Russia destroys monuments to Victims of Holodomor and Stalin’s Terror in occupied Luhansk

22.07.2024   

Halya Coynash

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is accompanied on all occupied territory by efforts to destroy historical memory and Ukrainian identity

Destruction of the memorials to the Victims of Holodomor and Stalin’s Repression in occupied Luhansk From the propaganda video

Missiles are the deadliest, but by no means the only weapon Russia is using in its determination to eradicate Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian historical memory on all occupied territory. 

The latest attack on Ukrainians’ memory of Holodomor, the man-made Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, and of Soviet repression was reported on 18 July 2024 in occupied Luhansk.  The Russian propaganda ‘Luhansk information centre’ announced the dismantling of stone monuments to the Victims of Holodomor and to the Victims of Stalin’s Repression on Remembrance Square in occupied Luhansk.  The report, although very brief, was filled with all the standard aspects of Russia’s narrative about Ukraine.  This, for example, includes labelling any Ukrainians or Ukrainian organizations with a pronounced sense of Ukrainian identity and patriotism as ‘nationalist’.   These are claimed to have been places of pilgrimage for “Ukrainian nationalists” and Prosvita activists, with this clearly viewed as something suspect.  The Prosvita, or Enlightenment, Society was only ‘radical’ to Russians who wanted to deny Ukrainian statehood, and the importance of Ukrainian as the state language. 

Even more typical is the pretence that the destruction of monuments honouring the memory of Ukrainians deliberately starved to death or persecuted was at the initiative of ‘Luhansk residents’.  It is claimed that there were appeals from “veteran organizations” which purportedly “demanded the dismantling of monument-fakes that have no historical or cultural significance and insult the patriotic sentiments of Luhansk residents.”

Memorial to the Victims of Holodomor in occupied Luhansk on 27 November 2023 Photo Realna Gazeta

Worth noting a poignant photo from 27 November 2023 of roses underneath the words: Rest in Peace, Those Starved to Death’  in occupied Luhansk.  The victims of this genocide are honoured throughout the world each year on the third Saturday in November, with at least one ‘Luhansk resident’ willing to take a major risk and lay flowers in memory, even though this was at the Monument to the Victims of Holodomor in a part opposite the Russian-controlled ‘ministry of state security’.

It is telling that the monuments, like others to Victims of Holodomor in particular, have been demolished since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and openly annexed Ukrainian territory, including Luhansk.  While a huge number of countries have joined Ukraine in recognizing Holodomor as an act of genocide, Russia has carried out an aggressive campaign of denial and disinformation.  The current regime under Russian leader Vladimir Putin has not openly denied the crimes of the Soviet era, and specially the Terror under bloody dictator Joseph Stalin.  It has, however, actively sought to ‘rehabilitate’ or whitewash Stalin and his henchmen, the notorious secret police from Cheka to KGB and has persecuted those organizations and activists who seek to remember the victims of the regime’s crimes.   Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, huge numbers of books on Ukrainian culture and history have been banned as ‘extremist’, including any books telling the truth about Holodomor and Soviet history.

The Monument to Victims of Stalin’s Repression in Luhansk that the Russians destroyed

The attacks on Ukrainian historical memory began back in 2014 in both occupied Crimea and the Russian proxy ‘Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics’ [‘LPR/DPR’].  In August 2015, a Memorial to the Victims of Political Repression and Holodomor was dismantled in Snizhne, within ‘DPR’. Such destruction was claimed to be aimed at the “reinstatement of historical justice”.  

By October 2022, the Russians had destroyed the Memorial to Victims of Holodomor in Mariupol.  The monument was made of granite and erected in 2004 near the Drama Theatre which was sheltering around a thousand residents when it was bombed by the Russians on 16 March 2022.   Here too the Russians produced a propaganda video claiming that Mariupol residents were in favour of the monument’s destruction, while only showing one collaborator who actually claimed that it was not Ukraine which had suffered from the Famine of 1932-33.   There was an especially cynical note in the attempt to justify the destruction by claiming that the granite was to be used ‘for construction work’.  No mention, of course, was made of who had destroyed Mariupol hospitals, residential buildings and places of culture.

Monuments to the Victims of Holodomor were also ostentatiously destroyed in occupied parts of Kherson oblast in late 2023.  The occupation forces in Ivanivka Hromada boasted of having destroyed at least fourteen memorials to Victims of Holodomor.  They prefaced Holodomor with the word ‘so-called’, and reposted images of the destruction, however did themselves wear masks to conceal their own identity.

