THE FAMINE GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE: A Teacher's Guide

The famine began in the fall of 1932 and lasted until the summer of 1933, during which as many as 10 million Ukrainians living in the Soviet Union perished of starvation. They died during a famine, engineered by the Soviet government, which had three major objectives in that part of its expanding empire:

Just as the Holocaust is not simply a "Jewish issue," but has universal implications, the Famine Genocide in Ukraine is more than a "Ukrainian issue". The Holocaust is an example of genocide perpetrated by a racist, fascist regime which had as its avowed purpose the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Ukrainian Famine is an example of genocide perpetrated by a communist regime which, while calling itself internationalist, was contaminated by Soviet chauvinism. For Soviet communists, Ukrainian ethno-cultural self-assertion was a threat both to the primacy of Russian culture and to the centralization of all authority in the hands of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Although this genocide is one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against a single nation, the West, to this very day, is hardly aware of it ever taking place. This is so for two reasons: 1) there still exists a general dearth of public awareness regarding the Soviet Union, its history, its peoples, and the way the government operated; 2) the Famine Genocide in Ukraine was denied by Soviet officials and covered up by influential correspondents from the West. If we are ever to comprehend genocide in all of its dimensions, it is imperative that this sordid chapter in the history of man's inhumanity to man be brought to light.

RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION

Russian history began with the founding of Moscow in 1147. By 1300, Moscow was the seat of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, a state of some 18,500 square miles. Ruled by a series of ambitious granddukes, Muscovy began expanding its borders in all directions, conquering a variety of ethnically different peoples in the process. By 1500, Muscovy, whose people were called Muscovites, included an area of some 772,000 square miles.

Muscovy continued to conquer and subjugate other peoples in much the same way that the ancient Romans had done. By 1700, Muscovy was an empire that encompassed an area of 5,600,000 square miles. Muscovy's rulers began to call themselves "czars", the Russian word for caesar or emperor. Czar Peter I changed the name of the empire from Muscovy to "Russia" to convince the world that his empire was heir to the ancient Rus' empire which once included large sections of Ukraine, Belarus and Muscovy, and a small part of Poland.

Russia's rulers never hesitated in their efforts to expand their empire. They fought all of their neighbors in an effort to conquer more land. By 1900, the Russian empire extended from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north, and from the Vistula River in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It was the world's largest empire totaling some 8,571,400 square miles in size. Russian aggression during the last five centuries devoured many peoples speaking a variety of languages.

The czarist government conducted its first modern census in 1897. Of the 126 million inhabitants living in the Russian empire at the time, only 51 million (41 %) were ethnic Russians. The non-Russian majority were considered to be foreigners and were often denied any means of self-expression in their native languages. The government was officially designated an autocracy, meaning that absolute authority resided in the person of the czar whose authority was not limited by a constitution. Without a constitution, or set of fundamental laws independent of the ruler's will, individuals had no legal rights other than those which the ruler saw fit to grant. People living in the Russian empire could not criticize the government. They had to pay high taxes and those who were inducted into the military had to serve for twenty years. With education generally reserved for the privileged few, most people could neither read nor write. Only in 1905, when a popular revolt shook the regime to its foundation, did the czar "grant" his subjects a limited form of representation. When it became evident that most of those elected to the newly created legislative assembly (Duma) were not always voting according to government wishes, the czar restricted voting privileges to the affluent class whose loyalty to royal policies was assured.

In an effort to assimilate the Ukrainian population, the czarist government initiated a "Russification" campaign. This was no easy task because the Ukrainian people wanted to retain their religious and national identities. To accomplish its objective, the government often discriminated against a separate Ukrainian identity by calling Ukrainians "Little Russians," forbidding the publication of Ukrainian books and periodicals, and jailing Ukrainian leaders who advocated greater freedom and autonomy for their people.

By 1917, the peoples of Russia had had enough of czarist despotism. They staged a revolution and the authoritarian rule of Czar Nicholas II was replaced by a democratically constituted government headed by Alexander Kerensky. Soon after the Russian revolution began, the conquered peoples of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine declared their independence. The Russian empire was beginning to crumble.

