Holodomor Memorial in Washington D.C. as final touches are made in preparation for its official opening on November 7. (State Dept./D.A. Peterson) Posted on 11/07/2015 5:27:09 PM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
History, Identity and Holodomor Denial: Russia’s continued assault on Ukraine
Holodomor Memorial in Washington D.C. as final touches are made in preparation for its official opening on November 7. (State Dept./D.A. Peterson)
2015/11/07 • Analysis & Opinion, History, News, Op-ed
On Saturday November 7, a long-awaited memorial to a little-known modern genocide will be dedicated in Washington D.C. It will be accompanied by an exhibit at Union Station aimed at raising awareness among Americans of what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, literally “death by hunger,†an engineered famine which took the lives of anywhere from 4 to 10 million Ukrainians in 1932-33 during the Soviet regime of Josef Stalin.
Congress allocated the small plot of land for construction of a memorial with Kyiv authorities in 2006, under then President Viktor Yushchenko, the infamously poisoned politician brought to power during Ukraine’s popular Orange Revolution. The memorial was ultimately funded with private donations. Ukrainian-American architect Larysa Kurylas designed the Holodomor "Field of Wheat" monument, a stark bronze sculpture of wheat stalks receding into the distance, symbolizing the rich agricultural lands and traditions of Ukraine so cruelly turned against the population to starve them into submission.
Holodomor Exhibit at Union Station (source: Roma Lisovich)
Until recently, most Americans probably couldn't identify anything significant about Ukraine's history or even find it on a map. Many are still surprised to learn, for example, that Ukraine with a population of over 46 million is one of the most populated country in Europe. The very fact that Ukraine is wholly inside Europe even comes as a surprise for many Americans. The reason for this lack of knowledge is the result of Ukraine’s centuries-old interconnectedness with its imperial Russian neighbor, under the Russian Empire of the Tsars and then under the totalitarian communists of the Soviet Union. As a result, most of what we have managed to learn about Ukraine has been written through the lens of Russian and Soviet historiography.
Importantly, for most of this history, Ukraine has been a colony of more powerful states. During the 20th Century, its colonization by both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany led to Ukraine being ground zero for arguably the two most horrific events of that century, the Holodomor in the 1930s and the Holocaust of the 1940s.
Much has been written and rightly continues to be written about the Holocaust. New facts and more accounts seem to come to light everyday, unearthed in attics and basements, helping us better understand the nature and scope of the catastrophic events that led to so much misery in Europe and the near annihilation of Jews on the continent. Much less is known about the Holodomor, although the death count is enormous, nearly 30,000 Ukrainians dying daily at the height of the famine, and the engineering incontrovertible. This contrast is a stark reminder of the continuing need to uncover and reveal the history of Eastern Europe, kept hidden for so long under Soviet authorities.
Holodomor Memorial Exhibit at Union Station (source: @24tvua, Roma Lisovich)
Now that Ukraine has jumped onto our screens and into our awareness of global affairs, this is an important opportunity to learn, and in some cases, unlearn what we’ve come to know as history. In this ongoing process of enlightenment, the National Holodomor Memorial and the accompanying exhibit in D.C. is a meaningful beginning. We also have a growing body of work from modern European historians such as Timothy Snyder whose work specifically focuses on the back-to-back tragedies of Ukraine under Stalin and Hitler, both deeply rooted in the desire to colonize Ukraine’s richly fertile territory. Thanks to such scholarship, we are beginning to come to terms with the many misconceptions, deliberate and otherwise, as we work together to fill the many gaping holes in our knowledge of Ukrainian history, a history largely written by Russians often hostile to Ukrainians.
In light of this history, it seems that the sorts of concealments and distortions we’ve seen so prominently in today’s Russian invasion rhetoric that vilifies and demeans both Ukraine and Ukrainians has been going on for a long, long time. In fact, Putin’s famously professed views of Ukraine not being a real nation, or that Ukrainians are merely lesser Russians, reveals a paternalistic attitude that many Russians have held about the Ukrainian minority for centuries.
Holodomor Memorial Exhibit at Union Station (source: @24tvua, Roma Lisovich)
This attitude played a critical role in what we know, and don’t know, about the Holodomor, one of the most horrific events in Ukraine’s history. During the Soviet era, talk of it was strictly forbidden, covered up in the language of modernization, as a seemingly laudable goal by Stalin to collectivize agriculture in the fertile territories of the Soviet Union.
