Was the Holodomor Genocide?

[Rubicon]

Ukrainian children's song

Father Stalin, look at this
Collective farming is just bliss
The hut's in ruins, the barn's all sagged
All the horses broken nags
And on the hut a hammer and sickle
And in the hut death and famine
No cows left, no pigs at all
Just your picture on the wall
Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz
The poor child cries as alone he goes
There's no bread and there's no fat
The party's ended all of that
Seek not the gentle nor the mild
A father's eaten his own child
The party man he beats and stamps
And sends us to Siberian camps

[Boethius]

That's from Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, which I think is an excellent book.  However, while no doubt this was written, nobody at that time would have sung this or said it.  It would have meant instant death.

It would not have even been uttered during the Brezhnev era.

[Rubicon]

It is in Bloodlands by T. Snyder.  The source he gives for the song is Kovalenko, Holod page 110.  I don't think it mattered if anyone heard the children singing the song.  They were unfortunately doomed to begin with.

[alyosha]

I wonder if the article has taken in to consideration that the famine was not limited to Ukraine, but was actually equally or more worse in Russia. Without having admiration for Stalin and his actions, one has to remember that he did not request the grain from the Ukrainian farmers to burn, but trying to divide the present sources of food between the full population. As such it was a redistributing of wealth (in this case food) which was one of the principles of communism.
Like the earlier years where those who had wealth such as the aristocracy were forced to give it up at gunpoint or be killed, the same tactic was used with respect to the farmers, and farmers in Russia were equally targetted.
As such it is doubtful that the acts were directed with the intent of destroying a group any more than that the Revolution was.

This is the Russian point of view, do not kill the messenger. 

I'd concur that Stalin probably wasn't intent on destroying Ukrainians as a group but mostly anticommunist.
Khrushchev, as a party boss for Ukraine and acting on Stalin's behalf was Ukrainian himself.
On the other hand, what   Stalin was doing would seem inevitably to target the entire Ukraine population.
Today we no longer have total wars or total genocides.  Wars are more fought by propaganda than nuclear bombs or even tanks.
The genocide tactic employed today is elimination by assimilation.  That is a bit like the old Roman tactic of stealing the infants of a rebellious tribe, which is also mentioned in the U.N. convention.
To get a people to accept their own demise through immigration and assimilation it is first necessary to psychologically destroy their sense of self and will to resist.
A whole people can be herded on to such a path by propaganda.
In 1978 in Jones Town Guyana Jim Jones even talked his own leftist congregation into mass suicide by drinking poison Kool aid.  That is where we Amercans get the derisive  expression "drink the Kool aid" to refer to someone acting stupidly against their own best interest.
I don't know that the Germans have been targeted for genocide, but their constant demonization through hereditary guilt is sure a good weapon for it, and the German depopulation birth rate ("measures intended to reduce births within the group") does fit the action even if there is no intent.
The most likely provable assimilation genocide today would probably be what is happening in Tibet, but I'm not up on the details of what is going on there.

[alyosha]

That's from Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, which I think is an excellent book.  However, while no doubt this was written, nobody at that time would have sung this or said it.  It would have meant instant death.

It would not have even been uttered during the Brezhnev era.

"Ukrainian children's song

Father Stalin, look at this
Collective farming is just bliss
The hut's in ruins, the barn's all sagged
All the horses broken nags
And on the hut a hammer and sickle
And in the hut death and famine
No cows left, no pigs at all
Just your picture on the wall
Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz
The poor child cries as alone he goes
There's no bread and there's no fat
The party's ended all of that
Seek not the gentle nor the mild
A father's eaten his own child
The party man he beats and stamps
And sends us to Siberian camps"





Too many of the words rhyme in English for me not to be suspicious.
Like this and bliss, sagged and nags, all and wall, Stamp and camp, child and mild etc.
I suspect this was a cold war bit of CIA/MI6 propaganda targeted at the English speaking world.
I will check out the life history of Mr. Snyder, likely CIA asset.  Thanks, I'll probably learn something  usefull from this.
 ;-)

[Boethius]

I'd concur that Stalin probably wasn't intent on destroying Ukrainians as a group but mostly anticommunist.
Khrushchev, as a party boss for Ukraine and acting on Stalin's behalf was Ukrainian himself.
On the other hand, what   Stalin was doing would seem inevitably to target the entire Ukraine population.

