Media reports on famine (07/24/83)

Media reports on famine

Freedom at Issue

NEW YORK - The Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33) and its causes was the subject of an article by Alexander Motyl in the July-August issue of Freedom at Issue, a publication of Freedom House, a national human-rights organization.

Mr. Motyl, who is the author of "The Turn to the Right," a study of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1920s, wrote that the famine was a direct outgrowth of Stalin's collectivization policies, which served the dual purpose of establishing party control over an independent peasantry and smashing the powerful national movement among the peasants.

"The key was to extract, proportionately, far more grain from the Ukrainians than from the other peasants," wrote Mr. Motyl.

Citing available statistics, the author noted that in 1930, 38 percent of the USSR's grain was extracted from Ukraine, although it produced only 27 percent of all harvested grain. With collectivization causing a sharp drop in grain production, government quotas remained high. In 1930, 23.1 million metric tons of grain were produced in Ukraine, while 7.7 were extracted, a number which remained unchanged in 1931 when production dropped to 18.3 million tons. By 1932, with grain production at an alarming 14.6 million tons, the quota was only lowered to 6.2 million tons, Mr. Motyl said.

"Such a policy could have resulted only in mass starvation, which began in the spring of 1932 and reached its peak in the winter of 1932-33," Mr. Motyl wrote. "Kiev province alone experienced a population loss of 2 million between 1931 and 1933."

But while Ukraine was in the throes of famine, with bloated bodies littering the streets of most villages, across the border in Soviet Russia there was not the faintest trace of starvation, Mr. Motyl said. What's more, the famine in Soviet Ukraine went largely unnoticed in the West, and the few correspondents in the USSR who did report on the tragedy, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, were simply not believed.

"Even more curious is the continued indifference to the famine," wrote Mr. Motyl. "That it was a holocaust, in the largest sense of the word, has still to penetrate the popular mind."

He noted that many academics adhere to the belief that the famine was an unfortunate, if avoidable, side effect of the Soviet regime's rush to collectivize, and that Stalin had not really intended to starve 5-7 million Ukrainians.

London Free Press

LONDON, Ont. - A July 17 demonstration by some 300 area Ukrainians and East Europeans marking the 50th anniversary of the Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33) was the subject of an article by Michele Mandel in the next day's edition of The London Free Press.

Marching behind a small black coffin symbolizing the estimated 5-7 million victims of the man-made famine, the demonstrators moved from Catholic Central High School to Victoria Park, where several survivors of the holocaust recalled the horrors they witnessed.

Among the survivors mentioned by Ms. Mandel was Halyna Huba who, as a 9-year-old girl in the village of Mykhailivka, saw 1,500 inhabitants - about half the population - starve to death in 1932 and 1933.

"She will never forget that her uncle and six cousins, their bodies swollen from hunger, perished within six weeks," wrote Ms. Mandel.

Helen Koschman, whose father, Gregory Roj, now 80, survived the famine, recalled that he was sentenced to 10 years in jail for stealing a sack of potatoes to feed his starving family. She said that he managed to escape and walked 100 kilometers toward his village, passing deserted towns with their streets strewn with rotting corpses.

"He told me he had to (tear) his underwear and put it around his face because the smell of the dead was so bad," Ms. Koschman told the Free Press.

She went on to say that her grandmother and grandfather died, as did her uncle, aunt and four cousins. Her mother survived by eating a gallon of honey buried in the orchard which the army had failed to find.

Fedir Podopryhora, another survivor now living in London, described an instance of cannibalism he had witnessed at his neighbor's home, where the mother and son were found dead.

He told Ms. Mandel: "Dmytro on the bench with one leg cut off, on the floor beside the stove was his dead mother and on the stove Dmytro's cut-off leg that probably she was trying to cook."

Mr. Podopryhora said he and his wife escaped the famine by fleeing his village of Selevyna for the city, where he found a job in a mine.

Dr. Eugene Roslycky, president of the London branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee and chairman of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights Behind the Iron Curtain which organized the march, told the crowd the famine was "premeditated genocide" by the Soviet Union to "destroy the Ukrainian spirit of freedom."

He dismissed any natural explanation for the famine: "There was no natural calamity, no floods, no drought. The Ukrainian soil is one of the most fertile soils in the world. The Ukraine has been called the food basket of Europe. The Russians organized this most destructive genocide. The artificial famine was planned by Moscow to destroy the Ukrainian nation."

He said that the famine was the result of Stalin's two-pronged plan to facilitate collectivization and to break the nationalist resistance of the Ukrainian peasantry. To achieve his goal, Stalin ordered special militia to confiscate all food, grain and livestock from Ukrainian farmers, property which was later sold on the international market for hard currency, Dr. Roslycky said.

He noted the silence of the world then and today on the famine, and called on the Canadian government to "present the case of Ukrainian genocide" to the United Nations, the paper said.

Ron Annis, representing the city at the rally, said most Canadians are not aware of the tragedy and he commended the group for calling attention "to this holocaust."

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