TEACHING UNIT THE GREAT FAMINE IN UKRAINE

1932-1933

TOPIC: GENOCIDE

These lessons were prepared by Valentina Kuryliw, Department Head of History and Social Studies for Grade 10 Civics for the Toronto District School Board.

Democracy: Global Perspective Activity 3: In Defence of Human Rights: Genocide: Man-Made Famine in Soviet

Ukraine. 1932-33. Lesson Title: Example of Genocide: Soviet Mode Famine in Ukraine 1932-33. Key Expectations: Overall Expectations PCV.04 - demonstrate an understanding of a citizen's role in responding to non-

democratic movements through personal and group actions. ACV.01 - demonstrate an ability to research questions and issues of civic importance,

and to think critically and creatively about these issues and questions.

Specific expectations PC3.04 - analyse the evolution of Canada's participation in international tribunals, from

the World War 11 to the International Court of Justice's ongoing prosecutions involving war crimes and genocide.

AC1.02 - demonstrate an ability to formulate questions; locate information from different sources; and identify main ideas, supporting evidence, points of view, and biases in these materials.

IC5.01 - analyse contemporary crises or issues of international significance in the context of the global community.

PC3.06 - demonstrate an ability to anticipate conflicting civic purposes, overcome personal bias, and suspend judgment in dealing with issues of civic concern.

AC3.02 - communicate their own beliefs, points of view, and informed judgments, and effectively use appropriate discussion skills.

Assessment / Evaluation Techniques Diagnostic Assessment of definition of Genocide Formative Assessment student responses to questions on video Summative Evaluation of Newspaper article produced.

Teaching / Learning Strategies 1. Teacher to review purpose of UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Discuss the

implications of the Declaration with the whole class using socratic questioning. (http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html)

2. Brainstorm definition of "genocide". Establish examples of genocide of which they know in different areas of the world and types of governments involved. This could be done in chart form using columns. Answer question, "why do genocides occur under such governments?"

3. Specific example: Famine in Ukraine: Unknown Holocaust of 1932-33. Teacher could introduce topic by: Showing the video Harvest of Despair. (see resources Appendix A)

Teacher instructions: It is recommended that the video be shown in 2 segments:

Part 1. Background information; events leading to Famine (half hour) Part 2. Famine and cover-up (half hour)

Assignment Part 1 a) What evidence exists that the Famine was man-made?b) What events led to the Famine? c) What evidence is there that the Famine was directed specifically against the

Ukrainian people? d) How many people died as a result of the Famine? e) What methods were used by government officials that led to the Famine? Assignment Part 2 a) Why were Western countries silent about this tragedy in 1932-1933? b) Why was there a media cover-up? c) Should the perpetrators, Communist Party members, be held accountable for

crimes against humanity? Why or why not? d) Suggest ways in which this could be done.

4. Class could be divided into groups of 5-6 with each group reporting their findings to the entire class, each group supplementing the answers of the previous groups on a chart. Conclusions to be drawn out in class discussion based on findings, Each group is to hand in one page on conclusions reached.

5. Students are to go over handout singly or in groups, "The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932-33," (Appendix B) answering the following:

a) What was the reason for the destruction of between 7,000, 000 - 10,000,000 Ukrainians in 1932-33?

b) Why can it be considered to be an example of ethnic cleansing?c) Explain how some Canadians were connected to events in Ukraine, and how

Canada was affected by events in Ukraine in 1932-33. d) Why was it possible to cover up the Famine for over 65 years?

Questions may be used as a guide for a class discussion; results could be checked orally or handed in for marking.

6. Working with case studies of eyewitness accounts. Articles are to be handed in for evaluation.

e) Class is divided into 6 groups:3 receive Case Study #1 (Appendix C);3 receive case Case Study #2 (Appendix C).

f) Each group is to read the eye witness account of the Famine and pick out the 5 most important facts in the case. Using information from the handout "The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932-33" (Appendix B) and the eye witness account, each student is to prepare an article for a newspaper in 1933 explaining what was happening in Ukraine. Be sure to include the following:

1. name of newspaper, date 2. headline for article

3. author of article, 4. drawing or illustration if possible. 5. main points to be made

7. Newspaper analysis: Sunday Sun “Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust” Eric Margolis, Dec. 13, 1998. (Appendix C)

Answer the following questions: 1. What is the reason given by Margolis for the Famine of 1933?2. How did Stalin manage to kill so many people?3. According to Eric Margolis, why didn't western countries speak out about

the Famine?4. What evidence does Margolis use to back up his statements? give 3

examples.5. Does Margolis present a convincing argument? Why or why not?

8. Examine photographs in the Chicago American, March 4,6, 1935 (Appendix C)Answer the question, "What were conditions like in Ukraine in 1933?" Give three fact illustrating support for your argument.

9. Additional articles on the Famine: Hunter, Ian, “A Tale of Truth and Two Journalists” Report Magazine, Monday March 27, 2000. (Appendix C)

a) How did Muggeridge and Duranty present events in Ukraine in 1933? b) What explanation is given for the discrepancies between the two journalists?

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Teacher information "Black Famine in Ukraine I932-33.' by Andrew Gregorovich. (http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine) (Appendix D)

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Resources Gregorovich, Andrew, "Black Famine, In Ukraine 1932-33, "A Struggle for Existence"

Forum Ukrainian Review no. 24, 1974. Harvest of Despair" (Canada 1984) Hunter, Ian, “A Tale of Truth and Two Journalists” , Report Magazine. March 27, 2000. Margolis, Eric. "Remembering Ukraine's Unknown Holocaust", Sunday Star. December

13, 1998. USA Ukraine Famine Commission, Case Studies - Tatiana Pawlichka, Sviatoslav Karavansky. Washington, 1986. http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine

Prepared by Valentina Kuryliw (York Humber High School) TDSB

Appendix A

HARVEST OF DESPAIR The 1932-33 Famine in Ukraine

It is called the forgotten holocaust -- a time when Stalin was dumping millions of tons of wheat on the Western markets, while in Ukraine, men, women and children were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day, 17 human beings a minute. Seven to 10 million people perished in a famine caused not by war, or natural disasters, but by ruthless decree. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of this great tragedy the story is finally being told. Since 1981, the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee has been gathering materials, seeking out eye-witnesses and documenting this unprecedented event. HARVEST OF DESPAIR is the product of this effort.

