Terms such as “Stalin’s Ukrainophobia” and “genocide of the Ukrainian people” were coined to refer to the events that caused the death of six million people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus; it is a little commented upon chapter of Soviet history.
Newsroom (22/04/2022 11:00, Gaudium Press) Three years ago, on 21 April 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was sworn in as the sixth president of Ukraine.
Upon receiving this information, the clever comment that circulated through the streets of the Eternal City of Rome during the troubled pontificates of Alexander and Pius VI immediately came to mind: “Sextus Tarquinius, sextus Nero, sextus et iste. Semper sub sextis perdita Roma fuit” – “Sixth was Tarquinus, sixth was Nero, and this is also the sixth! It was always under a sixth that Rome was lost”… However, it is still too early to say whether Ukraine will follow Rome in this peculiar coincidence.
But, without a doubt, it is under Zelensky that this nation has witnessed one of the darkest chapters in its history.
I say one of the darkest, and not the darkest, on purpose.
For almost two months we have been following the scenes of horror unfolding on Ukrainian territory, amid the mercilessness of an atrocious war. However, those who think that this is the first time Ukraine has suffered a calamity of such magnitude are mistaken: 90 years ago, the communist regime in the Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of millions of people on this very soil.
Communist, unrealistic and inhumane goal leads to conflict
“I have crossed the Ukraine, I tell you I saw it like a garden in full bloom.”[1] – Wrote Édouard Herriot, French MP and leader of the Radical Party, in the summer of 1933, on his trip to the Soviet Union. He claimed to have seen gardens in full bloom and beautiful crops. This testimony, however, was false, a statement requested by the U.S.S.R. in order to conceal a huge farce around the real and dramatic situation of the peasants.
In the then Soviet State, the fields had been collectivized by force and against the will of the peasants. Groups of peasants under the direction of Communist leaders – the Kolkhozes – were obliged to supply a certain and ever-increasing quantity of agricultural produce to the state: in 1930, for example, 30 per cent of the entire output of the Ukraine’s fields went to the government, and in the following year – for a smaller harvest – the figure reached 41.5 per cent. In reality, the peasants could only market 15% to 20% of their harvest, as they would reserve 12% to 15% for planting, 20% to 30% for livestock and the rest for their own consumption. And to make matters worse, in 1932, the collection plan was to be 32% higher than in the past year… An unrealistic target, which would lead to no other end but conflict.
“Of 78 convicts, 48 were under ten years old”
The state harvest of 1932 in Ukraine and the North Caucasus started more slowly than usual; actually it was because the peasants had begun to hide, or even “steal” some of the harvest during the night.
A true atmosphere of war ensued. The central government had to send troops, recruited from among communists and Komsomols – members of a Soviet organization in charge of training young people according to the maxims of Communism, which amounted in its totality to 35 million young people between 14 and 28 years – to take back the “stolen” grains by force.
Repression then followed: many peasants were deported, fined and sent to prison. Here is what an instructor of the Central Executive Committee wrote:
“The Balachevo prison holds five times more people than we anticipated, and in Elan there are 610 people in the small district prison. During the past month, Balachevo prison has ‘returned’ to Elan 78 convicts, 48 of whom were under ten years old.”[2]
Even these actions did not, however, bring the expected results; as a result, on 7 August, 1932, a law was enacted which provided for a ten-year sentence in a concentration camp or capital punishment for “every theft or dilapidation of socialist property“. This became known as the “law of the ears“, because the condemned were most often those who had “stolen” only a few ears of wheat or rye.
But still, the amount of wheat expected by the state did not appear. So the government decided to increase the demands and punishments against the “saboteurs” in a visibly unsuccessful attempt, ironically similar to that of that Pharaoh of Moses’ time who ordered the Hebrew people to provide, without allowances for labour, the same amount of bricks as he did. (Cf. Ex 5:10-18).
The demands of the State lead to mass murder
In the Kolkhozes, or collective farms, where production of the required produce had been lowest, all products were withdrawn from the shops, all current credit was refunded, and all “saboteurs” and “counter-revolutionaries” were arrested; if “sabotage” continued, the population was warned, there would be mass deportation.
