Ukraine is located in Eastern Europe on the Black Sea, bordered by seven countries:

Moldavia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus and Russia.

With a total area of about 603,700 sq km (233,090 sq mi), Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia. The capital of Ukraine is Kyiv (formerly spelled Kiev).

Ukrainian history began in the 9th century with the rise of the city of Kyiv as the center of an empire that came to be called 'Kyivan Rus'. In 988, the people of 'Kyivan Rus', then ruled by Volodymyr the Great (Prince Vladimir), adopted Christianity as the state religion.

Volodymyr the Great monument in Kyiv, Ukraine

In the 11th century, 'Kyivan Rus' was, geographically, the largest state in Europe. Conflict among the various principalities of Rus' and multiple invasions led to decline in the 12th century. 'Kyivan Rus' rapidly began to decline soon after Kyiv was sacked by the Mongols in 1240. The Mongol rule was very cruel and people often fled to other countries. Ukrainian settlements appeared in Poland and Hungary.

Descendants of the Kyivan royal house, however, continued to rule various duchies within the former empire. Three separate Slavonic people emerged from the Rus' empire - the Byelorus' (Byelorussians), The Muscovites (Russians) and the Rus' (Ukrainians).

Following the decline of Kyiv, the center of Rus'-Ukrainian life shifted to the southwestern provinces of Galicia and Volynia. A second Rus' state emerged when Galicia and Volynia were united during the 12th century.

During the 14th century, Poland and Lithuania fought wars against the Mongol invaders, and eventually most of Ukraine passed to the rule of Poland and Lithuania. Lithuania took control of the state of Volynia in northern/northwestern Ukraine, including the region around Kyiv (Rus'), and the rulers of Lithuania then adopted the title of ruler of Rus'. Poland took control of the region of Halychyna. Following the union between Poland and Lithuania, Poles, Germans, Armenians and Jews immigrated to the country.

After the formation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the gentry of Ukraine voted for membership in the Polish part of the Commonwealth 1569. The period immediately following the creation of the Commonwealth, saw a huge revitalization in colonisation efforts. Many new cities and villages were founded. New schools spread the ideas of the Renaissance; Polish peasants who arrived in great numbers were quickly Ukrainianized; during this time, many Ukrainian nobles became Polonized. Social tensions also grew. Ukrainian peasants (and some from other nations) who fled efforts to force them into servitude came to be known as Cossacks and earned a reputation for their fierce martial spirit.

Ukrainian Cossacks

A third Ukrainian state was created in the 17th century by the Cossacks,who established a series of autonomous forts along the Dnipro River. The Cossacks, who elected all of their "hetmans" (commanders-in-chief), eventually freed most of Ukraine from Polish rule and began to create a republic. The 1648 Ukrainian Cossack rebellion and war of independence, also known as "The Deluge", undermined the foundations and stability of the Commonwealth.

The reconstituted Ukrainian state sought a treaty of protection with the state of Muscovy in 1654. This ill-fated agreement was known as the Treaty of Pereyaslav.

Polish authorities then sought compromise with the Ukrainian Cossack state by signing the Union of Hadyach in 1658, but the agreement was later superseded by 1667 Polish-Russian Treaty of Andrusovo, which divided Ukraine between Poland and Russia.

The Cossack's ill-fated military alliance with Muscovy, however, resulted in a gradual take-over by the Muscovites. Poland quickly came to terms with Muscovy and the two nations partitioned Ukraine along the Dnipro River. The Cossacks attempted to free themselves of Russian rule in 1709 by allying themselves with the Swedes and attacking Muscovy. The Muscovites were victorious and from that day forward began to call themselves "Rus-sians." In 1775, Czarina Catherine II destroyed the famed Zaporzhian Fort, the last bastion of Cossack independence in Ukraine.

Tsarist rule over central Ukraine gradually replaced 'protection' over the subsequent decades. Through the Partitions of Poland Ukraine fell under the control of the Austrians in the extreme west (Galacia) and of the Russians elsewhere. Ottoman Empire control receded from south-central Ukraine, while the rule of Hungary over the Trans-Carpathian region continued.

Ukrainian writers and intellectuals were inspired by the nationalistic spirit stirring other European peoples existing under other imperial governments and became determined to revive the Ukrainian linguistic and cultural traditions and re-establish a Ukrainian nation-state. All through the 18th and 19th centuries writers and poets like Taras Shevchenko kept eastern Ukrainian hopes alive by writing about the glories of the past and urging Ukrainians to "cast off your chains."

The Russians in particular imposed strict limits on attempts to elevate Ukrainian language and culture, even banning its use and study. The fate of the Ukrainians was much more positive under the Austrians. During this time, the people of Ukraine began to accept a change of their name from Rus'/Rusyny (Ruthenia/Ruthenians) to Ukraine/Ukrainians.

The czarist Russian regime was overthrown in 1917 and eastern Ukrainians established the Ukrainian National Republic. On January 22, 1918, following the Communist takeover of Russia, the Ukrainian people declared their independence from Russia. At about the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and a Republic of Western Ukraine was created. On January 22, 1919, the two Ukrainian republics formally united during imposing ceremonies in Kyiv, the national capital.

Ukraine was able to maintain its independence for three years against overwhelming odds. Poland wanted to annex Galicia and invaded from the west. The communists wanted eastern Ukraine and invaded from the east. A czarist Russian army, still hoping to retrieve "all of Russia," invaded Ukraine from the south. The communists eventually defeated the Poles, the czarist Russian army, and the Ukrainians. Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with Poland. By 1921, the western part of the traditional territory had been incorporated into Poland, and the larger, central and eastern part became part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian SSR which partitioned Ukraine once again.

The Ukrainian national idea persevered during the inter-war years, and Ukrainian culture even enjoyed a revival due to Bolshevik concessions in the early Soviet years. By the late 1920s, however, the Soviet reaction was severe, particularly under Stalin, who imposed terror campaigns, which ravaged the intellectual class. He also carried out a genocide against the Ukrainian peasantry as part of his forced collectivization policies. Estimates of deaths from the 1932-1933 famine alone range from 7 million to 11 million.

After German and Soviet troops invaded Poland in 1939, the western Ukrainian regions were incorporated into the Soviet Union. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many Ukrainians, particularly in the west, welcomed them, but this did not last. In the encirclement battle of Kiev, acclaimed by the Soviets as a Hero City, more than 660,000 Soviet troops were taken captive.

Initially, the Germans were warmly received as "liberators" by the Ukrainian population. It should be noted that this generally stemmed from the ferocious repressions of the kulak peasants(a class that included almost all Ukrainians) by Stalin, and not to a feeling of nationalism. Soon, however, the Germans began their bloody regime of genocide, killing and deporting Jews and Ukrainian civilians and burning down entire villages, leading many Ukrainians to conclude that Nazi rule was just as terrible, or even worse, than the Soviet regime.

The Nazi's forced many Ukrainians into slave labor. Kyiv and other parts of the country were heavily damaged. Some Ukrainians began to resist Nazi Germany as well as the Soviet Union. Both Nazis and Soviets retaliated against the Ukrainians with severe reprisals, including mass executions, destruction of villages, and scorched earth campaigns. Resistance against Soviet Government forces continued as late as the 1950s.

Total civilian losses during the War and German occupation in Ukraine are estimated at 7 million. The great majority fell victim to atrocities, forced labor, and even massacres of whole villages in reprisal for attacks against Nazi forces. Of the estimated 11 million Soviet troops who fell in battle against the Nazis, about a fourth (2.7 million) were ethnic Ukrainians. Thus, the Ukrainian nation is distinguished as the first nation to fight the Axis powers during WW II in Carpatho-Ukraine and one that saw one of the greatest bloodsheds during the War. In addition, the first troops to liberate the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp were from the Ukrainian SSR.

Little changed for Ukraine over the next few decades. During periods of relative liberalization—as under Nikita Khrushchev from 1955 to 1964—Ukrainian communists pursued national objectives. In the years of perestroika, under U.S.S.R. President Mikhail Gorbachev, national goals were again advanced by Ukrainian officials.

The town of Pripyat, Ukraine was the site of the Chernobyl accident, which occurred in April 26, 1986 when a nuclear reactor exploded. The fallout contaminated large areas of northern Ukraine and even parts of Belarus.

Ukraine declared itself an independent state on August 24, 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and became a founding member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

On December 1, 1991 Ukrainian voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum formalizing independence from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union formally ceased to exist in December 25, 1991, and with this Ukraine's independence was officially recognized by the international community.

Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko

During the winter of 2004-2005 Ukraine experienced a peaceful political protest against fraudulent Presidential elections in Ukraine. "Orange Revolution" The Orange Revolution centered around Presidential contender Victor Yushchenko's orange campaign for political reform and national unity. Ukraine inaugurated Victor Yushchenko on January 23, 2005. In February of 2005, President Yushchenko pledged to expand awareness of the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. The First Lady of Ukraine, American-born Kateryna Chumachenko-Yushchenko is actively involved in expanding global awareness of the Ukrainian Genocide through the her foundation "Ukraine 3000".(1)

Sources: Myron B. Kuropas, The Ukrainians in America (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1972)
(1) 1991 Ukrainian Independence and Orange Revolution commentary by UGFF-USA, Inc.

Ukraine was formally incorporated into the USSR as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) in 1922. The Communists were aware that resistance to their regime was deep and widespread. To pacify the Ukrainian people and to gain control, Moscow initially permitted a great deal of local autonomy to exist in the UkSSR. The newly established Ukrainian Autocephalous (self-ruling) Orthodox Church and the new All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, non-Communist national institutions of great importance, were both permitted to continue their work until the end of the 1920's.

All of this changed once Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin wanted to consolidate the new Communist empire and to strengthen its industrial base. Ukrainian national aspirations were a barrier to those ends because even Ukrainian Communists opposed exploitation by Moscow. In Stalin's eyes, Ukraine, the largest of the non-Russian republics, would have to be subdued. Thus, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was placed under the jurisdiction of the Communist-controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Ukrainian bishops, priests and thousands of Christian lay leaders were sent to Siberian labor camps, the so-called "Gulag." Hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million, of Ukraine's intellectual leaders - writers, university professors, scientists, and journalists - were liquidated in purges ordered by Stalin. Not even loyal Ukrainian Communists were exempt from Stalin's terror. By 1939, practically the entire (98%) of Ukraine's Communist leadership had been liquidated.

Hardest hit by Stalin's policies were Ukraine's independent landowners, the so-called "kulaks" (kurkuly in Ukrainian). Never precisely defined, a kulak was a member of the alleged "upper stratum" of landowners but in reality anyone who owned a little land, even as little as 25 acres, came to be labeled as a kulak. Stalin ordered that all private farms would have to be collectivized. During the process, according to Soviet sources, which are no doubt on the conservative side, some 200,000 Ukrainian families were "de-kulakized" or dispossessed of all land. By the summer of 1932, 69.5% of all Ukrainian farm families and 80% of all farm land had been forcibly collectivized.

Stalin decided to eliminate Ukraine's independent farmers for three reasons: (1) they represented the last bulwark of resistance to totalitarian Russian control; (2) the USSR was in desperate need of foreign capital to build more factories and the best way to obtain that capital was to increase agricultural exports from Ukraine once known as "the breadbasket of Europe"; (3) the fastest way to increase agricultural exports was to expropriate land through a process of farm collectivization and to assign procurement quotas to each Soviet republic.

During the collectivization process, Ukrainian farmers resisted vigorously, often violently, especially when the GPU (Soviet secret police) and militia forced them to turn their land over to the government. Thousands of farmers were killed and millions more were deported to Siberia to be replaced by more trustworthy workers.

To increase exports and to break the back of remaining resistance, Moscow imposed grain procurement quotas on Ukraine that were 2.3 times the amount of grain marketed during the best year prior to collectivization. Laws were passed declaring all collective farm property "sacred and inviolate." Anyone who was caught hoarding food was subject to execution as an "enemy of the people" or, in extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for not less than 10 years. To make sure the new laws were strictly enforced, special "commissions" and "brigades" were dispatched to the countryside. In the words of one Sovietologist:

The work of these special "commissions" and "brigades" was marked with the utmost severity. They entered the villages and made the most thorough searches of the houses and barns of every peasant. They dug up the earth and broke into the walls of buildings and stoves in which the peasants tried to hide their last handfuls of food. They even in places took specimens of fecal matter from the toilets in an effort to learn by analysis whether the peasants had stolen government property and were eating grain.

Stalin succeeded in achieving his goals. The grain harvest of 1932 was greater than in 1931, providing more monies for industrial expansion. The cost to Ukraine, however, was catastrophic. Grain procurements continued even though it was clear to Soviet officials that more and more people were going hungry in the Ukrainian countryside. The result was inevitable. A famine, the magnitude of which staggers the imagination, struck Ukraine the still the Soviet government failed to provide relief. Detailed and documented descriptions of the horrors which prevailed in the rural areas of Soviet Ukraine have been presented by Ukrainian eye-witnesses, Congressional reports, and various newspaper accounts. Thomas Walker, and American journalist who traveled in Ukraine during the famine, left us an especially graphic account of the situation in one rural area:

About twenty miles south of Kiev (Kyiv), I came upon a village that was practically extinct by starvation. There had been fifteen houses in this village and a population of forty-odd persons. Every dog and cat had been eaten. The horses and oxen had all been appropriated by the Bolsheviks to stock the collective farms. In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied analysis. There were bones, pig-weed, skin, and what looked like a boot top in this pot. They way the remaining half dozen inhabitants eagerly watched this slimy mess showed the state of their hunger. One boy of about 15 years, whose face and arms and legs were simply tightly drawn skin over bones, had a stomach that was swollen to twice its normal size. He was an orphan; his father had died of starvation a month before and he showed me the body. The boy had covered the body with straw, there being no shovels in the village since the last raid of the GPU. He stated his mother had gone away one day searching for food and had not returned. This boy wanted to die - he suffered intensely with his swollen stomach and was the only one of the group who showed no interest in the pot that was being prepared.

The Soviet government has preserved the greatest secrecy concerning the exact number of persons who perished in Ukraine during the Genocide Famine, but analysis of recently revealed Soviet census data comparing 1939 with 1926 figures suggest that no fewer than ten million men, women , and children perished. According to American Sovietologists and other experts on the Stalin era, the fa in need never have occurred.

Despite the meager harvest, the peasants could have pulled though without starvation if there had been substantial abatement of the requisition of grain and foodstuffs. But he requisitions were intensified rather than relaxed; the government was determined to "teach the peasants a lesson" by the grim method of starvation...

By the beginning of the winter all the grain, including the seed grain of the farms in Ukraine, had been seized by the government. The last peasants lived on the last remaining potatoes, killed their last remaining livestock, they slaughtered cats and dogs, ate nettles and linden leaves. The acorns were all gone by January, the people began to starve. By March no food at all remained, and they died. The children died first, mostly the younger children, followed by the older people, then usually men before the women, and finally everyone else.

Sources: 1. Myron B. Kuropas, The Ukrainians in America (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company, 1972) pp.32-36. Also see James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine. 1918-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Hryhory Kostiuk, Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine: A Study of the Decade of Mass Terror (London: Atlantic Books, 1960) p. 129. 2. James Mace, "The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933; What Happened and Why," The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust (Jersey City: Ukrainian National Association, 1983) p. 29. 3. Clarence Manning, Ukraine Under the Soviets (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953) p. 97. 4. The Chicago American (March 6, 1935). 5. Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: A Portrait of Tyranny (New York?: Harper & Row Publishers, 1981) p. 65. 6. William Henry Chamberlin, The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944) pp. 59-60. 7. Robert Conquest, et. al., The Man-Made Famine in Ukraine (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public policy Research, 1984) p. 4. Our thanks to Dr. Myron B. Kuropas for contributing this article.

Joseph V. Stalin - Bolshevik revolutionary and the second leader of the Soviet Union.   Stalin
considered the national consciousness and desire for freedom of the Ukrainian people to be an obstacle
in the implementation of his policy of collectivization in the Soviet Union.  Of particular threat to Stalin
were the Ukrainian land-owning farmers whom he branded “kulaks”.

In 1929 Stalin introduced a policy for the liquidation of Ukrainian kulaks as a class and the policy was
legalized by the Soviet Central Committee in 1930.  Anyone with a Ukrainian national consciousness was
branded an “enemy of the State” by Stalin’s regime.  This initial campaign was geared toward kulaks
who resisted turning over their private farmland to the Soviet collective.  Those kulaks were dealt with
through massive arrests and deportations to forced labor camps, often to the concentration camps in
Siberia.  Those who weren’t arrested or deported were subject to the brutal terror of Stalin’s police and
oftentimes firing squad executions.

Despite the arrests, police seizures of their property and livestock, and even death sentences, the
kulaks continued to resist being subjugated by Moscow.  Stalin reacted by imposed unrealistically large
grain quotas on Ukraine in 1931.  As planned, Ukraine was unable to deliver on the grain quotas
because although it produced 27% of the entire Soviet grain harvest it was accountable for 38% of the
Soviet quota.  This intentionally unrealistic goal allowed Stalin to take draconian measures to penalize
the kulaks for their failure to meet the quota, and thus Stalin’s artificially imposed Famine in Ukraine
began.

In 1932 Stalin ordered Ukraine’s borders to be sealed to outside world.   In essence, Ukraine became
the world’s largest concentration camp.  He ordered massive quantities of grain and agricultural
products to be exported out of Ukraine to feed the rest of the Soviet Union and for foreign export. This,
along with Stalin’s ban on food imports into Ukraine, left insufficient reserves of food in Ukraine to feed
the population.

Kulak villages that were considered uncooperative or underproducers were blacklisted and completely
blockaded.  Anyone found to have foodstuffs in their possession was subject to execution, or in
extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for no less than 10 years in a Soviet concentration camp.  It
was standard practice to be sentenced to 10 years in a concentration camp for being in possession of a
potato or a handful of wheat kernels.

EXPERIENCES OF UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE SURVIVORS

"This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the
extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling
powers. The savage combination of words for the designation of a crime - an
artificial deliberately planned famine - is still incredible to many people
throughout the world, but indicates the uniqueness of the tragedy of 1933,
which is unparalleled, for a time of peace, in the number of victims it claimed."
Wasyl Hryshko - Genocide Survivor, 1933

"They were horrible years!  Mothers were slicing their children and sticking
them in pots to cook them, and then ate them.  My mother went into the field
where some horses were dying and brought back a horse's head.  About five
women bit into this horse's head.  What a horror it was; people were dropping
dead on the road.  If you pierced them the blood was like water.  So many
people died.  I remember every thing in the village, including the time they
took the crosses off the churches.  Two members from the Komsomol
(Communist Youth Organization) went up and took the crosses down.  They
buried them two meters into the ground and old women would go to kiss that
plot of ground...