The film probes the tragic consequences of the Ukrainian nation's struggle for greater cultural and political autonomy in the 20s and 30s. Through rare archival footage, the results of Stalin's lethal countermeasures unfold in harrowing detail. Highlighting the film are intensely moving eyewitness accounts of survivors of the famine, as well as such noted individuals as Petro Grigorenko, a former Soviet General, British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, Ambassador Johann Von Herwarth, the then German Attaché in Moscow and Andor Hencke, then German Consul in Ukraine and others.

HARVEST OF DESPAIR explores the reasons why this man-made famine remains so little known. Blinded by radical leftwing ideals, world statesmen, such as Edouard Herriot, Pulitzer prize-winning journalists, and celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw, all contributed to the regime's campaign of concealment. Even the democratic governments of the depression hit West preferred to remain silent over Soviet Russia's atrocities in order to continue trading.

In 1932-33, roughly one quarter of the entire population of Ukraine perished through brutal starvation. HARVEST OF DESPAIR, through its stark, haunting images, provides the eloquent testimony of a lost generation that has been silenced too long. The film leaves a legacy to future generations, an impassioned plea for humanity which is not easily forgotten. In April 1985 film Harvest of Despair won First Prize and Gold Medal at the Houston International Festival.

The filmmakers wish to express their great appreciation to the witnesses for their courage in recounting these traumatic events in their lives. Film can be purchased or rented at reasonable price from committee.

Released in 1984 this prize-winning film won seven awards in Canada and the United States. It is available on VHS cassette for $25.00 from:

Ukrainian Canadian Research & Documentation Centre 620 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2H4

Tel: (416) 966-1819 Fax: 966-1820ucrdc@interlog.com

Questions/Assignment:

Part 1 1) What evidence exists that the Famine was man-made? 2) What events within the Soviet Union and Ukraine led to the Famine? 3) What evidence is there that Soviet policy directed specifically against the Ukrainian

population? 4) How many people died as a result of the Famine?5) What methods were used by government officials that led to the Famine?

Part 2 1) Why were Western countries silent about this tragedy in 1932-337 2) Why was there a media cover-up? 3) Should the perpetrators, Communist Party members, be held accountable for crimes

against humanity? Why or why not? Suggest what could be done.

Appendix B

THE GREAT FAMINE IN UKRAINE, 1932-1933 An Example of Ethnic Cleansing

Valentina Kuryliw

In 1932-33, the Government of the USSR's assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, and on the Ukrainian nation, was one of the most devastating occurrences of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century. It was a colossal human tragedy. More lives were lost in Ukraine due to the Great Famine than in all of Europe as a consequence of World War I.

Today, the newly-independent Government of Ukraine estimates that no less than ten million Ukrainians starved to death in the man-made famine of 1932-33. At least three million were children. About one-third of the peasantry was wiped out.

HistoryUnder the rule of Joseph Stalin and his First Five Year Plan (1928-1932), a harsh policy of collectivization was applied in Ukraine. Beginning in 1928, independent farmers were forced to give up their farmland, livestock, and equipment to the state, without compensation. The more well-to-do peasant farmers, or kurkuls, and leaders in the villages were targeted as "anti-soviet, unwanted elements". They were systematically destroyed by deportations to Siberia, concentration camps, and firing squads. These people constituted about 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 of Ukraine's population of 32 million. Any opposition to collectivization was met by brutal force as secret police and army units were sent to villages to collect not only the grain quota, but also all food retained by individual households. The borders of Ukraine were sealed, so as to prevent any food imports. In contrast, food in Russia was plentiful except in the Kuban region where Ukrainians had settled. To ensure that Ukrainian peasants could not leave their villages to seek relief in the cities, the Soviet government instituted a system of passports so that no one could travel without permission. Entire villages died from starvation, while wheat collected in government-owned bins either rotted from mismanagement, sent abroad or was used for the production of alcohol. As people starved, Communist bosses and party faithful were well fed. On the collective farms, those peasants who survived the famine became little better than slave labourers, with few rights or privileges on land cultivated by their ancestors for centuries before.

CausesWhy did this happen? The answer lies in a statement made by Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, in 1932: "Food is a weapon." The famine was a conscious instrument of Soviet policy to break the body and spirit of the Ukrainian peasantry, and thus subjugate the nation completely to Soviet rule. After 250 years of Russian rule, Ukrainians had tried to gain independence during the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917-1920). Their attempt was crushed by the Red Army, and by 1923 Ukraine became a colony within the Soviet Union. Stalin was not going to permit such a struggle for freedom again. By crushing the peasantry, which constituted about 85% of Ukraine's population and which was resisting communism, he would deal the nation a mortal blow. To ensure compliance with the strategy of using "food as a weapon", and to minimize any sympathy for the suffering of the local

population, Stalin appointed mainly non- Ukrainians to key positions in the Ukrainian Government. We know that history has demonstrated both the brutality and the success of 5talin's domestic policies.

Effect of Famine on CanadaUkrainian farmers had settled and developed much of the Canadian west at the turn of the century. When these Canadians offered to help ease the suffering in Ukraine by sending food through the Red Cross, they were told that the famine was a hoax. In fact, in 1932 Soviet wheat from Ukraine was dumped on world markets. Wheat that had been confiscated from Ukrainian peasants by Fled Army troops and secret police was sold to western countries at prices no Canadian farmer could match. No one could believe that the people growing the wheat were being starved to death. Further, the Soviet government instituted a policy of "disinformation", convincing journalists and Soviet sympathizers in the west as well as western governments that there was no famine, as Ukraine had produced a great harvest in 1932, sufficient to feed its population for several years. Until very recently, the Soviet government maintained its formal denial that the Great Famine had ever taken place, or that the state had any part in creating it. Fortunately today there exists an excellent documentary record that Ukraine, "the breadbasket of Europe," was indeed a target of ethnic cleansing, with starvation as a potent weapon of Soviet policy of dealing with its towards its largest minority, the Ukrainian people.

