“As starvation raged throughout Ukraine in the first weeks of 1933, Stalin sealed the borders of the republic so that peasants could not flee, and closed the cities so that peasants could not beg. As of 14 January 1933 Soviet citizens had to carry internal passports in order to reside in cities legally. Peasants were not to receive them. On 22 January 1933 Balytskyi warned Moscow that Ukrainian peasants were fleeing the republic, and Stalin and Molotov ordered the state police to prevent their flight…Stalin had his ‘fortress’ in Ukraine, but it was a stronghold that resembled a giant starvation camp, with watchtowers, sealed borders, pointless and painful labor, and endless and predictable death.”
“Cut off from the attention of the world by a state that controlled the press and the movements of foreign journalists, cut off from official help or sympathy by a party line that equated starvation with sabotage, cut off from the economy by intense poverty and inequitable planning, cut off from the rest of the country by regulations and police cordons, people died alone, whole villages died alone. Two decades later, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt would present this famine in Ukraine as the crucial event in the creation of a modern ‘atomized’ society, the alienation of all from all.”
“There came a moment in Ukraine when there was little or no grain, and the only meat was human. A black market arose in human flesh; human meat may even have entered the official economy…A young communist in the Kharkov region reported to his superiors that he could make a meat quota, but only by using human beings.”
“The Soviet census of 1937 found eight million fewer people than projected: most of these were famine victims in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia, and the children that they did not have. Stalin suppressed its findings and had the responsible demographers executed.”
“Rafal Lemkin, the international lawyer who later invented the term genocide, would call the Ukrainian case ‘the classic example of Soviet genocide.’ ”
“The Soviet officials who persecuted the kulaks had more money than their victims, and the urban party members far better life prospects. Peasants had no right to ration cards, while party elites chose from a selection of food at special stores. If they grew too fat, however, they had to beware the roving ‘sausage makers,’ especially at night.”
“The laws of the international market ensured that the grain taken from Soviet Ukraine would feed others. Roosevelt, preoccupied above all by the position of the American worker during the Great Depression, wished to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The telegrams from Ukrainian activists reached him in autumn 1933, just as his personal initiative in US-Soviet relations was bearing fruit. The United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933.”
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books 2010
Sic semper, socialismus progressivus
(Thus always, progressive socialism)
Tags: famine, genocide in Ukraine, progressive movement connives at genocide, Roosevelt rewards Stalin, socialism, socialism and famine, Stalin as mass murderer, tyranny
Charles Rowley's Blog 
August 4, 2011 at 9:28 pm |
Thank you for publishing this! Today, Russia prohibits its historians from discussing the organized famines in the Ukraine and referring to them as genocide. Scholars of history in Russia can be fined or even jailed for researching this subject.
Organized famines were aimed at destroying the spirit of entrepreneurship and individualism that had always been among the defining characteristics of our national identity.
People often forget the lesson of Ukraine that has vividly demonstrated the price of communism.