A Horrific Mass Murder

Should Putin’s Russia be blamed for a genocide 90 years ago?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

On Nov. 26 Ukraine observed Holodomor Memorial Day, commemorating the Soviet induced famine organized by Communist dictator Joseph Stalin that left some four million Ukrainians dead. It has been recognized by the European Parliament as a “crime against humanity.”

“The Holodomor of 19321933 was a genocide of the Ukrainian people,” Ukrainian presidential official Andriy Yermak recently stated. “The Russians will pay for all of the victims of the Holodomor and answer for today’s crimes.” He added that Russia now “wants to organize Holodomor 2.0.”

The famine was officially denied by the former Soviet Union until 1987. In 2006, a sovereign Ukraine recognized it as genocide.

Surely no one can deny that this was a horrific mass murder, though today’s Russia views it as a tragedy that affected the Soviet Union as a whole. Moscow considers it one of the many horrors the Communist rulers conducted against all the peoples of the Soviet Union, including the Russians themselves.

MONSTROUS REGIME

We in the west, though, have decided to condemn a country that, thanks to its current reprehensible behaviour, we also now retroactively accuse of crimes committed by a predecessor state almost a century ago – at a time when its own ethnic majority nationality was also victimized by the same monstrous regime.

So, although the crime was carried out by the Communists who ruled the USSR, led by Joseph Stalin, himself a Georgian, we consider “Russia” responsible, though the Soviet Communist Party was an ideological, not ethnic, organization.

The famine began in the chaos of collectivization in 1929 when millions of people were forced to join state farms, and Ukraine was seen as a source of capital that could be used to build a modern industrial Soviet Union.

Crops were confiscated to sell abroad while people starved. Ukraine paid the price, because 70 per cent of exported Soviet grain was accounted for by that region, since it was the breadbasket of the country.

Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages, because the Soviet Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state.

When they were unable to meet the quotas, authorities confiscated even the seeds set aside for planting. Special teams were sent to search homes and even seize other foodstuffs. Starving farmers attempted to flee their villages, but Soviet authorities apprehended them. This sparked a series of rebellions, including armed uprisings.

DESTROYED POPULATIONS

One problem with the version of the Holodomor that sees it only in the context of specifically targeting Ukrainians is that similar actions also led to mass starvation elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Millions of other nationalities – including, for that matter, Russians – also starved to death.

Approximately 1.5 million people died in Kazakhstan, an estimated 38 to 42 per cent of all Kazakhs, actually the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine.

The famine was indeed a form of genocide, but one mainly targeting an economic class. It forced peasants into submission and drove them into the collective farms, to ensure a steady supply of grain to sell abroad.

Stalin was an ideologue, not a racial nationalist – he was destroying his own populations, regardless of ethnicity, in order to “build a Communist society.” The USSR officially targeted peasants as a social class, not a national or ethnic group, though Ukrainians were its main victims.

Oddly, turning this into an ethnic conflict also lets the totalitarian Communists off the hook. It was the “bad Russians” who were culpable. It’s almost like blaming all Germans, not mainly Hitler’s Nazis, for the Holocaust.

BLAMING MOSCOW

Also, speaking of Nazis, if we are to recall novelist William Faulkner’s famous line that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” what should we then say about those Ukrainians involved in the murder of over one million Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War? This genocide, more recent than the Holodomor, was indeed “racial.”

In 2010 the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) that killed, apart from Jews, some 100,000 Poles in 1943-45, was named a “Hero of Ukraine.” In 2016, though, the Polish parliament recognized the massacres as genocide. Are we then to also accuse today’s Ukraine as guilty of genocide?

The Holodomor was indeed a monstrous crime, carried out under the aegis of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – an organization made up of members of every one of that Bolshevik empire’s national groups, including, of course, Ukrainian Communists.

The famine was a genocide caused by a regime indifferent to death, similar to those in British-ruled Ireland in the 1840s and in Bengal, India in 1943, as opposed to those mass murders which were intentionally designed to destroy an ethnic group. This is not a distinction without a difference, though both are equally horrific.

Finally, if linking Putin’s Russia to the Holodomor is valid, why have we waited so long to bring it to the world’s attention? The post-soviet Russian state is now 31 years old, after all. Is it just a “coincidence” that we are only now blaming Moscow for this Soviet Communist atrocity - when we just happen to be in an undeclared war with Russia?