Khrushchev was an ethnic Russian, not a Ukrainian.  His parents were Russian peasants.

Stalin once said there were too many Ukrainians to just ship them all to gulags.  I have met survivors of the Holodomor.  It is fairly clear from the actions of those charged with enforcing the starvation that it was designed to wipe out the local population.

[alyosha]

My memory is often faulty.  It was something I read years ago. But the part about Nikita being party boss in Ukraine I think is true.
As to Alexander Soltzenytsens (sp?) comment about it being a total fabrication to discredit Russia I think that comes from his intense love of Russia.
I think Alexander Z was capable of believing what he wanted to some times.
I've read where Alexander Z claimed Stalin killed 40 million Soviets.  To me that figure stretches credulity.
Most horror stories are exagerated to sell newspapers, or books, or as propaganda.
I suspect in  50 or 100 years historians will revise figures down by half for all the half dozen major genocides of the 20Th century.  Our parents and grand parents generations weren't THAT bad.

[Boethius]

Yes, Khrushchev was head of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

The most recent numbers killed by Stalin before WWII range from about 9 to 12 million.  Most of that difference is based on the Holodomor.  At some time, the numbers were estimated to be as high as 10 million, at others, 3.3 million.  It has now been established, based on access to records and demographic calculations, that the number in Ukraine alone was around 4.5 million.  The numbers in Southern Russia (which at the time, was also predominantly ethnic Ukrainian) are not yet settled.

Solzhenitsyn included the Soviet war dead in Stalin's "count", as he ascribed heavy Soviet losses to Stalin.  Ukraine alone had 10 million war dead (this includes Ukrainian Jews), so, based on this count, Stalin's reign did result in the deaths of over 20 million Soviet citizens.

[alyosha]

I'm sure the German people are relieved to hear that Alexander Solzhenitsyn didn't blame Russian war dead on their grandfathers.  :-)

[Boethius]

He ascribed the high numbers to Stalin's total lack of preparedness for war.  Remember, Stalin had most officers executed or sent to gulags.  It was only when Stalin turned to old generals (and lied to them), and started a nationalist propaganda campaign that the war turned.  Accounts also have him practically paralyzed on the invasion.
 
Solzhenitsyn was the commander of a Red Army unit, so he had first hand experience of the front.

[mendeleyev]

Stalin was clinically insane. He knew full well that he was murdering millions and it delighted him. They had dared question his authority and his decision to move everyone to collective farms.

He also knew that Hitler would attack as much as three years prior and at times would speak of drawing Hitler into a trap of invading Eastern Europe, tiring his army, and then hitting him a fresh Red Army. Yet when Hitler struck, he cowered and at one point laid in a fetal position on the floor unsure of what orders to issue. Marshall Zhukov later regretted not either arresting or shooting him at that point except that Beria, Yagoda and others were present.



Stalin epigram / The Kremlin Highlander by poet Osip Mandelstam.
We are living, but can't feel the land where we stay, More than ten steps away you can't hear what we say. But if people would talk on occasion, They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian. His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits, And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.

Cucaracha's moustaches are screaming, And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming. But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen, And he plays with the services of these half-men. Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing,

He's alone booming, poking and whiffing. He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes - Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows. Every killing for him is delight, And Ossetian torso is wide.


Stalin would have someone jailed who alluded to his birth in Georgia (Caucasian), moreover to repeat the rumour that his real father was Ossetian was punishable by death.


Mandelstam was one of Stalin's favourite poets and that is saying something for a man who had wrote poetry himself. Mandelstam infuriated Stalin by speaking of the Ukrainian genocide publicly and for refusing to pen a tribute to Stalin as others had done. Stalin hated Jews and many poets like Mandelstam and Pasternak were of Jewish descent. Oddly Stalin's head of the secret police Genrikh Yagoda was Jewish, although he had changed his childhood name.

