Update on Holodomor Genocide unleashed against Ukraine

[ML]

Despite the scale of the tragedy, Ukraine had to regain independence in 1991 before survivors could speak openly about the mass starvation, aimed at destroying Ukrainian nationalism and breaking resistance to Soviet collectivized farms.  The Soviets (and now Russians) denied there had even been a famine, much less that it had been deliberate.

Today, the famine, known as the Holodomor (from Ukrainian holod, meaning starvation or famine, and the verb moryty – to inflict death) is the subject of controversy between Ukraine, who demands that the famine be recognized internationally as genocide against Ukrainians, and Russia, which denies that the famine was artificial and says several Soviet states suffered equally from it.

But the fact that Holodomor was indeed an act of genocide has been established by a number of scholars, including Andrea Graziosi, Raphael Lemkin, Norman Naimark, Timothy Snyder, Nicolas Werth and Anne Applebaum.

Read entire article here:

http://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/honest-history-holodomor-was-genocide-unleashed-against-ukraine.html

[msmob]

Once upon a time I'd have swallowed this story - but when Russians point out their ancestors in cities such as Smolensk suffered the same conditions - one has to wonder

[edited to add:]

Without a doubt this was a policy decision of Stalin and a crime against Soviet people ... ( as the US suggests ) ... Given that the famine extended WAY outside Ukraine's borders - how CAN it be Ukraine was specifically targeted if millions of non Ukraine SSR folk died, too ?

[Boethius]

The Holodomor was acknowledged in Soviet Ukraine during so called “glasnost’”. I remember a Canadian film being advertised all over Kyiv in 1990, when I was there, and discussing it with someone from Western Ukraine. He was young, so it was something new to him.

I disagree with you moby. Here’s another thread that discusses this issue-

http://www.russianwomendiscussion.com/index.php?topic=8365.0

[msmob]

The Holodomor was acknowledged in Soviet Ukraine during so called “glasnost’”. I remember a Canadian film being advertised all over Kyiv in 1990, when I was there, and discussing it with someone from Western Ukraine. He was young, so it was something new to him.

I disagree with you moby. Here’s another thread that discusses this issue-

http://www.russianwomendiscussion.com/index.php?topic=8365.0

About WHAT do you disagree, Boethius?

IF millions of Russian and Belarusians died, too - how can if be genocide targeted at Ukrainians ?

[krimster2]

Ukrainian Genocide of 1932-1933

Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.
this is beyond arguing...
According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kiev in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficit.

If I am allowed to gather data and safely return home from “Russia” at the end of July
I will write to you about another genocide still ongoing due to Chernobyl
that’s going to kill even more
and that none of this is happening by accident

it will probably be the last thing I write here...

MOB

no one argues Hitler killed millions of Jews and using the term holocaust
while also killing gypsies, homosexuals, Russians, Poles, and anyone else he could get his tiny little hands on

if you live in a country where the rule of law is only for the little people
and doesn't apply to the big people
this is one example of the consequences
history is full of many more

[Boethius]

About WHAT do you disagree, Boethius?

IF millions of Russian and Belarusians died, too - how can if be genocide targeted at Ukrainians ?

If you look at all the "Russian" regions that suffered the same fate, they had significant, often majority, ethnically Ukrainian populations.  Smolensk was at one time part of the Rzeczpospolita.  In Soviet times, a huge number of Moscow's police were from Smolensk, and most of them had Ukrainian surnames.  I don't post that as a "Ukrainian nationalist", as I have no issues acknowledging Russians, too, suffered tremendously under Bolshevism, and millions of Russians were exterminated as well.

The Kazakhs were similarly targeted for extermination.

krimster, the first scholar to write about the Holodomor seriously was Robert Conquest.  His book is Harvest of Sorrow.  Conquest's researcher was James Mace, then a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.  Mace was an expert on Ukrainian national identity and NEP.   The Holodomor resonated with him, partly because he was Cherokee, so the deliberate attempt to wipe out peoples was not a foreign concept to him.

Mace was the executive director of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, established by Congress, and it is he who lobbied Congress to declare the Holodomor a genocide.  His view of the  Ukrainian genocide, though, did not resonate with American academia, so he never obtained the golden ring of academia.  However, he did have influential supporters who ensured he remained employed.  He met a Ukrainian journalist, and eventually they married.  In 1993, he moved to Kyiv, where he was a professor of political science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and continued his Holodomor research until his death in 2004. 

Since archives have been opened, demographic studies are more precise, and it is estimated between 2. 5 million and 4.5 million Ukrainians were starved to death in Ukraine in 1932-33.

[krimster2]

pretty soon
I will be in a country
where talking about this
could land me in prison

[Boethius]

You can talk about the Holodomor in Russia.  You just can't suggest it was a genocide.

moby, another point I did not make is that the confiscation of grain was not just about collectivization. 

Ukrainian national consciousness (I mean, Ukrainians recognizing themselves as a distinct nation) was slow to develop.  It didn't really take root until the early 20th century.  But it exploded when NEP was introduced.  That is also the theme of James Mace's PhD thesis, published as Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933.

http://www.amazon.ca/Communism-Dilemmas-National-Liberation-1918-1933/dp/0916458091#customerReviews

The destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia started in 1930, but was particularly active at the same time as the Holodomor.  1932-33 was the apex of the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Soviet Ukraine.  Most of their works were banned until about 1986.  Of course, they were known among the diaspora that entire time.

Churches were closed in this period.  Ukrainian language was banned, with education solely in Russian.  It was not solely about destroying the "kulaks".  It was about reversing the national consciousness raised by NEP, something that occurred first under NEP in Ukraine, but was replicated in other republics.   

[krimster2]

The 1936 Soviet Constitution embraced the moral principle that “he who does not work shall not eat,”

losing your labor card meant losing your housing and ration card
making you homeless and without food
do you think your family will share their space and food with you?

if you were late to work by more than 20 minutes you would be punished
by immediate dismissal and eviction from enterprise housing
or talked back to your boss
or wouldn’t sleep with him
or the weaker workers...
the ones who struggled to meet quotas
get rid of them and replace them with younger ones
or just to instill fear

they numbered in the millions
when redundant enterprises were shut down by Stalin
who knows how many millions died
because they no longer had ration cards
in Soviet Russia even labor laws can kill you

[krimster2]

"You can talk about the Holodomor in Russia"

NOPE!

you will be charged with inciting "ethnic division" a federal crime now
this is something new, last 2-3 yr in Crimea
maybe just in Crimea
but this new "thing" is quite real
after getting the crap beaten out of you
YOU will go to jail
for ANYTHING pro Ukraine
ANYTHING....

I'm not like Jay
able to fend off hundreds of Russian paratroopers
with one one hand
while writing about how much Ukraine has improved
with the other
He's a REAL man...
I'm just a sex tourist
what do you expect from me
besides sex?
and tourism?

[msmob]

Krimster..

I 'missed' where JayH had offered an opinion on this thread...

Perhaps, this could be one thread were we learn - rather than compete ?