Turning the pages back... October 6, 1933 (10/01/06)

Turning the pages back...

October 6, 1933

October 6 will mark the 73rd anniversary of the first issue of the English-language newspaper The Ukrainian Weekly. That inaugural issue carried a report about the Ukrainian Holodomor and the deliberate starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviets.

Mass meetings were being held by Ukrainians throughout the United States and Canada to protest the attempts by the Soviets to starve the Ukrainian population and to silence Ukraine's struggle for freedom.

The article went on to report that since the overthrow of the Ukrainian National Republic 15 years prior, thousands of Ukrainians had been terrorized by the Bolshevik regime. Many had been shot or sent to labor camps in Siberia.

It was after these attempts to subdue the Ukrainian people that the Soviets decided to systematically starve to death over 5 million Ukrainians over the past year, The Weekly reported. To cover up their crime, the Soviets declared that poor crops were to blame for the famine. However, being that Ukraine has one of the most fertile lands on earth and is home to the famed "chornozem," it seemed to any learned person that this was a poorly concocted ruse.

According to eyewitness accounts, there was nothing to eat - even rodents had been consumed. People died in their tracks and were left to rot.

Notable people at the time including Dr. Ewald Amende, secretary of the Congress of National Minorities in Bern, Switzerland, called the Famine the "shame of the 20th century." Pope Pius XI expressed deep sympathy and offered to help. Cardinal Innitzer, archbishop of Vienna, issued a protest on August 19 against the Bolshevik actions and appealed for help from the International Red Cross. Appeals were made for the establishment of a Red Cross base in Ukraine, but to no avail, as the Soviets would not permit it. Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, along with archbishops and bishops, issued a protest against this persecution of unprecedented and inhuman character.

The article included the names of correspondents who were forbidden to enter Ukraine. But the article underscored that Bolshevik sympathizers like Walter Duranty of The New York Times had easy access and noted that he admitted that the atrocities in Ukraine had decimated the population.

The Weekly reported that further appeals were made by Ukrainian Americans to the U.S. government to send a special mission to Ukraine to investigate the conditions and for the U.S. government not to recognize the Communist dictatorship that was responsible for the tyrannical and oppressive situation.

Source: "Ukrainians protest deliberate starvation of Ukraine by the Bolsheviks," The Ukrainian Weekly, October 6, 1933.

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