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Orthodox and Greek Catholics of North America Jointly Honor Anniversary of Holodomor
- Status
K
KyivAndrew
Guest
Thank you for posting this about one of Europe’s forgotten genocides. Here is the link to same letter on the Ukrainian Catholic Church’s website in Canada, in Ukrainian, as well:
archeparchy.ca/recent_news.htm
Stalin’s collectivization took on a genocidal nature in Soviet Ukraine, as Stalin’s correspondence to his henchmen has revealed, as he feared Ukrainian nationalism was behind peasant resistance in Ukraine to Soviet power in 1932-33. That is why, on Stalin’s direct orders, the borders between Soviet Ukraine/Kuban and Soviet Russia were closed and blocked to prevent the starving from traveling to Soviet Russia where collectivization, though enforced, did not result in the deaths of millions as it did in Ukraine where wheat was confiscated and kept under guard by the Soviet Secret Police as the villages starved. (Kazakhstan, though a nomadic society, also underwent a similar genocide).
The Genocide, or Holodomor as they call it (from “Moryty Holodom” - Murder by Starvation), was not meant to exterminate each and every Ukrainian; but it was meant to kill as many millions of Ukrainians as deemed necessary (all the Ukrainian intelligentsia and churchmen concomitantly) until the Ukrainian nation would no longer be an independent people insubordinate to the rulers in the Communist Kremlin. In this it largely succeeded, evidence of which is provided to this very day by none other than the current president of Ukraine who imbibed Soviet propaganda completely and elides the issue of the Holodomor so as not to cause offense to today’s Kremlin. From 1932 on, the Ukrainian Churches, Ukrainian language, culture, history were to be severely truncated in the effort to create the new Soviet Man based on Moscow’s instructions.
To be blunt, it was in Ukraine where the Soviet regime had to face something new not covered in the Soviet criminal code: cannibalism. The Soviet Secret Police, the G.P.U., had to take over. If one starves a family at gunpoint for several months, human relations take on an unbelievable strife. Sometimes parents would tell children that if they should die first, their children should eat them to stay alive. In other situations, a mother might have gone out of her mind and looked upon her child for survival, or visa-versa.
A book on Soviet and Nazi crimes released by Yale historian Tim Snyder last month carries this excerpt from one village near Kharkiv, Ukraine, where several women formed something like an orphanage for all the new orphans picked up from the streets (parents had obviously starved to death):
“The children had bulging stomachs; they were covered in wounds, in scabs their bodies were bursting. We took them outside, we put them on sheets; and they moaned. One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus. They were tearing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. We took the child away from the hungry mouths and we cried.”
All these kids, and their parents, and grandparents, were to be dumped later on carts and thrown in unmarked mass graves throughout Ukraine : which makes calculating the death toll from the Holodomor difficult. As one old Ukrainian lady and witness of those years stated on a documentary, “we looked at the field outside the village, and the ground was moving because of all the starved buried there”. The G.P.U. searched everywhere for any possible hidden food. Sometimes the graveminder would throw still-alive but thoroughly weakened people onto his grave cart because a quota was to be met.
Scholars give the death toll anywhere from 3.3 Million to 5 Million, and some others higher by looking at the unborn. A neutral, objective, overview of this period in Ukrainian history which takes all views into account is provided by the French scholar (ex-communist) Nicolas Werth in the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence here:
massviolence.org/The-1932-1933-Great-Famine-in-Ukraine?artpage=4
I believe our Churches pray for these deceased souls because none of these millions ever really received a proper burial and Prayers for the Deceased.
Memory Eternal. Vichnaya Pamyat.
archeparchy.ca/recent_news.htm
Stalin’s collectivization took on a genocidal nature in Soviet Ukraine, as Stalin’s correspondence to his henchmen has revealed, as he feared Ukrainian nationalism was behind peasant resistance in Ukraine to Soviet power in 1932-33. That is why, on Stalin’s direct orders, the borders between Soviet Ukraine/Kuban and Soviet Russia were closed and blocked to prevent the starving from traveling to Soviet Russia where collectivization, though enforced, did not result in the deaths of millions as it did in Ukraine where wheat was confiscated and kept under guard by the Soviet Secret Police as the villages starved. (Kazakhstan, though a nomadic society, also underwent a similar genocide).
