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Never Forget: Holodomor Memorial Day

In 1932 and 1933, 7 Million (estimated) Ukrainians were massacred by genocidal famine
ordered by the Bolshevik government. Many were Christians. Students do not learn about
the Holodomor in middle school, high school, or even college. There aren’t dozens of
major Hollywood films depicting the horrific events that took place. Our politicians aren’t
referencing the Holodomor every other day and visiting Holodomor Museums. If you ask
any random American on the street about the Holodomor they will have no idea what it is. Why is this?
 
 
American students grow up inundated with Holocaust movies, books, and education from
grade school on up. American states like Florida even pass laws mandating Holocaust education
for our children. So why are we not learning about the Holodomor?
 
 
Perhaps even worse: why is Holodomor Denial allowed while if you question any part
of the Holocaust narrative you could land in jail across many European countries.
In particular why are prominent members of the Jewish community, who know the
realities of genocide in the 20th century, among some of the most prominent Holodomor denialists?
 
 
 
 
“The Holodomor “is definitely not a genocide,” said Zuroff,
the head of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”
About a decade ago Abe Foxman, the former head of the Jewish Anti Defamation League,
met with the President of Ukraine to pressure the government into downplaying the Holodomor.
 
 
 
Maybe Mr. Putin can give us a clue as to why this is.
 
Putin: First Soviet Government Was Mostly Jewish: “I thought about something just now:
The decision to nationalize this library was made by the first Soviet government, whose
composition was 80-85 percent Jewish,” Putin said June 13 during a visit to Moscow’s
Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. Interestingly enough,
around the same percentage of Joe Biden’s cabinet is Jewish too.
 
 
Thankfully unlike the Ukrainian Kulaks, the American Kulaks are armed,
but we must also be well versed in history so that it does not repeat itself.
Christians must never forget the genocide of millions of our Christian brothers and sisters.
We must hold to account those who seek to deny, hide, or downplay this atrocity.
We must educate our children about the horrors of what happened and we must not
be afraid to “offend” people in the process of discussing the truth about these important matters.
Objective truth is only offensive to those who hate and wish to hide objective truth.
 
 
Never forget.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus is King
 
_____________________________________________
 



Ukrainians greet German troops as liberators from Soviet tyranny.

People in Lvov or Lemberg in western Ukraine welcome the soldiers as they enter the city. Mass killings come to light. Just before fleeing the city, Soviet police used axes, knives and firearms to kill many Ukrainians in the GPU police headquarters. Bodies of victims are carried from the GPU building and laid out for identification. Enraged civilians round up and take revenge on those who had supported the Soviets.

 

 

 

The holodomor was enabled by the initial confiscation of firearms... click on this text to see who wants your firearms...

The Jewish Ethnic Cleansing Of Europeans

Holodomor: The Secret Holocaust in Ukraine

                                                                                                            Written by  James Perloff


When Ukraine resisted Soviet attempts at collectivization in the 1920s and '30s,

the Soviet Union under Stalin used labor camps, executions, and starvation

(Holodomor) to kill millions of Ukrainians.

 

In 1933, the recently elected administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt granted official U.S.

recognition to the Soviet Union for the first time. Especially repugnant was that this

recognition was granted even though Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had just concluded a

campaign of genocide against Ukraine that left over 10 million dead. This atrocity was

known to the Roosevelt administration, but not to the American people at large,

thanks to suppression of the story by the Western press — as we shall show.

 

Ukraine's Untold Tragedy

 

The Ukrainian genocide remains largely unknown. After 76 years, the blood

of the victims still cries for truth, and the guilt of the perpetrators for exposure.

 

Many Americans are barely acquainted with Ukraine, even though it is Europe's second

largest country after Russia, and has been a distinct land and people for centuries.

One reason for this unfamiliarity is that Ukraine has rarely known political independence;

it was under Russia's heel throughout much of its existence — under Soviet domination

prior to 1991, and under Czarist Russia before that. Many American students heard

little or nothing of Ukraine in their history classes because the nation had been

relegated to the status of a Russian "province."

 

Stalin accomplished genocide against Ukraine by two means. One was massive executions

and deportations to labor camps. But his second tool of murder was more unique:

an artificial famine created by confiscation of all food. Ukrainians call this the Holodomor,

translated by one modern Ukrainian dictionary as "artificial hunger, organized on a vast

scale by the criminal regime against the country's population," but often simply

translated as "murder by hunger."

 

Ukraine was the last place one would have expected famine, for it had been known

for centuries as the "breadbasket of Europe." French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère wrote

in 1573: "Ukraine is overflowing with honey and wax.... The soil of this country is so

good and fertile that when you leave a plow in the field, it becomes overgrown with grass

after two or three days. It will be difficult to find." The 18th-century British traveler

Joseph Marshall wrote: "The Ukraine is the richest province of the Russian empire....

The soil is a black loam.... I think I have never seen such deep plowing as these

peasants give their ground."

 

In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ukraine became part of a bloody

battlefield of fighting between the Bolsheviks (the group that eventually became the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Czarist Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists.

Ultimately, of course, the Bolsheviks prevailed, but Lenin shrewdly recognized that

concessions would be necessary to gain Ukraine's cooperation as a member of the

unstable young USSR. To exploit Ukrainians' long-standing resentment of Czarist domination,

he permitted them to retain much of their national culture. Ukrainians experienced a

relatively high degree of freedom extending into the mid-1920s. The Ukrainian Autocephalous

Orthodox Church and non-communist Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were allowed to

operate independently. However, as the Soviet Union consolidated its power, and

Joseph Stalin ascended to the party's top, these freedoms became expendable,

and Ukrainian nationalism, at first exploited, now became viewed as a liability.

 

 Coerced Collectivization


Despite a communist push for collectivization, Ukraine's farms had mostly remained private —

the foundation of their success. But in 1929, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's

Communist Party decided to embark on a program of total collectivization. Private

farms were to be completely replaced by collectives — in Ukraine known as kolkhozes.

This was, of course, consistent with Marxist ideology: the Communist Manifesto had called

for abolition of private property.

