The 1932-1933 Famine-Genocide against the people of Ukraine (CONCLUSION) (11/14/04)

The 1932-1933 Famine-Genocide against the people of Ukraine

Dr. Eugene Fedorenko

CONCLUSION

The population of Ukraine, which was destroyed by hunger and terror was supplemented by migrants from Russia. It is known that in the summer of 1933 the destroyed Ukrainian villages in the Kharkiv, Poltava, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions were inhabited by Russian settlers. Pavel Postyshev himself, as special secretary "inspector of resettlement at the Council of Commissars of USSR" directed these actions - to resettle Russians into Ukraine after the catastrophe of 1933.

Narrating the fate of the dying Ukrainian village, where she worked, a Russian activist talked about the settlers from the Orlov Oblast who moved into the dead village. Here is what she said:

"I learned later that the wheat harvest of 1933 of this village was harvested by the army. However, the soldiers did not enter the dead village but camped outside. They were told about an 'epidemic plague.' They complained about the awful smell from there. Next year the settlers from the Orlov Oblast came, because Ukrainian soil was the black soil while the land in the Orlov area was unfertile.

"Women and children stayed near the station, while men were taken into the village. They were given pitchforks and commanded to enter the houses and pull out the bodies of the dead - the dead men and women lay, some on the floor and some in bed. The smell was awful in the homes. The men from Orlov stuffed their noses and covered then with kerchiefs while pulling the bodies that fell apart. Later, they buried these pieces beyond the village ... When they cleared the homes of the bodies, they brought women to clean the floors, and wash the walls. They cleaned everything, but the smell of death remained. Again they whitewashed the walls and the floors but it still stank. They could neither eat nor sleep in those houses, so they returned to the Orlov Oblast. But the land did not remain uninhabited for long - since it's very fertile," (Grossman, pp. 132-133).

In 1933 Moscow also began to massively colonize Ukrainian cities with a Russian population. Thus, the numbers of Russians rose dramatically - the increase was almost doubled (from 5.6 to 9.2 percent ) at the end of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, in the free world, witnesses still remain of this ethnocide in Ukraine. They talked about this national catastrophe as did foreigners, who saw the Famine, who were in Ukraine but were not blinded by Soviet propaganda. The Welshman Gareth Jones wrote in the paper London Express how he walked on foot in the destitute countryside of Ukraine and saw hundreds of dead in abandoned villages.

And, in the British Fortnightly Review, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: "During my recent visit of Ukraine I saw this battle that the Soviet government led against the peasants. The battlefield was devastated as in a real war, and the destruction continues. On one side - millions of peasants with bodies swollen with hunger. On the other side - soldiers, militia, agents of GPU that obey the commands of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They attacked Ukraine as locusts and robbed it of all food. They executed and removed thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages. They turned the most fertile land in the world into a melancholy desert."

These were not the only news stories about this terrible famine in Ukraine, there were more. But the free world was completely hypnotized by lies and propaganda and did not believe many Western correspondents who witnessed the genocide in Ukraine. The press corps headed by Walter Duranty, the chief of the Moscow bureau for The New York Times, and Louis Fisher, the Moscow correspondent of the Nation, were infamous for assisting the Soviet propaganda machine in hiding the truth about the Famine in Ukraine.

At that time, when the U.S. was going through the Depression, many liberals and left-wingers believed that the Communists were building "a new social order, a classless society," and critics of the totalitarian Communist rule were branded "fascists." Respected scholars, politicians and even heads of state believed the Soviet lies. It suffices to mention that French Premier Eduard Herriot, who witnessed several masquerades organized by the Communists in Ukraine, stated that there was no terrible Famine in Ukraine.

In 1933 France reviewed its "friendly relations" with Moscow and President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Soviet regime.

It was due to apathy and sometimes even to approval by the West which saw the flourishing of "democracy" in the Soviet Union - that the Kremlin was able to fulfill its brutal plan of genocide in Ukraine in 1933. The general carnage of the Ukrainian village followed the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Thousands of cultural activists who took part in the flourishing of national and political formation in 1917-1929 and in the continuation in the cultural and national revival of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church were liquidated, its hierarchy, clergy and thousands of faithful were tortured. The population of Ukraine was destroyed by the Famine and Communist terror, and this was complemented by Moscow's colonization of first the cities and then the villages to speed up the process of Russification.