The Genocide, or Holodomor as they call it (from “Moryty Holodom” - Murder by Starvation), was not meant to exterminate each and every Ukrainian; but it was meant to kill as many millions of Ukrainians as deemed necessary (all the Ukrainian intelligentsia and churchmen concomitantly) until the Ukrainian nation would no longer be an independent people insubordinate to the rulers in the Communist Kremlin. In this it largely succeeded, evidence of which is provided to this very day by none other than the current president of Ukraine who imbibed Soviet propaganda completely and elides the issue of the Holodomor so as not to cause offense to today’s Kremlin. From 1932 on, the Ukrainian Churches, Ukrainian language, culture, history were to be severely truncated in the effort to create the new Soviet Man based on Moscow’s instructions.
To be blunt, it was in Ukraine where the Soviet regime had to face something new not covered in the Soviet criminal code: cannibalism. The Soviet Secret Police, the G.P.U., had to take over. If one starves a family at gunpoint for several months, human relations take on an unbelievable strife. Sometimes parents would tell children that if they should die first, their children should eat them to stay alive. In other situations, a mother might have gone out of her mind and looked upon her child for survival, or visa-versa.
A book on Soviet and Nazi crimes released by Yale historian Tim Snyder last month carries this excerpt from one village near Kharkiv, Ukraine, where several women formed something like an orphanage for all the new orphans picked up from the streets (parents had obviously starved to death):
“The children had bulging stomachs; they were covered in wounds, in scabs their bodies were bursting. We took them outside, we put them on sheets; and they moaned. One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus. They were tearing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. We took the child away from the hungry mouths and we cried.”
All these kids, and their parents, and grandparents, were to be dumped later on carts and thrown in unmarked mass graves throughout Ukraine : which makes calculating the death toll from the Holodomor difficult. As one old Ukrainian lady and witness of those years stated on a documentary, “we looked at the field outside the village, and the ground was moving because of all the starved buried there”. The G.P.U. searched everywhere for any possible hidden food. Sometimes the graveminder would throw still-alive but thoroughly weakened people onto his grave cart because a quota was to be met.
Scholars give the death toll anywhere from 3.3 Million to 5 Million, and some others higher by looking at the unborn. A neutral, objective, overview of this period in Ukrainian history which takes all views into account is provided by the French scholar (ex-communist) Nicolas Werth in the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence here:
massviolence.org/The-1932-1933-Great-Famine-in-Ukraine?artpage=4
I believe our Churches pray for these deceased souls because none of these millions ever really received a proper burial and Prayers for the Deceased.
Memory Eternal. Vichnaya Pamyat.
Y
yaHalyna
Guest
My dad lived through the Holodomyr. He told me about moving the snow to find grass pips underneath and eating the grass dirt &all. He told me how they would break off barks from the trees and chew it - at least chewing was somewhat satisfying. My dad weighed 78 pounds and back then they thought he was dying of tuberculosis. He ended up in the German concentration camps. When in the 40s the Americans liberated the concentration camps, they said he was starving, and sent him to the USA.
Just like nobody believed Hitler’s concentration camps - yes he killed 6 million jews, but he killed 9 million Ukrainians, so too the free world didnt’ believe the Holodomyr - Stalin purposly starving (simply confiscating all their foods) Ukrainians (the breadbasket of Europe AND Asia) to feed his armies.
Then in the 70s had the nerve with the Russian wheat deal…will the free world ever learn?
And the church sat silent…
Just like nobody believed Hitler’s concentration camps - yes he killed 6 million jews, but he killed 9 million Ukrainians, so too the free world didnt’ believe the Holodomyr - Stalin purposly starving (simply confiscating all their foods) Ukrainians (the breadbasket of Europe AND Asia) to feed his armies.
Then in the 70s had the nerve with the Russian wheat deal…will the free world ever learn?
And the church sat silent…
K
Kaninchen
Guest
One of the 20th Century’s greatest crimes against humanity.
I first came across the subject from Robert Conquest’s books - until then I’d always thought of it as one of the horrific consequences of forced collectivisation, rather than a policy of genocide. I think the problem is that the whole ‘nation killing’ (of other nationalities as well) theme has been missed in the West, lost in the general awfulness of the numbers.
I first came across the subject from Robert Conquest’s books - until then I’d always thought of it as one of the horrific consequences of forced collectivisation, rather than a policy of genocide. I think the problem is that the whole ‘nation killing’ (of other nationalities as well) theme has been missed in the West, lost in the general awfulness of the numbers.
K
KyivAndrew
Guest
Hey, Kaninchen is here.
