Ukraine’s Great Famine 1932-1933 –

80^th Anniversary

In 1932-33 there was a famine in the USSR. Twenty years later Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-American-Jewish lawyer, one of the draftsman of the United Nations' Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, offered the following remarks in a paper which he entitled “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine”:

“What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide… the destruction of the Ukrainian nation... the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible of all – starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death…”

In order to better understand the enormity of this Genocide, consider that in the 1926 Soviet census there were 31 million Ukrainians in the USSR. The 1937 census only recently revealed because Stalin had the results expunged, showed only 26 million Ukrainians. Thus a 5 million decrease over 11 years. The other populations in the USSR grew by 17% over that period of time. Were Ukrainians permitted to grow at a similar rate, there should have been 36 million in 1937, a discrepancy of 10 million which of course includes unborn children of the victims, thus 7-8 million would be a reasonable estimate of actual victims. Russians in that period increased by 23%. To better understand the gravity of this Soviet crime, consider that the number of victims included some 3 million children.

These statistics and other recently unearthed Soviet documents bear out that the famine was aimed at the Ukrainian nationality. Some scholars, in particular Soviet apologists, have argued that the famine occurred in Russia as well. This is ironically accurate in part. The famine ravaged the Kuban region of Russia which was ethnographically Ukrainian territory and heavily concentrated by Ukrainians and was visible in other areas of Russia mostly where those fleeing from Ukraine and Kuban had fled. In fact, on January 22, 1933 at the height of the Famine, Josef Stalin, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of Commissars of the USSR issued a Directive from Moscow directing a police action to prohibit the massive departure of farmers from Ukraine and the Kuban region. No other areas of the USSR were singled out prohibiting departure “in search of bread.”

The intent of the forced starvation of Ukrainian peasant, the “mens rea” in criminal terminology was set forth in an August 9, 1932 letter fro Stalin to his main henchman in Ukraine Lazar Kaganovich in which Stalin bemoaned the existence of Ukrainian nationalists even in Communist party ranks and voiced his intent to make an example of Ukraine.

Let me share with you what this Famine was like through several rather graphic, yet very real descriptions:

The Italian Consul in Kharkiv, the then capital of the Ukrainian SSR painted the following picture in a report which he sent to his government:

“A week ago, a special service was set up to protect children who have been abandoned. Along with the peasants who flock to the towns because there is no hope of survival in the countryside, there are also children who are simply brought here and abandoned by their parents, who then return to their village to die. Their hope is someone in their town will be able to look after their children…. So for a week now the town has been patrolled by…attendants in white uniforms who collect the children and take them to the nearest police station… around midnight they are all transported in trucks to the freight station… That’s where all the children who are found in stations and on trains, the peasant families, the old people and all the peasants who have been picked up during the day are gathered together… A medical team does a sort of selection process… anyone who is not yet swollen up and still has a chance of survival is directed to…buildings, where a constant population of about 8,000 lies dying on straw beds… Most of them are children. People who are already starting to swell up are moved out in good trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town so that they can die out of sight. When they arrive at their destination, huge ditches are dug, and the dead are carried out of the wagons.”

William Chamberlain, the Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor wrote in 1933:

“Quite by chance the last village we visited was at once the most terrible and the most dramatic. It is called Cherkass, and it lies about seven or eight miles to the south of Byelaya Tserkov, a Ukrainian town south-west of Kiev. Here the normal mortality rate…had been far exceeded. On the road to the village, former icons with the face of Christ had been removed, but the crown of thorns had been allowed to remain – an appropriate symbol for what the village had experienced. Coming into the village, we found one deserted house after another, with window panes fallen in, crops growing mixed with weeds in gardens with no one to harvest them. A boy in the dusty village called the death-roll among families he knew…”There was Anton Samchenko, who died with his wife and sister, three children were left. With Nikita Samchenko’s family, the father and Mikola and two other children died, five children were left. Then Grigory Samchenko died with his son Petro, a wife and daughter are left. And Gerasim Samchenko died with four of his children, only the wife is still living. And Sidor Odnorog died with his wife and two daughters, one girl is left. Gura Odnorog died with his wife and three children, one girl is still alive…”

A subsequent assessment of this historical event with an attempt to grasp the enormity of it, appeared in “Time “magazine in 1982. The respected journalist Lance Morrow wrote:

“This is the fiftieth anniversary of the enforced famine, engineered by Stalin, in which some 8-10 million Ukrainians and Cossacks perished. Their extermination was a matter of state policy, just as the ovens of Dachau were a mater of state policy. The Ukrainian kulaks died… for the convenience of the state, to help with the organization of the new order of things…they died and yet the grass has grown over the world’s memory of their murder. Why? The numbers of the dead would surely qualify that entry (one thinks mordantly), for some genocidal hall of fame…”

The United States Congress issued its findings in 1988 after years of research:

“The Genocide Convention defines genocide as one or more specified actions committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group wholly or partially as such…One or more of the actions specified in the Genocide Convention was taken against the Ukrainians in order to destroy a substantial part of the Ukrainian people…Overwhelming evidence indicates that Stalin was warned of impending famine in Ukraine and pressed for measures that could only ensure its occurrence and exacerbate its effects. Such policies not only came into conflict with his response to food supply difficulties elsewhere in the preceding year, but some of them were implemented with greater vigor in ethnically Ukrainian areas than elsewhere and were utilized in order to eliminate any manifestation of Ukrainian national self assertion.”

Even six former communists wrote in the French seminal publication on the subject entitled “The Black Book of Communism”:

“Should one see this famine as a “genocide of the Ukrainian people,” as a number of Ukrainian historians and researchers do today? It is undeniable that the Ukrainian peasants were the principal victims in the famine of 1932-33, and that this “assault” was preceded in 1929 by several offensives against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, who were accused of “nationalist deviations… ”

Fellow Americans, let us remember the victims, perhaps, especially those innocent three million children. We appeal to all nations, governments and international organizations to share our pain and offer solace by recognizing the Famine of 1932-33 as Genocide of the Ukrainian people. We ask you to teach your children and grandchildren about this simultaneously tragic and heinous page of history. Today, we kneel in prayer and ask God to protect us all from evil and grant us peace. For our departed brethren, we ask God to give them rest. At the same time we vow to be vigilant lest today's or future generations suffer a similar fate.

Allow me to disturb your peace one last time. American journalist (Thomas Walker) in 1933 spoke with a runaway nine year-old in Kyiv well over one hundred miles from the runaway’s home:

“-Where do you live? Nowhere!

-Where are your parents? They died.

-Where did they die? In Chernihiv.

-How? There was nothing to eat.

-Where did you spend the night? In an empty wagon beyond the fence.

-Do you want to become a Communist? No, I just want to die and be with my mom.”

Today, 80 years later let us remember that simple Ukrainian girl. She died an excruciatingly painful death. She starved. Her only solace was that she would be with her mother.

Askold S. Lozynskyj

November 2, 2013

These remarks were delivered at the commemoration of the 80^th anniversary of the Holodomor held at the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York on November 2, 2013