 

Intense pressure was placed upon Ukrainian peasants to join the kolkhozes. Twenty-five

thousand fanatical young communists from the USSR's cities were sent to Ukraine to

compel the transition. These became known as the Twenty-Five Thousanders; each

was assigned a particular locality, and was accompanied by a weapons-bearing communist

entourage, including members of the GPU (secret police, forerunner

of the KGB). A communist commission was established in each village.

 

Holodomor survivor Miron Dolot, in his book Execution by Hunger, describes what

happened soon after a commission was started in his village by its

Twenty-Five Thousander, Comrade Zeitlin:

 

We did not have to wait too long for Comrade Zeitlin's strategy to reveal itself.

The first incident occurred very early on a cold January morning in 1930 while people

in our village were still asleep. Fifteen villagers were arrested, and

someone said that the Checkists [GPU] had arrived in the village at midnight....

 

The most prominent villagers were among those arrested.... This was frightening.

Our official leadership had been taken away in one night. The farmers,

mostly illiterate and ignorant, were thereby left much more defenseless.

 

The leaders of Dolot's village were never seen again.

 

Throughout Ukraine, the Twenty-Five Thousanders held mandatory village meetings

in which they demanded that all peasants relinquish private farming and "volunteer"

to join a collective. Most peasants fiercely resisted. In principle, of course, there is nothing

wrong with farmers pooling their resources and efforts in a cooperative venture.

But this was not what the communists meant by collectivization. On the kolkhozes,

the government owned everything — the land, animals, equipment, and produce.

The worker kept no fruits of his labor, and was at the state's mercy to receive a pittance of pay.

 

Soviet collectives never succeeded. As the eminent Sovietologist Robert Conquest noted

of them, "Wherever they had existed they had, with all the advantages given them by

the regime, done worse than the individual farm." On the kolkhozes, livestock, poorly

cared for, easily died, and equipment fell into disrepair. This was because the workers

did not own them, nor did they have any stake in the collective. This illustrated the

conflict between Marxist ideology and the reality of human nature. Making matters

worse, the collectives were organized by the Twenty-Five Thousanders, who, being

urban youths, had no agricultural experience; their ignorance of

farming basics often became the butt of jokes among local Ukrainians.

 

To force the villagers into collectives, the communists threatened them with being

declared enemies of the state, to be dealt with by the GPU. Jails — unfamiliar to

Ukrainian peasants — began appearing in every village. To instill additional fear,

Soviet army units were brought in, lodging themselves in homes without permission.

Torturous punishments were devised, such as "path treading," in which a resisting

peasant would be forced to walk through the snow to the next village, there to be

interrogated by its officials, and if he still refused to join a collective, walk to the next

village. This would carry on until the peasant either died of exhaustion or bent to the

state's will. A very effective method was to simply seize a family's food supply.

Threatened with seeing their children starve, many peasants gave in.

By the summer of 1932, 80 percent of Ukraine's farmland had been forcibly collectivized.

 

Scapegoat for Communist Failure

 

But since the kolkhozes failed to produce as predicted by Marxist theory, and with

many peasants still refusing to join, Stalin sought a scapegoat. It was announced

that the failure of collectivization was due to sabotage by "kulaks." These were the

more prosperous peasants. Merely owning a cow, hiring another peasant, or having

a tin roof (instead of the more common thatched roof) were all considered evidence

that one was a kulak.

 

Of course, in any economy, some people thrive more than others. This is usually

owing to industriousness and efficiency. According to Marxist doctrine, however,

all wealthier peasants (kulaks) were "bloodsuckers" and "parasites" who had grown

rich by exploiting poorer peasants and who were now subverting collectivization.

Stalin announced that the solution to better grain production was to "struggle against

the capitalist elements of the peasantry, against the kulaks," and he proclaimed the

goal of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." In reality, however, Ukraine had

never had a distinct social class of kulaks — this concept was a Marxist invention.

 

Those accused of being kulaks were either shot, deported to remote slave labor camps

in Russia, or put in local labor details. Few survived. One could be accused of being a

kulak on the flimsiest evidence. Some peasants accused others merely out of envy

or dislike. As one Soviet writer later noted: "It was easy to do a man in; you wrote a denunciation;

you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work

for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows." Some very poor peasants

were accused of being kulaks simply because they were religiously devout. And ironically,

many of the "rich" kulaks earned less income than the communist officials prosecuting them!

"Dekulakization" slaughtered millions.

 

Ironically, this process killed off the most productive farmers, guaranteeing a smaller

harvest and a more impoverished Soviet Union. The remaining farmers did not dare

take steps to improve their lands or prosper, for fear they would be reclassified as kulaks.

But Stalin accomplished his true goal: destroying leadership

that might oppose the complete subjugation of Ukraine.

 

This campaign extended beyond kulaks to broadly attacking all vestiges

of Ukrainian nationalism. As Dolot notes, the Soviet Communist Party

 

sent [Pavel] Postyshev, a sadistically cruel Russian chauvinist, as its viceroy to

Ukraine. His appointment played a crucial role in the lives of all Ukrainians. It was

Postyshev who brought along and implemented a new Soviet Russian policy in

Ukraine. It was an openly proclaimed policy of deliberate and unrestricted destruction

of everything Ukrainian. From now on, we were continually reminded that there were

"bourgeois-nationalists" among us whom we must destroy.... This new campaign

against the Ukrainian national movement had resulted in the annihilation of the

Ukrainian central government as well as all Ukrainian cultural, educational, and social institutions.

 

The Ukrainian Language Institute, Ukrainian Institute of Philosophy, Ukrainian State

Publishing House, and countless other institutions were purged, their leaders murdered

or imprisoned. So fanatical was the war on nationalism that even the colorful embroidered

national costumes Ukrainians wore were seized. Eyewitness Yefrosyniya Poplavets recalls:

"To save our embroidered shirts we put them on under our old ragged jackets. It didn't work!

They undressed us and took the shirts to eradicate any national spirit in the household."

 

But perhaps the most intense thrust was against the church, for it represented not only

a form of Ukrainian solidarity, but the Gospel whose principles inherently oppose those

of Marxism. The Communist Party declared: "The church is the kulak's agitprop."