Then they filled the wooden church full of wheat.  During the night mice made
their way through the walls, leaving little holes from which women filled their
buckets with the wheat.  The Komsomol took the wheat from the church, and
afterward it stood empty.  So many people died in the village that in the
cemetery they stopped putting up crosses.  During the winter an old woman
would take a cross from the cemetery to make a fire in her house so that her
children would not freeze."
Nina Popovych - Genocide Survivor -  born 1925, Lysycha Balka, Ukraine
- from Irene Antonovych and Lialia Kuchma's Generations: A Documentary  
of Ukrainians in Chicago, p. 32

"In 1932 and 1933 Kyiv seemed like a paradise to nearly villagers who had
been stripped of all they had by the Soviet government.  A no wonder:  some
villages were dying out completely, except for those who still had the courage
and strength to flee.  There were cases where mothers had gone mad and
killed a child to feed the rest of the family.  So, thousands of villagers flocked
to the city of Kyiv.  Many of the weak ones sat or lay down by buildings or
fences, most never to get up again.  Trucks driven by policemen or
Communist Youth League members, mobilized for that purpose, went around
picking up bodies or carrying those still alive somewhere outside the city
limits.  It was especially terrible to see mothers whose faces had turned black
from hunger with children who no longer cry, but only squeal, moving their
lips in an attempt to find sustenance where there was none.   People sought
salvation and found death.  I saw these things as  I walked to work through
the Haymarket on Pidvil'na Street near the Golden Gates and Volodymyr
Street."
Varvara Dibert - Genocide Survivor - from Congressional testimony
presented before the United States Ukraine Famine Commission in
Washington, DC, October 8, 1986.

"The spring of 1933 was the most horrible and tragic moment in the history of
the Ukrainian people.  In th fall of 1932 and the early winter of 1933 the
Russian Communist government had taken away the entire grain crop and all
food produce from the Ukrainian farmers in order to bring them into
submission and obedient servitude in the collective farms.

In the collective farms of my native district, which numbered 672 people, 164
died that fatal spring of 1933.  Actually this collective farm suffered little
compared with all the surrounding places, for to induce the farmers to remain
there, they were given 300 grams of bread per person baked from all kinds
of chaff and some liquid concoction cooked from refuse.  But there were
villages and hamlets where not a single person remained alive.  For instance,
in the large village of Chemychyna, in Neforoshchanske County, which
stretched for two and a half miles, though I do not recall it's population, and
the hamlet Rybky, of the Sukho-Mayachka village administration, where 60%
of the population died.

Here is another of the many incidents of the famine:

In my native village, there was a stallion kept for breeding mares.  He was
well fed, receiving 13 pounds of oats daily, but for some unknown reason, he
suddenly died.  This happened at the end of May 1933.  This district
administration forbid the stallion to be buried, until a special commission
arrived and held an inquest.

The dead stallion lay in the open for three days and began to decay.  A
guard was appointed to shield it from the starving people who would have
eaten the meat.  On the fourth day the commission arrived and, having
completed the investigation, ordered the stallion to be buried.

No sooner was that done and the commission gone, then like an avalanche,
the people descended on the dead, decaying stallion and, in an instant,
nothing was left of him.  Violent arguments ensued, because some had
grabbed more than their share.

A spectacle I shall never forget was when a 16 year old boy who, beside his
stepmother, was the only survivor in the family, and swollen from starvation,
crawled up to the place where the dead stallion had been and finding a hoof,
snatched it in both hands and gnawed at it furiously.  The boy was never
seen again, and rumors circulated, that he had been eaten by his
stepmother.

It was forbidden for people to leave their villages.  GPU* guards blocked all
roads and railways.  Any food that farmers happened to be carrying was
taken away from them.  For picking a stray head of wheat or a frozen potato
or beet left behind in the field, a person was sentenced to ten years in prison
or concentration camp, according to the ruling passed by the government
August 7, 1932.

Thousands of corpses littered the streets, byways and buildings.  Deaths
occurred at such a rate that the government could not keep up with burying
the corpses.

During all this time there was not the slightest sign of any famine in the
neighboring Russian territory.  The Soviet press never mentioned the famine
in Ukraine but on the contrary, (even) printed misleading propaganda about
"flowering Ukraine" and her great achievements in industry and
collectivization.

To cover up its bloody crime, the Soviet government warned all doctors not
to state true cause of death on death certificates.  Instead, they stated a
prevalent digestive ailment was the cause."

*GPU = Soviet secret police

Polikarp Kybkalo - Genocide Survivor testimony presented before the
United States Ukraine Famine Commission in Washington, DC on October 8,
1986

In 1931, I was ten years old, and I remember well what happened in my native
village in the Kyiv region.  In the spring of that year, we had virtually no
seed.  The Communists had taken all the grain, and although they saw that
we were weak and hungry, they came and searched for more grain.  My
mother had stashed away some corn that had already sprouted, but they
found that, too, and took it.  What we did manage to sow, the starving people
pulled up out of the ground and ate.

In the villages and on the collective farms (our village had two collectives), a
lot of land lay fallow, because people had nothing to sow, and there wasn't
enough manpower to do the sowing.  Most people couldn't walk, and those
few who could, had no strength.  When, at harvest time, there weren't
enough local people to harvest the grain, others were sent in to help on the
collectives.  These people spoke Russian, and they were given provisions.

After the harvest, the villages tried to go out in the field to look for a few
gleanings of wheat or cabbage, and the Communists would arrest them and
shoot them or send them to Siberia.  My aunt, Tatiana Rudenko, was taken
away.  They said she had stolen the property of the collective farm.

That summer, the vegetables couldn't even ripen.  People pulled them out of
the ground, still green, and ate them.  People ate leaves, nettles, milk thistle.  
By autumn, no one had any chickens or cattle.  Here and there, someone
had a few potatoes or beets.  People coming from other villages, told the
very same story.  They would travel all over trying to get food.  They would
fall by the roadside, and none of us could do anything to help them.  Before
the ground froze, they were just left lying there dead in the snow or, if they
died in the house, they were dragged out to the cattle- shed, and they would
lie there frozen until spring.  There was no one to dig graves.

All the train stations were overflowing with starving, dying people.  Everyone
wanted to go to Russia (the RSFSR) because it was said that there was no
famine there.    Very few (of those left) returned.  They all perished on the
way.  They weren't allowed into Russia and were turned back at the border.  
Those who somehow managed to get to Russia, were able to save
themselves.

In February of 1933, there were so few children left that the schools were
closed.  By this time, there wasn't a cat, dog, or sparrow in the village.  In that
month, my cousin Mykailo Rudenko died.  A month later my aunt Nastia
Klymenko and her son, my cousin Ivan, died, as well as my classmate, Dokia
Klymenko.  There was cannibalism in our village.

On my farmstead, an 18 year old boy, Danylo Hukhlib, died and his mother
and younger sisters and brothers cut him up and ate him.  The Communists
came and took them away, and we never saw them again.  People said they
took them a little ways of and shot them right away, the little ones and the
older ones, together.

At that time, I remember, I had heavy, swollen legs.  My sister Tamara, had a
large swollen stomach, and her neck was long, and thin, like a bird's neck.  
People didn't look like people.  They were more like starving ghosts.

The ground thawed, and they began to take the dead to the ravine in ox
carts.  The air was filled with the reeking odor of decomposing bodies.  The
wind carried this odor far and wide.  It was thus over all of Ukraine."
Tatiana Pawlichka - Genocide Survivor testimony before the United States
Ukraine Famine Commission in Washington, DC on October 8, 1986.

MEMORIES OF UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE WITNESSES

"Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter 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 have
forgotten how to sing! I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-
smacking of the fat foreigners enjoying our butter..."  
Victor Kravchenko - Former Soviet trade official and defector

"... On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from
lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU*carrying out the
instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the
country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had
shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had
reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert."  
* GPU = Soviet secret police
Malcolm Muggeridge - British foreign correspondent -  May 1933

"this famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any
overwhelming natural catastrophe or such complete exhaustions of the
country's resources in foreign or civil wars"
William Henry Chamberlin - Correspondent for the Christian Science
Monitor who was originally pro-Soviet.  He was one of the few Westerners
who personally toured Ukraine during the Genocide of 1932-1933.  Russia's
Iron Age (London, 1935) p. 82.

"...(Our reporting) served Moscow's purpose of smearing the facts out of
recognition and declaring the situation which, had we reported simply and
clearly, might have worked up enough public opinion abroad to force
remedial measures.  And every correspondent each in his own measure, was
guilty of collaborating in this monstrous hoax on the world."
Eugene Lyons  - Moscow United Press correspondent from 1928 - 1934.  
Assignment in Utopia, p. 573.

" I saw ravages of the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine - hordes of families in
rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment
windows their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous
heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles."  
Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed p. 68

“About 20 miles south of Kyiv I came upon a village that was practically
extinct by starvation.    There had been 15 houses in this village and a
population of 40-odd persons. Every dog and cat had been eaten.  The
horses and oxen had all been appropriated by the Soviets to stock the
collective farms.  In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied analysis.  
There were bones, pig-weed, skin and what looked like a boot top in this pot.  
The way the remaining half dozen inhabitants eagerly watched this slimy
mess showed the state of their hunger.  One boy of about 15 years of age,
whose face and arms and legs were simply tightly drawn skin over bones,
had a stomach that was swollen to twice its normal size.  He was an orphan;
his father had died of starvation a month before and he showed me the
body.  The boy had covered the body with straw, there being no shovels in
the village since the last raid of the Soviet secret police.  He stated his
mother had gone away one day searching for food and had not returned.  
This boy wanted to die – he suffered intensely with his swollen stomach and
was the only one of the group who showed no interest in the pot that was
being prepared.
Thomas Walker - American journalist who traveled in Ukraine during the
Genocide of 1932-1933.

"Moscow employed the famine as a political weapon against Ukrainians in the
year 1932-1933.  The famine was in its entirety artificially induced and
organized."
F.M. Pidigo - Economist who lived and worked in Ukraine during the
Genocide of 1932-1933.  Investigation of Communist Takeover & Occupation
of the Non-Russian Nations of the USSR, p. 35.

"FOUR EARS OF CORN"
Recollection of the horrors of the Famine of 1933 had become a sort of ritual
in our family. I heard the traumatic story hundreds of times. When I was a
child, I ran away every time my mother began to retell her horrible story. But
even the bits, I caught on my way out, were enough to give me nightmares.
When in time, I became a mother myself, I better grasped the pain my poor
mother suffered, and understood the scope of her tragedy. Her endurance
and unyielding faith fueled her to survive it all for us, her second family.

The Famine of '33 left lasting scars not only on my parents for the rest of
their lives, but to this day, on us children. Unlike my father, who spoke openly
about the evils of communism, but wept, trembled and shut down, when
asked about the Famine, my mother continued to fear the Soviets even in
America, but spoke incessantly of the Famine.

When she spoke—I listened. I knew by heart the sequence of events and the
wording of her story. At times, when she jumbled a memory, I cued her
discretely. Deeply engraved in my memory is my mother’s last account of the
Famine, a month before her death in June of 1983. Her stories became more
detailed. Mother named people and events that I had never heard before.
Her uncharacteristically fearless tone and serenity struck me as she began
her narrative.

I remember that moment vividly. I see my mother’s tidy gray braid on the side
of her white pillow. While caressing her head, I asked how she was feeling,
she sighed sadly: “ My soul will never rest. My poor darlings!”  She lamented.
“Maybe your father and I are guilty. WE COULDN'T GET AWAY! We tried to
go to Kharkiv or Donbas but the commander commissar refused to issue us
our documents. The Army sealed the borders and shot those who
approached the railroad. Oh my Lord! There were so many bodies by the
tracks!” In her quest for relief of her lifelong open wound, mother continued
her story, as if she were telling it to me for the first time.

MY MOTHER’S STORY
“All our supply of wheat and other winter provisions were taken from us,
including those meager reserves buried in the ground in the orchard or
hidden in the woods. Like your grandfather, people were thrown out of their
houses and many disappeared during the night. None dared to question.
Everyone lived in fear.

“I recall,” she continued, “that in the fall of 1932, I picked four ears of corn
from behind our shed and put them out to dry on the bench, so I could make
some corn flour for the children. Someone reported it to the collective farm
leadership. As an already branded ‘class enemy’, I was accused of stealing
the corn from the collective farm and sentenced to five years without witness
or trial. All four children were left with your father. He had great merits in the
eyes of the Soviet State for he came from a poor family, and therefore was a
“proletarian”. Fed’ko, your oldest brother, was then 11 years old and tended
cows at the collective farm.

At the prison, I was assigned the job of pickling cabbages and cucumbers. In
the spring, I received a desperate letter from your father. Despite the coded
wording of his letter, I understood that my little ones were dying of hunger.
There are no words to describe my despair. That night, I escaped from
prison. I could think only of saving the children.

Afraid of meeting someone on my way, I wandered through the woods on my
way home. The villages seemed deserted. Only once did I hear a feeble
human voice calling me, at the edge of a village. A man, leaning against a
house, was inviting me to stay overnight. My heart stopped. In his shiny
bulging eyes, I was sure I saw a mad man. I ran as fast as my feet could carry
me. Intuitively, I feared the worst. I had to get home as soon as possible.
Putting my destiny in the Lord’s hands, I waded across the stream without
knowing how to swim. When I finally reached home, I found my darlings still
alive. Swollen, unconscious but alive! I didn’t save them! I couldn’t save
them! All three died in my arms a few days apart, just like Oksanka, three
days before I was taken to prison.

It was now against the law to bury them in the orchard, as it was customary.
The communist rulers threw my angels’ bodies on a cart poled on top of
other bodies. This image haunts me all my life—my little Marussia, Halynka
and Tarasko being tossed from the cart into a pit outside the village without
even a prayer…

My only reason for living was Fed’ko. I was a fugitive and had to hide. To
survive, we roamed the fields in search of fallen grains amongst the stubble
of the harvested fields. We no longer feared being shot for this crime against
the communist state. But there was no other place of work for a peasant but
the collective farm, and I had to work. Fed’ko was afraid, he begged me not
to go. I promised him that I would return. I promised…"

Mother always broke down when she reached this part. Anticipating it, I
sobbed. After calming down, she continued:

“I was standing in line with the others peasants. When my turn came, the
brigadier asked my name without lifting his head. Upon my response, he
shifted his eyes to a list in front of him, then stood-up and pointing a finger at
me shouted: “You, Evdokia Kononivna Boyko, are a fugitive from Soviet law!
People like you are a threat to our state. You shall serve your term in full!”
My whole world crumbled again. Oh my dearest child! The Lord only knows
where I got the strength to shout to the brigadier: “If your children were dying
from starvation, wouldn’t you have run away to save them?” He silently
lowered his eyes. I was taken to prison on the spot to serve the remainder of
my five-year term.”

In 1937, my mother was one of thousands of prisoners on their way to
Siberia. She had volunteered to go, for she had lost hope. In Poltava, the
prisoners were let out of their wagons and told to kneel in rows facing the
sunset. A few dozen prisoners were freed. Blinded by the sun, mother
thought she was hearing things: “Evdokia Kononivna Boyko, you are free!”
She did not move. She thought it was a dream. Then she heard her name
again, “Evdokia Kononivna B… YOU ARE FREE!”

At the prosecutor’s office two letters awaited my mother, letters written by her
two former prison wardens. Their recommendation was to free her on
grounds of her hardworking, peasant nature and honesty—so indispensable
for the building of socialism. The woman prosecutor believed them.

One can only imagine how she ran; or rather, how she flew on her wings of
joy from Poltava to Fed’ko! However, her happiness was short lived. That
same horrible year of 1937, pregnant with my older sister, mother was on trial
again, this time, accused of drowning a swine in a water tank while on her
night watch shift at the state pig-breeding farm.

The indictment stated that my mother, a ‘class enemy’ of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republic (USSR), worked against progress in the planned economy
of the state having drowned the swine. The communist system did not allow
livestock to die.

The inquest lasted two years. A 10-year sentence hung over my mother’s
head. A courageous veterinarian risked his life to pass an honest verdict: the
swine had died from natural causes. A necropsy revealed that there was no
water in the swine’s lungs. Fearing dismissal or even imprisonment, the farm
leader dropped the swine in the tank, conveniently pointing at my mother--
already an enemy of the state.

MY PILGRIMAGE
Poltava greeted me with a dense grayness that penetrated both faces and
nature. In the heavy fog, the naked trees resembled giant skeletons, and one
could feel and even smell despair in the air. So, this was my Ukraina! What
have they done to your soul and beauty? Kept on pounding in my head.

A solemn Panakhyda* was held in the Tower, the only standing structure, of
the once historic Uspenskyj Cathedral dynamited by the Soviets. The angel
voices of the children’s choir echoed in the Holy Tower: “Vichnaya Pamiat’,
Vichnaya Pamiat’, Vichnaya Pamiat”; in memory eternal of Marussia, Halynka,
Tarasko, Oksanka and Fed’ko: “May the Lord safeguard them were all the
righteous rest”

After the gloominess of the previous evening, the morning was bright and
crisp. I was on my way to fulfill the most sacred part of my promise to mother.
The thought of standing on the ground where my ancestors lived, and where
my siblings were born and died, was overwhelming.

Kilochky had not changed much since my parents left it 50 years before. The
villagers were of the same lineage, and I was still able to see my grandfather’
s furrow between his field and his neighbor’s. Only the raven where the
bodies of the innocent victims of the Genocide, was leveled off, and a
children’s play ground was built on it.

To the children’s surprise, God was in their midst, as a prayer was sung for
the first time on their ground, and the smoke from the censer rose to heaven
proclaiming God’s love and resurrection to all those innocent souls. May they
rest in peace.

* Panakhyda- Memorial Service
** Vichnaya Pamiat’ -Memory Eternal

Written by Halyna Boyko-Hrushetsky
“Four Ears of Corn” (revised) was originally published in 1993 in “Witness, Stories of
Genocide and Urban Survival” created for middle school children in Chicago through a
grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

Ukrainian National Museum
Ukrainian Genocide Gallery

2249 West Superior Street
Chicago, IL  60612
USA
(312) 421-8020
http://ukrainiannationalmuseum.org/

The Ukrainian National Museum, located in the heart of Chicago's Ukrainian Village,
houses an impressive collection of Ukrainian artifacts.

The newly added Ukrainian Genocide Gallery (2003) contains a collection of
Ukrainian Genocide of 1932-1933 documents, artwork and recently declassified
photographs from the Former Soviet Union.

The Museum library houses materials in English and Ukrainian on the topic of the
Ukrainian Genocide of 1932-1933.

