, particularly abominable, instrument of policy execution...
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.''
...Like many other peoples throughout the world, Ukrainians have had their bare of tragedy and suffering, most particularly in the twentieth century..
''As the disturbances spread, the authorities called in the army to guard the stocks and the soldiers, usually Russian or at least not Ukrainians, did not hesitate to use their arms to safeguard the procurements. By virtue of the decree of August 7, 1932, on the safe guard of socialist property, provision was made for very heavy penalties, including death and the confiscation о f all possessions, against those who tried to get hold о f the grain or other food belonging to the state.''
..''I recall the great indignation with which a well-informed and renowned Ukrainian poet told me personally about mass deaths and suffering from hunger of the swollen children. He was an ardent supporter of the Soviet government, but nevertheless, in strong words he accused the Soviet clique of Stalinist leadership of having "organized the famine". He told me that in the future, the history will forgive them for many mistakes and sins against living people, perhaps it will forgive them even the anti-humanitarian methods of dekulakization, and deportations, and firing squadrons - but it will never forgive them and should not forgive them the deaths and suffering of the masses of children, tormented by famine…
...Dr. Conquest asserted "there were arrests for saying that the famine "had taken place.. '
...Collectivization" meant that a villager was no longer the owner of his own land, didn't have control of his own crops, "dekulakization" meant that a great number of villagers - between 1.6 an d 1.8 of the population - around 25 million families, deported to the Arctic…
...Scrutinizing the documentary evidence of Stalin's intentions to commit genocide against Ukrainians, Hiroaki Kuromiya recently argued that it is not possible to "conclude that Stalin intended to kill millions of people through famine. Nor did he propagate the famine-terror'. On the contrary he did it. It is likely, however, that Stalin originally intended to use the famine on a limited scale as political terror."
''Stalin used famine as a cheap alternative to deportation.''
''The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1934 was far more brutal than the last great famine in Europe, which occurred in Finland in 1868. And the most astonishing is that such a famine resulted from deliberate human action, not from climatic hazard.''
''Tо facilitate the collectivization of peasantry in Ukraine, Stalin decided to split the Ukrainian society and eliminate its elites. In the fall of 1929 OGPU arrested 700 intellectuals accused of connections with the movement for the Liberation of Ukraine" (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy - SVU), in March-April 1930 put 45 of its fictitious members on trial for spiracy against the Soviet state. Among their crimes was setting up cells for the peasantry with the aim of separating Ukraine from tke USSR. Tke purpose of what was the first major Soviet show trial was to terrorize the Ukraiman intelligentsia, prevent them from taking up the cause of the peasants, and provide leadership on the national level. Other trials followed, first against Ukrainian nationalist elements, and by the time of the Great Famine, against disenchanted Ukrainians in party and administrative positions. At the same time, the regime deprived the villages of their natural leaders. The fall of 1929 witnessed the first phase of dekulakization, or the removal of "rich peasants" (Russian —kulaks; Ukrainian — kurkul ). Some of the confiscated kulak property went to the special cadres made up of city workers (the "25-thousanders') and rural indigents who helped with the confiscation, the rest was turned over to the collective farms. The dispossessed farmers were then driven out of their villages, exiled to Russia's northlands or resettled on poor land, in remote regions of Ukraine. A second wave of dekulakization took place a year later. In this way Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of its best farmers, many of whom died in transit or as a result of the harsh conditions prevailing in their places of resettlement. Those who survived formed a valuable work force and their children provided new citizens for the Russian republic''
....Peasant unrest in Ukraine had national overtones. The GPU picked up fliers with such inscriptions as ''Time to rise against Moscow's yoke" and "Petlura told us the time to wake up, time to rise."
....Stalin wrote, "Ukrainian affairs have hit rock bottom. Tilings are had with regard to the Party [...] bad with the Soviets [...] bad with tke GPU." The 500,000 strong Communist Party of Ukraine was full of rotten elements, infiltrated with "conscious and unconscious Petlura adherents". Stalin cautions: "as soon as things get worse, these elements will waste no time opening front inside (and outside) the Party, against the Party. ' And he warned: 'Unless we begin to straighten out the situation we may lose Ukraine. "
Nikita Khrushchev, "was fond of saying that every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist."
