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The Political Famine of 1932-1933"
Harvest of Despair (Soviet Engineered Famine in the Ukraine) 1933 - Video
Chapter 5 "The Ukraine Under The Soviets" "...So it is impossible to say with certainty how many of the persons executed, exiled, or imprisoned as a result of these trials were actually working for an independent Ukraine and how many were merely sacrificed to suspicion. It may, however, be affirmed with reasonable certainty that far more Ukrainians suffered for political reasons under the Soviet rule than under the Tsarist regime. "This is especially true if one counts among the victims of Soviet rule the large number of relatively well-to-do peasants who were 'liquidated,' that is dispossessed of their property and banished to forced labor as kulaks and the larger number of people of all classes, mostly peasants, who perished in the political famine of 1932-33. This famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or of such a complete exhaustion of the country's resources in foreign or civil war as preceded and helped to cause the famine of 1921-22. "Partly because of the discontent with the new system of collective farming and the lack of manufactured goods, partly because the government had returned to methods of war communism, demanding arbitrarily all the peasants' surplus grain, without defining clearly what was supposed to constitute 'surplus,' the peasants in Ukraine had slowed down their productive effort. Climatic conditions were also unfavorable, both in 1931 and in 1932. "The situation that had developed by the autumn of 1932 might be briefly summarized as follows. Despite the meager harvest, the peasants could have pulled together without starvation if there had been a substantial abatement of the requisitions of grain and other foodstuffs. But the requisitions were intensified, rather than relaxed; the Government was determined to 'teach the peasants a lesson' by the grim method of starvation, to force them to work hard in the collective farm. "Early in 1933 the Ukraine was declared 'out of bounds' for foreign correspondents, so that there could be no widely circulated accounts of the great human tragedy that was taking place there. Moscow was flooded with rumors of widespread starvation, of carts going about the streets of Poltava and other towns, picking up the dead. In the autumn of 1933, when the ban on travel in the Ukraine by foreign journalist was lifted, I went with my wife, who was herself born in Ukraine, to learn at first hand what had happened in the Ukraine. We visited two widely separated regions, one in the neighborhood of Poltava, on the left bank of the Dnieper, the other near the town of Bila Tserkva, on the right bank. We also made systematic inquiries at railway stations as we traveled across the country.
"But every village I visited reported a death rate of not less than ten per cent. This was not an irresponsible individual estimate, but the figure given out by the local Soviets. For, while it was easy to tell credulous tourists in Moscow that there has been no famine, it was impossible for local officials to make any such assertion when every peasant with whom we talked was mentioning friends and relatives who had perished, either from outright hunger or from typhus, influenza and other diseases that always ravage a famine-weakened population. "I retain an unforgettable impression of a village called Cherkassy, which is seven or eight miles south of the town of Bila Tserkva. One the road to this village an ikon showing the face of Christ had been removed, as part of the official anti-religious policy of that time. But the crown of thorns, with unconscious symbolism, had been permitted to remain. "Walking through the dusty streets of the village one was impressed by the sense of death and desertion. House after house seemed to be abandoned, with window panes fallen in and corn growing mixed with weeds in gardens which had been abandoned by their owners. The young secretary of the village Soviet, whose name was Fischenko, reported that 634 out of the 2,074 inhabitants of the village had died. There had been one marriage in the village during the last year. Six children had been born, of whom one had survived. "It's better not to have children than to have them die of hunger," said a woman with whom I talked in the office of the Soviet. 'No,' argued the boy, 'if not children are born who can till the land?' Another boy on one of the village streets called the death roll of his friends and acquaintances: "There was Anton Samchenko, who died with his wife and sister; three children were left. In Nikita Samchenko's family the father and Mykola and two other children died; five children were left. Then Grigory Samchenko died with his son Petro: a wife and daughter are left. Gerasim Samchenko died with his four children; only the wife is still alive. And Sidor Odnorog died with his wife and two daughters; one girl is left. Gura Odnorog died with his wife and three children; one girl is still alive." "This kind of grim, stark chronicle could have been compiled in almost any village in the Ukraine in that terrible winter and spring of 1932-33. In the village of Zhuke, not far from Poltava, I went into a peasant house at random and found a listless looking girl, fourteen years old. Her father was in the fields; her mother and four brothers had perished during the famine. A woman in Poltava declared that 'no war ever took from us so many people." "This was certainly no exaggeration. If one should take ten per cent mortality figure as normal (and from what I learned on the trip I think this would be a conservative estimate) the number of deaths in the Ukraine must have been over three million. While no official statistics about this tragedy have been published there are two points of circumstantial evidence showing how the population growth of the Ukraine was retarded. The proportion of the Ukrainian population in the Soviet population, according to the census of 1939, was 17.5 per cent. It has been 20 per cent during the twenties. The absolute figure of the Ukrainian population reported in 1939 was 30,960,221, indicating a decline during the preceding decade." "There has perhaps been no disaster of comparable magnitude that received so little international attention. The Soviet method of stifling direct reporting of the famine by refusing permission to correspondents to visit the stricken regions until a new crop had been harvested and the outward signs of the mass mortality had been largely eliminated proved very effective. Officially Moscow officialdom continued to deny brazenly that there had been any starvation. Few correspondents were inclined to risk difficulties with the censorship by sending the story of events which had occurred some months in the past." "The Ukrainians abroad, to be sure, learned through indirect channels of what had happened to their homeland and made unavailable attempts to organize relief and to bring the inhuman government policy that led up to the famine to the attention of public opinion. The Ukrainians across the border in Poland naturally received the fullest information and any enthusiasm that had existed among them for communism was considerably cooled." "Agricultural conditions gradually improved in the Ukraine, as in other parts of the Soviet Union, after the crowning tragedy of forced collectivization, the peasants gave up the struggle for individual landholdings. It is noteworthy that the death rate was much higher among the individual peasants than among the members of the collective farms during the famine. This is because the former were subjected to more ruthless requisitions and did not get the benefit of the tardy and inadequate relief measures which were organized for the collective farms." "...Official Soviet population figures tell a grim and unmistakable story of the sufferings of the Ukraine under Soviet rule. About 30,000,000 people lived in the territory of Soviet Ukraine, within its pre-1939 frontiers, in 1917. The Soviet census of January 1, 1933, reported a population of 31,901,000 for the Ukraine. And the latest Soviet census, of 1939, gives 30,960,221 as the population of the Ukraine. So it appears that, for a period of over twenty years, there was a negligible increase of population, while during the thirties there was an actual decrease. There could be no more eloquent proof of the human losses inflicted by civil war, two great famines (in 1921-22 and 1932-33), and the mass deportations of so-called kulaks. Under normal conditions there would have been an increase of at least thirty per cent in a prolific peasant country, like the Ukraine, during a period of twenty-two years. The population should have been about 40,000,000, not about 31,000,000, as recorded in the last Soviet census. This would suggest that the abnormal losses of the Ukraine through death and deportation (over and a above the normal death rate) must have been little short of ten million." "The Ukraine..A Submerged Nation" William Henry Chamberlin The Macmillan Company New York, 1944 Pages 59-61, 73 William Henry Chamberlin was foreign correspondent for the "Christian Science Monitor" for nearly twenty years. In 1922 he went to Russia as correspondent and stayed there for 12 years.
"A Year of Horror" Forty years ago, in 1932/1933, Russia perpetrated the most outrageous genocide in the history of mankind. Over seven million Ukrainians, hundreds of thousands of Don Cossacks, North Caucasians, Byelorussians, and other -Russians fell victim to artificial famine, systematically organized by Russian colonialists.
Hundreds of thousands of privately owned farms are tantamount to hundreds of thousands of points of resistance to the Russian way of life. A collectivized village means total control over the farmer. It is a massive attempt at mastering him. It is an attempt to prevent food assistance to the insurgents as well. The collective farms in the subjugated countries are the Russian control centers of this aspect of life too. A Ukrainian peasant is an individualist. He despises collective economy. He stands for a peasant's private ownership of land. Collectivization of agriculture, therefore, is a thoroughly political and ideological category, not only an economic one. A kolkhoz and private property means a collision of two worlds----Russia and Ukraine----in the national and political respect. It is a clash of an amorphous mass, a herd, a controlled by the tyrants and - the individuality which has its own dignity, its own human and national "I". Collectivization is a leveling of life in order to stifle everything creative in a human being. Collectivization is a method of national oppression with the help of massive efforts to impose a hostile ideology of life upon a subjugated nation. The French, the English, the Dutch and the Belgians by no means imposed their way of life upon the countries acquired by them. The Russian do the contrary. They force their way of life upon the subjugated nations as a means of dominating them. And thus, for instance, in literature or art socialist-realism is a form of Russian imperialism. It is an attempt at spiritual Russification, which hand in hand with linguistic Russification is to force the subjugated peoples to accept the "reality" of Russian slavery, the dictates of Russia, as the subject of their creativity. Militant atheism is a form of Russian imperialism in the religious sphere, for, by destroying Christianity and other traditional religions, it attempts to liquidate the millenary spiritual traditions of a nation and to reduce a human being to cattle. The Russian official Kremlin-style "Orthodoxy", as a Ceasaro-papist religion, as a "Church" which serves the Russian regime, is another form of Russian imperialism, which follows the line of the "Third Rome". Side by side with linguistic Russification there is an attempt at the Russification of the spirit... Sovietization is Russification. The Soviet people do not and cannot exist. There are only the Russian people and the subjugated people. Widespread nationalization and socialization are also a form of Russian colonialism in Ukraine and other subjugated countries. Scores of millions of private owners in the subjugated nations are a difficult category for total control. For this reason, all measures adopted by Russia in the subjugated countries must be viewed as nothing other than the forms of Russian imperialism and colonialism. Forty years ago, Russia committed the greatest crime of genocide in order to drive Ukrainians into the kolkhozes. Ukraine - the richest agricultural country of Europe - lost over seven million inhabitants. Russia sent its troops to take away the harvest, the bread, from Ukraine by force. Hundreds of thousands of Russian troops plundered Ukrainian villages, confiscating all grain and killing people. The Ukrainian peasant resisted joining the kolkhoz, resisted giving his land to the Russians. An uneven battle ensued. The Ukrainian village rose against collectivization. The peasants perished in battle with Russian troops, but did not go to the kolkhozes. The struggle continued for many months. The Russian armies crushed the peasants' uprising against collectivization. They took bread from Ukraine to Russia. The Ukrainian peasants perished by the millions in the villages and in the streets of cities. Dantean scenes were the order of the day. Ukraine did not succumb. When the mothers and children, and the elderly and the sick were dying in the streets of towns and villages, the insurrection was crushed by the Russians The Russian tyrants, Stalin and Molotov, temporarily crushed the resistance of the Ukrainian nation at the price of millions of Ukrainian victims. Several million so-called kulaks, i.e. Ukrainian well-to-do farmers, were forcefully deported to Siberia either to concentration camps or to dig canals. At that time, the Ukrainian nation lost over ten million victims of Russian Bolshevik terror. However, Russia failed to break the Ukrainian nation. It revived again. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) organized the struggle of the nation anew and continue to do so at present. Ukraine continues to fight. The Ukrainian people will never forgive the Russian occupants for the ten million victims of 'Russia's hunger siege of Ukraine. On this fortieth anniversary of the greatest crime of genocide known in the history of mankind, Ukraine warns the free world against the Russian tyrants who are preparing a similar genocide for it. It is a tragedy for the free world that is silent in the face of such outrageous crimes and continues to support Russian domination over hundreds of millions of people and scores of nations. Caveant consules!
