From 1932-33 Stalin sealed the borders of Ukraine, collectivized farming, and forced labour on the people of Ukraine. All the while, they were being starved for the greater good of the USSR?! If they were caught eating one more grain than they were rationed, they were killed on the spot. And the rations were not fair. An estimated 7 to 10 million people died (bigger than the holocaust) and hardly anybody has even heard of this?! Oh wait, I forgot! Stalin and his buds re-wrote history so that it never actually happened! When the USSR fell apart in 1991 and Ukraine gained autonomy was the first time anybody heard a word of a genocide of millions of people!
I can't begin to understand this.
Read for yourselves, it's very worth your while:
When I was a student at McMaster University I made a presentation to the History Club which included several myths about the USSR including the 1933 famine. My history professor was very sceptical about the famine and basically refused to accept that it had happened. I offered him eyewitness accounts from the book Black Deeds of the Kremlin translated by my father Alexander on Sherman Avenue North in 1953 but my professor dismissed them as a "Ukrainian viewpoint." In other words, as far as our schools and the university were concerned, the 1933 famine, actually a genocide, in Ukraine did not exist.
You and I have heard this story elsewhere. Ukrainian famine denial is the same as Jewish Holocaust denial and is perpetrated by the same kind of misguided individuals or academics. Even today there are sites on the internet that claim there was no 1933 famine genocide in Ukraine.
How is it possible that two of the world's greatest tragedies in this century could be doubted and denied? In the case of the Jews it is antisemitism but in the case of the Ukrainians we now know how it was done. We can trace the famine denial back to people like Walter Duranty, the foreign correspondent of The New York Times in Moscow, who reported that there were food shortages but no famine. Later Duranty said privately and quietly that perhaps 10 million died in the famine but this never appeared on the pages of The New York Times.
1. Collectivization
Collectivization is
the process of conversion of small private farms and livestock into
giant collective farms. The Soviet Government could not control the
independent farmers in Ukraine. They were in a position on their own
farms to disregard the Soviet system. The most intelligent and best
farmers -- not necessarily rich -- were labelled kulaks by the Soviet
government, their land and animals were confiscated and they were exiled
to Siberia or executed. Rather than surrender both their land and their
livestock of horses, cows, etc. many Ukrainian farmers slaughtered them
before the Soviet authorities could confiscate them. The Collective
farmers became workers paid at a starvation wage by the state. Stalin
told Churchill in 1942 that Collectivization was worse than an entire
year of the war against Germany and that there were ten million
victims.
The coverup was carefully organized by Stalin's Kremlin. During the terrible year of 1933, Moscow banned all travel by foreigners in Ukraine and especially all foreign correspondents for the first three-quarters of the year. Ukraine's borders were sealed tight by the Red Army and the Soviet Secret Police. They were opened only late in the year when the 1933 crops had been harvested ending the hunger and also when bodies and other evidence had been cleared away. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge went into Ukraine to find out exactly why he had been banned from travelling there. He discovered the death toll in the form of nearly empty villages.
The American foreign correspondent William H. Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor also visited Ukraine late in 1933 as soon as the Kremlin allowed travel. He wrote that in Ukraine the Soviet government had "clamped down with the use of the last and most terrible weapon -- organized famine." (Russia's Iron Age, 1934). Chamberlin revealed in his book that Moscow had "organized" the famine. This is the most terrible secret of the famine: it was intentionally organized by Stalin's Soviet government.
Stalin and his henchman Lazar Kaganovich, who was in charge of Agriculture, were responsible for creating the Ukrainian genocide in 1933. Moscow's denials and the Kremlin's clever manipulation of the mass media convinced the world that there had been no massive death toll from hunger in Ukraine. Over the years it was only the very rare exception that someone mentioned the "famine" in a passing reference.