''A criminal law was adopted to force peasants to sell their reserves to the state. Those who refused to sell grain or other agriculturalal products at low prices were charged with speculation, sentenced to prison and their property was confiscated."
''In strict Marxist logic, nationality is meaningless because the proletariat on whom the construction of a perfect society rests is by definition stateless. Consequently, Lenin considered nationalism as the sign of conservative "petit bourgeois" capitalism which must be destroyed, even though it might he temporarily used to advantage to topple the regimes in power and install Bolshevik power.''
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of tke Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong.''
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.''
here are some more interesting quotes and expressions:
…Ukraine was known for its fiery nationalism and its dominant peasant class. In such circumstances, collectivization meant crushing the peasantry, "traditional cradle of Ukrainian nationalism"..
''The Japanese consul in Odesa, who made an extensive journey throughout various regions of tke USSR in June 1932, wrote:
- "Ukrainian peasants, compared to the peasants in other republics, create a pitiful impression with their ragged clothing, emaciated bodies, and requests for alms. Even in large train stations, farmers and their wives and children stretch out their hands for alms and beg for bread.''
..."I do believe that Communist Party organs and organs sympathetic to the Communist. Party were, a large degree, controlled by agents of the Soviet Union in this period. There's a great deal of evidence to that effect. Another sort: somewhat sympathetic press organs, they seem to have been more easily manipulatable either because of those who determined editorial policy or wrote for such journals, or because the Soviets were able to influence what correspondents in Moscow could publish..
..The press dispatches going out from Moscow were subject to censorship, but the Moscow policy, naturally, was to convert the correspondents themselves to public relations people for the Soviet Union, when that was possible. A major success along this line was achieved in the case of the New York Times correspondent, Mr. Walter Duranty. Mr. A.J. Klieforth, of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, in his memorandum of June 4, 1931, reported a conversation he had, in the course of which:
"... Duranty pointed out that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own." (exhibit P-48, p 174)
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of the Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong. This trend probably explains the extent of Moscow's intervention, if not its methods, from 1930 onwards.''
''The city of Vinnitsa might well be called the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91 graves there lie the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. Among the gravestones or real cemeteries , in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937 until their discovery by the Germans in 1943. Many o f the victims had been reported by the Soviets as exiled to Siberia.''
...In 1920, 1926, and again in 1930-33, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the Ukrainian Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in 1931 along. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is conservatively estimated that at least 75% of the Ukrainian intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians (ibid., Summer 1949)..
''Many of us have by now read the depressing stories of mass starvation that have consequently been numbed by the statistical data on the numbers of dead—all in "peacetime"—whose estimates range from four million towards of ten million. ''
The famine was certainly man-made in the sense that its immediate origin lies in human behavior - first and foremost, the grain procurements - and not, for example, in climatic conditions or in natural catastrophes, i.e.
...The disaster might be interpreted as a series of tragic coincidences, but the Petitioner, backed by many witnesses and experts, goes much further. In fact, the applicant reproaches the Soviet authorities with having in essence, orchestrated the famine to ensure the proper implementation of their policies, even at the cost of indescribable sufferings. It is the Petitioner's contention that collectivization, dekulakization and denationalization expressed in different ways the unequivocal determination of the Soviet authorities to destroy the Ukrainian nation and that - in the last resort - the famine was the final, particularly abominable, instrument of policy execution...
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.''
...Like many other peoples throughout the world, Ukrainians have had their bare of tragedy and suffering, most particularly in the twentieth century..
''As the disturbances spread, the authorities called in the army to guard the stocks and the soldiers, usually Russian or at least not Ukrainians, did not hesitate to use their arms to safeguard the procurements. By virtue of the decree of August 7, 1932, on the safe guard of socialist property, provision was made for very heavy penalties, including death and the confiscation о f all possessions, against those who tried to get hold о f the grain or other food belonging to the state.''
