Dear Friends!
In 1932-33 there was a famine in the USSR. Twenty years later Raphael
Lemkin, a Polish-American-Jewish lawyer,
one of the draftsman of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, offered the following remarks in a paper
which he entitled “Soviet Genocide in the
Ukraine”:
“What I
want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide… the
destruction of the Ukrainian nation… the Soviet plan was aimed at 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 this body is perhaps the
most terrible of all – starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000 Ukrainians
starved to death…”
In order to better understand the enormity of this Genocide, consider
that in the 1926 Soviet census there were 31 million Ukrainians in the
USSR. The 1937 census only recently
revealed because Stalin had the results expunged, showed only 26 million
Ukrainians. Thus a 5 million decrease over 11 years. The other populations in
the USSR grew by 17% over that period of time. Were Ukrainians permitted to
grow at a similar rate, there should have been 36 million in 1937, a
discrepancy of 10 million which of course includes unborn children of the
victims, thus 7-8 million would be a reasonable estimate of actual victims.
Russians in that period increased by 23%. To better understand the gravity of
this Soviet crime, consider that the number of victims included some 3 million
children.
These statistics and
other recently unearthed Soviet documents bear out that the famine was aimed at
the Ukrainian nationality. Some scholars, in particular Soviet apologists, have argued that the
famine occurred in Russia as well. This is ironically accurate in part. The famine ravaged the Kuban region of Russia which was
ethnographically Ukrainian territory and heavily concentrated by Ukrainians and
was visible in other areas of Russia mostly where those fleeing from Ukraine
and Kuban had fled. In fact, on January 22, 1933 at the height of the Famine,
Josef Stalin, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist
Party and Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of Commissars of the USSR
issued a Directive from Moscow directing a police action to prohibit the
massive departure of farmers from Ukraine and the Kuban region. No other areas
of the USSR were singled out prohibiting departure “in search of bread.”
The intent of the
forced starvation of Ukrainian peasant, the “mens rea” in criminal terminology
was set forth in an August 9, 1932 letter fro Stalin to his main henchman in
Ukraine Lazar Kaganovich in which Stalin bemoaned the existence of Ukrainian
nationalists even in Communist party ranks and voiced his intent to make an
example of Ukraine.
Let me share with
you what this Famine was like through several rather graphic, yet very real
descriptions:
The Italian Consul
in Kharkiv, the then capital of the Ukrainian SSR painted the following picture
in a report which he sent to his government:
“A week ago, a
special service was set up to protect children who have been abandoned. Along
with the peasants who flock to the towns because there is no hope of survival
in the countryside, there are also children who are simply brought here and
abandoned by their parents, who then return to their village to die. Their hope
is someone in their town will be able to look after their children…. So for a
week now the town has been patrolled by…attendants in white uniforms who
collect the children and take them to the nearest police station… around
midnight they are all transported in trucks to the freight station… That’s
where all the children who are found in stations and on trains, the peasant
families, the old people and all the peasants
who have been picked up during the day are gathered together… A medical
team does a sort of selection process… anyone who is not yet swollen up and
still has a chance of survival is directed to…buildings, where a constant
population of about 8,000 lies dying on
straw beds… Most of them are children. People who are already starting to swell
up are moved out in good trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town so
that they can die out of sight. When
they arrive at their destination, huge ditches are dug, and the dead are
carried out of the wagons.”
William Chamberlain, the Moscow correspondent of the
Christian Science Monitor wrote in 1933:
“Quite by chance the last village we visited
was at once the most terrible and the most dramatic. It is called Cherkass, and
it lies about seven or eight miles to the south of Byelaya Tserkov, a Ukrainian
town south-west of Kiev. Here the normal mortality rate…had been far exceeded.
On the road to the village, former icons with the face of Christ had been
removed, but the crown of thorns had been allowed to remain – an appropriate
symbol for what the village had experienced. Coming into the village, we found
one deserted house after another, with window panes fallen in, crops growing
mixed with weeds in gardens with no one to harvest them. A boy in the dusty
village called the death-roll among families he knew…”There was Anton
Samchenko, who died with his wife and sister, three children were left. With
Nikita Samchenko’s family, the father and Mikola and two other children died,
five children were left. Then Grigory Samchenko died with his son Petro, a wife
and daughter are left. And Gerasim Samchenko died with four of his children,
only the wife is still living. And Sidor Odnorog died with his wife and two
daughters, one girl is left. Gura Odnorog died with his wife and three
children, one girl is still alive…”
A subsequent
assessment of this historical event with an attempt to grasp the enormity of
it, appeared in “Time “magazine in 1982.
The respected journalist Lance Morrow wrote:
“This is the
fiftieth anniversary of the enforced famine, engineered by Stalin, in which
some 8-10 million Ukrainians and Cossacks perished. Their extermination was a
matter of state policy, just as the ovens of Dachau were a mater of state
policy. The Ukrainian kulaks died… for the convenience of the state, to help
with the organization of the new order of things…they died and yet the grass
has grown over the world’s memory of their murder. Why? The numbers of the dead
would surely qualify that entry (one thinks mordantly), for some genocidal hall
of fame…”
The United States
Congress issued its findings in 1988
after years of research:
“The Genocide
Convention defines genocide as one or more specified actions committed with
intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group wholly or
partially as such…One or more of the actions specified in the Genocide
Convention was taken against the Ukrainians in order to destroy a substantial
part of the Ukrainian people…Overwhelming evidence indicates that Stalin was
warned of impending famine in Ukraine and pressed for measures that could only
ensure its occurrence and exacerbate its effects. Such policies not only came
into conflict with his response to food supply difficulties elsewhere in the
preceding year, but some of them were implemented with greater vigor in
ethnically Ukrainian areas than elsewhere and were utilized in order to
eliminate any manifestation of Ukrainian national self assertion.”
Even six former
communists wrote in the French seminal publication on the subject entitled “The
Black Book of Communism”:
“Should one see this
famine as a “genocide of the Ukrainian people,” as a number of Ukrainian
historians and researchers do today? It is undeniable that the Ukrainian
peasants were the principal victims in the famine of 1932-33, and that this
“assault” was preceded in 1929 by several offensives against the Ukrainian
intelligentsia, who were accused of “nationalist deviations… ”
Fellow Americans, let us remember the
victims, perhaps, especially those innocent three million children. We appeal
to all nations, governments and international organizations to share our pain
and offer solace by recognizing the Famine of 1932-33 as Genocide of the
Ukrainian people. We ask you to teach
your children and grandchildren about this simultaneously tragic and
heinous page of history. Today, we kneel
in prayer and ask God to protect us all from evil and grant us peace. For our
departed brethren, we ask God to give
them rest. At the same time we vow to be vigilant lest today’s or future
generations suffer a similar fate.
Allow me to disturb your peace one last time.
American journalist (Thomas Walker) in 1933 spoke with a runaway nine year-old
in Kyiv well over one hundred miles from the runaway’s home:
“-Where do you
live? Nowhere!
-Where are your
parents? They died.
-Where did they
die? In Chernihiv.
-How? There was nothing to eat.
-Where did you
spend the night? In an empty wagon
beyond the fence.
-Do you want to
become a Communist? No, I just want to die and be with my mom.”
Today, 80 years
later let us remember that simple Ukrainian girl. She died an excruciatingly
painful death. She starved. Her only
solace was that she would be with her mother.