Forward from the Book: "Genocide of the Ukrainian People" The Artificial Famine in the Years 1932-1933 by Prof. Vasyl Plyushch 1973, Pages 5-6 Published by: Ukrainisches Institut fur Bildungspolitik Munchen e. V. Munchen 80, Zeppelinstr. 67 All pictures to this article were added by the Gnostic Liberation Front from: http://www.ukraine.be/famin/famine_fr.html
Andrew Gregorovich UKRAINE, "the breadbasket of Europe" is a land famous for its fertile black earth and its golden wheat. Yet, only forty years ago seven million Ukrainians starved to death although no natural catastrophe had visited the land. Forty years ago the people starved while the Soviet Union exported butter and grain. While Moscow banqueted, Ukraine hungered. Stark, cold, statistics, the accounts of thousands of Ukrainian survivors and German; English and American eyewitnesses, as well as confessions of Moscow's agents and the admission of Stalin himself: All these have slowly seeped out of the Iron Curtain and have been piled into a tremendous mountain of facts. The whole story, pieced together like a jig-saw puzzle, ends with the biggest puzzle of all: Why did Moscow decide to starve to death seven million Ukrainians? THE CLOAK OF DECEIT: "COLLECTIVIZATION"
The Communist Party on January 5, 1930, as part of the first Five Year Plan, started the machinery of Collectivization rolling. Collective is, incidentally Kolkhoz in Russian and Kolhosp in Ukrainian. The Russian peasantry demonstrated little opposition to Moscow because of their past tradition of communal farming. The Russian mir, or village commune, where the land is owned by the village and not by the individual, had for centuries prepared the Russians psychologically for Collectivization. On July 30, 1930 the first RSFSR decree abolishing the mir was passed to make way for the Collectives. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, had an independent, individualistic farming tradition of private ownershp of land. The Russian communal spirit was comething completely foreign to the farmers of Ukraine and so they opposed Moscow bitterly. While the collectivization in the Russian Republic (RSFSR) went on schedule, the stubborn resistance of the Ukrainians slowed it down to such a standstill that Moscow even had to retreat temporarily. This was noted by Stalin in his famous "Dizzy with Success" letter. One way the Ukrainian farmer showed his opposition to collectivization was by slaughtering his livestock before joining. Later a death penalty was passed for such an action. The folowing table shows the tremendous drop in livestock:
WHY DID THE FAMINE TAKE PLACE?OPPOSlTlON TO COLLECTIVIZATION is only half the story why Moscow created the famine in Ukraine. The Ukrainian opposition was not only ideological, that is against Communism, but also political. Russian nationalism reared its ugly head at this time. The Kremlin used the famine as a political weapon to destroy Ukrainian aspirations for independence. At the same time as the famine (1932-34) a wave of persecutions of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers and leaders took place. Plots for liberating Ukraine were discovered not only in the smallest villages but even in the top ranks of the Ukrainian Communist Party itself. Purges took hundreds of Ukrainians. Suicide was the escape of many. In 1933 the famous writer Mykola Khvylovy and the veteran Ukrainian Communist, Mykola Skrypnyk, both chose suidde. "This famine," says the American authority William H. Chamberlin, "may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or of ... a complete exhaustion of the country's resources... " THE STRANGEST WAR IN HISTORYTHE DEATH AND DESOLATION caused by the famine is likened to war by many of the eyewitnesses. And in fact, the unequal struggle between the peasants of Ukraine and the agent of the Russian Kremlin certainly may be accurately called a "war". This Ukrainian-Russian "war" between peasants armed with pitchforks and the Red Army and Secret Police, was carried out mercilessly with no pity for the aged or young, nor for women and children. According to Bertram D. Wolfe: "Villages were surrounded and laid waste, set to the torch, attacked by tanks and artillery and bombs from the air. A Secret Police Colonel, almost sobbing, told the writer Isaac Deutscher: "I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the civil war. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine-guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh no, no!" One Moscow agent, mighty Hatayevich, in reprimanding Comrade Victor Kravchenko, one of 100,000 men "selected by the Central Committee of the Party" to help in Collectivization said: "... I'm not sure that you understand what has been happening. A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It's a struggle to the death. This year (1933) was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay, We've won the war." Hatayevich, Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Dnipropetrovsk Communist Party and one of the foremost Communist in the Ukrainian SSR reveals here that the famine was intentional, that it took millions of lives, and that he considered it a "war" aganst the Ukrainian farmers. One woman in Poltava said, "No war ever took from us so many people." This was true, since Ukraine's losses in 1932-33 were greater than that of any nation that fought in the First World War. It should be emphasized that the main weapon in this struggle was not tanks, machine guns or bullets -- but hunger. Famine, a man-made "Collectivized" famine, was the main cause of the loss of life in this "war," one of the strangest in history. STALIN'S CONFESSION TO CHURCHILL
"Oh, no" he (Stalin) said, "the Collective Farm policy was a terrible srtuggle ... Ten millions," he said, holding up his hands. "It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary ..." Stalin admits that a complete year of World War II to him was less of a struggle than Collectivization! How gigantic the opposition of the Ukrainian peasants must have been. Stalin went on to tell the British Prime Minister that some peasants "agreed to come in with us" and were given land to cultivate in Tomsk or lrkutsk (both in Siberia). "But," Stalin added, "the great bulk (of the 10 million) were very unpopular and were wiped out by their labourers (?)." When Nikita Khrushchev "purged" Stalin in his 1956 secret speech, he didn't say a word about this Famine, the most immense of Stalin's crimes. Instead, Khrushchev expressed concern over the "thousands" of innocent Communists that had suffered from Stalin's diabolical suspicion. It was on this occasion that Khrushchev said that Stalin considered deporting the population of Ukraine, however as Khrushchev says: "The Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, he would have deported them also." In his book Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, Little, Brown, 1970) the Soviet premier devotes a chapter to the famine in Ukraine, 1945. HOW MANY DIED?
This statement from a United States Senate Document (No. 122 of 1958) can be backed up with actual statistics squeezed out of the Soviet press. The Russian government, however, took special measures to keep secret the death toll. Of course, it has never admitted any statistics or even the existence of the famine. But, indirect references were accidentally made and it is possible to estimate that during the famine from 10% to 25% of Ukraine's population (32,680,700 in January 1932) starved to death. Vasyl Hryshko, in his factual study says that in 1935 about 25,000 people died daily in the villages of Ukraine, or more than 1,000 per hour or 17 every minute. It was in early 1933 that the greatest loss of life took place. In the first half of the year foreign travel in Ukraine was banned. No newspaper correspondents were allowed to visit the besieged country until the late summer and fall when signs of the famine had been cleared up. The American journalist William Henry Chamberlin visited Ukraine immediately after the ban on travel was lifted. He says every village he visited had lost at least ten percent of its residents. Hryshko sums up the statistics of 1932 and 1939 in this way. When we compare the 32,680,700 persons living in Ukraine in 1932 with the 1939 figure of 30,960,200 we see that, taking into account the normal 2.36 per cent annual increase, in seven years Ukraine had lost 7,465,000 persons. Of this number, Hryshko says, some 4,821,600 persons or roughly 18.8 percent of the Ukrainian population, died in the years 1932-1933. The impact of the famine is shown in many ways. Just before World War II a survey of the number of students was made. Since children start school in the USSR at seven years of age therefore, seven years after 1932 there should be an indication of the famine by a drop in enrollment. Look at these figures:
The Russian Republic (where no famine took place), shows a steady increase as did all seven other Soviet Republics, with the exception of Armenia. Why did Ukraine have an absolute loss of 600,216 students and Byelorussia (also a famine area) 11,174? The tragic story of these missing school children is written in the pages of the man-made famine. Let us not forget that Stalin himself said "ten millions" some of whom suffered death not from famine but as slave laborers in Siberian mines and timber camps. EYE WITNESSES SPEAKHUNDREDS OF UKRAINIAN eyewitnesses of the famine have told their tragic and unbelievable experiences in the book The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, edited by S. 0. Pidhainy. The second volume of this work is devoted exclusively to "The Great Famine in Ukraine." It should be added that some of the people were able to travel to Moscow and other areas because they were technicians, etc. They testify that while they left Famine at the border of Ukraine or the Kuban (North Caucasus) area, which is also Ukrainian populated, they found no evidence of hunger in Russia or other Soviet republics, except Byelorussia. It is not possible to give even a hint of the horror and pathos in Ukraine at the time. Writer Arthur Kaestler:Arthur Koestler, the famous writer who visited Ukraine in late summer of 1932 and fall 1933 and who spent about three months in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv writes in The God That Failed: "I saw the ravages of the famine of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine: hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment window their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles ..." American Traveller Carveth Wells:Carveth Wells, a world traveller, traveled through Ukraine in July 1932 and describes the early stages of the famine in his fascinating book Kapoot. "The extraordinary thing was that the farther we penetrated into the Ukraine, which used to be the 'Granary of Russia', the less food there was and the more starvation to be seen on every side." "None of us knew what tragedies had been enacted here ... "We ourselves happened to be passing through the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the very midst of the famine in July, 1932. From the train windows children could be seen eating grass. The sight of small children with stomachs enormously distended is not at all uncommon in Africa or other tropical countries, but this was the first time I had ever seen white children in such a state." Soviet Official Victor Kravchenko:
"Although not a word about the tragedy appeared in the newspapers, the famine that raged ... was a matter of common knowledge. "What I saw that morning ... was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back ... Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables. There was not even the consolation of inevitability to relieve the horror. "The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone (weak from hunger), their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless." Kravchenko was shocked to discover a butter plant was wrapping its products in paper titled in English USSR Butter Export. "Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter being sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see ... people eating butter stamped with a Soviet trade mark. Driving through the fields, I did not hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart. These people had forgotten how to sing. I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-smacking of fat foreigners enjoying our butter ..." At the same time Communist Party members and Soviet officials, the privileged classes, were specially supplied with food. Some of these, however, had a conscience and Comrade Somanov, Chief of the Political Department said: "Victor ... I'm of peasant origin myself and the sufferings of my people hurt me deeply. Tears, blood, death, exile. And why? The land is fertile, the people are hard-working. Why must we let them starve and die and perish? The more I think of it the more confused I get." The famine was not caused by a lack of food in Ukraine. This may seem a paradox but the cause of the famine was completely the Kremlin's decision. It locked up Ukraine's food and guarded it from the people. The Russian grain collectors did not take only the wheat from the peasants but stripped them of all food. In one village near Odessa "they collected all the grain, potatoes, beets to the last kilogram" and "in other places they even took half-baked loaves of bread from the stove." These are not mentioned by Kravchenko. He does reveal however, that these millions need not have died except at the whim of Stalin in Moscow. He says: "When the first of the new grain was being delivered to the granary near the railroad station, I made a discovery which left me tremulous with horror. Stacked in the brick structure were thousands of poods of the previous year's (1932) grain collections These were the state reserves for the district ordered by the government, their very existence hidden from the starving population by officialdom Hundreds of men, women and children had died of undernourishment in these villages, though grain was hoarded almost outside their doors! "The peasants who were with me when we found the 'State reserves' stared with unbelieving eyes and cursed in anger. Subsequently I came to know that in many other parts of the country the government hoarded huge reserves while peasants in those very regions died of hunger. Why this was done only Stalin's Politburo could tell -- and it didn't."
