Holodomor
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil:
God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Those who remain silent are responsible.”
Edith Stein
(St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross)
Fair is Fair.
In fairness, we don’t expect our nation’s present and past political leaders to know everything - despite the assertions of some that they do – or that they are always honest – despite their claims to be.
For example, in mid-January a renowned golfer claimed to have won a Florida tournament for which he missed the entire first day of competition – because he was 600+ miles away at a funeral in North Carolina!
It’s a nice prize if you can get it and several – now fired – NFL and college head coaches are trying to use the claim “Well, I won part of the last four games that my team lost” to get their jobs back.
Nonetheless, if you want to win “Stump the Politico Trivia,” try “What was The Holodomor?” Or, “What is a Potemkin village?”
In 1783, the Russian Empire annexed Crimea, which had been devastated by war, from the Ottoman Empire. [Yes, history repeated itself in 2014 under Vladimir Putin.] In 1787, as Empress Catherine II, her court and a number of ambassadors whom she was attempting to woo to the Russian side for another war against the Ottoman Empire prepared to visit the region, Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin supposedly constructed fake settlements to conceal the dilapidated conditions of Crimea. It was long – falsely – alleged that the governor constructed “mobile villages” along the banks of the Dnipro River complete with phony villagers and campfires to impress the tourist as their barges passed by. [Cue “It’s A Small World (After All).”]
In the simplest terms, Holodomor is “death inflicted by starvation.” And as some politicians begin to argue for cutting or severing support for the people of Ukraine, it is important – perhaps morally essential – to understand the Holodomor.
"In the case of the Holodomor, this was the first genocide
that was methodically planned out and perpetrated
by depriving the very people who were producers of food
of their nourishment (for survival).
What is especially horrific is that the withholding of food
was used as a weapon of genocide
and that it was done in a region
of the world known as the ‘breadbasket of Europe.’”
Prof. Andrea Graziosi, University of Naples
After the fall of the Russian monarchy (February 1917) and the end of World War I (November 11, 1918), Ukraine declared itself the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic in January 1918 and fought a desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, war for independence against the (Russian) Bolshevik Red Army (1918-1921). By 1922, Ukraine was forced into the USSR – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
“UKRAINE, ‘the breadbasket of Europe’ is a land famous
for its fertile black earth and its golden wheat.
Yet, only forty years ago seven million Ukrainians starved to death
although no natural catastrophe had visited the land.
Forty years ago the people starved
while the Soviet Union exported butter and grain.
While Moscow banqueted, Ukraine hungered.”
Andrew Gregorovich (1935-2022)
The following year, Soviet leaders initiated measures to destroy every element of Ukrainian national identity - intellectual and cultural and to prevent a “Ukrainian national counterrevolution.”
"I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground against the Tsar
and then I fought in the civil war.
Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages
with machine-guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately
into crowds of peasants?
Oh no, no!"
A secret police colonel quoted by author Isaac Deutscher
Stalin initiated repression on a massive scale, including widespread arrests and imprisonments. Intellectuals and church leaders who had supported pro-Ukrainian policies were executeds by Stalin’s regime and a “First Five-Year Plan,” which included the collectivization of agriculture, was initiated. The new plan, designed to fund the USSR’s transformation into an industrial power, was resisted by the majority of rural Ukrainians, who were independent small-scale or subsistence farmers and forced to surrender their land, livestock and farming tools and were ruthlessly suppressed by the Russian-backed secret police and the Red Army.
Wealthy and successful farmers were labeled “kulaks” – “fists” – and enemies of the state, marked for elimination and stripped of their lands.
Ultimately, the destruction of centuries-old Ukrainian rural communities and their way of life set the stage for terror by hunger – the Holodomor.
“He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger
is immoral. Why?
Because anger looks to the good of justice.
And if you can live amid injustice without anger,
you are immoral as well as unjust.”
