Manitoba takes Stalin off the shelves (02/20/05)

Manitoba takes Stalin off the shelves

CALGARY - Responding to complaints from local Winnipeg residents, taken up by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission (MLCC) on February 9 announced that it would immediately begin removing Crimean wines bearing an image of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin from its shelves.

The wines, 1998 vintage port and sherry, depict a meeting of "The Big Three" - Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill - at Yalta, on Ukraine's Crimean coastline, in February 1945. At that meeting the fate of post-war Europe was decided and an infamous decision was made to forcibly repatriate "Soviet citizens" to the USSR, which resulted in the execution of many of those unfortunates and the internment of millions in the gulag. The 60th anniversary of the Yalta Agreement is February 11.

Commenting on the MLCC's move, UCCLA's director of research, Dr Lubomyr Luciuk, said: "This is very good news, and we commend the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission for acting promptly and removing these offensively labeled wines from their shelves. No mass murderer's mug should grace a wine label. We hope that nothing like this will ever happen again and although we are not aware of who the importers of these wines are, we suggest they alert the winery about how unconscionable it was to commemorate a conference that resulted in the enslavement or extermination of many innocent men, women and children.

"Stalin should not be glorified or exalted. It's time we came to recognize that the Stalinist dictatorship was responsible for more suffering than any other regime in 20th century Europe. We hallow the memory of those many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who survived the genocidal Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, then found themselves in Western Europe at war's end and probably thought themselves safe, only to then be forced back to the USSR at bayonet point, to a horrid fate.

"That is what happened as a consequence of the Yalta Agreement, the mass enslavement of witnesses to genocide, with the West's complicity. We cannot tolerate that being ignored or diminished by the use of Stalin's image on a wine label for sale in Canada. Ukrainians have just recently, with their Orange Revolution, rejected the legacy of Communism. We don't want Stalin exalted here in Canada, even if only on a wine label."

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