W.E.D. ALLEN"Since that date (1926) catastrophes have befallen the rural folk of the Ukraine about 3,000,000 are reckoned to have perished during the famine of the early thirties, and another 2,000,000 certainly have migrated (to Siberia?) as a result of conditions which they have found intolerable." The Ukraine: A History, by W.E.D. Allen, Cambridge University Press, 1941, page 375. IVAR SPECTOR"Hundreds of thousands of the recalcitrants were transported to Siberia to work in the forest or mines. ... Others starved during the famine which swept Ukraine in the early 1930's particularly in 1932." An Introduction to Russian History and Culture, by Ivar Spector, D. Van Nostrand, New York, 1950. GEORGE VERNADSKY"... Largely as a result of the forcible collectivization of agriculture, a famine developed in Ukraine. Starvation and all it accompanying diseases stalked unchecked through the richest agricultural region in the Soviet Union, and within the space of a few months hundreds of thousands if not millions of people died in unimaginable misery." A History of Russia, by George Vernadsky, Philadelphia, Blakiston, 1944, page 337. "The famine of 1930-31 followed close on the heels of the chaos, which existed everywhere in agriculture, and in Ukraine in particular the suffering and starvation reached a scale which almost passes human comprehension." A History of Russia, by George Vernadsky, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954, page 360. RICHARD CHARQUES"But among the ghastly fruits of the campaign for collectivization was the 'man-made famine' of 1931-32 in the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus, where it had been resisted most fiercely and where the fields had lain almost totally neglected. There were millions of deaths from starvation in these regions." A Short History of Russia, by Richard Charques, London, 1959, page 245. EDWARD CRANKSHAW"At the same time Stalin had just forced through the collectivization of agriculture ... at a fearful price ... First there were the millions of ruined lives, the lives of the rich and middle peasants, the so-called kulaks, killed in the struggle, or exiled to Siberia; then the three million dead in the great famine which swept Ukraine ..." Russia by Daylight, by Edward Crankshaw, London, Michael Joseph, 1951, page 100
BERTRAM D. WOLFE"The peasantry fought for its life with fowling pieces and pitchforks. Uprisings embraced whole regions. Villages were surrounded and laid waste ... Districts were stripped of their stocks of grain and seed, then cordoned off to die of famine and plague." Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, by Bertram D. Wolfe, Praeger, New York, 1957, page 165 "In 1932 the State decreed the death penalty for stealing a bit of coal or grain from a freight train. Then the death penalty was provided for the collectivized farmer who might steal from the fields some of the product of his "collective labor;" then for the willful slaughter of his own cattle; then for letting "cattle die by neglect." "In March 1933, thirty-five officials of the Commissariat of Agriculture were executed after being 'tried' ... for having 'willfully permitted noxious weeds to grow in the fields.'" Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, by Bertram D. Wolfe, Praeger, New York, 1957, pages 169-71 DR. EWALD AMMENDE"... Official Soviet reports referred to the 1932 harvest as of medium quality: poor results or failure were never mentioned. (page 29) 1933 was a particularly critical year for the food supply of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, 1.8 million tons of grain and other foodstuffs were exported ... In the first eight months of 1934, during which period the acute lack of foodstuffs continued, the export was even more considerable; 591,835 tons of grain, worth 13.6 million roubles were exported ... via the Black Sea ports." Human Life in Russia, by Dr. Ewald Ammende, London, G. Allen & Unwin, 1936, page 46 WALTER DURANTY"In the first fortnight of January (1933) ... Stalin made a speech 'What is wrong,' Stalin asked in effect, 'on the agrarian front? We are wrong, my comrades -- we, not the peasants nor the weather, nor class enemies, but we Communists, who have the greatest power and authority the world ever saw, yet have made a series of blunders ... We miscalculated the new tactics of hostile forces of boring from within, instead of engaging in open warfare.'"
"In April, 1933, I travelled through Ukraine to Odessa, and ... a Red Army brigade commander (General) told me: 'We had a communal farm in Ukraine attached to my regiment ... Everything went well until a year ago (1932). Then the whole set-up changed. We began to get letters asking for food. Can you imagine that, that they asked food from us? We sent what we could, but I didn't know what had happened until I went to the farm only a month ago (March 1933). My God, you wouldn't beleive it. The people were almost starving. Their animals were dead. I'll tell you more, there wasn't a cat or dog in the whole village, and that is no good sign ... Instead of two hundred and fifty families there were only seventy-three, and all of them were half-starved. I asked them what happened. They said 'Our seed grain was taken away last spring.' They said to me, 'Comrade Commander, we are soldiers and most of us are Communists. When the order came that our farm must deliver five hundred tons of grain, we held a meeting. Five hundred tons of grain! We needed four hundred tons to sow our fields, and we only had six hundred tons. But we gave the grain as ordered."
What was the result? I asked the brigade commander. "Barren fields," he told me. "Do you know that they ate their horses and oxen, such as was left of them? They were starving, do you know that? Their tractors were rusty and useless; and remember, these folks weren't kulaks, weren't class enemies. They were our own people, our soldiers. I was horrified ..." USSR: The Story of Soviet Russia, by Walter Duranty, New York, 1944, pages 194-5 MAURICE HINDUS"The more well to-do peasants continued to resist the movement, and to dispose of their opposition, the Soviets proceeded to liquidate them." The Great Offensive, by Maurice Hindus, New York, 1933, page 154 "Worst of all the excessive collection of grain. This was carried out with especial vigor." (Hindus, page 151) "Thousands (of people) came to Moscow, because they knew that in Moscow there was an abundance of food. The Ukraine with its lovely lands and its lovely skies and its lovely white villages was siezed with panic and gloom. The mortality of livestock from starvation during this time was enormous." (Hindus, page 153) "I never had seen such an abundance of weeds in the fields as there were in the summer of 1932. Sugar beet in the Kiev area (Ukraine) were literally submerged in weeds." (Hindus, page 154) Hindus quotes the Commissar of Agriculture, Yakovlev, who spoke in February 1933 about the Peremozhetz collective farm in Odessa region of Ukraine. "Here," said Yakovlev, "was as choice a farm as there was in that part of the country -- rich soil, superb climate -- Yet in 1932 it failed to fulfill the grain obligation to the government even though the amount was reduced to one-fourth of what it had been the year before, and many a family had in hand only scanty supplies of bread. Of its 153 horses, only 53 were left. The other 100 died of starvation." RONALD HINGLEY"The same year (1932) also saw the outbreak of the second great Soviet famine, in the Ukraine and along the Volga. It claimed some five million further peasant victims -- deliberately sacrificed by Stalin, who continued to dump Soviet grain on world markets while those who had grown it were starving en masse. The new dictator was very largely successful in concealing this disaster from world opinion." A Condse History of Russia, by Ronald Hingley, New York, Viking Press, 1972, pages 172-73. S.V. UTECHIN"The next famine, that of 1932-3 was created artificially by the authorities as a means of breaking the resistance of the peasants to the collectivization of agriculture; ... the grain was removed from the countryside by armed detachments chiefly composed of internal security troops and Komsomol members. (page 175) Millions of peasants died of starvation or were deported and sent to forced labour camps." (page 120). A Concise Encyclopedia of Russia, by S.V. Utechin, New York, Dutton, 1964. CLARENCE A. MANNING"It is difficult to estimate accurately the number who perished in the famine, but it was approximately 4,800,000. This is certainly an underestimate, although certain other calcu- lations will place the number between five and six million." Ukraine Under the Soviets, by Clarence A. Manning, New York, Bookman Associates, 1953, page 101. JOHN F. STEWART"While no official statistics about this tragedy have been published, there is a document - The Small Soviet Encyclopedia of 1940, in which it is stated that Ukraine had in 1927 a population of 32 millions, and in 1939, only twelve years later, a population of 28 million. Where had the 4 millions gone to, apart from what should have been the natural increase of at least another 4 million?" Tortured but Unconquerable Ukraine, by John F. Stewart. Edinburgh, Scottish League for European Freedom, 1953. page 8. Reproduced gratefully from: http://infoukes.com/history/famine/gregorovich/
93 Ukrainian Film Directed by Oles Yanchuk
"A Family's Struggle In Stalin's Man-Made Famine" "Famine-33" Film Review by Stephen Holden The New York Times, December 15, 1993 "The indelible images of human suffering that permeate Oles Yanchuk's film "Famine-33" are memorable precisely because they are so far removed in tone from the raucous, shoot-'em-up violence and hysteria of Hollywood movies. In this drama of a Ukrainian family's struggle to survive a Government-created famine that killed more than seven million (a quarter of the population) in 1933, the suffering is etched in the stony faces of people too weary and weak to raise their voices." "In an early scene, the members of an impoverished farming family solemnly take turns dipping their ladles into the single bowl of watery soup that is their only meal of the day. Later in the film, scores of villagers numb with despair and hunger huddle silently in the pouring rain outside a Government office until a truckload of armed soldiers arrives to disperse them. In the most poignant scene, a little boy who has lost his parents calls for his mother as he wonders panic- stricken through a snowy woodland where the trees are outnumbered by crosses marking the dead." "In the film's grimmest moment, a train stops on the side of a hill, and Russian (Soviet) soldiers unload hundreds of dead bodies from a flatcar, tossing them down a slope and into a burning pit. For every few bodies deposited, a log is rolled to fuel the fire." "Although the Katrannyks, the family portrayed in "Famine-33" are fictional, the historical events covered by the film are real. In 1932 and '33, Stalin instituted a program in which Soviet troops seized all the livestock, crops and seed stocks grown in Ukraine, the Soviet Union's richest agricultural region, deliberately bringing about mass starvation. One goal of the program was to raise capital for Soviet industrialization by selling the grain abroad. A more insidious goal was to force the independent farmers to work in collectives, where they were patrolled by soldiers, and treated no better than serfs. Integral to the program was the crushing of any notions of Ukrainian independence through the destruction of churches and other cultural institutions." "Famine-33" which opens today (December 15, 1993) at Film Forum 1 (New York City), relies more on images than on words as it follows the inexorable disintegration of the Katrannyks, a family of six, after Soviet troops invade their house and remove their food supply. Shot mostly in grimy black-and-white, the film occasionally explodes into misty pastel colors for scenes in which the characters hallucinate a time of peace and plenty. The film has a dioramic quality. Instead of following the day-to-day decline of the Katrannyks, it is a series of tableaux of crucial moments in the lives of the family and their neighbors." "Technically the movie is quite crude. The screenplay written by Serhij Diacheniko and Les Taniuk from Vasyl Barka's novel "The Yellow Prince," is hardly more than a series of spoken captions. There is no conventional character development. Everyone in the fiercely polemical film is an archetype. In those few scenes that require acting, the performances are uneven." "The Soviet forces that carry out the savagery are portrayed as uniformly monstrous. They take sadistic pleasure in flaunting their grain, vodka and sausages in the faces of the hungry and think nothing of slaughtering hundreds of unarmed protesting farmers with machine guns. When Myron Katrannyk (Georgi Moroziuk), the head of the household, is suspected of hiding a sacred chalice, he is summoned to Communist party headquarters, suspended on a rack and beaten. After he and his wife, Odarka (Halyna Sulyma), refuse to talk, they are held prisoner and their children are left to fend for themselves. One of the perils they face is being kidnapped and eaten." "Famine-33" is a difficult movie to watch, but it has a stark monumentality. As the camera lingers on the wasted faces and desolate terrain of a land without hope, the film builds up a portrait of suffering and oppression that has universal echoes." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Famine-33" Directed by Oles Yanchuk; written (in Ukrainian with English subtitles) by Sherhij Diachenko and Les Taniuk, based on the novel "The Yellow Prince," by Vasyl Barka; directors of photography, Vasyl Borodin and Mykhajlo Kretov; edited by Mykola Kalandjonak and Victor Pacukevych. At Film Forum 1, 209 Houston Street, South Village (New York City); time: 95 minutes. This film is not rated. Odarka......................................Halyna Sulyma Myron........................................Georgi Moroziuk
ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny July 25, 2002 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: I am doing a three-part ZGram in the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 that happened when my parents were in their early twenties and studying in Odessa, the Ukraine. Therefore, I know this story well from many personal accounts. The following three essays were taken from the exceppent Ukrainian website, UKAR, at www.ukar.org My readers would be well advised to visit and get a feel for the early thirties in that part of the world - and the horror that came with Bolshewism - financed by Jewish banking oligarchs in New York and carried out by mostly Jewish revolutionaries. The first two Parts deal with the actual famine. The third part deals with how it was shamefully reported in America by a Jewish Communist, Walter Durante, who wrote for the New York Times This is Part I [START] Collectivization and the famine BY BOHDAN KRAWCHENKO UKRAINE
FAMINE 1933 In 1932 and 1933 millions of people in Ukraine died of hunger. Unlike most famines, the one in Ukraine was not caused by some natural calamity or crop failure, but was man-made. The 1920s - "Golden Era" The peasantry - about 80 per cent of Ukraine's population - had fought pitched battles against landlords during the 1917 revolution to realize its age-old dream of owning land. When in 1918-19 the Bolsheviks occupied Ukraine and made their first bid to collectivize peasant land, the Ukrainian peasants resisted so fiercely that Lenin ordered "severe punishment" for any Bolshevik who preached collectivization. During the 1920s, peasants organized voluntary cooperatives and agriculture thrived. In this period the Ukrainian people forced the Bolsheviks to change their nationality policy. The Ukrainian language displaced Russian in education, state administration and the mass media. Ukrainians were recruited into the party and government. Within the Communist Party of Ukraine there developed a powerful Ukrainian wing which demanded an end to Russian domination in economic and political life. Stalin's policies in 1929 brought the "golden era" to an end Collectivization In 1928 Stalin suddenly announced accelerated industrialization in the form of the first five-year plan. The plan was hastily put together and, as a result, billions of rubles were wasted. By 1930 it became clear that Stalin's government was running out of funds. Rather than rethink economic strategies, Stalin ordered more grain to be squeezed out of the peasantry. The quickest method of accomplishing this, according to Stalin, was to establish collective farms by expropriating all peasant land, grain reserves and livestock without compensation. Also, collective farms would have to turn over all their produce to the state. Interestingly enough, when the Nazis occupied Ukraine, they did not abolish collective farms: they appreciated this finely tuned instrument for the exploitation of the peasantry. In Ukraine, collectivization had another aim: to "destroy the social basis of Ukrainian nationalism - individual peasant agriculture," according to the Soviet newspaper Proletarska Pravda, (22.1.1930). It was in 1930 as well that Stalin ordered the first of a series of purges of Ukrainian cultural and political figures - all part and parcel of a program to roll back the achievements of the national revival of the 1920s. The campaign against kulaks An essential component of forced collectivization, according to Stalin, was the "elimination of kulaks as a class." The word kulak conjures up an image of a wealthy, grasping peasant. The reality had little in common with the myth. In the 1920s there were laws banning the sale and purchase of land and of its rent. Land was distributed on the basis of the size of the peasant family. Some peasant households did, of course, own more land than others. But these households also had larger families to support. Compare the richest kulak in Ukraine with an industrial worker. In the mid-1920s the average annual income per working peasant in the richest peasant farm in Ukraine (comprising about 30 acres) was 200 rubles. The average worker, by contrast, made 521 rubles a year and received many social-security benefits which were not available to the peasantry. When the campaign against kulaks began, the Soviet regime was at a loss for a definition of the term and produced an arbitrary set of criteria. For example, a household owning a motor of any kind was classified as belonging to the kulak category. Neither were kulaks those who hired labor. As the Russian demographer M. Maksudov has shown, the majority of those employing labor in the countryside were invalids of the First World War and the revolution, widows and families with few children. The campaign against kulaks, therefore, had little to do with economic considerations. "Dekulakization" was intended to rid the countryside of peasants (irrespective of their material standing) who were most likely to organize and lead resistance to forced collectivization. According to official Soviet surveys, Ukraine had 71,500 kulak households in 1929. But according to official Soviet sources, between 1930 and 1932, 200,000 kulak households or one million people were "eliminated." The plan for the destruction of kulaks was overfulfilled by almost 200 per cent. The deportations Those who resisted collectivization were either executed or sent to prison camps and their families were deported to Siberia or the Russian Arctic circle. Peasant activists were deported with their families to the northern regions of Russian. Here is what some eyewitnesses wrote about their experiences: "Barefooted and poorly clad peasants were jammed into railroad cars and transported to the regions of Murmansk and the like. Peasants were unloaded into snow about two metres deep. The frost stood at 75 degrees below zero. Without even an axe or a saw we began building huts from tree branches. In two weeks all the children, the sick and the elderly had frozen to death." The death rate among Ukrainian peasants deported to the Sverdlovsk region in Russia was typical: only 2,300 of the original group of 4,800 survived the winter. The suffering during the deportations was terrible enough, yet it pales in comparison with what happened during the famine of 1932-33. Grain requisition campaigns By the spring of 1930 peasant resistance to collectivization had reached such proportions that Stalin panicked and ordered a temporary retreat. In an article entitled "Dizzy with Success," he admitted that excesses had occurred and falsely pinned the entire blame on local officials. Moreover, he reassured the peasants that membership in collective farms henceforth would be "voluntary." In the spring of 1930 there occurred a mass exodus of peasants from collective farms. Thinking that Stalin's regime had learned its lesson, peasants worked with a will and brought in an excellent harvest - 23.1 million (metric) tons of grain. But in the autumn of 1930 Stalin again changed course. He ordered the drive for collectivization to be resumed and the maximum amount of grain to be taken out of Ukraine. A third of the harvest, or 7.7 million tons of grain, was taken by the state. The renewed collectivization drive produced chaos in agricultural production. The peasantry was given no incentive to produce. By the end of 1930, for example, 78 per cent of collective farms in Ukraine had failed to pay peasants for the days that they had worked. Ironically, peasants' payment in Ukraine (in kilos of food produce) was half what it was in Russia. Reassured by his success of 1930, Stalin ordered the 1931 quota for grain delivery to the state to be set at the same level - 7.7 million tons. The 1931 harvest, however - 18.3 million tons of grain - was 20 per cent smaller than in 1930. Almost 30 per cent of the harvest was lost because of the breakdown of the transportation system. Intent on exporting grain to finance industrialization, Stalin ordered that it be requisitioned whatever the cost to the peasantry. By the early spring of 1932, 7 million tons had been taken. The amount was so great that the republic was short of seed grain by 45 per cent. Ukrainian officials knew that if the rate of grain requisitioning continued, famine would break out. They argued with Moscow for a major downward revision of Ukraine's agricultural obligations for 1932. M. Skrypnyk, Commissar of Education, in July 1932 recounted how, while touring the Ukrainian countryside, he had heard from peasants that "we had everything taken away from us but the broom." V. Chubar, head of the Ukrainian government, insisted that neither the peasants nor his administration were at fault for the agricultural crisis, but that it was due to the unrealistic plans of Moscow. Stalin did lower the amount of grain to be requisitioned in 1932 to 6.2 million tons, but this was still far above the capacities of the Ukraine in view of that year's poor harvest - 14.6 tons. Neither did Stalin relax the collectivization drive and, as a result, agriculture was plagued by chaos. Millions of tons of grain were lost. Tightening the noose Moscow sent a special mission, accompanied by troops, to oversee the 1932 grain requisition. Collective farms stopped distributing food to peasants. For example, according to official statistics, only five per cent of collective farms in Dnipropetrovsk province handed out food produce for days worked in 1932. To prevent peasants from feeding themselves by taking collective farm produce, a law was passed in August 1932 stipulating the death penalty, and under exceptional circumstances, a ten-year sentence in labor camps for "theft of socialist property." Thus, it was reported in the Soviet press (Visti, 10.11.1932) that the Dnipropetrovsk court had sentenced a group of hungry peasants to the firing squad for the theft of a sack of wheat. An obligatory delivery system was established for each collective farm. The harvest was organized in the form of a military operation, with soldiers guarding grain from the peasants. Officials and peasants who did not fulfill their quotas were treated in accordance with the infamous August 1932 decree. On 17 December 1932 regulations were tightened even further. A complete economic blockade was ordered of villages that did not fulfil their obligations to the state: all trade, all shipments of food and consumer goods, whatever their source, were prohibited. Officials, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge, "had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they shot and exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they have reduced some of the most fertile land in the whole world to a melancholy desert." Could have been avoided The famine finally subsided in 1934, when the 1933 harvest was brought in. This was because, in the spring of 1933, Moscow "lent" Ukraine seed grain. Moscow also reduced the quantity of grain to be delivered to the state to five million tons, about one-quarter of the 1933 harvest. Soviet officials today deny that the famine took place, although they do admit that there were problems due to drought. If that was the case, then Ukraine should have suffered a famine in 1934, not in 1932-33. The 1934 harvest was the worst in many years - 12.3 million tons. But there was no famine in 1934 because Stalin reduced the amount of grain from existing stocks to feed the population. He could have done this in 1932-33, but he did not. Instead, he deliberately exported 1.7 million tons of grain to the West to pay for industrial equipment. The offers of international relief organizations to assist the starving in Ukraine were rejected by the Soviet government on the grounds that there was no famine, hence no need to aid its victims. The borders of Ukraine