Priests were executed or sent to labor camps; church land was confiscated; monasteries

were closed. The churches — some of them centuries-old national monuments —

were either demolished, or turned into cinemas, libraries, barracks and other secular

uses for the state. Church icons were smashed; books and archives were burned;

church bells were even sold as scrap. By the end of 1930, 80 percent of all Ukraine's

village churches had been shut down. These measures were applied not only against

Ukraine's Orthodox churches, but against other denominations and

religions, for as Marx had said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses."

 

"Murder by Hunger"

 

Yet the worst still awaited Ukraine. By 1932, virtually all kulaks had been liquidated,

but many of the remaining poor peasants still resisted communism and collectivization.

Stalin now began war upon Ukraine's poorest — ironically those who,

in Marxist doctrine, should have been esteemed as "the proletariat."

 

In 1932, Stalin demanded that Ukraine increase its grain output by 44 percent.

Such a goal would have been unachievable even if the communists had not already

ruined the nation's productivity by eliminating the best farmers and forcing others onto

the feeble collectives. That year, not a single village was able to meet the

impossible quota, which far exceeded Ukraine's best output in the pre-collective years.

 

Stalin then issued one of the cruelest orders of his dark career: if quotas were not

met, all grain was to be confiscated. As one Soviet author much later wrote: "All the

grain without exception was requisitioned for the fulfillment of the Plan, including

that set aside for sowing, fodder, and even that previously issued to the kolkhozniki

as payment for their work." The authorization included seizure of all food from all

households. Any home that did not turn over all its grain was accused of "hoarding"

state property. One villager recalled the process by which communist "brigades"

invaded homes:

 

Every brigade had a so-called "specialist" for searching out grain.

He was equipped with a long iron crow-bar with which he probed for hidden grain.



The brigade went from house to house. At first they entered homes and asked,

"How much grain have you got for the government?" "I haven't any.

If you don't believe me search for yourselves," was the usual laconic answer.



And so the "search" began. They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry

and the cellar. Then they went outside and searched the barn, pig pen, granary

and the straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough

to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded

on the floor of the house, tramped the whole yard and garden.

If they found a suspicious-looking spot, in went the crow-bar.

 

Miron Dolot recalls:

 

They measured the thickness of the walls, and inspected them for bulges where

grain could have been concealed. Sometimes they completely tore down suspicious

walls.... Nothing in the houses remained intact or untouched. They upturned

everything: even the cribs of babies, and the babies themselves were thoroughly

frisked, not to mention the other family members. They looked for "hidden grain"

in and under men's and women's clothing. Even the smallest amount that was

found was confiscated. If so much as a small can or jar of seeds was found that

had been set aside for spring planting, it was taken

away, and the owner was accused of hiding food from the state.

 

Of course, to avoid starvation, nearly every family did attempt to conceal food.

But experience soon made the brigades proficient at detecting even the most clever hiding places.

 

The result was mass starvation that took millions of lives during the terrible winter

of 1932-33. Food was nearly impossible to find anywhere. Many begged

neighbors for potato skins or other scraps — only to find their neighbors equally destitute.

 

There was still some food on the collectives, which the communists did not deplete like

households. However, in August 1932 the Communist Party of the USSR had passed a

law mandating the death penalty for theft of "social property." Watchtowers were built

on the collectives, manned by trigger-happy young communists. Thousands of peasants

were shot for attempting to take a handful of grain or a

few beets from the kolkhozes, to feed their starving families.

 

Unable to get food, many ate whatever could pass for it — weeds, leaves, tree bark,

and insects. The luckiest were able to survive secretly on small woodland animals.

American journalist Thomas Walker wrote:

 

About twenty miles south of Kiev (Kyiv), I came upon a village that was practically

extinct by starvation. There had been fifteen houses in this village and a population

of forty-odd persons. Every dog and cat had been eaten. The horses and oxen had

all been appropriated by the Bolsheviks to stock the collective farms. In one hut

they were cooking a mess that defied analysis. There were bones, pig-weed, skin,

and what looked like a boot top in this pot. The way the remaining half dozen

inhabitants eagerly watched this slimy mess showed the state of their hunger.

 

A few people even resorted to cannibalism, eating those

who had died and, in some cases, murdering those still living.

 

Many peasants attempted to reach Ukraine's cities like Kiev, where factory workers

were still allowed a little pay and food. However, in December 1932 the communists

introduced the "internal passport." This made it impossible for a villager to

get a city job without the Party's permission, which was almost universally denied.

 

Other peasants hoped to get to Poland, Romania, or even Russia, where there was

no famine. But emigration was strictly forbidden. Ukrainian train stations were swamped

with the starving, who hoped to sneak aboard a train, or beg in hopes that a passenger

on a passing train might throw them a bread crust. They were repelled by GPU guards,

who found themselves faced with the problem of removing countless corpses of

the starving who littered these stations.

 

Horror of Genocide

 

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who secretly investigated Ukraine without

Soviet permission, was able to escape communist censorship by sending

details home to the Manchester Guardian in a diplomatic bag. He reported:

 

On a recent visit to the Northern Caucasus and the Ukraine, I saw something

of the battle that is going on between the government and the peasants.... On

the one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from

lack of food; on the other, soldier members of the GPU carrying out the instructions

of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm

of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of

peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile

land in the world to a melancholy desert.

 

At the famine's height, 25,000 people per day were dying. As the winter wore on,

Ukraine became a panorama of horror. The roadsides were filled with the corpses

of those who died seeking food. The bodies, many of which snow concealed

until the spring thaw, were unceremoniously dumped into mass graves by the communists.

 

Many others died of starvation in their own homes. Some chose to end the process by

suicide, commonly by hanging — if they had the strength to do it. "They just sat,"

writes Dolot of his fellow villagers, "or lay down silently, too feeble even to talk.

The bodies of some were reduced to skeletons, with their skin hanging grayish-yellow

and loose over their bones. Their faces looked like rubber masks with large, bulging,

immobile eyes. Their necks seemed to have shrunk onto their shoulders.

The look in their eyes was glassy, heralding their approaching death."

