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The Holodomor

Bolshevik Russia's Genocide by Famine Against Ukraine

David Stewart

November 23, 2024

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The Holomor was an artificial famine engineered by the Soviet Union in 1932-1933. It targeted Ukrainians for resisting forced collectivization by confiscating their food.  An estimated 5 to 7 million Ukrainians died of starvation, an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust. 

 

Victims included those in modern Ukraine and in historically Ukrainian regions of Kuban and Slobozhanshchyna as well as Ukrainians in Kazakhstan. Genocide and ethnic cleansing of historically Ukrainian regions was perpetrated through famine, executions, deportations, and other repressions.  From 1928 to 1937, the Ukrainian-majority population of the Kuban region fell from 950,000 to just 150,000.

 

Forced starvation was also used as a tool of repression from 1921-1923 during the Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine and from 1946-1947 after the Second World War. It continues to be used by the Russian terror state today, which destroys grain, livestock, water, power plants, and other civilian infrastructure and starves prisoners of war.

 

Each victim of the Holodomor, every man, woman and child, was a person of value and dignity. Each had unique personal attributes, cherished hopes and dreams, was loved and cared for, and contributed to society. Through the brutality of the communist regime, many of their names and even their very existence have been effaced. Each had a story that can no longer be heard.

 

Scholars have noted that the communist ideology was worse than slavery. Slave owners had an economic interest in maintaining the life and health of their slaves. Communism imputed no value to those who resisted or were considered undesirable through the lens of their totalitarian ideology, construing their elimination as “progressive.”  Thus destruction of human life was unleashed on a scale previously unseen. Communism claimed an estimated hundred million lives in the 20th century, making it the deadliest ideology in human history. 

 

The perpetrators of the Holocaust were held accountable with war trials and a national reckoning. Yet the perpetrators of the Holodomor have never been held accountable. Its ideological underpinning remains dominant in Russia. 

 

Russian atrocities against the Ukrainian people go well beyond communism. Americans do not understand Ukrainian history and have no frame of reference for doing so. We do not know what it is like to have a neighbor like Muscovite Russia which has sought for centuries to destroy our culture, language, identity, and every vestige of independent thought by any means available.

 

The United States’ war of independence was fought over complaints that are trivial compared to the oppression that Ukrainians have endured for centuries. The British were principled opponents with a strong sense of ethics and honor. Many accounts of our revolutionary war note captured British troops being released on their word of honor which appears overwhelmingly to have been respected. There is nothing in American history akin to the pervasive deceit, perfidy and atrocities of the Muscovites.

 

My intent is not to diminish the legacy of the United States’  struggle for freedom. It is rather to note that Ukraine’s tragedies lie outside of the American historical understanding. The false assumption that others share our values and want the same things is a great error in the West today. Western naivete has continued to be exploited by the enemies of freedom. We have increasingly come to accommodate totalitarian states under the delusion that this will cause them to accept our values, rather than degrading our own. The pronouncements of many purported Western “experts” fail because of basic misunderstandings.

 

Ukrainians understand things that many Western policymakers and academics do not. Your voice is important. Your knowledge and perspectives, your outreach to educate others by sharing your experiences and history, are vitally needed in the American democratic process.

 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sometimes erroneously been referred to as Putin‘s war. All segments of Russian society have participated in the aggression of the terror state. Likewise, the Holodomor was not “merely” Stalin’s famine. Western sympathy for Soviet propaganda has hindered recognition of centuries of Russian racism and imperialism. From the de facto status of Muscovite Russians as the ruling class of the Soviet Empire to mass deportations and sending out ethnic minorities for meat grinder tactics in war, systemic Russian racism has never had a societal reckoning.