were closely patrolled and starving Ukrainian peasants were not allowed to cross into Russia in search of bread. The toll How many millions perished? Harry Lang, editor of the left-wing Jewish daily Forward, published in New York, visited Ukraine in 1933 and was told by a high-ranking state official that six million people had perished from the famine. Other estimates range from 6.5 to 8.5 million. We will never know the exact number. We do know that according to the 1926 Soviet population census there were 31.2 million Ukrainians in the U.S.S.R. According to the 1939 Soviet census this number had dropped by 3.1 million to 28.1 million. (There was no emigration from the Soviet Ukraine in this period.) Over a 13-year period, according to Soviet statistics, the number of Ukrainians had diminished by 11 per cent. The population of the U.S.S.R., on the other hand, increased by 16 per cent and the number of Russians by 28 per cent. A national tragedy When the Ukrainian peasantry was under attack in 1932-33, Ukrainian political and cultural leaders sprang to their defense. Ewald Ammende, a German eyewitness who analysed this question, wrote in 1936: "The widest circle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia had entered the struggle: teachers, students, Soviet officials, all thought it was their duty to protest against a further sucking dry of their country.... The Soviet regime was faced by a united people, a solid front, including everyone from the highest Soviet officials down to the poorest peasants." Ukrainian cultural and political leaders paid a heavy price for refusing to become unwilling agents in the extermination of their own people. In 1933, at the height of the famine, a massive purge was ordered in Ukraine. As P. Postyshev, Stalin's henchman in Ukraine, pointed out, "almost all people removed were arrested and put before the firing squad." The purge continued virtually uninterrupted until 1938, claiming the lives of 80 per cent of Ukraine's creative intelligentsia. Thousands of priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were killed, as were that church's 35 bishops. The desire to stamp out a Ukrainian national consciousness was so extreme that, according to the famous Russian composer, Dmitrii Shostakovich, several hundred blind bandurysty - itinerant folk singers - were executed. Hundreds of thousands of party members were shot. The purge was so thorough that by 1938 not a single secretary of the Council of the People's Commissars in Ukraine (the cabinet), not even a single deputy of Ukraine's parliament, the Supreme Soviet, was left. The purges were intended to deal a devastating blow to the existence of Ukrainians as a nation. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev said Stalin had even considered deporting all Ukrainians to Siberia, but "there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them." With the famine and the purges, Stalin had come as close to destroying a nation as his unrestrained power would permit. [END] ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny July 27, 2002 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: The first two Parts of this three-part ZGram on the Russian famine of 1932-33 dealt with the actual famine. This last part deals with how it was shamefully reported in America by a Jewish/Communist journalist, Walter Durante, who wrote for the New York Times, as reviewed more than six decades later by the Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1999 [START] OOPS! by John Leo Garbled accident reports are hardly the worst reportorial sins. The worst always involve getting it wrong on purpose. The name of Walter Duranty comes up quickly. Duranty covered the Soviet Union for The New York Times in the Stalin era. He is perhaps the only Pulitzer winner that The Paper of Record would fervently like to forget. At first a critic of the Soviet Union, Duranty soon evolved into an enthusiastic supporter and state-of-the-art propagandist. One of his favorite comments was, "I put my money on Stalin." When friends asked about Stalin's tactics, Duranty liked to say "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Not that he noticed many broken eggs in Russia. When Stalin engineered massive famine in the Ukraine to help break resistance to Soviet control, Duranty told Times readers that "any report of a famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." In 1933, at the height of the famine, he wrote of abundant grain, plump babies, fat calves, and "village markets flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk, and butter at prices far lower than in Moscow." He added that "a child can see this is not famine but abundance." In fact, the death toll was enormous and Duranty knew it. He told colleagues privately it was in the range of 10 million. British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge said Duranty was "the biggest liar of any journalist I ever met." But the Pulitzer committee praised Duranty's reports for their "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and clarity." Four errors, arguably five, in a single phrase. Eventually, Duranty's Soviet coverage provoked debate among his editors and readers. To its credit, the Times editorial page challenged his accounts. But in the genteel journalistic world of that era, his reporting was never odious enough to get him recalled or fired. The embarrassing Pulitzer has never been withdrawn or returned. In these scandals, editors had plenty of time to reassess or spike bad stories. That's a luxury the profession will have less of in the twenty-first century. In an age of high-speed journalism, the risks are greater and the decisions had better be sharper. [END]
Thank you, Ernst Zundel!!! And Here Is
What I found When I clicked www.ukar.org
Shame on
these Bastards! -------------------------------------------------------------
Reproduced from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/4964784.stm
The
Manchurian media By I.J. Toby Westerman Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent from 1921 to 1934 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, ranks as one of the worst and most dangerous examples of sycophantry in journalism. His consistent whitewash of Soviet rule, including the man-made famine of 1932-33 -- in which as many as 10 million men, women and children died -- stands as a disgrace to journalism and all those calling themselves journalists. Malcolm Muggeridge, author, journalist and one-time socialist, was one of the few who were able to get into the famine-ravaged lands of the U.S.S.R. and report on what he saw. Later, Muggeridge described Duranty as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism." Duranty's misrepresentation of events -- and the contemporary response to them -- has a specific and immediate bearing upon how today's news is presented, manipulated or unreported. Unfortunately for the public, Duranty today has many spiritual descendants whose reporting is colored by ideology and/or self-interest. Delayed reaction Duranty's activities in the Soviet Union have been revealed in Robert Conquest's "Harvest of Sorrow," and in B.J. Taylor's "Stalin's Apologist." Further discussion of the 1932-33 famine is found in the appropriate chapter of "The Black Book of Communism." Though known, Duranty's falsification of the news has never drawn the deep-seated wrath that one might expect, despite the fact that his "reporting" made him complicit in the extermination of millions of people. Duranty, in effect, was an accomplice to mass murder, but his former employer, The New York Times, has expressed something in the order of mere embarrassment. Terror famine The "reason" behind the slaughter was the continuing struggle between the central government in Moscow and small farmers in various regions who resisted collectivization of the land. It was in those areas where resistance to collectivization was the strongest that the famine struck. An additional desired result of the famine was the destruction of Ukrainian nationalism. The great terror-famine had nothing to do with poor harvests or even an inadequate supply of food. Not only was there enough food, during the 1932-33 famine, the Soviet Union actually exported food. In reprisal to resistance to earlier attempts at collectivization, Stalin ordered that certain areas meet impossible quotas of grain and other foodstuffs. The central government took everything edible. Men and women were shot for eating produce from their own fields. The numbers of dead mounted as the process of extermination proceeded. The NKVD, predecessor to the better-known KGB, was in complete control of the regions affected. At will, roads could be blocked, villages isolated and, of course, individuals executed without trial or warning. Secrecy was vital. Though diplomats of various nations did learn of Stalin's war of extermination, there would be no threat to carrying the plan out as long as the general public outside the Soviet Union remained ignorant. The cover-up On the rare occasion that an accurate report on the famine was published in the press, reassurances quickly appeared countering the original report and diluting its effect. Of all those involved in famine disinformation, Duranty, as Moscow correspondent for the prestigious New York Times, proved one of the most useful. In 1932 Duranty wrote that there was no famine, nor "is there likely to be." He knew differently. In September 1933, Duranty detailed to British diplomats how many had died and where: The North Caucasus and Lower Volga had lost 3 million people in the past year; Ukraine lost 4 to 5 million, and the total, Duranty stated, could be as high as 10 million. The truth concerning the terror-famine was difficult to assess, but Duranty knew it. The NKVD had taken extreme measures to isolate and destroy as much evidence as possible of the famine. Afflicted villages, some losing as much as 100 percent of their population, were cut off from the rest of the world. Flags indicating an epidemic were flown and roads to the area were cut off. Secret trains were used that left for famine areas and then traveled to remote rail spurs. The contents were carefully guarded by the NKVD, but not even the best efforts of the secret police could forever hide the identity of the cargo -- the corpses of the dead piled indiscriminately for quick, anonymous, mass burial. An historical error The media watchdog group Accuracy in Media has sought for years to set the record straight regarding Duranty and his reporting. A.I.M. approached both the New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize administrator about this matter. The Times indicated that it would cooperate with the decision of the Pulitzer Prize administrator. In a letter now a year old, Reed Irvine, chairman of A.I.M., contacted Seymour Topping, the present administrator and also a former Times Moscow correspondent, requesting that he take action on the question of Duranty's award. In the letter, Irvine pointed out that Duranty received special favors from Stalin's government, including a car and a mistress, designed to ensure the correspondent's cooperation. Duranty did cooperate, and the truth about Stalin's policy of extermination remained hidden for years. Irvine questioned if the award would have been given to Duranty at all if the truth regarding Soviet influence upon the reporter had come to light. Stating that "Trust in journalists and the media is at a low ebb," Irvine challenged the Pulitzer Prize administrator to meet the same standard as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. In 1992 the Academy revoked a 1989 Grammy given to a musical group that later was found not actually to have sung its own lyrics. A.I.M.'s Roger Aronoff confirmed in a recent telephone conversation with WorldNet that to date no action has been taken on Irvine's request to Seymour. Beyond a "slap on the wrist" -- an oblique acknowledgment that the Times correspondent's Pulitzer has been challenged -- no other action has been taken in the Duranty case. Red-colored glasses Could it be because not much has changed since the days of Walter Duranty? Let's fast-forward from the '20s and '30s to the current era. In its Jan. 1, 1990 edition, Time magazine's Senior Editor Strobe Talbott explained why the newsweekly had selected as its "Man of the Decade" -- not Ronald Reagan, who had broken the back of the Soviet Union and brought down the Berlin Wall, but Mikhail Gorbachev. Wrote Talbott, "A new consensus is emerging that the Soviet threat is not what it used to be. The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in the Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along." The Soviet Union was never a threat to the United States? Gorbachev was a great leader? This analysis by Time's senior editor would take on tremendous significance during the Clinton administration, just a couple of years later. ...