 

The communists, on the other hand, ate excellent rations, and party bosses even

enjoyed luxurious ones. In Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow,

we read the following account of the party officials' dining hall at Pohrebyshcha:

 

Day and night it was guarded by militia keeping the starving peasants away from

the restaurant.... In the dining room, at very low prices, white bread, meat, poultry,

canned fruit and delicacies, wines and sweets were served to

the district bosses.... Around these oases famine and death were raging.

 

But perhaps the worst paradox: although much of the confiscated grain was exported

to the West, large portions were simply dumped into the sea by the Soviets, or allowed

to rot. For example, a huge supply of grain lay decaying under GPU guard at Reshetylivka

Station in Poltava Province. Passing it in a train, an American correspondent saw

"huge pyramids of grain, piled high, and smoking from internal combustion." In the

Lubotino region, thousands of tons of confiscated potatoes were allowed to rot,

surrounded by barbed wire.

 

All this underscores the true purpose of the food confiscation: genocide. Sergio Gradenigo,

the Italian consul in Moscow, wrote in a dispatch to Rome on May 31, 1933:

 

The famine has been deliberately planned by the Moscow government and implemented

by means of brutal requisition. The definite aim of this crime is to liquidate the Ukrainian

problem over a few months, sacrificing from 10 to 15 million people. Do not consider this

figure to be exaggerated: I'm sure it could even have been reached and exceeded by now.

 

While there is disagreement over how many lives the genocide claimed, Gradenigo's

figures have turned out to be rather accurate. In Harvest of Sorrow, historian Robert Conquest,

considered by many the leading authority on the famine, put the toll at 14.5 million. About

half of these deaths represent the liquidation of the kulaks, via execution and slow

death in gulags, while the famine itself claimed the lives of approximately seven million,

including three million children.

 

Helping Stalin Hide the Holocaust

 

How did a holocaust of these dimensions remain unknown in the West? First, the

Soviets suppressed all information regarding the famine. Russia's state-controlled

press was prohibited from discussing it, and for ordinary citizens,

just mentioning the famine carried a penalty of three to five years' imprisonment.

 

Although some Western observers did report the magnitude of the Ukrainians' plight,

such comments were extremely rare. During the famine, the Soviets prohibited foreign

journalists from visiting Ukraine. But just as significant was the cooperation of influential

Western writers sympathetic to communism. The Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw,

after receiving a tour carefully orchestrated by the Soviets, proclaimed in

1932: "I did not see a single under-nourished person in Russia, young or old."

 

But by far the worst offender was Walter Duranty, New York Times' Moscow bureau

chief from 1922 to 1936. Duranty enjoyed personal access to Stalin, called him

"the greatest living statesman," and even praised the dictator's notorious show trials.

To call Duranty a Soviet sympathizer greatly understates his role. Journalist Joseph Alsop

termed Duranty a "KGB agent," and Malcolm Muggeridge called him

"the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."

 

Duranty's published denials of Ukraine's Holodomor were perhaps the vilest acts of

his career. In November 1932, he brazenly told his New York Times readers,

"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be." He denounced as

"liars" the few brave writers who reported the famine, which he called "malignant propaganda."

When accumulating reports made the massive deaths hard to dispute, Duranty switched

tactics from outright denial to downplay. He wrote in the Times in March 1933:

"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality

from deaths due to malnutrition."

 

Incredibly, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for

"dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia."

 

Some will ask: did the Ukrainians resist the genocide? Yes! Throughout Stalin's war,

hundreds of riots and revolts, on various scales, erupted throughout Ukraine. There are

even a number of stories where groups of heroic women overran the communist-guarded

kolkhozes and seized grain for their starving children. And it

was not unusual for a village's local party tyrant to suddenly be found dead.

 

However, such resistance was brutally suppressed. The Soviets had passed gun

registration decrees in 1926, 1928, and 1929, and few Ukrainians owned effective

weapons. Resistance largely constituted pitchforks against machine guns. The GPU

and Soviet army dealt with revolts; aircraft were brought in to suppress the

more serious ones. And the famine of 1932-33 left peasants too weak to resist.

 

Triumph at Last, Tragedy Not Forgotten

 

The Holodomor stands as a permanent warning of what happens when unlimited state

power destroys God-given rights. A cursory review of America's Bill of Rights demonstrates

that virtually every right mentioned was trampled on by Stalin in Ukraine. Yet although

the dictator used every means to eradicate the people's will, the national

spirit lived on unbreakably, until Ukraine gained its independence in 1991.

 

Here in the United States, Ukrainian-American organizations such as the

Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation,

and others work diligently to maintain awareness of the Holodomor. Last year, they

helped commemorate the genocide's 75th anniversary. And largely thanks to their efforts,

in 2008 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution deploring the genocidal famine.

One of UCCA's ongoing campaigns — which The New American heartily

endorses — is for the long-deserved revocation of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize.

 

James Perloff is the author of

The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline 

 

 

_______________________________

 

 

 

 

 


Click on this text to see: HOLODOMOR : The famine-genocide of Ukraine, 1932-1933....

 

 

                                             Eyewitness accounts:

 

"Please return the grain that you have confiscated from me. If you don’t return it I’ll die. I’m 78 years old and I’m incapable of searching for food by myself."

(From a petition to the authorities by I.A. Rylov)

 

 

"I saw the ravages of the famine of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine: hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment window their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles ..."

(as remembered by Arthur Kaestler, a famous British novelist, journalist, and critic. Koestler spent about three months in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv during the Famine. He wrote about his experiences in "The God That Failed", a 1949 book which collects together six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous ex-Communists, who were writers and journalists.)

 

 

Our father used to read the Bible to us, but whenever he came to the passage mentioning ‘bloodless war’ he could not explain to us what that term meant. When in 1933 he was dying from hunger he called us to his deathbed and said “This, children, is what is called bloodless war...”

(as remembered by Hanna Doroshenko)

 

 

"What I saw that morning ... was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back ... Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables. There was not even the consolation of inevitability to relieve the horror."

(as remembered by Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet defector who wrote up his experiences of life in the Soviet Union and as a Soviet official, especially in his 1946 book "I Chose Freedom". "I Chose Freedom" containing extensive revelations on collectivization, Soviet prison camps and the use of slave labor came at a time of growing tension between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West. His death from bullet wounds in his apartment remains unclarified, though it was officially ruled a suicide. His son Andrew continues to believe he was the victim of a KGB execution.)

