Turning the pages back... July 31, 1983 (07/27/03)

Turning the pages back...

July 31, 1983

Twenty years ago, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Soviet-made Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933, The Ukrainian Weekly ran a column titled "The Great Famine." Relying on news from Svoboda and, later, The Ukrainian Weekly (which began publication in October 1933), the column's goal was to remind and inform Americans and Canadians of this terrible crime against humanity.

The entry titled "August 1-15, 1933," which appeared in this paper's on July 31, 1983, reported that on August 3, 1933, the news on the front page of Svoboda was that the Communists in the Soviet Union were struggling with the bureaucracy of the collective farm system. According to Moscow reports, there were plenty of Communist Party members who "directed offices" and did not work in the fields as they were supposed to, and some farms had more office workers than field workers. Therefore, the Communist Party had begun purging these "workers."

The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty reported that one collective farm had decreased its worker staff by one-third. He interviewed a peasant who stated that the bureaucracy was running the workers to the ground; he said he was glad to see Moscow cracking down on these "office workers." Duranty commented that the number of these Communist Party "parasites" kept increasing.

On August 4, a letter, written by a Kiev resident, who was originally from western Ukraine, appeared in Svoboda. It had been sent to the man's relatives in Lviv, who forwarded it to the Dilo newspaper, which shared it with Svoboda. Following are a few excerpts.

"Currently, my wife, my children and I are going absolutely hungry. We had some potatoes a while back, and things were bearable then, but now we eat potato skins with no sauce. I work, I have a job, but it brings me nothing. To live like the middle class, one has to bring home at least 1,500 karbovantsi a month; I get 200.

"... They don't allow you to go back home and they don't allow you to survive here. It looks like we'll have to die a death of starvation like those around us. I beg you, call the family together and send us a package - anything, even some lard, for I have forgotten the look and the taste of it."

The author of the letter described himself as "naked, barefoot and hungry." He noted that lice were everywhere, people were dying of typhoid, and swollen and hungry people were in the streets of the city.

On August 8, Svoboda printed news from Lviv about Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky's issuance of a statement calling on all Ukrainians in western Ukraine to help their brothers and sisters in need in eastern Ukraine. He said the population in eastern Ukraine was dying of hunger - a hunger imposed on the people by the Soviet regime. The regime, he said, was based on "injustice, deception, godlessness and laziness."

"The cannibalistic system of state capitalism has turned this recently rich land into a ruined state, and led its people to a death by starvation," he said.

Source: "The Great Famine; Part XXIV, August 1-15, 1933," The Ukrainian Weekly, July 31, 1983, Vol. LI, No. 31.

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