Yeah…It does get difficult at times to complete actual research on the subject when, under the new President of Ukraine, the Soviet Secret Police archives in Kyiv on this period have been closed. Russia’s archives on this period are also difficult to access now. Even under the previous pro-Western President of Ukraine, Yushchenko, the State Archives, unbelievably, were (and still are) administered by a card-carrying member of Ukraine’s unreconstructed Communist Party. Yushchenko never bothered putting at least someone neutral in charge of Ukraine’s historical archives. The Communist Party of course maintains the old view of collectivization.
Another exacerbating factor is that most scholars in the West on the Soviet Union do their research from Moscow, leaving the “peripheries” so to speak to be, which then misses the issue of whether certain policies from the Kremlin had different results in the ethnic republics. Lynne Viola of the University of Toronto, who is quoted quite often on works about Soviet collectivization because of her research, remarkably remarked two years ago at an Academic Conference on Ukrainian Collectivization in Toronto that she had never done research in Ukraine proper on collectivization. I do recall as a teen coming across a quote of hers in the “Village Voice” newspaper in the States back in the 1980s around when Conquest’s book came out that she couldn’t believe Stalin would starve the population with war with Germany approaching. Viola had an interesting review of Anne Applebaum’s book on the Gulag in the Nation magazine.
I also recall meeting as a student in university Ukraine’s leading scholar now on the Famine, Stanislav Kulchytsky, back around the time the Soviet Union was near its end and scholars from the Soviet Union under glasnost were given more allowance to travel out West. I recall him telling me that the Famine was a result of natural consequences in all seriousness. In the 1990s, as more information was revealed after the Soviet collapse, his research led him to believe it was purposeful and genocidal. I believe he puts the death toll somewhere now around 3.5 million (not counting the earlier dekulakization’s fatalities or the later Great Purges death toll) in Ukraine which some say is too low (Graziosi), but the figure is difficult to p(name removed by moderator)oint and I believe research on it should be clear of any political bias.
Stalin had a phobia of resistance in Ukraine to the Kremlin and did see the peasant question in terms of nationality. (Stalin did perceive the national question differently from Lenin). However, all rural citizens of Ukraine would suffer regardless of Stalin’s motivation, so that Jewish agricultural areas in Ukraine for instance would also suffer Famine, as I recall reading one Rabbi’s recollection of this period. None were spared within the confines of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and the Ukrainian Kuban. The internal passport system was enforced in Soviet Ukraine to prevent escape to any cities.
It makes for grim reading. It is astounding to contemplate that within the next decade World War Two would ensue and add even more horror, blood, and millions upon millions of deaths on the battlefield, in the Holocaust, in concentration, extermination, and labour camps what with the Nazis coming east to fulfill their genocidal goals. Stalin of course came back as the victor thereafter but the war didn’t change his internal policy or repression.
Andrew,
off to Milan derby.
F
fatherstephaniu
Guest
In Regina, Saskatchewan we are organizing a commemoration of the Holodomor on Friday, November 26th at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. The presentation is a one-man play by Father Edward Danylo Evanko, entitled Holodomor: Murder By Starvation.
M
mardukm
Guest
Not just Ukranians, but THE WHOLE WORLD should commemorate this sad event.
I can’t imagine why such a stunning evil has not been more fully exposed in the Western world. I don’t recall reading about it from any general history books when I was growing up - the only holocaust I knew and read about was the Jewish one.
I would like to ask - Was this ethnic cleansing kept secret for a long while by the Soviet authorities? I’m just stunned that many (and I count myself among that group) have been largely ignorant of this holocaust.
Blessings,
Marduk
I can’t imagine why such a stunning evil has not been more fully exposed in the Western world. I don’t recall reading about it from any general history books when I was growing up - the only holocaust I knew and read about was the Jewish one.
I would like to ask - Was this ethnic cleansing kept secret for a long while by the Soviet authorities? I’m just stunned that many (and I count myself among that group) have been largely ignorant of this holocaust.
Blessings,
Marduk
A
Alexander_Roman
Guest
I was pleased to work on legislation that makes the Holodomor commemoration in November a provincial day of observance in Ontario.
We should light a candle in honour of the victims on that day and pray for the repose of their souls.
Alex
We should light a candle in honour of the victims on that day and pray for the repose of their souls.
Alex
K
Kaninchen
Guest
Yes, on ground we’ve travelled before.Hey, Kaninchen is here.
I’ve sometimes conjectured that one of the reasons why events like this have been ignored is really part of the historic picture that Western Europeans have of Russia and Eastern Europe.
There’s always been a kind of ‘there be dragons’ view of the mental map of the region in the Western mind, mysterious and exotic with expected barbarity - rather like, “X million dead in India/China famine,” sad but something one has come to expect in “benighted lands beyond the pale of civilization.”