 

 

"From 1931 to 1934 we had great harvests. The weather conditions were great. However, all the grain was taken from us. People searched the fields for mice burrows hoping to find measly amounts of grain stored by mice..."

(as remembered by Mykola Karlosh)

 

 

"I still get nauseous when I remember the burial hole that all the dead livestock was thrown into. I still remember people screaming by that hole. Driven to madness by hunger people were ripping the meat of the dead animals. The stronger ones were getting bigger pieces. People ate dogs, cats, just about anything to survive."

(as remembered by Vasil Boroznyak)

 

 

"People were dying all over our village. The dogs ate the ones that were not buried. If people could catch the dogs they were eaten. In the neighboring village people ate bodies that they dug up."

(as remembered by Motrya Mostova)

 

 

"I’m asking for your permission to advance me any amount of grain. I’m completely sick. I don’t have any food. I’ve started to swell up and I can hardly move my feet. Please don’t refuse me or it will be too late."

(From a petition to the authorities by P. Lube)

 

 

"In the spring when acacia trees started blooming everyone began eating their flowers. I remember that our neighbor who didn’t have her own acacia tree climbed on ours and I went to tell my mother that she was eating our flowers. My mother only smiled sadly."

(as remembered by Vasil Demchenko)

 

 

"Of our neighbors I remember all the Solveiki family died, all of the Kapshuks, all the Rahachenkos too - and the Yeremo family - three of them, still alive, were thrown into the mass grave…"

(as remembered by Ekaterina Marchenko)

 

 

"Where did all bread disappear, I do not really know, maybe they have taken it all abroad. The authorities have confiscated it, removed from the villages, loaded grain into the railway coaches and took it away someplace. They have searched the houses, taken away everything to the smallest thing. All the vegetable gardens, all the cellars were raked out and everything was taken away.

Wealthy peasants were exiled into Siberia even before Holodomor during the “collectivization”. Communists came, collected everything. Children were crying beaten for that with the boots. It is terrifying to recall what happened. It was so dreadful that every day became engraved in my memory. People were lying everywhere as dead flies. The stench was awful. Many of our neighbors and acquaintances from our street died.

I have no idea how I managed to survive and stay alive. In 1933 we tried to survive the best we could. We collected grass, goose-foot, burdocks, rotten potatoes and made pancakes, soups from putrid beans or nettles.

Collected gley from the trees and ate it, ate sparrows, pigeons, cats, dead and live dogs. When there was still cattle, it was eaten first, then - the domestic animals. Some were eating their own children, I would have never been able to eat my child. One of our neighbours came home when her husband, suffering from severe starvation ate their own baby-daughter. This woman went crazy.

People were drinking a lot of water to fill stomachs, that is why the bellies and legs were swollen, the skin was swelling from the water as well. At that time the punishment for a stolen handful of grain was 5 years of prison. One was not allowed to go into the fields, the sparrows were pecking grain, though people were not allowed."

(From the memories of Olexandra Rafalska, Zhytomir)

 

 

"A boy, 9 years old, said: "Mother said, 'Save yourself, run to town.' I turned back twice; I could not bear to leave my mother, but she begged and cried, and I finally went for good."

(Recollected by an observer simply known as Dr. M.M.)

 

 

"At that time I lived in the village of Yaressky of the Poltava region. More than a half of the village population perished as a result of the famine. It was terrifying to walk through the village: swollen people moaning and dying. The bodies of the dead were buried together, because there was no one to dig the graves.

There were no dogs and no cats. People died at work; it was of no concern whether your body was swollen, whether you could work, whether you have eaten, whether you could – you had to go and work. Otherwise – you are the enemy of the people.

Many people never lived to see the crops of 1933 and those crops were considerable. A more severe famine, other sufferings were awaiting ahead. Rye was starting to become ripe. Those who were still able made their way to the fields. This road, however, was covered with dead bodies, some could not reach the fields, some ate grain and died right away. The patrol was hunting them down, collecting everything, trampled down the collected spikelets, beat the people, came into their homes, seized everything. What they could not take – they burned."

(From the memories of Galina Gubenko, Poltava region)

 

 

"The famine began. People were eating cats, dogs in the Ros’ river all the frogs were caught out. Children were gathering insects in the fields and died swollen. Stronger peasants were forced to collect the dead to the cemeteries; they were stocked on the carts like firewood, than dropped off into one big pit. The dead were all around: on the roads, near the river, by the fences. I used to have 5 brothers. Altogether 792 souls have died in our village during the famine, in the war years – 135 souls"

(As remembered by Antonina Meleshchenko, village of Kosivka, region of Kyiv)

 

 

"I remember Holodomor very well, but have no wish to recall it. There were so many people dying then. They were lying out in the streets, in the fields, floating in the flux. My uncle lived in Derevka – he died of hunger and my aunt went crazy – she ate her own child. At the time one couldn’t hear the dogs barking – they were all eaten up.”

(From the memories of Galina Smyrna, village Uspenka of Dniepropetrovsk region)


 
 
 


 Ukrainians welcome the righteous German army as liberators from Communist tyranny and savagery.

 

Ukrainian women mourn the deaths of their husbands who had been rounded up and executed en masse by Jewish-Soviet NKVD agents and local Jews who collaborated with the Communist occupiers of their nation. The Ukrainians eagerly joined the fight against the beastly abomination of a nation: the USSR (a de-facto Jewish colony since 1917).

What the Jews did to the Ukraine (having lived through the Jewish-Soviet Holocaust of 6-10 million of their people in 1932′s Holodomor a decade earlier) they also did in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries that had come under Soviet-Communist occupation in late 1939 and early 1940 — i.e. betray the country by collaborating with the invading/occupying hordes of mass murderers and mass rapists, the Soviet Communists.

 

 

 
 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
 

How Stalin Hid Ukraine's Famine From the World

In 1932 and 1933, millions died across the Soviet Union—and the foreign press corps helped cover up the catastrophe.

 

Oct 13, 2017

 

 

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, and farm animals. At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food.

