Turning the pages back... August 19, 1990 (08/20/00)

Turning the pages back...

August 19, 1990

Ten years ago on August 19, The Ukrainian Weekly commented on yet another in a series of events under that changed forever the course of events in the Soviet Union.

On August 13 President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR had issued a sweeping decree denouncing the crimes of Stalin and urging the restoration of rights for all victims of Stalinist repressions. It was Mr. Gorbachev's strongest condemnation to date of Joseph Stalin's mass repressions, deportations, murders and sentences of death by famine caused by his brutal forced collectivization of agriculture.

The Weekly reported that Mr. Gorbachev had ordered the blanket rehabilitation of persons who died of starvation, were shot or sent to labor camps as "enemies of the people" who opposed collectivization.

"Repressions conducted ... during the period of collectivization" were "unlawful and contradictory to the main civil and economic rights of human beings," Mr. Gorbachev stated. The decree similarly condemned as illegal and unjust Stalin's repressions against "all citizens on political, social, ethnic, religious and other motives in the 1920s through the 1950s" and moved to completely reinstate the rights of these citizens.

Though a special commission previously had been created to study repressions under Stalin and had already rehabilitated thousands of victims, Mr. Gorbachev noted, "even now, thousands of cases haven't been considered, and a stain of injustice hasn't been removed from the innocent Soviet people who suffered during forced collectivization, who were sentenced, deported with their families to remote regions without means of existence, without a right of appeal ..."

The Weekly's editorial commented:

"Clearly, the decree, with its broad call for rehabilitation of Stalin's innocent victims, will affect millions. In Ukraine alone between 7 and 10 million died as a result of famine, countless numbers were shot, exiled and otherwise repressed. The Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches were liquidated, their clergy and hierarchy killed, and faithful persecuted. Crimean Tatars were deported en masse out of their native lands.

"Mr. Gorbachev has now given the all-union government and the parliaments of Soviet republics until October 1 to formulate proposals on how to restore all civil rights to surviving victims of Stalinism. ... For now, we must hail Mr. Gorbachev's decree denouncing Stalin's heinous crimes. But, we reserve final judgement until it is clear just how the injustices of the past are to be rectified."

Source: "Stain of injustice" (editorial), The Ukrainian Weekly, August 19, 1990, Vol. LVIII, No. 33.

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