Appendix C

Case Study #1

Famine Testimony of Tatiana Pawlichka

In 1932, I was 10 years old, and I remember well what happened in my native village in the Kiev 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 villagers tried to go out in the field to look for gleanings, and the Communists would arrest them and shoot at them, and 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, milkweed, sedges. By autumn, no one had any chickens or cattle. Here and there, someone had a few potatoes or beets. People coming in 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. When 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 Russian SFSR] because it was said that there was no famine there. Very few [of those who 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 into Russia could 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 Mykhailo 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 off 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 ubiquitous odor of decomposing bodies. The wind carried this odor far and wide. It was thus over all of Ukraine.

Congressional Testimony presented before the United States Ukraine Famine Commission in Washington D. C., October 8, 1986

Case Study #2

Famine Testimony of Sviatoslav Karavansky

From my childhood years I remember that from 1929, the beginning of industrialization and collectivization, our family and all of the people of Odessa suffered a great shortage of food. Buttermilk, milk, sugar and even bread disappeared from the stores. In the period 1929-30 the whole city turned to the rationing system. The entire population lived on rations. The portions that were handed out continued to decrease, and in the winter of 1933 I, as a dependent, received 200 grams (seven ounces) of black bread per day. My mother, brother and sister received the same ration. Bread was, and still is, the main source of nourishment for the Soviet population. For comparison, let's consider the daily ration of the Soviet soldier. The soldiers of the Red Army received at that time one kilogram (36 ounces) of bread per day. The entire city of Odessa lived on rations which were insufficient for healthy people, but which kept it from starving. The rural population was not subject to rationing, and it perished. People in the villages could not receive any help from their relatives in towns because the city population was hungry, too.

It should be mentioned that the closing of churches preceded the Great Famine. So, the organizer of the famine took into consideration the major role played by the Church in dealing with national disasters like the famine. It is known that during the famine of 1921 in Ukraine churches aided the starving people. During 1932-33, the churches did not function, and the clergy were sent to labor camps, which, in reality, were death camps.

Our family lived in downtown Odessa, and I attended school there. I never saw starving people downtown, but many of the latter were seen on the outskirts of the city. Odessa was a port where foreign sailors and businessmen could always be found, so the authorities took measures not to allow hungry peasants to reach the downtown area. But everyone in Odessa knew that there was a horrible shortage of food in the villages. People swelled from hunger and died. In the school which I attended from September 1932 to May 1933, the teacher told us that the kulaks (or kurkuls) were responsible for all the temporary difficulties of the Soviet socialist economy.

My father was employed in the Odessa shipyard, and I heard from adults that a lot of foreign ships in the docks were waiting their turn to be loaded with grain from Odessa grain elevators. My parents wondered how it was possible that such great quantities of food were being exported while the village population was starving. To ask questions about this was dangerous. If a child asked about these things in school, the teachers assumed that he had been taught by his parents, who were thus placed in danger. So, my parents were very careful about telling me not to ask any questions in school, and not to reveal anywhere what was discussed in the family.

The entire population was terrorized by the arrests and trials which culminated in 1932-33. In those years so-called "torgsins" were opened in Odessa. In "torgsins" anyone could buy for gold and foreign currency all the food that otherwise was distributed through the rationing system. Many people who had small golden crosses or wedding rings brought them to "torgsins." Once my mother went to "torgsin" as well. She brought back a loaf of black bread, turning the day into a holiday for the entire family. There were rumors in Odessa that people were being arrested for

selling human sausage in the market place. There was a saying that the sausages "had been shot." Such accounts were not published in the newspapers, which only praised the wisdom of the party and the great leader, Stalin.

In 1934 my father, as a shipyard employee, got a free ticket for an Odessa-Batumi cruise on the Black Sea. Traveling to Batumi on the liner, he observed that a large number of Ukrainian peasants had migrated to Georgia where there was no food shortage and no famine.

The famine in Ukraine was over, but those who survived fled from Ukraine. I know that in the local schools in the village of Rossosha near Proskurov (now Khmelnytsky) there was no first year class for the 1940-41 school year because the birth rate in 1933 had been zero. In 1953-54 the Soviet Navy also experienced shortages of healthy servicemen because of the zero birthrate in 1933 in Ukraine. The requirements for the service in the navy were reduced because otherwise it was impossible to recruit the necessary number of sailors. I received this information from a navy officer who had served a 10-year term in Mordovia. In 1970 my wife and I met a woman in the village of Tarussa (Kaluga region) who spoke with a strong Ukrainian accent. She told us that she was born near Kiev. In 1933 she had fled from her native village because of the famine and had found shelter in Tarussa where she later married and settled down, thereby escaping death while her entire family died of starvation.

Since the revolution, the majority of the Ukrainian population has felt hostility toward the Soviet occupation. The artificial famine deepened the hostility. It is believed that half of the entire prison population in the gulag was composed of Ukrainians. The memory of the famine was especially vivid for the Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s and '70s. The founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group, Mykola Rudenko, wrote a poem about the famine titled "The Cross." References to the famine are present in the works of the late Vasyl Stus, Oles Berdnyk and others.

Congressional Testimony presented before the United States Ukraine Famine Commission in Washington D. C., October 8, 1986

Remembering Ukraine's Unknown HolocaustEric Margolis

The Sunday Sun, December 13, 1998 As Britain's socialist government cleared the way for a gaudy show trial of that Great Satan of the left, Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 65th anniversary of this century's bloodlest crime was utterly ignored. Leftists now baying for Pinochet's head don't want to be reminded of the Unknown Holocaust.

