EPISODE 531 THE HOLODOMOR : MASS STARVATION IN UKRAINE 1932 – 1933 CAUSED BY JOSEPH STALIN
alan skeoch
Feb. 23 2022
1933 eviction of a Kulak (peasant farm) and her daughter from her home with limited possessions. To face death from starvation likely. From Donets region of Ukraine
UKRANIAN CONTACTS IN MY LIFE
Kent Farrow sent me a message yesterday. “Alan, could you write an Episode on Ukraine that would help readers
understand what is happening…roots of what is happening…” The Russian invasion of Ukraine has begun
and jeopardizes world peace. That much we all know. For those of us who are non-Ukrainian the whole Russian-Ukrainian
history is largely unknown.
Kent’s request is flattering. My ability to explain briefly the root origins of the conflict is listed because the
roots are deep and long…roots that twist and turn. My knowledge is limited and I hesitate to even begin because
the attempt will prompt responses from scholars far more informed than I am.
My high school years at Humberside Collegiate were shared by a large emigrant Ukrainian population of students
whose parents were Canadian refugees post 1845. I got to know them well. One of my best friends was Jim Romaniuk
whose father was a slaughter house worker at the Toronto stock yards and whose mother was a fine
intellectual. The Romaniuks were assimilated Ukrainian Canadians. Jim smiled and laughed a lot.
Warm hearted, gregarious, We were both second string team members in Grade 11. I was super nervous.
Would I do the right job? Coach Burford looked along the second string bench and there was Jim with
his hand up and finger pointing down at me. “Put Al on, coach.” That was Jim…always looking out for the other guy
in a nice way.
He rarely if ever talked about
Ukraine but I knew some facets of the dark history after reading a book titled “Documents
of the Expulsion” which described the horrific flight of many Ukrainians fleeing westward as the Russian army
was biting st the heels of the collapsing German army in 1945.. This was not pretty stuff to read. I do not recommend
the book as relaxed evening literature.
A large number of our high school football team were Ukrainian Canadians like Bob Cwirenko whom
I still associate with on our alumni group from the 1950’s. His parents were part of that flight. Many
did not make it to the western refugee camps. Bob Cwirenko became an engineer and played football
for SPS (U. of T.) He played outside corner backer and I got him once with a good cross body block
and was surprised to hear “nice block Al”. So many memories.
I even learned a few words in Ukrainian so I could
ask a Ukrainian girl to a school dance and she accepted. ‘Dobre’
My teaching career at Parkdale College was also touched by Ukrainian Canadians. The most memorable
to me was Taras Prociw. He was a very gentle, kind and thoughtful scholar whose parents were part of
a much earlier wave of Canadian Ukrainians in the wave period 1891 – 1914. Taras was deeply aware of the
Ukrainian nationalism that caused some of our students to practice with wooden guns for the eventual
liberation of Ukraine from the Soviet Union. Taras was part of the great wave of Ukrainians who settled
the Canadian west only his family took an urban route by settling in West Toronto.
There were other Ukrainian contacts as well. Amusing . Like Big Bill Mashtalar who took me joy riding in his
father’s new Oldmobile 98 one evening. We cruised through High Park in the dead of night with our lights
out searching for lovers. Stupid thing to do but teen ager can be stupid. Perhaps you did not know
that. Our idea was to flash our lights on romantic liaisons. It did not work out very well. The first flash
revealed a bunch of tough guys drinking beer.
“What the hell? Wo are those sons of bitche with the light…let’s get them.” A chase resulted that
I will never forget. We raced down the spine of High Park to the Queen Elizabeth Highway and then
accelerated westward chased by the beer drinkers. Fortunately Bill had the Olds 98 and we pulled
away…and lucky there were no cops. Why tell you this? Just to establish that I had lots of Ukrainian
friends. And I met some tough Ukrainian guys as well. One inside linebacker from St. Mike’s U. of T. team loved to knee me in
the mouth rather than trying to get our quarterback until my friend Ed Jackman kicked him in the balls. I played for Victoria
College at the time my mouth was hamburger. Growing up in Toronto was like that in the late 1950’s.
Later that year Bill Mashtlar asked me if I wanted to go to a camp. The word camp sounded like fun so
we drove with his parents to a Ukrainian social camp on the north side of the Dundas Highway where
it crosses 16 mile Creek. The camp life involved a lot of singing snd dancing … laughing, eating, perhaps
a little adult drinking. Very friendly to me for I only knew a few words of Ukrainian so they spoke English.
I did not know at the time that the camp was a socialist Ukrainian camp. Not religious. Socialists.
That experience helped me to crush the anti-communist attitudes that were sweeping Canada
in the 1950’s. These were not bad people.
Still later I became aware of another Ukrainian camp on the south side of the Dundas Highway at
16 mile Creek. This camp had a Ukrainian church at its centre…I am not sure if Orthodox or Catholic.
One of my fellow teachers st Parkdale was the daughter of a Ukrainian priest whose followers and
other attended this camp. Both camps…socialist and religious…did not like each other as
near as I could determine. I became aware however that Ukrainian history was very complex.
And that Ukrainian nationalism was strongest in the camp on the south side of Dundas.
“Why did the Ukrainians build their social camps opposite each other?” I have no idea. What
I did discover however was that unity was tenuous.
