Child Victim of Famine
Holodomor Facts and History:
The following are a chronology of events that led to the “Holodomor”
1917
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin take power in Russia.
1922
The Soviet Union is formed with Ukraine becoming one of the republics.
1924
After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin, one of the worst dictators in human history ascends to power.
1928
Stalin introduces a program of agricultural collectivization that forces peasants/farmers to combine their land and livestock into collective farms. Stalin decides that collective farms would not only feed the industrial workers in the cities but would also provide a substantial amount of grain to be sold abroad, with the money used to finance his industrialization plans.
1929
A policy of enforcement is applied, using regular troops and secret police to confiscate lands and livestock. Many Ukrainian peasants/farmers, known for their independence, still refuse to join the collective farms. Stalin decides to “liquidate them as a class”.
1930
Hundreds of thousands are expropriated, dragged from their homes, packed into freight trains, and shipped to Siberia where they are left, often without food or shelter. In the end, 1,000,000 Ukrainian peasants are seized and more than 850,000 deported to the frozen tundras of Siberia, where many perished.
1932
The Soviet government increased Ukraine's production quotas by 44%, ensuring that they could not be met. Starvation becomes widespread.
1933
Ukrainians are dying at the rate of 25,000 a day. In the end, up to 10 million starve to death.
Corpses of Famine Victims on the streets.
(Kharkiv, Ukraine)
Uncovering the Truth:
“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”
(as reported by the New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer-prize winner Walter Duranty)
Denial of the famine by Soviet authorities was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, like Walter Duranty. It was the official policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of a famine and thus to refuse any outside assistance. Anyone claiming that there was in fact a famine was accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. Inside the Soviet Union, a person could be arrested for even using the word ‘famine’ or ‘hunger’ or ‘starvation’ in a sentence.
Outside the Soviet Union, governments of the West adopted a passive attitude toward the famine, although most of them had become aware of the true suffering in Ukraine through confidential diplomatic channels.
In November 1933, the United States, under its new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, even chose to formally recognized Stalin’s Communist government and also negotiated a sweeping new trade agreement. The following year, the pattern of denial in the West culminated with the admission of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations. Stalin’s Five Year Plan for the modernization of the Soviet Union depended largely on the purchase of massive amounts of manufactured goods and technology from Western nations. Those nations were unwilling to disrupt lucrative trade agreements with the Soviet Union in order to pursue the matter of the famine.
It was kept out of official history until 1991, when the country of 47 million finally won its independence.
Today it is recognized as genocide by less than two dozen countries out of 196. The famine is now the focus of books, exhibitions and documentaries marking the 75th anniversary of the tragedy.
Ukraine’s government is asking the United Nations to recognize the disaster as an act of genocide, worsening already frosty relations with Russia, which says the famine resulted from drought. Russian nationalists vandalized an exhibit at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in November. While the Russian government didn’t condone the attack, it called Ukraine’s depiction of the famine a “one-sided falsification of history.’’
In recent years Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko had ordered the release of old KGB records on the Famine.
With this information it has become very apparent that this Famine was a deliberate act of Genocide, a method to ethnically cleanse Ukrainians from the territories of Ukraine and parts of Russia. At first only several thousand documents were released. Recently another batch of 25,000 documents is being declassified.
As more documents are released this event in Ukrainian history has taken on a very ominous tone.
On November 28th 2006, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) had passed a decree defining the Holodomor as a deliberate Act of Genocide.