The Museum hours are:  Thursday - Sunday          11:00 AM to 4:00 PM
           Monday - Wednesday      By Appointment

UGFF-USA Ukrainian Genocide Brochures are available for FREE at the
Museum

A Curriculum Guide for Teaching Genocides with a Focus on the Holodomor, the Famine Genocide in Ukraine
Created by Motria Melnyk 2011

Teaching the Holodomor (Ukrainian Genocide)
An educator's guide to teaching the Ukrainian Genocide
compiled and coordinated by Oksana A. Wynnyckyj
for the World Congress of Ukrainians, November 2007

Visit the Ukrainian National Museum’s Ukrainian Genocide Exhibit

The Ukrainian National Museum is located in the heart of Chicago's century old Ukrainian
Village.  The museum houses an impressive collection of Ukrainian artifacts.  The newly
added Ukrainian Genocide Gallery (2003) contains a large collection of Ukrainian Genocide of
1932-1933 documents, artwork and recently declassified photographs from the former Soviet
government.  The Museum library houses articles, pamphlets and books in both English and
Ukrainian on the topic of the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932-1933.  Ukrainian Genocide Famine
Foundation- USA Ukrainian Genocide Brochures are available for free at the Museum.

The Museum hours are:   Thursday - Sunday          11:00 AM to 4:00 PM
                             Monday - Wednesday      By Appointment

School tours may be arranged by calling (312) 421-8020.

The Ukrainian National Museum is located at 2249 West Superior Street in Chicago, IL  60612.
The museum has a parking lot and is easily accessible via CTA bus route 66.

     Paper on the Topic:
                                         The Western Ukrainian community and the Holodomor in the Ukrainian SSR 1932-1933



                                                                                                               Olena Fedchuk
                                                                                   Student in the Humanities Faculty (History)
                                                                                    National University of the Ostroh Academy
                                                                                                         Ostroh, Ukraine - 2004





Introduction     
1. The background to the Holodomor of 1932-33      
2. Famine and the stance of Western Ukrainian society       
Conclusions       
Bibliography     

Introduction

The importance of this topic is clear. 20th Century Ukraine survived an immense tragedy that was organized by the soviet regime: the famine of
1932-33. Although more than 70 years have passed since that time, this problem was and will remain real as long as the Ukrainian people
remember it, until the last eye-witness dies. This is why it is critical to objectively assess the events of 1932-33, not only to provide information
about this catastrophe from all points of view, but also to ensure that the famine in Ukraine is recognized as an act of genocide.

The purpose of this study is to cast light on attitudes in the Western Ukrainian community to the artificially organized famine or Holodomor on the
territory of Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33.

To this end, two objectives have been established:

•        to show how the Holodomor affected the attitudes of the population of Western Ukraine towards the soviet regime; and
•        to place attitudes towards the Holodomor among Western Ukrainians in the context of Polish-Soviet relations.

1. The background to the Holodomor of 1932-33

The 1921 Treaty of Riga transferred 130,000 sq. km of Western Ukrainian territory to Poland, along with a population of over 10 million, which
constituted nearly 30% of the population of Poland at the time [9, p. 336]. What was unusual about the situation was that Western Ukraine forcibly
found itself part of Poland, so for the people who lived there, Poland was seen as an invader. Moreover, Polish policy towards Ukrainians was
typically vague and rife with unfair and severely discriminatory practices.

For these reasons, in the 1920’s a large portion of Western Ukrainian intelligentsia responded favorably to the policy of “ukrainianization”
announced by the Ukrainian SSR in 1923 and the blossoming of Ukrainian culture alongside the New Economic Plans in the economy. Prior to
1925, nearly 50,000 Halychans [Galicians] participated in the rebuilding of the economy and culture of the Republic [1, p. 428].

Initially the Republic responded by entrusting them with responsible posts in both the Party and state organs. Indeed, the involvement of Western
Ukrainian intelligentsia in serving the needs of the industrial and cultural managers of the Ukrainian SSR both raised its image, on one hand,
and on the other weakened the influence of the Ukrainian National Republic government in exile, leading to a huge split in the national emigrant
community.

The bolshevik Party and the Soviet Government had a clearly defined goal in its policy towards Western Ukraine. Vladimir Lenin, and eventually
Josef Stalin and his entourage, made the point of using the occupation of Western Ukraine by Poland as one of the more effective means of
exporting the communist revolution and Russian expansion to the countries of Eastern Europe. Moscow was expanding its influence in Western
Ukraine, mostly through local communists.

The WU Communist Party boasted some 5,000 rank-and-file members and kept close contact with the CP (bolshevik) of Ukraine, the Russian
Communist Party (bolshevik) and the Comintern, blindly following Moscow’s orders. The leaders of the CPWU had even prepared a “Mobilization
Plan for underground work in case of war against the Soviet Union,” which included launching a partisan movement on Polish territory [11, p.
225].

Yet another form of interference in the life of the country is worth mentioning. The bolsheviks selectively financed non-communist forces through
the government of the Ukrainian SSR. For instance, in 1927, the Ukrainian SSR offered to set aside US $168,100 for this purpose. This money
was to be used to do battle with Ukrainian national-democratic associations and nationalist parties by supporting organizations that were leftish
in orientation—Selrob, for instance, was given US $30,000 a year—, sovietophile student organizations, and private Ukrainian schools, who were
given US $77,100. The Taras Shevchenko Learning Society in L’viv was given US $12,000.

The situation began to change in the mid-1920s, when the Central Committee of the CP (b) of Ukraine made a decision to refuse entry to
Halychans onto the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. The reasons for this change of face were explained in a letter from the CC CP (b) U of 20
September, 1924:

“The influx of political emigrants from Halychyna, Poland, Czechoslovakia and especially Western Ukraine because of Polish terror, is growing
stronger. Our communist press in Poland and Czechoslovakia is portraying the economic situation in the Ukrainian SSR as the flourishing of the
country… This is partly strengthening our draw for political migration. However, when these political emigrants are confronted with our realities,
and compare it with the information in the communist press at home, they are deeply disillusioned.” [9, p. 337]
In 1930, the CC CP (b) U made a decision to stop financing Ukrainian institutions and organizations beyond the borders of the USSR.
Systematic reporting of events on Western Ukrainian territory in the soviet media was also stopped. Contact between academics and artists from
the two parts of Ukraine lost its meaning.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the Stalinist totalitarian regime moved into broad-based, systematic terror against its own populace. In the
Ukrainian SSR, an outright hunt began for those who had come from Western Ukraine, who began to be fired from their jobs, jailed, sent to
concentration camps, and unfairly sentenced to death [4, p. 308]. This had an immediate negative impact on the political situation in eastern
Halychyna and Volyn. Starting in the 1930s, ukrainianization was swiftly dropped, persecution began against the intelligentsia, writers and artists,
former military and students, workers—in short, anyone who had come from Western Ukraine. In 1929 came collectivization, the Year of the
Great Breakthrough, 1929, and then the particularly terrible famine or Holodomor of 1932-33. All this swiftly killed pro-soviet sentiments among a
large portion of the Western Ukrainian intelligentsia and began a reversal of attitude [13, p. 37]. This was inevitable with natives of Western
Ukraine who had actively engaged in the socio-economic and military life of Soviet Ukraine becoming the front line of the Ukrainian intelligentsia
who were caught up in the purges and persecutions.

When a refugee from the USSR, V. Yurchenko, whose real name was Yuriy Karas-Hlynskiy, published his memoirs, he raised a furore among
communist and sovietophile elements in Western Ukraine [2, p. 309]. Yurchenko had managed to escape from Solovki, prison islands on the
White Sea north of Archangelsk, and to make his way back to Halychyna. He then wrote his “Solovetski Memoirs,” which came out in print in 1931
and became an immediate bestseller. In 1932, these memoirs became the basis of a court case called the “Yurchenko affair.” The head of the
Shevchenko Society in L’viv, K. Studynskiy, decided to turn detective with the aim of proving that Yurchenko’s memoirs were the “unhealthy fruit of
an unhealthy imagination.” He started by talking to employees at the Soviet embassy in L’viv [10, p. 165].

The Yurchenko Affair resulted in Studynskiy being removed from his position as head of the Shevchenko Society and was a major failure of soviet
diplomacy in Poland. It seriously damaged the position of sovietophile elements in Western Ukraine, as it became clear that with the Soviet
Union’s politics growing more and more totalitarian, defending the “fatherland of workers” with a clear conscience became a real exercise in the
impossible. The price of compromising with the bolsheviks in order to get funding in support of Ukrainian science and culture in Western
Ukraine became much to high, especially as the Ukrainian SSR began to shut down the “ukrainianization project.” Indeed, ukrainianization within
the Ukrainian SSR suddenly provided the excuse on which stalinism formulated the myths of “nationalism” and “national-deviationism” that
made it possible to “grab” and “neutralize” the huge army of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” [1, p. 68]

2. Famine and the stance of Western Ukrainian society
The psychological fracture at the beginning of the 1930s between Western Ukrainian society and the USSR caused the collapse of Moscow’s
efforts. The Holodomor of 1932-33 in Soviet Ukraine had a particularly shocking effect on Western Ukrainians. Information about the real state of
affairs in the Ukrainian countryside the collectivization was carried by refugees from the Soviet Union who fled across the Polish border in the
hundreds. Some of these refugees were sent back after being interrogated by Polish authorities. To avoid this kind of situation, Soviet authorities
began to increase the number of soldiers along the border with Poland and began to help residents in border areas with foodstuffs [7, p. 410]
Still, the Western Ukrainian press was able to print many eye-witness accounts of the tragedy.

One famous Western Ukrainian political and community leader, Maria Rudnytska, commented at this time: “Throughout 1932, persistent rumor
circulated in L’viv that there was a famine in Soviet Ukraine. But nobody at that point understood how serious and threatening the situation really
was. When word came through of Skrypnyk’s suicide, we began to realize that on the other side of the Zbruch something truly awful was taking
place. This was what finally got the Ukrainian community on this side to actively speak out against this deadly threat to the Ukrainian people.” [11,
pp 405-406]
In fact, the death of Mykola Skrypnyk on 7 July 1933 shocked the Western Ukrainian community. Accusations from the bolshevik leadership that
he was trying to get Les’ Kurbas into the party, that he wanted to import 1,500 teachers from Western Ukraine into the Ukrainian SSR who had
been “prepared for shipment by western imperialists,” and so on, were striking in their absurdity.

As a consequence of the famine and persecutions in the Ukrainian SSR, the number of sovietophiles dropped steeply and people began to
leave the Communist Party of Western Ukraine in droves. In a short time, the Party’s membership was down to 2,600. The arrest in Soviet
Ukraine of the CPWU leadership demoralized the organization. Notably, between 1933 and 1938, the number of members of the CP (b) U
shrank by 2,681, that is, nearly in half.

The suicide of M. Stronskiy, secretary at the Soviet consulate in L’viv, was also widely publicized. After all, Stronskiy had been a senior officer with
the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the Ukrainian Halych Army. [1, p. 196] The reasons for his 2 August 1933 death were widely debated in the
Ukrainian press. The paper Dilo declared that the death of M. Stronskiy was connected to the “anti-Ukrainian terror on the other side of the
Zbruch.” It noted the impact of the suicides of writer Mykola Khvyloviy, Skrypnyk and Stronskiy on Halychans: “We know the power of this
demonstrative act of theirs. The shots that killed Khvyloviy and Skrypnyk put paid to the remains of Halychan sovietophilia…All the most honest
individuals began to flee the bolshevik camp…admissions, repentances, anti-bolshevik revelations began to rain down, and pro-soviet
publications died a quick death…” [2, p. 197] After Stronskiy’s suicide, Western Ukrainian academics in the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences—
K. Studynskiy, F. Kolessa, V. Shchurat and M. Vozniak—delivered a letter to the Soviet consulate in L’viv announcing that they were turning down
their titles as academicians. [1, p. 198]
On 22 September 1933, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine agreed to “publish the resolution
withdrawing the title of academician from Vozniak, Kolessa, Studynskiy, and Shchurat on behalf of the RNK simultaneously with the publication of
the resolution of the Presidium of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences on this matter.” [1, p. 201] On 4 October 1933, a session of the AUAS
Presidium removed their titles “as enemies of the working masses of Ukraine.” The paper Dilo noted that the AUAS resolution “formally cut the
last cultural tie with Halychyna, which became impossible because of the all-powerful control of the GPU [the precursor to the NKVD] over all the
spiritual life of Greater Ukraine.” [1, p. 205]
Information about the persecutions and famine in the Ukrainian SSR raised many questions. Assurances from staff at the USSR consulate in L’
viv that these were “fantasies of the bourgeois media,” did little to calm the Western Ukrainian community. In addition to the press and diplomatic
channels, information about the famine in Soviet Ukraine was coming to Western Ukraine through Ukrainian emigrant organizations from
several western countries that were doing what they could to get the attention of both their communities and their governments to the tragic
events unfolding in Ukraine.

For instance, the Ukrainian Canadian community sent an appeal to the President of the United States to provide assistance to those suffering
from the famine, while the former Ukrainian Hetman, Pavlo Skoropadskiy, called on western governments not to recognize the USSR. [3, p. 89] In
Western Ukraine, UNDO, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and parties of a social-democratic and liberal-democratic orientation all
condemned the genocide of Bolshevik Moscow against the Ukrainian people. 7, p. 106] A 24 June 1933 “Resolution of the Central Committee of
UNDO about the situation in Soviet Ukraine” declared: “The communists’ state policy has led to a situation where masses of Ukrainians are
dying of hunger. The Central Committee of the Ukrainian National-Democratic Union utterly condemns this usurpist policy of the communists
against Ukraine, which has been calculated to lead to the physical and psychological destruction of the Ukrainian nation.” [8, p. 107]
On 16 July 1933, at the initiative of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation (UPR), the faction of Ukrainian deputies in the Polish Sejm, an
advisory session of representatives of different political forces was called to discuss the famine in Soviet Ukraine. After some preparatory work,
the UPR called a second session on 25 July 1933 in which representatives of 44 political, scientific, cultural, educational and economic
organizations and societies took part. [11, p. 408] At this session, the Ukrainian Civic Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine (CCSU) was formed
and became the center of all activities tied to the Holodomor. The Committee was chaired by D. Levytskiy, the head of UNDO and the UPR, while
practical work was carried out by the Action Committee headed by V. Mudriy, M. Rydnytska, V. Doroshenko, and Z. Pelenskiy. The Action
Committee set up a network of subcommittees for the Salvation of Ukraine on Western Ukrainian territory. The only groups that did not join the
CCSU were Halychan radicals and the social-democrats. They set up their own committee called the Joint Committee of Ukrainian Social-
Radical and Social-Democratic Parties. [3, p. 96]
The first step taken by the CCSU was an appeal to the Ukrainian population to that was signed by 44 regional organizations in Eastern
Halychyna. Even before it appeared in the local press, the Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, Andrey Sheptytskiy issued an
appeal on 24 July 1933, called “Ukraine is in its death throes.” [8, p. 96] In this appeal, he challenged “Christians all over the world, all those who
believe in God, but especially all workers and peasants…to join in the voice of protest and pain and spread it as far as possible to all the
countries of the world.” The appeal by Metropolitan Sheptytskiy was welcomed positively and received support from many European countries. [8,
p. 98]
Moved by Sheptytskiy’s appeal, the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal T. Innitzer, called on the European community to help Soviet Russia (the
USSR), where millions of people were dying of hunger and where there were known instances of cannibalism. Soviet diplomats cynically
responded: “In Russia, we have neither cannibals nor cardinals.” [1, p. 335] The International Coordinating Committee for Help to the Hungry,
established in Vienna, collected a substantial number of donations, but efforts to hand these over to official representatives of Moscow hit a
stone wall.

In L’viv, the Action Committee prepared a series of instructions about how to set up local civic subcommittees, how to organize protest actions,
how to work with refugees from the Ukrainian SSR, how to collect cash donations, grain and clothing, and information on the activities of local
committees. The CCSU issued two brochures at this time: 1) “Evil times in Ukraine” by V. Mudriy analyzed the economic and domestic policy of
Moscow that had led to the catastrophe in Ukraine; 2) “An act of salvation for Greater Ukraine” by A. Zhuk talked about the activities of the civic
committees. [11, p. 407]
29 October 1933 was declared a national day of mourning and protest in Western Ukraine. All community organizations in both the cities and
countryside of Western Ukraine held meetings and public rallies of the Ukrainian population. On this day, donations were also collected to help
those suffering from famine in Ukraine. One of the main objectives of the CCSU was to organize international help for those dying of hunger.
At the beginning of September 1933, Maria Rudnytska and Z. Pelenskiy were sent to Geneva. Their tasks were: 1) to establish contact with
Ukrainian committees to help the hungry in Prague, Berlin, Vienna, Brussels and Paris; 2) to participate in the Congress of Nationalists which
was to take place in Switzerland; 3) to interest international humanitarian organizations in the famine in Ukraine; 4) to get the famine in Ukraine
on the agenda of the next session of the League of Nations. [11, p. 411]
Rudnytska remembers how they began their work by visiting the editorial offices of well-known Swiss papers and handing them materials on the
famine. Swiss newspapers began to print this information just before the League of Nations session. When this happened, the USSR began to
manipulate the situation with lies and blackmail. First, it denied categorically that there was any famine in Ukraine, declaring all information in the
western press slander and malicious anti-soviet propaganda, adding for good measure that those publishing the articles were agents of
fascism. It is worth noting that even many years later, V. Molotov, one of Josef Stalin’s close advisors, categorically denied the existence of a
famine in 1933, saying that those people who talked about one were “unaware and enemies of communism.” [13, p. 423]
However, all the efforts of the Halychyna representatives to get the issue of the Holodomor on the agenda of the League of Nations session were
in vain. Eventually, Rudnytska confirmed: “Only the governments of countries who were members of the League had the right to put something
on the agenda. To imagine that, given the international situation at the time, any country might be interested in getting into a scrap with the Soviet
Union and to take on itself the role of the champion of the rights of the starving was worse than hopeless. Ukrainians themselves had no
opportunity to get the League of Nations to worry about the tragic situation in Ukraine, because we had no legal basis on which to do so.” [11, p.
424] The Western delegation was supported by the representative of the Ukrainian National Republic in exile.

The leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists sent a written protest against Moscow’s artificially organized famine. But the protest
did not end there. An OUN conference 3 June 1933 in Berlin adopted a resolution to assassinate the Soviet consul in L’viv. M. Lemyk, a graduate
of the L’viv Academic Gymnasia was given responsibility for carrying this out. The then territorial leader of OUN, Stepan Bandera, told a Polish
court in the summer of 1936, “I personally passed this order on to Lemyk and gave him both the rationale and the instructions. We knew that the
bolsheviks would present such a murder in a false light, so we decided that Lemyk would turn himself in to the police rather than shoot at them,
so that he would have an opportunity to make a court case out of it.” [10, p. 137]
The Lemyk court case was indeed sensational. Many journalists came to L’viv, including the TASS correspondent and representatives of the
Soviet consulate in Warsaw. All the Ukrainian lawyers in L’viv, led by K. Levytskiy, agreed to defend Lemyk in court. But the Polish judge rejected
this option because Poland and the USSR had just finished signing a mutual non-aggression pact. Polish authorities thought this might spoil
Polish-Soviet interstate relations. In the end, only V. Starosolskiy, S. Shukhevych and S. Biliak were allowed to defend Lemyk. He would have
been sentenced to death, except that he was not yet 21. Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. [3, p. 134] Notably, this act raised
enormous sympathy for OUN among many in the Ukrainian community, especially the young. The Organization’s membership grew substantial
following the Holodomor in the Ukrainian SSR and the mass persecutions by Polish authorities on Western Ukrainian territory, which were
subjected to repeated efforts at “pacification.”