Irish Senate recognizes Ukrainian genocide in the 1930s

The Upper House of the Irish Parliament on Thursday approved the recognition of the Holodomor as the Ukrainian extermination and genocide of millions of people during the 1930s in the era of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

 Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky at the Holodomor commemoration in Ukraine. - Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images via ZU / DPA

"I thank the Irish Senate, Seanad Éireann, for recognizing the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people. Having survived the Great Famine in the past, Ireland knows the horror of famine and shares our pain. We will always remember this friendly move," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dimitro Kuleba reacted to the decision on his Twitter profile.

The Ukrainian Embassy in the country, for its part, has called the move "historic". "Ireland is one of our closest friends who is not afraid to call a spade a spade," it has indicated on the same social network.

With this decision, Ireland joins other countries, such as Romania, that have recognized the Holodomor, whose commemoration is celebrated next November 28, as a genocide of the Ukrainian people, a great famine between 1932 and 1933 that caused the death of several million people, as reported by the UNIAN news agency.

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Nikolai Vavilov in the years of Stalin's ‘Revolution from Above’ (1929–1932)

Abstract

This paper examines new evidence from Russian archives to argue that Soviet geneticist and plant breeder, Nikolai I. Vavilov's fate was sealed during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (‘Revolution from Above’) (1929–1932). This was several years before Trofim D. Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist and widely portrayed archenemy and destroyer of Vavilov, became a major force in Soviet science. During the ‘Cultural Revolution’ the Soviet leadership wanted to subordinate science and research to the task of socialist reconstruction. Vavilov, who was head of the Institute of Plant Breeding (VIR) and the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), came under attack from the younger generation of researchers who were keen to transform biology into a proletarian science. The new evidence shows that it was during this period that Vavilov lost his independence to determine research strategies and manage personnel within his own institute. These changes meant that Lysenko, who had won Stalin's support, was able to gain influence and eventually exert authority over Vavilov. Based on the new evidence, Vavilov's arrest in 1940 after he criticized Lysenko's conception of Non-Mendelian genetics was just the final challenge to his authority. He had already experienced years of harassment that began before Lysenko gained a position of influence. Vavilov died in prison in 1943.

Politics of Perseverance: Ukrainian Memories of “Them” and the “Other” in Holodomor Survivor Testimony,

 1986-1988

 Johnathon K. Vsetecka,
.Unpublished Master of Arts thesis,
 University of Northern Colorado, May 2014.

ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, now known as the Holodomor, from a survivor’s point of view. The Commission on the Ukraine Famine, beginning work in 1986, conducted an investigation of the famine and collected testimony from Holodomor survivors in the United States. This large collection of survivor testimonies sat quietly for many years, even though the Holodomor is now a recognized field of study in history, among other disciplines. A great deal of scholarship focuses on the political, genocidal, and ideological aspects of the famine, but few works explore the roles of everyday Ukrainian people. This thesis utilizes the testimonies to examine how everyday survivors construct memories based on their famine experiences. Survivors often share memories of themselves, but they also elaborate on the roles of others, which included Soviets, German villagers, and even other Ukrainians. These testimonies transcend the common victim and genocide narratives, showing that not all Ukrainians suffered equally. In fact, some survivors note that the famine did not disrupt their everyday lives at all. Collectively, these testimonies present a more complex narrative of everyday events in Ukraine and elucidate on the ways that survivors remember, interpret, and construct memories related to the Holodomor.

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/01/famine-subjugation-and-nuclear-fallout.html

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Welsh journalist Gareth Jones to be honoured in Ukraine capital

MARCH 7, 2026

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones will be honoured with a 2m x 60cm memorial made of Welsh slate in the centre of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city.

The memorial will be sited in the street named after him in 2020 by Kyiv City Council in recognition of his role as one of the first correspondents from the West to tell the world the truth about the famine in Ukraine, which killed an estimated 4 million Ukrainians between 1931 – 1932.

The memorial will feature an image of Gareth Jones and an inscription in Ukrainian, Welsh and English together with a portrayal of both Welsh and Ukrainian flags, crossed in harmony.

The memorial’s inscription will read: “Gareth Jones – Welsh journalist who was the first to state in the Western press, under his own name, that the Holodomor occurred in Ukraine in 1932-1933”.

Welsh Government has allocated £16,000 to the Senedd Cross-Party Group Friends of Ukraine for the construction and placement of the memorial.

Alun Davies MS, Chair of the Cross-Party Group said: “We don’t do enough to recognise the contribution Welsh citizens have made to world affairs. Gareth Jones was a unique individual. Whilst some journalists were wined and dined by the Soviet authorities and chose to ignore or deny what was happening in Ukraine, he chose to go and see for himself and he told the world.

“At this time, when Ukraine’s very existence is under attack and parts of the country where the Holodomor had such terrible impact are occupied, this is a way of recognising the vital role of journalists in exposing the truth and showing our solidarity and friendship with Ukraine.”

It is anticipated it will be ready for unveiling in a civic ceremony in Kyiv in November 2026, the traditional day of remembrance of the Holodomor (‘Death by Starvation’).

Graham Colley, grandnephew of Gareth Jones said: “I very much welcome this initiative which not only recognises the contribution of my Great Uncle, Gareth, to exposing one of the last centuries great crimes, the Holodomor. It is also a tribute in these troubling times to his commitment to the highest ethical standards of journalism at a time when the Soviet authorities and collaborative journalists sought to hide the truth of those terrible events.

“It is a fitting Welsh tribute to a true Welsh hero, one who is sadly better known internationally than he is in Wales. I hope this memorial stone will contribute to the growth of relations between the people of Wales and Ukraine.”

The memorial plinth will be hand-crafted and inscribed from natural Welsh slate. The project was approved by Kyiv City Council at a meeting between the Council and Alun Davies MS (Chair of the Cross-Party Group) and Mick Antoniw MS during their recent visit to Ukraine to deliver vehicles and aid to front-line units.

In March 1933 Gareth Jones convened a press conference in Berlin where he declared the famine which was a consequence of Stalin’s disastrous collectivisation programme. Although it affected parts of Russia and the Russian Federation as well, resistance in Ukraine was furious with an estimated 200 uprisings, which  were brutally suppressed. The implementation of the seizure of foods and grain resulted in the mass starvation of Ukrainian towns and villages. The consequences of the Holodomor are felt to this day particularly in Eastern and Central Ukraine.

The Welsh Parliament has formally passed a resolution declaring the Holodomor and Act of Genocide, the only one of the four Parliaments of the United Kingdom to formally make this declaration, joining other countries such as France, Australia and Canada.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gareth_Jones_Edit.jpg Gareth Jones Source: People of Truth Author: Український інститут національної пам’яті, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Famine, subjugation and nuclear fallout: How Soviet experience helped sow resentment among Ukrainians toward Russia

The Conversation
January 30, 2022

‘We have a chance to show the truth’: Inside Chernobyl's 'death zone' 30 years later
Ukraine and Russia share a great deal in the way of history and culture – indeed for long periods in the past, the neighboring countries were part of larger empires encompassing both territories.

But that history – especially during the Soviet period from 1922 to 1991, in which Ukraine was absorbed into the communist bloc – has also bred resentment. Opinions of the merits of the Soviet Union and its leaders diverge, with Ukrainians far less likely to view the period favorably than Russians.

Nonetheless, President Vladimir Putin continues to claim Soviet foundations for what he sees as “historical Russia” – an entity that includes Ukraine.

As scholars of that history, we believe that an examination of Soviet-era policies in Ukraine can offer a useful lens for understanding why so many Ukrainians harbor deep resentment toward Russia.

RAWSTORY+
Revisiting 'The Lost Boys of Ukraine': How the war abroad attracted American white supremacists

Stalin’s engineered famine

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ukraine was known as the breadbasket of Europe and later of the Soviet Union. Its rich soil and ample fields made it an ideal place to grow the grain that helped feed the entire continent.

After Ukraine was absorbed into the Soviet Union beginning in 1922, its agriculture was subject to collectivization policies, in which private land was taken over by the Soviets to be worked communally. Anything produced on those lands would be redistributed across the union.

In 1932 and 1933, a famine devastated the Soviet Union as a result of aggressive collectivization coupled with poor harvests.


A deliberate famine?
Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Millions starved to death across the Soviet Union, but Ukraine felt the brunt of this horror. Research estimates that some 3 million to 4 million Ukrainians died of the famine, around 13% of the population, though the true figure is impossible to establish because of Soviet efforts to hide the famine and its toll.

Scholars note that many of the political decisions of the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin – such as preventing Ukrainian farmers from traveling in search of food, and severely punishing anyone who took produce from collective farms – made the famine much worse for Ukrainians. These policies were specific to Ukrainians within Ukraine, as well as Ukrainians who lived in other parts of the Soviet Union.