Later, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, document archives were opened, and the world began to learn of the systematic and premeditated inhumanity of Stalin’s brutal plan to suppress the Ukrainian nation and people, by making them work impossibly harder than ever, then depriving them of their entire harvest, their livestock, and finally criminalizing even the mere possession of food.
I heard stories from my mother passed on by her father, who witnessed traumatized villagers being shot on the spot for having a sack of potatoes. No questions asked. This is how millions were slowly, quietly and ruthlessly starved to death.
Russia's open era of glasnost is long gone, sadly. Instead, we see under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a resurgent militaristic, imperial Kremlin that has no problem highlighting the good side of Stalin (as Federal Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko did in a recent interview) or violently destroying Ukrainian territory or even killing Ukrainians. Stalin is again popular, and once again we’re even back to the systematic denials of the Holodomor’s significance, cause, and any responsibility for the millions of Ukrainian deaths.
These denials have taken on a distinctly nasty character since relations between Ukraine and Russia have taken a sharp nose-dive after Russia invaded Ukraine last year. In fact, as part of Russia’s propaganda war on Ukraine, state-run media have been attempting to use Holodomor denial to boost their campaign against Ukraine and the West more generally.
It’s a kind of double gut punch, claiming Ukrainians' defining suffering doesn’t really exist, even a "hoax," invented and perpetrated by neo-Nazis, who conveniently are also running the coup government in Kyiv. Such pronouncements just pour the proverbial salt into a deeply painful wound, one ingrained in every Ukrainian's collective memory.
Others have analyzed the illogical and shameful attempts by Russia's Kremlin-controlled media to deny Ukraine's Holodomor. Cathy Young in The Daily Beast has a particularly good exposition of the issues. And there are many other articles at Radio Liberty and podcasts that have commendably taken the deniers to task.
Tomorrow's official unveiling of the National Holodomor Memorial in the U.S. is a time to remember the millions of Ukrainian lives lost to hunger and lost to history. Perhaps had we known more of the truth of this dark period in Russia's and Ukraine's history, we would have been in a better position to understand the mindset of Putin's Russia today. This mindset differs little from that of Stalin or from the Russia of the Tsars for that matter, all rooted in colonial, paternalistic and hostile views of Ukraine and Ukrainians. In fact, Putin's Kremlin is DOING THE SAME THING Stalin's Kremlin did to Ukraine, and for the same reasons namely, Russia seeks to suppress a people who have expressed their WILL TO BE FREE, to have their OWN voice, their OWN government, and their OWN identity.
In a recent talk, legendary journalist Marvin Kalb essentially argues that this is Ukraine's cross to , cursed by its geography to remain within Russia's orbit.
The story doesn't end but begins there. It's important to understand that for Putin, as in Stalin's day and for centuries, Ukraine has been fundamental not only to Russia's ambitions but its very identity. After all, what kind of Empire, or even Great Nation, would Russia be without Ukraine, where much of its history, heart and soul are located?
Russians believe their civilization was founded in Kyiv (Kyivan Rus, they call it). Quintessentially Russian greats like Chekhov, Babel, Gogol, Prokofiev, Bulgakov, Nekrasov, Akhmatova, even Solzhenitsyn (mother) are from Ukraine.
You can see Russia struggling with these issues of identity when one of its most famous artists Ilya Repin had the renown painting of the Zaporozhye Cossacks writing a letter to the Turkish Sultan hidden as subversive at Tretyakovskaya Gallery.
These identity issues, the blessing and curse of empire, are what Russia’s rulers have heretofore been unable to face, and as a result, they have continually resorted to assertions of dominance in aggressive and brutal ways. Russians, after Putin, will eventually come to terms with their identity crisis, hopefully less defensively and less aggressively, once they recognize they don't have to define themselves by their perceived enemies, and begin to appreciate their own uniquely rich human capital.
In the meantime, Ukraine is moving forward. It has rejected its Soviet past. And Ukraine's assertion of an independent identity from Russia since the Euromaidan protests and revolution is probably the harshest rejection of Russia in its history, even more than during Stalin's era.