USSR papers reported quite widely on the Lemyk court case. The assassination of the representative of the Soviet consulate 21 October 1933 in
L’viv was seen only in the context of an “unbridled anti-soviet campaign in Western Ukraine.” The Soviet Ambassador in Warsaw, V. Antonov-
Ovsienko, wrote in his diary 27 November 1933: “Despite our precautions, unbridled anti-soviet provocations have going on in Halychyna that
have created the conditions for an assassination attempt on our consulate in L’viv.” Still, neither the soviet press nor in the communiqués of
soviet diplomats was anything said about the fact that the reason for these provocations was the famine and persecutions in the Ukrainian SSR.

Mass arrests and the Holodomor raised a number of painful issues in Western Ukraine and had a negative impact on the attitude of most locals
to the USSR. Yet the information about the situation in Soviet Ukraine that got through to Western Ukraine was in bits and pieces and therefore
somewhat exaggerated. This led to the rise of ideological myths and endless rumors, especially about the fate of the western Ukrainian
intelligentsia in Soviet Ukraine.

Western Ukrainian communities knew little about the real purpose of the resolution passed by the Central Committee of the All-Union
Communist Party (b) of 24 January 1933, which ultimately included the Ukrainian SSR into the unitary state known as the USSR. To carry out this
policy, Pavel Postyshev, a trusted acolyte of Josef Stalin’s, came to Soviet Ukraine. According to official data, Moscow sent, along with him, 30
political “commissars” to every county of the Ukrainian SSR, which added up to an army of 15,000. [9, p. 237] The Great Stalinist Terror in Soviet
Ukraine was, in fact, a mere extension of the Great Terror Famine.

Conclusions

The artificial famine in the Ukrainian SSR in 1932-33 can be interpreted as a form of genocide intended to destroy the Ukrainian nation.
Ukrainian researchers have been able to show that more than 5 million people died of starvation in the Ukrainian SSR at this time. In 1988, the
Holodomor was recognized by the US Congress and the International Bar Association as a genocidal act, thanks to the efforts of the Ukrainian-
American community.

At the time, the US Congress also set up a commission to study the reasons for and the consequences of the Holodomor of 1932-33. Over the
course of four years, the commission interviewed over 600 eye-witnesses, it studied and analyzed an enormous number of documents and
materials, and it prepared a summation. All the materials were eventually handed over to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, which had not even
officially acknowledged the Holodomor as an act of genocide at that point, and no one ever saw the US commission’s documents again.
One important challenge today is to recreate the proper history of the events of those years of the Holodomor on Ukrainian soil in 1932-33. This
should be the achievement of a new generation of Ukrainians, who need to know as much as possible about our history, about the events of this
particular period, and especially about the criminal essence of the totalitarian regime of Josef Stalin.

Bibliography:

1.        Danylenko, V., Documents of Soviet Special Services on the Famines in Ukraine (1921-23, 1932-33, 1946-47), Pamyat Stolit, 2003, Nº3
2.        Danylenko, V., Kasyanov, G., Kulchytskiy, S., Stalinism in Ukraine: The 1920s and 1930s, Kyiv, Lybid, 1991
3.        Drach, Ivan, The hard lessons of being Ukrainian: The Famine of 1933, Suchasnist, 1993, Nº11
4.        The Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine Through the eyes of historians and the language of documents, Kyiv, 1990
5.        The Famine of 1933 in Ukraine: Testimony about Moscow’s destruction of Ukrainian peasants, Dnipropetrovsk, Munich, 1993, 223 pp
6.        Hetmanchuk, M., “Ukrainianization in the 1920s: Experience and lessons learned,” The Ukrainian National Idea and The Process of            
     Establishing Statehood in Ukraine, L’viv, Spodom, 1998
7.        Kulchytskiy, S., 1933: A tragedy of famine, Kyiv, 1989
8.        Kulchytskiy, S., Ukraine Between the Two Wars (1921–1939), Kyiv, Alternatyvy, 1999
9.        Rubliov, O., Chechenko, Y., The Land of Stalin and the Fate of the Western Ukrainian Intelligentsia (1920–1950), Kyiv, Naukova Dumka,
    1994
10.      Rudnytska, M., Articles. Letters. Documents, L’viv, Misioner, 1991
11.      Solovey, D., Ukraine’s Golgotha, Drohobych, Renaissance, 1993, 280 pp, taken from Yarmus, S., The Famine in Ukraine (1932-33):
     Why?, Winnipeg, 1983
12.      Yefymenko H., The change of vectors in Moscow’s national policy during the famine of 1933, UIZh, 2003, Nº5, pp 25-47

 Paper on the Topic:
                                                           The Holodomor of 1932-1933 and the Ukrainian Emigrant Community



                                                                                                                Maria Peleshok
                                                                                        Student in the Humanities Faculty (History)

                                                                                         National University of the Ostroh Academy
                                                                                                               Ostroh Academy, 2004
                                                                                                            

Introduction        
1. How Ukrainian emigrants told the world about the famine in Ukraine        
2. How émigré organizations protested against soviet policies in Ukraine and fed the hungry        
Conclusions        
Sources and literature

Introduction
The Ukrainian emigrant community, often called the diaspora, has been an integral part of the socio-political history of the Ukrainian people.
Ukrainians abroad played an important role in applying experience and re-evaluating events during the period of national liberation efforts, in
promoting the Ukraine question in foreign communities, and in continuing the search for ways to make their country an independent state. At the
same time, Ukrainian emigrants were always on top of events in their homeland.

In contrast to the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian diaspora, which consisted largely of migrant workers, the wave of emigration that came as a result
of the failure of the battle for national liberation in 1917–1920 had a very strong political orientation. This was largely because who left the country
at this time were the leadership of key political organizations and members of the government bodies under the Central Committee, the State of
Ukraine, the Directorate, and the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR), who represented a major part of the national, political, academic
and cultural elite as well as soldiers from the UNR Army. [1, p. 65]
Ukrainian emigrants set up community centers in all countries of Europe, in the US, Canada and Latin America. Despite differences in traditions,
religion and culture among emigrants from different regions of Ukraine, different social groups and different levels of education and internal
political differences, these people were able to maintain a high degree of national solidarity and common interest in the dramatic events taking
place in their homeland. The main areas in which the Ukrainian emigrants were active included disseminating information and advocacy around
the world, especially in the League of Nations, with the purpose of criticizing the Bolshevik government and revealing the crimes of the Stalin era.
Needless to say, they did not forget Ukraine’s greatest tragedy, the Holodomor or Great Famine of 1932–1933.

Without any doubt, the most positive phenomenon of their activity during this period was the way the entire Ukrainian community abroad
consolidated around the Holodomor in Ukraine. Casting aside their political ambitions and ideological squabbles, representatives of political
parties and community associations joined forces to establish a strong international voice regarding the terrible tragedy taking place in their
homeland.

The issue of the place of the Ukrainian diaspora in informing the world community about the great famine in the Ukrainian SSR was often
illuminated by representatives of that same Ukrainian diaspora. Monographs such as “A Nation Struggling for Its Survival in 1932 and 1933 in the
Ukrainian Diaspora” (Winnipeg, 1985) by M. Marunchak, presented and disseminated at the TUIHA conference on the artificial famine in Ukraine
in 1932–1933 in New York on 19 November 1983, and O. Pytliar’s “Echoes of the Great Hunger among Ukrainians in the West,” printed in the
journal, “Path to Liberation” (1984, Vol. 2), presented this problem from a broad range of views. Specific aspects of the Ukrainian emigrant
community’s activities in relation to the Holodomor were the focus of articles in the Ukrainian expat press, such as Tryzub, Rebuilding the Nation,
Ukrainian Nationalist, Ukrainian Voice, and so on, and in generalized writing on the history of the Ukrainian emigrant community and its political
life in P. Polovetskiy’s “Stalin’s Accomplices in the Murder of a People by Hunger in 1933” (Munich, 1955), P. Mirchuk’s “A Brief History of the OUN
(Denver, undated), O. Shulhin’s “Without Territory: Ideology and the actions of the UNR Government in exile” (Kyiv, 1998) and others. This could
also be read about in memoirs, such as Yuriy Boyko’s “Nationalism and Eastern Ukrainian Lands During the Konovalets Era: Yevhen
Konovalets and his times” (Munich, 1974), Yevhen Onatskiy’s “In the Eternal City: Notes from a Ukrainian journalist in 1933” (Toronto, 1983), and
a collection of personal memoirs called “The Great Hunger in Ukraine: A collection of testimonies, memoirs, reports and articles presented and
printed in the press in 1983 on the 50th anniversary of the 1932–1933 famine in Ukraine” (Toronto, 1988).

The purpose of this article is to review and analyze the activities of the Ukrainian emigrant community and its organizations with regard to the
Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine on the basis of newly opened archives and printed materials, along with a better-grounded and systematic
discussion of the issue at hand. To reach this goal, three objectives were established:
•        to examine the ways in which the Ukrainian emigrant community was active in relation to the Holodomor;
•        to categorize the ways in which information about the Holodomor was disseminated by Ukrainian emigrants;
•        to establish the significance of the activities of the Ukrainian diaspora in 1932–1933.

1. How Ukrainian emigrants told the world about the famine in Ukraine
All the soviet government’s disinformation and efforts to cover-up the truth about the terrible events in Ukraine were not enough to prevent the
collection of facts about the real state of affairs in the Ukrainian countryside. The State Center of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), a
government-in-exile led by well-known politician and statesman A. Livytskiy, brought together one of the largest Ukrainian emigrant groups,
including former servicemen from the UNR Army, members of the Ukrainian diplomatic corps from the Directorate period, academics, teachers
and students from Ukrainian post-secondary institutions in Poland, CSR and other countries.

The Center lost no opportunity to provide objective information to the international community or to express, on behalf of the entire nation, protest
against the genocide being carried out by the Communists on Ukrainian territory.  The situation in the Ukrainian SSR was written up in
numberless articles in the news bulletin of the government-in-exile. A special communiqué on the Holodomor in Ukraine was published in
French and English, which drew the attention of the world community to this evil, albeit not on the scale that the UNR émigré community might
have wanted. [10, p. 118]
Information on events in Ukraine was directly handled by two centers belonging to the Government-in-exile: in Warsaw and in Paris. A separate
organization was specially set up under the Ukrainian central committee in Warsaw, to take responsible not only for propaganda but to also
provide practical assistance to those starving in the Ukrainian SSR. It was run by a well-known Ukrainian civic and political activist and academic,
L. Chykalenko. The French center was represented by O. Shulhin, who ran the Paris diplomatic mission under the Directorate and then, in the
1930s, the UNR Foreign Ministry in exile. He had contact with many influential officials in France and in the League of Nations.

In Paris, there was also a Main Émigré Council (HER), which set up a special committee that included O. Shulhin (chair), I. Kosenko and O.
Udovychenko (deputy chairs), M. Kovalskiy (secretary), and H. Keller-Chykalenko (representative in Geneva). The Committee prepared appeals to
all the international humanitarian organizations, reported news to the press and published a French-language brochure called “Le famine en
Ukraine.” [15, p. 95]
The first political predictions by the State Center of the UNR in exile about the possibility of a man-made famine emerging in Ukraine were
published in June 1930. Representatives of Ukrainian émigré associations and political circles drew the attention of the world community to the
danger of a possible famine as a consequence of collectivization in Ukraine. At that point, an appeal was published by the Main Émigré Council,
in which reservations were expressed about the fact that foreign states were trading with the USSR, given the real situation in the Ukrainian
countryside. It was pointed out that the Soviet Union was under financial strain at the time, which it was trying to resolve at the expense of the
individual soviet republics, especially Ukraine, where a system of forced confiscation of grain called “requisitioning” was in full force.

“To all the other evils, the glorified collectivization of the village can now be added and the setting up of grain-producing communes, all of which
completely contradict the individualistic spirit of the Ukrainian countryside,” the HER statement read. “The Ukrainian farmer’s livestock and his
farm implements—all the goods he has accumulated over long years of work—are being taken away by the commune.” The authors of the
document emphasized that all these measures, “which the communists consider the triumph of their doctrine,” in reality have but one goal: “to
ruin the more-or-less better-off villagers and through this approach to destroy any active resistance in Ukraine to the Moscow occupier.” In
predicting the tragic unfolding of events as an inevitable consequence of the then policy of the soviet government in the countryside, the
members of the HER emphasized that the soviet regime, “using terror and modern collectivization…will once more bring this country the worst
imaginable disaster…” [7, p. 67]
At the very end, the Main Émigré Council turned to the Soviet Union’s international trading partners: “In the name of the huge Ukrainian émigré
community scattered across Europe, we are turning to the civilized world with an urgent appeal. We ask you not to increase the shameful trade of
the soviets, not to buy grain from Ukraine that covered in the blood of our villagers, not to finance Russian occupation of Ukraine…” But these
warnings were not heard—or not heeded.

In less than two years, the Holodomor enveloped Ukraine in a black cloud. At this point, the information that was being publicized by the diaspora
no longer had any predictive quality about it. It was simply reporting on the dramatic state of the Ukrainian village and concerned with organizing
assistance from humanitarian organizations abroad. This was the purpose, among others, of an appeal dated 20 July 1933 by HER to the
International Red Cross Society signed by I. Kosenko: “A terrible misfortune has fallen upon Ukraine. Thousands of people are dying every week
from famine in Kyiv and other cities in this country. In the countryside, the situation is even worse: people are eating corpses. Epidemics are
mowing down the population. In the name of Ukrainian émigrés, who are scattered around the world, the Main Émigré Council calls on all
international charitable organizations to establish a Committee to Assist Unfortunate Ukraine.”

In mid-July 1933, HER addressed a detailed list to the head of the League of Nations. Not limiting itself to this, the Council sends separate
letters and circulars to prominent people in the world, such as US President F.D. Roosevelt, to influential European humanitarian organizations,
and to Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskiy, begging them to come to the assistance of the Ukrainian people.

Also in July 1933, the Main Émigré Council, having provided evidence of the terrible famine in Ukraine, called on the world community to set up
an international organization to assist Ukraine—the International Committee to Assist the Starving in Ukraine, on the initiative of the French
Society for Ukrainian Studies in Paris. This committee was established and I. Karashevych-Tokarzhevskiy was elected its temporary chair. In
addition, a protectorate was set up for this committee, including princes of the Church and world leaders.

