Genocide by famine – Ukraine, North Caucasus

source: dyarneward.com; United Human Rights Council

A Le Temps journalist took this photo in Buguruslan in 1921, 11 years before the so-called Holdomor took place in 1932. The famine had been going on for longer than the Russian officials admitted. No foreign journalists were allowed in and the government took no responsibility for it, and so the truth was put together through bits and pieces collected in time.

Children in Berdyansk, Ukraine – 1922

 

Gareth Jones – “Everywhere was the cry “There is no bread. We are dying. This cry came from every part of Russia, Volga, Siberia, North Caucasus, Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves to see what was happening.” (source)

Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.

We know all about the crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.

But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria? Were it not for writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.

The souls of Stalin’s millions of victims still cry out for justice.

Read the rest here The forgotten Holocaust

English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who went on a secret (and risky) trip to Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus in 1933:

“The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, without any consideration whatsoever of the consequences in human suffering”

Writer Arthur Koestler described what he saw from his train:

“Starving children who looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles … the stations were lined with begging peasants with swollen hands and feet, the women holding up to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, stick-like limbs and swollen, pointed bellies.”

Vasily Grossman:

“Their heads [were] like heavy balls on thin little necks, like storks, and one could see each bone of their arms and legs protruding from beneath the skin, how bones joined, and the entire skeleton was stretched over with skin that was like yellow gauze.

“And the children’s faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were 70 years old. And by spring they no longer had faces at all. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads – thin, wide lips – and some of them resembled fish, mouths open. Not human faces.”

Ukraine and the North Caucasus have some of the most fertile soils in Europe. Yet an (induced) famine killed millions of people in the 1930’s, in an attempt to bring under control rebellious people of Ukraine who had refused the new Soviet system. Though North Caucasians were not particularly reticent, they were indiscriminately affected.

Map below showcases mollisols (in dark green) which are an indicator of high soil fertility. Full world map here

Between 1918 and 1933, the Bolshevik regime embarked on a systemic plan to exterminate the peasant population of the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine. This was a deliberate tactic meant to collect wealth and “exterminate” farmers who refused to follow the mass collectivization program imposed by the Soviet regime.

North Caucasus lost a quarter of its population and Ukraine lost an estimate 5 million people. Ukraine called it “the Holodomor” (which means death by starvation). The great famine also affected Lower Volga, Kazakhstan and Siberia.

In 1918, in a ploy to increase the state’s wealth, the Bolsheviks prohibited ownership of private property and empowered the Secret Police (Cheka) to oversee the operation. Selected villages were blacklisted and surrounded by armed militia. A quota was imposed on the villagers and crops and livestock were confiscated in order to fulfill this quota. The peasants were unable to meet the targets and so they starved to death. The actions of the Bolsheviks would dramatically alter the socio-economic structure in Kazakhstan, the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine.

Map of the famine

In Northern Caucasus the death toll exceeded 1 million. The areas effected were the Republic of Adygea, Krasnodar Krai, the Republic of Karachay–Cherkessia, Stavropol Krai, Kabardino-Balkaria, the Republic of North Ossetia, the Republic of Ingushetia, the Republic of Chechnya and the Republic of Dagestan.

Stalin continued to impose radical reforms under his 5 year plan and entire populations  starved to death under his collectivization policy.

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Excerpts from an 1933 article written by Malcolm Muggeridge after his Caucasus/ Ukraine trip – read the full article click here Soviet and the peasantry

“How are things with you?” I asked one man. He looked round anxiously to see that, no soldiers were about. “We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away,” he said and hurried on. This was what I heard again and again and again. “We have nothing. They have taken everything away.” The famine is an organised one. Some of the food that has been taken away from them—and the peasants know this quite well – is still being exported to foreign countries.

Soviet party secretary for the North Caucacus said in a speech delivered at Rostov:

“But, you may urge, is it not true that we have deported Kulaks (name given to independent farmers) and counter-revolutionary elements before? We did deport them, and in sufficiently large numbers. But at the present moment, when what remains of the kulaks are trying to organise sabotage, every slacker must be deported. That is true justice. You may say that before, we exiled individual kulaks, and that now it concerns whole stanitzas (villages) and whole collective farms. If these are enemies they must be treated as kulaks …The general line of our party is to fight dishonesty by means of the extreme penalty, because this is the only defense we have against the destruction of our Socialist economy,”

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GENOCIDE:
Stalin’s Ukrainian famine – the Holodomor

 As millions died, and others moved in search  of food, armed guards sealed off the border  with Russia, where there was food. As millions  died, the USSR exported grain. According to Dr  Taras Hunczak of Rutgers University, 28  million tons were exported during 1932 and  1933 – four tons of grain per each man, woman and child who starved. There was no physical reason that they should have died. It was a deliberate policy.

Read full story http://newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=2923

April 1933 – Letters from Ukraine on the famine

“Oh, Mr. Ambassador! We cannot express in a letter all our misery; we are being forced to cannibalism by our Workers’ Government of Desperates; save us!” 

*Cases of cannibalism had been reported in Ukraine;  (extremely disturbing) photos exist as clear evidence.

 Documentary below starts with a detailed description of the famine and its causes

 

Malcolm Muggeridge 1983 interview about his secret trip to Ukraine and North Caucasus:

“I’ll tell you another thing that’s more difficult to convey, but it impressed me enormously. It was on a Sunday in Kiev, and I went into the church there for the Orthodox mass. I could understand very little of it, but there was some spirit in it that I have never come across before or after. Human beings at the end of their tether were saying to God: “We come to You, we’re in trouble, nobody but You can help us.”

Their faces were quite radiant because of this tremendous sense they had. As no man would help them, no government, there was nowhere that they could turn. And they turned to their Creator. Wherever I went it was the same thing.”

–

Holodomor memorial

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