A new book details how the Soviet regime buried evidence and even stopped people from fleeing famine-stricken areas in 1932-33
OF THE estimated 70m deaths due to famines in the 20th century, at least 40m occurred under communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea and Cambodia. The precise number of deaths remains uncertain, as do the causes, owing to the difficulty of disentangling the effects of war, revolution and disease, as well as those regimes’ isolation and secrecy. Even low estimates, however, are damning: what clearer illustration could there be of socialism’s impracticality than its repeated failure to feed its own people? In her powerful account of the famine in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer prize-winning writer (and a former journalist at The Economist), tells an even more sinister story. Far from an unintended result of ill-conceived policies, she argues, the roughly 4m deaths from hunger in 1932 and 1933 were part of a deliberate campaign by Josef Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership to crush Ukrainian national aspirations, literally starving actual or potential bearers of those aspirations into submission to the Soviet order. As her book’s subtitle says, Stalin was waging “war on Ukraine”, the Soviet Union’s strategically and economically most valuable republic after Russia. War, as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, is the continuation of politics by other means. The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised. As Ms Applebaum notes, this is not a new argument. Émigré survivors of the famine said as much in the 1950s. They were largely dismissed, however, as right-wing conspiracy-mongers driven by anti-communism and Ukrainian nationalist hatred of Russia.
The symposium marks the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine-genocide that resulted in the deliberate starvation of millions of victims. Discussions of gender aspects of the Holodomor will help personalize the history of genocidal practices in Ukraine and their consequences. The goal is to help high school teachers and college and university faculty develop curricula for teaching the subject.
A newly discovered voice cuts through the historical haze. She is Rhea Clyman, a young Canadian reporter of Polish Jewish background, who traversed the starving Soviet heartland in eastern Ukraine when Joseph Stalin’s man-made famine was just beginning. Clyman’s newspaper articles from 1932-1933, published in the Toronto Telegram and the London Daily Express, show her remarkable resourcefulness and courage. After she was banished from the USSR for writing about the Famine and the Gulag, this brave woman went on to cover Hitler’s early years in power.
Today another Russian autocrat is trying to dismember Ukraine by using disinformation and brute force.
Those areas that suffered from the Famine Genocide are currently invaded by Russia, where the ongoing war has lasted for over four years. Ukraine’s soldiers are held as prisoners of war. In central Ukraine two little girls are growing up without their dad, Serhiy Hlondar, a member of Ukraine’s Special Forces, who was captured in the battle of Debaltseve a day after Russian-led forces were meant to silence their guns in accordance with the Minsk 2 agreement. Mr. Hlondar has never seen his youngest daughter, and after 700 days of captivity his family has received only seven letters to keep their hopes alive.
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https://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?357470-The-Coming-Collapse-of-China-and-India&p=7687028#post7687028
The exact numbers of victims of the famine is unknown due to the lack of records and the presence of a ban on the documentation of hunger as cause of death, but estimates vary from 3 to 8 million having died as result of starvation. Holodomor is often viewed as the central event to the Ukrainian collective memory as an example of a purposeful attempt at eliminating Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule by enforcing a man-made famine through collectivisation, imposition of unrealistic production targets, confiscation of food, and blocking of emmigration out of areas targeted by said policies. To understand the intentional nature of the famine, one must take a look at the context preceding it and the policies it entailed throughout its duration. The introduction of the Five Year Plan concept in 1928 paved the way for collectivisation to become the Soviet Union’s most defining policy. The elimination of private property and its absorption into collectively-controlled and state-run farms, which became known as kolkhozes and sovkhozes, respectively, brought with it unrealistic ambitions for production output which translated into the use of compulsion and terror tactics of the working class to keep up with state-imposed quotas. Historian Timothy Snyder summarises the phenomenon, writing: “Moscow expected far more from Ukraine than Ukraine could give”.
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