After being released from the Gulag Mandelstam was forbidden to return to Moscow under what was called at the time as a "minus-twelve" exile sentence. A "minus twelve" meant that a released criminal could not live in any of the Soviet Union's 12 largest cities. So Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda chose Voronezh in southern Russia. Like most Soviet wives in that period, she had followed him to live nearby his prison.

Mandelstam however disobeyed Stalin's "minus 12" sentence and after a few years in Voronezh he and Nadiya returned to Moscow where he finally authored the tribute that Stalin had wanted.


Ode to Stalin byOsip Mandelstam

If I were to employ charcoal for highest praise-For the unalloyed gladness of a picture-I'd cut up the thin air with the most subtle rays, Feeling of care and of alarm a mixture.

So that the features might reflect the Real, In art that would be bordering on daring I'd speak of him who shifted the world's wheel, While for the customs of a hundred peoples caring.I 'd raise the eyebrow's corner up a bit, And raise it once again, and keep on trying.

Look how Prometheus has got his charcoal lit-Look, Aeschylus, at how I'm drawing and crying! I'd make a handful of resounding linesTo capture his millennium's early springtime, And I would tie his courage in a smile.And then untie it in the gentle sunshine; And in the wise eyes' friendship for the twin, Who shall remain unnamed, I'll find the right expression, Approaching which, you'll recognize the father - him-And lose your breath, feeling the world's compression .

And I would like to thank the very hills (Georgia) Which bred his hand and bone and gave them feeling: Born in the mountains, he knew too the prison's ills.I want to call him - no, not Stalin - Dzhugashvili! (Dzhugashvili was Stalin's real name - Georgian)

Painter, guard and preserve the warrior with your paint: Surround him with a blue and humid forestOf damp attention. Not to disappointThe father with images that are unwholesome, thoughtless.Painter, help him who's everywhere with you, Reasoning; feeling; always, always building.Nor I nor anyone else, but all mankind, that's who-Homer-Mankind will raise his praise's ceiling.

Painter, guard and preserve the warrior with your paint; The woods of humanity sing after him, growing thicker-The very future itself, the army of the sage-They listen to him ever closer, ever quicker.He leans over from the stage, as from a mount on high, Into the mounds of heads. The debtor far surpasses The suit against him: strictly kind the mighty eyes; The thick eyebrow at someone nearby flashing; And I would draw an arrow to point out The firmness of the mouth - father of stubborn speeches; The plastic, detailed eyelid, and about

Its outline , framing it, a million ridges; He is all frankness, recognition, copper, andA piercing earshot, which won't tolerate a whisper; At everyone prepared to live and die like menCome running playful somber little wrinkles.Squeezing the charcoal in which all has converged, And with a greedy hand seeking only a resemblance-Trying to find only the resemblance's hinge-I'll crumble up the coal, pursuing his appearance. (Dark skinned Georgian)

I learn from him, not learning for myself.I learn from him to show myself no mercy.And if unhappiness conceals the plan's great wealth, I will discover it amid chaos and cursing.Let me remain as yet unworthy to have friends, Let me remain unfilled with tears and with resentment; I still keep seeing him in a greatcoat, as he stands

In an enchanted square, with eyes full of contentment.With Stalin's eyes a mountain is pushed apart.The squinting plain looks far into the distance: Like a sea without seams, the future from the past-From a giant plow to where the sun's furrow glistens.

He smiles a reaper's smile, the smiling friend, Reaper of handshakes in a conversationWhich has begun and which will never end Smack in the middle of all of Creation.And every single haystack, every barn Is strong and clean and smart - a living chattel, A mankind miracle! May life be large.Listen to happiness's axis roll and rattle. (Can you spell murder of Ukrainian farmers)

And six times over in my consciousness I keep, Slow witness to the labor, struggle, and harvest, His whole enormous path - across the steppe, Across Lenin's October - to its kept promise.Into the distance stretch the mounds of people's heads: I become small up there, where no one will espy me; But in kindhearted books and children's games, instead, I'll rise again to say the sun is shining.The warrior's frankness: there exists no truer truth.For air and steel, for love and honor, One glorious name takes shape on reader's tongue and tooth, And we have caught it and have heard its thunder.


