Media reports on famine (06/12/83)

Media reports on famine

Toronto Star stories

TORONTO - A May 29 rally here by some 8,000 Ukrainian Canadians to mark the 50th anniversary of the Great Famine in Ukraine, as well as an eyewitness account by a famine survivor, were the subjects of three separate articles in the Toronto Star.

On Sunday, the day of the rally, the paper ran a story by staffer Joe Serge which provided a historical overview of the famine, and outlined efforts by the Ukrainian emigre community to publicize what the paper called the "Ukrainian 'holocaust'." It also ran an article on the same page centered on the recollections of famine survivor Mykola Kostiuk, a resident of Toronto.

The third article was a news account of the downtown rally published on May 30.

Mr. Serge wrote that the famine was the result of a deliberate attempt by Moscow "to bring to their heels Ukrainian peasants, the backbone of Ukrainian nationalist aspirations" who fiercely resisted the collectivization policies of Joseph Stalin. He said starving peasants were forced to survive by eating birds, cats, carrion and tree leaves, some eventually resorting to cannibalism. When the famine eased in 1933-34, 7-10 million Ukrainians had died.

According to Mr. Serge, Soviet censorship at the time kept most foreign reporters far from the famine-stricken countryside, but eventually stories did manage to filter out. He mentioned accounts which appeared in the French newspaper Le Matin, the New York Evening Journal and the Daily Forward, a New York Jewish Daily, whose correspondent wrote that he saw "real, unrestrained famine" along with "typhus, swollen, naked corpses, empty villages whose inhabitants have been deported, died or run away..."

Mr. Serge noted that the Soviets continued to deny that the famine was a pre-meditated genocide aimed at eradicating the Ukrainian peasantry, and he cited a recent television interview by Alexander Pedakin, the Soviet Embassy's press attache in Ottawa, in which he said:

"But I'm telling you that the situation was not, first, as great as it is now portrayed here. And second, it was not a result of a special anti-Ukrainian drive or sort of, as it is being presented by your professors from secret services. It was not. It was a combination of circumstances."

But the article quotes Andriy Bandera, vice-president of the national executive of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee as saying that the famine "was a distinct policy to starve ethnic Ukrainian regions," adding that "there was no famine in Moscow."

In the story on Mr. Kostiuk, which appeared without a byline, the famine survivor, now 68, recalled that people "were dying like flies." He said that his grandfather, a wealthy landowner, was imprisoned for resisting collectivization, and his father, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, was deported to Siberia for 15 years. His younger sister starved to death.

Mr. Kostiuk told the Star that he survived the famine by illegally sneaking into Moscow by lashing himself to the chimney of a train. In Moscow, he recalled, "stores were plentiful... there was bread, butter, oil and everything that we couldn't get at home."

He also remembered walking across a Moscow square on May 1, a national holiday, and seeing a formation of airplanes overhead spell out Stalin's name.

"It was a holiday mood," he told the Star. "Meanwhile, our people were dying of starvation. Only to crush a nation."

News account

In the story on the demonstration published on May 30, Star staffer John Ferri reported that among the over 8,000 people at the commemorative rally and religious service were speakers from all three major Canadian political parties, including Yuri Shymko, a Liberal member of the provincial parliament.

The rally began at Queens Park, site of the Ontario legislative buildings, with marchers moving down University Avenue to Nathan Phillips Square at City Hall.

The paper said the demonstration began with a religious service at Queen's Park led by a number of Ukrainian Orthodox priests, including Archbishop Wasyly of Saskatoon.

Washington Post letter

WASHINGTON - A recent letter to The Washington Post, commenting on a May 22 story on a Ukrainian American demonstration marking the 50th anniversary of the Great Famine, objected to the reporter's statement that Ukrainians "charge" that Stalin deliberately allowed 7 million peasants to starve.

In the letter, published in the May 30 issue of The Post, Andy Moursund of Washington said that the famine was more than an allegation, and that the figure of 7 million dead could be verified in scholarly sources.

"Would The Post print an article on the recent Holocaust survivors' reunion that stated 'participants in the gathering charge that Hitler killed 6 million Jews'?" he wrote.

Mr. Moursund suggested that the author of the article, Eve Zibart, consult Robert Conquest's book, "The Great Terror," for information on the famine, adding that Dr. Conquest considered the figure of 7 million "a conservative estimate."

"In simple respect for the victims of this unspeakable crime, one would think that the reality of their deaths would not be left hanging as an open question by The Post," Mr. Moursund wrote.

Washington Times article

WASHINGTON - The Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33) was mentioned in an article on world hunger published in the May 31 issue of The Washington Times.

In the piece, author Bui Anh Tuan argued that frequently the cause of hunger is not poverty but politics, and he adduced the Ukrainian holocaust to support his point.

The article said in part: "In 1932-33, some 7 to 10 million Ukrainian peasants were starved to death. How come large-scale famine took place in an affluent country of 50 million inhabitants, long known as a breadbasket in Europe? Famine then was no natural disaster. Instead, it was caused by man. It was caused by Stalin and the Russian Communist Party with a view of destroying the kulak will to resist forced Soviet collectivization."

Sunday Record editorial

MIDDLETOWN, N.Y. - The May 15 issue of the Sunday Record here carried an editorial on negotiating with the Soviets which made an extended reference to the Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33), warning that the Soviet Union is a country "that did not hesitate to use starvation of millions as a political weapon."

The Orange County paper noted that Ukrainians in Glen Spey and Kerhonkson, as well as around the country were this year commemorating the 50th anniversary of the famine, but that "few Americans have heard of this holocaust."

It noted that most journalists at the time "were content to believe the Soviet government's reports that no starvation was occurring in Ukraine," which the editorial described as "one of the richest wheat-growing regions on earth."

"Grain was confiscated from overflowing storage bins to break the back of a nationally conscious peasantry, and to impose collectivization," the paper said.

It also quoted Dr. James Mace from his introduction to "The Ninth Circle," recently released by the Ukrainian Studies Fund at Harvard, who wrote that "(the famine) is cut from the same cloth as Hitler's death camps, a world gone mad on the blood of human beings sacrificed on the altar of political expediency."

"Time has passed, and the Soviet leaders since have tried to officially distance themselves from the policies of Joseph Stalin," the editorial said. "Yuri Andropov, who formerly ran the KGB - the same organization that manufactured the famine in Ukraine - is the new Soviet leader."

The editorial said the United States should "tear away all illusions" about the type of government they are dealing with when negotiating disarmament or other treaties. It recommended that the United States be prepared to "talk tough" to wring concessions from the Soviets "because tough talk is the only kind the Soviets understand."

The editorial was partly due to the efforts of UNA activists Walter Kwas, an Ulster County legislator, and Roman Slobodian, who informed the newspaper about the Great Famine.

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