Euromaidan was successful in ousting a Russia-friendly president, and the new Ukrainian government has succeeded in refocusing the world's attention to an unrepentant aggressive Russia. Although Ukraine may be struggling in many ways, Ukraine's identity as distinct from Russia is not one of them. Today's distinctly Ukrainian Ukraine will struggle but will not be turning back to Russia anytime soon. Putin's shameless seizure of Crimea followed by a destructive and tragic war in the Donbas has only solidified Ukraine's determination to fulfill its European dream of dignity and self-determination. And though perhaps not loudly but certainly consistently, the international community fully supports Ukraine in this effort. The National Holodomor Memorial is a important reminder of just that.
To learn more about the Holodomor, see James Oliver's work at Euromaidan Press here and here. Some other Holodomor history sources and websites:
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Cairns, Andrew. The Soviet Famine 1932-33: An Eyewitness Account of Conditions in the Spring and Summer of 1932. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1989. Commission on the Ukrainian Famine. Investigation of the Ukrainian famine, 1932-1933: Oral History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1990. Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. USA: Oxford University Press, 1987. Davies, R.W. The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930. London: Macmillan, 1980. Davies, Robert William and S.G. Wheatcroft. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Dimarov, Anatoliy. A Hunger Most Cruel: The Human Face of the 1932-1933 Terror-Famine in Soviet Ukraine. Winnipeg: Language Lantern Publications, 2002. Dolot, Myron. Who Killed Them and Why? In Remembrance of Those Killed in the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Dolot, Myron. Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987. Halii, Mykola. Organized Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933. Chicago: Ukrainian Research and Information Institute, 1963. Hryshko, Wasyl. The Ukrainian Holocaust of 1933. Toronto: Bahriany Foundation, 1983. Kostiuk, Hryhory. Stalinist Rule in Ukraine: A Study of the Decade of Mass Terror, 1929-1939. Munich: Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSSR, 1960. Krawchenko, Bohdan. Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Marcus, David. “Famine Crimes in International Law,†American Journal of International Law 97, no. 2 (2003): 245-281. Motyl, Alexander, “Deleting the Holodomor: Ukraine Unmakes Itself,†World Affairs Journal, Sept.-Oct. 2010. http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/deleting-holodomor-ukraine-unmakes-itself . Motyl Alexander, “Remembering the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide,†World Affairs Journal, Blogpost from December 13, 2013. http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/remembering-ukrainian-famine-genocide . Oleksiw, Stephen. The Agony of a Nation: The Great Man-Made Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933. London: National Committee to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Artificial Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933, 1983. Procyk, Oksana, Leonid Heretz and James Earnest Mace. Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-1933: A Memorial Exhibition, Widener Library, Harvard University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986 Serbyn, Roman. Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1986. Snyder, Timothy D. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010. WEBSITES: http://www.holodomorct.org/ http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm http://judicial-inc-archive.blogspot.com/2010/08/bolshevik-famine-seven-million-dead.html http://www.ukrainiangenocide.com/ http://www.ukrainiangenocide.org/ http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/ukraine_famine.htm http://www.faminegenocide.com/ http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/ http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/facts/
FILMS: 1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awxHKqEquco 2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_dnRA5NFhs 3- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjcO4tcobc0 [Holodomor English] 4-
http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/09/15/holodomor-stalins-genocidal-famine-of-1932-1933/#arvlbdata Holodomor (“death by hunger†in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of at least four million Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies. The Holodomor can be seen as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry, who resisted Soviet policies. This assault occurred in the context of a campaign of intimidation and arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, artists, religious leaders, and political cadres, who were seen as a threat to Soviet ideological and state-building aspirations.
The Ukrainian peasants were given impossible high quotas of the amount of grain to submit to the Soviet state. Special teams were sent in to search homes and confiscate all produce to the last grain. A particularly brutal law called “5 ears of grain law†was passed, following which starving Ukrainians were shot on the spot for gathering grain that remained on the field after the harvest.
As a result, at least four million people starved to death in Ukraine. At the height of the Holodomor, 28,000 people were dying PER DAY. This number does NOT include the (1) ethnic Ukrainians outside the Ukrainians SSR who died, (2) the half million people deported from Ukraine during collectivization or (3) the thousands of religious, cultural and political leaders who were destroyed.
