CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of history's most horrifying cases of genocide - the Soviet-made Great Famine of 1932-33, in which some 7 million Ukrainians perished.
Relying on news from Svoboda and, later, The Ukrainian Weekly (which began publication in October 1933), this column hopes to remind and inform Americans and Canadians of this terrible crime against humanity.
By bringing other events worldwide into the picture as well, the column hopes to give a perspective on the state of the world in the years of Ukraine's Great Famine.
PART XXI
June 1933
In mid-1933, Svoboda received eyewitness reports about the famine in Ukraine. On June 3, Svoboda printed a news item from Warsaw; it related the experiences of visitors to southern Ukraine and the Crimean region. The news stated that the people fleeing the famine would wait at train stations for weeks, trying to find room on the trains passing through their villages. The stations were overcrowded with people dying from hunger, or suffering from typhoid and physical exhaustion. The eyewitnesses reported they saw corpses of dead children lying on the station platforms.
According to the reports from Poland; the desperate circumstances led to wide-scale banditry, to the point that it was unsafe to be outside after 7 p.m. Cases of cannibalism were also reported, according to the eyewitness accounts.
On June 8, Svoboda carried a commentary titled "In the Claws of Hunger." The unsigned article stated that the reason for the famine in Ukraine was the Soviet regime's introduction of collectivization, which it said had stifled political and cultural growth in the country. The article said that the peoples' struggle for economic freedom and social equality continued in order to save the people from famine, death and denationalization.
On June 12, Svoboda ran a story based on information from the Ukrainian Bureau in Geneva, which reported on the latest Soviet-issued decree directed at miners in the Donbas region in Ukraine. The ukase declared that if miners left their jobs, their meal tickets would be taken away and they would not be able to obtain foodstuffs from the state-run stores. The reason many of the miners were leaving their jobs was because of physical exhaustion, the bureau reported. The decree also claimed that the supervisors of the mines had the right to raise the daily quota of coal. The bureau noted that the miners had a difficult time mining enough coal to meet the quotas set earlier.
On June 14, Svoboda carried an article based on news from Berlin, stating that Pavlo Postyshev, a minister in Stalin's government, had begun still another crackdown in Ukrainian schools. The article noted that in his opposition to Ukrainian separatism, he issued statements decreeing that it was unnecessary to teach Ukrainian in the schools, and that Jews and other nationalities living in Ukraine needed to learn Russian, not Ukrainian.
That same day the paper ran a story from the Ukrainian Bureau in London, which reported that it had recently learned that the Soviet government had exported foodstuffs to other countries, while people on its own territory were dying of hunger.
On June 20, Svoboda carried a story datelined Moscow under the headline "Communist mobilization" which dealt with a decree that had been issued calling for workers to be transported to the Donetske region for mining. Many factories did not want to let their skilled workers go, and the ones who did go south could not find accommodations or food to survive, the story said.
On June 22, Svoboda carried a story datelined Moscow stating that over 100,000 political prisoners were being released from prisons. While these prisoners were being granted amnesty, many Ukrainians were being arrested for non-production of foodstuffs.
On June 23, O. Snovyda, a frequent contributor to Svoboda, wrote a commentary titled "The Direction Russian Politics is Taking in Ukraine." He stated that the Soviet regime was aiming for depopulation of Ukraine and the elimination of Ukrainian nationalism. He wrote that the fields were barren, peasants were dying of hunger, and typhoid had hit large portions of the population. Many people were being resettled in Siberia, he added.
Citing several London newspapers, Svoboda reported on June 26 that Alexander Kerensky, former head of the provisional government after the Russian Revolution, had published a letter in the English press, which stated that the London Economic Conference currently taking place should form a commission and send its members to the Soviet Union to check on economic conditions in the country. He said that he was aware that thousands of people in Ukraine were dying. Their only source of food was dead animals, horses, cats and dogs, and that cases of cannibalism were also spreading in Ukraine, he said.
* * *
Around the world:
The London Conference of 1933, titled "The World Monetary and Economic Conference," began its meeting on June 12. The conference had as its objective to check the world depression by means of currency stabilization and economic agreements. The conference would result in unbridgeable disagreements among the participants, as the final outcome saw increasingly stringent trade and currency restrictions.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that by October 1 there would be 1 million new jobs for the unemployed in the United States. The American Federation of Labor had reported that unemployment fell by 12 percent in the first months of the year.
The Ukrainian Pavilion at the Chicago World's Fair opened.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 10, 1983, No. 28, Vol. LI
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