Perloff: Holodomor – The Secret Holocaust in Ukraine — 14.5 million murdered, 3 million children!

From: The New American

Thursday, 05 February 2009

Holodomor: The Secret Holocaust in Ukraine

When Ukraine resisted Soviet attempts at collectivization in the 1920s and ’30s, the Soviet Union under Stalin used labor camps, executions, and starvation (Holodomor) to kill millions of Ukrainians.

In 1933, the recently elected administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt granted official U.S. recognition to the Soviet Union for the first time. Especially repugnant was that this recognition was granted even though Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had just concluded a campaign of genocide against Ukraine that left over 10 million dead. This atrocity was known to the Roosevelt administration, but not to the American people at large, thanks to suppression of the story by the Western press — as we shall show.

Ukraine’s Untold Tragedy

The Ukrainian genocide remains largely unknown. After 76 years, the blood of the victims still cries for truth, and the guilt of the perpetrators for exposure.

Many Americans are barely acquainted with Ukraine, even though it is Europe’s second largest country after Russia, and has been a distinct land and people for centuries. One reason for this unfamiliarity is that Ukraine has rarely known political independence; it was under Russia’s heel throughout much of its existence — under Soviet domination prior to 1991, and under Czarist Russia before that. Many American students heard little or nothing of Ukraine in their history classes because the nation had been relegated to the status of a Russian “province.”

Stalin accomplished genocide against Ukraine by two means. One was massive executions and deportations to labor camps. But his second tool of murder was more unique: an artificial famine created by confiscation of all food. Ukrainians call this the Holodomor, translated by one modern Ukrainian dictionary as “artificial hunger, organized on a vast scale by the criminal regime against the country’s population,” but often simply translated as “murder by hunger.”

Ukraine was the last place one would have expected famine, for it had been known for centuries as the “breadbasket of Europe.” French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère wrote in 1573: “Ukraine is overflowing with honey and wax…. The soil of this country is so good and fertile that when you leave a plow in the field, it becomes overgrown with grass after two or three days. It will be difficult to find.” The 18th-century British traveler Joseph Marshall wrote: “The Ukraine is the richest province of the Russian empire…. The soil is a black loam…. I think I have never seen such deep plowing as these peasants give their ground.”

In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ukraine became part of a bloody battlefield of fighting between the Bolsheviks (the group that eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Czarist Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists. Ultimately, of course, the Bolsheviks prevailed, but Lenin shrewdly recognized that concessions would be necessary to gain Ukraine’s cooperation as a member of the unstable young USSR. To exploit Ukrainians’ long-standing resentment of Czarist domination, he permitted them to retain much of their national culture. Ukrainians experienced a relatively high degree of freedom extending into the mid-1920s. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and non-communist Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were allowed to operate independently. However, as the Soviet Union consolidated its power, and Joseph Stalin ascended to the party’s top, these freedoms became expendable, and Ukrainian nationalism, at first exploited, now became viewed as a liability.

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While there is disagreement over how many lives the genocide claimed, Gradenigo’s figures have turned out to be rather accurate. In Harvest of Sorrow, historian Robert Conquest, considered by many the leading authority on the famine, put the toll at 14.5 million. About half of these deaths represent the liquidation of the kulaks, via execution and slow death in gulags, while the famine itself claimed the lives of approximately seven million, including three million children.

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