Meanwhile, reports indicating a serious risk of famine for the winter of 1932-33 were reaching Moscow, including regions where collection had been reasonable and even excellent. Even the most engaged Stalinists asked Stalin that the state collection be reduced, because: “we must consider – wrote Khatayevich to Molotov – the minimal needs of the Kolkhozians, in whose absence there will be no one to sow.”[3]
But for the Communist chiefs, the needs of the state must come first and not second. Thus, even the peasants’ small reserves had to be handed over for the goal to be completed, and this accomplished by means of threats or even torture.
Famine irremediably followed, even in the richest agricultural regions of the Soviet Union; and, to prevent the foreseeable rural exodus, the travel of any peasant to the urban areas was prevented. Thus stated one circular of the time:
“The General Committee and the government have evidence that this mass exodus of peasants is organized by the enemies of Soviet power, the counter-revolutionaries and the Polish agents, for the purpose of propaganda against the Kolkhozian system in particular, and the Soviet power in general.”[4]
In the famine-stricken regions, train crossings were suspended and the Soviet police began to prevent, by barriers, peasants from leaving their districts.
The account of the then Italian consul in Kharkov clearly demonstrates the situation of misery in which the people found themselves:
“A week ago a service was organized to collect the abandoned children. In fact, along with the peasants who go to the towns because they no longer have any hope of surviving in the countryside, there are children who have been brought here and then abandoned by their parents, who return to the villages to die there. The parents hope that someone in the city will take care of their offspring. […] A week ago, the dvorniki (building caretakers) were mobilized, to patrol the town in their white shirts and take the children to the nearest police stations. [Around midnight, they start transporting them in trucks to the Severo Donetz freight railway station. This is where the children found in the stations and on the trains, the families of peasants, the elderly and lonely people gathered in the city during the day are also gathered together. Doctors are present […] who make the “selection“. Those who are not yet swollen from illness and have some chance of survival are led to the camps of Holodnaia Gora, where, in barns and on lying on hay, there agonizes a population of about 8,000 souls, composed mainly of children. […] The bloated people are transported in freight trains and abandoned 50-60 kilometres from the town so that they die without anyone seeing them. […] On arrival at the unloading sites, large pits are dug and the dead are removed from the wagons.”[5]
The death toll reaches an unimaginable number
In the spring of 1933, the death toll reached its peak. In Kharkov alone, an average of 250 corpses were collected every day, many whose livers had been removed, as, sadly, cases of cannibalism had become frequent.
The affected region – called the “famine zone” – comprised the whole of Ukraine, where at least four MILLION deaths were recorded; the plains of the Kuban and the North Caucasus, recorded one million dead; and a large part of Kazakhstan reports the same frightening death toll of one million.
In April of 1933, two letters from the writer Mikhail Cholokhov were delivered to Stalin, explaining the details of how the authorities had extorted food from the peasants and asking for an urgent dispatch of supplies. What was the reply?
Stalin stated, without further ado, that the population was being duly punished for having carried out “strikes and sabotage” against the government, and for having practiced “trench warfare against the Soviet power”.
In the year 1933, while peasants were starving to death, 18 million units of wheat were exported by the Soviet government to “meet the needs of industrialization“.
“Ukrainophobia?”
Some historians have spoken of a “genocide of the Ukrainian people“[6] and even of a “Stalin’s Ukrainophobia”, per Andrei Sakharov’s expression. What is certain is that the worst affected areas – on Ukrainian lands – were the same ones that offered the greatest resistance to the collectivization policy of 1929-30.
The authors of the “Black Book of Communism“, from which we have gathered our information for this article, establish, in a peculiar way, a link between two historical figures who are very similar in their intolerance towards “political enemies”: “Robespierre undeniably placed the first stone on the path which was later to lead Lenin to terror. For it was he himself who said, (…) during the voting on the laws: ‘To punish the enemies of the Fatherland, it is enough to know their identity. It is not a matter of punishing them, but of destroying them.'”[7]
It seems that Ukraine’s current enemies have adopted, at least in practice, an analogous ideology.
Are we to believe that the similarities are mere coincidences?
Compiled by Sandra Chisholm