In 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin unleashed genocide in Ukraine. Stalin determined to force Ukraine's millions of independent farmers - called kulaks - into collectivized Soviet agriculture, and to crush Ukraine's growing spirit of nationalism.

Faced by resistance to collectivization, Stalin unleashed terror and dispatched 25,000 fanatical young party militants from Moscow - earlier versions of Mao's Red Guards - to force 10 million Ukrainian peasants into collective farms. Secret police units of OGPU began selective executions of recalcitrant farmers.

When Stalin's red guards failed to make a dent in this immense number, OGPU was ordered to begin mass executions. But there were simply not enough Chekists (secret police) to kill so many people, so Stalin decided to replace bullets with a much cheaper medium of death - mass starvation.

All seed stocks, grain, silage and farm animals were confiscated from Ukraine's farms. (Ethiopia's Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Marjam used the same method in the 1970s to force collectivization: the resulting famine cased one million deaths.)

OGPU agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and rail lines. Nothing came in or out of Ukraine. Farms were searched and looted of food and fuel. Ukrainians quickly began to die of hunger, cold and sickness.

When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent henchman Lazar Kaganovitch to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovitch, the Soviet Eichmann, made quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent of all Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. A Ukrainian party member named Nikita Khruschchev helped supervise the slaughter.

During the bitter winter of 1932-33, mass starvation created by Kaganovitch and 0GPU hit full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots. Some parents even ate infant children.

The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin's custom-made famine and Cheka firing squads remains unknown to this day. The KGB's archives, and recent work by Russian

historians, show at least seven million died. Ukrainian historians put the figure at nine million, or higher. Twenty-five percent of Ukraine's population was exterminated.

Millions of victims Six million other farmers across the USSR were starved or shot during collectivization. Stalin told Winston Churchill he liquidated 10 million peasants during the 1930s. Add mass executions by the Cheka in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; the genocide of three million Muslims in the USSR; massacres of Cossacks and Volga Germans and Soviet industrial genocide accounted for at least 40 million victims, not including 20 million war dead.

Kaganovitch and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD) were Jewish. The predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders, and the frightful crimes and cruelty inflicted by Stalin's Cheka on Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland, led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people for both communism and their suffering. As a direct result, during the subsequent Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the region's innocent Jews became the target of ferocious revenge by Ukrainians, Balts and Poles.

While the world is by now fully aware of the destruction of Europe's Jews by the Nazis, the story of the numerically larger holocaust in Ukraine has been suppressed, or ignored. Ukraine's genocide occurred 8-9 years before Hitler began the Jewish Holocaust, and was committed, unlike Nazi crimes, before the world's gaze. But Stalin's murder of millions was simply denied, or concealed by a left-wing conspiracy of silence that continues to this day. In the strange moral geometry of mass murder, only Nazis are guilty.

Socialist luminaries like Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and PM Edouard Herriot of France, toured Ukraine during 1932-33 and proclaimed reports of famine were false. Shaw announced: "I did not see one under-nourished person in Russia." New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Russian reporting, wrote claims of famine were "malignant propaganda." Seven million people were dying around them, yet these fools saw nothing. The New York Times has never repudiated Duranty's lies.

Modern leftists do not care to be reminded their ideological and historical roots are entwined with this century's greatest crime - the inevitable result of enforced social engineering and Marxist theology.

Western historians delicately skirt the sordid fact that the governments of Britain, the U.S. and Canada were fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and Stalin's other monstrous crimes. Yet they eagerly welcomed him as an ally during World War II. Stalin, who Franklin Roosevelt called "Uncle Joe," murdered four times more people than AdoIf Hitler.

None of the Soviet mass murderers who committed genocide were ever brought to justice. Lazar Kaganovitch died peacefully in Moscow a few years ago, still wearing his Order of the Soviet Union, and enjoying a generous state pension.

Reprinted with the permission of SunMedia Corporation. Cartoon reprinted with permission of the artist.

Chicago American, March 4,6, 1935

A Tale of Truth and Two Journalistsby Ian Hunter

Report Magazine, March 27, 2000

It is hard to credit that a decade has slipped away since the death of Malcolm Muggeridge on November 14, 1990. The most compellingly readable of journalists, hardly a day goes by that I do not recall one of Muggeridge's insights or marvel afresh at his prophetic vision.

Muggeridge's journalistic integrity was shaped by one searing experience; in 1932 he went to Moscow as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Joseph Stalin's twin manias - collectivization of agriculture and dekulakization of peasants - were then at their bloodthirsty zenith, but few Westerners could have guessed it from the sycophantic foreign reporting.

The Dean of the Moscow press corps was Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Joseph Alsop would later say of him: "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade."

For two decades Duranty was the most influential foreign correspondent in Russia. His dispatches were regarded as authoritative; indeed Duranty helped to shape U.S. foreign policy. His biographer, Susan Taylor (Stalin's Apologist, Oxford University Press, 1990) has demonstrated that Duranty's reporting was critical factor in President Roosevelt's decision in 1933 to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union.

Duranty, an unattractive, oversexed little man, with a wooden leg, falsified facts, spread lies and half truths, invented occurrences that never happened, and turned a blind eye to the man-made famine that starved to death more than 14 million people (according to an International Commission of Jurists which examined this tragedy in 1988-90). When snippets of the truth began to leak out, Duranty coined the phrase: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs". This phrase, or a variant thereof, has since proved useful to a rich variety of ideologues who contend that a worthy end justifies base means. Yet when the Pulitzer committee conferred its prize on Duranty (in 1932, at the height of the famine) they cited his "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity."

One story that circulated among Moscow correspondents trying to explain Duranty was that he was necrophiliac; in exchange for favourable reporting, the Soviet authorities may have allowed him unsupervised night access to the city morgues. Whether true or not (and Duranty's biographer, Susan Taylor, leaves this question open), certain it is that the regime had some sort of hold on Duranty; they showered benefits on him, - a fancy apartment, an automobile, and fresh caviar daily.