..''I recall the great indignation with which a well-informed and renowned Ukrainian poet told me personally about mass deaths and suffering from hunger of the swollen children. He was an ardent supporter of the Soviet government, but nevertheless, in strong words he accused the Soviet clique of Stalinist leadership of having "organized the famine". He told me that in the future, the history will forgive them for many mistakes and sins against living people, perhaps it will forgive them even the anti-humanitarian methods of dekulakization, and deportations, and firing squadrons - but it will never forgive them and should not forgive them the deaths and suffering of the masses of children, tormented by famine…
...Dr. Conquest asserted "there were arrests for saying that the famine "had taken place.. '
...Collectivization" meant that a villager was no longer the owner of his own land, didn't have control of his own crops, "dekulakization" meant that a great number of villagers - between 1.6 an d 1.8 of the population - around 25 million families, deported to the Arctic…
...Scrutinizing the documentary evidence of Stalin's intentions to commit genocide against Ukrainians, Hiroaki Kuromiya recently argued that it is not possible to "conclude that Stalin intended to kill millions of people through famine. Nor did he propagate the famine-terror'. On the contrary he did it. It is likely, however, that Stalin originally intended to use the famine on a limited scale as political terror."
''Stalin used famine as a cheap alternative to deportation.''
''The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1934 was far more brutal than the last great famine in Europe, which occurred in Finland in 1868. And the most astonishing is that such a famine resulted from deliberate human action, not from climatic hazard.''
''Tо facilitate the collectivization of peasantry in Ukraine, Stalin decided to split the Ukrainian society and eliminate its elites. In the fall of 1929 OGPU arrested 700 intellectuals accused of connections with the movement for the Liberation of Ukraine" (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy - SVU), in March-April 1930 put 45 of its fictitious members on trial for spiracy against the Soviet state. Among their crimes was setting up cells for the peasantry with the aim of separating Ukraine from tke USSR. Tke purpose of what was the first major Soviet show trial was to terrorize the Ukraiman intelligentsia, prevent them from taking up the cause of the peasants, and provide leadership on the national level. Other trials followed, first against Ukrainian nationalist elements, and by the time of the Great Famine, against disenchanted Ukrainians in party and administrative positions. At the same time, the regime deprived the villages of their natural leaders. The fall of 1929 witnessed the first phase of dekulakization, or the removal of "rich peasants" (Russian —kulaks; Ukrainian — kurkul ). Some of the confiscated kulak property went to the special cadres made up of city workers (the "25-thousanders') and rural indigents who helped with the confiscation, the rest was turned over to the collective farms. The dispossessed farmers were then driven out of their villages, exiled to Russia's northlands or resettled on poor land, in remote regions of Ukraine. A second wave of dekulakization took place a year later. In this way Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of its best farmers, many of whom died in transit or as a result of the harsh conditions prevailing in their places of resettlement. Those who survived formed a valuable work force and their children provided new citizens for the Russian republic''
....Peasant unrest in Ukraine had national overtones. The GPU picked up fliers with such inscriptions as ''Time to rise against Moscow's yoke" and "Petlura told us the time to wake up, time to rise."
....Stalin wrote, "Ukrainian affairs have hit rock bottom. Tilings are had with regard to the Party [...] bad with the Soviets [...] bad with tke GPU." The 500,000 strong Communist Party of Ukraine was full of rotten elements, infiltrated with "conscious and unconscious Petlura adherents". Stalin cautions: "as soon as things get worse, these elements will waste no time opening front inside (and outside) the Party, against the Party. ' And he warned: 'Unless we begin to straighten out the situation we may lose Ukraine. "
Nikita Khrushchev, "was fond of saying that every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist."
''A criminal law was adopted to force peasants to sell their reserves to the state. Those who refused to sell grain or other agriculturalal products at low prices were charged with speculation, sentenced to prison and their property was confiscated."
''In strict Marxist logic, nationality is meaningless because the proletariat on whom the construction of a perfect society rests is by definition stateless. Consequently, Lenin considered nationalism as the sign of conservative "petit bourgeois" capitalism which must be destroyed, even though it might he temporarily used to advantage to topple the regimes in power and install Bolshevik power.''
''It is more than likely that the Soviet authorities in Ukraine and elsewhere strove to overcome a "petit bourgeois" nationalism that in the long term threatened the stability of tke Soviet Union. Such a goal is easily understandable in principle. The risk of separatism did exist in the Ukraine, considering the success of the policy of "Ukrainization" in areas where national feeling was traditionally very strong.''
''Most of the accused, from whom false confessions had been extracted, were former members of the parties in power at the time of Petlura's nationalist government and were condemned to heavy prison sentences. Purges were carried out in university circles and in the Academy of Sciences and, under the pretext of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, many intellectuals ended up in prison or were forced to go into exile.''
The testimony of Japanese consul in Odesa.