Stalin understood the poem for what it was and Mandelstam was arrested and tried again, this time he would not survive the Gulag. For a really detailed line by line explanation of both poems, enjoy this: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/reading-mandelstam-stalin/?pagination=false

[mendeleyev]

Related to the topic of the Holodomor:

The Holodomor wasn't just some isolated event in the past. It is still felt today. In 2012 Ukrainians are still dealing with the impact of Stalin's brutal, deliberate and systematic murder of Ukrainian farm families. This the topic of today's Mendeleyev Journal:

Near Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine is a women's monastery and church that Christian believers have been working to revive. Founded in 1881 the Holy Synod granted that the monastery could be established to meet the medical needs of the community and for sheltering destitute women and children. "In the village of Alexander to establish a reckless female community in the name of Our Lady of the Sign with the name Свято-Знаменский женский монастырь (Holy Znamensky Women's Monastery) with that number of nurses, which the community will be able to provide at their own expense."



The monastery was the idea of a wealthy widow, the hereditary noblewoman named Catherine P. Vasilenko who used her inheritance to fund the construction and staffing of the monastery. In 1901 construction began on the monastery in 1903 the monastery was incorporated as women's convent. In 1904, a nun named Ekaterina Pavlovna the biblical name of Elizabeth and was elevated to the rank of abbess of the convent.



By the early twentieth century, the monastery had 250 nuns, 5 buildings, brick and candle factories to offer employment to destitute women, a windmill, a bakery, and creamery. The monastery operated a shelter for girls from poor families and orphans as well as a school for the children of the area's poorest farmers. The monastery had a huge garden (if you can call 500 acres just a "garden") with milling for wheat, fruit tree orchard and flowers. God had in providence blessed the monastery with some of the richest growing soil in southern Ukraine.



Throughout its history Znamensky Convent cared for the needs of the surrounding region. Then came the Soviet revolution and the monastery entered a period of desolation and decline as the Soviets and Stalin began the shame of  what is called today the Holodomor Genocide, the brutal murder by systematic and deliberate starvation of Ukrainian families who resisted Stalin's collectivization of farms. By 1927 the monastery was closed. The Soviets dynamited the  town's Cathedral of the Transfiguration and turned the small monastery church into a gym. The job creating factories were closed and the buildings converted into a larger school. 




The tomb of the first abbess was desecrated and her relics were thrown out. However pious villagers moved her remains to another village church where they are stored until now. Locals still honor her sacred memory. By the end of the 90s the monastery was ruins with overgrown bushes, garbage, weeds and old trees littering the property. In 1997 the government returned the property to the church and with the blessing of the Archbishop of Dnipropetrovsk a small group of nuns and villagers began the restoration of the monastery. The work of restoration has been done via donated funds and labour but still much is needed to be done.




The destruction was so great, and the recovery so complicated that the abbess Abbess Barbara has appealed to every Christian person to consider assisting with the project.  At present, the monastery in dire need of the following building materials:

- Roofing materials
- Metal (valves, channels, angles, tubes, electrodes)
- Cement
- Waterproofing materials
- Foam insulation materials
- Boards/lumber
- Tile for flooring
- Laminate;
- Plumbing fixtures (sinks, faucets, toilets)


(Women's choir at the church.)

Those wishing to contribute to the revival of the monastery, please refer to the abbess Abbess Barbara on mobile telephone 38 - (097) 215-48-87. Please remember the time differences if you live in the West. There is an 10 hour difference from Los Angeles or 7 hour difference from New York.

If you'd rather contact the Archbishop's office, it is in Dnipropetrovsk:
49070,Украина,
 г.Днепропетровск,
 Красная площадь 7,
 Управление Днепропетровской Епархии Украинской Православной Церкви

The link for Russian readers is http://www.eparhia.dp.ua/news.php?id_news=1977

(Photo credits: A. Dombrovsky)

[alyosha]

He ascribed the high numbers to Stalin's total lack of preparedness for war.  Remember, Stalin had most officers executed or sent to gulags.  It was only when Stalin turned to old generals (and lied to them), and started a nationalist propaganda campaign that the war turned.  Accounts also have him practically paralyzed on the invasion.
 
