October 16, 1983

Media reports on famine. XIII

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

PITTSBURGH – The October 7 issue of the Post-Gazette ran a lengthy, front-page article on the Great Famine in Ukraine by staffer Bohdan Hodiak.

Headlined “‘Hidden’ famine in Ukraine killed millions,” the article was accompanied by a page one photograph of a young girl holding her horribly emaciated brother.

“The artificial famine, which will be commemorated in Pittsburgh this weekend, has been described as the crime of the century which few have ever heard of, and, as the only large-scale humanly engineered famine in history,” wrote Mr. Hodiak.

He said that, according to British Sovietologist Robert Conquest, as many as 14 million people may have died as a result of the famine.

“While Ukrainians were starving, the Soviet Union was exporting grain, and the Soviet leadership was denying any famine existed, as it still denies it occurred today,” Mr. Hodiak said.

Noting that Ukraine’s population dropped 10 percent between 1926 and 1939, Mr. Hodiak quoted Dr. James Mace of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute as writing that the famine “succeeded in breaking the Ukrainian peasantry as a political force, completed the destruction of the entire social structure of the Ukrainian nation, and made possible far-reaching political changes.”

But, according to Mr. Hodiak, the Soviet Union also paid a price, as the virtual destruction of Ukrainian private agriculture through collectivization and the virtual annihilation of the peasant class “marked the beginning of the chronic need by the Soviet Union to purchase grain from the United States, Canada and other countries.”

One cause of the famine, Mr. Hodiak wrote, stemmed from “Stalin’s decision to protect the goals of the five-year industrial expansion plan.” Because he needed money to buy Western machinery, Stalin ordered that exorbitant grain quotas be imposed on an already badly overtaxed agricultural system still reeling from the upheavals of collectivization.

“Stalin was unwilling to admit that collectivization had dramatically reduced the grain harvest, and he sent some 10,000 overseers into Ukraine, backed by the army, to collect every scrap of grain to meet the quotas,” according to Mr. Hodiak.

He said the results of these policies were graphically described in a book by the late Soviet writer Vasily Grossman titled “Forever Flowing,” published in the West in 1972.

Wrote Mr. Grossman: “They (the peasants) ate cats and dogs until it became difficult to catch them. The animals began to fear people and became wild. They caught mice, snakes, birds, dug in the earth for worms. They crushed bones to make them into flour. They boiled leaves and grass.”

There were also instances of cannibalism, with mothers killing children and then eating them. Other children, whose parents had died, were left to fend for themselves.

Mr. Hodiak said that although some journalists, such as Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian, did report accurately on the famine, others like New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty willfully concealed the truth.

“Although emigre Ukrainian organizations made many appeals for food to Western governments and to relief organizations they were all unsuccessful,” Mr. Hodiak said.

By 1934 and 1935 articles on the famine finally began to appear in the West, but by that time the Soviets had eased some of the restrictions on food and grain. Also by that time, 5 to 7 million people were dead, he wrote.

Mr. Hodiak ended his article with a closing quote from Mr. Grossman’s book: “And so it all passed. And where are their lives, their terrible pain? Is it all gone? Will no one answer for this? Will it all be forgotten? Overgrown by the grass.”


Chicago Sun-Times

CHICAGO – UNA Supreme Vice-President Myron Kuropas, writing in the September 22 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times, said he fears that the U.S. public, with its urgent concern with the disarmament issue, will soon forget about the Soviet attack on the Korean jetliner much in the same way that the world forgot about the Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33).

“History repeats,” wrote Mr. Kuropas. “In 1933, the Kremlin leadership planned a famine in Soviet Ukraine that resulted in the premeditated murder to millions of men, women and children.”

He attributed the lack of general knowledge about the famine to Soviet denials and to “those in the West who were willing to corroborate the denial,” particularly journalists Walter Duranty of The New York Times and Louis Fischer of the Nation.

Because the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally during World War II, events such as the famine were overlooked, wrote Mr. Kuropas, adding that after the war American military personnel even helped in the forced repatriation of millions of Soviet citizens back to the USSR, where most were either exiled or killed.

Today, according to Mr. Kuropas, there are still those in the United States all too willing to accommodate the Soviet leadership, which he says is aware of the West’s tendency to forgive and forget Soviet behavior.

“Andropov knows that no matter how outrageous Soviet behavior is today, one small gesture, one insignificant concession tomorrow, will be seized upon by a peace-hungry West as a sign that the Soviets are beginning to mellow,” wrote Mr. Kuropas. “Hope for the future will quickly dim the lessons of the past.”

He said that the decision to shoot down the Korean airliner was “consistent” with the heritage of Soviet leaders, and should not be viewed as some kind of insane anomaly.

“Some of us are insane for believing that marching for peace in America will somehow transform beasts into butterflies in the Kremlin,” Mr. Kuropas said.


The Hartford Courant

HARTFORD, Conn. – The September 30 issue of The Hartford Courant carried a story by staffer Stephanie Della Cagna on a memorial service for the victims of the Great Famine in Ukraine held the day before at the State Capitol.

The paper said that the candlelight ceremony in the Senate chamber included remarks by Dr. Yaroslav Turkalo, chairman of the Connecticut Commemoration Committee, who told a group of some 125 people that the Soviet Union is “replete with horror stories and crimes.”

Michael Voskobiynyk, president of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance, who survived the famine, described hunting for food and watching “the collectors pick up the bodies that were swollen with famine.”

The paper said that Gov. William O’Neill had designated September 29 as Ukrainian Famine Commemoration Day in the state.

It quoted Orest Dubno, who is commissioner of the Department of Revenue Services, as saying that throughout history, the Soviets have provided examples of brutality.


Southtown Economist

CHICAGO – Alex Harbuziuk, copy editor of The Daily Southtown Economist Newspapers, wrote an article about the Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33) in the September 30 issue of the paper, which serves parts of Chicago and its suburbs.

In the article, headlined “Soviets starved millions,” Mr. Harbuziuk compared the famine, which he said killed an estimated 7 million Ukrainians, with the Jewish holocaust, but added that the “conscience of the world has not yet been tinged” by the Ukrainian tragedy.

He said the famine was engineered by Stalin to “break the will of the independent-minded and nationally conscious Ukrainian peasantry,” and resulted in malnutrition and mass starvation in Soviet Ukraine. Much of the grain confiscated by Soviet authorities was later sold on the international market to finance Stalin’s industrialization policies, wrote Mr. Harbuziuk.

“Knowing that the Kremlin oversaw this holocaust surely makes it easier to understand how the Soviet Union’s leaders today can show no remorse over exterminating those 269 people aboard flight 007, then boasting they would do it again,” he said.

Mr. Harbuziuk said he wrote the article in connection with the October 2 famine commemorations in Washington.

“Ukrainians want to inform the present generation about this atrocity,” he wrote. “They want the world to remember this blot on history.”


The Ukrainian Weekly, October 16, 1983, No. 42, Vol. LI

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