A representative Russian government based on democratic principles was short-lived, however. Within a year, a small, well-organized group of Communists headed by Vladimir I. Lenin overthrew Kerensky's government and re-established authoritarian rule over Russia. Following in the footsteps of their czarist predecessors, Lenin's Red Army invaded and recaptured Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus and Ukraine. Promising to grant full national rights to each of the conquered nations (including the right to secede), Moscow established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), forcibly incorporating the re-conquered peoples into a Russian orbit. Although all of the Soviet republics were supposedly equal, it was the Russian republic that dominated Soviet affairs from the beginning.

During the 1920's, Lenin and his followers attempted to pacify their minorities by granting them certain national and civil rights. When the various national groups started to push for more rights, however, the Communist government changed its approach and began to centralize its control. According to Hannah Arendt, the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state by the time Stalin had consolidated his power in 1929.

During the 1930's, Stalin initiated a reign of terror in the Soviet Union that was unlike any the world had ever seen. All opposition to Soviet rule was ruthlessly suppressed. Millions of Soviet citizens were sent to Siberia for the slightest offense, often without trial. Millions were shot or simply disappeared. No one was safe from Stalin's unpredictable will. University professors, teachers, army generals, farmers, journalists, and even Stalin's closest revolutionary associates, were executed simply because Stalin or his secret police decided they were "enemies of the state".

In 1939, Stalin signed an agreement with Germany's Adolf Hitler, another totalitarian dictator, and the two of them invaded Poland. Stalin annexed the eastern third of Poland, populated mainly by Ukrainians and Belarusians, after a bogus "plebiscite" in which the results were predetermined. A year later, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, claiming that their people wanted to become part of the Soviet Union. By 1960, the Soviet empire included an area of 8,650,060 square miles. In addition, the Soviet Union controlled most of eastern Europe, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland.

UKRAINE AND ITS PEOPLE

Ukrainian history began in the 9th century with the rise of the city of Kyiv (Kiev) as the center of an empire that came to be called Kyivan Rus' ( Kievan Rus'). In 988, the people of Kyivan Rus', then ruled by Volodymyr the Great (Prince Vladimir), adopted Christianity as the state religion.

Kyivan Rus' began to decline soon after Kyiv was sacked by the Mongols in 1240. Descendants of the Kyivan royal house, however, continued to rule various duchies within the former empire. Three separate Slavonic peoples emerged from the Rus' empire - the Belarusians, the Muscovites (Russians) and the Rus'-Ukrainians.

Following the decline o f Kyiv, the center of Rus'-Ukrainian life shifted to the southwestern provinces of Galicia and Volynia. A second Rus' state emerged when Galicia and Volynia were united during the 12th century. In the 14th century, Galicia was annexed by Poland while Volynia came under Lithuanian rule.

A third Ukrainian state was created in the 17th century by the Cossacks, a group of military freedom fighters who had established a series of autonomous forts along the Dnipro River (Dnieper River). The Cossacks, who elected all of their "hetmans" (commanders-in-chief), eventually freed most of Ukraine from Polish rule and began to create a republic. An ill-fated military alliance with Muscovy, however, resulted in a gradual take-over by the Muscovites. Poland quickly came to terms with Muscovy and the two nations partitioned Ukraine along the Dnipro River. The Cossacks attempted to free themselves from Russian rule in 1709 by allying themselves with the Swedes and attacking Muscovy. The Muscovites were victorious and from that day forward began to call themselves "Russians." In 1775, Czarina Catherine II destroyed the famed Zaporozhian Sich ( Zaporozhian Fort), the last bastion of Cossack independence in Ukraine.

Ukrainian aspirations for freedom did not die, however. All through the 18th and 19th centuries, writers and poets like Taras Shevchenko kept eastern Ukrainian hopes alive by writing about the glories of the past and urging Ukrainians to "cast off your chains." Soon after Polish-occupied Ukraine was annexed by Austria, a similar national literary tradition emerged there.

The czarist Russian regime was overthrown in 1917 and eastern Ukrainians established the Ukrainian National Republic. On 22 January 1918, following the Communist takeover of Russia, the Ukrainian people declared their independence from Russia. At about the same time, the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed and the Republic of Western Ukraine was created. On 22 January 1919, the two Ukrainian republics formally united in Kyiv, the national capital.

Ukraine was able to maintain its independence for three years against overwhelming odds. Poland wanted to annex Galicia and invaded from the west. The Communists wanted eastern Ukraine and invaded from the east. A czarist Russian army, still hoping to retrieve "all of Russia", invaded Ukraine from the south. The Communists eventually defeated the Poles, the czarist Russians, and the Ukrainians. Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with Poland, which partitioned Ukraine once again. Moscow received eastern Ukraine while Poland annexed eastern Galicia and Volynia. The Soviets grabbed the latter two provinces soon after the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in 1939.

SOVIET POLICY AND THE FAMINE GENOCIDE

Ukraine was formally incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) in 1922. The Communists were aware that resistance to their regime was deep and widespread. To pacify the Ukrainian people and to gain control, Moscow initially permitted a great deal of local autonomy to exist in Soviet Ukraine. The newly established Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the new All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, non-Communist national institutions of great importance, were both permitted to continue their work until the end of the 1920's.

All of this changed once Stalin came to power. Stalin wanted to consolidate the new Communist empire and to strengthen its industrial base. Ukrainian national aspirations were a barrier to those ends because even Ukrainian Communists opposed exploitation by Moscow. In Stalin's eyes, Ukraine, the largest of the non-Russian republics, would have to be subdued. Thus, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was placed under the jurisdiction of the Communist controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Ukrainian bishops, priests, and thousands of Christian lay leaders were sent to Siberian labor camps, the so-called "Gulag". Hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million, of Ukraine's intellectual leaders -writers, university professors, scientists and journalists - were liquidated in purges ordered by Stalin. Not even loyal Ukrainian Communists were exempt from Stalin's terror. By 1939, practically the entire Communist leadership in Ukraine had been liquidated.

Hardest hit by Stalin's policies were Ukraine's independent landowners, the so-called "kulaks" (kurkuly in Ukrainian). Never precisely defined, a kulak was a member of the alleged "upper stratum'' of landowners, but in reality anyone who owned a little land, even as little as 25 acres, came to be labeled a kulak. Stalin ordered that all private farms would have to be collectivized. During the process, according to Soviet sources, which are no doubt on the conservative side, some 200,000 Ukrainian families were "de-kulakized" or dispossessed of all land. By the summer of 1932, 69.5% of all Ukrainian farm families and 80% of all farm land had been forcibly collectivized.

Stalin decided to eliminate Ukraine's independent farmers for three reasons: 1) they represented the last bulwark of resistance to totalitarian Soviet control; 2) the Soviet Union was in desperate need of foreign capital to build more factories, and the best way to obtain that capital was to increase agricultural exports from Ukraine, once known as "the breadbasket of Europe"; and 3) the fastest way to increase agricultural exports was to expropriate land through a process of farm collectivization and to assign procurement quotas to each Soviet republic. During the collectivization process, Ukrainian farmers resisted vigorously, often violently, especially when the GPU (secret police) and militia forced them to turn their land over to the government. Thousands of farmers were killed and millions more were deported to Siberia to be replaced by more trustworthy workers.

To increase exports and to break the back of remaining resistance, Moscow imposed grain procurement quotas on Ukraine that were 2-3 times greater than the amount of grain marketed during the best year prior to collectivization. Laws were passed declaring all collective farm property "sacred and inviolate." Anyone who was caught hoarding food was subject to execution as an "enemy of the people" or, in extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for not less than 10 years. To make sure the new laws were strictly enforced, special "commissions" and "brigades" were dispatched to the countryside. In the words of one Sovietologist:

"The work of these special "commissions "and "brigades" was marked by the utmost severity. They entered the 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. They even took specimens of fecal matter from the toilets in an effort to learn by analysis whether the peasants had stolen government property and were eating grain."

Stalin succeeded in achieving his goals. The grain harvest of 1932 was greater than in 1931, providing more monies for industrial expansion. The cost to Ukraine, however, was catastrophic. Grain procurements continued even though it was clear to Soviet officials that more and more people were going hungry in the Ukrainian countryside. The result was inevitable. A famine, the magnitude of which staggers the imagination, struck Ukraine and still the Soviet government failed to provide relief. Detailed and documented descriptions of the horrors which prevailed in the rural areas of Soviet Ukraine have been presented by Ukrainian eyewitnesses and various newspaper accounts. Thomas Walker, an American journalist who traveled in Ukraine during the famine, left us an especially graphic account of the situation in one rural area:

"About twenty miles south of Kyiv, I came upon a village that was practically extinct by starvation. There had been fifteen houses in this village and a population of forty-odd persons. Every dog and cat had been eaten.