Enter Malcolm Muggeridge. In the spring of 1933 Muggeridge did an audacious thing; without permission he set off on a train journey through what had formerly been the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine and North Caucusus. What Muggeridge witnessed, he never forgot. In a series of articles smuggled out in the diplomatic pouch, he described a man-made famine that had become a holocaust: peasants, millions of them, dying like famished cattle, sometimes within sight of full granaries, guarded by the army an police. "At a railway station early one morning, I saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded into cattle trucks

at gunpoint - all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet." At a German co-operative farm, an oasis of prosperity in the collectivized wilderness he saw peasants kneeling down in the snow, begging for a crust of bread. In his Diary, Muggeridge wrote: "Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven't seen this. Ideas will come and go; but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood."

But few believed him. His dispatches were cut. He was sacked by the Guardian and forced to leave Russia. Muggeridge was vilified, slandered and abused, not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, where sympathy to what was called "the great Soviet experiment" was de rigour. Walter Duranty's voice led the chorus of denunciation and denial, although privately Duranty told a British foreign office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had been starved to death - adding, characteristically, "but they're only Russians."

Beatrice Webb (Muggeridge's aunt by marriage) admitted that "In the Soviet Union, people disappear," but she still denounced Muggeridge's famine reports as "base lies". The Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, applauded Stalin's "steady purpose and kindly generosity." George Bernard Shaw made a whirlwind tour and pronounced himself fully satisfied that there was ample food for all in the worker's paradise.

If vindication was a long time coming, it cannot have been sweeter than when Duranty's biographer, Susan Taylor, wrote in 1990: "But for Muggeridge's eyewitness accounts of the famine in the spring of 1933 and his stubborn chronicle of the event, the effects of the crime upon those who suffered might well have remained as hidden from scrutiny as its perpetrators intended. Little thanks he has received for it over the years, although there is a growing number who realize what a singular act of honest and courage his reportage constituted."

Alas, when these words came to be written, Muggeridge had died. Still, they are worth remembering.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario and was the first biographer of Malcolm Muggeridge.

Permission to reprint this article has been granted by editorial board of the Report Magazine.

Appendix D

Teacher Resource:

BLACK FAMINE IN UKRAINE 1932-33 A STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

byAndrew Gregorovich

UKRAINE, "the breadbasket of Europe" is a land famous for its fertile black earth and its golden wheat. Yet, only forty years ago seven million Ukrainians starved to death although no natural catastrophe had visited the land. Forty years ago the people starved while the Soviet Union exported butter and grain. While Moscow banqueted, Ukraine hungered.

Stark, cold, statistics, the accounts of thousands of Ukrainian survivors and German; English and American eyewitnesses, as well as confessions of Moscow's agents and the admission of Stalin himself: All these have slowly seeped out of the Iron Curtain and have been piled into a tremendous mountain of facts. The whole story, pieced together like a jig-saw puzzle, ends with the biggest puzzle of all: Why did Moscow decide to starve to death seven million Ukrainians?

THE CLOAK OF DECEIT: "COLLECTIVIZATION"

THIS GREAT CRIME OF GENOCIDE AGAINST the Ukrainian people has not been completely ignored by the history books of the world. Any history of the Soviet Union will mention the triumph of "Collectivization" in which the Kulaks, or well-off farmers, were "liquidated as a class." Collectivized farming, which is today the most inefficient agricultural system in existence, had to be instituted for Marxist reasons. The Kulaks (Kurkulsin Ukrainian) constituted only 4 to 5% of the

peasantry -- yet they endangered the success of Communism!

The Communist Party on January 5, 1930, as part of the first Five Year Plan, started the machinery of Collectivization rolling. Collective is, incidentally Kolkhoz in Russian and Kolhosp in Ukrainian. The Russian peasantry demonstrated little opposition to Moscow because of their past tradition of communal farming. The Russian mir, or village commune, where the land is owned by the village and not by the individual, had for centuries prepared the Russians psychologically for Collectivization. On July 30, 1930 the first RSFSR decree abolishing the mir was passed to make way for the Collectives.

The Ukrainians, on the other hand, had an independent, individualistic farming tradition of private ownershp of land. The Russian communal spirit was comething completely foreign to the farmers of Ukraine and so they opposed Moscow bitterly. While the collectivization in the Russian Republic (RSFSR) went on schedule, the stubborn resistance of the Ukrainians slowed it down to such a standstill that Moscow even had to retreat temporarily. This was noted by Stalin in his famous "Dizzy with Success" letter. One way the Ukrainian farmer showed his opposition to collectivization was by slaughtering his livestock before joining. Later a death penalty was passed for such an action. The folowing table shows the tremendous drop in livestock:

Livestock in Ukraine

Horses Cattle Sheep Hogs

1928 5,300,000 8,600,000 8,100,000 7,000,000

1935 2,600,000 4,400,000 2,000,000 2,000,000

Source: Ukrainian Encyclopedia, page 1064

WHY DID THE FAMINE TAKE PLACE?

OPPOSITION TO COLLECTIVIZATION is only half the story why Moscow created the famine in Ukraine. The Ukrainian opposition was not only ideological, that is against Communism, but also political. Russian nationalism reared its ugly head at this time. The Kremlin used the famine as a political weapon to destroy Ukrainian aspirations for independence. At the same time as the famine (1932-34) a wave of persecutions of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers and leaders took place. Plots for liberating Ukraine were discovered not only in the smallest villages but even in the top ranks of the Ukrainian Communist Party itself. Purges took hundreds of Ukrainians. Suicide was the escape of many. In 1933 the famous writer Mykola Khvylovy and the veteran Ukrainian Communist, Mykola Skrypnyk, both chose suidde.

