July 17, 1983

Media reports on famine. VI

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Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK – The Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33) was the subject of an op-ed article by Adrian Karatnycky published in the July 7 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Karatnycky began his article with an extended quote from Malcolm Muggeridge describing the death and destruction resulting from the famine. Mr. Muggeridge, who, as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian, was one of the few journalists to accurately convey the scope and severity of the tragedy, said the fertile fields of Ukraine were transformed into a “desert” peopled by starving peasants.

“The devastation Mr. Muggeridge described wasn’t caused by any natural catastrophe,” wrote Mr. Karatnycky. “It was an entirely new phenomenon – history’s first artificial famine: a consequence of Stalin’s effort to collectivize agriculture and crush the nationally conscious Ukrainian peasantry.”

Mr. Karatnycky noted that with the exception of Mr. Muggeridge and William Henry Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor, “the Western press was largely silent about the genocide that was occurring in Soviet Ukraine.” The famine, he said, killed between 4.5 and 7 million people.

“Some reporters from the West concealed the truth because of an ideological commitment to Soviet communism,” he wrote. “Others, like New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, were seduced by official favors and access to high government circles into deliberately and shamelessly attempting to suppress the story of the famine, while writing fawning articles of Stalin’s rule.”

Mr. Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Order of Lenin for his work, Mr. Karatnycky wrote.

As to the famine itself, Mr. Karatnycky wrote that it was created when the regime ordered the confiscation of all seed, foodstuffs and grain from the Ukrainian peasantry, grain that was ultimately sold to Western Europe to help finance Stalin’s industrialization policies. At the same time, the regime was pursuing an intense campaign of collectivization. Tied in with this was Stalin’s desire to eradicate the persistent nationalism of the Ukrainian peasantry.

“While the drive to collectivize agriculture was a widespreading phenomenon common to the entire USSR, only in Ukraine did it assume a genocidal character,” Mr. Karatnycky wrote. “Indeed, there can be no question that Stalin used the forced famine as part of a political strategy whose aim was to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian national sentiment.”

Mr. Karatnycky said that the famine “is important for both moral and political reasons,” nothing that in addition to “our moral obligation to honor the memory of the nameless victims” it is “important to understand the forced famine as a pivotal event in Soviet history, whose consequences remain to this day.”

Not only did the famine have a disastrous impact on Soviet agriculture – one that is being felt today – but, according to Mr. Karatnycky, “the famine eliminated a substantial segment of the USSR’s non-Russian population, thus ensuring that the Soviet Union would remain for the next five decades a state dominated by an absolute Russian majority.”

But despite the famine’s seminal significance, Mr. Karatnycky noted that “its full story has remained untold,” and that “not one serious book on this tragedy is available in English.”

He added that the famine, which he compared to the Jewish Holocaust and the massacre of Cambodians by Pol Pot, must not be ignored any longer.

“Today – at a time when some would recast Soviet communism in a friendlier mold, the better to negotiate arms reduction with – may once again be an inopportune time to bring up the terrible loss of life and painful trauma of the brutally scarred Ukrainian nation,” Mr. Karatnycky concluded. “Yet 50 years seems too long to remain silent about one of the greatest crimes in mankind’s history.”


Sun-Sentinel

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Antonina Husak of Coral Springs, Fla., in a moving letter to the Sun-Sentinel here, recalled the grim horror of the Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33), which she experienced as a little girl.

She blamed the famine, which was to cost some 7 million lives in Soviet Ukraine, on the Kremlin’s decision to “destroy the Ukrainian people” through starvation, a campaign which saw the confiscation of grain and foodstuffs by a force of 25,000 non-Ukrainians.

“Those ‘commissars’ were inhumanly cruel and ruthless,” she wrote. “They organized special brigades and literally went from house to house taking away everything edible.”

The result, Ms. Husak went on, was devastation on an unthinkable scale, with most major roads littered with the rotting corpses of peasants who tried to flee to the cities to escape the hunger ravaging the countryside. She noted that at the time of the famine the Soviet Union was selling Ukrainian grain to the West, causing American farmers to burn their surplus crop.

Those that did not die of hunger were often persecuted and either jailed or shot for harboring even a few kernels of grain to stave off starvation.

“My uncle was executed on the spot, like many others who tried to hide some food from the brigades,” Ms. Husak wrote.

Yet, despite the scope of the tragedy, Ms. Husak said that few in the West even knew that it was happening because many Western reporters, sympathetic to the Communist cause, dismissed famine reports as “malignant propaganda.”

“On the 50th anniversary of this genocide of the Ukrainian people, I feel that I owe to my grandfather, my uncle, my many relatives, my childhood friends and to the millions of other innocent victims who perished in this other holocaust, a testimony of remembrance and a warning to the world of the perils of communism,” Ms. Husak wrote in closing.


The Ukrainian Weekly, July 17, 1983, No. 29, Vol. LI

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