Turning the pages back... May 8, 1983 (05/04/03)

Turning the pages back...

May 8, 1983

Back in 1983 The Winnipeg Free Press featured three articles on the Great Famine in Ukraine, including an interview with British author Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the first Western journalists to report extensively on the tragedy. In addition to the interview, conducted in 1982 by Toronto writer Marco Carynnyk, the paper's April 9 issue published an eyewitness account by 72-year-old Winnipeger Oleksa Hay-Holowka, and a story on the reluctance of some survivors to talk about the genocidal Famine.

Along with the three articles, the Free Press printed the following note: "Few events of such enormity have attracted so little public clamor or more press apathy than the government-programmed famine which led to the extermination in 1932-33 of 8 million people in Ukraine. The Free Press was a party to that apathy - in the years immediately after the famine and in efforts this year to publicize its 50 anniversary. Editors took it for granted it was a matter best left to history books and academics, ignoring much significant new research on the subject. Readers have noted the shortcoming. These pages acknowledge it."

The 80-year Mr. Muggeridge, who was the Soviet correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in the early 1930s, called the famine "the most terrible thing I have ever seen." The sight of people dying of hunger as the result of a deliberate government policy was something he had never experienced. "The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was not the result of some catastrophe like drought or an epidemic," he said. "It was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind which demanded the collectivization of agriculture, immediately, as a purely theoretical proposition, without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering."

In his recollections, Mr. Holowka, a plant disease expert who came to Canada in 1949 and was working on a book about the Great Famine, told of being pressed into service to help remove the bodies of famine victims. "The first house we went to, we found two dead children lying on the bed," said Mr. Holowka, who returned to Ukraine from Leningrad in 1932, the start of the famine. "The mother was leaning on the bed. She was dead, too. The father was lying on his back on the floor." He also recalled that "People ate dogs, cats and rats. When pets and rats were gone, there was a lot of cannibalism."

In the article on survivors, columnist Manfred Jager quoted Dr. Jaroslav Rozumnyj, head of the Slavic studies department at the University of Manitoba, as saying that it is difficult to get many survivors to talk about their experiences. "For one thing, many of these people still have family members living in the Soviet Union and are afraid of what might happen to them if people here speak out and get their names in the paper," Prof. Rozumnyj told the Winnipeg Free Press.

However, Prof. Rozumnyj also told of one woman who called him shortly after hearing a lecture in Winnipeg by Dr. James Mace of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, who was doing research for Dr. Robert Conquest's book on the famine, "The Harvest of Sorrow," which was published in 1986. "She told me she never believed the story her grandfather had told her, how he actually cut pieces of flesh from his arm and leg to feed his children to keep them alive," he said. "The details in Dr. Mace's lecture brought all this alive to her and she almost broke down realizing the horror of it all."

Source: "Media Reports on Famine: Winnipeg Free Press," The Ukrainian Weekly, May 8, 1983, Vol. LI, No. 19.

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