And although Hitler’s crimes were indeed heinous, that’s a problem. When I ask my friends and classmates what other holocausts in the history of the world matched the brutality of the Jewish Holocaust, they can’t give me an answer. The deaths of millions of people have been forgotten. History has been rewritten by the perpetrators.
Now it’s time to get it right. After old KGB records were released almost a century after it happened, the truth is starting to come out. It’s called “Holodomor” – the Ukrainian translation for “death by starvation.”
It was a deliberate act of political suppression. In 1928 and 1929, Stalin forced peasants throughout Ukrainian to join state-owned farms – in accordance with his socialist ideology. Many peasants refused to join, and they defied Stalin’s dictatorship. In response, Stalin took drastic measures, which he outlined in his address to the Conference of Marxist Students of the Agrarian Question in 1929 (in his speech, the term “kulak” means “peasant”):
…We have recently passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting proclivities of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class…Now the expropriation of the kulaks in the regions of solid collectivization is no longer just an administrative measure. Now, the expropriation of the kulaks is an integral part of the formation and development of the collective farm…
(“Joseph Stalin: Liquidation of the Kulaks”)
Could Stalin’s intent be any clearer? Shortly after his declaration, Stalin began his ruthless extermination. In 1930, almost one million Ukrainians were dragged from their homes and deported to prison camps. Two years later, the agricultural production quotas were raised by forty-four percent; in essence, the peasants were robbed of their own food, and Stalin redistributed grain to other regions. In an interview with Fox News, Viktor Yuschenko, the former President of Ukraine, says that in 1932 the Ukrainian people needed ten million tons of grain to survive; they produced over twelve million. Despite this surplus, it is estimated that between seven to ten million Ukrainians died of starvation between 1932 and 1933. In addition, people who were caught hoarding food were killed and tortured by Soviet guards.
Twenty-five thousand candles are lit in Kiev every year in memory of the twenty-five thousand people who died every day during the famine. Yet, people around the world still don’t get the picture. Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s current President, even denies that the Holodomor was an act of genocide. Most importantly, the Holodomor is not even mentioned in history textbooks or classrooms. Since seventh grade, I have taken six history courses, and I was never taught the truth about the forced famine.
This ignorance seems to echo one of Winston Churchill’s most famous quotes: “History is written by the victors.” The Soviet Union was one of the victors in World War II, and Stalin was able to cover up the genocide he inflicted. In the tense atmosphere that followed the war, no country had the courage to expose his atrocities. After all, he was considered part of the “Big Three” that ruled in the aftermath of World War II, and he even posed as a friend of Churchill and Roosevelt in a famous picture during the conference at Yalta.
And although some reporters did witness the Ukrainian famine during the 1930s, they often distorted its true meaning. Walter Duranty, a correspondent for the New York Times, reported the following:
Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. (“Holodomor Facts and History”)
It is unbelievable to think that people actually believed Duranty. As defined by the Medline Plus Medical Encyclopedia, malnutrition is a “general term that indicates a lack of some or all nutritional elements necessary for human health.” What caused this malnutrition? Did the Ukrainians run out of their vitamin pills? It seems that people missed the obvious connection between starvation and malnutrition.
It is truly a shame that the Ukrainian famine has been left out of history’s pages. Imagine if some of the most traumatic events in America’s history, such as the Bataan Death March or 9/11, were forgotten. What if the rest of the world claimed that they never happened? We must call things what they are – the murder of millions of political enemies in the Soviet Union is indeed a holocaust, and the starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants is indeed genocide.
Eighty years after Holodomor, why should anyone still care? Because acknowledging that it happened is the first step in making sure that it never happens again. Some progress is being made; a handful of countries, including the United States, now recognize Holodomor as an act of genocide. A memorial was even erected in Washington, D.C. in 2008 to commemorate the tragedy and its victims. Yet, when students and teachers don’t understand the history of the Ukrainian famine, there is a problem. Textbooks must be rewritten. All of my classmates should be able to explain what happened during the Holodomor. History is the cornerstone of the future, and it’s time to get it right.
Works Cited
“Holodomor Fact and History”. Holodomor 1933. Online. Internet. 8 May 2010.
“Joseph Stalin: Liquidation of the Kulaks”. Historical Documents. Online. Internet. 8 May 2010.