"This famine," says the American authority William H. Chamberlin, "may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or of ... a complete exhaustion of the country's resources... "

THE STRANGEST WAR IN HISTORY

THE DEATH AND DESOLATION caused by the famine is likened to war by many of the eyewitnesses. And in fact, the unequal struggle between the peasants of Ukraine and the agent of the Russian Kremlin certainly may be accurately called a "war". This Ukrainian-Russian "war" between peasants armed with pitchforks and the Red Army and Secret Police, was carried out mercilessly with no pity for the aged or young, nor for women and children. According to Bertram D. Wolfe: "Villages were surrounded and laid waste, set to the torch, attacked by tanks

and artillery and bombs from the air. A Secret Police Colonel, almost sobbing, told the writer Isaac Deutscher:

"I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the civil war. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine-guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh no, no!"

One Moscow agent, mighty Hatayevich, in reprimanding Comrade Victor Kravchenko, one of 100,000 men "selected by the Central Committee of the Party" to help in Collectivization said:

"... I'm not sure that you understand what has been happening. A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It's a struggle to the death. This year (1933) was a test of our strength and their 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."

Hatayevich, Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Dnipropetrovsk Communist Party and one of the foremost Communist in the Ukrainian SSR reveals here that the famine was intentional, that it took millions of lives, and that he considered it a "war" aganst the Ukrainian farmers.

One woman in Poltava said, "No war ever took from us so many people." This was true, since Ukraine's losses in 1932-33 were greater than that of any nation that fought in the First World War. It should be emphasized that the main weapon in this struggle was not tanks, machine guns or bullets -- but hunger. Famine, a man-made "Collectivized" famine, was the main cause of the loss of life in this "war," one of the strangest in history.

STALIN'S CONFESSION TO CHURCHILL

WHEN SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL visited Stalin at the Kremlin in August, 1942 he asked: " ... Have the stresses of the war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of the Collective Farms?"

"Oh, no" he (Stalin) said, "the Collective Farm policy was a terrible srtuggle ... Ten millions," he said, holding up his hands. "It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary ..."

Stalin admits that a complete year of World War II to him was less of a struggle than Collectivization! How gigantic the opposition of the Ukrainian peasants must have been. Stalin went on to tell the British Prime Minister that some peasants "agreed to come in with us" and were given land to cultivate in Tomsk or lrkutsk (both in Siberia). "But," Stalin added, "the great bulk (of the 10 million) were very unpopular and were wiped out by their labourers (?)."

When Nikita Khrushchev "purged" Stalin in his 1956 secret speech, he didn't say a word about this Famine, the most immense of Stalin's crimes. Instead, Khrushchev expressed concern over the "thousands" of innocent Communists that had suffered from Stalin's diabolical suspicion. It was on this occasion that Khrushchev said that Stalin considered deporting the population of Ukraine, however as Khrushchev says: "The Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, he would have deported them also." In his book Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, Little, Brown, 1970) the Soviet premier devotes a chapter to the famine in Ukraine, 1945.

HOW MANY DIED?

"CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATES place the number of deaths in Ukraine due to this enforced famine, at about 4,800,000. Many recognized scholars, however have estimated the number between 5 million to 8 million."

This statement from a United States Senate Document (No. 122 of 1958) can be backed up with actual statistics squeezed out of the Soviet press. The Russian government, however, took special measures to keep secret the death toll. Of course, it

has never admitted any statistics or even the existence of the famine. But, indirect references were accidentally made and it is possible to estimate that during the famine from 10% to 25% of Ukraine's population (32,680,700 in January 1932) starved to death.

Vasyl Hryshko, in his factual study says that in 1935 about 25,000 people died daily in the villages of Ukraine, or more than 1,000 per hour or 17 every minute. It was in early 1933 that the greatest loss of life took place. In the first half of the year foreign travel in Ukraine was banned. No newspaper correspondents were allowed to visit the besieged country until the late summer and fall when signs of the famine had been cleared up. The American journalist William Henry Chamberlin visited Ukraine immediately after the ban on travel was lifted. He says every village he visited had lost at least ten percent of its residents.

Hryshko sums up the statistics of 1932 and 1939 in this way. When we compare the 32,680,700 persons living in Ukraine in 1932 with the 1939 figure of 30,960,200 we see that, taking into account the normal 2.36 per cent annual increase, in seven years Ukraine had lost 7,465,000 persons. Of this number, Hryshko says, some 4,821,600 persons or roughly 18.8 percent of the Ukrainian population, died in the years 1932-1933.

The impact of the famine is shown in many ways. Just before World War II a survey of the number of students was made. Since children start school in the USSR at seven years of age therefore, seven years after 1932 there should be an indication of the famine by a drop in enrollment. Look at these figures:

Russian SFSR Ukraine Byelorussia

1914-15 4,965,318 1,492,878 235,065

1928-29 5,997,980 1,585,814 369,684

1938-39 7,663,669 985,598 358,507

Source: Cultural Construction of the USSR, Moscow: Government Planning Pub., 1940, pages 40-50.

The Russian Republic (where no famine took place), shows a steady increase as did all seven other Soviet Republics, with the exception of Armenia. Why did Ukraine have an absolute loss of 600,216 students and Byelorussia (also a famine area) 11,174? The tragic story of these missing school children is written in the pages of the man-made famine. Let us not forget that Stalin himself said "ten millions" some of whom suffered death not from famine but as slave laborers in Siberian mines and timber camps.

EYE WITNESSES SPEAK

HUNDREDS OF UKRAINIAN eyewitnesses of the famine have told their tragic and unbelievable experiences in the book The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, edited by S. 0. Pidhainy. The second volume of this work is devoted exclusively to "The Great Famine in Ukraine." It should be added that some of the people were able to travel to Moscow and other areas because they were technicians, etc. They testify that while they left Famine at the border of Ukraine or the Kuban (North Caucasus) area, which is also Ukrainian populated, they found no evidence of hunger in Russia or other Soviet republics, except Byelorussia. It is not possible to give even a hint of the horror and pathos in Ukraine at the time.

