June 19, 1983

Media reports on famine. III

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Edmonton Sun

EDMONTON – The Edmonton Sun on May 1 and 3 ran a two-part series by columnist Fraser Perry on the Great Famine in Ukraine which included an eyewitness account by a survivor, Prof. Yar Slavutych of the University of Alberta.

In the first part of the article, titled “Joe Stalin’s ‘official hunger,'” Mr. Perry referred to the famine as “a monstrous crime” perpetrated by Stalin and virtually unknown in the West. He said that he began learning more about the tragedy this year when reports of survivors reached the newspaper in connection with the 50th anniversary of the event.

“My own knowledge of the event keeps growing, willy-nilly, by quantum leaps,” he wrote.

Mr. Perry said that the famine was the result of Stalin’s cynical solution to the problem of Ukrainian peasant resistance to collectivization and increased intrusion of Russian culture.

“Stalin’s solution? Certainly not to tie up a lot of money and manpower in death camps, as Hitler was to do a few years later,” he wrote. “No, he still relied on deportation to slave-labor camps… with the firing squad as ultimate back-up. But his real weapon was an artificial food shortage, created by robbing the Ukraine of its bumper 1932 harvest.”

The May 3 installment of the series, headlined “‘In Russia no famine,'” centered on the recollections of Prof. Slavutych, then known by his family name of Zhuchenko.

He said that in 1932 he and his father, who farmed about 55 acres, were arrested and ordered deported to Siberia for failing to meet the grain quota imposed by the authorities. However, he said that he managed to escape from the transport train and make his way back home, where he found his mother and five sisters, who told him that nearly 100 of the wealthier families in the district had been uprooted, the men exiled or jailed, the women and children chased out and their homes destroyed.

When he revisited the area some 10 years later, Prof. Slavutych said he had “established that 23 families…had completely died out.”

“Our district lost almost half its population by deportation and the heavy death toll from hunger,” he recalled.

Dr. Slavutych, who fought in the Ukrainian underground during World War II, said he survived the famine by, ironically, working on a state farm. He remembered seeing corpses of starved farmers on the roadside next to piles of their own grain, “sweating and rotting under the rain-covers.” He said that the famine was limited mostly to Ukraine, noting that “in Russia there was no famine.”


Winnipeg Free Press

WINNIPEG – The Winnipeg Free Press on May 3 and 9 printed three letters dealing with the Great Famine in Ukraine, with the author of one calling recently published stories on the tragedy a “propaganda ploy designed to slander the Ukrainian Socialist Republic.”

The other two letters praised the paper’s extensive coverage of the famine, which resulted from Joseph Stalin’s attempts to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and which killed 5-7 million people.

Prof. Roman Serbyn of the University of Quebec, in a letter published May 9, called the paper’s three articles in the April 9 issue “both informative and disturbing.”

“Canadian readers today can only be amazed and disgusted at learning for the first time of the crime’s magnitude, of its effects on the survivors, many of whom had made Canada their new homeland, and of the cover-up, not only by the Soviets, but also by some Western governments and newspapers,” wrote Prof. Serbyn.

He said that he hoped other newspapers “will have the courage to follow your example.”

In a letter published in the May 3 issue of the paper, P.J. Manastyrsky of the Winnipeg branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee commented on an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few Western journalists who accurately reported on the extent and the intent of the famine.

“This interview justifiably illustrates that 8 million people of Ukrainian descent were definitely exterminated by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin,” he wrote.

Mr. Manastyrsky noted that more people died in the first few months of the famine than in the four years of World War I, adding that this year thousands of Ukrainians will be observing the 50th anniversary of the tragedy.

In the same issue, the paper also ran a letter signed by John Goray of Winnipeg, who attributed the famine to “feudal landowners and their henchmen,” who he said “horded their grain in order to starve rebellious peasants into submission.” He also said that a severe drought contributed to the famine.


Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK – The Great Famine in Ukraine was mentioned in a June 3 Wall Street Journal editorial dealing with a Soviet disarmament delegation’s encounter with emigres at a recent symposium in Minneapolis.

“This convocation of Soviet and American citizens for peace was not long under way when it ran smack into the one group of people it should most want to avoid – recent immigrants to the U.S. from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” the editorial said in part. “One questioner in the audience called the panelists ‘propagandists or liars and hypocrites.’ Others in attendance voiced their bill of particulars: The Soviet Union harasses its citizens for their religious beliefs; its army is killing innocent people in Afghanistan; its policies caused the death of millions in Ukraine in the 1930s; Jews are no longer allowed to leave Russia; and we can’t trust the Soviets to honor their international agreements.”

The paper said that American delegates later issued a formal apology to their guests from the Soviet Union.


The Ukrainian Weekly, June 19, 1983, No. 25, Vol. LI

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