The preceding is an excerpt of Toby Westerman's in-depth cover story in July's WorldNet Magazine. In the balance of the article, Westerman shows how Time's Senior Editor Strobe Talbott left journalism to join the Clinton administration as the president's most trusted adviser on Russia, and how "the establishment media still engage in denial and derision, but never acknowledge the obvious truth. In this way, they continue as the spiritual descendants of the New York Times' correspondent Walter Duranty." Reproduced from: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=16372
Don
Heddesheimer
Chapter 5: This chapter sketches the very puzzling story of where the money raised in these fund raising drives went in Russia at least according to the published sources. We will also cover a few important points of historical background and touch on the political situation in the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century, a period that is largely forgotten or misunderstood today. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's own yearly expenditures chart shows the amounts of money the 'Joint' says they spent from 1914 through 1934 on relief. They had two classifications of aid: emergency or general relief which included soup kitchens, clothing, emergency medical care and rehabilitative or reconstructive relief which consisted largely of setting up and operating trade schools, banks, and farms. At the end of World War One, people were generous with their contributions, but in the early 1920s collections dropped off year by year. In 1926, as featured in the last chapter, the promoters really got creative and were successful in boosting collections. The aid raised during the war and in the immediate postwar period was channeled into emergency relief, which they also called general relief. Later, most of the money was spent on reconstruction, or rehabilitative relief. By 1926, they were spending 81% of the money on reconstruction, and in 1927, 86% according to their own figures. Less than 20 percent of the funds sent to Poland actually went into emergency relief in 1927 according to chairman David A. Brown. The remainder was devoted to "constructive undertakings" such as establishing cooperative banks in Poland, financing tradesmen and artisans, and promoting Jewish agricultural settlements.[138] Also in 1927, a Max Steuer who had gone to Europe to investigate the relief programs charged that 40% of the money raised "disappeared in the manipulations by the bankers on the subject of exchange." Mr. Steuer quoted a Dr. Greenebaum, a member of the Polish Parliament, who said that until recently, "after the money had been transmitted, the exchanges were so manipulated on the other side that at least 40 percent of the money was consumed before a single dollar was distributed to any person for whom it was intended." Steuer made other charges but also made it clear that he was referring to Polish bankers and not American bankers.[139] As one would expect, Steuer received a scathing in the press for questioning the actions of the 'Joint'. On Monday, September 12, 1927, The New York Times editorialized:[140] "Mr. David A. Brown cited figures which would indicate that in Poland less than 20 percent of the funds went into emergency relief. The remainder was devoted to 'constructive' undertakings. Mr. Henry Moskowitz in a recent public statement expresses the opinion that a study of the Joint Distribution Committee's accounts would show that in Poland the bulk of the relief money went into the establishment of cooperative banks and other agencies for the purpose of financing small tradesmen and artisans. Incidentally, this may suggest what Mr. Steuer had dimly in mind - very dimly - when he made his startling charges, and particularly his reference to manipulation of the exchanges. If American dollars were converted into Polish zloty for the creation of bank capital, it is conceivable that some losses may have been incurred through the fluctuations of the Polish exchange." The Jewish Daily News was more blunt. They editorialized that Mr. Steuer had simply removed himself from the role of a Jewish communal leader.[141] The actions of the Committee were defended by both Louis Marshall and Felix Warburg. Warburg deplored the wide publicity and insisted that Steuer had placed an exaggerated value on hearsay testimony and was trying his case in the newspapers. Warburg further stated that no good purpose had been served by Steuer's statement and that the problem had been corrected. Speaking at the Constructive Relief Conference in October of 1927, Felix Warburg responded that the policy of the Joint Distribution Committee has been based on a deep seated respect for the Jewry of the old world and that the European Jews, long before the war, had developed many conspicuous national and international philanthropic associations. He said that the leadership of European Jewry had never been questioned and that it was the general policy of the 'Joint' to work within existing Jewish organizational structures in Europe.[142] Warburg wasn't recorded as saying anything about the starvation statistics that had been claimed during the fund raising campaigns of the year before. But he did offer the opinion that 1919 and 1920 were the blackest years in modern Jewish history. During those two years, according to Warburg: "Widespread massacres and pogroms resulted in the murder of several hundred thousand Jews. On the other hand, it witnessed a phenomenal revival of Jewish activity, accompanied by intense social strife, and by a renaissance of cultural and economic theories incident to the universal movements for national self-determination and the recognition of racial minority rights." Warburg also claimed that there had been Ukrainian pogroms in the course of which nearly 200,000 Jewish men, women and children perished by fire and sword, constituting one of the blackest pages of history.[143] The public quickly forgot about Steuer's little criticism. In 1932, Felix Warburg was selected as second only to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in an honor roll of the ten leading Jews in the United States. Others in that top ten included United States Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo and Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter as well as New York Times publisher Adolf Ochs and Rabbi Stephen Wise.[144] What kind of a person was Felix Warburg? He was described as fun loving, a person who knew how to relate to many different types of people. While highly respected and genuinely liked as a leader within the New York establishment, he was not an intellectual, a doer, not a thinker. Married to an heiress while maintaining numerous girl friends openly, he was the kind of person who is incapable of embarrassment, possessed of a cast iron gut, and publicly credible whether or not he was being particularly truthful. The rap on Felix was that he was the family flyweight and not bright enough for the Hamburg bank.[145] In reading this next section, it's only fair to first point out the obvious, that to most of the general public, Felix Warburg was an extremely wealthy Republican banker. We will assume that he didn't at first want to have anything to do with Soviet Russia. To me, saying that Jews were attracted to communism is about as fair as saying that Germans were attracted to National Socialism. But it is a fact that the private charity he headed funded agricultural colonies in the Soviet Union, claiming that millions of Jews were starving in Europe, year after year. Jewish agricultural colonies in Russia had been tried before under czarist rule. Before the Communist revolution, there were Chibbat Zion branches in operation all over Russia. This socialist agricultural movement was financially supported by Baron Edmund de Rothschild who called them "my colonies" and put in agents to supervise them. This didn't mean that Baron Rothschild approved of the Czar any more than Warburg was attracted to communism. It's possible that both Rothschild and Warburg thought that they could have a positive and moderating effect on these respective regimes by being involved in a business relationship with them. Or they could have become involved for other reasons, such as to facilitate emigration from Russia, or to set up temporary settlements of people who could later be moved to Palestine. Of course there's the obvious humanitarian reasons. With the benefit of hindsight, any attraction to Marxist ideology seems odd and incredible. But we must briefly mention a few of the writers and thinkers whose works were influential during that period and whose ideas could have motivated leaders and opinion makers from Rothschild and Warburg on down to the lowliest commissar and GULag enforcer. They are largely forgotten now perhaps for the good reason that their ideas have not stood the test of time. A Hebrew novelist extolled readers to cease to be Jews in a theoretical religious sense and to become Jews in their own right as a living and developing nationality. Nachman Syrkin predicted that the Jews would redeem the world which crucified them and that their role in human history was a uniquely chosen role, which in the future through the agency of Zionism would usher in the socialist millennium.[146] Syrkin said in 1918 that the Jewish people is socialist not by necessity but because the revolution was declared on Mt. Sinai.[147] A chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Kook, wrote that a consistent application of all the laws of the Torah in social and economic matters would not tolerate the capitalist system. Moses Mendelssohn, who was the founder of Jewish rationalism, argued:[148] "The progress of modern civilization has come to be regarded as a sort of 'Messiah' for the final solution of the Jewish problem." Dov Ber Borochov was a leading exponent of Marxist Zionism. He wrote The National Question and the Class Struggle in 1905, which was widely read by Jews living in Russia at the time. Writing in the scientific, jargon ridden, lumberingly constructed style of Marxist analysis[149] Borochov argued that just as the class struggle is waged for the material means of production, there is also a national struggle waged for "spiritual" (language, customs, mores) and territorial conditions of production. Borochov theorized that the normally antagonistic classes within a conquered or oppressed nationality unite in identifying with the oppressed proletariat. According to Borochov, even upper classes of an oppressed nationality think and act like oppressed proletariat because of the history of the whole nationality having been oppressed. By this twisting of Marxist gibberish, Jewish nationalism was transformed into a progressive movement of national liberation by interpolating the class struggle into Zionism. The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia explained Boroshov's theory this way:[150] "Borochov's chief ideological contribution was his Marxist analysis of the economic structure and social situation of the Jewish people, pointing to the physical inevitability of territorial concentration in Palestine as a means of occupational redistribution and normalization." Sokolow's History of Zionism first published in 1919, chronicles that during the Communist revolution of 1917 at Odessa, a port on the black sea, entire battalions of Zionist soldiers bore through the town behind blue and white banners proclaiming: "Liberty in Russia, land and liberty in Palestine". A hundred and fifty thousand men followed these banners to which the military Governor of Odessa insisted on showing honor publicly.[151] In the course of the Russian civil war between the reds and the whites, the Jewish population rallied massively to the Red Army, and its intelligentsia was recruited into the Soviet state apparatus.[152] Leon Trotsky, as the head of the Red Army in 1919, accepted the proposition from Paole Zion that Jewish "national battalions" be constituted to organize the defense of the Jewish population and win it over to the new Bolshevik regime.