Stalin became the teacher of Hitler. We can only speculate what might have happened if Stalin's secret genocide by famine had been fully exposed to the world. Would Hitler's terrible secretive Holocaust of 6,000,000 Jews been possible? We also know that Hitler in World War II adopted Stalin's famine weapon and starved millions of Soviet prisoners of war including many Ukrainians.
Perhaps I should now mention one of the greatest points of confusion about the years 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine: In my opinion, there were actually two separate and distinct events in 1932 and 1933. In 1932 there definitely was a small famine in which Ukrainians perished. This famine was due to the inefficiency and callousness of the Soviet bureaucracy.
It is a different story for 1933.
Stalin's brutal government actually passed laws and made regulations
late in 1932 from which the only possible outcome was a massive genocide
organized to create a maximum number of deaths from starvation. This is
the actual genocide which destroyed so many Ukrainians. This is why I
believe the 1932 famine should not be confused with the tragic 1933
genocide. This was carefully organized and became the intentional
genocide plan of Stalin's government although we do not know if it was
pre-mediated. Stalin used executions, exile to Siberia -- which en route
took its toll of victims -- and mainly famine to commit the terrible
Genocide of Ukrainians in 1933.
2. 1933 Famine in Ukraine Was Actually a Genocide
Many people have tried
to give an accurate name to the 1933 famine because of its diabolical
nature. It has been called the Great Famine (to reflect the extent and
number of victims) the Black Famine, Holocaust Famine and the Stalin
Famine. In Ukraine it has been called Holodomor meaning Hunger Death or
perhaps Hunger Murder. It has been called the Organized Famine, the
Engineered Famine, the Man-Made Famine and the Artificial Famine. But it
really wasn't artificial since real people died of real hunger. It may
be called the 1932-1933 Famine Genocide. But in my opinion it is most
accurately labelled simply Genocide in Ukraine 1933 since it was planned
in 1932 and intended to kill much of the Ukrainian nation in 1933.
3. United Nations Definition of Genocide
The 1949 United
Nations Convention on Genocide defines genocide as "acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group." This includes "Killing members of the group" and
"Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." So the
actions of Stalin's government exactly fill the official U.N. definition
of genocide.
Where exactly did the genocide take place? Eastern Ukraine was the major area of Stalin's famine. However, the evidence shows that it was also organized in ethnographic areas outside Ukraine which had a large Ukrainian population such as the Kuban region south-east of Ukraine. It also stretched eastward to the Volga and seems to coincide with pockets of Ukrainian population.
We know it was especially directed against Ukraine because just over the north-eastern border in Russia the famine did not exist. Many starving Ukrainians attempted to go to Russia for food but were stopped at the border. People trying to carry food into Ukraine were stopped by the authorities at the Ukrainian-Russian border and the food was confiscated.
Perhaps you know that journalists and
reporters have a formula on how to write a news article. This is called
the Five W's and an H. These are: Who What Where When Why and How. I
have already touched on all of these except How? and Why?
4. How Did Stalin Organize the Genocide?
How did Stalin's
government organize the genocide in Ukraine? First of all the decision
and the first steps were taken in August 1932 and then the first
procedures and plans were put in place. For example, on August 7, 1932
the law on the protection of state property was established. If you took
a single ear of wheat from a collective farm -- you could be shot --
and there were people who suffered this fate. On December 6, 1932 a
Soviet decree proclaimed a complete blockade of villages for allegedly
sabotaging grain procurement.
Moscow sent an army of agents, who were communist party members and mostly Russians from Russia, into Ukraine. With the help of the Red Army and the GPU Soviet Secret Police Ukrainian villages were surrounded and every scrap of food in the village was confiscated including even bread baking in ovens. A thorough search was also made to find any food hidden by the Ukrainian farmers.
Sometimes it became a military action
and resulted in an unequal struggle between farmers with pitchforks
against heavily armed soldiers. The Ukrainian farmers invariably lost
these battles. One Soviet General called it a "War" and was disturbed
that he was fighting unarmed Ukrainian farmers. Many villages were
emptied by these battles and by the famine. Molotov drafted an
unpublished decree which encouraged Russians to settle in the empty
villages of Ukraine and the North Caucasus. Victor Kravchenko, who was
one of the agents, later wrote a book I Chose Freedom, in which he
described 1933 as the Harvest in Hell.