What made the Shoah different was that one of the most civilized and advanced societies of the West went “mad dog” and killed technologically, industrially and managerially – in other words, “people just like us.”
K
KyivAndrew
Guest
Yes and Yes. What made the Shoah unique was that each and every Jew - religious, secular, assimilated or not - in Hitler’s Genocidal Plan was to be exterminated right til the last wherever one could be found and wherever one hid. The Jewish people horrifically were to be exterminated from the face of the earth. I’ve always wanted to read this book on the Shoah and Communist/Nazi crimes by Alain Besancon who believes and argues that the Ukrainian Famine/Holodomor was indeed genocide but who also covers the uniqueness of the Shoah.Yes, on ground we’ve travelled before.
I’ve sometimes conjectured that one of the reasons why events like this have been ignored is really part of the historic picture that Western Europeans have of Russia and Eastern Europe.
There’s always been a kind of ‘there be dragons’ view of the mental map of the region in the Western mind, mysterious and exotic with expected barbarity - rather like, “X million dead in India/China famine,” sad but something one has come to expect in “benighted lands beyond the pale of civilization.”
What made the Shoah different was that one of the most civilized and advanced societies of the West went “mad dog” and killed technologically, industrially and managerially – in other words, “people just like us.”
amazon.com/Century-Horrors-Communism-Uniqueness-Crosscurrents/dp/1933859180/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289860356&sr=1-2
I have read some of his essays but will get around to reading this book.
Both of these crimes against humanity were obviously different in kind; the suffering, whatever the different goals and mechanism, of course was very real - children, the elderly, disabled. It is profoundly sad.
K
Kaninchen
Guest
I hope nobody thinks that I said what I said about the Shoah in a kind of “Our tragedy was worse than your tragedy,” way, I really wasn’t.
I was more comparing attitudes to it - “people like us did it” as opposed to “people like them did it” - in the Western mind.
It’s terribly important that these events - all of them - are memorialised, researched and so on. A reminder of the horrors that can accompany somebody’s idea of creating a “better world”.
K
KyivAndrew
Guest
No, Kaninchen, I didn’t perceive anything of the sort! I was looking as you did at the "industrial’ type of genocide the Nazis practiced.
Yes, in the Western mind, of course.
Of course. I think my vocabulary is failing me at the end of a long day.
I simply was afraid in my posting that I was not seen to be diminishing the Shoah, and I hope I have not. Heck, I guess when you start talking about deaths in the millions on a Forum Board…
Kaninchen, if truth be told, since I joined CAF, I have always considered you to be perhaps the most intelligent poster and one of the most thoughtful posters on CAF and I always look forward to reading a post when I see “Kaninchen” has posted. I may not post often on some of the threads I’ve seen you on but I find myself more in agreement with you than not…
C
ConstantineTG
Guest
The sad truth is that there are very many comparable sad stories around the world and those most pepole focus on the sad stories of their own lands than of lands far away. For example, in World War 2 Japnese soliders took young women in the Philippines and turned them into sex slaves. They were referred to as “Comfort Women”. This story has been largely ignored outside the country which doesn’t help the plight of the survivors who are seeking compensation from the Japanese government. The most famous of such events is The Rape of Nanking which happened in Japanese occupied China back then. But even that doesn’t garner a lot of international attention.
There’s just so many sad and unfortunate stories out there that we fail to recognize some of them. And that is the saddest part of it, not that such events were ignored, but that there is too many of them.
M
mardukm
Guest
K
KyivAndrew
Guest
Father, I am not sure we out in the East can boast of someone with as good a voice as Father Ed Evanko, of CBC fame; it seems we in the East might have to catch up with you guys on talent.
It is nice to know of the vocation he chose and leads.
K
KyivAndrew
Guest
Yes, Brother Marduk, kept secret by the Soviet authorities right up until just about the end of the Soviet Union. (p.s. I’m not sure using the word “holocaust” is apropos in discussing the Ukrainian famine). Those who did attempt to bring attention to it in the Ukrainian community in the free world were subjugated to a long history of attacks from the Soviet propaganda machine that talk of the Ukrainian Famine was all Nazi lies, even though, of course, the onset of the Famine was before Hitler came to power, never mind that it was neither here nor there. The Soviet Disinformation machine was quite adept. In 1953 with Stalin still running the show, many Ukrainians in North America risked their and their families’ lives (back in Ukraine) by putting memories to paper in “The Black Deeds of the Kremlin” published in North America with first-hand accounts of what they lived through back in the 1930s in Ukraine. If the Soviets could trace the village or town of the memoirists, bad things could happen to family back home. Sometimes K.G.B. agents would actually put selected activists in the Ukrainian community in North America under duress if they could latch on to anyone vulnerable at some event: i.e. “Ivan, you have family here in Vinnytsia, your sister, mother, father, are still there, and we can tell you, they are O.K ; now we’ll make sure they are safe for you, just tell us once a month at this place who in the community is planning a demonstration here, or a meeting with a politician here to draw attention to this subject”. I knew of two such sad stories.