The Japanese consul in Odesa, who made an extensive journey throughout various regions of the USSR in June 1932, wrote:
- "Ukrainian peasants, compared to the peasants in other republics, create a pitiful impression with their ragged clothing, emaciated bodies, and requests for alms. Even in large train stations, farmers and their wives and children stretch out their hands for alms and beg for bread.
- "Ukrainian peasants, compared to the peasants in other republics, create a pitiful impression with their ragged clothing, emaciated bodies, and requests for alms. Even in large train stations, farmers and their wives and children stretch out their hands for alms and beg for bread.
"... Duranty pointed out that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own."
Interesting quote from historical materials about the Holodomor:
..The press dispatches going out from Moscow were subject to censorship, but the Moscow policy, naturally, was to convert the correspondents themselves to public relations people for the Soviet Union, when that was possible. A major success along this line was achieved in the case of the New York Times correspondent, Mr. Walter Duranty. Mr. A.J. Klieforth, of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, in his memorandum of June 4, 1931, reported a conversation he had, in the course of which:
"... Duranty pointed out that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own."
..The press dispatches going out from Moscow were subject to censorship, but the Moscow policy, naturally, was to convert the correspondents themselves to public relations people for the Soviet Union, when that was possible. A major success along this line was achieved in the case of the New York Times correspondent, Mr. Walter Duranty. Mr. A.J. Klieforth, of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, in his memorandum of June 4, 1931, reported a conversation he had, in the course of which:
"... Duranty pointed out that, in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own."
Thursday, June 19, 2014
The Genocide they could not hide!
"Although Moscow was well aware of the disorganized state of Ukrainian agriculture as a result of collectivization, Soviet Ukraine was obliged to deliver 2.3 times the amount of grain marketed in the precollectivization year. Tke 1930 quota of 7.7 million tons of grain was met and it represented a third of a total harvest of 23 mdlion tons... In 1931, despite a decline in sown area, Moscow kept the same quota of 7.7 million tons for Ukraine and insisted it be met even after it became apparent that the Ukrainian harvest had dropped to 18.3 million tons, according to official figures and almost 38% of that was "lost during the harvest. Tke Ukrainian Soviet regime was able to deliver only 7 millions tons and in 1932 the virtually unanimous opposition of the Ukrainian hierarchy forced Stalin to lower the 1932 quota to 6.5 million tons. The quotas were not met, only 47 million tons were obtained at a cost of millons of lives."
Of course, the famine led some ukrainians to flee the disaster zone, to Russia and Belarus, but most of these refugees had to return to Ukraine quickly since tрeir illegal migration status (linked to tрe passport requirement imposed in 1932) prevented them from living and working outside Ukraine.
Of course, the famine led some ukrainians to flee the disaster zone, to Russia and Belarus, but most of these refugees had to return to Ukraine quickly since tрeir illegal migration status (linked to tрe passport requirement imposed in 1932) prevented them from living and working outside Ukraine.
from the testimonies of the witnessers:
''The deliberate destruction of Ukrainian peasant farmers, intellectuals, government officials, and anyone accused of "Ukrainian nationalism" provides additional grounds to consider tke Kremlin's actions as genocide. In May 1933, in a dispatch to the Italian Embassy in Moscow, the Italian consul in Kkarkiv, Sergio Gradenigo, assessed the consequences of the famine: perkaps, in the not-too-distant future, there will be no further talk either of Ukraine or of the Ukrainian people. And hence tkere will also be no Ukrainian problem, since Ukraine in fact will become part of Russia.''
Victor Yushchenko about Holodomor:
''Seventy-five years ago the Ukrainian people fell victim to a crime of unimaginable horror. Usually referred to in the West as tke Great Famine or the Terror Famine, it is known to Ukrainians as tke Holodomor. It was a state- organized program of mass starvation that in 1932-1933 killed an estimated seven to ten million Ukrainians, including up to a third of the nation's children.''
And here is how the "Virus of Bolshevism" dealt with prosperous peasants who were called ''kulaks''.
The first category was composed of kulaks who, reputedly active counterrevolutionaries, should arrested immediately and imprisoned or, more frequently, shot without any form of trial.
The kulaks of the second category were to be subject to deportation to Siberia or the Arctic regions, after confiscation of their property.
