Ukraineian Famine
"Dniepropetrovsk was overrun with starving farmers," remembered one Party worker. "Many of them lay listless, too weak even to beg around the railway stations. Their children were little more than skeletons with swollen bellies." He was appalled at what was happening, but his superior saw things differently. "A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime… It's a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We've won the war!"
A Man-Made Famine raged through Ukraine, that being the ethnic-Ukrainian region of northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River region in 1932-33. This resulted in the death of between 7 to 10 million people, mainly Ukrainians. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his henchman Lazar Kaganovich instigated this collectivization that led to the Great Famine. The famine was also used as an effective tool to break the renaissance of Ukrainian culture that was occurring under approval of the communist government in Ukraine. Moscow perceived this as a threat to a Russo-Centric Soviet rule and therefore acted to crush this cultural renaissance in a most brutal manner. "Not only did the Soviet authorities deny there was a famine in Ukraine at the time it was happening, they continued for decades thereafter to claim that any talk of famine in 1933 was part of an international conspiracy, aided by Ukrainian émigrés in the 'imperialist West,' to besmirch the good name of the Soviet Union… We will probably never know how many people died directly or indirectly as a result of the Great Famine. In any case, the figures fai...
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...rm system was indeed "here to stay". If one can justify the intentional killing of about 6 million people then Joseph Stalin's Five-Year Plan (which included collectivization and purges) and his "war" was victoriously uncanny.
Works Cited
Danilov, A. The History of Russia: The Twentieth Century. Heron Press. 1996
Kamenetsky, I. The Tragedy of Vinnytsia: Materials on Stalin's policy of extermination
in Ukraine during the Great Purge - 1936 to 1938. Ukrainian research and documentation
Center. Toronto - New York. 1989
Magocsi, Paul, R. A History of Ukraine. University of Washington Press. Seattle. 1996
Mazower, M. Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. Vintage Books. 2000
Riasanovsky, N. A History of Russia. Oxford University Press. New York and Oxford. 2000
Treadgold, D. Twentieth Century Russia. Rand McNally & Company. Chicago. 1959
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