Funny thing is as a student activist in the 1980s, the K.G.B. in Ukraine paid a visit to my second cousin’s family back in the old country after one time us Ukrainian students in Canada brought some recognition to the plight of the Church and country under the Soviet Union at one particular international event. Scared the heck out of my family back in Ukraine. I learned of it later from a letter from Ukraine (posted with Lenin stamps and all) asking my dad if his son was at such and such an event. Unbelievable, and I didn’t publish my name in organizing. But the thing is the Communists started off as an underground group and they always looked on the Ukrainian emigre community as one of its enemies, no matter how relatively powerless we were.
It was risky because the paranoid Kremlin kept very close tabs on the Ukrainian emigration. Many did not even risk writing back home to find out who survived World War Two so as not to endanger their families back home. When the Iron Curtain collapsed, there were many family reunions of siblings and parents and kids who had not seen one another in 50! years, including in my family.
On the Famine memoirs, nobody took the stories really seriously until British historian Robert Conquest relied on them among other sources and published his groundbreaking work on Collectivization in the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian Famine.
Since an initial bump, there has been a steep regression in acknowledging the facts recently. In Moscow now, Soviet history is being brought slightly back into Vladimir Putin’s understanding of Soviet history. Similarly, in Ukraine, a corrupt thugocracy consisting of Soviet-schooled men has closed the archives on the Holodomor unbelievably and stated there is nothing left to research! The Education Minister in Ukraine now is one Dmytro Tabachnyk who claimed recently in a newspaper article in Russian that people who discuss the Holodomor and the mass deaths on Ukrainian news-sites or internet blogs are “polluting the blogosphere”. Polluting was his word. Now this is thoroughly revolting to many Ukrainians for THE Minister of Education in Ukraine to proclaim. The powers who lobbied for Tabachnyk’s appointment would deserve another thread.
So yes, the story was kept hidden and now, it seems, after letting some info. out, it is to be locked up again or is to be interpreted in ways acceptable to the corrupt powers that now be.
So in an ironic kind of way, national-democratic forces in Ukraine (and the Church) are falling back on the diaspora to help them out, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Problem is there is a lot of people in the Ukrainian community who are losing hope now as to things changing back in Ukraine; there is fatigue. It feels like our parents’ and grandparents’ generation struggled so long to see the Soviet Union collapse and freedom for Ukraine that there is little appetite left to keep struggling against the forces who wish to bring many aspects of the good old days back to Ukraine and Russia: i.e. no free press; no truly democratic choice in elections (Yedyna Rossiya in Russia acclaimed, or Yanukovych’s party in Ukraine), journalists killed; history’s crimes whitened; curbs on certain churches like ours, and the list goes on. Ukraine is being sucked back into some neo-Soviet miasma it seems at times, with those parts of the old Iron Curtain that could escape the Kremlin’s grip - Poland, Hungary, the Czecks, Slovaks - at least being given a chance to develop freely.
K
KyivAndrew
Guest
Yes, creating a world for Aryan Supermen in one Brown utopia (requiring the extinction of Jewish people, the decimation of other subhumans, etc) or creating a world for Homo Sovieticus in the other utopia (requiring, under Lenin and Stalin, the near-elimination or repression of certain supposed classes, religions, or truculent nationalities). The former seemed more exclusivist obviously, and one came out of the Left and the other the Right. It is interesting however to see how each ideology developed and the Soviet had longer to evolve. I am still looking at reading this book by historian David Brandenberger which argues how Soviet goals changed from Lenin to Stalin re: nationalities and governing ideology. It is called “National Bolshevism” which explains some things that always intrigued me on the uniting myths of the new Sovietskiy Chelovek (Soviet Man):
books.google.ca/books?id=I8AGb8zN-ykC&printsec=frontcover&dq=David+Brandenberger&hl=en&ei=TiXiTOz7AqPenQeT2rirDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
O.K. I’m punching my timecard out now. zz
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