The less prosperous and least influential kulaks formed the third category. Reputedly, they were, normally, simply expelled from collective farms, after partial confiscation of property and dispersed within the province, where they would be asked either to tend the rest land or to carry out menial jobs.
The criteria for distribution among the categories were particularly that type, which reinforced the arbitrariness of the authorities. Tke kulaks who escaped death were deprived of practically all their rights. Access to schools was denied to their children; tkey were largely refused the benefits of state services. No recourse was offered to them against the treatment, however contrary to the law, to which they were subject.
The kulaks of the second category were to be subject to deportation to Siberia or the Arctic regions, after confiscation of their property.
The less prosperous and least influential kulaks formed the third category. Reputedly, they were, normally, simply expelled from collective farms, after partial confiscation of property and dispersed within the province, where they would be asked either to tend the rest land or to carry out menial jobs.
The criteria for distribution among the categories were particularly that type, which reinforced the arbitrariness of the authorities. Tke kulaks who escaped death were deprived of practically all their rights. Access to schools was denied to their children; tkey were largely refused the benefits of state services. No recourse was offered to them against the treatment, however contrary to the law, to which they were subject.
The testimony of the witnesser of how the peasants, who make up 80% of the population enjoy the "freedom and equality" from the Soviet Bolsheviks.
In order to forcefully keep the peasants in the villages, they have introdused the passport system in the cities, while the inhabitants of the countryside not received passports at all, thus absolutely preventing them from leaving the countryside, to search of work or to purchase bread. They must die of starvation at home. That is how they wish to force the peasants to work the fields and give all the fruits of that work to the state. That is how the peasants, who make up 80% of the population enjoy the "freedom and equality" from the government. People are forced to work, having no (not benefiting from) civil rights. It can be compared to the situation before the revolution when the Jews were not allowed to live in the cities. This is how the peasants are treated presently in the USSR. A peasant - kolgosp member, receives the pay of 35-38 kopeks for a trudoden, while a spool of sewing thread costs 1 rb. and 1.50, or a pound of bread costs 3 rubles,thus making it impossible for the peasants to buy it in the market or make a profit.
Presently, there are great number of cases, when for stealing kolgosp bread, starving peasants are sentenced to be shot or to serve 6 to 10 years in labor camps in Siberia. The families of those poor peasants remain in the claws of hunger and death. No one pays any attention to them since nobody can provide even for iimself. The crops in kolgosps are down to a minimum level: 15-20 poods for every hectare. Such crops do not fulfill the "needs of the state" (since the needs of the state also include grain exports abroad).
Presently, there are great number of cases, when for stealing kolgosp bread, starving peasants are sentenced to be shot or to serve 6 to 10 years in labor camps in Siberia. The families of those poor peasants remain in the claws of hunger and death. No one pays any attention to them since nobody can provide even for iimself. The crops in kolgosps are down to a minimum level: 15-20 poods for every hectare. Such crops do not fulfill the "needs of the state" (since the needs of the state also include grain exports abroad).
It should be noted here that Ukraine never knew the semi- collective (collectivist) formula of the "obshchina" which were practiced in Russia under tke Czarist regime.That is why in Ukraine the collectivization provoked the fiercest resistance.
...''It also appears that it was in Ukraine that collectivization provoked the fiercest resistance. This could be explained by the objective resources which only Ukraine had at its disposal. However, it seems tkat more fundamentally the Ukrainians have always manifested great individuality, a fact which explains, in essence, their natural resistance to any form of collectivization. It should be noted here that Ukraine never knew the semi- collective (collectivist) formula of the "obshchina" which were practiced in Russia under tke Czarist regime.''
The kulaks who escaped death were deprived of practically all their rights. Access to schools was denied to their children; they were largely refused the benefits of state services.
The kulaks who escaped death were deprived of practically all their rights. Access to schools was denied to their children; they were largely refused the benefits of state services. No recourse was offered to them against the treatment, however contrary to the law, to which they were subject.
the testimony of the witnesser
..the decree "forbade any private grain or bread trade; this made it impossible for peasants to buy bread." Petitioner has asserted tbe existence of a blockade of the Ukrainian-Russian border for the purpose of preventing the entry of food into Ukraine. The evidence establishes that there was indeed a secret order to this effect, by AA. Andreyev, Commissar of Transport, to the railway officials. "Train tickets were sold only to those who had written permission to travel". Those without travel permits were travelling "unlawfully" ..