 

 

Neither the Ukrainian famine nor the broader Soviet famine were ever officially recognized by the USSR. Inside the country the famine was never mentioned. All discussion was actively repressed; statistics were altered to hide it. The terror was so overwhelming that the silence was complete. Outside the country, however, the cover-up required different, subtler tactics. These are beautifully illustrated by the parallel stories of Walter Duranty and Gareth Jones.

 

 

In the 1930s, all of the members of the Moscow press corps led a precarious existence. At the time, they needed the state’s permission to live in the USSR, and even to work. Without a signature and the official stamp of the press department, the central telegraph office would not send their dispatches abroad. To win that permission, journalists regularly bargained with foreign ministry censors over which words they could use, and they kept on good terms with Konstantin Umansky, the Soviet official responsible for the foreign press corps. William Henry Chamberlin, then the Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote that the foreign reporter “works under a Sword of Damocles—the threat of expulsion from the country or of the refusal of permission to re-enter it, which of course amounts to the same thing.”

 

Extra rewards were available to those, like Walter Duranty, who played the game particularly well. Duranty was The New York Times correspondent in Moscow from 1922 until 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous. British by birth, Duranty had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and skeptical “realist,” trying to listen to both sides of the story. “It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,” he wrote in 1935—the kulaks being the so-called wealthy peasants whom Stalin accused of causing the famine. But “in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose.”

 

This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that Duranty lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin. But the attention he won from his reporting back in the U.S. seems to have been his primary motivation. His missives from Moscow made him one of the most influential journalists of his time. In 1932, his series of articles on the successes of collectivization and the Five Year Plan won him the Pulitzer Prize. Soon afterward, Franklin Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, invited Duranty to the governor’s mansion in Albany, where the Democratic presidential candidate peppered him with queries. “I asked all the questions this time. It was fascinating,” Roosevelt told another reporter.

 

As the famine worsened, Duranty, like his colleagues, would have been in no doubt about the regime’s desire to repress it.  In 1933, the Foreign Ministry began requiring correspondents to submit a proposed itinerary before any journey into the provinces; all requests to visit Ukraine were refused. The censors also began to monitor dispatches. Some phrases were allowed: “acute food shortage,” “food stringency,” “food deficit,” “diseases due to malnutrition,” but nothing else. In late 1932, Soviet officials even visited Duranty at home, making him nervous.

 

In that atmosphere, few of them were inclined to write about the famine, although all of them knew about it. “Officially, there was no famine,” wrote Chamberlin. But “to anyone who lived in Russia in 1933 and who kept his eyes and ears open, the historicity of the famine is simply not in question.” Duranty himself discussed the famine with William Strang, a diplomat at the British embassy, in late 1932. Strang reported back drily that the New York Times correspondent had been “waking to the truth for some time,” although he had not “let the great American public into the secret.” Duranty also told Strang that he reckoned “it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food,” though that number never appeared in any of his reporting. Duranty’s reluctance to write about famine may have been particularly acute: The story cast doubt on his previous, positive (and prize-winning) reporting. But he was not alone. Eugene Lyons, Moscow correspondent for United Press and at one time an enthusiastic Marxist, wrote years later that all of the foreigners in the city were well aware of what was happening in Ukraine as well as Kazakhstan and the Volga region:

 

The truth is that we did not seek corroboration for the simple reason that we entertained no doubts on the subject. There are facts too large to require eyewitness confirmation. … Inside Russia the matter was not disputed. The famine was accepted as a matter of course in our casual conversation at the hotels and in our homes.

 

Everyone knew—yet no one mentioned it. Hence the extraordinary reaction of both the Soviet establishment and the Moscow press corps to the journalistic escapade of Gareth Jones.

 

Jones was a young Welshman, only 27 years old at the time of his 1933 journey to Ukraine.

 

Possibly inspired by his mother—as a young woman she had been a governess in the home of John Hughes, the Welsh entrepreneur who founded the Ukrainian city of Donetsk—he decided to study Russian, as well as French and German, at Cambridge University. He then landed a job as a private secretary to David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, and also began writing about European and Soviet politics as a freelancer. In early 1932, before the travel ban was imposed, he journeyed out to the Soviet countryside (accompanied by Jack Heinz II, scion of the ketchup empire) where he slept on “bug-infested floors” in rural villages and witnessed the beginnings of the famine.

 

In the spring of 1933, Jones returned to Moscow, this time with a visa given to him largely on the grounds that he worked for Lloyd George (it was stamped “Besplatno” or “Gratis,” as a sign of official Soviet favor). Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, had been keen to impress Lloyd George and had lobbied on Jones’s behalf. Upon arrival, Jones first went around the Soviet capital and met other foreign correspondents and officials. Lyons remembered him as “an earnest and meticulous little man … the sort who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk.” Jones met Umansky, showed him an invitation from the German Consul-General in Kharkiv, and asked to visit Ukraine. Umansky agreed. With that official stamp of approval, he set off south.

 

 

Jones boarded the train in Moscow on March 10. But instead of traveling all the way to Kharkiv, he got off the train about 40 miles north of the city. Carrying a backpack filled with “many loaves of white bread, with butter, cheese, meat and chocolate bought with foreign currency” he began to follow the railway track towards the Kharkiv. For three days, with no official minder or escort, he walked through more than 20 villages and collective farms at the height of the famine, recording his thoughts in notebooks later preserved by his sister:

 

I crossed the border from Great Russia into the Ukraine. Everywhere I talked to peasants who walked past. They all had the same story.

 

“There is no bread. We haven’t had bread for over two months. A lot are dying.” The first village had no more potatoes left and the store of burak (“beetroot”) was running out. They all said: “The cattle are dying, nechevo kormit’ [there’s nothing to feed them with]. We used to feed the world & now we are hungry. How can we sow when we have few horses left? How will we be able to work in the fields when we are weak from want of food?”

 

Jones slept on the floor of peasant huts. He shared his food with people and heard their stories. “They tried to take away my icons, but I said I’m a peasant, not a dog,” someone told him. “When we believed in God we were happy and lived well. When they tried to do away with God, we became hungry.” Another man told him he hadn’t eaten meat for a year.

