Quotable notes (04/30/00)

Quotable notes

Honorable senators, some 67 years ago, a terrible and very sad event changed the lives of the Ukrainian population forever. It was in 1932 and 1933 that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in an effort to force millions of independent Ukrainian farmers into collectivized Soviet agriculture, adopted, in his demonical ways, several tactics to install a political famine.

Measures were adopted such as raising Ukraine's grain procurement quotas by 44 percent to create a drastic grain shortage, resulting in the inability of Ukrainian peasants to feed themselves; implementing an international passport system to restrict movements of Ukrainians traveling in search of food; killing anyone caught taking or hiding grain from a collective farm; persecuting thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers and leaders; and attacking, with tanks and artillery, villages inhabited by defenseless farmers. Those are just a few of the horrible political measures taken by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his henchman Lazar Kaganovich to break Ukraine's will to resist.

Even though considerable efforts were made to hide or ignore the atrocities of this political famine, factual evidence has been gathered by recognized scholars to estimate the number of victims of the genocide at about 10 million people. Regrettably, the Western world, during the years of the Soviet Union, did not acknowledge or understand the magnitude of the genocide. With the acknowledgment of the present leadership in the Kremlin of this atrocity, it is an event in history that must be understood and commemorated.

This horror is poignantly described in a passage from a book entitled "I Chose Freedom" by Victor Kravchenko, a Communist agent who was assigned to safeguard the new harvest. It reads as follows:

"What I saw that morning was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back ... Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital, around conference and banquet tables. There was not even the consolation of inevitability to relieve the horror."

I know that senators in this chamber actively support the cause of human rights and the dignity and worth of all human beings. I therefore encourage you, honorable senators, to join the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Group to commemorate the victims of the Ukrainian famine genocide of 1932-1933.

- Sen. A. Raynell Andreychuk addressing Canada's Senate on November 23, 1999, regarding the policy of former Soviet Union on forcing Ukrainian farmers into agricultural collectives.

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