Posted on 11/23/2018 11:57:49 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Oksana Ostapenko was 12 years old and facing death from hunger when a stranger saved her life by taking the girl into his family and sharing the last of their food.
Today, aged 97, the Ukrainian's voice trembles when she recalls the terrible famine that hit her country in the 1930s due to policies enforced by Joseph Stalin's police.
"They came and took away all our grain..."
The death toll of the famine - known as the "Holodomor" in Ukrainian - remains debated among historians. But Kiev authorities estimate the number of those who died at around four million, or 13 per cent of the total population at the time.
Kiev has recognised this as a genocide against the Ukrainian people by Stalin's regime, specifically aimed at eradicating the country's peasantry. More than 15 countries recognise that view of events.
Now dozens of stories like Ostapenko's have been gathered in a book published to coincide with the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor. The national day of remembrance of the famine is on Saturday.
The book, "Humanity in an Inhumane Time", focuses on the people who saved others from dying of hunger.
Ostapenko's saviour was Yegor Kryvenko, whose work as a mechanic at a local mill allowed him to secure some extra flour for his family.
"I just met kind people," Ostapenko said of the father-of-two who offered to take her in when her own mother could no longer support her.
"He divided everything that was stored equally, down to the last gram," she said.
"Even in the most dire conditions there were those who had the courage to resist," Tylischak said.
"They saved lives. One, several or the whole community - depending on what opportunities they had," said Viktoriya Yaremenko, a historian who also worked on the book.
(Excerpt) Read more at channelnewsasia.com ...
When the Germans came into Ukraine, they were initially welcomed as liberators.
Meanwhile, as noted in the Jerusalem Post:
The role of Jews in the Russian Revolution, and by extension Communism writ large, has always been a sensitive subject because antisemitic voices often painted Soviet Communism as a Jewish plot, or “Jewish Bolshevism.” When Alexander Solzhenitsyn began work on a book called 200 Years Together, he was criticized for what touching this taboo issue. His own comments to the press didn’t help the matter, claiming two-thirds of the Cheka (secret police) in Ukraine were Jewish.When Ukrainians saw that a disproportionate percentage of their Stalinist oppressors were Jewish, it may have had some impact on their relations with Jewish Ukrainians during Nazi occupation.
Solzhenitsyn's "200 Years Together" was never published in English, although unofficial translations are available on the internet
??? Jews never made up remotely close to 60% of Russia OR USSR population.... where did you get such an idea?
Jewish population in USSR in 1933 was around 2.5 million according to this source:
Overall population of USSR in 1930s estimated around 160-170 million (of course in flux due to famine/genocide and also increases in some other areas).
YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) has an article Russian Revolutions of 1917
YIVO also conducted some talks on the subject in 2017. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2O2yZT49_A, there is a segment on Jewish representation in the Secret Police (49:00), with the role of Jews in the NKVD being discussed at 55:00.
Just imagine if those Ukrainian folks had rifles and SMGs and shot every Soviet commie pr*ck in the face when they came to take the food.
And did so every damn time they came.
It’s easy to take from people who can’t fight back. Not so much when your own life will get shortened.
JTA — Russian President Vladimir Putin said that at least 80 percent of the members of the first Soviet government were Jewish.
“I thought about something just now: The decision to nationalize this library was made by the first Soviet government, whose composition was 80-85 percent Jewish,” Putin said June 13 during a visit to Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.
First, your phrasing was ambiguous.... I thought you were talking about overall population not “Bolsheviks” or “Soviet government officials” .... you said “Russian state” which is very poor phrasing when trying to talk about the original govt of the USSR. Anyway, my point about the proportions in the overall population is irrelevant if we are talking about the very small clique of Bolsheviks who led the Russian Revolution, except that it makes it more striking if indeed so many of the revolutionary core were indeed Jews.
If the early Soviets were such a high proportion Jewish it would be interesting to know more about their political and religious views, which I certainly haven’t studied. I do know that “Trotsky” (Lev Bronstein) was Jewish in origin although quite secular and atheistic by the time he approached adulthood and became a revolutionary.
Stalin started out as a seminary student, but it makes no more sense to blame Christianity for Stalin than to blame Judaism for Trotsky, I think. Both went very far from and in severe opposition to their origins.
Still, such a high proportion of Bolsheviks coming from Jewish backgrounds certainly would raise questions. I suspect it has to do with feeling on the margins of the society and thus being more susceptible to revolutionary appeals, but I have not studied that generation.
Hitler did tend to fuse “Bolshevism” and “Jews” in his thinking and propaganda.... maybe there was more to the background of that than I was aware of, since I really need to read a lot more on the Soviet revolutionary period.
That’s why it’s said “If someone wants to take your guns away, it’s because they want to do something to you that you won’t let them do if you still have your guns”.
“...If someone wants to take your guns away...”
And that other part of that is: They can only “take” what you allow them to.
The one overriding reason for having firearms - They’re for “The Day”. And they know it.
“Don’t start nuthin’, won’t be nuthin’”.
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