The USSR attempted to cover up the Holodomor, and Russia continues to DENY or diminish it to the very day. For more on the topic, please see: Stalin’s genocidal Holodomor campaign of 1932-33. What we know vs the denialist lies
Stalin’s genocidal Holodomor campaign of 1932-33. What we know vs the denialist lies: The man-made famine's victims lying dead on the streas of Kharkiv. Photo: Ewald Ammende, 1933
The man-made famine's victims lying dead on the streets of Kharkiv. Photo: Ewald Ammende, 1933
Article by: James Oliver
On 5 July 1933, a desperate appeal for food aid was sent to Stalin from within the Bashkir ASSR. The Bashkirs are a small Turkic ethnic group that mostly reside in a region just to the north and west of Kazakhstan, and in 1933 Stalin had targeted them for the Kulaks in their midst. In February of that year 1000 Bashkir families had been deported to Stalin's gulags for that reason.
In February 1933, 1000 Bashkir families had been deported to Stalin’s gulags. What makes the appeal notable is that we know Stalin had read it. To the left of the document he penciled the cryptic word "за" along with a signature.
For a brief overview of the Holodomor, please see our infographic: Holodomor: Stalin’s genocidal famine of 1932-1933
An appeal for food aid was sent to Stalin from within the Bashkir ASSR
In Russian the word "за" could either mean "for" or "after" depending on the context. If Stalin ever had an intent to give the Bashkir ASSR food aid he would only have done it after a certain goal had been reached, namely further control of the region to his wishes which in practice meant further russification, something that was reflected in the distorted census of 1939. Both the Holodomor and the Goloshchekin Genocide which used highly similar pretexts and modus operandi had provided a model, something that other parts of the USSR were inspired by as a means of getting rid of supposed enemies of the state or keeping them under control. We know this because on 16 February 1933 a telegram was sent to Stalin from Stalingrad asking if all repressive measures taken against the Ukrainians to prevent their migration "be extended to our region?"
A telegram sent to Stalin in 1932 from Stalingrad asking if all repressive measures taken against the Ukrainians to prevent their migration “be extended to our regionâ€
During the 1930s, knowledge of what Stalin was actually doing rarely made much headway in the West. Too many were instead convinced by the pro-soviet lies peddled by the likes of playwright George Bernard Shaw, French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot and New York times correspondent Walter Duranty, whose reporting on the USSR had won him a Pulitzer prize.
Duranty's outright public dishonesty can be gauged by contrasting it to his private remarks, such as those that were recorded by a report dated 30 September 1933 that came from the British charge d'affaires in Moscow. "According to Mr. Duranty, the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga has decreased in the past year by 3 million, and the population of Ukraine by 4-5 million. The Ukraine had been bled white …
"According to Mr. Duranty, the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga has decreased in the past year by 3 million, and the population of Ukraine by 4-5 million. The Ukraine had been bled white" Mr. Duranty thinks it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."
Duranty's figure of 10 million is interesting because one can easily say that it represents a minimum estimate for the number of deaths in 1932-33 that have been confirmed by modern scholars. As I have mentioned before, 4-5 million at least did indeed die within the Ukrainian SSR and when you add in the number of Ukrainians who died outside of it (such as in the Kuban (North Caucasus) which was a majority Ukrainian area and where 1-2 million died), you are looking at a Holodomor total of 5-7 million. Add to that the figures from the Goloshchekin Genocide where at least 1.5 million Kazakhs died and you’re looking at 6.5-8.5 million deaths within a single year. Add in the victims of the famine in the Volga (of which the Volga Germans seemed to have been a main target) and other areas such as Crimea or the Bashkir ASSR it quickly adds up. Some Russians too were also caught up in the starvation during 1932-33 and they too must be counted among Stalin's victims but Russians did not starve nowhere near in the same proportions as the Ukrainians, Kazakhs or a number of the ethnic minorities that inhabited Southern Russia. A major aim of the Holodomor and related famines was to change ethnographic compositions to suit Stalin's whims, in effect Russification - something that the archival evidence explicitly admits. For Ukraine, the consequences of Stalin’s decision making is plaguing its eastern parts today.
All the above is well known to those of us who specialize in the history of Stalin's crimes even though knowledge of those crimes remains relatively unknown in the west by means of a successful Soviet disinformation campaign. Pointing out these crimes and exposing Soviet propaganda for what it is should be what is called in the US a "no brainer," yet Russia today continues to completely refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing committed in its name. Pointing out the Holodomor or other crimes is often depicted as simply being an attack on the Russian character, or rather the Kremlin itself from which these crimes actually originated from.
