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By Evgenia Mussuri, Kyiv Post Staff Writer
Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, May 22, 2003
Seventy years after the Great Famine of 1932-1933 killed
millions of Ukrainians, the country’s lawmakers have recognized it as
an act of genocide.
In an address to the nation, they described it as a terror famine, or
holodomor, deliberately unleashed by Joseph Stalin’s regime to
weaken the Ukrainian people’s resistance to Sovietization.
The Communist Party continues to reject this interpretation. Though
they acknowledge that Ukraine was struck by a famine in the early
1930s, the Communists deny it was the result of a deliberate policy
targeting Ukrainians.
According to various estimates, the Great Famine killed between 4
million and 10 million people in Ukraine. Many villagers starved after
state requisitioning squads confiscated their grain stockpiles.
The Rada has held several hearings on the subject this year, and
deputies voted on May 15 to approve an address to the nation.
“The total destruction of millions of Ukrainian peasants by means of
an artificial famine was a deliberate terrorist act of Stalin’s political
system,” the address reads.
It concludes by calling for the famine to be “publicly condemned by
Ukrainian society and the international community as an act of genocide
that brought about much death.”
However, the corresponding bill did not have an easy passage. Only
at the second attempt did it gather 226 votes – the minimum number
needed to pass.
While no deputies voted against the bill or abstained, 184 of those
registered as present failed to participate in the vote.
In particular, the entire Communist faction walked out of the chamber
before the hearing began. Oleksandr Holub, a Communist deputy and
a member of the National Minorities and Interethnic Relations committee,
explained the Communists’ position on the issue, describing the hearing
as a “political farce.” He said the faction was opposed to re-writing the
history of the Soviet period.
“We respect the memory of the victims of the famine, but they were not
victims of a terror famine,” he said. “Today it is more relevant to talk
about the present-day famine, which is being caused by the current
regime.”
Valery Mishura, a parliament deputy and the Communist Party’s
ideology chief, said that the faction walked out of the hearing because
the interpretation of the famine in the proposed bill did not correspond
to “objective reality.”
“This was not a terror famine, just a famine,” he said.
Mishura said that severe drought led to a bad harvest in 1932.
“The drought did not affect just Ukraine, but also other parts of the
Soviet Union such as the Kuban, Kazakhstan and the Lower Volga
region,” he said.
Mishura also said that the famine occurred during a period of violent
turmoil, as the Soviet regime confiscated property and food stocks from
wealthy peasants who opposed the collectivization of agriculture.
While Mishura acknowledged that the Soviet rulers made a number of
strategic mistakes in their collectivization campaign, he denied that their
actions were intended to destroy the Ukrainian nation.
“The famine was not limited to Ukraine, and it affected Russia and other
areas,” he said. “It was not just Ukrainians who died, but all the people
who lived on this land.”
Our Ukraine deputy Vasyl Chervony disputed Mishura’s take on history,
citing research that led the U.S. Congress to recognize the famine as
genocide in 1988.
Chervony insisted that documentary evidence and eyewitness reports
demonstrated that the famine was deliberate. He said that a number of
foreigners who visited Ukraine in 1932 confirmed that the harvest was
a good one.
“[The Soviets] did not just confiscate food, sometimes they threw it into
the sea or left it out to rot in inaccessible places,” he said.
He also suggested that by identifying themselves as the successors to the
Soviet Communist Party, Ukrainian communists were associating
themselves with Soviet crimes.
“By walking out, they implicated themselves in those crimes and showed
that they remain a territorial subdivision of the Russian communists,”
he said.
Oleksandr Zadneprovsky, a professor of history at Donetsk National
University and the author of “Famines in Ukraine,” a study of famines
through Ukrainian history, welcomed the Rada decision.
“They should have done it long ago,” he said. “All the famines in the
history of Ukraine were man-made in one way or another,” he said.
“[In 1932-1933] the government knew that people were starving,
but the government kept confiscating food anyway.”
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