Some historians claim that Stalin’s moves were done to quash a Ukrainian independence movement and were specifically targeted at ethnic Ukrainians. As such, some scholars call the famine a genocide. In Ukrainian, the event is known as “Holodomor,” which means “death by hunger.”

Recognition of the full extent of the Holodomor and implicating Soviet leadership for the deaths remains an important issue in Ukraine to this day, with the country’s leaders long fighting for global recognition of the Holodomor and its impact on modern Ukraine.

Countries such as the United States and Canada have made official declarations calling it a genocide.

But this is not the case in much of the rest of the world.

Just as the the Soviet government of the day denied that there were any decisions that explicitly deprived Ukraine of food – noting that the famine affected the entire country – so too do present-day Russian leaders refuse to acknowledge culpability.

Russia’s refusal to admit that the famine disproportionately affected Ukrainians has been taken by many in Ukraine as an attempt to downplay Ukrainian history and national identity.

Soviet annexation of Western Ukraine

This attempt to suppress Ukrainian national identity continued during and after World War II. In the early years of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian national movement was concentrated in the western parts of modern-day Ukraine, part of Poland until the Nazi invasion in 1939.

Before Gemany’s invasion, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany entered into a secret agreement, under the guise of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, which outlined German and Soviet spheres of influence over parts of central and east Europe.


David Low’s famed cartoon depicting Stalin and Hitler’s pact over Poland.
David Low/British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent

After Germany invaded Poland, the Red Army moved into the eastern portion of the country under the pretense of stabilizing the failing nation. In reality, the Soviet Union was taking advantage of the provisions laid out in the secret protocol. The Polish territories that now make up western Ukraine were also incorporated into Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, subsuming them into the larger Russian cultural world.

At the end of the war, the territories remained part of the Soviet Union.

Stalin set about suppressing Ukrainian culture in these newly annexed lands in favor of a greater Russian culture. For example, the Soviets repressed any Ukrainian intellectuals who promoted the Ukrainian language and culture through censorship and imprisonment.

This suppression also included liquidating the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, a self-governing church that has allegiance to the pope and was one of the most prominent cultural institutions promoting Ukrainian language and culture in these former Polish territories.

Its properties were transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church, and many of its priests and bishops were imprisoned or exiled. The destruction of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is still a source of resentment for many Ukrainians. It stands, we believe as scholars, as a clear instance of the Soviets’ intentional efforts to destroy Ukrainian cultural institutions.

The legacy of Chernobyl in Ukraine

Just as disaster marked the early years of Ukraine as a Soviet republic, so did its final years.

In 1986 a nuclear reactor at the Soviet-run Chernobyl nuclear power in the north of Ukraine went into partial meltdown. It remains the worst peacetime nuclear catastrophe the world has seen.

It required the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people in the areas surrounding the power plant. And to this day, approximately 1,000 square miles of Ukraine are part of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where radioactive fallout remains high and access is restricted.

Soviet lies to cover up the extent of the disaster – and missteps that would have limited the fallout – only compounded the problem. Emergency personnel were not given proper equipment or training to deal with the nuclear material.

It resulted in a heavy death toll and a higher than normal incidence of radiation-induced disease and complications such as cancer and birth defects among both former residents of the region and the workers sent in to deal with the disaster.

Other Soviet republics and European countries faced the fallout from Chernobyl, but it was the authorities in Ukraine who were tasked with organizing evacuations to Kyiv while Moscow attempted to cover up the scope of the disaster.

Meanwhile, independent Ukraine has been left to attend to the thousands of citizens who have chronic illnesses and disabilities as a result of the accident.


An abandoned fun fair, two kilometers from the Chernobyl power station.
Martin Godwin/Getty Images

The legacy of Chernobyl looms large in Ukraine’s recent past and continues to define many people’s memory of living in the Soviet era.

Memories of a painful past

This painful history of life under Soviet rule forms the backdrop to resentment in Ukraine today toward Russia. To many Ukrainians, these are not merely stories from textbooks, but central parts of people’s lives – many Ukrainians are still living with the health and environmental consequences of Chernobyl, for instance.

As Russia amasses troops at Ukraine’s borders, and the threat of an invasion increases, many in Ukraine may be reminded of past attempts by its neighbor to crush Ukrainian independence.

Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Harvard University and Jacob Lassin, Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Russian and East European Studies, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SEE

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Book Review: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/05/book-review-marxism-and-philosophy-of.html

Nikolai Vavilov in the years of Stalin's ‘Revolution from Above’ (1929–1932)

Abstract

This paper examines new evidence from Russian archives to argue that Soviet geneticist and plant breeder, Nikolai I. Vavilov's fate was sealed during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (‘Revolution from Above’) (1929–1932). This was several years before Trofim D. Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist and widely portrayed archenemy and destroyer of Vavilov, became a major force in Soviet science. During the ‘Cultural Revolution’ the Soviet leadership wanted to subordinate science and research to the task of socialist reconstruction. Vavilov, who was head of the Institute of Plant Breeding (VIR) and the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), came under attack from the younger generation of researchers who were keen to transform biology into a proletarian science. The new evidence shows that it was during this period that Vavilov lost his independence to determine research strategies and manage personnel within his own institute. These changes meant that Lysenko, who had won Stalin's support, was able to gain influence and eventually exert authority over Vavilov. Based on the new evidence, Vavilov's arrest in 1940 after he criticized Lysenko's conception of Non-Mendelian genetics was just the final challenge to his authority. He had already experienced years of harassment that began before Lysenko gained a position of influence. Vavilov died in prison in 1943.

Politics of Perseverance: Ukrainian Memories of “Them” and the “Other” in Holodomor Survivor Testimony,

 1986-1988

 Johnathon K. Vsetecka,
.Unpublished Master of Arts thesis,
 University of Northern Colorado, May 2014.

ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, now known as the Holodomor, from a survivor’s point of view. The Commission on the Ukraine Famine, beginning work in 1986, conducted an investigation of the famine and collected testimony from Holodomor survivors in the United States. This large collection of survivor testimonies sat quietly for many years, even though the Holodomor is now a recognized field of study in history, among other disciplines. A great deal of scholarship focuses on the political, genocidal, and ideological aspects of the famine, but few works explore the roles of everyday Ukrainian people. This thesis utilizes the testimonies to examine how everyday survivors construct memories based on their famine experiences. Survivors often share memories of themselves, but they also elaborate on the roles of others, which included Soviets, German villagers, and even other Ukrainians. These testimonies transcend the common victim and genocide narratives, showing that not all Ukrainians suffered equally. In fact, some survivors note that the famine did not disrupt their everyday lives at all. Collectively, these testimonies present a more complex narrative of everyday events in Ukraine and elucidate on the ways that survivors remember, interpret, and construct memories related to the Holodomor.

From the Holodomor to the Kholodomor

BY ALEXANDER J. MOTYL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 10/31/22 
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

AP Photo/Andriy Andriyenko

People receive bread at a humanitarian aid center in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Oct. 26, 2022.

Ninety years ago, in 1932-1933, Ukraine lost millions of people to the Holodomor, the genocidal “death by famine” engineered by Joseph Stalin and his minions. Today, Ukraine is on the verge of experiencing a Kholodomor, a genocidal “death by freezing” engineered by Vladimir Putin and his minions.

At least 4 million Ukrainian peasants were killed in the Holodomor. At its height, some 25,000 people starved daily. The “kill rate” was no less than 8 million per annum, which exceeds even that of the Holocaust. Stalin made the famine to punish the Ukrainians for their traditional resistance to Russian and Soviet rule and his policy of collectivization.

Putin’s motives are identical. He began a genocidal war against Ukraine on Feb. 24. Russian missiles and shells have targeted hospitals, schools, kindergartens, shopping centers and thousands of apartment buildings. The targets are not random or the result of bad aim. The Russian armed forces are purposely destroying Ukrainians and their identity. In addition to killing, Ukrainians have been tortured, raped, evicted, deported and kidnapped — all in a systematic and intentional effort “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The Kholodomor is a continuation of Russia’s genocidal policies by other means. Instead of outright physical violence, Moscow is intent on killing Ukrainians in the manner of the Holodomor — slowly, by depriving them of heat and sustenance. Since Ukraine’s winters are very cold and very long, and since the forthcoming winter is expected to be unusually cold, the chances are great that tens of thousands — especially the very young, the very old, and the infirm — will freeze to death or starve, as medical facilities and stores close and transportation networks shut down.

The war will continue, however, as Ukrainians realize that they have no choice but to fight. Their ability to push the Russians out of the occupied territories will remain largely undiminished as well. And Putin and his generals surely know this. The Kholodomor, in other words, has no military purpose. It’s purely and simply an act of genocide.

