1932-33 HOLODOMOR CAPPED OFF 5 YEARS OF GENOCIDE

By Stephan Bandera

One recurring question in Holodomor discourse is "So why didn't Ukrainians fight back?" when they in fact did: forced collectivization began in 1928 with Stalin's first five year command economy performance plan.  In 1930, more than 4,000 uprisings, involving 1.2 million villagers, took place throughout Soviet Ukraine according to Ukraine's Institute of National Memory. After five years, the population was physically exhausted and 1932-33 was easy pickings for armed GPU (State Political Administration) cavalry and infantry units that isolated farms, entire districts into starvation by taking everything that was left – including sowing seeds.

On March 16, 1930, the chief Chekist of the Ukrainian Soviet republic’s GPU Vsevolod Balitsky wrote:  “Yesterday, I arrived in Tulchyn district. The entire district is seized by disturbances and uprisings. Rebellions are currently occurring in 153 villages. Soviet authorities and activists have been completely expelled from 50 villages… Collective farms have been liquidated in most of the district’s villages… Armed uprisings are taking place in some villages. Trenches have been dug around the villages where armed [men] are preventing entry. In some villages people are singing “Ukraine Is Still Alive”…

“Armed resistance was encountered while conducting operations in the villages of Horyachivka and Vilshanka… where the shootout lasted for three hours. In the village of Balanivka… 500 men took to the forests armed with pitchforks and axes.

“The entire district has been divided into operative sectors. Armed units of communists and GPU cavalry have been assigned to every sector. Orders have been issued to resolutely crush the uprisings…”

The source for this document alone is cause for optimism: the Central Archives of the FSB of the Russian Federation, the direct descendant in the chain of Bolshevik political police from the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, and KGB. This gives hope that the Russians may yet address the Holodomor as it occurred in Russia.

By 1932, only 2.8 million tons of grain was left in Ukraine. Food and fodder supplies were reduced to 2.7 million tons instead of the necessary 11 million tons required to feed the population and livestock. Famine was inevitable. All the bolsheviks had to do was organize "bring out your dead" wagons and dump executed or starved-to-death bodies into pits.

Another very interesting document being introduced into Holodomor discourse is a typescript of the unpublished "History of Genocide" written by Rafael Lemkin (1900-1959) – the man who coined the term genocide and drafted a UN convention on genocide. The typescript, found in the New York Public Library, will soon be published in a collection of Holodomor-related documents being prepared by Montreal professor Roman Serbyn.

There are those out there today who would claim that the Holodomor was not genocide. Those folks should take the time and learn what the man who coined the term “genocide” had to say on the issue.

Lemkin had no doubts that Soviet policy was directed at “the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”  Lemkin was in a very unique position to know exactly what was happening in Ukraine. Born in what is now Belarus, the Polish-Jewish lawyer studied in Lviv. During the Holodomor, he worked as Deputy Prosecutor in the town of Berezhany in what is now Ternopil oblast – less than one hundred kilometers away from Soviet Ukraine.

Lemkin did not limit his description of this “classic example of Soviet genocide” to the Holodomor of 1932-33. Lemkin described the “systematic pattern” of the genocide of Ukrainians in four steps that began in the 1920s:  “The first blow was aimed at the intelligentsia, the national brain, so as to paralyze the rest of the body… Going along with this attack on the intelligentsia was an offensive against the churches, priests and hierarchy, the ‘soul’ of Ukraine… The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folk lore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine… The fourth step in the process consisted in the fragmentation of the Ukrainian people at once by the addition to the Ukraine of foreign peoples and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians.”

Thus, the man who coined the term genocide lived and worked in what is today modern-day Ukraine during the years of the Holodomor, had firsthand knowledge of what was happening in Soviet Ukraine. He definitely thought it was genocide, but described what happened to Ukrainians as a "classic example of Soviet genocide," suggesting that communist Moscow orchestrated more than one genocide.

Ukraine's President Victor Yushchenko certainly did not limit the list of peoples that fell victims to three decades of bloody Bolshevik rule under Stalin.

"With brotherly respect and sympathy we bow our heads before all those who suffered from Stalin's regime as we did: before Russians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, Moldovans, Jews, and tens of other nations," Yushchenko said in his keynote address at the opening of the Holodomor Memorial Complex in Kyiv on Saturday, November 22.

Source: Ukrainian Echo April 7, 2009

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons.