Remembering the Holodomor - Ukraine

[hollister]

The "Holodomor" or "famine plague" as it is known in Ukraine, was part of Joseph Stalin's programme to crush the resistance of the peasantry to the collectivisation of farming.

Don't go near the priest's house either - because the neighbours there have killed and eaten their children
Ekaterina Marchenko recalls a warning from her mother
When in 1932 the grain harvest did not meet the Kremlin's targets, activists were sent to the villages where they confiscated not just grain and bread, but all the food they could find.

The confiscations continued into 1933, and the results were devastating. No-one is sure how many people died, but historians say that in under a year at least three million and possibly up to 10 million starved to death.

The horrors Ekaterina saw live with her still.

"We didn't have any funerals - whole families died," she tells me.

"Of our neighbours I remember all the Solveiki family died, all of the Kapshuks, all the Rahachenkos too - and the Yeremo family - three of them, still alive, were thrown into the mass grave."

complete article - news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7111296.stm

[pieter]

Holly,

Europe was a strange place in the first half of the twentieth century; progroms, revolutions, civil wars, genocides (on the Armenians, Ukrainians - this article- and jews), and the mass murder of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian civilians by Stalinists,
Nazi's and Ukrainian insergants (UPA; Ukrainian Partisan Army; who killed tens of thousands of Poles), next to the Ukrainian Capo's in the concentration camps in Poland.

The "Holodomor", the result of forced policy of collectivization introduced in the early thirtees is nearly a forgotten history in the world. I only heard of it when I was an adult and started investigating what happened during the Russian revolution, the first world war, the interbellum period, the Polish-Sovjet war of 1920 and the second world war.
By studying the Polish history I extended my view to the Ukrainian history, because the Polish-Russian confrontation had also an Ukrainian element of conflict between Poles and Urkainians, and then suddenlt found out about the "Holodomor", and how huge the amount of victims was. That opened my eyes for the Stalinist terror.

Pieter

[Jaga]

Holly,

thanks for reminding us the great famine, especially since anniversaries are coming. The world still knows too little about it!