[153] In 1922, it was reported that a strong Jewish army organized for self-protection was well equipped with rifles, ammunition, and machine guns and numbered 500,000 strong. In a town called Spalla, the Jewish Volunteer Army, well armed, engaged in guerrilla warfare with a band of several hundred bandits, which ended with the Jews entering the town. Order was established immediately and several thousand former residents who escaped a series of massacres two or three years before began streaming in from all parts of Russia and Rumania. The Jewish army was founded by young Zionist groups and therefore had religious as well as racial significance.[154] Beginning in 1924, Jewish colonies totaling 1.5 million acres were established in the Crimea, the Zaporozje, Cherson, and Odessa districts, in Caucasia and in White Russia. Also in 1924, at a luncheon at Kuhn & Loeb in New York, a program was worked out to involve the Joint Distribution Committee in some of these projects. The Joint Distribution Committee began financing Soviet Jewish agricultural settlements in Ukraine and the Crimea with a mixture of donated money, loaned money, and Soviet funding. These settlements became a bizarre hybrid of Park Avenue charity and Marxist agriculture. Some of the Jewish settlements founded by Agro-Joint were Zionist colonies settled by people who saw the Crimea as a stepping-stone on the road to Palestine. Thirteen of the colonies had Hebrew names. According to statistics published in Yehuda Bauer's book, My Brother's Keeper, which was financed with a generous grant from the Joint Distribution Committee, there were 112 Agro-Joint colonies in the Crimea in 1928.[155] The Soviet government contributed 500,000 rubles for the Agro-Joint settlements each year and placed this budget at the disposal of Agro-Joint.[156] The new Soviet government considered the Jews to be a formerly oppressed nationality entitled to their own territorial regions. In accordance with the Soviet scheme of national autonomy, these regions were governed as autonomous Jewish districts. Schools, Colleges, law courts, police forces and the entire machinery of government were conducted in Yiddish. There were also traveling theaters, publications, movies, radio and lectures. Jewish workers were recruited for new factories all over Russia. In Asia near the Manchurian border, the New Jersey sized territory of Biro-Bidjon was, in time, also declared a territory exclusively for Jewish settlers. It was prestigious being Jewish in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and the first half of the thirties and perhaps long after that. It was a time of state protection for Russian Jews. They were assumed to be faithful allies of Soviet Power and therefore to be trusted in promoting policy. The Soviet government gave the Jewish theater a first class building in the middle of Moscow and large state subsidies for its work, and its creative figures received generous titles and medals which guaranteed them privileges and material comforts within the Soviet system.[157] In the spring of 1927, Felix Warburg went to the Soviet Union, traveling from Vladivostok to Moscow, claiming to have toured forty of the Agro-Joint colonies in the Crimea and Ukraine. Warburg's party traveled by private railroad car and toured more remote regions in two chauffeured limousines. Felix laid a cornerstone for a Felix Warburg high school and visited a settlement named Felix Warburg No. 4 and 5.[158] Upon his return he told a fund raising rally in Chicago:[159] "I wish you had been with us on our trip through Russia. Good friends had warned us not to make the trip, that it was dangerous, that we were going to a country where everything would be supervised and we would get predigested food in regard to the things we wanted to see. Nothing of the kind has happened. In no country we visited were we as free from formalities and granted such absolute freedom as in Russia. [...] The work in Russia has been a great success, not only from the sentimental standpoint but also from the financial standpoint. It is difficult to realize that untrained Jewish people from the cities should have been brought to these farms and in the third year should begin seriously to pay back the loans, heavy loans, but that is the truth. Everything given to them is noted down by them in a book. Whenever they look at the book they know what they owe to the mutual credit society, and they know what they owe to the Kassas and they know what they owe to the Jews of America." Julius Rosenwald, the owner of Sears, was a heavy donor to the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation and a settlement was also named after him. To the Communists it was blood and not religion that determined Jewishness. Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union was prosecuted as a crime against the Jewish nationality. It was a crime against racism. Communists supported what they called "spiritual" aspects of the people. These spiritual aspects were myths, folkways, customs and so forth and should not be confused with religion, which the communists opposed. While religious Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were persecuted as religions within the communist system, the Jewish people were favored as an historically oppressed nationality like the Georgians or the Armenians. In 1928, the Central Committee of the Communist party in Moscow appointed a special committee to combat anti-Semitism. The special committee's program provided for a systematic campaign by trained personnel beginning within the Communist Party and also within schools including colleges. The campaign against anti-Semitism was introduced into the schoolbooks, motion pictures, the press, and literature. Public debates on anti-Semitism were held and excursions to the Jewish colonies arranged. A campaign against anti-Semitism was also conducted in the Red Army and in the trade unions. It became a crime against the state. The highest disciplinary penalties were provided in the program recommended by the committee for those found guilty of anti-Semitic practices and particularly for those opposing the Jewish colonization work.[160] The head of the Moscow State Theater and seven other officials of the State Theater were dismissed for their anti-Semitic practices.[161] A Moscow dispatch to The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported that four "Pogromists" were sentenced to death and nine to prison terms of from one to ten years.[162] During a conference on combating anti-Semitism held in the All-Russian Communist Club, a Moscow District Court Judge stated that disciplinary punishment had been inflicted upon seventy persons in Moscow during the first ten months of 1928 for anti-Semitic propaganda.[163] The battle against anti-Semitism became an election campaign issue in White Russia.[164] "Communists, fight ignorance, alcoholism and anti-Semitism read a poster placarded in the streets." In a separate report, two ringleaders found guilty of attacking the Jewish Colony No. 3 were sentenced to death. Two other members of the band were sentenced to imprisonment followed by deportation. The Chief of Police and his assistant received eighteen-months jail sentences and the chairman of the regional Soviet was sentenced to one year in prison.[165] The Communist press was reporting that the principal cause of anti-Semitism in industrial centers was the influence of the "Kulaks" (wealthier peasants) upon former peasants now working in factories. A reporter from The Jewish Telegraphic Agency investigated and reported in a dispatch from Minsk:[166] "Jewish and non-Jewish workers interviewed by the correspondent agreed in blaming the Kulaks for using their influence over the new factory hands for the purpose of promoting anti-Semitic disturbances and thus making trouble for the Soviet government. The Kulaks are especially incensed at the government's insistence upon its plan for the eventual socialization of agriculture." In one show trial eight workers including three Communist party members were charged with tormenting a Jewish working girl. In order to achieve the maximum publicity, it was staged in the largest available hall and advertised throughout Russia. The President of the White Russian Supreme Court presided over a bench of judges, and the chief prosecutor of the White Russian Republic personally conducted the case for the state. The President of the White Russian Academy of Sciences and the dean of the Minsk faculty of Law also appeared as "prosecutors on behalf of public opinion". Intending to serve as a warning to other offenders, the sentences at Soviet show trials tended to be draconian. According to the indictment, a Jewish girl was first habitually mocked and later roughly handled. She was told she would be put in an oven and then water was thrown over her. Then she tripped and fell on her face and finally was brutally kicked on the ankle with a wooden clog. Such rowdyism was all too frequent with White Russian workers during that period. Almost an exactly similar case occurred almost simultaneously in a nearby town at another factory with a non-Jewish girl as the victim, but no action was taken.[167] Why did the Bolshevist party decide to hold a full-dress political anti-Semite 'show trial' at the White Russian capital Minsk? A major reason given in a New York Times report covering this trial was that the Soviet elections were about to begin and the Communists hoped to use these elections to smash the power of the Kulaks once and for all. In White Russia much land had recently been taken from the Kulaks and a small part of it was utilized to form new Jewish land colonies. As a result there had been a certain amount of terrorization of the new Jewish colonists. The Communists then hit back with this slogan:[167] "All anti-Semitism comes from the Kulaks." It was also decided to thrash out this case with the utmost publicity because such acts were prevalent in the area and an increase could have become politically dangerous in an atmosphere of discontent generated by a bad harvest, crushing taxation on the villages and a shortage of goods in the towns. Even the official "Jewish section" of the Communist party directorate in Moscow often soft-pedaled anti-Semitism in order not to supply enemies of the Soviet regime and the anti-Socialist Jewish press abroad with opportunities for "fantastic pogrom propaganda."[167] The eight defendants were accused of "counter revolution" although the alleged facts hardly seemed to justify such a terrible charge. The Soviet Chief Prosecutor (Krylenko) at this trial wanted the death penalty by shooting for Class One offenders found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities and prison for an indefinite term for Class 2 offenders. He stated:[167] "Under no circumstances will these criminals belonging in Class 2 be allowed to return home. After their release from prison they will be exiled for life to remote places out of harm's way." The central issue at the trial was whether the defendants were guilty of an act of a counter-revolutionary nature (Class One). The judge sought to establish the connection of the defendants' acts with the influence of the Kulaks, wealthy peasants, and Nepmen. Nepmen were new economic policy men - small businessmen who had been allowed to operate under Lenin after the famine of 1921-1922, but were later taxed out of existence. The four major defendants were found guilty of anti-Semitism and rough treatment of their fellow worker and received prison terms.[168] In a separate show trial four months later, 24 other Russian workers charged with anti-Semitism received prison sentences. The trial attracted wide attention, and hundreds of people crowded the court to hear the decision, which was issued at 5 o'clock in the morning. At the same time during a meeting held in Moscow, Anatole Lunatcharsky, Commissioner of Education, said he could understand those who opposed the Soviet Government but could not see how followers of communism could maintain the claim that "Jews govern us".