 

Jones saw a woman making homespun cloth for clothing, and a village where people were eating horse meat. Eventually, he was confronted by a “militiaman” who asked to see his documents, after which plainclothes policemen insisted on accompanying him on the next train to Kharkiv and walking him to the door of the German consulate. Jones, “rejoicing at my freedom, bade him a polite farewell—an anti-climax but a welcome one.”

 

In Kharkhiv, Jones kept taking notes. He observed thousands of people queueing in bread lines: “They begin queuing up at 3-4 o’clock in the afternoon to get bread the next morning at 7. It is freezing: many degrees of frost.” He spent an evening at the theater—“Audience: Plenty of lipstick but no bread”—and spoke to people about the political repression and mass arrests which rolled across Ukraine at the same time as the famine. He called on Umansky’s colleague in Kharkiv, but never managed to speak to him. Quietly, he slipped out of the Soviet Union. A few days later, on March 30, he appeared in Berlin at a press conference probably arranged by Paul Scheffer, a Berliner Tageblatt journalist who had been expelled from the USSR in 1929. He declared that a major famine was unfolding across the Soviet Union and issued a statement:  

 

Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread.  We are dying.”  This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia …

 

“We are waiting for death” was my welcome: “See, we still have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,” they cried.

 

Jones’s press conference was picked up by two senior Berlin-based U.S. journalists, in The New York Evening Post (“Famine grips Russia, millions dying, idle on rise says Briton”) and in the Chicago Daily News (“Russian Famine Now as Great as Starvation of 1921, Says Secretary of Lloyd George”). Further syndications followed in a wide range of British publications.  The articles explained that Jones had taken a “long walking tour through the Ukraine,” quoted his press release and added details of mass starvation. They noted, as did Jones himself, that he had broken the rules which held back other journalists: “I tramped through the black earth region,” he wrote, “because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.” Jones went on to publish a dozen further articles in the London Evening Standard and Daily Express, as well as the Cardiff Western Mail.

 

The authorities who had showered favors on Jones were furious. Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign minister, complained angrily to Maisky, using an acidic literary allusion to Gogol’s famous play about a fraudulent bureaucrat:

 

It is astonishing that Gareth Johnson [sic] has impersonated the role of Khlestakov and succeeded in getting all of you to play the parts of the local governor and various characters from The Government Inspector. In fact, he is just an ordinary citizen, calls himself Lloyd George’s secretary and, apparently at the latter’s bidding, requests a visa, and you at the diplomatic mission without checking up at all, insist the [OGPU] jump into action to satisfy his request. We gave this individual all kinds of support, helped him in his work, I even agreed to meet him, and he turns out to be an imposter.

 

In the immediate wake of Jones’s press conference, Litvinov proclaimed an even more stringent ban on journalists travelling outside of Moscow. Later, Maisky complained to Lloyd George, who, according to the Soviet ambassador’s report, distanced himself from Jones, declaring that he had not sponsored the trip and had not sent Jones as his representative. What he really believed is unknown, but Lloyd George never saw Jones again.

 

The Moscow press corps was even angrier. Of course its members knew that what Jones had reported was true, and a few were looking for ways to tell the same story. Malcolm Muggeridge, at the time the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, had just smuggled three articles about the famine out of the country via diplomatic bag. The Guardian published them anonymously, with heavy cuts made by editors who disapproved of his critique of the USSR, and, appearing at a moment when the news was dominated by Hitler’s rise to power, they were largely ignored. But the rest of the press corps, dependent on official goodwill, closed ranks against Jones. Lyons meticulously described what happened:

 

Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials. … There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take, under the effulgence of Umansky’s gilded smile, before a formal denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski.

 

Whether or not a meeting between Umansky and the foreign correspondents ever took place, it does sum up, metaphorically, what happened next. On March 31, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, Duranty himself responded. “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” read the New York Times headline. Duranty’s article went out of its way to mock Jones:

 

There appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with “thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation.” Its author is Gareth Jones, who is a former secretary to David Lloyd George and who recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union and reached the conclusion that the country was “on the verge of a terrific smash,” as he told the writer. Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones's judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a 40-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad.

 

I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.

 

Duranty continued, using an expression that later became notorious: “To put it brutally—you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He went on to explain that he had made “exhaustive inquiries” and concluded that “conditions are bad, but there is no famine.”

 

Indignant, Jones wrote a letter to the editor of the Times, patiently listing his sources—a huge range of interviewees, including more than 20 consuls and diplomats—and attacking the Moscow press corps:

 

Censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement.  Hence they give “famine” the polite name of “food shortage” and “starving to death” is softened down to read as “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition...

 

And there the matter rested. Duranty outshone Jones: He was more famous, more widely read, more credible. He was also unchallenged. Later, Lyons, Chamberlin and others expressed regret that they had not fought harder against him. But at the time, nobody came to Jones’s defense, not even Muggeridge, one of the few Moscow correspondents who had dared to express similar views. Jones himself was kidnapped and murdered by Chinese bandits during a reporting trip to Mongolia in 1935.

 

“Russians Hungry But not Starving” became the accepted wisdom. It also coincided nicely with the hard political and diplomatic considerations of the moment. As 1933 turned into 1934 and then 1935, Europeans grew even more worried about Hitler. By the end of 1933, the new Roosevelt administration was actively looking for reasons to ignore any bad news about the Soviet Union. The president’s team had concluded that developments in Germany and the need to limit Japanese expansion meant that it was time, finally, for the United States to open full diplomatic relations with Moscow. Roosevelt’s interest in central planning and in what he thought were the USSR’s great economic successes—the president read Duranty’s reporting carefully—encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too. Eventually a deal was struck. Litvinov arrived in New York to sign it—accompanied by Duranty. At a lavish banquet for the Soviet foreign minister at the Waldorf Astoria, Duranty was introduced to the 1,500 guests. He stood up and bowed.

 

Loud applause followed. Duranty’s name, the New Yorker later reported, provoked “the only really prolonged pandemonium” of the evening. “Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty.”  With that, the cover-up seemed complete.

 

 

This article has been adapted from Anne Applebaum’s new book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.

