Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART III

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April 1932
On April 2 Svoboda reported from Bucharest that a special commission composed of both Rumanian and Soviet representatives was beginning investigations of the shootings of Ukrainian refugees who crossed the Dnister into Bessarabia. Rumanians represented included the minister of the press, Bagnal, and the ambassador for Bessarabia, Christie. Svoboda reported that the commission representatives from Russia were Gen. Meneshchynsky of the Moscow secret police and Redel, head of the secret police in Ukraine. An official of the Rumanian government said there was a possibility that the League of Nations would be asked to take part in the investigations of this “masquerade staged by the Bolsheviks on the Dnister by shooting more than 1,000 refugees in a three-month period,” reported Svoboda. The April 9 headlines in Svoboda read: “Hungry peasants steal from and then burn a preserved foods factory; Soviet armies and secret police shoot at the hungry masses.”

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART II

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March 1932
On March 1, 1932, Svoboda carried news of the killings of Ukrainian peasants trying to escape to Rumania from Ukraine. The headline read: “Bolsheviks have once again shot Ukrainian peasants trying to cross the Dnister.” The secret police killed 200 men, women and children who were fleeing from Ukraine and Soviet government tyranny. The story, datelined Bucharest, explained that as the peasants approached the middle of the frozen river, the Communist police began shooting. When the shooting stopped, corpses lay strewn over the ice.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART I

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the harshest and cruelest tragedies of the Ukrainian people, the Great Famine of 1932-33. This column, which appears for the first time this week, hopes to shed some light on the development of events as reported to the Ukrainian community in the United States. Svoboda, The Ukrainian-language daily newspaper which has almost 40 years old then, carried any news it could get about Soviet grain procurements and the subsequent famine. In the 1983 New Year appeal of the Ukrainian National Association’s Supreme Executive Committee, it is stated: “In the years 1932, 1933 and 1934, issues of Svoboda provide perhaps the best documentation of the horrors of the Great Famine and unmasks the organizers and executors of this holocaust. Further, the need to inform the American public and the press about the tragedies in 1933 Ukraine was one of the main reasons for the establishment of The Ukrainian Weekly.”