Posted on 03/25/2014 9:48:05 PM PDT by No One Special
Ukraine, a fertile provider of food, almost died 80 years ago – of starvation. In the village of Targan, 120 kilometres south of the Ukrainian capital Kiev [Kyiv], half the people died from hunger in 1932-1933.
Oleksandra Ovdiyuk, 92 today, survived what Ukrainians call the “Hunger-extermination” – not insufficient food, but deliberate policy imposed by the Soviet dictator Stalin.
She said: “The Bolsheviks had special brigades of seven men that would sweep through the villages in wagons and confiscate any hidden beans, grain or other food from the farmers’ homes.”
Opinion has remained divided for many decades whether the mass death was the result of a deliberate drive to kill an entire people, because Ukrainian nationalism was on the rise, or the unintentional effect of misguided mismanagement by Stalin in his quest to feed rapid industrialisation elsewhere. Millions fell, mostly in rural Ukraine. Cannibalism was documented.
Survivor Olena Goncharuk felt the terror: “We were afraid to go out in the village, because people were starving and they hunted children. My neighbour had a daughter, who disappeared. We went to her house. The head was separated from the body, and the body was cooking in the oven.”
Stalin’s forces in 1932-33 requisitioned food stores, deported peasants or forbade them from leaving the land, carried out mass executions and put people in prison.
Olena Goncharuk relives the horror: “There was a man who went into a woman’s house to take the body away. But she was still alive. She asked the man: ‘Don’t take me, I’m still breathing.’ And he said: ‘One way or another you are going to die, and I don’t want to have to come back for you tomorrow!’”
Cherished sites today belie the great nameless burials. Stalin’s reign of terror would claim many victims in other terrible actions too, aimed at consolidating power – his purges, for example. And information about death tolls and nationalities of who died where and how – by firing squad or famine – was guarded, repressed, denied or distorted with propaganda pseudo-justification.
Historian Volodymyr Serhiychuk told us: “There was famine in other USSR regions, in Kazakhstan, for instance, but Kazakhs could go and seek food in neighbouring Russian regions, or in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Ukrainians, in contrast, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, couldn’t go to Belarus or Russia, because the borders were closed and there were no railway tickets for them.
“Ukrainian farmers didn’t want to join collective farms, they didn’t want to give the Bolsheviks their produce. That’s why the Bolsheviks killed them with famine.”
Then more millions were killed in World War Two. It was only many years later that light could be shed on the Holodomor. After independence in 1991, a law in Ukraine made it a criminal offence to deny that the Holodomor was pre-meditated genocide.
Iryna Gibert, from euronews headquarters in Lyon, spoke about this with André Liebich, a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
He is a historian whose speciality is the countries of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.
euronews: “Ukrainian law defines the Holodomor as a genocide against the people of Ukraine. More than 20 countries recognise this. But many people consider that the term ‘genocide’ does not say enough. Why is this?”
André Liebich: “It is in fact a poorly chosen term. When we think ‘genocide’, and certainly in the context of the 1930s, we think foremost of the Holocaust. The difference is that the Holodomor did not only affect the Ukrainian people but also other peoples within Ukraine and outside it: in Kazakhstan and in Russia. In addition, the Holocaust was a campaign whose intention was to exterminate a people while the Holodomor was not conceived to eradicate the Ukrainian people, even though there were undeniably millions of victims. It was the result of a brutal, inhumane policy led by Stalin, who didn’t care how many died because of him. But his first intention wasn’t to eliminate the Ukrainians but rather to realise his programme, whatever the cost, even if it meant millions of peasant victims especially – peasants who often were Ukrainians.”
euronews: “The criminal code in Ukraine provides for prosecution for public denial of the Holodomor. Doesn’t that stifle debate on the subject?”
Liebich: “Absolutely. It is not up to the state to decree what is true, or to put a stop to discussion. The fact that the Holodomor is contested by some people only makes the debate more real and necessary. It is by showing what happened and discussing the number of victims that we manage to establish the truth. It’s not for the state to legislate what is true and not true, and to stop discussion.”
euronews: “The reality is millions of individual deaths – even if the numbers vary. Isn’t it fair to count this tragedy on the scale of a crime against humanity, as is the case for the Holocaust?”