 

 

 

 


 

 

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Russia livid over Israeli bill to recognize Ukrainian genocide

'Cynical, speculative claim about millions of victims for political reasons; Regrettable our Knesset friends distorted history.'


Russia & Israel: Gloves still on
                                                                                                                                                                           Russia & Israel: Gloves still on
 
 
 

Russia reacted seriously to yesterday's Knesset bill to recognize the Ukrainian genocide in the 1930's advanced by Druze MK Akram Hasson (Kulanu) and marking the Holodomor ("to kill by starvation"), the mass famine in Ukraine between 1932-3 in which millions were killed. The Russian Embassy reacted by saying the bill "sadly distorts history".

 

Meanwhile, the Russians are applying additional pressure on the media. Yesterday, Russian Deputy Ambassador to Israel Leonid Frolov spoke with Galei Tzahal's Michael Hauser Tov. Frolov was asked whether this law intensifies sensitivities while security coordination between Jerusalem and Moscow regarding Iran and Syria is at its peak.

 

Frolov said: "This is not a good time to discuss such a proposal. This is a very important time for all the world and now, when Mr. Trump declared Jerusalem as the capital, Israel needs the support not only of the United States; Israel needs the support of many other countries, who think in a different way."

 

The Ukrainian wholesale murder in the 1930s perpetrated by Stalin is an upsetting issue for the Russians. According to Hasson's proposal, the State of Israel will officially recognize the Ukrainian genocide, and even hold a memorial day and ceremony on the subject.

 

Russia claims it was natural disaster that caused the terrible hunger, and not, as they say in Ukraine, a deliberate action of the Soviet Union against them. Moscow over the years has exerted heavy pressure on many countries, including Israel, not to recognize the genocide.

 

Ukraine, Russia

However, the new bill states that "there is no reason why the Knesset should not recognize it as such," and that "this is the most serious

humanitarian disaster other than the Holocaust." MK Hasson is aware of the sensitivities but insists on advancing the law. Hasson's

office said that he decided to submit the bill following a visit with a delegation of Knesset members in the Ukraine a few weeks ago.

Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said during a speech in the Knesset in November 2017 that "the moral support and the

State of Israel's solidarity with the victims of totalitarian terror against the Ukrainian people in 1932 and 1933 are very important to us.

I want to emphasize that among the Ukrainian nation, so many people died of starvation that

in those years we lost perhaps more than we lost during World War II."

 

Even though the law is only in its infancy and it is not certain whether it will be promoted, Moscow is already angry at Israel.

A source in the Russian Foreign Ministry says: "If the law is promoted we will respond sharply.

It will have far-reaching implications for the relationship between Russia and Israel."

 

The Russian Embassy in Israel also said: "This is a cynical, speculative claim about the memory of millions of victims

for political reasons. It is regrettable that our friends in the Knesset prepared a bill that

distorted history. We call on all relevant elements in Israel to study historical facts more accurately."

 

This morning several representatives from the Russian embassy in Israel will arrive for

meetings with Knesset officials in an attempt to thwart the bill even before it comes up.

Asked by Hauser Tov whether the law, if advanced, could really harm relations between Israel and Russia, Deputy Ambassador Frolov replied,

"We'll find a way how to solve differences between our peoples and countries. It will be bad;

it will be a wrong step, but relations between countries is much more important."

 

The Deputy Russian Ambassador also referred to the Polish Holocaust Law and took a swipe at Israel:

"Poland now wants to delete some pages of history ... on Israel's part,

this proposal [on the Ukraine] also is to rewrite history, like in the Polish case."

 

 

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ukraine Marks 'Holodomor' Anniversary 

Ukraine has marked the 85th anniversary of the Stalin-era famine, known as the Holodomor, in which millions of people died of starvation ... Moscow responded by rejecting critics who describe the Holodomor exclusively as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his wife, Maryna, on November 24 laid bouquets fashioned from wheat stalks and red flowers at a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor on Kyiv's Mykhailivska Square ... The Holodomor took place in 1932 and 1933 as Soviet authorities forced peasants in Ukraine to join collective farms by requisitioning their grain and other food products. Estimates of the famine's death toll range from three million to seven million.
Ukrainians Around World Commemorate 'Holodomor' Victims 

Today [Nov. 24] Ukrainians around the world commemorate victims of an artificial famine of 1932-1933 known as the Holodomor, the result of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's order to force peasant households into collective farms. The exact number of Ukrainians who perished during the Holodomor genocide is unknown but scholars say at least 3.9 million people were starved to death in Ukraine as the Soviet government seized their property and crops, closed off the borders and denied any outside aid. Besides Ukraine, millions of people in other agricultural regions of the Soviet Union were subjected to collectivization and starvation. Of all ethnic groups, Kazakhstan saw the highest death ratio: an estimated 38 percent of the ethnic Kazakh population died during the 1931-1933 famine, according to a Harvard University study published in 2001.
Pope Francis Recalls Ukraine 'Holodomor' Famine

... Pope Francis remembered the man-made famine that struck Ukraine in 1932-1933 and the anniversary of the event which occurred on Saturday. The famine is known as 'Holodomor' in Ukrainian, which means "to kill by starvation". Pope Francis called it "a terrible famine instigated by the Soviet regime which caused millions of people to die." Though the final death toll is unknown, most estimates put the number of people killed between 3.3 and 7.5 million, most of whom were ethnic Ukrainians. The Vatican City State is one of 16 countries to consider Holodomor an act of genocide carried out by the Soviet government.
Nationalism and Genocide: Origin of the Artificial Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine
Valentyn Moroz -- Institute for Historical Review
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p207_Moroz.html

... These elementary analogies are enough to show that the murder of seven million Ukrainians in 1933 could not have been motivated by socio-economic or "class" reasons alone. Conflicts claim millions of victims only in struggles between nations, as in wars, colonial struggles, and so forth, when the national question is paramount. Moscow needed a holocaust. The imposed famine of 1933 and the whole range of repressive mass killings during the 1930s were an expression of the empire's struggle for self-preservation. It was this instinct, and not the economic doctrine of collectivization, that impelled the Kremlin to carry out the horrors of the 1930s.

There was, and always will be, a very good reason for the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.