Thomas Aquinas
As part of his “plan,” Stalin established unrealistic grain procurement quotas, accompanied by other Draconian measures intended to wipe out significant elements of the Ukrainian nation. The “Five Stalks of Grain” decree in August 1932 declared that anyone, even a child, caught taking any produce from a collective field could be shot or imprisoned for stealing “socialist property.” It has been reported that, at the beginning of 1933, about 54,645 people were tried and sentence and 2,000 of these were executed.
"... I'm not sure that you understand what has been happening.
A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime.
It's a struggle to the death. This year (1933) was a test of our strength
and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here.
It has cost millions of lives,
but the collective farm system is here to stay.
We've won the war."
Mendel Hatayevich
Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party in Ukraine
In January 1933, Stalin sealed the borders of Ukraine, establishing a system of internal passports designed to restrict the movement of farmers; it also applied to the Kuban region of Russia, which borders Ukraine and in which Ukrainians made up 67 percent of the population. During the period of “the Great Famine,” more than one-third of Ukrainian villages were “blacklisted” by Stalin’s government for failing to meet their quotas of grain shipped to Russia and groups of “activists” organized by the Communist party were dispatched to the countryside to enforce Russian edicts.
“The work of these special ‘commissions” and ‘brigades’ was marked by the utmost severity. They entered villages and made the most thorough searches of the houses and barns of every peasant. They dug up the earth and broke into the walls of buildings and stoves in which the peasants tried to hide their last handfuls of food.”
Clarence Augustus Manning (1893-1972)
Chairman of the Department of Slavic Studies, Columbia University
In June 1933, at the height of the Holodomor, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 per day. [By comparison, February 4, 2021 saw the highest number of American COVID-19 deaths in a single day – 5,077.] A 2015 study by a team of demographers from the Ukrainian Institute of Demographic and Social Studies and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill put the number of Ukrainian deaths during the 1932-1933 Holodomor at around 3.9 million. By some studies the number of famine deaths during the Holodomor accounted for 13.3 percent off the entire Ukrainian population; the rate was 19 percent in Kyiv (Kiev) and 29 percent in the area around Kharkiv.
Yet, the Soviet state extracted 4.27 million tons of Ukrainian grain in 1931 – enough to feed at least 12 million people for an entire year; in January 1933 the USSR had enough grain reserves to feed over 10 million people. At the same time, Moscow refused and denounced offers of foreign aid.
Famine and death by starvation were critical elements of Soviet policy to subjugate Ukraine.
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), an expert in international criminal law, who established the word “genocide,” called the Holodomor “the classic example of Soviet genocide.” Lemkin identified four integral components in the genocidal process in Ukraine:
The decimation of the Ukrainian national elites, including political and cultural leaders,
The destruction of the Ukrainian Autocephalous (independent) Orthodox Church – including hierarchy, clergy, institutions and buildings,
The starvation of the Ukrainian farming population,
The replacement of that farming population with non-Ukrainians from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
During the period of Russian/Soviet/Communist Party control of Ukraine it was impossible/dangerous to speak of the Holodomor and, only shortly before Ukraine won its independence in 1991, information was only available from the eyewitness testimony of refugees who had escaped from the Soviet Union after World War II.
“The creative engine of a people was destroyed, slowing down and distorting nation-building for decades. The Soviet regime prevented families and individuals from processing both personal and national grief. For more than 50 years, Ukraine could not address this trauma openly.”
Irena Chalupa
Director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Libertad Ukrainian Service
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.
The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread
winding its way through our political and cultural life,
nurtured by the false notion that democracy
means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Isaac Asimov
Among the consequences of the Holodomor that Putin uses to justify his February 14, 2022 invasion of Ukraine: Stalin and his successors attempted to promote a new Soviet identity and forced Ukrainians to use the Russian language. While it is true that many 2022-2023 Ukrainians speak Russian, it a language imposed by starvation and death. That’s an important reality when American politicos use the “So many people in Ukraine speak Russian” justification for cutting or eliminating financial and other aid to Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion.
KHAI ZHIVE UKRAINE!
LONG LIVE UKRAINE!