Solzhenitsyn was the commander of a Red Army unit, so he had first hand experience of the front.

I suspect the incapacitation of Stalin in June 1941 was a ruse.  There is a tactic of political statecraft that consists of feigning weakness during a crisis.
Ivan the terrible used a similar ploy once.  Saddam Hussein, an admirer and imitator of Stalin did the same thing in March 2003.
The tactic was known as far back as Roman times and animals even use it some.
When a ground nesting bird distracts you from her nest with the “broken wing, can’t fly, can only scurry along the ground” ruse you have been had by a birdbrain.
What Stalin may well have been doing that June was seeing if there were any potential coup plotters out there and if so to lure them to strike while they thought he was incapacitated, but when Stalin was actually fully alert.
The idea is better to deal with “this deviationist, running dog of capitalism, traitor scum” when you are fit and expecting it rather that have the plotter remain hidden  waiting for a time of real weakness.
Also by forcing the politburo to come as a group and beg Stalin to take charge and issue orders, Stalin re-enforced his position as the leader.
I sometimes have a guilty admiration for the man.  He was a tough character.  What can I say?  It’s a guy thing. 
;-)

[Faux Pas]

I suspect the incapacitation of Stalin in June 1941 was a ruse.  There is a tactic of political statecraft that consists of feigning weakness during a crisis.
Ivan the terrible used a similar ploy once.  Saddam Hussein, an admirer and imitator of Stalin did the same thing in March 2003.
The tactic was known as far back as Roman times and animals even use it some.
When a ground nesting bird distracts you from her nest with the “broken wing, can’t fly, can only scurry along the ground” ruse you have been had by a birdbrain.
What Stalin may well have been doing that June was seeing if there were any potential coup plotters out there and if so to lure them to strike while they thought he was incapacitated, but when Stalin was actually fully alert.
The idea is better to deal with “this deviationist, running dog of capitalism, traitor scum” when you are fit and expecting it rather that have the plotter remain hidden  waiting for a time of real weakness.
Also by forcing the politburo to come as a group and beg Stalin to take charge and issue orders, Stalin re-enforced his position as the leader.
I sometimes have a guilty admiration for the man.  He was a tough character.  What can I say?  It’s a guy thing. 
;-)

Or, he could have actually been in the fetal position with soiled skivvies because he was scared and not the tough guy you imagine?

[alyosha]

Or, he could have actually been in the fetal position with soiled skivvies because he was scared and not the tough guy you imagine?

 It's possible.  But it would have been out of character with the rest of his life, and in accord with a tradition of state craft dating to Roman times, and in alignment with evolutionary animal behavioral strategies dating to, well.., older than dirt.

I don't think I'd ever have been drinking buddies with Stalin, even if I drank.

[mendeleyev]

He was clinically insane.

This was the man who'd go to parties and be served separate food from special containers from the Kremlin (always tested by a waiter just prior to eating), yet he'd sneak out at night in disguise to wander the streets and stop in homes to nervous hosts who weren't fooled by his disguises, and eat freely at their tables.

[alyosha]

He was clinically insane.

This was the man who'd go to parties and be served separate food from special containers from the Kremlin (always tested by a waiter just prior to eating), yet he'd sneak out at night in disguise to wander the streets and stop in homes to nervous hosts who weren't fooled by his disguises, and eat freely at their tables.

Probably criminally insane.  Paranoia is pretty much a prerequisit for being a long lived dictator.
There's a famous line from the movie  "Lion In Winter"about Edward I of England.
"Yes I'm a ba-tard.  It's the only way to be 50, King of England and alive all at the same time."

[alyosha]

Related to the topic of the Holodomor:

The Holodomor wasn't just some isolated event in the past. It is still felt today. In 2012 Ukrainians are still dealing with the impact of Stalin's brutal, deliberate and systematic murder of Ukrainian farm families. This the topic of today's Mendeleyev Journal:

Near Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine is a women's monastery and church that Christian believers have been working to revive. Founded in 1881 the Holy Synod granted that the monastery could be established to meet the medical needs of the community and for sheltering destitute women and children. "In the village of Alexander to establish a reckless female community in the name of Our Lady of the Sign with the name Свято-Знаменский женский монастырь (Holy Znamensky Women's Monastery) with that number of nurses, which the community will be able to provide at their own expense."