Writer Arthur Kaestler:

Arthur Koestler, the famous writer who visited Ukraine in late summer of 1932 and fall 1933 and who spent about three months in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv writes in The God That Failed:

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

American Traveller Carveth Wells:

Carveth Wells, a world traveller, traveled through Ukraine in July 1932 and describes the early stages of the famine in his fascinating book Kapoot.

"The extraordinary thing was that the farther we penetrated into the Ukraine, which used to be the 'Granary of Russia', the less food there was and the more starvation to be seen on every side."

"None of us knew what tragedies had been enacted here ...

"We ourselves happened to be passing through the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the very midst of the famine in July, 1932. From the train windows children could be seen eating grass. The sight of small children with stomachs enormously distended is not at all uncommon in Africa or other tropical countries, but this was the first time I had ever seen white children in such a state."

Soviet Official Victor Kravchenko:

Victor Kravchenko was a Soviet official who escaped from the USSR Embassy in the United States in 1944. He described his life in the book I Chose Freedom. In 1933 he was one of the Communist agents assigned to safeguard the new harvest, the "Harvest in Hell" as he calls it:

"Although not a word about the tragedy appeared in the newspapers, the famine that raged ... was a matter of common knowledge.

"What I saw that morning ... was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back ... Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables. There was not even the consolation of

inevitability to relieve the horror.

"The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone (weak from hunger), their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless."

Kravchenko was shocked to discover a butter plant was wrapping its products in paper titled in English USSR Butter Export.

"Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter being 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 had forgotten how to sing. I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-smacking of fat foreigners enjoying our butter ..."

At the same time Communist Party members and Soviet officials, the privileged classes, were specially supplied with food. Some of these, however, had a conscience and Comrade Somanov, Chief of the Political Department said:

"Victor ... I'm of peasant origin myself and the sufferings of my people hurt me deeply. Tears, blood, death, exile. And why? The land is fertile, the people are hard-working. Why must we let them starve and die and perish? The more I think of it the more confused I get."

The famine was not caused by a lack of food in Ukraine. This may seem a paradox but the cause of the famine was completely the Kremlin's decision. It locked up Ukraine's food and guarded it from the people. The Russian grain collectors did not take only the wheat from the peasants but stripped them of all food. In one village near Odessa "they collected all the grain, potatoes, beets to the last kilogram" and "in other places they even took half-baked loaves of bread from the stove." These are not mentioned by Kravchenko. He does reveal however, that these millions need not have died except at the whim of Stalin in Moscow. He says:

"When the first of the new grain was being delivered to the granary near the railroad station, I made a discovery which left me tremulous with horror. Stacked in the brick structure were thousands of poods of the previous year's (1932) grain collections These were the state reserves for the district ordered by the government, their very existence hidden from the starving population by officialdom Hundreds of men, women and children had died of undernourishment in these villages, though grain was hoarded almost outside their doors!

"The peasants who were with me when we found the 'State reserves' stared with unbelieving eyes and cursed in anger. Subsequently I came to know that in many other parts of the country the government hoarded huge reserves while peasants in those very regions died of hunger. Why this was done only Stalin's Politburo could tell -- and it didn't."

W.E.D. ALLEN"Since that date (1926) catastrophes have befallen the rural folk of the Ukraine about 3,000,000 are reckoned to have perished during the famine of the early thirties, and another 2,000,000 certainly have migrated (to Siberia?) as a result of conditions which they have found intolerable."

The Ukraine: A History, by W.E.D. Allen, Cambridge University Press, 1941, page 375.

IVAR SPECTOR"Hundreds of thousands of the recalcitrants were transported to Siberia to work in the forest or mines. ... Others starved during the famine which swept Ukraine in the early 1930's particularly in 1932."

An Introduction to Russian History and Culture, by Ivar Spector, D. Van Nostrand, New York, 1950.

GEORGE VERNADSKY"... Largely as a result of the forcible collectivization of agriculture, a famine developed in Ukraine. Starvation and all it accompanying diseases stalked unchecked through the richest agricultural region in

the Soviet Union, and within the space of a few months hundreds of thousands if not millions of people died in unimaginable misery."

A History of Russia, by George Vernadsky, Philadelphia, Blakiston, 1944, page 337.

"The famine of 1930-31 followed close on the heels of the chaos, which existed everywhere in agriculture, and in Ukraine in particular the suffering and starvation reached a scale which almost passes human comprehension."

A History of Russia, by George Vernadsky, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954, page 360.

RICHARD CHARQUES"But among the ghastly fruits of the campaign for collectivization was the 'man-made famine' of 1931-32 in the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus, where it had been resisted most fiercely and where the fields had lain almost totally neglected. There were millions of deaths from starvation in these regions."

A Short History of Russia, by Richard Charques, London, 1959, page 245.

EDWARD CRANKSHAW"At the same time Stalin had just forced through the collectivization of agriculture ... at a fearful price ... First there were the millions of ruined lives, the lives of the rich and middle peasants, the so-called kulaks, killed in the struggle, or exiled to Siberia; then the three million dead in the great famine which swept Ukraine ..."

Russia by Daylight, by Edward Crankshaw, London, Michael Joseph, 1951, page 100

"I'm still young and want so much to live a while" - Zina

This letter was written to K. Riabokin, a University Professor at Kharkiv, by his niece Zina: "Please, Uncle Do Take Me to Kharkiv."

"We have neither bread nor anything else to eat. Dad is completely exhausted from hunger and is lying on the bench, unable to get on his feet. Mother is blind from the hunger and cannot see in the least. So I have to guide her when she has to go outside. Please Uncle, do take me to Kharkiv, because I, too, will die from hunger. Please do take me, please. I'm still young and I want so much to live a while. Here I will surely die, for every one else is dying ..."

----The Uncle received the letter at the same time that he was told of her death. He says, "I did not know what to say or what to do. My head just pounded with my neice's pathetic plea: `I'm still young and want so much to live ... Please do take me, please ...'"

BERTRAM D. WOLFE"The peasantry fought for its life with fowling pieces and pitchforks. Uprisings embraced whole regions. Villages were surrounded and laid waste ... Districts were stripped of their stocks of grain and seed, then cordoned off to die of famine and plague."

Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, by Bertram D. Wolfe, Praeger, New York, 1957, page 165

"In 1932 the State decreed the death penalty for stealing a bit of coal or grain from a freight train. Then the death penalty was provided for the collectivized farmer who might steal from the fields some of the product of his "collective labor;" then for the willful slaughter of his own cattle; then for letting "cattle die by neglect." "In March 1933, thirty-five officials of the Commissariat of Agriculture were executed after being 'tried' ... for having 'willfully permitted noxious weeds to grow in the fields.'"

Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, by Bertram D. Wolfe, Praeger, New York, 1957, pages 169-71

DR. EWALD AMMENDE"... Official Soviet reports referred to the 1932 harvest as of medium quality: poor results or failure were never mentioned. (page 29) 1933 was a particularly critical year for the food supply of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, 1.8 million tons of grain and other foodstuffs were exported ... In the first eight months of 1934, during which period the acute lack of foodstuffs continued, the export was even more considerable; 591,835 tons of grain, worth 13.6 million roubles were exported ... via the Black Sea ports."

Human Life in Russia, by Dr. Ewald Ammende, London, G. Allen & Unwin, 1936, page 46

WALTER DURANTY"In the first fortnight of January (1933) ... Stalin made a speech 'What is wrong,' Stalin asked in effect, 'on the agrarian front? We are wrong, my comrades -- we, not the peasants nor the weather, nor class enemies, but we Communists, who have the greatest power and authority the world ever saw, yet have made a series of blunders ... We miscalculated the new tactics of hostile forces of boring from within, instead of engaging in open warfare.'"

"In April, 1933, I travelled through Ukraine to Odessa, and ... a Red Army brigade commander (General) told me: 'We had a communal farm in Ukraine attached to my regiment ... Everything went well until a year ago (1932). Then the whole set-up changed. We began to get letters asking for food. Can you imagine that, that they asked food from us? We sent what we could, but I didn't know what had happened until I went to the farm only a month ago (March 1933). My God, you wouldn't beleive it. The people were almost starving. Their animals were dead. I'll tell you more, there wasn't a cat or dog in the whole village, and that is no good sign ... Instead of two hundred and fifty families there were only seventy-three, and all of them were half-starved. I asked them what happened. They said 'Our seed grain was

taken away last spring.' They said to me, 'Comrade Commander, we are soldiers and most of us are Communists. When the order came that our farm must deliver five hundred tons of grain, we held a meeting. Five hundred tons of grain! We needed four hundred tons to sow our fields, and we only had six hundred tons. But we gave the grain as ordered."

What was the result? I asked the brigade commander.

"Barren fields," he told me. "Do you know that they ate their horses and oxen, such as was left of them? They were starving, do you know that? Their tractors were rusty and useless; and remember, these folks weren't kulaks, weren't class enemies. They were our own people, our soldiers. I was horrified ..."

USSR: The Story of Soviet Russia, by Walter Duranty, New York, 1944, pages 194-5

MAURICE HINDUS"The more well to-do peasants continued to resist the movement, and to dispose of their opposition, the Soviets proceeded to liquidate them."

The Great Offensive, by Maurice Hindus, New York, 1933, page 154

"Worst of all the excessive collection of grain. This was carried out with especial vigor."

(Hindus, page 151)

"Thousands (of people) came to Moscow, because they knew that in Moscow there was an abundance of food. The Ukraine with its lovely lands and its lovely skies and its lovely white villages was siezed with panic and gloom. The mortality of livestock from starvation during this time was enormous."

(Hindus, page 153)

"I never had seen such an abundance of weeds in the fields as there were in the summer of 1932. Sugar beet in the Kiev area (Ukraine) were literally submerged in weeds."

(Hindus, page 154)

Hindus quotes the Commissar of Agriculture, Yakovlev, who spoke in February 1933 about the Peremozhetz collective farm in Odessa region of Ukraine. "Here," said Yakovlev, "was as choice a farm as there was in that part of the country -- rich soil, superb climate -- Yet in 1932 it failed to fulfill the grain obligation to the government even though the amount was reduced to one-fourth of what it had been the year before, and many a family had in hand only scanty supplies of bread. Of its 153 horses, only 53 were left. The other 100 died of starvation."

RONALD HINGLEY"The same year (1932) also saw the outbreak of the second great Soviet famine, in the Ukraine and along the Volga. It claimed some five million further peasant victims -- deliberately sacrificed by Stalin, who continued to dump Soviet grain on world markets while those who had grown it were starving en masse. The new dictator was very largely successful in concealing this disaster from world opinion."

A Condse History of Russia, by Ronald Hingley, New York, Viking Press, 1972, pages 172-73.

S.V. UTECHIN"The next famine, that of 1932-3 was created artificially by the authorities as a means of breaking the resistance of the peasants to the collectivization of agriculture; ... the grain was removed from the countryside by armed detachments chiefly composed of internal security troops and Komsomol members. (page 175) Millions of peasants died of starvation or were deported and sent to forced labour camps." (page 120).

A Concise Encyclopedia of Russia, by S.V. Utechin, New York, Dutton, 1964.

CLARENCE A. MANNING"It is difficult to estimate accurately the number who perished in the famine, but it was approximately 4,800,000. This is certainly an underestimate, although certain other calcu- lations will place the number between five and six million."

Ukraine Under the Soviets, by Clarence A. Manning, New York, Bookman Associates, 1953, page 101.

JOHN F. STEWART"While no official statistics about this tragedy have been published, there is a document - The Small Soviet Encyclopedia of 1940, in which it is stated that Ukraine had in 1927 a population of 32 millions, and in 1939, only twelve years later, a population of 28 million. Where had the 4 millions gone to, apart from what should have been the natural increase of at least another 4 million?"

Tortured but Unconquerable Ukraine, by John F. Stewart. Edinburgh, Scottish League for European Freedom, 1953. page 8.