Pointing out the Holodomor or other crimes is often depicted as simply being an attack on the Russian character, or rather the Kremlin itself from which these crimes actually originated from. For Putin, a man who lives on the authoritarian legacy of the USSR, who began his career as a KGB thug, and who has incorporated the supposed glories of the USSR into his brand of Russian nationalism, the Holodomor and other Soviet crimes persist as black stains on his ideology. Thus, he has an agenda to promote denial of them all. I've already published an article on one of Russia's most prominent Holodomor deniers in which i covered much of the above and refuted some common denial tropes. This article is going to cover a few more denial tropes, such as those promoted in this Sputnik article which twitter has persistently alerted me to.
That article begins with a rambling conspiracy theory that the Holodomor was simply invented after WW2 by a conjunction of the CIA and the OUN/UPA specifically "Nazi collaborator" Mykola Lebed and this brings us to Myth 1.
MYTH 1: "The Holodomor was entirely 'invented' by the Far Right"
Mykola Lebed of course did not invent the Holodomor. Beyond the fact that this myth is not an answer to the archival evidence some of which you can see above, it is not even true that only the Ukrainian Right in general tried to promote awareness of the Holodomor at the time. One such example is the Ukrainian Socialist Radical Party (URSP) which formed out of a merger between two other socialist parties in 1926. This party operated in Polish controlled Western Ukraine and it represents an interesting case study of Socialism as it professed Anti-sovietism, believing that Stalin’s USSR was no different to the capitalist states when it came to matters of imperialism and colonialism and setting its slogan "All Land to the Peasants without Redemption" against what the Soviets were actually doing in the Ukrainian SSR. During 1933, at the peak of the Holodomor, this party established a committee in order to stage protests about hunger in the USSR. But to little effect. It was inhibited by the Polish government which kept its side of the 1934 Polish-Soviet non-aggression pact (that Stalin would violate in 1939) by keeping its mouth shut. Another well-known left-wing promoter of the Holodomor was George Orwell. That the image of the Holodomor made its way into Animal Farm was not a coincidence.
Gareth Jones, one of the most prominent journalists who helped expose the Holodomor to the West, was affiliated to the British Liberal party. Commemorating the Holodomor does not necessarily promote Nazism either. Ukraine's Jews were also seriously devastated by the famine and their story is important. Those Neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust and instead focus on an incoherent "Jewish conspiracy" with regards to Soviet rule are in effect double genocide deniers. They deny the USSR's murderous antisemitism which means they also deny this aspect of the Holodomor.
MYTH 2. All the photographic evidence is a lie
It has been alleged from Holodomor deniers that all the photographs depicting famine in Ukraine during 1932-33 are actually all implants from elsewhere
It has been alleged from Holodomor deniers that all the photographs depicting famine in Ukraine during 1932-33 are actually all implants from elsewhere, notably the famine of 1921-22. In 2009 RT published a Holodomor denial article with this as a theme. This myth has unfortunately been sustained due to the fact that international Holodomor exhibitions (and even this film) sometimes by accident do allow photos from elsewhere to slip through unchecked. Far from this being some conspiracy, one must remember that Stalin didn’t like anyone to photograph something inconvenient such as a person starving. For that reason visual references are very rare but that is not to say they do not exist. The key is identifying the photographer if possible, and where the photo was taken. These photos of the Holodomor in Kharkiv taken by an Austrian engineer are sometimes considered to be the only authentic Holodomor photos, but lesser known are the photos around the Donetsk countryside taken by a Ukrainian by the name of Marko Zhelezniak or the photos of Mykola Bokan around Chernihiv. 
"300 days without bread – a small lunch" A photo depicting the family of Mykola Bokan who took this photo which is dated "April 2 1933." For his photos, Bokan was arrested and sent to the Gulag. He did not survive
Despite the claims of the deniers, supposed false photographic evidence does not refute the Holodomor as a whole.
Genuine photos of the famine do exist and they are but one strand in the cumulative body of evidence. Genuine photos of the famine do exist and they are but one strand in the cumulative body of evidence.