5. 7,000,000 Ukrainians Died in the Genocide: 25,000 Per Day
At the peak of the
genocide, which was in March 1933 according to Prof. Conquest,
Ukrainians were dying at the rate of 25,000 per day, 1,000 per hour or
17 every minute. Estimates of the total deaths vary from 5 to 10 million
but 7 million is the accepted figure. This was almost one-quarter of
the population of Ukraine.
The children were especially devastated with one estimate stating that "no fewer than three million children born between 1932 and 1933 died of hunger." (M. Maksudov in Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933, Ed. by Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko, Edmonton CIUS, 1986). One third of the children of Ukraine starved to death in the famine.
The New York Times (Dec. 22, 1997)
published a powerful quote from Stephane Courtois in its review of the
Black Book of Communism:
"I'm still young and I want so much to live"
One young Ukrainian girl wrote to her uncle, Professor K. Riabokin, at Kharkiv University as follows:
"Please Uncle, do take me to Kharkiv.
"We have neither bread nor anything else to eat. Dad is completely exhausted from hunger and is lying on the bench, unable to get on his feet. Mother is blind from hunger and cannot see in the least. So I have to guide her when she has to go outside. Please Uncle do take me to Kharkiv because I, too, will die from hunger. Please do take me, please. I'm still young and I want so much to live. Here I will surely die because everyone else is dying. . . Please do take me, please . . . ."
The Uncle received the letter at the
same time that he was told she was dead. He says, "I did not know what
to say or what to do. My head just pounded with my niece's pathetic
plea: 'I'm still young and want so much to live. . . . Please do take
me, please. . . .'"
6. Soviet Coverup
The coverup of the
1933 genocide included official Soviet government denials for over a
half a century. The very first Soviet Ukrainian official to admit the
existence of the 1933 genocide was Volodymyr Shcherbitsky, the Head of
the Communist Party of Ukraine. On December 25, 1987 he said there was
"famine in some localities of Ukraine." (Pravda Ukrainy, Dec. 26, 1987).
Actually Nikita Khrushchev as a private citizen in his 1970 memoirs
Khrushchev Remembers tells of a naive Soviet official who said to him:
"A train recently pulled into Kiev loaded with corpses of people who had
starved to death. It had picked up corpses all the way from Poltava to
Kiev. I think somebody better inform Stalin about this situation." Of
course, we know Stalin knew about it because he had organized it.
In addition to banning travel of foreigners into Ukraine, the Kremlin put strong pressure on foreign correspondents to follow the communist line that there was hunger but no famine in Ukraine in 1933.
When Soviet Census officials in 1937 submitted the USSR Census Report to the Government it revealed that the population was millions lower than it should have been. As a result, Stalin's government suppressed the 1937 census of the USSR and shot many of the census officials. A new 1939 census "corrected" the population to a higher level in order to conceal the famine. We know it would be foolish to believe that the 1939 census reflected reality.
For many decades excuses have been
offered by the Soviet government and pro-Russian academics. For example,
it was suggested that the weather caused a 1933 crop failure. However,
the 1933 weather records actually reveal no adverse weather conditions.
In fact, the crop in 1933 was larger than 1931 or 1934 years when there
was no famine. In 1933 the Soviet Union exported 1.7 million tons of
grain to the West while Ukrainians starved. Late in 1933 it was
discovered that some of the confiscated Ukrainian grain was stored in
storage facilities under armed guard -- right in Ukraine.
7. WHY?
Why? The Ukrainian
farmers and the Ukrainian cultural and intellectual leaders were opposed
to collectivization which made the independent farmer into a "worker."