Liebich: “Entirely so: as a crime against humanity – not as a crime against a particular people. If we conceive of the Holodomor as a crime that affected millions of individuals across the former
USSR, we have the foundation for a common commemoration, a reconciliation between the Russians and the Ukrainians and other peoples. If we portray the Holodomor as exclusive, as a purely Ukrainian tragedy targeting only them, we only create conflicts with others who were also victims of that tragedy.”
euronews: “Ukraine is often criticised for competitively inflating the death toll. What’s your opinion on that?”
Liebich: “There is, effectively, an overstating of the number of victims which doesn’t help anyone. The lowest we can give for the Holodomor is 2,000,000. If we add those who died of illness, of famine-induced weakness, add the birth deficit, we get a figure of several million – but we don’t get the 10,000,000 that we sometimes hear, and maybe not even the 6,000,000 that is the standard figure for the Holocaust, to which some seek to compare the Holodomor.”
I wonder if Pooty has an official position on the Holodomor?
Bump
Interesting timing. The media had NO PROBLEM keeping this story, essentially, under wraps for DECADES as it made a Communist (Stalin) look bad. But now that they’re mad at Russia, they finally get around to doing a story on it. NEVER mentioned when I went to public school...in fact, nothing bad about the Soviet Union was EVER mentioned, even though they were the biggest threat to my existence (during the Cold War).
(and yes, I’ve read books on this subject...I know it’s out there, but how many Americans know it)
Lessons learned from Tuketu’s post:
1. The “We’re entitled to your stuff” crowd is, was, & will always be with us. Whenever you see the word “deprived”, you know somebody is pissed you have something they don’t, and will use fed.gov to steal it.
2. The excuses remain the same: hard-working Americans, the chilluns’, the troopies, patriotism (which I guess covers all the freeloaders, too). Fair Share Crowd PING applies here.
3. That ensuring your own survial could be akin to, or worse than profiteering.
4. Caching and OPSEC should be higher on everyone’s priority lists.
5. It always seems to boil down to individual -vs- collective, so plan accordingly and see #4.
JMO,
LB
They had just come out of a depression and drought. They learned the value of two cellars. The food was stuff they had canned several years before.
***how many GIs were deprived of food? ***
What is really interesting is the SAME MAN who confiscated the home canned food was the same government agent who, ten years earlier, had bought up all the cattle he could get, dug a hole and shot them, then buried them.
The New York Times has been the enemy of humanity for as long as it has existed.
None. We prosecuted WWII with no starvation amongst our troops.
*** Our men were at war and we were deprived.***
No they weren’t. The men going into landing craft were fed steak before, and there was enough meat on hand that one sailor grabbed a big raw roast from the kitchen and tried to catch a shark.
The people back home were trying to rebuild their herds after the government slaughtered and buried thousands of cattle years before, and all farmers tried to keep two years supply in case of a crop failure.
One of my favorite cartoons from WWII is by Bill Mauldin. Russians with American supplies are trying to figure what we sent them by looking in a Russian/American dictionary for words like...SPAM....MAZOLA.
And let's not forget the 1915-1918 Armenian Genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Muslim Turks, without worldwide outrage. I've seen articles speculating that this showed Stalin and Hitler that they could do something similar without consequence.
In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled Ukraine’s enduring Holodomor horror, when millions starved in the 1930s, No One Special wrote: (Concerning my reference to the use of the word kulak) Yes, it means fist but I heard it was in reference to the closed fist of someone who would not share their produce
The way I saw it referenced was a fist wrapped around the throats. BTW Websters New World Dictionary 1979 edition shows it as Russian of Estonian orig) p416)
That dictionary also describes it as a “well to do farmer” not as a derogatory reference which is a revisionist remnant of the Durante NYT influence
Yes. He doesn’t want to hear about it. Ukraine held a commemoration of it and the Ruskies went ape
You cite ONE possible example but why were WE ON RATIONS? Still a blackmarket deal IMHO
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