The horses and oxen had all been appropriated by the Bolsheviks to stock the collective farms. In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied analysis. There were bones, pig-weed, skin, and what looked like a boot top in this pot. The way the remaining half dozen inhabitants eagerly watched this slimy mess showed the state of their hunger.

One boy of about 15 years, whose face, arms and legs were simply tightly drawn skin over bones, had a stomach that was swollen to twice its normal size. He was an orphan; his father had died of starvation a month before and he showed me the body. The boy had covered the body with straw, there being no shovels in the village since the last raid of the GPU. He stated his mother had gone away one day searching for food and had not returned. This boy wanted to die. He suffered intensely with his swollen stomach and was the only one of the group who showed no interest in the pot that was being prepared."

The Soviet government preserved the greatest secrecy concerning the exact number of persons who perished in Ukraine during the Famine Genocide, but an analysis of recently revealed Soviet census data comparing 1939 with 1926 figures suggests that no fewer than ten million men, women and children perished. According to American Sovietologists and other experts on the Stalin era, the famine need never have occurred:

"Despite the meager harvest, the peasants could have pulled through without starvation if there had been substantial abatement of the requistion of grain and foodstuffs. But the requisitions were intensified rather than relaxed; the government was determined to "teach the peasants a lesson" by the grim method of starvation."

By the beginning of the winter, all the grain, including the seed grain of the farms in Ukraine, had been seized by the government. The peasants lived on their last remaining potatoes, killed their last remaining livestock, cats and dogs, and ate nettles and linden leaves. The acorns were all gone by January, and people began to starve. By March, no food remained, and they began to die.

According to one Soviet expert who had access to Soviet statistics, the forced collectivization campaign, the liquidation of the kulaks, and the Famine Genocide resulted in the untimely death of some twenty-two million men, women and children in the Soviet Union.

THE FAMINE PRESS COVER-UP

During the 1930's, the West, including the United States, was in the throes of the Great Depression. Banks and businesses collapsed. Factories closed. Homes and farms were repossessed because their owners couldn't keep up with their bank loan payments. Unemployment reached 40% in the larger cities where soup kitchens and bread lines were common.

It was during this period of doubt and uncertainty that some in the West came to believe that communism was superior to capitalism, a message the Soviet Union had been promoting since its inception. In a well orchestrated program of disinformation, Moscow projected the image that the Soviet Union was a "worker's paradise", where labourers were members of a privileged class and unemployment was unthinkable. Unaware of the true state of affairs in the Soviet Union (Soviet press censorship was very strict), thousands of despairing clerics, college professors, poets, movie stars, writers, journalists, and other molders of public opinion turned to Moscow for guidance and inspiration. It was an era one American journalist labeled as America's "Red Decade," a time when romanticized communism represented the future, bankrupt capitalism the past. Strong supporters of the "Soviet way" were two correspondents stationed in Moscow during the 1930's, Walter Duranty of the New York Times and Louis Fischer of The Nation. Both were determined to present the Soviet Union in the best possible light.

The first reliable report of the Famine Genocide to reach the outside world was presented by Gareth Jones, a British journalist who visited Ukraine in 1933 and left the Soviet Union to write about what he had seen. When his story broke, the American press corps - many of whose members had seen the pictures of the famine horrors taken by German consular officers earlier -- were besieged by their home offices to verify Jones' findings. Some consulted with the Soviet press censor to determine how to best handle the story.

Commenting on the British scare story being repeated by the American press, Duranty admitted that mismanagement on some collective farms "made a mess of Soviet food production", but added that "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.'' After describing an exhaustive inquiry with all of his sources, Duranty wrote: "There is a serious food shortage. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."

Earlier, Duranty had written that food shortages were the result of peasant resistance to collectivization. The situation would not have been serious, he argued, if world food prices hadn't fallen. This "forced the Soviet Union to increase the exportation of foodstufs at a time when the shoe was beginning to pinch and the distribution of the food at home would have corrected many difficulties." Commenting on Duranty's role in covering up the Famine Genocide, Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian during the 1930's, declared:

"Duranty was the villain of the whole thing. It is difficult for me to see how it could have been otherwise that in some sense he was not in the regime's power."