At its 18 September 1933 meeting, the HER Presidium decided to turn with a new appeal to the League of Nations on the matter of the famine in
the USSR, and to a slew of organizations that supported the State Center of the UNR in exile—including the Ukrainian Central Committee in
Poland, the Ukrainian Association in Czechoslovakia, the Ukrainian communities in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Belgium, and Luxemburg, and
to the Union of Ukrainian Emigrant Organizations in France, to join in a protest action. [13]
Over Summer 1933, at a number of world agricultural conferences, representatives of the State Center of the UNR in exile made an effort to draw
the attention of conference delegates to the famine in Ukraine. Starting in July 1933, a special memorandum was released in which the issue of
slave labor in the USSR was raised and the need to set up conditions for normal faming that would not lead to tragic consequences for the
people of Ukraine. At the next conference in London at the end of August of that same year, the issue was raised to regulate the international
grain trade. Conference representatives, those of the USSR first among them, were demanding that quotas for exporting soviet grain be
increased at the same time as the population of Ukraine was dying of hunger. A few days prior to the sitting of the Advisory Committee of the
Grain Commission, which the London conference had elected, O. Shulhin, the representative of the UNR government-in-exile, came to Geneva
to register with the chair of this committee a protest against any exporting of grain from the USSR, which emphasized: “This grain properly
belongs to those who sowed it and who today are dying of hunger—the villagers of Ukraine and Kuban…” [11, p. 210]
This issue was also explained in a special communiqué from the Ukrainian Press Bureau in Paris on 18 September 1933, as a follow-up
proposal to the foreign trade bodies of European states regarding a halt to the purchase of grain from the USSR. The author formulated a well-
argued protest: “…We vehemently protest this kind of export, which we cannot describe as anything less than criminal. The UNR Government is
preparing a new presentation before the League of Nation, in which it will attempt to organize international assistance for starving Ukraine.” [15,
p. 210]
On 27 September 1933, at the request of the State Center of the UNR in exile O. Shulhin handed a letter to the head of the 14th plenary session
of the League of Nations, Mr. Water, in which the reasons for the famine in Ukraine were described: “…We have to say that the famine in Ukraine
arose as a result of the collectivization of grain production, on the one hand, which was forcibly instituted by the soviets, and especially the so-
called grain consignments. Grain harvested in Ukraine has been designated to supply the soviet army, Moscow, and particularly for export.”
Further were a number of specific propositions for ameliorating this dreadful catastrophe: “(1) To take the necessary measures to interfere in the
export of grain from the USSR, which is, in fact, from Ukraine; (2) To organize an investigative commission that could determine the scale of the
disaster on the spot; (3) To organize international assistance to the starving in Ukraine.” [15, p. 210]
Various prominent academics in emigration began to involve themselves in the various tasks of the State Center of the UNR in exile, such as
economist Prof. K. Maciewycz and V. Slyvynskiy. In August, these two prepared a memorandum from the representatives of the HER in Paris
called “The economic crisis in the Soviet Union and the matter of agricultural organization in Ukraine.” Through the Foreign Minister of the
Government-in-exile, O. Shulhin, it was passed on to the British Prime Minister, who was then in charge of the International Agricultural
Conference in London. [1, p. 68]
This representational forum included two Ukrainian emissaries in the Rumanian parliament, V. Zalozetskiy and Yuriy Serbyniuk. They reported to
English Government circles about the real state of affairs in Ukraine and the progress of the efforts of the Ukrainian emigrant community to
organize assistance. According to the Pittsburgh-based Ukrainian journal “National Word,” the English “were very positive towards the
assistance campaign by the Ukrainians and, having had experience from their work in the Soviet Union during the famine of 1921–1922, were
ready to help in any way.” [7, p. 67]
Overall, the State Center of the UNR in exile put considerable effort into informing the world community about the real state of affairs in Ukraine.
Within this context, the Ukrainian Society of Former Soldiers of the UNR Army under Gen. O. Udovychenko also organized a protest action that
raised the issue of the Holodomor in Ukraine at the IX Assembly of the International Confederation of Combatants (CIAMAK), in Geneva. After
listening to the report by Gen. Udovychenko, assembly delegates passed a special resolution to send an investigative commission to Ukraine. In
it, they made note of the fact that the soviet government “is denying even the reality of a famine and is exporting grain abroad in enormous
quantities.” The CIAMAK leadership passed this resolution along to the head of the League of Nations Council, noting that “in the face of such a
tragic contradiction, humaneness requires that the situation in Ukraine be normalized, and this can only be done through the international
commission that would work inside Ukraine and asks that the 14th Assembly of the League of Nations take all the necessary steps to organize
such a commission, in the name of humanity.” [9]
The leaders of three Ukrainian socialist parties also turned to world socialist organizations with a protest against the famine in Ukraine and a
call to support the struggle against “shortsighted economic exploitation of the Ukrainian people by the Bolshevik dictatorship.” I. Makukha and M.
Stakhiv signed on behalf of the Ukrainian Radical Socialist Party, L. Hankevych and I. Kvasnytsia signed on behalf of the Ukrainian Social-
Democratic Party, and I. Mazepa and P. Fedenko signed for the overseas committee of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The last
of these also announced an “Appeal to Ukrainian Socialist Parties” at the International Socialist Conference that took place in August 1933 in
Paris. Fedenko presented horrifying figures on mass deaths by starvation among the rural population of Ukraine, countless incidents of
cannibalism, and a spreading epidemic of typhus and plague. [1, p. 69]
Ukrainian monarchist organizations, which had grouped themselves around the former Hetman of the Ukrainian State, Pavlo Skoropadskiy,
played a major role among the political emigrant community in Germany, the US and Canada, where the military and athletic Sich Society also
supported the Hetmanate. The Hetmanate organizations were experienced in running campaigns for humanitarian assistance.
In 1923 in Berlin, these groups set up the Ukrainian Red Cross Assistance Society, which was also called the Ukrainian Society for Aid to
Refugees. The Hetman’s wife, O. Skoropadska, headed this organization, and D. Doroshenko and V. Korostovets were both among the
leadership. The main purpose of this Society was to assist refugees who continued to arrive in Germany. On 22 September 1933, a commission
was set up within the Society that shortly became the Ukrainian-German Committee for Assistance to the Starving in Ukraine. Yevhenia
Skoropadska, the Hetman’s daughter, was in charge of this Committee, and its leadership included O. Skoropys-Yoltukhovskiy, Prof. Mirchuk, H.
Diakov, and H. Vinkler (treasurer). [7, p. 76]
“Our duty, hetmanites, is to look for pathways to reach the hearts of the idealistically inclined elements in European countries” was what the
Hetmanate leadership wrote in its flyers about the measures this Committee was taking in regards to the Holodomor in Ukraine. Through V.
Korostovets, the Commander-in-Chief under Hetman Skoropadskiy in Great Britain, a Ukrainian-English commission was set up under the main
Committee run by Ms. Skoropadska. On 10 October 1933, the Committee addressed a letter in German to the then-head of the League of
Nations, Norwegian Prime Minister J-L. Møvinkel, thanking him for “his sincere, committed representation of the interests of the hungry.” The
letter was signed by Hetmanivna Skoropadska. [9, p. 306]
The Committee’s executive deliberately limited its functions to material assistance to the starving and disseminating information, hoping to draw
more than just the Hetmanites to the campaign. “Getting material aid to the starving people in the Ukrainian SSR rapidly will only be possible if
we completely separate this humanitarian assistance campaign from all political actions,” read a statement in the Bulletin of the Ukrainian
Hetmanate. [8] The Committee to Assist Those Starving in Ukraine under the Ukrainian Union of State Grain growers (UUSG) established
relations with many Ukrainian and German charitable organizations and promoted its activities among Hetmanate organizations in Europe,
Canada and the US. [2, p. 134]
Without any doubt, the charity campaigns of the UUSG also popularized the idea of the Hetmanate, as it allowed other parties and political forces
with the same goals—assisting refugees and those starving in Ukraine—to join forces. In addition, the fact that these charitable organizations
were run by women who represented the Hetmanate encouraged women to join Hetmanate organizations. Flyers with appeals to donate money
to the Fund for The Starving in the Ukrainian SSR were printed in 15,000 print-runs in four languages: Ukrainian, German, French and English.
Like most political organizations, the Hetmanate organizations did not stop their drives for aid even in 1934. It was in this year, according to
Ukrainian scholars, that the number of deaths rose, generally as a result of various diseases and complications from long-term starvation. In
order to avoid risking the lives of parents and relatives of the UUSG leadership who had remained in Ukraine, as well as all of those who were
given aid through this organization, the Committee sent money and foodstuffs through private individuals, carefully covering up its participation in
this.

This aspect of the assistance campaign is written in great detail, among others, in a letter from S. Shemet, the persona secretary of Hetman
Skoropadskiy, to P. Boyarskiy, the head of the United Russian Community Organizations in Yugoslavia, whose parents were given assistance by
the committee headed by Yevhenia Skoropadska. Shemet asked people not to tell their parents from whom the aid was coming insofar as this
could have negative consequences for those receiving the assistance. “You need to understand,” he emphasized, “that the Bolsheviks are
always very happy to get hard currency, but are suspicious of the activities of Committees established abroad, whether they are by emigrants or
foreign philanthropists… We need to keep the community aspect of this assistance as secret as possible.” [10, p. 118] At the same time, he
pointed out that soviet agents were constantly surveilling him and other people who were close to Hetman Skoropadskiy. Moreover, they regularly
set up provocative situations that only made it more clear how closely the Bolshevik regime was following the activities of UUSG. This meant that
any hint that the Hetmanate leadership was financing the humanitarian aid could have a negative impact on those who were receiving that aid in
Ukraine.

As a protest against the policy of famine in Ukraine, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian National Democratic Union (UNDU) issued a
statement 24 June 1933 that discussed the cultural, socio-political and economic state of people in the Ukrainian SSR. This document
examined the main direction of the activities of the Bolshevik government, which were aimed at totally destroying Ukrainians and their cultural,
social and economic traditions. Specifically, the statement noted, the regime was “artificially wiping out the national features of Ukrainian letters
and sciences, subduing people through terror to accommodate communist-Muscovite internationalism.” In the socio-political sphere, “Muscovite
communists are ever more deliberately oppressing the Ukrainian people, through imprisonment, forced labor and the physical annihilation of
nationally aware and active villagers, workers and intellectuals.” In the economic sphere, “Muscovite communists are running a policy of
complete exploitation.” The UNDU statement pointed out the political nature of the policy of artificial famine in the Ukrainian SSR, which was
being waged by the Bolshevik regime “in order to break any resistance among the Ukrainian people” and their desire for freedom. [3, p. 320] Already in Winter 1932–33, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) began to release information about the Holodomor through the
Ukrainian Information Bureau in Geneva and its newsletter, the “Bulletin of Ukrainian Information,” which was published in French by M. Kushnir.
This included analytical materials about the state of the USSR economy and the impact of communist economic management in Ukraine. The
newsletter of the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists (PUN), Rebuilding the Nation, in Issue #9–10 of September–October 1933, also
published a number of articles dedicated to the Holodomor in Ukraine. Among these were two articles, one by D. Berkut called “The Domestic
War and Its Mechanics” and the other by K. Syretskiy aptly entitled, simply, “S.O.S.” These not only addressed the problem at hand, but also
attacked other emigrant political groups for not paying enough attention to the tragedy taking place on the territory of soviet Ukraine. [7, p. 69] The
latter came to the conclusion, based on an article by Dr. Schiller, an advisor to the German Embassy in Moscow who had written about the
famine in the Kuban region, that the intention of the communist regime with the tragic famine of 1932–1933 was to “depopulate Ukraine in order
to destroy it once and for all.” In September 1933, PUN published a statement in Rebuilding the Nation, in which it called on people to increase
the struggle for an independent state and to organize a humanitarian assistance campaign for starving Ukraine as one of the stages in the battle
for national liberation. [15, p. 210]
Notably, in its statements, OUN tended to put the accent primarily on forceful methods of combating the organizers of this inhuman campaign:
“We won’t beat off this latest attack from Moscow with soulful sighs and mere verbal protests, but only through self-sacrificing, merciless battle
will we speed up the end of this foreign domination of Ukraine and of other peoples who have been captured by a common enemy.” And so the
OUN did not limit itself to the printed word: it was one of the first organizations to launch mass protest actions. [7, p. 75] The leadership of OUN, troubled by the terrible state of the population of soviet Ukraine, was in constant consultations among themselves in
their search for international organizations to which it was worth turning for assistance. At the end of September 1933, well-known Ukrainian
community and political activist and the PUN representative in Italy Yevhen Onatskiy received a number of letters from the then-Foreign Policy
advisor of OUN, D. Andriyevskiy, which were dedicated to the Holodomor in Ukraine and the search and establishment of contacts to help find
sources of charitable work to benefit the suffering. In the letter dated 24 September 1933, Andriyevskiy, among others, noted that he had
“established contact with François, a Belgian senator and the treasurer of the International Aid Union…an organization similar to the Red Cross
that consists of government official representatives. It has the advantage of not being as tied up as the Red Cross, so it may be very useful to us.
The head is Ciraolo, an Italian who is also on the Nanson Committee. I think that we can get something done with this organization. But it means
we have to put pressure on certain individuals, especially on its head. I will order our organizations to start this and I would like to ask you
personally to contact Ciraolo as soon as possible…”

In assessing the activities of different international organizations in granting assistance to the starving population of Ukraine, Andriyevskiy
indicated how OUN was oriented in this area: “It seems that the International Red Cross has moved away from dealing with the famine in
Ukraine, arguing that this is a political issue and probably because it doesn’t want to spoil relations with the soviets… I don’t know if we’re going
to find international help or not, but in any case we have to make a major uproar around the world. Then, maybe, something will change in the
behavior of the soviets and they will begin to feed the hungry. That will make our business better known among foreigners. That may even raise a
little spirit in our country. And we’ll show whose Ukraine is: the Muscovites’, who aren’t even lifting a finger, or ours, who are killing ourselves for
it, without any regard to what state we belong to.” [9. p. 389]
In order to draw the world community’s attention to the tragic situation in Ukraine, OUN attempted an extremely demonstrative measure,
organizing a terrorist attack against a staff member at the Soviet consulate in L’viv on 22 October 1933. This act of terrorism was one of a slew of
similar armed attacks linked by the overall idea of “OUN anti-bolshevik acts” on western Ukrainian territory. OUN chroniclers called this act by
one of their fighters “a shot in the defense of millions.” The resolution to organize an attack on the soviet consul in L’viv as an act of protest
against the “Muscovite-bolshevik organized famine in Ukraine” was passed at a PUN conference with members of regional OUN executive
committees in Berlin on 3 June 1933.

In this way, the Ukrainian émigré community tried everything it could to get the world community to pay attention to the tragedy unfolding in
Ukraine in 1932–1933.

2. How émigré organizations protested against soviet policies in Ukraine and fed the hungry
In 1933, Ukrainian émigré community organizations and associations brought the issue of the need to offer assistance to the starving people of
Ukraine before the international community. In particular, Ukrainian women, united in the Ukrainian Women’s National Council (UWNC) played a
major role. In contrast to women’s organizations in other countries, whose purpose was to gain equal political rights with men, Ukrainian
women saw their main purpose as the struggle for independence as a nation. At international fora and congresses, these women continually
tried to get the attention of the world community of women to the tragic fate of the Ukrainian people under Bolshevik occupation and to carry out
all kinds of joint campaigns with representatives of other women’s organizations, especially in Belarus, whose population was also suffering
from food shortages and grain requisitions. In addition to press conferences at the end of 1932, in reaction to news about the Holodomor in their
homeland, they emphasized that the rural class in the Ukrainian SSR urgently needed organized, fraternal assistance “directed by the people of
the civilized world, so that this friendly grain might get to the lips of the starving villager and laborer.” [13]
On 21 June 1932, the leadership of the UWNC resolved to address the International Red Cross with a plea to send food parcels. At this very
meeting, the idea of setting up a committee in Prague to organize assistance for the starving was first brought up. The President of UWNC, well
know community activist and teacher S. Rusova and the Council Secretary, Kh. Kononenko, in their joint article on the pages of Tryzub wrote
about the difficulties in giving material assistance to the starving people of Ukraine:
“Ukrainian women who have joined forces in emigration through the Ukrainian Women’s National Council, find themselves helpless to give this
unfortunate population any kind of assistance. The Ukrainian émigré community has been closed off from its people by terrible bolshevik
barriers: not even a feather can fly from there to us or from us to Ukraine. Our correspondence with our relatives brings down brutal persecution
on them.”

Complaining that all their efforts to send foodstuffs of any kind to their parents and relations in soviet Ukraine are responded to with repression
against the latter, the women noted that they were only able to properly inform the world about those terrors that were taking place in their
homeland. [13]
From 14 to 19 May 1932, the regular international women’s congress of the League for Peace and Freedom took place in the French city of
Grenoble. The League held such congresses only once every three years. Ukrainian women, one way or another, managed to participate in
these congresses, kept in touch with its organizational center, and more than once received assistance from the League, which from time to
time raised the issue of the problems of the Ukrainian nation at international venues like the League of Nations. S. Rusova and Kh. Kononenko
took part in the May international congress as representatives of the Ukrainian section and spoke more than once about the state of soviet
Ukraine’s farmers, especially the population of Bukovyna. Thus, Ms. Rusova very decisively demanded that the League of Nations express its
open position towards the soviet Government, “which is a government of terror and violence against those peoples who have had the misfortune
to belong to the soviets.” [9]
The League of Peace and Freedom was formed back in 1915 at the initiative of Jenny Adams and other renowned activists from a variety of
countries, who wanted to raise their voices against the War. The Ukrainian section was established in Vienna in 1921 and that same year was
accepted as an equal member to the League. V. O’Connor-Vilinska was elected the first head of the Ukrainian section. When the section’s
executive was moved to L’viv, B. Baran was elected its head. However, already then, Ukrainian delegates pointed out, there was evident
reluctance on the part of representatives of a number of European governments to oppose the actions of the Government of the USSR, with
whom those countries’ conformist leaders sought a compromise. [9]
Ukrainian women, organized in the Union of Ukrainian Women in L’viv under the direction of the renowned civic and political activist from
Halychyna and a deputy to the Polish Sejm, Maria Rudnytska, turned to international women’s organizations in August 1933 with an appeal
printed in several languages. This statement presented mortality statistics as a result of famine in Ukraine and reported on the progress of the
struggle for national liberation on the part of the Ukrainian people. The appeal ended with a call to “women of all nations, countries and
continents, all classes, parties and confessions” with a plea that they awaken the “sleepy consciences” of their husbands, sons and brothers,
who hold “responsible government offices” in those countries and to ask them “that feeling of fellow solidarity and justice that make it impossible
to fraternize” with the killers of millions of people in soviet Ukraine. [5, p. 69]
Under the leadership of M. Rudnytska, the L’viv Union of Ukrainian Women carried out an active propaganda campaign among international
women’s organizations around the world, including London, Geneva and Paris. As a result of their efforts, 10 international women’s
organizations sent their own memoranda on the issue of the Holodomor to the head of the League of Nations Council, who at that time was
Norwegian Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs J.-L. Møvinkel. In the name of all these women’s organizations, whose center was in
London, a joint letter was sent to Geneva, signed by Ashby Corbert, with a separate memorandum on the famine attached. On this same issue,
Ms. Rudnytska and the head of the Union of Ukrainian Women in Prague, Z. Mirna, visited the well-known Czech activist, Senator F. Plaminkova,
who also supported the anti-famine campaign of the Joint Committee of International Women’s Organizations in Geneva. [6, p. 360]
The Central Union of Ukrainian Students (CEUUS), a community organization with its headquarters in Prague, combined all émigré and Western
Ukrainian student organizations. At the XV Congress of the International Students’ Organization in Venice, which took place 24 August—2
September 1933, the Ukrainian delegates, representatives of CEUUS, disseminated a specially prepared appeal in the French language under
the title “An appeal to university students of all countries” among all the participants in this international venue. The document emphasized that
“Ukraine is dying in the agonies of a violent hunger accompanied by a Terror directed at destroying Ukrainians.” Ukrainian students who were
beyond the borders of their homeland were “trying to help their brothers who had stayed behind by organizing a Ukrainian Red Cross.” [9, p. 362]
They called on international organizations, including student unions, to turn the attention of the world community to Ukraine, which might ensure
that the soviet regime would admit to the fact of a famine and thus to open the delivery of foodstuffs and medications to the starving.

Nearly 100 appeals similar to the one quoted at the students’ congress, were disseminated and they aroused a general feeling of compassion
among those present, but that was as far as these representatives of young people from all different countries were willing to do. Moreover, the
proposal was made that Ukrainian émigré students improve their organizational skills so that they would not in future need “international
assistance.” [6, p. 363]
In Luxembourg in August 1933, Ukrainian students who had joined forces in the Obnova Society took part in the International Congress of
Catholic Students, disseminated an appeal from Ukrainian Greek-Catholic clergy in Halychyna and appealed to the civilized world to extend help
to those starving in Ukraine. [5, p. 52]
In the fall of 1933, Ukrainian students from CEUUS organized a slew of protest actions with the Union of Sub Carpathian Students and tried to
get other national student organizations involved in them. Among others, in the assembly of young people and students that took place 29
October 1933, representatives of Lithuanian student unions also participated.

The first steps of the Ukrainian section of the League of Captive Peoples began in September 1932. On the initiative of the secretary of
Prometheus I. Baziak, at that time working in the special forces of the State Center of the UNR in exile and directly informed about the scale of the
Holodomor in the Ukrainian SSR, led by R. Smal’-Stockiy, a number of meetings of the limited presidium of this organization took place in
Prague and Berlin. Having resolved to launch a broad-based campaign to inform all state and community officials abroad about the situation in
Ukraine, they set up a special commission, led by Prometheus President M. Livytskiy, and sent it to Geneva. [13]
A large number of Ukrainian societies issued appeals to international organizations and directly turned to all kinds of foreign community
associations. Among others, the Union of Ukrainian Journalists and Writers Overseas, based in Prague, published a statement “To the civilized
world: About the famine in soviet Ukraine” in June 1933. In this statement, the Union protested the Holodomor in Ukraine and demanded that an
international commission be sent to the Soviet Union to “study the famine in Ukraine and to organize an immediate rescue campaign.” [7, p. 53] In Winter 1932, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskiy launched a press campaign to organize help for dying brothers and sisters in the “Empire of the
Devil.” The top leadership of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was one of the first to demonstrate the need to carry out joint campaigns in
order to ensure success to broad-based community efforts to get help to those starving in Ukraine. On 24 July 1933, an appeal was issued
entitled: “To all people of good will” and signed by all the bishops of the UGCC: Metropolitan Sheptytskiy (L’viv), Hryhoriy Khomyshyn (Stanislaviv,
now Ivano-Frankivsk), Iosafat Kotsylovskiy (Przemyszl), Nykyta Budka (titular bishop of Tataru), Hryhoriy Lakota (Przemyszl), Ivan Buchko (L’viv),
and Ivan Liatyshevskiy (Stanislaviv). [3, p. 321] This missive was translated into several foreign languages and sent out to all the most influential
international organizations.