[169] The Soviet war on anti-Semitism coincided with the period after Lenin's death in 1924 when Joseph Stalin was jockeying for power. He was a man who spent a lifetime portraying himself as an internationalist and as a determined foe of anti-Semitism. Stalin's bitterest enemy, Leon Trotsky, called Stalin a clerk, an embezzler of ideas, timid and unintelligent, but never said anywhere that Stalin was motivated by anti-Semitism. Stalin, an early editor of Pravda, had first came to public attention with the publication of his article "Marxism and the National Question" in the Communist theoretical journal Enlightenment one year before the start of World War One in 1913. This article dealt with what Marxists should do after the revolution with all of the non-Russian nationalities that had been conquered and forcibly made a part of Russia by the Czars. Stalin argued for the creation of locally autonomous regions (colonies, reservations) for the historically oppressed nationality groups where their language, folkways and traditions would be respected. In this politically charged article, Stalin wrote at length on the Jewish nationality, describing them as not a nation but something mystical, intangible and otherworldly. This article established Stalin as the Bolshevik authority on the national (actually the nationalities) question. Lenin appointed Stalin the Commissar of Nationalities Issues in the first Bolshevist government. In April of 1922, at Lenin's insistence, Stalin was elected to the newly created post of general secretary of the Communist party.[170] Less than a year after becoming the undisputed dictator of the Soviet Union with his public statements viewed as national policy, Stalin made his most famous statement about anti-Semitism. Stalin characterized it as "the most dangerous survival of cannibalism":[171] "National and racial chauvinism is a remnant of man hating customs characteristic of the era of cannibalism. Anti-Semitism is an extreme expression of racial chauvinism and as such is the most dangerous survival of cannibalism. It is useful to the exploiter for it serves as a lightning rod enabling capitalism to evade the blows of the toilers. 'It is a danger to the working people for it is a false path leading them into the jungles and away from the right road. Communists cannot but be irreconcilable enemies of anti-Semitism. In the Soviet Union it is rigidly prosecuted and militant anti-Semites are punishable by death under the law." Stalin's "cannibalism" and "lightning rod" analogies were standard communist orthodoxy. Karl Kautsky, a principal theorist of the second Marxist International, wrote in 1903 that the czarist regime used the Jews "as a lightning conductor during the storms that gather over the autocracy". Lenin always condemned anti-Semitism in the clearest and most intransigent fashion. In 1918, he signed a decree calling it a "mortal danger for the entire revolution and as a menace to the workers and the peasants". Engels saw the struggle against anti-Semitism as a priority task of the international workers' movement writing in Arbeiterzeitung, the daily newspaper of the Austrian Socialists, that "we owe much to the Jews [...] Marx was of pure Jewish blood, Lassalle was Jewish, very many of our best comrades are Jewish".[172] And Karl Marx said: "The stiffest form of opposition between Jew and Christian is religious. How is this to be resolved? By abolishing religion". Marx also said that man emancipates himself from religion politically by relegating it from public to private law.[173] Typically, Stalin's supporters were dedicated, not particularly intellectual party officials who had never been outside the Soviet Union. His group brought a rigid, totalitarian, small mindedness to Marxist social theory. When the theories proved to be unworkable, they became even more dogmatic, brutal, and even murderous in their insistence on carrying them out. Lazar Kaganovich was probably the biggest and certainly the most durable butcher during the Stalinist era. Sometimes using the alias Kosherovitz,[174] he was the Soviet official most responsible for the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933. Some have even argued that Kaganovich was the real master at the Kremlin and Stalin a mere puppet.[175] The only English language biography about this killer of over twenty million people was written by Stuart Kahan, an American writer whose aunt Rosa was Stalin's third wife and who is therefore also the nephew of Lazar Kaganovich, but more about that later. Kahan worked as a journalist for the New York Times. In the 1980s, he visited and interviewed Kaganovich who was retired and living in a Moscow apartment. A courageous book based on interviews with family members commingled with family history and lore, it is a fascinating and highly readable biography. But it spares the family and treats even Lazar Kaganovich in a relatively friendly manner, to the extent that it is ethically possible. While the only available biography about this biggest mass killer of the twentieth century is largely positive, it's amazing that this book exists at all. Kahan wrote that during the first year of the 'Great Terror' Kaganovich supervised the killing of nearly half a million people as mass purges swept across the country like a deranged prehistoric animal.[176] While he was in power, eight towns' names were changed to Kaganovich in addition to the Moscow subway initially being named after him. He was assigned to the Cheka (later called the OGPU, then the NKVD, and still later the KGB), an investigative agency that became a political police force of organized terror. Stalin assigned Kaganovich the task of keeping his second wife under surveillance and reporting back on her activities. After she committed suicide, Kaganovich introduced Stalin to his younger sister Rosa who was a medical doctor at a clinic in Moscow and within a year Rosa Kaganovich became Stalin's third and last wife. His perennial sidekick during that period was a young Nikita Khrushchev who as a Shabes Goy in the Ukraine lit the Sabbath lights and started the stoves for the Jewish high politicos on Saturdays.[177] Khrushchev wrote in his biography that as a Russian peasant he first met Kaganovich in 1917 and owed his early career to Kaganovich. Kaganovich was Khrushchev's boss from 1928 to about 1938 and again from 1946 to 1948.[178] Kahan wrote that Kaganovich took great pleasure in having 16 major Cossack villages removed to Siberia because he blamed the Cossacks for persecuting Jews under the Czars.[179] He participated in demolishing the church of Christ the Savior in Moscow for a new palace of Soviets. The holy week monastery was turned into a theater for use by party members:[180] "People were afraid to laugh. It was as if a huge blanket had been dropped over their mouths." Kahan wrote of an interesting and possible account of Stalin's death. According to Kahan, after Stalin's first stroke Rosa (Dr. Rosa Kaganovich Stalin, Stalin's wife) prescribed for him pills called dicoumarol, an anticoagulant also used in rat poison. Large amounts are lethal, but taken in small amounts, dicoumarol retards blood clotting making another stroke less likely. After his first stroke, Stalin took dicoumarol twice a day. Later Rosa secretly quadrupled the dosage, which eventually poisoned him. The problem with the story is that Kahan implicates Molotov, Bulganin, and others in the inner circle as plotters in Stalin's demise. It is not very likely that Stalin would have no friends in his own inner circle but this theory protects Rosa and Lazar Kaganovich from total responsibility.[181] Maybe Stalin really was killed by a Jewish doctor, namely his wife. An autopsy might tell us for sure. Hard to believe stories about killer doctors have been around for a long time in the Soviet Union. An earlier 'doctors plot' was one of the excuses for the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930s. Briefly, this earlier tale and its resultant consequences went like this: In 1934, Bukharin, Yagoda, and other rightists in contact with Trotsky were plotting to assassinate Stalin, Voroshilov, Kirov, Menzhinsky, Molotov, Kuibyshev, Kaganovich, Gorky, and Zhdanov, just about the entire Soviet leadership. They plotted to accomplish this through physicians slowly ruining the health of these leaders. As directed by the plotters, the physicians deliberately gave bad advice and mistreatment for illnesses especially to the cardiovascular system. Injections and stimulants were administered in a way calculated to surreptitiously kill the patient. In that way, Menzhinsky was murdered and his position in the leadership was assumed by Yagoda. When Gorky, the internationally famous literary figure, contracted a serious case of influenza and died, it was soon rumored that his doctor deliberately aggravated his condition, murdering Gorky. Soon they were saying that Trotsky had ordered that "Gorky must be physically exterminated at all costs" due to Gorky's prestige and because he was very devoted personally to Stalin. These and similar fictional 'crimes' were prosecuted at three trials held at the height of the Great Terror before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR in August 1936, January 1937, and in March 1938.[182] At the 1936 trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought from prison where they were serving out terms on previous convictions. The prosecutors established that an intimate relationship had developed between Leon Trotsky on the one hand and Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess of National Socialist Germany on the other hand. At the conclusion of the third trial in 1938, the murdering doctors and other plotters were convicted and shot by a firing squad. During the great terror, from 1936 to 1938, Stalin approved a plan to summarily shoot tens of thousands of people establishing target figures for shootings by province. There was socialist competition between NKVD departments to find the most spies. N.I. Ezhov, Stalin's secret police chief at the height of the Great Terror, cynically and knowingly forced confessions from innocent people. Stalin personally signed death sentences including a record 3,167 in one day. Eventually Ezhov was arrested, convicted, and shot for the crime of "leftist overreaction" and was replaced by Beria.[183] The old line Bolsheviks were arrested and shot in a move that may have actually been popular with some of the lower classes because there was so much bitterness accumulated against the misery that the revolution had caused to the Russian people.[184] Closing this chapter with a note concerning the Soviet 'doctors plot' of the 1950s, according to author Kahan, six of the fifteen doctors who were charged were Jewish, but the official news of the arrest only reported nine of the fifteen names, including all of the six Jewish names. It therefore looked to the world like most of those arrested were Jewish, which is typical of the misconceptions that are repeated to this day. For example, online Encarta Encyclopedia reports: "In 1953 fifteen doctors, most of them Jewish, were arrested and charged with murdering important Soviet officials on orders from the Joint Distribution Committee, a Zionist organization." Go figure. Notes
Reproduced gratefully from: http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/tfh/index.html#toc
 Harvest of Despair (Soviet Engineered Famine in the Ukraine) 1933 - Video
The command to wipe out Amalek
The End of the Legends
The House on Un-American Activities
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"No one, I am sure, could have made such a trip with an honest desire to
learn the truth and escaped the conclusion that the Ukrainian countryside had
experienced a gigantic tragedy. What had happened was not hardship, or
privation, or distress or food shortage, to mention the deceptively euphemistic
words that were allowed to pass the Soviet censorship, but stark, outright
famine, with its victims counted in millions. No one will probably ever know the
exact toll of death, because the Soviet Government preserved the strictest
secrecy about the whole question, officially denied that there was any famine,
and rebuffed all attempts to organize relief abroad. 
The Russian position in Ukraine had been undermined. Millions of Ukrainian
peasants resisted forced collectivization. The collectivization of agriculture
is not only an economic category, but also a military one. It is a tool of
Russia's domination over the subjugated nations. Collectivization is a Russian
way of life, which Russia imposes forcefully upon the oppressed peoples in order
to rule over them. It is a means of stifling private initiative, a totalitarian
form of imperio-colonialist domination. 
Gareth
Jones, largely forgotten except by his family, is today
being called by Ukrainians 'The Unsung Hero of Ukraine