Malcolm Muggeridge wrote the truth about the Famine Genocide as did Christian Science Monitor staff correspondent William Henry Chamberlin, who traveled in Ukraine during the winter of 1933 and reported that some "4 million peasants are found to have perished ." Reflecting on his trip, Chamberlin later wrote:

"No one, I am sure, could have made such a trip with an honest desire to learn the truth and escaped the conclusion that the Ukrainian countryside had experienced a gigantic tragedy. What had happened was not hardship, or privation, or distress, or food shortage, to mention the deceptively euphemistic words that were allowed to pass Soviet censorship, but stark, outright famine, with its victims counted in the millions."

Extensive coverage of the Famine Genocide was also provided by the Hearst newspaper chain. Unfortunately, the tragedy was misreported as having taken place in 1934, rather than 1933. Responding to the series, Louis Fischer wrote that he had been in Ukraine in 1934 and had witnessed no famine. Although Fischer was aware of the famine having taken place a year earlier, he never mentioned it in his article. He admitted "food shortages" in Ukraine but attributed them to drought, adding: "Had it not been for collectivization, the extended drought would have wrought much havoc in the grain-growing areas." As for the use of force by Soviet authorities, Fischer saw no problem. "All governments are based on force," he argued. "The question is only of the degree of force, who administers it, and for what purpose." In his book, Soviet Journey, Fischer applied his theory of civil rule to the Soviet collectivization campaign:

"History can be cruel. The peasants wanted to destroy collectivization. The government wanted to retain collectivization. The peasants used the best means at their disposal. The government used the best means at its disposal. The government won."

The New Republic repeated the notion that collectivization was a spectacular success and added that if there were any food shortages in Ukraine, they were the result of sabotage by Ukrainian separatists.

Thus, with the help of some members of the Western press, the Soviet Union succeeded in its effort to shield the truth about the Famine Genocide from the world's eyes. "Years after the event,'' wrote one journalist in 1937, "when no Russian Communist in his senses any longer concealed the magnitude of the famine, the question whether there had been a famine at all was still being disputed in the outside world."

UKRAINE IN RECENT TIMES

Ukrainian suffering did not end with the famine. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Ukrainian people bore the brunt of the devastation which followed. Ukrainians were designated "untermenschen" (subhuman) by Hitler and his followers. Before they retreated from Ukraine in 1944, the Nazis exterminated almost 4 million civilians (including 900,000 Jews) and sent some 2,240,000 Ukrainians to work as slave labourers in Germany.

Despite Nazi oppression, millions of Ukrainians fled Ukraine with the Germans rather than live under Soviet rule. When the war ended, they were designated "displaced persons" by the United States and other Western nations. Stalin, however, demanded they be returned to the Soviet Union by force, if necessary. Many Ukrainians returned voluntarily, believing Soviet promises of a better life. Some were forcibly repatriated with the help of the United States army. Almost all returnees were sent directly to the labor camps of Siberia by Stalin, never to see Ukraine again.

Stalin died in 1953, and life in Ukraine improved slightly when Nikita Khrushchev became the Soviet premier. The Soviet Union, however, gradually returned to its centuries-old policy of Russification and suppression. Ukrainian dissidents protesting human and national rights violations were arrested and sentenced to long terms in labor camps. The Ukrainian Catholic Church was outlawed and most Orthodox Churches were either closed or served as museums of atheism. Few Ukrainians were allowed to emigrate, and travel within the Soviet bloc was restricted. Members of the Communist party and their families were the new privileged class, enjoying separate stores, separate hospitals, and special schools. Ukrainians still were not masters of their own land.

FOOD AS A POLITICAL WEAPON

The genocide by starvation initiated by Stalin in Ukraine during the 1930's has had many Communist imitators in recent years.

Cambodia was taken over by the Communists in 1975. During the next three years the government of Pol Pot was responsible for the death of two to four million Cambodians through a program of planned execution and forced starvation.

Ethiopia was taken over by a Communist regime in 1974. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people, including Eritreans seeking independence, were allowed to starve to death while the government spent millions of dollars on military armaments.

Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. Unable to subdue the Afghan countryside, the Soviets began a program of genocidal suppression which included the extermination of the civilian population and the creation of famine conditions.

The Western media paid relatively little attention to these horrors and when they had, as in the case of Ethiopia, the Communist regime's culpability was hardly mentioned. In Ethiopia, the press reported drought as the major cause. The most recent case, the genocide in Darfur, and the genocide in Rwanda earlier, have received wider media coverage, but not nearly enough to make a difference.

*Prepared by the League of Ukrainian Canadians, with special thanks to Myron B. Kuropas and the U.S. Ukraine Famine Commission, 2006.