The monastery was the idea of a wealthy widow, the hereditary noblewoman named Catherine P. Vasilenko who used her inheritance to fund the construction and staffing of the monastery. In 1901 construction began on the monastery in 1903 the monastery was incorporated as women's convent. In 1904, a nun named Ekaterina Pavlovna the biblical name of Elizabeth and was elevated to the rank of abbess of the convent.



By the early twentieth century, the monastery had 250 nuns, 5 buildings, brick and candle factories to offer employment to destitute women, a windmill, a bakery, and creamery. The monastery operated a shelter for girls from poor families and orphans as well as a school for the children of the area's poorest farmers. The monastery had a huge garden (if you can call 500 acres just a "garden") with milling for wheat, fruit tree orchard and flowers. God had in providence blessed the monastery with some of the richest growing soil in southern Ukraine.



Throughout its history Znamensky Convent cared for the needs of the surrounding region. Then came the Soviet revolution and the monastery entered a period of desolation and decline as the Soviets and Stalin began the shame of  what is called today the Holodomor Genocide, the brutal murder by systematic and deliberate starvation of Ukrainian families who resisted Stalin's collectivization of farms. By 1927 the monastery was closed. The Soviets dynamited the  town's Cathedral of the Transfiguration and turned the small monastery church into a gym. The job creating factories were closed and the buildings converted into a larger school. 




The tomb of the first abbess was desecrated and her relics were thrown out. However pious villagers moved her remains to another village church where they are stored until now. Locals still honor her sacred memory. By the end of the 90s the monastery was ruins with overgrown bushes, garbage, weeds and old trees littering the property. In 1997 the government returned the property to the church and with the blessing of the Archbishop of Dnipropetrovsk a small group of nuns and villagers began the restoration of the monastery. The work of restoration has been done via donated funds and labour but still much is needed to be done.




The destruction was so great, and the recovery so complicated that the abbess Abbess Barbara has appealed to every Christian person to consider assisting with the project.  At present, the monastery in dire need of the following building materials:

- Roofing materials
- Metal (valves, channels, angles, tubes, electrodes)
- Cement
- Waterproofing materials
- Foam insulation materials
- Boards/lumber
- Tile for flooring
- Laminate;
- Plumbing fixtures (sinks, faucets, toilets)


(Women's choir at the church.)

Those wishing to contribute to the revival of the monastery, please refer to the abbess Abbess Barbara on mobile telephone 38 - (097) 215-48-87. Please remember the time differences if you live in the West. There is an 10 hour difference from Los Angeles or 7 hour difference from New York.

If you'd rather contact the Archbishop's office, it is in Dnipropetrovsk:
49070,Украина,
 г.Днепропетровск,
 Красная площадь 7,
 Управление Днепропетровской Епархии Украинской Православной Церкви

The link for Russian readers is http://www.eparhia.dp.ua/news.php?id_news=1977

(Photo credits: A. Dombrovsky)

Do they have a mailing address?

[mendeleyev]

Do they have a mailing address?

Alyosha, here is the mail address. The mail for the Monastery is sent via the Diocese of Dnepropetrovsk:

Metropolitan Irenaeus (of Dnipropetrovsk and Pavlograd)
Управление Днепропетровской епархии
 Украинской Православной Церкви
Украина, 49070,
г.Днепропетровск, Красная площадь 7



The Monastery/convent does have access to direct wire transfer for donations:

р/с 26007050226647
ОКПО 26459960
МФО 305299
Приват Банк

Кредитная карточка: 5211537406423207 Приват банк
Бобер Татьяна Онуфриевна (игумения Варвара)

[Eduard]

I may be mistaken but I think that these photos are of the monument dedicated to Golodomor. I took them last year in Kiev.

[Anotherkiwi]

This memorial is in front of the Mikhailivskiy Cathedral.

