HOLOCAUST AND HOLODOMOR
by Nicholas Lysson (April 2007)
A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi Holocaust is the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization. [...] Norman Davies gives the following description in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed phrase is his own:
“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants” “The rest, in various stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or neighbours.” “well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”
All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the “class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has seen many terrible famines. But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.
See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986); Nicolas Werth, The Great Famine, in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism (pp. 159-6
(Harvard University Press, 1999); Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 257-59 (1996); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (1985); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 84-85 (2003); and the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Report to Congress (198
. That report, at pp. 6-7, cites estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the Ukraine and 9 million overall.
Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, pp. 248-49 (2000) gives this description, drawn from still further sources, all cited in his notes:
"A population of “walking corpses” even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. Cannibalism became so common-place that local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.”
"They staggered into towns and collapsed in the squares. Haunting the railway stations these “swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice,” followed passengers with mute appeals. [They] “dragged themselves along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy. Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead.” Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by wolves."
Boris Pasternak says “what I saw could not be expressed in words. There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.” See Brian Moynahan, The Russian Century, p. 130 (1994). Nikita Khrushchev, in Khrushchev Remembers: The Final Testament, p. 120 (1976), says “I can’t give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers.”
According to S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, p. 202 (Oxford University Press 1990), “Soviet authorities require[d] that the shades of all windows be pulled down on trains traveling through the North Caucasus, the Ukraine and the Volga basin.” At pp. 239-40, Taylor says this famine “remains the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish Holocaust of the next decade.”
In September 1933, Duranty—who cultivated his relationship with Stalin, and is remembered today for his public denials that any such thing was happening—privately told fellow journalists Eugene Lyons (United Press) and Anne O’Hare McCormick (herself from the New York Times) that the death toll was 7 million, but that the dead were “only Russians.” (Sic: mostly Ukrainians; and note the word “only.”) See Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 579-80 (1937). Duranty’s number is described in Lyons’s book only as “the most startling I had heard”, but is revealed in Lyons’s Memo for Malcolm Muggeridge (Dec. 9, 1937), quoted by Marco Carynnyk in “The New York Times and the Great Famine, Part III,” available online.
Several days after giving the 7-million number to Lyons and McCormick, Duranty told the assembled staff at the British chancery in Moscow that the toll for the Soviet Union as a whole might be as high as 10 million. See the report of William Strang, the charge d’affaires (Sept. 26, 1933), quoted by Carynnyk in the text accompanying n. 46. The British government referred publicly to the ongoing situation as an “illegal famine.” Id., n. 46.
Duranty’s 10-million number may have come from Stalin himself. It’s reputedly the same number Stalin gave Winston Churchill a decade later; see, e.g., Eric Margolis, Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust, Toronto Sun, Dec. 13, 1998 (available online).
While I googled it I stumbeled upon Mongolian anti-Chinese neo-nazis.