The Ukrainian village, the vital strength of the nation, became the object of total destruction because Stalin said the "peasantry is the main army of the national movement." Maksym Sahaidak writes in his treatise "The Ethnocide of Ukrainians in USSR" (Ukrainskyi Vistnyk, No. 7-8, 1974) that "this was the main reason for the deadly Famine in Ukraine [in] 1932-1933." Such an "original" and "most just in the whole world" method of solving the national problem was invented by "father Stalin." Thus, it was that via ethnocide in 1933 Moscow came to implement the merger of nations and the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.

All attempts by the Soviet government, even with the help of allies beyond its borders, to obliterate or hide the satanic plan of ethnocide in 1933 did not succeed. After World War II many witnesses of the genocide escaped to the West. On the 20th anniversary of the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, publications of memoirs by direct witnesses who lived through the Famine or their relatives appeared. Specifically, "The Black Deeds of the Kremlin" appeared in two volumes and Dmytro Solovej published a documented study of genocide of 1933 titled "The Golgotha of Ukraine."

Later, other scholarly publications about the genocide appeared, among them works by foreigners. The famous scholar, author of "The Red Terror," Robert Conquest wrote a seminal work about the genocide in Ukraine called "The Harvest of Sorrow" in 1986. It was translated into Ukrainian and published in Ukraine in 1994. The scholarly works of the young historian Dr. James Mace deserve mention. Dr. Mace was staff director of the official U.S. government committee that investigated genocide in Ukraine. The result of the committee's work was three volumes of testimonies of witnesses and contemporaries of the genocide published in 1990.

In Ukraine, the work of Sahaidak, "Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the USSR" appeared in 1983. Also, in 1976, a memorandum of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was published in which it was stated that "from the first years of Stalin's dictatorship, Ukraine became an arena of genocide." Further, it states "that within three years, 1930-1933, we can count at least 10 million dead Ukrainians" who were killed deliberately - about one fourth of the Ukrainian nation. Despite the extent of ethnocide in Ukraine, this tragedy is relatively unknown in the world. Despite horrible testimonies of witnesses and those who survived the Great Famine, few in the world know that this genocide was a horrible tragedy which equals or surpasses the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.

The famous historian Dr. Conquest, who first wrote about this tragedy for the Western readers, states in his "Harvest of Sorrow" that the difference lies in that when the Germans lost the war, the "Germans were caught and they had to explain what they did. Stalin never told anyone that he wanted to starve anyone. He just took away food from people. All this was done under the cover of humanistic rhetoric," said Dr. Conquest.

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association says there are other reasons the world knows little about the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide. He blames the Western journalists who worked hard in Moscow, who knew what was happening in Ukraine but did not write about it. One such journalist was Walter Duranty, who served Stalin and hid the truth about the genocide. Duranty notified a British diplomat that in his estimation nearly 10 million Ukrainian people had died. However, in his articles in The New York Times he continued to deny any Famine in Ukraine and referred to Stalin as the "greatest statesman." He received the highest journalism award - the Pulitzer Prize.

On the basis of thousands of documents and testimonies, the reasons for and consequences of this tragedy in Ukraine were established. The genocide was a planned action of the Soviet regime against the Ukrainian people. Dmytro Tabachnyk, the vice prime minister for humanitarian affairs, spoke on behalf of the Ukrainian government during meetings in the Ukrainian Parliament on the 70th anniversary of the genocide. He said, "In these tragic years Ukraine lacked 10 to 25 percent of its population, losing 25,000 people a day, 1,000 an hour and 17 every minute."

We expect that the Verkhovna Rada will not only recognize the Famine in Ukraine as genocide but will ask the United Nations to recognize the Famine of 1932-1933 as genocide against the Ukrainian people.

Present and future generations should learn that the Famine was the genocide against the Ukrainian nation - this is a cruel truth that is beyond any doubt today.

Ukrainians must create a scholarly research institute and a museum of genocide and erect a memorial to the victims of this genocide. Duty to our nation demands this.

Dr. Eugene Fedorenko is chairman of the Educational Council of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.

PART I

CONCLUSION

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