IN THE PRESS

U.S. News & World Report comments on Famine-Genocide

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - The anniversary of the Great Famine was brought to the fore by U.S. News & World Report (June 30-July 7 issue) via an article titled "A reign of rural terror, a world away" by Lewis Lord. The article appeared on page 4 of the magazine under the overhead "70 Years Ago."

The writer spoke of Stalin's Great Terror, citing Dr. Robert Conquest's estimate that 14.5 million people, half of them children, perished. "Dekulakization killed 6.5 million, and famine claimed most of the rest," the article pointed out.

Mr. Lord also wrote: "The great horror emerged from Stalin's 1929 decision to eliminate the country's most energetic peasants and herd the rest into big collective farms. He declared a class war, claiming that the 'kulaks,' the supposedly rich peasants who, in fact seldom possessed more than a few acres and two or three horses and cows, were exploiting the peasant who owned less. ... Over the next two years, millions of kulaks were expelled to distant lands. ... Many wound up in the gulag. ... Some peasants, branded as 'bloodsuckers' and 'parasites,' were simply taken from their homes and shot."

"Slower deaths awaited millions of peasants, mostly in Ukraine, driven into Stalin's new collective farms. ... Stalin in 1932 set [the government's] share [of the grain harvested] at a greedy level that left hardly a grain for the growers. ... The certain result was one of the two or three deadliest famines in modern history," he noted.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 20, 2003, No. 29, Vol. LXXI

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