As our readers are fully aware, this year marks the beginning of observances of the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 that killed millions in Ukraine – 4 million, according to some sources; 7 million to 10 million, according to others. We will never know the exact number because this genocide organized by Joseph Stalin and his regime was not meant to become known. Contemporaneous reports of hunger in Soviet-controlled Ukraine were denied, and willing sycophants supported those denials. For decades, the Holodomor was a forbidden topic in the USSR. According to historian and Holodomor researcher Stanislav Kulchytsky (writing in 2005), “The Stalinist taboo on mentioning the Famine was broken only after the Ukrainian diaspora succeeded in persuading the U.S. Congress to create a temporary commission to investigate the events of 1932-1933 in Ukraine.” The U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, whose staff director was the late James Mace, in its final report to Congress in 1988 concluded that the Holodomor was genocide.
That determination was actually made much earlier by none other than the coiner of the term “genocide.” Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, first used the term in 1944 in his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” and he championed adoption of the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. In 1953 Lemkin wrote an essay titled “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine.” According to Ukrainian Canadian scholar Dr. Roman Serbyn, the essay seems to be the text for Lemkin’s address on September 20, 1953, at the Ukrainian Famine commemoration in New York.
As reported on the front page of this newspaper’s issue dated September 26, 1953, Lemkin spoke at a rally at the Manhattan Center that was held immediately after a protest march marking the Famine’s 20th anniversary. Some 15,000 people participated in the march; a capacity audience of 5,000 attended the rally. The Weekly reported that Lemkin “reviewed in a moving fashion the fate of the millions of Ukrainians before and since the 1932-1933 [Famine] who died victims to the Soviet Russian plans to exterminate as many of them as possible in order to break the heroic Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet Russian rule and occupation, and Communism.”
Lemkin began his remarks with these words: “What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.” As Dr. Serbyn pointed out in 2009, in an introductory note to Lemkin’s essay/speech, “He rightly extends the discussion of Ukrainian genocide beyond the peasants starving in 1932-1933, and speaks about the destruction of the intelligentsia and the Church, the ‘brain’ and the ‘soul’ of the nation. He puts emphasis on the preservation and development of culture, beliefs and common ideas, which make Ukraine ‘a nation rather than a mass of people.’ ”
Lemkin pointed out: “Ukraine is highly susceptible to racial murder by select parts and so the Communist tactics there have not followed the pattern taken by the German attacks against the Jews. The nation is too populous to be exterminated completely with any efficiency. However, its leadership, religious, intellectual, political, its select and determining parts, are quite small and therefore easily eliminated, and so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced labor, exile and starvation.”
He detailed a three-pronged attack on the Ukrainian nation: first on “the intelligentsia, the national brain, so as to paralyze the rest of the body”; then against “the churches, priests and hierarchy, the soul of Ukraine”; and then on “the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine.” The weapon used against the latter, Lemkin continued, “is perhaps the most terrible of all – starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5 million Ukrainians starved to death…” And then there was a “fourth step,” he said, that “consisted in the fragmentation of the Ukrainian people at once by the addition to the Ukraine of foreign peoples and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians throughout Eastern Europe. In this way, ethnic unity would be destroyed and nationalities mixed. …”
Lemkin’s essay went on to detail Soviet atrocities of the later 1930s and 1940s in Ukraine. “This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation. …Soviet national unity is being created, not by any union of ideas and of cultures, but by the complete destruction of all cultures and of all ideas save one – the Soviet,” he concluded.
Today, with Soviet-era archives being accessible to researchers in Ukraine, Lemkin’s cogent analysis has been confirmed and substantiated.