The countries of the collective West know this, too. Even if they might dispute the appropriateness of the genocide label, all Europeans, North Americans, and their democratic allies in other parts of the world know mass murder when they see it. And they also know that their publicly stated commitment to human rights obliges them to do something to stop the Kholodomor. Of course, they also knew about the Holodomor but did nothing about it.

This time, things appear to be different: The West has been supplying Ukraine with impressive amounts of military, financial and humanitarian aid, and there’s a good chance that Ukraine will receive more than just a few anti-missile defense systems that will enable it to shield its energy networks and population centers from Russian attack.

For both strategic and humanitarian reasons, the United States and United Kingdom have taken the lead in helping Ukraine avoid genocide. But the two countries that should be in the forefront of the anti-genocide effort are Germany and Israel. After all, Germany committed the Holocaust, and Jews were its victims. If anybody knows something about genocides and why they should happen “never again,” it’s surely the Germans and the Israelis.

Instead, although Germany supports Ukraine politically, it has been reticent about supplying it with the weapons it needs to defend itself. Israel, meanwhile, has hemmed and hawed about the war and has provided Ukraine with no weapons at all.

To be sure, both Germany and Israel have their reasons — the key one being not wanting to burn all bridges to Russia. That may make strategic sense but remaining silent while Ukraine is being subjected to a genocide undermines the sincerity of German efforts to atone for the Holocaust and Israeli efforts to commemorate it. And their moral discreditation will have untold negative consequences for the international community’s campaign to prevent genocides. If the Germans and Israelis care only about the genocide the former perpetrated and the latter survived, then why should anyone care about faraway genocides in other parts of the world?

A recently published “appeal of Ukrainian Jews to the president, government, Knesset, and civil society” of Israel emphasizes the importance of moral concerns. The 106 prominent signatories, representing all walks of life, write that “from the first days of the massive attack we expected the understanding and support of Israel.” Unfortunately, “we bitterly acknowledge that our expectations of help proved to be almost hollow.” The appeal then says: “We are aware of the security considerations by which the responsible leaders of your country must be guided. But we consider the logic that led to the outrageous inactivity of the government to be not only amoral, but also unjustified. The attempt to avoid enraging Russia in no way differs from attempts to placate terrorists. Both Ukraine and Israel know what the risks of such behavior are.”

German reluctance and Israeli silence are morally indefensible, and both countries should be ashamed, if only because present and future genocidaires — Putin and his imitators — will applaud such cowardice and conclude that mass murder can and will go unpunished.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.” 

UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST ARMY OUN–UPA AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE

HOLODOMOR
90 years on, Ukrainians see repeat of Russian ‘genocide’

By AFP
Published November 27, 2022

Holodomor in Ukrainian means 'death by starvation' — © AFP
Ania TSOUKANOVA

Ninety years ago, millions perished in Ukraine in a manmade famine under Joseph Stalin that many in the country call genocide. For Ganna Pertchuk, the current Russian invasion is a case of history repeating itself.

At the tall candle-shaped Holodomor (Ukrainian for death by starvation) memorial centre in central Kyiv, a dozen Orthodox priests in black and silver robes gathered Saturday for a religious ceremony for the victims of the famine.

The event was held outdoors despite sub-zero temperatures.

Before starting the ceremony, Archbishop Filaret, 93, laid a wreath of red carnations at the monument with a statue of an emaciated girl clutching some stalks of wheat against her chest.

“We pray for those who perished in the famine,” he said.

“The Holodomor was not a result of a bad harvest but the targeted extermination of the Ukrainian people,” he said.

“What happened in the 1930s was genocide and what is happening now is also genocide,” said Pertchuk, a pensioner, who attended the ceremony

“The parallels are very clear.”

Millions of Ukrainians died in the 1932-1933 famine – Copyright AFP Pedro Rances Mattey

Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of Europe for its abundant wheat crops, a product of its rich, black soil. But under Soviet rule it lost between four and eight million citizens during the 1932-1933 famine. Some researchers put the figure even higher.

While some historians argue the famine was planned and exacerbated by Stalin to quash an independence movement, others suggest it was a result of rapid Soviet industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture.

Ukraine officially considers it a “genocide” along with a number of Western countries, a label that Moscow vehemently rejects.

– ‘Victory of Good over Evil’ –

Pertchuk, like many Ukrainians has heard horror stories from family members.

Her mother-in-law, remembered as a young girl hiding with her family in a village near Kyiv so “that she wasn’t eaten up,” Pertchuk said, speaking of a famine that fuelled rare cases of cannibalism.