On 28 October 1933, a second pastoral appeal from the Ukrainian Catholic bishopric in Western Ukraine regarding the Holodomor was signed
by Metropolitan Sheptytskiy, and Bishops Khomyshyn, Kotsylovskiy, Lakota, Liatyshevskiy, and Buchko. The clergy and faithful were called to
declare 29 October a day of national mourning and protest—with a common fast, prayers and “good deeds to beg… God’s mercy on our
brethren who are suffering and dying from hunger.” [2, p. 134]
A separate missive on the Holodomor had been issued in February 1933 by Ioan Teodorovych, the American Archbishop and head of the
Ukrainian Greek-Orthodox Church (UGOC) in Canada. Presenting facts about the massive Holodomor that had engulfed Ukraine, the
Archbishop listed the reasons that had given rise to it. A leading pastor and head of the All-Ukrainian Aid Committee in Berlin, Petro Verhun,
brought up the appeal of the UGCC bishops on the famine in Ukraine in both Ukrainian and German during his sermons in many German cities:
23 July in Bremen, 30 July in Grimen near Stralsund, 27 August in Hemelingen and others. “It was touching to see,” wrote the journal Tryzub, “our
workers, in Grimen as in Berlin, pull the last pennies out of their pockets in order to bring some contribution, however small, to the aid of the
starving.” [13]
On 11 September 1933, the priests of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in Germany announced a day of mourning “for those murdered by
starvation in Greater Ukraine.” At the funeral service almost all members of the Ukrainian community in Berlin were present, without regard to
political or religious alliance, including Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskiy and his family. At the invitation of the pastors, the Georgian, Azeri, Turkestani
and other émigré communities in Germany who belonged to national colonies also responded, as did many German artists and community and
church activists.

Among them was a delegate from the Berlin Diocesan Council of Bishops, Prelate Lichtenberg. After the funeral service presided over by Father
Verhun, Rev. Lichtenberg also read the appeal of the UGCC bishops in German. He also gave a sermon in German, in which he recalled the
accomplishments of the Ukrainian people in their historical struggle for their own state. The Pastor turned to those  members of the German
community present in the church during the service to support the aid campaign and not to abandon the Ukrainian people who were trapped in
this tragic situation. During the campaign, cash donations were collected for the starving. [9]
The Bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Canada, V. Ladyka, added his own pastoral letter to these protests, called “At this time of national
grief” on 13 September 1933.

Protest actions by Ukrainians in the US were supported by the missives to the faithful from Archbishop Kostiantyn Bohachevskiy, the apostolic
patriarch for Ukrainians in the US and head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the US. In them, the well-known community and church
elder emphasized the “Christian duty to feed the hungry.” He also underscored that “this duty has possibly never stood before Ukrainians in such
threat and force as it stands today, faced with the fact that millions of brothers and sisters are suffering death by starvation.” Archbishop
Bohachevskiy ordered all Greek-Catholic Churches in the US to say Mass for the starving in Ukraine on 24 December 1933, as well as to run
assistance campaigns.

In Summer 1933, a wide network of aid committees was set up in every country there were Ukrainians. Protest actions engulfed the towns and
villages of Halychyna and Bukovyna. All the efforts of émigré Ukrainians went into getting the world community to pay attention to what was going
on in the USSR, denying the shameless lies of the soviet regime about the “happy life” of the Ukrainian village and the exceptional
“accomplishments” of socialist transformations in the farm sector. To a large extent, Ukrainians were helped in this by other minority groups
whose fellow countrymen lived in the Ukrainian SSR and who were dying a hungry death alongside Ukrainians.

During the course of 1933, the German organization Вшесіег іп N01, established in Berlin to provide help for German colonists starving in
Ukraine,  collected DM 700,000 to support starving Germans in Ukraine and the Volga and shipped 100,000 individual parcels through Torgsin.
In November 1933, the organization put on an exhibition of 150,000 letters from the starving and food substitutes with photographs of the starving
from the USSR. They also published a book of letters and photographs of the starving population. [13] By November 1933, Вшесіег іп N01 was
able to help 100,000 individuals by sending food packages to them directly.

Conclusions
Representatives of different political groups among Ukrainian emigrants such as the State Center of the UNR in exile, hetmanate organizations
who were essentially monarchist in orientation and supported former Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskiy, Ukrainian socialist centers and
organizations, organizations of Ukrainian nationalists, communities, academic, women’s, student and veteran societies and associations, and
elders of all religions wanted more than anything to offer practical assistance to the starving, to inform the international community and to call on
it to condemn the government of the USSR for its policy of destroying the Ukrainian people through famines in the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban’.

In analyzing the considerable contribution of emigrant Ukrainians in informing the world community about the tragic events taking place in
Ukraine in 1932–1933, it becomes clear that precisely because of their efforts, mass protest actions were organized in Western countries
against soviet policy in Ukraine and, more importantly, that real assistance was given to the starving in Ukraine. In addition to this, the Ukrainian
diaspora made an enormous contribution to shedding light on the problems of the Holodomor both at the time, in 1932–1933, and in later years.

Sources and literature:
1.        T. Vronska and T. Ostashko, “Participation of Ukrainian and foreign political and community organizations in protest actions against the
Holodomor in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1930s, UIZh. № 5, 2003.
2.        The Famine of 1933 in Ukraine: Testimony on Moscow’s destruction of Ukrainian peasants, Dnipropetrovsk, Munich, Prescom, 1933.
3.        V. Hryshko, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, New York, 1963.
4.        V. Danylenko, G. Kasiyanov and S. Kulchytskiy, Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, Kyiv, Lybid, 1991.
5.        Dilo, 1933, 6 August.
6.        R. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, (in Ukrainian), Kyiv, 1992.
7.        M. Marunchak, A Nation in the Struggle for Survival: 1932 and 1933 among the Ukrainian diaspora, Winnipeg, 1985.
8.        Yevhen Onatskiy, In the Eternal City: Notes from a Ukrainian journalist, 1933, 3 volumes, Toronto, 1983.
9.        V. Piskun, The Ukrainian political diaspora and famines, Memory of Centuries, № 3, 2003.
10.        P. Plovetskiy, Stalin’s Accomplices in the Murder of a People by Hunger in 1933, Path to Victory, 1955, 8 May.
11.        V. Soldatenko, 1933, the Hungry Year: Subjective thoughts on objective processes, Dzerkalo tyzhnia #24, 2003.
12.        D. Solovey, Ukraine’s Golgotha, Drohobych, Vidrodzhennia, 1993.
13.        Tryzub, Paris, September, October, November 1933.
14.        Yu. I. Shapoval, Those Tragic Years: Stalinism in Ukraine, Kyiv, Politvydav Ukraine, 1990.
15.        O. Shulhin, Without Territory: Ideology and the actions of the UNR Government in exile, Kyiv, 1998.

 Paper on the topic:
                                                                The Holodomor of 1932–1933: Political and Economic Aspects

                                                                                                                Ihor Zubenko
                                                                                            Student in the Economics Faculty
                                                                                  National University of the Ostroh Academy
                                                                                                      Ostroh, Ukraine - 2004


Foreword   

Section 1.       
1.1 Political and economic reasons for the Holodomor       
1.2 Industrialization and the Five-Year Plans        
1.3 The process of collectivization       

Section 2.        
2.1 The consequences of collectivization and the beginning of the Holodomor        
2.2 Grain delivery campaigns. The blacklist.       
2.3 Press reaction to events in Ukraine: the foreign and diaspora press        

Section 3.       
3.1        The famine peaks. Eye-witness accounts.        
3.2        The aftermath of the famine and the losses to Ukraine        
Conclusion        
Bibliography   


A rifle-butt hammered at the door…

A rifle-butt hammered at the door, knuckles rapped on the window.

“Open up in there, young woman! Why are you hiding inside your house?”

Her heart pounded and stabbed: “Oh, horror! Guests have come to me. What will I offer them?—my son is not cooked yet…”

She runs to open the door of the hay store and bows deeply to her guests. She invites her guests to come in and closes the door behind them.

The soldiers enter the house: one of them sits down to write, two more stand by the oven. Two more stand with their rifles at the door.

“How’s life, young mistress? Let’s see what you’re cooking up.”

The young woman stands still and only smiles quietly.

The men pull the pot out of the oven and see the curled up fingers.

The young woman stands still and only smiles beatifically.

They find the chopped up legs, the little ribs soaking in the trough and, under the sieve, the blue little head that has already begun to reek.

The young woman stands still and only smiles terribly.

“So, how are you keeping alive, young woman? Why are you so quiet? Why don’t you talk?”

“This is how I keep alive,” she said, and spoke no more.

Whose voice is that in her throat? Hoarse but trembling and gay.

“Yes, this is how I live,” she larked. “Am I not mother to him? Tell me, did we not want to eat? Do you not want to eat? Then sit. Among you, I, too,
am young. By God, believe me, people—”

At this she choked, her heart hammered once and went silent again.

“Believe me, people, by God…this is how I live,” she chirped. “I am a young widow.”

She suddenly trembled, as though remembering something. Her eyes traveled wildly around the house and she threw herself at her son, patting
his head and covering his mouth tightly with her hand.

She wants to weep in grief but she cannot. She can only pound her head on the floor: “My little son, my darling child! What have I done with you?!”

The soldiers take the wretched woman and lift her up, freshening her face with water.

Meanwhile, the soldier keeps writing and writing, but tears keep getting in his way.

Pavlo Tychyna, from the collection, “A wind from Ukraine”



Foreword

The Ukrainian people have survived many tragedies, but a more terrible evil than the Famine of the 1930s, the history of Ukraine has not seen.
Its reasons have not been determined to this day. Some believe that Stalin and his henchmen all along planned to destroy Ukrainian peasantry—
whom they saw as the mainstay of nationalism and private property. Others say it was the result of an insane approach to gaining capital for
industrialization, and the fate of the countryside was simply not taken into account. One thing is obvious: the famine in Ukraine was not the result
of a natural disaster but was man-made.

Over many decades, Ukrainian schoolbooks claimed that at the beginning of the 1920s, famine affected only the Volga region. This is how it was
publicized at the time before the western world as well, giving Lenin and his collaborators to ask for food supplies to this specific region. Yet
when the same kind of famine struck all of southern Ukraine, from which grain was being impounded and shipped north and for export, Moscow
was silent.

One of the major contemporary students of the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932–33 was James Mace.

During his lifetime, American James Mace came to be called “The first Knight of Ukraine,” which was awarded to him by a community
organization. Yet he was given no national awards or orders from Ukraine. Nor did he have the typical signs of a successful American lifestyle:
his own home, a car and a six-figure bank account. Dr. Mace, a world-renowned historian, had only one thing: his name. He dedicated his life to
studying a part of Ukrainian history—the Holodomor of 1932–33. This first among western researchers was very clear about the reasons for this
tragedy: It was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. The fact that the US Congress also acknowledged this in 1988 was to a very
large extent due to the role played by Dr. Mace. James Mace lived in Kyiv for more than 10 years, where he found kindred spirits. And the love of
his life: Ukrainian writer Natalia Dziubenko.

James Mace was born on 18 February 1952 in the city of Muskogee, Oklahoma. He gained his doctorate at the University of Michigan on the
topic, “Communism and the dilemma of national liberation,” which was about Soviet Ukraine from 1918 to 1933. In 1983–1986, he collaborated
with Robert Conquest on materials for the seminal book, “Harvest of Sorrow.” He authored a two-volume “Study of the Ukrainian Famine.”
Working under a Harvard project together with Leonid Hertz, he collected and edited an “Oral History” based on eye-witness accounts that was
published in 1990. Between 1986 and 1990, he was the executive director of the US Commission on the Ukrainian Holodomor (Washington DC)
and the main presenter of the Commission’s report before the US Congress.

At the beginning of 1990, he moved from the US to Kyiv. Here he converted to the Orthodox religion. In 1995, he became a professor of political
science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 1997, he began to privately consult and write for Den’, a Ukrainian-language daily
paper. Dr. Mace’s son William lives in the US.

Section 1.

1.1 Political and economic reasons for the Holodomor

The tragedy of a great famine in Ukraine could have been foreseen already in 1925, when the XIV Congress of the Communist Party decided to
go for mass industrialization. This was to happen at the cost of rural areas, for which purpose the Congress enshrined asymmetrical prices for
industrial and agricultural goods.

Soviet economists themselves calculated that the artificial difference in prices for industrial and farm products in order to move capital in favor of
industrial development, mainly in Russia, cost Ukrainian farmers 300 million pre-war gold karbovanets annually, which amounted to 20
karbovanets for every tenth of a hectare of sown land. In short: where a Ukrainian peasant prior to WWI was able to purchase a manufactured
good for 1 pood [40 Russian pounds or 16.4 kg] of grain, then now it cost the equivalent of 4–5 poods.

On 23 February 1929, “Journal de Geneve,” a Swiss paper, commented thus on the travel notes of American farmer Tom Campbell, who was
familiarizing himself with agricultural problems in the Soviet Union: “As long as the Ukrainian farmer sees that he is working ‘pour le roi des
Russes (for the Russian King),’ that is, the masters of the Kremlin, as long as his surplus production is confiscated or purchased for a price that
makes it not worth the extra effort, as long as his success is envied and his purchase of livestock in order to work automatically makes him a
member of the so-called “kurkul” class—of course, he won’t take a single step in the direction of expanding production. Nothing encourages him
to do so—on the contrary, everything is being done to cut down any and all opportunities.”

Political reasons

From 1 November 1932 to 1 February 1933, the Molotov commission “procured” an additional 1.711 million tonnes of grain from Ukraine. The
total amount of grain confiscated by the state from the 1932 harvest was 3.381 million tonnes. In short, Molotov was unable to fill the grain-
procurement plan, although he transported almost all existing stores out of the country. At the start of 1933, there were virtually no stores left
anywhere in Ukraine, yet people needed to survive to the next harvest. Winter grain confiscations took the last remaining bits of grain that were
left from those already suffering from famine.

Soviet archives have no documents about an emergency grain procurement commission. Because it never existed. Molotov, and occasional
Lazar Kaganovich, traveled to Ukraine on an inspection basis, gave verbal orders, and all written orders on “increasing” grain procurements that
they deemed necessary to issue, went under the stamp of republican organs with the signature of CP(b)U Central Committee’s General
Secretary, Y. V. Koster, Chair of the People’s Council Committee of the Ukrainian SSR V. Y. Chubar, and others. Even the minutes of meetings of
the CK KP(b)U politburo, which went on for hours, only listed these two emissaries of Stalin as present.

In the Ukrainian SSR’s People’s Council Committee resolution called “On measures to increase grain procurements” dictated by Molotov 20
November 1932, there was a point that allowed the use of “natural penalties.” This meant penalizing those kolhosps who “owed” grain but did
not have any by removing meat products, in order to settle with the state. These penalties were to be taken as communal livestock as well as
kolhosp livestock. Permission to do so was to be granted by each individual Oblast Executive Committee.

In and of itself, this point in the government resolution—as, indeed, the entire resolution—was ominous testimony of the barbarism of the
totalitarian state in the extreme conditions of an economic catastrophe. These “natural penalties” were, of course, to be with oblast approval, only
related to meat, and without any searches involved. In an instruction from the Justice Committee of the Ukrainian SSR dated 25 November 1932
that covered the organizing the implementation of the resolution, it was even emphasized that “mass shakedowns” were undesirable.

Still, the verbal orders of Stalin’s emissaries were more important than what was written in resolutions. Taking the “natural penalties” as a basis,
local officials expanded them to include all possible food supplies held by villagers. Archives, papers and testimony of the villagers themselves
show that in all towns of Ukraine, except those adjacent to border areas, searches of people’s yards began, including confiscation, of any and all
food supplies other than grain: rusks, potatoes, beets, salo, salted products, dried fruits and so on that villagers had prepared to tide them over
to the new crop. Confiscation was presented as a punishment for “kurkul sabotage” of grain procurements. In effect, this was a campaign that
was knowingly intended to slowly destroy rural families at the physical level. As in the Northern Caucasus, where the emergency committee was
chaired by Kaganovich, under the guise of a grain procurement campaign on an enormous part of Ukrainian territory, a gigantic, unforeseen
campaign of terror through famine was carried out in order to teach those who remained alive to be “smart and sharp” in the words of Kosior,
that is to work conscientiously for the state in the community farms known as kolhosps.

What took place in Ukraine in 1933 was not recorded anywhere in official documents. The reason was that Stalin had ordered all his people to
act as though there was no such thing as a great famine. Even in the transcript reports of the CK KP(b)U plenum and the politburo protocols of
this time, the word “famine” is not even mentioned.

There is no doubt that the deaths of millions of villagers was caused by a cold-blooded decision of Stalin’s to take all food stores away from
Ukraine’s farm dwellers and to then to wrap the hungry in a curtain of silence and to prohibit any assistance on the part of the international or
soviet communities. To prevent any initiatives on the part of the hungering masses to flee beyond the borders of the republic, squadrons of
internal forces patrolled the border areas to keep the famine victims contained.

Deaths from starvation began in the first month of the Molotov Commission’s activities. From March 1933 on, they became widespread. DPU
offices nearly everywhere registered cases of cannibalism and necrophagia. Desperate to at least save their children from a hungry death,
villagers tried to take their youngsters to towns and cities and to leave them at institutions, hospitals, even on the streets. However, in the darkest
months of this unprecedented Holodomor, Stalin only admitted publicly to “problems with food in a slew of kolhosps.” In his speech at an All-
Union Congress of Top Kolhospniks on 19 February 1933, he cynically reassured his audience: “In any case, compared to the problems
workers had 10–15 years ago, your problems today, Comrade Farmworkers, seem mere child’s play.”

Analysis of demographic statistics for the 1930s shows that direct losses to the population of Ukraine were 150,000 in 1932 and 3–3.5 million in
1933. The real demographic losses, including reduced fertility among women due to starvation, for the period 1932–1934 were around 5 million.
Scholars have come to the conclusion that of all instances of genocide known to humanity, for sheer scale, nothing matches what happened in
Ukraine in the early 1930s. [4, pp 98-102]
Economic reasons

Regardless of the success of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, remained agricultural-industrial and its
economy was in need of technical and technological modernization. In the 1920s, there was considerable debate within the Communist Party
about how it would be possible to reach a world level of economic development. The dominant position was that of Josef Stalin and his circle,
who preferred an authoritarian form of managing and attaining industrialization at whatever cost in the shortest term possible. This, they thought,
would lead to “the building of the material and technical foundation of socialism.” A plan for all-encompassing radical economic transformations
was prepared in 1928. A strategy of accelerated development in heavy industry was selected, and its basic stages laid out in the so-called “Five-
Year Plans.”

