Remember the Holodomor

[Lars]

Remember the Holodomor
The Soviet starvation of Ukraine, 75 years later

12/08/2008




This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the Soviet Union: the great famine the Ukrainians call Holodomor, "murder by starvation." This catastrophe, which killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people in 1932-33, was largely the product of deliberate Soviet policies. Inevitably, then, its history is fodder for acrimonious disputes.

Ukraine--which, with Canada and a few other countries, observed Holodomor Remembrance Day on November 23--seeks international recognition for a Ukrainian "genocide." Russia denounces that demand as political exploitation of a wider tragedy. Some Russian human rights activists are skeptical of both positions.

Meanwhile, the famine remains little known in the West, despite efforts by the Ukrainian diaspora. Indeed, the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.

In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada. A backlash from the left was quick to follow. Revisionist Sovietologist J. Arch Getty accused Conquest of parroting the propaganda of "exiled nationalists." And in January 1988, the Village Voice ran a lengthy essay by Jeff Coplon (now a contributing editor at New York magazine) titled "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right." Coplon sneered at "the prevailing vogue of anti-Stalinism" and dismissed as absurd the idea that
the famine had been created by the Communist regime. Such talk, he asserted, was meant to justify U.S. imperialism and whitewash Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis.

By the time Coplon wrote, however, the Soviet regime was dying. The partial opening of Soviet archives soon confirmed the extent to which Stalin and his henchmen knowingly used hunger to punish resistance and beat the peasantry into submission. Among the finds was a direct order by Stalin to cordon off starving villages and intercept peasants trying to flee in search of food. The post-Soviet leadership of both Russia and Ukraine was willing to acknowledge the Terror-Famine, though differences soon emerged on whether it should be regarded as a Ukrainian genocide or equal-opportunity mass murder.

Ukrainian-Russian relations began to deteriorate after the "Orange Revolution" of late 2004. Russia under Vladimir Putin was sliding deeper into authoritarianism and anti-Western nationalism, while Ukraine, led by President Viktor Yushchenko, sought closer ties to the West. Even as the political mood in Russia began to emphasize the alleged positive aspects of the Soviet past, Yushchenko promoted a view of Soviet-era Ukraine as a "captive nation" under a foreign boot.

In November 2006, the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill proclaiming the Holodomor a genocide and making Holodomor denial "unlawful." An escalation of rhetoric followed; a 2007 statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry accused "certain political circles" in Ukraine of insulting the memory of non-Ukrainian famine victims. Since then, the pro-government Russian press has published dozens of articles assailing Ukraine's stance on the Holodomor as an insidious anti-Russian ploy. This year, President Dmitry Medvedev declined an invitation to Holodomor Remembrance Day ceremonies in Kiev in a petulant letter that dismissed "talk of the so-called Holodomor" as an "immoral" attempt to give a shared tragedy a nationalist spin and also took a swipe at Ukraine's desire to join NATO.

[Ought Six]

The Putin regime has made a policy of denial and whitewashing of Soviet-era atrocities.

[jane333]

Why are the political and social movements of nations we despise considered 'atrocities' when they are no different from those of our own, and the nations that we support? Governments have always coerced people to join and cooperate, or worse.

[frodo]

Exactly when did any English speaking country deliberately starve Ten million people to death in an act of genocide?

Between the years of 1932 – 1933 nearly a quarter of the Ukrainian rural population was intentionally liquidated by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet regime in an attempt to crush the Ukrainian national identity. Stalin considered the national consciousness and desire for freedom of the Ukrainian people to be an obstacle in the implementation of his policy of collectivization in the Soviet Union. Of particular threat to Stalin were the Ukrainian land-owning farmers whom he branded “kulaks”. Stalin began to plan how to crush the Ukrainian people’s aspirations for freedom and an independent Ukrainian nation. His policies targeted the backbone of Ukraine – the kulaks and the working class peasants of rural Ukraine.