“Imagine the horror,” said the 61-year-old former nurse, with tears in her eyes.

She said she was “praying for our victory which will be a victory of Good over Evil”.

“It was an artificial genocidal famine…,” priest Oleksandr Shmurygin, 38, told AFP. “Now when we experience this massive unprovoked war of Russia against Ukraine, we see history repeating itself.”


The memorial has a statue of an emaciated girl clutching some stalks of wheat. — © AFP

Among those gathered to commemorate the victims of the famine was lawyer Andryi Savchuk, who spoke of its “irreparable” loss for Ukraine.

“Stalin’s system, the repressive state, wanted to destroy Ukraine as a nation,” he said. “Today we see that the efforts made by Stalin are continued by (President Vladimir) Putin.

“At that time, they wanted to exterminate Ukrainians through famine,” he added.

“Today, they are exterminating us with heavy weapons,” and bombing energy installations to deprive citizens of electricity, heating and water just as the punishing winter sets in.

But just as Ukrainians hold on in the 1930s, so they would against Moscow today, said Savchuk.

“We have an unyielding will and confidence. And the whole world is with us.”

UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST ARMY OUN–UPA AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Historical representation of the wartime accounts of the activities of the OUN–UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Ukrainian Insurgent Army)

Politics of Perseverance: Ukrainian Memories of “Them” and the “Other” in Holodomor Survivor Testimony, 1986-1988

 Johnathon K. Vsetecka,
.Unpublished Master of Arts thesis,
 University of Northern Colorado, May 2014.

ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, now known as theHolodomor, from a survivor’s point of view. The Commission on the Ukraine Famine, beginning work in 1986, conducted an investigation of the famine and collectedtestimony from Holodomor survivors in the United States. This large collection ofsurvivor testimonies sat quietly for many years, even though the Holodomor is now arecognized field of study in history, among other disciplines. A great deal of scholarshipfocuses on the political, genocidal, and ideological aspects of the famine, but few worksexplore the roles of everyday Ukrainian people. This thesis utilizes the testimonies toexamine how everyday survivors construct memories based on their famine experiences.Survivors often share memories of themselves, but they also elaborate on the roles ofothers, which included Soviets, German villagers, and even other Ukrainians. Thesetestimonies transcend the common victim and genocide narratives, showing that not allUkrainians suffered equally. In fact, some survivors note that the famine did not disrupttheir everyday lives at all. Collectively, these testimonies present a more complexnarrative of everyday events in Ukraine and elucidate on the ways that survivorsremember, interpret, and construct memories related to the Holodomor.

Thinking about Genocide and Mass Murder: How Could it Have Happened in Nice Canada?

   June 10, 2019    on Thinking about Genocide and Mass Murder: How Could it Have Happened in Nice Canada?

By Alvin Finkel

The decision of the Commission on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women to use the word “genocide” to describe past Canadian state policies regarding Indigenous women has occasioned heated debate about whether that word is appropriate for anything short of a conscious state plan to rapidly physically eliminate all members of a defined group or to thoroughly destroy their culture and thus eliminate them as a unique entity. The Commission suggests that in fact the latter has been the goal of Canadian governments all along and that condoning physical violence against Indigenous women has been an unstated side effect of attitudes and policies that deny the right of Canada’s Indigenous people to preserve their millennial cultures.

A Political Cartoon from July 1880 in Grip Magazine

Decisions about what human horror stories qualify as genocide are largely political. There is, of course, consensus that Hitler planned to murder all Jews and managed to kill the majority of them in areas that were under German control at some point during his rule. His murder of Roma was also clearly genocide.

But what about the Holodomor, the murder through famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933? There may have been as many deaths of Ukrainians as a result of Stalin’s maniacal efforts to collectivize and industrialize Ukrainian farming so as to accelerate Soviet industrialization as of Jews in the Holocaust. Many historians and governments view the famine as a genocide, but the Russian government and some historians deny that Stalin, while unbending in his efforts to collectivize peasants’ landholdings, meant to eradicate the Ukrainians as an ethnic group. But claims that he was only involved in misguided class warfare against peasants are contradicted by the Soviet decision to distribute crops seized from Ukrainian peasants not to Ukrainian workers but to workers in other republics, leaving that republic’s workers to share the fate of their peasant co-ethnics.