1.2 Industrialization and the Five-Year Plans

The main issue that needed to be resolved in taking the course of industrialization was financing the expansion of manufacturing, especially
heavy industry. Having no way to take out external loans and no internal accumulation of capital—the nationalization of businesses had sharply
reduced the efficiency of manufacturing and ignoring market laws essentially made the concept of profits meaningless—, Stalin and his circle
resorted to a number of measures to accelerate the expansion of heavy industry: transferring capital into this sector that had accumulated in
agriculture, light industry, trade and other branches; increasing direct and indirect taxes; taking advantage of the enthusiasm for work among
workers and forced labor of political prisoners; confiscating church and monastery property and so on.

In contrast to developed countries, industrialization was introduced in the USSR not to satisfy consumer demand among the country’s
population. On the contrary, the production of consumer goods was very limited. Here, the state became not only the owner of the means of
production but also the main consumer of its output—mostly weaponry and industrial equipment. Financing all came from the state budget, that
is, out of the pockets of the general population, which is only possible in a totalitarian system. A major resource for industrialization was the
colonial abuse of captive nations, including Ukrainians among them. This was done by setting over-low prices for the import and export of
goods, especially farm products. Thus, Ukraine was paid 2.40 karbovanets for 1 centner of meat, while on a world market such as London it was
selling for the equivalent of 8.80 karbs. The cheapest item was grain that was exported from Ukraine.

The country’s top officials did not understand—or refused to understand—that undervaluing goods, systematically ignoring the interests of rural
areas, and putting off the resolution of social problems such as lodgings and mass goods, would inevitably affect the development of industry
itself. This was confirmed by the results of the first Five-Year Plan (FYP) (1928/29–1932/33). Fully detailed and meticulously debated, this Plan
never came to life. Of the two versions, the realistic and the optimal, the optimal was used as the base. In addition, Stalin issued an order to
adjust the optimal version in the direction of increasing indicators for specific items such as pig iron, petroleum, farm equipment, and so on. In
1932, although the acceptable version of the FYP called for 7mn t, and the optimal for 10mn, only 6.2mn tonnes of pig iron were actually
produced. The same indicators for output of tractors were 53,000, 170,000 and 49,000 tonnes, while for cars it was 100,000, 240,000 and a
mere 24,000 t.

This pattern repeated itself in other areas of the planned objectives. Still, despite the failure of the first Five-Year Plan, Stalin announced to the
world in January 1933 that the Plan had been completed—and ahead of time, that is, in four years and three months. Nor was the objective for
Gross Industrial Output reached, while productivity was only 41%, compared to a planned 110%. This is the point when soviet statistics became
a faithful handmaiden to the totalitarian regime, providing false figures on the real state of affairs, not only in the economy, but in soviet society as
a whole. [5, pp 83-84]
The second Five-Year Plan, 1933–1937, fared no better than the first, loaded as it was with a slew of unrealistic, economically unsound
objectives that made it essentially impossible to carry out. The steel industry and tractor manufacturing were able to reach the levels required by
the first two FYPs only in 1949. Serious failures were also typical of the pre-war third FYP, 1938–June 1941.

The first three Plans were also a flop in Ukraine. For instance, coal output in Donbas according to plan was supposed to expand from 27mn t to
53mn t, but actually only reached 45mn t. The output of pig iron was supposed to nearly triple in Ukraine, which was also an impossible goal. [5,
p. 84]
As a result of the Stalinesque leap in industrialization in Ukraine, as in the Soviet Union as a whole, economic development was lopsided, the
shortage of mass goods kept growing, and inflation kept rising. The crop failure of 1928 increased problems with supplying urban populations
with food products in Ukraine. In the second quarter of that year, a system of rationing cards was introduced. People in smaller places, where
these cards were not distributed, found themselves starving. Only in January 1935 was the card system cancelled and fixed prices introduced for
bread. In October of that year, prices on all foodstuffs became controlled. Completely standardized prices for basic goods were canceled only in
1936.

Thus, the main idea of the Five-Year Plans, to industrialize the country and at the same time to raise living standards in the course of “building
socialism” did not work, especially in terms of increasing the material well-being of the average person. In terms of industrial growth, Ukraine’s
first FYP proved relatively the most promising. Of 1,500 new industrial enterprises that were supposed to be established across the USSR, 400
were designated to Ukraine and most of them were actually launched.

Indeed, the technical level at some of them was quite high. Among these new plants were the Zuyivskiy and Zhterivskiy power stations. The
biggest power station in Europe at that time was Dnipro HES, built in 1932 in Zaporizhzhia. In Donbas, 53 new mines came on line, while those
plants that were already in operation in Ukraine, 12 blast furnaces and 24 Marten furnaces were installed.

Along with the expansion of existing capacities, the new giants of the steel industry arrived, like AzovStal, ZaporizhStal and KryvorizhStal. In 1932,
the first electro-plating plant was built for the purpose of manufacturing steel instrumentation, DniproSpetsStal. Ukraine soon took one of the top
places in the world for steel production. It also posted decent results in machine-building. In October 1931, the newly-built Kharkiv Tractor Plant
(KhTZ) went on line. The Luhansk Rail Engine Plant was reconstructed, as were machinery plants in Kharkiv and Kyiv. The Kramatorsk Machine-
Building Plant, Ukraine’s biggest, was also built at this time.

In the food processing industry, new branches appeared: margarine, dairy, oil processing, animal feed, and baked goods. Between 1928 and
1937, 67 mechanized bread-making factories and 5 large-scale meat-processing plants were built. In 1932, the Kherson Canning Plant was
revived. Knitting plants were opened in Odesa, Kyiv and Kharkiv. Still, light industry began to fall considerably behind heavy industry, while
demand for mass-produced goods was constantly greater than the supply.

One aspect of both the first and subsequent Five-Year Plans that was particularly bad for Ukraine’s economic development was the fact that they
established special privileges for Russia’s centralized industrial zones in Leningrad and the Urals. In Ukraine, only those branches were
supposed to expand at an accelerated pace that provided Russian industries with fuels and metals. Of the 61.6 billion karbovanets earmarked in
the first FYP for the development of the domestic economy, Ukraine was given only 11.3bn karbs or 18.3%, while Russia got 68%—much more
than should by rights have been. Of the amount allocated to Ukraine, 4.2bn karbs were to go to industry and only 1.2bn karbs was allocated for
construction. The worst was that 78% of those 1.2bn karbs were earmarked for the Donetsk-Kryviy Rih corridor (population 6.5mn), that is, to
satisfy Russian demand for coal and metals, while the rest of the territory of Ukraine (population 22.5mn) got only 22%. [3, pp 48-50] In other words, Ukraine’s industry was largely expected to continue developing in the way that had been established under the tsars: then, as
now, Ukraine’s role came down to supplying Russia with fuel, raw metals, and heavy equipment. The next FYPs brought few changes to the
overall situation. In the second Plan, Ukraine was given even less money—only 16.7% of the overall Union budget, while in the pre-war years,
that fell to 14.5%. Russia’s share grew to 71%, meanwhile.

This kind of situation forced economist M. Volobuyev to declare that the revolution had done nothing to change the economy: Ukraine remained a
colony of Russia. The colonial nature of Ukraine’s economic was also reinforced by the institution of an unrestricted centralized system of
managing the economy, the all-Union operation of transportation, financial systems, and bodies controlling the use of material resources.
Already by the second half of the 1920s (1924–1927) 20% more Ukrainian capital was transferred into the General Budget Fund than had been
during the Russian Empire. Still, the efforts of Volobuyev and other economists to defend the sovereign rights of Ukraine as the totalitarian soviet
regime strengthened its grip were like voices crying in the desert. In the 1930s and the decades that followed, Ukraine was completely deprived
of even the semblance of a national economy.

In order to stimulate workers to fulfill the FYPs—universal employment, the enthusiasm of millions with minimal material incentives, a huge
deficit of consumer goods and services—, the Bolsheviks organized “socialist competition” on a mass scale, which was based on the
enthusiasm of the general population and which the Stalinist totalitarian regime took advantage of to the fullest. The overall management of
socialist competition was controlled by the Communist Party, while its actual organization was handled by the unions. This was the era of the
“shock troopers” and “heroes of socialist labor.” During the first FYP, this approach to organizing labor was relatively effective. In time, the
competition stopped being an effective instrument for “combating” production costs and improving product quality and no longer did much to
help the execution of economic plans. The organization of competitions and the execution of objectives tended more and more to be formalities
and tools of propaganda, while the bureaucrats reported in a timely manner on the execution of all plans and objectives and declared the
“winners.” The practice of using prison labor, especially political prisoners, became widespread.

Despite their use of mass-scale organizational measures, party/state officials were unable to get control of manufacturing and waste and chaos
were widespread. Dilatory delivery of equipment led to new factory and plant premises standing idle for long periods of time. Meanwhile, there
were cases where ill-trained operators simply damaged equipment when older “bourgeois” specialists were fired, punished as “enemies of the
people” and “enemies of socialism.” The Shakhtynsk Affair in Donbas was a classic example. Often the lack of qualified personnel meant that
enterprises were unable to actually produce the required volumes of output.

Distancing workers from the means of production, the command-administrative approach to managing led to Ukraine’s industries becoming
economically inefficient. Major repairs were put off for lack of spare capital, which normally would have been generated and accumulated by the
company’s own efforts, just as it was in industrial countries in Europe and North America.

Industrialization dramatically changed the structure of the economy, especially the relationship between manufacturing and agriculture in the
overall volume of gross output. At the end of the 1930s, the output of heavy machinery surpassed all other industrial branches, while the share of
heavy industry in the overall output of the economy was 92.5% by 1938. This kind of unbalanced industrial development effected Ukraine’s
economy. Although its industrial capacity was seven times higher than it had been in 1913—which would easily have placed Ukraine among the
leading industrial nations of Europe—, the level of development of the main branches of the economy remained low compared to developed
countries.

1.3 The process of collectivization

Having launched high-speed industrialization in the Soviet Union, Stalin and his entourage decided to also collectivize the farm sector, in order to
use non-economic pressure  to force grain growers to pay an additional “tribute” to the expansion of industry. The only way to do so was to force
country dwellers to work together in collective farms and to establish a command-driven, bureaucratic system of management in the agricultural
sector, just as in other industries. This form of organization ensured control on the part of the All-Union CP(b) over farmworkers and became a
key block in the formation of the totalitarian system.

At the same time, the country’s leaders understood that the process of collectivization would be long and difficult, especially after the New
Economic Plan, under which rural people had felt a certain amount of freedom and satisfaction from working on their own land. Taking this into
account in the process of putting together the first Five-Year Plan, a target was set of getting 18–20% of rural households into the kolhosps by the
end of the FYPs (1933). This plan was based on the principles of the NEP and the cooperative development of rural areas.

The transition to collectivization led to a grain crisis in 1927–1928 that, interestingly, was not the result a crisis in farm production itself, but was
spurred by the fact that, as market prices for grain rose, farmers refused to sell their grain to the state for lower prices. Stalin and his circle took
advantage of the situation to cancel NEP altogether and begin the widespread application of emergency measures, that is, to use force against
the countryside.

In January 1928, the politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union CP(b) decided on the mandatory extraction of surplus grain from
villagers and the need to force the collectivization of the farm sector. All open grain markets were shut down, farms were subject to search as in
the times when foodstuffs were confiscated from farmsteads, and the owners of any surplus grain were taken to court. This raised the ire of
farmers. In many places, there were demonstrations. At least 150 mass protests were registered in rural areas, including in Ukraine.

The decision to collectivize made the position of Stalin very clear: in addition to economic plans, that is, getting the capital to finance
industrialization, he proved completely indifferent to the mood of the countryside, ignoring the attitude of rural dwellers towards kolhosps and
their unwillingness to give up running their own farms. Mass collectivization began in 1929, which was called the “Year of the Great
Breakthrough.” Ukraine then had everything that was needed to become first among the republics to complete collectivization. A Commission
headed by the USSR People’s Commissar for Agriculture Y. Yakovlev established the timeframe for complete collectivization in the main grain-
growing regions. In the 5 January 1930 Resolution of the CC of the All-Union CP(b) “On the pace of collectivization and measures to assist the
state in building collective farms,” Ukraine was included in the regions where collectivization was to be completed by Fall 1931 or Spring 1932.

Ukraine’s state party apparatus presented a slew of its own initiatives to speed up the pace of collectivization. The slogan “high-speed
collectivization” suddenly appeared among the general population. On 24 February 1930, the Secretary-General of the CC CP(b)U, S. Kosior,
signed a directive to local party organizations in Ukraine that put the objective thus: “The steppes must be completely collectivized by the time of
spring fieldwork, while all of Ukraine must be completely collectivized by Fall 1930.” In this way, the Ukrainian Party leadership itself reduced the
timeframe for collectivization by 12–18 months.

The start of collectivization had shown that farmers were reluctant to part with their property and to turn it over to collective farms. For the Soviets
were collectivizing not only the means of production but also productive livestock, poultry and instruments. This could only be achieved using
crude force. Those who refused to join the kolhosp were declared enemies of the soviet order and thieves. They were not allowed to grind their
grain at the mills, their children were refused schooling, and doctors refused to treat them.

Attacks against better-off farmers were particularly forceful. Not only were farmers who used hired help called kurkuls (kulaks), but even those
who happened to run their own farms using a motorized vehicle or who had tin rooves on their houses. At the first, this attack came in the form of
administrative pressure: extremely high taxes, a ban on renting out lands, and so on. In December 1929, though, the soviet government switched
to a policy of open terror: villagers who actively opposed collectivization were shot or imprisoned, wealthier farmers were exiled to distant regions
of the USSR, and many were forced to leave their territories. The process of “dekulakization” hit not only better-off households, but also those
who simply did not want to join a kolhosp.

The campaign to eliminate kurkuls as a class was a way of persecuting all country dwellers without exception. Officially, the number of “kurkul”
households in Ukraine was listed as 71,500, but in fact, by 1932, more than 200,000 farmsteads had been eliminated. Together with the
members of the family, this affected almost 1,500,000 individuals. Of these, nearly 850,000 were sent as “special migrants”—more accurately
state serfs—to the north of Russia and to Siberia, where large numbers died and the rest lived and worked in inhuman conditions. Regions like
Kuzbas, Karganda, Pechora, and Kolyma were largely built on the bones of Ukrainians.

The “elimination of kurkuls as a class” campaign was intended, firstly, to destroy that layer of rural society that was capable of organizing
opposition to total collectivization. But this did not entirely work. Peasants continued to refuse to join the kolhosp: they would sell of or slaughter
their livestock and hide or wreck their equipment and other property that was supposed to be collectivized. Over 1928–1932, nearly half the cattle
herds in Ukraine were slaughtered, and it took decades to bring the numbers back up again. In many instances, it ended up in open protests on
the part of farmers, that occasionally grew into armed insurrections that encompassed entire counties. Rough estimates are that in 1930 the
overall number of insurrectionists in Ukraine was nearly 40,000. Regular army and even armed vehicle divisions, artillery, and sometimes even
air attacks were used against them.

Events took on a threatening scale. At the beginning of March 1930, Pravda, the soviet paper, published an article by Josef Stalin called “Drunk
with success,” in which certain excesses in the building of kolhosps were criticized. The main blame for “distorting the Party line,” Stalin
hypocritically laid at the feet of local officials, whose fault lay only in the fact that they fervently carried out Party orders. Farmers began leaving
kolhosps en masse, especially in Ukraine, where they amounted to more than 50%. This turn of events could hardly please the Bolshevik
leadership, and by September 1930 the attack on private farmers was renewed. By the end of 1932, nearly 70% of all farmsteads had been
collectivized in the Ukrainian SSR, covering some 80% of all sown territory.

In short, the most hard-working and successful landowners were destroyed in the process of collectivization. The fate of those country families
who were deported to the north of Russia and to Siberia was particularly tragic. They were transported in cattle cars in bitter frosts, tossed out
into a snowy wasteland, often without anything to survive by—no food, no clothing, no footwear. As a result, countless thousands, especially
children, simply died.

Once collectivization was complete, all incentives to work in rural areas were completely destroyed and the command-driven economy was
established under kolhosps that were in the complete control of state officials. In effect, the practice of confiscating foodstuffs from those who
produced them was renewed, as it had been during the years of “war communism,” with the one difference that the focus of mandatory grain
deliveries were no longer individual farmers but the kolhosp: the state could take away every last speck of grain from a kolhosp and no one
would put up the least bit of protest.

During the 1930 harvest, Ukraine delivered a mandatory grain order of 7.804mn tonnes, compared to only 5.072mn t in the previous growing
season. This was a record yield of grains, and the kolhosps were left with nearly nothing. The 1932 harvest plan was even more demanding
than in 1931, despite the repressions that were being applied, not only against private farmers, but also against individual heads of kolhosps,
village councils and county officials.

The poor organization of work at the kolhosps, the reluctance of villagers to work on them, the destruction of successful farmsteads, and the
widespread slaughter of livestock by farmers to prevent their confiscation all contributed to the undermining of the foundation of the agricultural
production. In the meantime, the gross harvesting of grain shrank, the yields of various produce on kolhosp fields began to decline: in some
kolhosps, 1932 yields were as low as 3cnt/ha. Thus, in 1931, the gross harvest of grain was 98.1% of the 1929 level, whereas in 1932 it was
only 78.6%, horse counts were only 66.7% of the 1928 level, cattle were down to 58.2%, swine down to 37.7%, and sheep and goats were only
20%. [1, pp 123-127]
The cutting off of commercial ties between the farmer and the consumer of foodstuffs as a result of the elimination of the network of enterprises
and their replacement by a farm cooperative also had a negative impact on the development of kolhosp production during its initial period. Both
the processing and the selling of agricultural products slowed down considerably, although these were desperately needed by urban dwellers
and gave country dwellers a source of income.

The incompetence of kolhosp managers brought considerable damage to the flourishing of agricultural production, as these were appointed to
their post not for their professional capabilities, but for their ideological qualities.

The kolhosps were making use of primitive tools and farm implements that had been expropriated from the local farmers. The state-run Machine
and Tractor Stations (MTSs) that were set up in rapid order—by 1932, there were 592 such points in Ukraine alone—were capable of serving
only half of the country’s kolhosps. Even so, farm technology remained low even at those kolhosps that were served by MTSs.

As in the times of serfdom, villagers were suddenly attached to their place of residence by the system of internal passports that was introduced
in 1932. Without official permission, they could not leave their collective farm. Terrorized by repression, they were essentially transformed into
second-class citizens.

All these efforts by Party-state organs were aimed at turning the countryside into the main source of capital for the unrealistic, forced pace of
industrialization. The state needed hard currency to buy industrial equipment abroad. The only way to get such currency was to export raw
materials—mainly grain, whose price had dropped sharply on international markets. But the leadership of the USSR was not prepared to take
the external situation into account and, accordingly, slow the pace of industrialization down. Despite poor prices, grain export volumes kept
growing. Whereas the country harvested 835mn centners and exported 48.4mn cnt in 1930, in 1931, 51.8mn cnt were exported although only
395mn centners had been harvested. Many kolhosps found themselves with not only all their crop but also their entire seed stores confiscated.
In many districts of Ukraine, people were beginning to starve. Some kolhosps simply collapsed at this time.