''Tke penalty included imprisonment in concentration camps and confiscation of all possessions. In practice, the law was invoked not only against petty thieves, but even against those who gleaned already-harvested fields ''..
''Tke penalty included imprisonment in concentration camps and confiscation of all possessions. In practice, the law was invoked not only against petty thieves, but even against those who gleaned already-harvested fields ''..
Holocaust or Holodomor?
It turns out that the word ''Holocaust'' does not quite fit the definition of Ukrainian Genocide. Actually I did not know about it.
By the way , not long ago, I spent my weekend in Krakow.
The Afternoon I spent the time in the Jagiellonian Library.
I was interested in many topics including the Ukrainian Famine tragedy.
Dozens of articles I just copied to my computer.
And here's one of them. The opinion of the author, who believes that the term "Holocaust" belongs only to Jewish tragedy.
In this case, the name ''Holodomor'' is unique in its kind. ( as well as ''Maidan'' actually.)
And therefore , according to author, the word ''Holocaust'' is not well suited to describe the Ukrainian tragedy.
(In any case, let us not forget that we're talking about the terrible tragedy.
And only now the world beginning to learn about this terrible tragedy.
By the way , on the entire Jagiellonian Library, I found only two books about ''Holodomor'', in many libraries in general , there is not even a single work about ''Holodomor''.)
Here is this article that I scanned from one of the library books:
''Holocaust or Holodomor?''
''Ukrainians have sometimes spoken of the "Holodomor" as the Ukrainian holocaust. With all due respect to those who have chosen to do so, I must point out the pitfalls of such a usage of the term. Tke word "holocaust" is isually traced to Wycliffe's translation of the Bible as a burnt offering to the Lord, and indeed it is an English word from the ancient Greek words "kolos" (whole) and "caustos" (to burn). In reference to Hitler's destruction of the Jews, it came to be used as a not quite exact translation of the Hebrew word "Shoah" (complete and utter destruction), yet evocative of what Hitler tried to do to with a people traditionally considered themselves to be chosen by God, the Jews, to destroy tbem entirely as a people, including burning them in ovens specially désigned for that purpose. It is not a generic term for a certain kind of crime against any given group but a specific word for a specific event and as such has entered many languages. Almost until the end of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians in the West used such terms as the Great Famine or the man-made Famine in Ukraine. Only when the veil of silence began to gradually lift , did it become clear that the word "holodomor" become the label that stuck in people's memory in the place where it happened. Tke word itself is interesting, "holod" (hunger or famine) and "mor" (mass death as in a plague, like chumats'kyi mor, tke Black Death).
For this reason, to speak of the Ukrainian Holocaust makes about as much sense as speaking of the Jewish Holodomor. It is a unique term that has arisen from the depths of a victimized nation itself. As the unique tragedy faced by Ukrainians in the USSR becomes more a part of the consciousness of the larger world, the use of the word that Ukrainians in Ukraine have chosen will inevitably enter the other languages as well.
As is the case with any culture of which we are not a part, those who are not part of the Ukrainian nation that has lived through the Soviet period, a nation that has been skaped or distorted by precisely that experience, cannot tell them how to understand themselves any more than we can tell them how to overcome all the obstacles that their past has burdened them with. Ukrainians in Ukraine will make tkeir own Ukrainian history. ''
By the way , not long ago, I spent my weekend in Krakow.
The Afternoon I spent the time in the Jagiellonian Library.
I was interested in many topics including the Ukrainian Famine tragedy.
Dozens of articles I just copied to my computer.
And here's one of them. The opinion of the author, who believes that the term "Holocaust" belongs only to Jewish tragedy.
In this case, the name ''Holodomor'' is unique in its kind. ( as well as ''Maidan'' actually.)
And therefore , according to author, the word ''Holocaust'' is not well suited to describe the Ukrainian tragedy.
(In any case, let us not forget that we're talking about the terrible tragedy.
And only now the world beginning to learn about this terrible tragedy.
By the way , on the entire Jagiellonian Library, I found only two books about ''Holodomor'', in many libraries in general , there is not even a single work about ''Holodomor''.)
Here is this article that I scanned from one of the library books:
''Holocaust or Holodomor?''