MYTH 3. The Holodomor was natural
Ignoring the documentary evidence, some Holodomor deniers look to purely climatic reasons as an explanation for a famine that they admit but deny it was genocide. Sometimes this comes attached with an added note that the famine of 1932-3 is just simply one of a long list of famines that have blighted the area or Eastern Europe in general. With each natural famine though one can easily find a culprit, either extreme prolonged weather as was the case for the "Tsar Famine" of 1894-5, or a bout of explosive volcanism somewhere around the world. One example would be perhaps the worst natural famine to have impacted Eastern Europe (including Ukraine) which happened between 1600-1603 – the culprit was the Huaynaputina volcano in Peru which in 1600 produced the most powerful volcanic eruption within South Americas recorded history. As there was no bout of volcanism of similar or greater magnitude in the early 1930s, we cannot pin the Holodomor on that. So what then? The aforementioned Sputnik article mentions that Ukraine was struck by periods of drought around about the same time, except drought cannot stand alone as a single explanation to the loss of 5-7 million Ukrainians. No other of the many droughts that have peppered Ukraine's past comes close to such a death toll nor taken a similar proportion of a total population at any one given time.
No other of the many droughts that have peppered Ukraine's past comes close to such a death toll nor taken a similar proportion of a total population at any one given time.
Screenshot 2015-08-12 at 9.08.51 AM.png
Stalin’s refusal to reduce quotas for Kuban region
Manmade factors have to account as the most major part of the explanation for such a death toll. On August 22 1932 Stalin sent a telegram to his associate in the Kuban, Boris Sheboldaev, telling him that he could not support a requested reduction of grain quotas for the Kuban. Instead Stalin reminded him that despite there being drought in the Middle Volga that region was still fulfilling its quotas better.
The message was obvious. Reckless pursuit of fulfilling grain quotas regardless of actual circumstance took precedence over human lives. It was this philosophy more than drought that helped condemn millions of Ukrainians to death. Mark Tauger may be a popular citation for those who wish to dismiss the Holodomor only as a natural event, but his methodology has been open to criticism. Grover Furr, also cited in the Sputnik article as "the US expert in Soviet history" is not even a historian but a professor in an unrelated field of English but who is to Stalin what David Irving is to Hitler – both use exact same type of dishonest reasoning for the fanatical defense of their beloved dictators and both prioritize their extremist murderous ideologies over actual research. For that, there is nobody of repute who takes either liar or their claims seriously.
MYTH 4. None of the famines in the USSR in the 1930s were ever targeted at a specific people
In 1933, Mendel Khataevich, a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Ukraine had boasted "we needed a famine to show them who is boss here. It claimed millions of lives, but the collective farm system has been established, we have won the war."
"we needed a famine to show them who is boss here. It claimed millions of lives, but the collective farm system has been established, we have won the war."
By now it should be quite obvious what conclusions one can draw from the documentary evidence highlighted above.
This myth is a meta-myth promoted by Stalin’s apologetics. Their denialist logic suggests that because all the famines was actually one single large famine affecting the whole south of the USSR, therefore it picked on nobody in particular and therefore none of its victims can be considered victims of a genocide. This logic underlays that Sputnik article. It is a lynchpin to the denialist arguments of Andrei Marchukov and especially Prof. Viktor Kondrashin. What they want you to forget here is that a single dictator can be guilty of multiple accounts of Genocide as Hitler was, Milošević was, and Stalin certainly was.
Within Russia, Putin has managed to control the flow of information regarding acts of genocide that Stalin conducted against ethnic minorities. Within Russia, Putin has managed to control the flow of information regarding acts of genocide that Stalin conducted against ethnic minorities. With regards to Kazakhstan, he has a Yanukovych-esque puppet in the form of Nursultan Nazarbayev to suppress the memory of what happened there. But that does not necessarily mean that Ukraine or the rest of us that have knowledge of these genocides can not acknowledge them and commemorate all the victims of Stalin.
Man’s inhumanity is sometimes very hard to grasp.
This is impossible because Putin is a righteous dude. I heard it here on FR.
I sympathize with the Ukrainians but the author is an admitted Progressive. (not sure what that is in her context, understand what it is in the US)
—
From Twitter>
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Paula Chertok
@PaulaChertok
Linguist, lawyer, teacher, progressive. Survivors’ & 60s child, Russian refugee, Polish immigrant, Ukraine/Belarus homeland. Inclusion, innovation b4 profits.
Left of Center
He builds churches! He loves his country!
And yet we have pro-Russian trolls trying to say that we need to align with Russia (and their allies Iran and China) to fight ISIS. We all know how that will end.