In Spring 1932, weakened villagers, who had half-starved over the winter, were unable to successfully carry out spring works. The grain crop was
poor, but not much lower than the average for many previous years. Still, the Kremlin was not pleased with this kind of situation, as it wanted to
increase exports even more. Deciding that the reason for the low harvest was the lack of desire among rural dwellers to unhesitatingly support
the utopian idea of “building socialism in our country,” the Stalinist leadership decided to take its revenge.

The most violent crime of the Communist regime against the Ukrainian people was the Holodomor organized by it in 1932–1933. The purpose
of this planned action against Ukrainian farmers was to destroy the foundation of the Ukrainian nation and national rebirth, to eliminate all
independent farmsteads, and to make it impossible for anyone to withstand the soviet regime.

“Moscow planned the famine in order to destroy the Ukrainian village as a national bastion. Ukrainian peasants were not destroyed because
they were peasants but because they were Ukrainians,” writes American author and professor Robert Conquest. Analysis convincingly shows
that events in the Ukrainian countryside at that time exhibited all the elements of political genocide. This was the conclusion reached by the
1988–1990 International Commission to study the famine in Ukraine, which included a number of top international lawyers.

Today, the US, Canada, Australia and Argentina have officially declared the same. A slew of legislatures in the world, including the Baltic
countries, are preparing to do the same. A mere 70 years after this Ukrainian national tragedy did the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine itself carry out
its civic duty to the memory of millions of Ukrainians: on 14 May 2003, it recognized the Holodomor of 1932–1933 an act of genocide against the
Ukrainian people.

The main reason for the Holodomor of 1932–1933 was the deliberate, criminal policy of the Bolshevik regime. Even Stalin himself noted that the
overall grain crop for 1932 was higher than that of 1931. In other words, there was no shortage of food. But the state deliberately confiscated
most of the harvest, including grain that had been designated for seeding, for insurance and for fodder, ignoring the appeals and warnings of
local Ukrainian officials. This sentenced millions of people to death from an artificially created famine. Any attempts to counter this aggression
were violently crushed.

Section 2.

2.1 The consequences of collectivization and the beginning of the Holodomor

The first kolhosp spring, 1930, was promising. Ukraine had a relatively good harvest, yielding about 4.7 centners per hectare, which was a
record for all the years of soviet rule at that point. The impression was created that the collectivized countryside would be able to support the
“leap” in industrialization. Farmworkers achieved the results for the first year of total collectivization in a state of shock. Although the nasty word
“confiscation” was not being used, the half-forgotten experience of 10 years earlier returned to the collectivized countryside. The market was
disappearing. Money lost its purchasing power. Resources for preparing the soil was miserly, while wages on the communal farms were
wretched. To feed themselves, people had to mostly rely on their household gardens. Yet, the number of kolhosps kept growing.

After March 1930, administrative pressure on private farmers was considered excessive. This did not mean that collectivization somehow lost its
forcible nature. It was simply becoming more and more difficult for anyone to farm individually: private farms were being dekulakized and
burdened with difficult objectives and high taxes, while kolhosps were given tax breaks. By the end of 1932, almost 70% of Ukraine’s farms were
collectivized, covering more than 80% of sown territory. Other grain-growing regions reached similar levels of collectivization. Collectivization was
accompanied by expropriation of the successful layer of farmers and the ruination of a well-developed system of agricultural cooperatives.
Indeed, this practice of confiscation rapidly led to a crisis situation. The most significant sign of the crisis that engulfed the young kolhosp system
was the complete disinterest of farmers in developing collective farms—in short, their unwillingness to work.

Collectivization led to a steep fall in productivity in the farm sector. In 1930, the gross harvest of grain in Ukraine was 23 million tonnes; in 1931 it
fell to 18mn t, and in 1932 it plunged to 13mn t. While this was more than enough to feed the entire population of the republic, the Union
government continued to set exaggerated grain production quotas. In 1931, the republic’s leadership appealed to Moscow to reduce the plan
numbers. Stalin agreed to a slight reduction in the quota, but this did not remedy things. As a result, by the end of 1931 famine had begun in
Ukraine.

Naturally, the forced collectivization that had began on a mass scale in 1929 ultimately destroyed the Ukrainian countryside and opened the way
for the even more terrible famine in 1932–1933. It was intended to put grain growers in place, not only in Ukraine itself, but in all ethnically
Ukrainian territories: Kuban, Stavropol, Voronezh…

Precisely on the pretext that grain production had not met the set quotas in Kuban, Moscow banned ukrainianization there on 14 December 1932.
The following day, the CC All-Union CP(b) and the Soviet RNK passed a resolution, signed also by Stalin and Molotov, to immediately terminate
all ukrainianization in the Far East, in the Central Chornozem oblasts, and in Kazakhstan. This is why it is possible to concur with the words of
the American scholar, Chamberlain: “The Soviet government used the famine as a national policy instrument on an unprecedented scale, in
order to destroy those who resisted its policies.” [cited in Tryzub, 1934]
In August 1932, a law was passed that provided for the death sentence for stealing kolhosp property. Even for the theft of a handful of grain, a
person would pay with their life. Soon there appeared a law on “combating speculation,” which provided for a sentence in a concentration camp
for 5-10 years for those villagers who, in trying to save themselves from starvation, tried to exchange household items for foodstuffs in urban
areas. They could not purchase food, because as of 1928, food was distributed on the basis of rationing cards in the cities. In short, rural
dwellers found themselves in an untenable situation.

2.2 Grain delivery campaigns. The blacklist.

Meanwhile, the grain production quotas kept growing. In 1931, Ukrainian farmers gave the state 39% of the gross national grain harvest, while in
1932 this was up to 55%. In October 1932, an emergency commission chaired by V. Molotov arrived in Ukraine to oversee the republican grain
campaign. This commission began working with the adoption of a resolution 18 November 1932 by the CC CP(b)U and 20 November 1932 by
the RNK of the Ukrainian SSR that were virtually identical in content and had the same name: “On measures to increase grain deliveries.” These
resolutions required agricultural cooperatives where kolhosp workers were being given bonuses more than the established norm during
harvesting—15% of actual threshed grain—to organize the return of illegally distributed grain. The Commission was brutal in its handling of this.

Party activists were mobilized for rural work. Both regular soldiers and squadrons of DPU appeared in the countryside and forcibly confiscated
every last grain from the local people. Party and Soviet workers and heads of kolhosps who tried to interfere in the rape of the countryside were
persecuted by order of Stalin. The Molotov Commission did not adopt any resolutions of its own, but operated in the name of the party state
officials of the republic. It instituted the practice of “natural” fines, that is confiscating meat, potatoes and other foodstuffs whenever there was no
grain to take, against kolhosp workers and private farmers who “owed” grain to the plan. The main repressive measure was permission to the
county executive committees to transfer to the grain procurement account all natural funds of the kolhosps: seed, food and forage grains.

Villages that had an especially large debt in grain deliveries were entered onto a “black list.” Being blacklisted essentially meant the village was
under blockade: the residents had no right to leave the village and if there was not enough food in the village, people simply died of starvation.
The large village of Havrylivka died out almost entirely. Only as of 15 December 1932 was it permitted to sell gas, matches and other household
products in villages, with the exception of 82 counties in five oblasts who had the biggest debts in grain deliveries.

The organization of this famine was the handiwork of such men as L. Kaganovich, who arrived in Ukraine right behind Molotov, Secretary-General
S. Kosior, and Council of People’s Committees V. Chubar. In January 1933, Stalin sent his personal emissary Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine, who
became the Second Secretary of the CC CP(b)U—but, in actual fact, the dictator of Ukraine. On his orders, the villages were ransacked and every
last bit of grain removed.

Over 1932–1933, when Ukraine was short of grain, the Bolshevik leadership did nothing to slow down grain exports, shipping out 1.72 and 1.68
million tonnes those two years. It is a safe conclusion that this export was undertaken not only to buy necessary equipment or materials abroad,
but also to create the illusion that there was plenty of grain in the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the 1930s, Ukraine was known as the
breadbasket of Europe, so any news about a terrible famine on its territory would astound everyone in the West, including France. And although
the French press dedicated much less space to publishing articles about Ukraine than the British or the Germans did, it would be a mistake to
think that the Ukrainian factor was not taken seriously by the French. The citizenry of this country generally reacted with empathy towards the
Ukrainian people, with the exception of the communists and those who insisted on believing in soviet propaganda about the wonderful life of the
people of the USSR.

2.3 Press reaction to events in Ukraine: the foreign and diaspora press

The French press was informed about the tragedy in Ukraine and—other than those publications that took their orders from Moscow—generally
condemned the Soviet regime for its inhuman way of breaking the resistance of peasants who refused to be collectivized by starving them and its
ethnic discrimination. Under the column “Famine in Ukraine,” a series of articles appeared that exposed the soviet practice of genocide.
Journalist C. Berthillon set herself the goal of exposing the bloody soviet regime. Ms. Berthillon not only saw the grim reality, but properly
assessed the imperial ambitions of Moscow. “Precisely to destroy all resistant elements, the soviet government, in the hopes of destroying an
entire peoples who were at fault for nothing other than a desire for liberty, deliberately organized this horrible famine,” she wrote. [2]
Reactions similar to Ms. Berthillon’s were evident in other French papers. Author Robert de Bonplan wrote in the provincial paper, “Le petit
Marseillais,” that public opinion was disturbed by news about the famine that was decimating Ukraine, where entire villages were dying out. “It’s
clear that this famine happened largely because the Soviets wanted it to, using this as a means to punish Ukraine for its prolonged national
resistance. The history of Ukraine and the Red Terror that has been unleashed there is one of the most tragic in the post-war period.” [11] Naturally, the Soviet regime tried to cover up the deaths of millions of people. Domestic media said nothing. The government rejected any offers
of help from abroad, insisting that rumors of famine were being deliberately spread by enemies of the USSR. One-time Prime Minister of France,
Eduard Herriot, who traveled at the time around the Soviet Union, announced to all the world that there was no famine in the country. This was
written up in two lengthy articles on the famine in 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine that were published in “L’ordre,” a Parisian daily. [8] In an article
entitled “What E. Herriot won’t tell us after returning from his triumphant tour,” author Charles de Pere-Chappuis ironically wrote about the French
diplomat’s visit, who declared on the basis of what he had seen that “French opinion is incorrectly informed about the suffering of Ukrainian
peasants.”

And what truth could Herriot possibly have transmitted when, after his supposed wanderings in the Soviet Union, he wrote: “Sometimes we talk
about Ukraine, but it’s essentially like the province of Bose (one of the largest grain-producing provinces in France). I was taken to a village that
had supposedly been devastated. There, I could see fruit orchards and I could see people gathering grain on machinery. I could see the
hardworking locals and no one looked wretched. I could see nice, healthy children. If one assesses the situation in the USSR calmly, then it
becomes clear that the USSR is gradually becoming a state that will have the same power as the USA.” The “bloom of life” so blinded Herriot
that he was unable to see how entire villages were dying of hunger.

Alas, tales of the rich life in Ukraine were spread by others, like Romain Roland, Henri Barbuse and Bernard Shaw, too. Only the Ukrainian
diaspora kept crying out otherwise. One representative of the Ukrainian National Republic’s government-in-exile, Prof. Oleksandr Shulhin, having
painted a terrible portrait of the famine in Ukraine, turned to the Grain Commission that had been set up by the London Economic Conference
with this plea: “At a time when the advisory committee is supposed to decide how much grain the USSR should ship abroad, we ask you, in the
name of humanity, to reject any export of food products, especially grains, from the USSR. This grain rightfully belongs to those who sowed it and
today are dying of starvation—the farmers of Ukraine and Kuban. For our part, we protest vehemently against this export, which we cannot call
anything other than a crime.” [Tryzub, 1933] But the world remained deaf and millions of Ukrainians continued to die.

On 27 September 1933, “Le Matin” published a front-page story on two pages about the Holodomor, which had been passed on to the editors by
a one-time Petrograd professor called I. Buzyna. “Prior to the May First holiday, the starving trekked to the city, among them thieves and the
homeless who were dying on the streets. In order not to expose our wretchedness to strangers, trucks would collect them forcibly and take them
all away like rabid dogs…” “There are ever more incidents of people murdering because of hunger and occasionally someone is arrested for
selling human flesh at the market.” [9]
Moscow kept silent. Until 1987, there was no mention of the Famine of 1933 in any soviet histories or press.

Section 3.

3.1        The famine peaks. Eye-witness accounts.

The famine reached its peak in the winter and spring of 1933. People were resorting to eating crushed tree bark or straw mixed with rotten,
frozen cabbage; cats, dogs, rats, and eventually slugs, frogs and nettles. Needless to say, they would then die from terrible stomach ailments.
There were many instances of cannibalism. Some peasants went crazy with hunger and would kill their own or others’ children. Entire villages
disappeared, and meanwhile the raids and searches and the confiscation of anything edible continued. Famine spread through all of Soviet
Ukraine, as well as to the Northern Caucasus, Crimea, Kursk, the lower Volga region, and Kazakhstan. Evidence of this is in the testimony of eye-
witnesses of the terrible Holodomor such as N. Indyk from the village of Andriyivka in Poltava oblast:

“People were so weakened by hunger that entire families would die. Others fought to stay alive by looking for food. In the summer it was easier:
there were berries, apples and apricots. In the fall, people would go out in the fields and look for the potatoes that remained after harvesting, the
roots of beets or leftover corncobs. There were even cases where people would break open the pits of cherries or apricots to eat the kernels.
People ate grass, even leaves, the softer bark of trees, or even little branches. Of course, people ate beans, fodder beets which they would first
boil, then grate to make pancakes. They would also make pancakes from corn flour. These were a dirt-brown color, but tasty. People would also
eat oilcakes and the chaff from grain.

“There were more terrible incidents of people eating live birds, beetles, flies and worms. Where people ate other people. My grandmother told
me that in their village was a family called Kozub who had five children. The kids were always running around hungry, poorly clothed and barefoot
and when the youngest child fell ill and began to die, the mother decided not to bury it but to leave it so that they could eat. It was horrifying, but
true.” [6, p. 144]
3.2        The aftermath of the famine and the losses to Ukraine

The number of those who died of starvation is impossible to state precisely. Different scholars say from 2.5 million to 8 million victims died.
According to Robert Conquest, author of “Harvest of Sorrow,” a book on soviet collectivization and the Holodomor, at least 5 million peasants
died in Ukraine and another 2 million beyond its borders. At the beginning of the 1990s, S. Kulchytskiy (Ukraine) and S. Maksudov (USA) tried to
come up with a more accurate figure based on recently released archives of soviet demographic statistics. According to Kulchytskiy’s
calculations, direct losses to Ukraine from starvation were in the range of 3–3.5 million persons in 1933. Total losses, including a lowered birth
rate, range from 4.4–5 million. According to Maksudov, 4–4.5 million died of hunger, while total losses were in the range of 5.5–6 million. Other
researchers have concluded that there is no other instance of genocide that, for sheer scale, can be compared to what happened in the
Ukrainian SSR at the beginning of the 1930s. The Famine of 1933 is the most terrifying of the many crimes of the Stalin era. [4, pp 57–59]
Conclusion

Josef Stalin liked to combine draconian policies with insignificant concessions of a largely propagandist nature. Thus, in 1934, when the
campaign for centralization began, the capital of Ukraine was moved from Kharkiv to its traditional center, Kyiv. In 1935, Stalin repeated this
move. Prior to the “Great Purge,” he gave the people of the Soviet Union a new Constitution that guaranteed them all the civil rights that were
enjoyed in “bourgeois democracies.” He declared the Supreme Soviet, which included the House of Councils (soviets) and the House of
Nationalities, the highest organ of state power. He also confirmed the right of the republics to withdraw from the Union and increased the
number of republics from 4 to 11, dividing up the Central Asian and Caucasus regions. An infamous example of Stalin’s utter cynicism was his
phrase, spoken in the middle of the terrors of the 1930s: “Life is better, life is merrier.”

In 1997, the “Black Book of Communism” was published in France as “Le Livre noir du communisme,” edited by historian Stéphane Courtois.
The authors focused their attention on the most important “question without an answer:” How is it that communists have gotten away without
being punished for their mass murders? This question was partly answered by the British journalist, P. Jones: “The guilty have died in
comfortable beds or continue to live as well-off pensioners or are even in power today.”

Thus, the “success” of the communist regime, achieved through extraordinary means of forced industrialization of production and total
collectivization of the countryside, had an overall negative impact on the state of Ukraine’s economy. The industrialization of the 1930s
strengthened the colonial dependence of Ukraine’s economy on that of Russia and a growing imbalance between light and heavy industry in
favor of the latter. Collectivization led to the estrangement of country dwellers from their land, to the neglect of Ukrainian villages, and to their
social and moral collapse. It destroyed the incentives for farmers to work and put a brake on the development of agricultural production, the
consequences of which Ukraine feels to this day.

The communist very effectively mastered the art of covering their tracks and forcing critics to keep quiet. That is why the world knows about
Stalinism, although the initiator of mass terror, concentration camps, ethnocide and genocide was actually Vladimir Lenin. “You can fool some of
the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time,” said US President Abraham Lincoln, “but you cannot fool all of the people all of
the time.” This brilliant phrase seems particularly apt when it comes to the Holodomor of 1932–1933. For the truth, as one French writer put it in
the paper “Tap,” sooner or later becomes “clear, a public secret,” despite the disinformation spread by such foolish “tourists” as Eduard Herriot,
Walter Duranty and others.

Bibliography:
1.        Baran, V., Hrytsak, Y., Zaitsev, O., History of Ukraine, Svit: L’viv, 1996, 86 pp
2.        Zhukovskiy A., “Contemporary French press on the famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933,” Suchasnist #10: Kyiv, 1983
3.        Conquest, Robert., Harvest of Sorrow: Collectivization and the Holodomor, Znannia: Kyiv, 1993, 98 pp
4.        Kulchytskiy, S.V., 1933: A tragedy of famine, Znannia: Kyiv, 1989, 133 pp
5.        Kulchytskiy, S.V., Kotliar, M., A guide to the history of Ukraine, Ukraina: Kyiv, 1996, 280 pp
6.        Serhiychuk, V., How they murdered us with hunger, Bibioteka Ukraintsia: Kyiv, 1997, 54 pp
7.        Daily Mail, 19 December 1997
8.        L’ordre, 10 and 13 September 1933
9.        Le Matin, 30 August and 4 October 1933
10.        Le monde slav, 9 September 1933
11.        Le petit Marseillais, 30 August 1933