''Ukrainians have sometimes spoken of the "Holodomor" as the Ukrainian holocaust. With all due respect to those who have chosen to do so, I must point out the pitfalls of such a usage of the term. Tke word "holocaust" is isually traced to Wycliffe's translation of the Bible as a burnt offering to the Lord, and indeed it is an English word from the ancient Greek words "kolos" (whole) and "caustos" (to burn). In reference to Hitler's destruction of the Jews, it came to be used as a not quite exact translation of the Hebrew word "Shoah" (complete and utter destruction), yet evocative of what Hitler tried to do to with a people traditionally considered themselves to be chosen by God, the Jews, to destroy tbem entirely as a people, including burning them in ovens specially désigned for that purpose. It is not a generic term for a certain kind of crime against any given group but a specific word for a specific event and as such has entered many languages. Almost until the end of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians in the West used such terms as the Great Famine or the man-made Famine in Ukraine. Only when the veil of silence began to gradually lift , did it become clear that the word "holodomor" become the label that stuck in people's memory in the place where it happened. Tke word itself is interesting, "holod" (hunger or famine) and "mor" (mass death as in a plague, like chumats'kyi mor, tke Black Death).
For this reason, to speak of the Ukrainian Holocaust makes about as much sense as speaking of the Jewish Holodomor. It is a unique term that has arisen from the depths of a victimized nation itself. As the unique tragedy faced by Ukrainians in the USSR becomes more a part of the consciousness of the larger world, the use of the word that Ukrainians in Ukraine have chosen will inevitably enter the other languages as well.
As is the case with any culture of which we are not a part, those who are not part of the Ukrainian nation that has lived through the Soviet period, a nation that has been skaped or distorted by precisely that experience, cannot tell them how to understand themselves any more than we can tell them how to overcome all the obstacles that their past has burdened them with. Ukrainians in Ukraine will make tkeir own Ukrainian history. ''
The meaning of the word ''Holodomor''
holod" (hunger or famine) and "mor" (mass death as in a plague, like chumats'kyi mor, the Black Death).
Party activists seized everything they found and left the farmers to starve.
In December 1932 farmers were ordered to surrender all grain reserves for next year's wing, the authorities being afraid that the starving people would eat the seeds. On 1 January 1933, Stalin addressed the Ukrainian farmers with instructions to surrender all hidden grain and threatened them with punishment if they did not comply. As almost all of the collective farms were in arrears, the implementation of this order took the form of a house-to-house search for "hidden grain.' Party activists seized everything they found and left the farmers to starve.
On 22 January 1933, a secret directive, composed and signed by Stalin, forbade peasants from Ukraine to travel in search of provisions to Belarus or Russia, where food was more readily available.
On 22 January 1933, a secret directive, composed and signed by Stalin, forbade peasants from Ukraine to travel in search of provisions to Belarus or Russia, where food was more readily available. The same provisions applied to the Kuban, even though that region was part of the RSFSR. Railways and water transportation facilities were instructed not to sell tickets to farmers from these regions and the GPU received orders to arrest all farmers trying to leave their villages without permission from tke authorities. As a result of that order, a quarter of a million people were arrested within the first six weeks, 85 % of them were sent back to the village to starve and the rest were punished in other ways.
It was not until the late 1980s as the Soviet empire stumbled into the dustbin of history and an independent, internationally recognized Ukraine re-emerged in Europe that restored freedom allowed for the truth to be set free.
Those
who survived knew that the famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine was a
deliberate, politically engineered catastrophe whose victims numbered in the
many millions yet few dared even whisper about this devastation of their nation
to others in the generations following. It was not until the late 1980s as the
Soviet empire stumbled into the dustkin of history and an independent,
internationally recognized Ukraine re-emerged in Europe that restored freedom
allowed for the truth to be set free. Until then those who had endured the horror
now known as the Hololomor remained trapped in the very place where
it could not be spoken of.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
"The Ukrainian Famine in the History of Genocide". Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
"The Ukrainian Famine in the History of Genocide"
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgojN3CxG8Q
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgojN3CxG8Q
"The Ukrainian Famine in the History of Genocide". Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
"The Ukrainian Famine in the History of Genocide"
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgojN3CxG8Q
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgojN3CxG8Q
"The Ukrainian Famine in the History of Genocide". Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
"The Ukrainian Famine in the History of Genocide"
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgojN3CxG8Q
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgojN3CxG8Q
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