In 1929 Stalin introduced a policy for the liquidation of Ukrainian kulaks as a class and the policy was legalized by the Soviet Central Committee in 1930. Anyone with a Ukrainian national consciousness was branded an “enemy of the State” by Stalin’s regime. This initial campaign was geared toward kulaks who resisted turning over their private farmland to the Soviet collective. Those kulaks were dealt with through massive arrests and deportations to forced labor camps, often to the concentration camps in Siberia. Those who were not arrested or deported were subject to the brutal terror of Stalin’s police and oftentimes firing squad executions.

Despite the arrests, police seizures of their property and livestock, and even death sentences, the kulaks continued to resist being subjugated by Moscow. Stalin reacted by imposed unrealistically large grain quotas on Ukraine in 1931. As planned, Ukraine was unable to deliver on the grain quotas because although it produced 27% of the entire Soviet grain harvest it was accountable for 38% of the Soviet quota. This intentionally unrealistic goal allowed Stalin to take draconian measures to penalize the kulaks for their failure to meet the quota, and
thus Stalin’s artificially imposed Famine in Ukraine began.

In 1932 Ukraine’s borders were sealed to outside world. In order to limit the famine to Ukraine, the Soviet police established checkpoints along all railroad lines to prevent any of the starving Ukrainians from entering Russia and anyone traveling from Russia from bringing food into Ukraine. In essence, Ukraine became the world’s largest concentration camp.

Stalin ordered massive quantities of grain and agricultural products to be exported out of Ukraine to feed the rest of the Soviet Union and for foreign export. This, along with Stalin’s ban on food imports into Ukraine, left insufficient reserves of food in Ukraine to feed the population. Kulak villages that were considered uncooperative or underproducers were blacklisted and completely blockaded. Anyone found to have foodstuffs in their possession was subject to execution, or in extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for no less than 10 years in a Soviet concentration camp. It was standard practice to be sentenced to 10 years in a concentration camp for being in possession of a potato or a handful of wheat kernels.

Reports leaked out to the West that the Ukrainian countryside was afflicted by a terrible famine. All reports were denied and discredited by the Soviet government in Moscow. Even New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who was in collaboration with Stalin’s regime, covered up the Famine in Ukraine in his articles. Trainloads of food aid were donated to Ukraine by foreign organizations but they were turned back by the Soviet authorities who vehemently proclaimed that there was no Famine in Ukraine.

http://www.ukrainiangenocide.com/htestimonytext.html

And the @rsehole Putin thinks Stalin was a good guy.

[jane333]

Where did I say English-speaking? I have the feeling that language, skin color and ethnicity mean much less than we think when it comes to bigotry.

Decide what you want about your world. I'll always present a list of horrific events to include the Crusades, the witch hunts, the decimation of Australian aborigine and American Indian tribes by Europeans, and the Rwanda genocides before I get into anti-Communist blather. Take yer pick.

[doc_jake]

You forgot the British treatment of the Boer civilians during the second Boer war (1900). Only thousands not millions but it still doesn’t make it right.

[sandyd]

Between the years of 1932 – 1933

Hmmmm....

[Old Hawk]

Originally Posted by frodo

Exactly when did any English speaking country deliberately starve Ten million people to death in an act of genocide?

Estimates vary but 1845 is pretty bad.

http://www.nde.state.ne.us/ss/irish/irish_pf.html

OH

[frodo]

Jane used the term "political and social movements" to describe what happened in Ukraine. Do you also want to call what happened to Germany's Jews a "political and social" event?

Furthermore, Two wrongs don't make a right, so comparisons are irrelevant. Genocide is genocide.

[Old Hawk]

Originally Posted by frodo

Jane used the term "political and social movements" to describe what happened in Ukraine. Do you also want to call what happened to Germany's Jews a "political and social" event?

Furthermore, Two wrongs don't make a right, so comparisons are irrelevant. Genocide is genocide.

Indeed it is.

http://www.nde.state.ne.us/ss/irish/irish_pf.html

n October, 1846, Trevelyan wrote that the overpopulation of Ireland "being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and as unthought of as it is likely to be effectual." Two years later after perhaps a million people had died, he wrote, "The matter is awfully serious, but we are in the hands of Providence, without a possibility of averting the catastrophe if it is to happen. We can only wait the result." Later that year Trevelyan declared: "The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people." (36.) In 1848 Trevelyan was knighted for his services in Ireland.