As a result he came under the complete control of the state on farm
land he no longer owned. Stalin used the genocide to break the will and
opposition of the Ukrainian nation to collectivization and Russian rule
and to assert his firm and complete control of Ukraine.
Despite their many efforts Ukrainians
in the western world were unable to break the skepticism of the world.
They produced volume two of the Black Deeds of The Kremlin dedicated
entirely to the 1933 genocide but it was ignored by the academic world.
Academics generally avoided mentioning the genocide although in some
books the 1933 "famine" received a passing reference or one sentence.
Ukrainians published many pamphlets and articles in the Ukrainian press
but this had virtually no impact on the consciousness of the world.
Finally, however, there was a sequence of events which brought the
genocide into the world's awareness.
8. Documentary Film Harvest of Despair
The first step was the
prize-winning documentary film Harvest of Despair produced in 1984 by
the Ukrainian Canadian Research & Documentation Centre in Toronto.
This film, directed by Slavko Nowytski, was shown on the CBC, PBS and
other television networks. It seems to have been the catalyst which
first, and finally, caught the attention of the general public.
9. Professor Conquest's Book Harvest of Sorrow
Two years later, in
1986, the academic world was forced to accept the reality of the 1933
genocide because of the book The Harvest of Sorrow, by Professor Robert
Conquest. Professor Conquest, of Stanford University in California, is a
highly respected expert on the Soviet Union. His book was the very
first full scholarly study of the 1933 genocide. Published by the
University of Alberta and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies,
this book aroused a strong reaction and protests from pro-Soviet
individuals. But it has stood the test of time. Conquest carefully
analysed the background and history of the genocide and concluded that 7
million died. (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the
Terror-Famine, by Robert Conquest. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press
and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986. 412 p.)
When Ukraine's leader Shcherbitsky in
1987 publicly admitted the existence of the famine it finally gave the
first official confirmation of this tragic event. The Ukrainian
Communist Party issued a resolution on February 7, 1990 which blamed
Stalin as the perpetrator of the famine. The next day as the mighty
Soviet Union was in the process of crumbling away the Soviet Government
ordered that the "full details of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933" be
published (Toronto Star / Reuter Feb. 8, 1990). But Moscow's policy soon
changed. Archives were shut tight again and Moscow, as far as I know,
never published a book on the famine.
10. U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine
Both of these
government pronouncements, of Ukraine and Russia, can probably be
credited as a direct reaction to the work of the Commission on the
Ukraine Famine headed by Prof. James Mace who is of Scottish American
origin. It published an Interim Report in 1987 and submitted its final
Report to the United States Congress on April 22, 1988. This report was
the final one of six volumes on the famine the Commission published
which have given Americans and the entire world considerable
documentation, eyewitness testimony and details confirming the 1933
genocide.
In the 19 findings of the Report to Congress by the Commission on the Famine there are three which I think sum up the main points:
- There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933 caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.
- The victims of the Ukrainian famine numbered in the millions.
- Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933.
* * *
One of the saddest aspects of the 1933 Genocide in Ukraine is that it was very thoroughly erased from the historical memory of Ukraine. The Soviet system carefully eliminated from history virtually all evidence including the visual photographic record. Ukrainians in Ukraine today do not know about the Stalin Genocide, while by comparison, Jews everywhere are very aware of the Hitler Holocaust.
Canada's one million Ukrainian Canadian community, has not only remembered Canada's dead in the World Wars. We have also preserved the memory of the 1933 Genocide in Ukraine and it is we who have passed this historical memory, like a torch, to our kinsmen in Ukraine.
Here in Canada we should support the proposal to establish a Canadian Genocide Museum in Ottawa. We should write to our Members of Parliament in support of the Genocide Museum proposed by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. It will help to educate Canadians and recognize all the major historical genocides perpetrated in this century against such peoples as the Armenians, Ukrainians and Jews.[url]http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/genocide/genocide-speech.html[/url]
This is real non ski gabber. Fuck what NSG has become.