While most Western scholars seem inclined to qualify the Soviet-induced Ukrainian famine as a genocide, one almost never sees that term employed in discussions about British-induced famines in India and elsewhere. Colonial-era famines began with one in Bengal between 1770 and 1773 that wiped out 10 million lives, a third of all Bengalis. Within a decade another two famines, one in South India’s Tamil region and one in North India, accounted for another 20 million deaths. In all three cases, and many more before independence, the famines were the product of forced monoculture for export purposes and refusal of the British authorities to allow imports of food from areas unaffected by crop failures to the suddenly infertile regions.

Apologists for the British authorities suggest that such famines predated the British and were nature’s way of reducing overpopulation in India. But Indian scholars reject such claims, noting that traditional Indian economies featured a variety of crops as well as gathered fruits and vegetables, irrigation projects, storage of surpluses, and sharing arrangements across wide areas so as to provide insurance for all in case of scarcities. Even during the British raj, the princely states that paid tribute to Britain, but were not incorporated into the area under direct British rule, fared far better than the areas firmly under Britain’s thumb.

The last of the Bengal famines occurred after the Holodomor. In 1942-3, though Bengal produced a bumper crop of rice, two to three million Bengalis died of famine as the British authorities exported most of that crop to reinforce the war effort. Again, it was a decision not to feed people rather than a lack of food that resulted in Indian deaths. In short, what India experienced for much of the colonial period was a kind of economic genocide that paralleled the Holodomor but under capitalist conditions.

Similarly, though we tend to think of the “Irish famine” of 1846, which resulted in at least a million deaths and two million Irish fleeing their country, in terms of the failure of the potato crop, Ireland produced enough food that year to easily satisfy the food requirements of all of the Irish people. But British policy insisted upon the export of most of the crops out of Ireland, leaving Ireland’s poverty-stricken masses, to whom London offered minimal relief, in hunger.

Certain Irish stereotypes create the notion that the potato growers created their own fate because they focused on one crop and an unreliable one at that. In fact they had little choice since the English had much earlier dispossessed them of the better lands on their island, leaving them to attempt to survive in the marginal areas where the potato was about the most reliable crop they could grow. Like the Indian farmers, the Irish were victims of Britain who were stereotyped as the authors of their own misfortune.

Across Africa and Asia, the various European countries imposed regimes of quasi-slavery that left millions dead. The armies of Belgian’s King Leopold II, forcing the Native people of the Congo to supply limitless ivory and rubber, slaughtered between six and ten million of the 20 to 30 million people estimated to be living in the Congo basin.

“Economic genocide” also best describes the fate of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas who were conquered by Spain and Portugal. While the numbers of people in the Americas in 1500, as European colonization began, are calculated as from anywhere from 20 million to 100 million, there were only 1.5 million Indigenous people across the two continents by 1650. While European germs killed many, populations did spring back if they were largely left in control of their lands and their labour as was the case in the fur trade. But for the most part that did not happen. In Potosi, in Bolivia, as many as 4 million miners died in the silver mines over several centuries. The Spanish mineowners forced Indigenous men into the mines to work until their death without ever seeing daylight again and then replaced the dying with slaves still alive.

Because of the fur trade, the early Canadian story of European-Indigenous relations seems tame compared to the Spanish American story. But as settlement replaced the fur trade, dispossession of Indigenous lands, and then efforts to destroy their cultures and break their spirits came to British North America and then Canada. The dispossession was arguably less violent than in the United States not because the Canadian authorities were gentler than because the American experience showed Canadian Indigenous people that it was impossible to fight people who had so little regard for human life as Europeans. In any case, what followed was a horror story that still has not ended despite many Canadian politicians expressing fine words completely disconnected from their actions.

Like the British—and like the Americans, whose record in slaughtering Indigenous people, Latinos, and Asians also counts in the millions—Canadians like to think of themselves as civilized folks whom no respectable person can accuse of genocide or even racism except for the most common-garden variety. Stephen Harper as prime minister famously said that Canada had no history of colonialism. But those who study Indigenous-colonial relations know better, and whether or not we want to use the term “genocide” to describe a long history of racism and sexism towards Indigenous peoples, we need to come to terms with our nation’s savagery towards the first inhabitants of our continent. And we need to act on what commissions like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now the Commission on the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women have recommended. Or we will never get beyond wordplay as opposed to implementing social justice.

Alvin Finkel is the author of Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy. He is professor emeritus of History at Athabasca University, president of the Alberta Labour History Institute, and co-author of the two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples, now in its 7th editions.