 

While responsibility for the Holodomor lies primarily with Muscovite Russia, it could not have so long continued and been concealed without Western collaborators. First among these was Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief who praised Stalin and the Soviet regime while covering up the murder of millions of Ukrainians. Duranty was well aware of the atrocities and acknowledged them privately to colleagues, but denied or whitewashed them publicly. He wrote in a March 1933 dispatch: “There is no famine. But, to put it brutally, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Mr. Duranty did not disclose what kind of “omelet” he believed was being made.

 

Duranty’s 1931 article carrying the Orwellian title “Stalinism Solving Minorities Problem" boasted that “every nationality in the [Soviet] union was allowed full linguistic autonomy and what might have seemed a dangerously lavish degree of cultural and political autonomy.” He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his articles. Despite serial deceptions that identify Duranty as a pathological liar, a genocide apologist and Stalin’s propagandist, the New York Times’ admission that Duranty’s work is “largely discredited” and the Pulitzer Board’s acknowledgment that his reporting “falls seriously short,” Pulitzer has refused to revoke Duranty’s award.

 

One of the few Western heroes was Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist fluent in Welsh, German, French, and Russian. In March 1933, Jones walked for forty miles through villages, collective and state farms in Ukraine. Jones found children with swollen bellies, families without food, and unemployed workers without bread cards, doomed to a slow, painful death by starvation. He recorded his observations and interviews in his diary and published over twenty newspaper articles upon his return to Great Britain. Jones was the first to publish accounts of the Holodomor in his own name. His reports were widely disbelieved in the West, and Western governments took no action. Russian atrocities have been facilitated by Western incredulity at conduct which lies entirely outside of their own experience and comprehension. Gareth Jones was murdered in Inner Mongolia in 1935 with strong evidence of involvement of the Soviet secret police.

 

Ukrainian-born economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1922, a decade before the Holodomor, that much of the power of the Soviet terror state arose from sympathy for its professed aims, while documenting that its ideological claims were opposite to reality. He documented the rejection of millennia of human knowledge and development for the sake of power by “destructionists.” He wrote in Die Gemeinwirtschaft

 

“It is not the cannons and machine guns that Lenin and Trotsky have at their disposal that make up the strength of Bolshevism, but the fact that its ideas are received with sympathy throughout the world.”

 

The crimes of the Holodomor have been compounded by the failure to learn and apply their lessons. Today’s crises have arisen directly from these failures. That Western leaders and academics have often demonstrated more sympathy for the oppressors than victims continues to be a problem today. Ukrainians and others have not been able to rely on Western nations to implement their professed values. The struggle is not only against the Russian terror state, but against its Western enablers. Some of these enablers loudly condemn evils of centuries past that require no moral courage to denounce. They profess the moral high ground as if they were wiser and more virtuous than their forebears, while turning a blind eye to the evils of our day. 

 

We in the West have sacrificed human rights and international law for cheap products made with slave labor and Russian oil mingled with the blood of Ukrainian children. The advocates of truth must continually set these matters forth and demand justice. Incremental progress has often been achieved not through the devotion to principle of some of our leaders, but from being repeatedly called out for inaction in the face of irrefutable evidence so that acting rightly becomes a matter of their self-interest.

 

What was the crime of millions of Ukrainians who perished in the Holodomor? Why do many Muscovite Russians hate Ukrainians to the point of genocide? In my observation, many Russians hate Ukrainians because Ukrainians will not bow down to the lie. They will not deny their own sight and hearing. They will not betray their reason and conscience to serve false ideology. They believe in human rights and dignity, and of the accountability of all people before God. They value truth and freedom and will be slaves to no one.

 

Thank you for remembering the Holodomor and its victims. Thank you for not allowing your history to be blotted out or rewritten with lies. These are not issues only of history, but hold deep importance for the present and future. Each of us has a duty to bring these matters before the eyes of the world and to bear witness on behalf of those who cannot speak. It is beyond the power of our words to properly honor them and the principles they sacrificed for. We can do so only with our lives in carrying forth their legacy and the battle for human dignity. May they live eternally in bright memory.

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