[alyosha]

Alyosha, here is the mail address. The mail for the Monastery is sent via the Diocese of Dnepropetrovsk:

Metropolitan Irenaeus (of Dnipropetrovsk and Pavlograd)
Управление Днепропетровской епархии
 Украинской Православной Церкви
Украина, 49070,
г.Днепропетровск, Красная площадь 7



The Monastery/convent does have access to direct wire transfer for donations:

р/с 26007050226647
ОКПО 26459960
МФО 305299
Приват Банк

Кредитная карточка: 5211537406423207 Приват банк
Бобер Татьяна Онуфриевна (игумения Варвара)

Thanks.  I'll try the snail mail address.  I got stung on an internet thing to a site in the Baltic countries once.
I may have to decipher your post address a bit more as our Englilsh reading postal service may have a hard time deciding what country to send it to.  :-)

[ML]

If you think you know what Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the term genocide, thought about genocide, think again. A dissertation-in-progress on Lemkin and the history of the United Nations Genocide Convention by Douglas Irvin-Erickson, a doctoral student in global affairs at Rutgers University-Newark, is likely to change how we think and talk about genocide.

As Irvin-Erickson writes in an article (“The Romantic Signature of Raphael Lemkin”) scheduled to appear in the Journal of Genocide Research: Lemkin used the work of an art historian to define nations as “families of minds”…. Lemkin intended the word genocide to signify the cultural destruction of peoples, which could occur without a perpetrator employing violence at all.

In his 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin wrote that genocide was “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

A colonial practice, genocide had two phases: “One, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”

Genocide, in other words, is not, in Lemkin’s understanding, about mass killing per se, but about the destruction of nations qua nations. Mass killing is, thus, a means to the end of genocide, and not its goal.

It follows from the above that, according to Lemkin, the Holodomor—the famine of 1932-1933—was only one of the means employed by the Stalinist regime to Sovietize and Russify the Ukrainian nation. The actual genocide was Sovietization and Russification, processes that were initiated during the Civil War of 1918-1921, revived by Stalin in the late 1920s, and then vigorously pursued by him and all his successors, including Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, into the early 1980s. It was only under the liberalizing rule of Mikhail Gorbachev that the Russificationist project, and hence genocide, was abandoned.

The genocide was not that Stalin’s regime killed so many people, but that these individuals were killed with the purpose of destroying the Ukrainian way of life, an argument in line with his writings on how the French colonial state sought to eradicate Algerian national consciousness through state terror, political disenfranchisement, and poverty.… The most devastating aspect of the genocide for Lemkin was not the death of individuals, but the potential loss of a cohesive group who shared a common belief in their unity through language, customs, art, or even a sense of shared history.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/genocides-definition-revisited

[Shadow]

As already determined in another thread, the actions of Stalin were not directed towards Ukrainians specific. Similar actions were done in any ofthe other Soviet republics. This means that either Stalin committed genocide on all of the Soviet Union, or he did not commit genocide at all.
Your choice.

Now to make things a bit more interesting and going 

Is the US intervention in several countries to bring their form of government (and life) genocide in this view ?
Are the ideas of a group like the Islamic Brotherhood to bring countries under Islamic law genocide ?

[ML]

As already determined in another thread, the actions of Stalin were not directed towards Ukrainians specific. Similar actions were done in any ofthe other Soviet republics. This means that either Stalin committed genocide on all of the Soviet Union, or he did not commit genocide at all.
Your choice.

From a knowledgeable (not me) source:  The Holodomor was not merely the collectivization of the peasantry.  At the same time, their churches were destroyed, Ukrainian language was prohibited, the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia was sent to gulags, and Russians were moved, en masse, on Ukrainian lands.  This is why, today, Russian is still the dominant language of Eastern Ukraine.

The regions of Russia (Siberia, Southern Russia) in which collectivization and mass starvation were carried out were predominantly populated by ethnic Ukrainians.  The same form of genocide was carried out against Kazaks and in Central Asia.  Similar genocides were carried out, in a different way, against Bashkirs.  They were deported, en masse, to Siberia, where most of them perished.  In 1941, Germans were next on the list, though they had also suffered pogroms during WWI and in the 1920's.  The Don Cossacks were wiped out by Trotsky in the 1920's as well.