Sorry for them, time for America to bring its troops home and defend us. Our Empire, yes America is an empire as surely as Britain was, needs to be dismantled. Walk softly and carry a big stick, should be our motto. Let others help themselves and their neighbors. We spend trillions on continents far away, while our own neighborhood is neglected. IMHO..
MOSCOW (Reuters) - International monitors say they have spotted a new kind of Russian weapons system in rebel-held Ukraine this week, possible evidence of Moscow's continued interest in Ukraine even as it focuses on Syria.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is monitoring a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, reported that its monitors had seen a mobile TOS-1 'Buratino' weapons system for the first time.
The Buratino is equipped with thermobaric warheads which spread a flammable liquid around a target and then ignite it. It can destroy several city blocks in one strike and cause indiscriminate damage.
Only Russia produces the system and it was not exported to Ukraine before the conflict broke out, according to IHS Jane's Group and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which track arms exports.
The OSCE's findings are embarrassing for the Kremlin, which has turned down its rhetoric on Ukraine and shifted attention to Syria, where it has begun air strikes. The report comes before President Vladimir Putin holds talks in Paris on Friday with the leaders of Germany, France and Ukraine on the peace process.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Sounds like Ukrainians were “enemies of the people” and had to be dispatched.
...not much different than how Al Gore and other liberals view us ‘Global Warming deniers’.
Irrelevant, in this case.
The USA should stay out of the middle east -- except to protect Christians. Right now, we haven't been protecting Christians (thanks to Obama).
Let Russia do it and then let the Sunnis and Shias kill each other.
What's wrong with that?
Historically, the Muscowites, Belarussians and Ruthenians/Ukrainians were one people -- the East Slavs arising from Kievan Rus. This was split in the 13th century with the Mongol invasion. After this, Belarus and Ukraine were under the Lithuanian Duchy and then under the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Muscowy was a tax collector for the Grand Khan and then arguably took over the Mongol Empire -- it's traditions politically are more Mongolic, authoritarian.
the Ruthenians were under the more chaotic, more democratic P-L commonwealth and developed different traditions.
But they didn't have time to develop their culture after the middle ages because of the strong Polish national culture. So many Ruthenians became Polonized.
in the 17th century the Ukrainians jumped into the Russian fire and destroyed any chance of them emerging as a separate nation state -- Ukraine was the badlands between PLC, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, so they were more chaotic than the Belarussians
But no time to develop a higher culture.
under Tsarist Russia they were still frontier lands but in the mid 1800s Europe went through a period of nationalisation (thanks to the influence of the French revolution), creating mono-cultures instead of multicultures that had existed prior -- so England stamped out the Cornish language and attempted to do the same with other languages. The French utterly stamped out their local languages (and still do), there was standard German
And the Russians attempted the same. They were moderately successful with other nationalists (Finnic like Mordvins etc) and VERY successful with fell East Slavs
So, I would argue that Ukraine has not had the time to develop a separate identity and is very closely tied to their cousins in russia ethnically and culturally
Putin is using this as an excuse to bite into Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjcO4tcobc0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afVdnbMd6gA
What is important is to ask why was Ukraine so violently attacked? The answer is it was attacked this way because it perceived itself as an independent nation. Stalin did this to break national aspirations of the Ukrainians. Yet many Russians to this day insist that Ukraine is theirs, which would make as much sense as the USA saying the UK belongs to us. Russia has never admitted its role in this crime and has exonerated itself from all crimes against its neighbors and its citizens even as it plans new crimes against them. And the man who rules Russia today, like an absolute monarch of old, faithfully served the communist party that killed so many people stuck in the Soviet empire. Strangely, some who claim to be American conservatives see nothing wrong with Putin being a former communist and believe he is a true conservative.
Eastern Ukraine,populated with Russians by Stalin tends to be pro Russia particularly in the Donetsk region. The rest of Ukraine is very nationalistic with the Ukrainian language and culture predominant. Ukraine does not want to come back under Russias control and IMHO will not
But Putin is so handsome and cool, say it ain’t so!!!!!
Irrelevant?
Socialists of all forms are not to be trusted.
In this case (as I said), it is irrelevant. To point it out is to cast doubt on the truth of what she is saying, because socialists lie - right? But in this case, she's telling the truth about the horror of the holodomor mass murder. So casting doubt about that is not helpful.
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