Ukrainians are part of the warp and weave of our society. Well over 1 million people. The
Ukraine itself has a population of 40 million.
Now to get back to the request from Kent. Basic question. The history is very complicated.
NASTY, violent, unforgiving, horrific, unending. Let me
select one event that explains the Ukrainian point of view. There are many other causes
of course. But I am not writing a history of Ukraine. I am trying to present a fact that might
be on the minds of Ukrainians as events unfold today in 2022…ninety years later.
Dateline: 1932
Location. Ukraine
Participants” Joseph Stalin, Ukrainian kulaks (farmers)
Results. Horrific
THE HOLODOMOR…STARVATION BY HUNGER
EXCERPT BY ANNE APPLEBAUM
KULAK grain being confiscated. Seed Grain gone. Future crop gone. Starvation on the way
THE HOLODOMOR…’EXTERMINATION BY HUMGER’
(Excerpt from book by Anne Applebaum titled Red Famine)
Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).
Causes of the famine
The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing to collectivefarms, and they deported so-called kulaks—wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages. It also sparked a series of peasant rebellions, including armed uprisings, in some parts of Ukraine.
The rebellions worried Stalin because they were unfolding in provinces which had, a decade earlier, fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He was also concerned by anger and resistance to the state agricultural policy within the Ukrainian Communist Party. “If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine,” he wrote to his colleague Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932, “we may lose Ukraine.” That autumn the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food. Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food. Despite growing starvation, food requisitions were increased and aid was not provided in sufficient quantities. The crisis reached its peak in the winter of 1932–33, when organized groups of police and communist apparatchiks ransacked the homes of peasants and took everything edible, from crops to personal food supplies to pets. Hunger and fear drove these actions, but they were reinforced by more than a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric emanating from the highest levels of the Kremlin.
From famine to extermination
The result of Stalin’s campaign was a catastrophe. In spring 1933 death rates in Ukraine spiked. Between 1931 and 1934 at least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians. Police archives contain multiple descriptions of instances of cannibalism as well as lawlessness, theft, and lynching. Mass graves were dug across the countryside. Hunger also affected the urban population, though many were able to survive thanks to ration cards. Still, in Ukraine’s largest cities, corpses could be seen on the street.
The famine was accompanied by a broader assault on Ukrainian identity. While peasants were dying by the millions, agents of the Soviet secret police were targeting the Ukrainian political establishment and intelligentsia. The famine provided cover for a campaign of repression and persecution that was carried out against Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian religious leaders. The official policy of Ukrainization, which had encouraged the use of the Ukrainian language, was effectively halted. Moreover, anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic—an independent government that had been declared in June 1917 in the wake of the February Revolution but was dismantled after the Bolsheviks conquered Ukrainian territory—was subjected to vicious reprisals. All those targeted by this campaign were liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to the Gulag (a system of Soviet prisons and forced-labour camps), or executed. Knowing that this Russification program would inevitably reach him, Mykola Skrypnyk, one of the best-known leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party, committed suicide rather than submit to one of Stalin’s show trials.
HOLODOMOR BASIC FACTS
There were few pictures taken of the Holodomor. Best kept from western eyes that were distracted by their own Great Depression. In this
photo a Kulak family tried to hide their seed grain by burying it in barrels Usng probing rods officials found the grain and confiscated any other
food the family had. Usually the homes of these so called wealthy Kulaks were taken as well and their farms joined into large collective farms.
Kulaks died in great numbers. Some managed to flee to the west earlier but by the 1930’s flight was impossible. They were ordered to
stay where they lived…with no food.
THE HOLODOMOR BASIC FACTS
The term Holodomor (death by hunger, in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies. The Holodomor can be seen as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry, who resisted Soviet policies. This assault occurred in the context of a campaign of intimidation and arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, artists, religious leaders, and political cadres, who were seen as a threat to Soviet ideological and state-building aspirations.
Between 1917 and 1921, Ukraine briefly became an independent country and fought to retain its independence before succumbing to the Red Army and being incorporated into the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, Soviet central authorities, seeking the support of the populace, allowed for some cultural autonomy through the policy known as “indigenization.”
By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided to curtail Ukraine’s cultural autonomy, launching the intimidation, arrest, imprisonment and execution of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, as well as Communist Party functionaries who had supported Ukraine’s distinctiveness.
At the same time, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. The majority of Ukrainians, who were small-scale or subsistence farmers, resisted. The state confiscated the property of the independent farmers and forced them to work on government collective farms. The more prosperous farmers (owning a few head of livestock, for example) and those who resisted collectivization were branded kulaks (rich peasants) and declared enemies of the state who deserved to be eliminated as a class. Thousands were thrown out of their homes and deported.
In 1932, the Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state. When the villages were not able to meet the quotas, authorities intensified the requisition campaign, confiscating even the seed set aside for planting and levying fines in meat and potatoes for failure to fulfill the quotas. Special teams were sent to search homes and even seized other foodstuffs. Starving farmers attempted to leave their villages in search of food, but Soviet authorities issued a decree forbidding Ukraine’s peasants from leaving the country. As a result, many thousands of farmers who had managed to leave their villages were apprehended and sent back, virtually a death sentence. A law was introduced that made the theft of even a few stalks of grain an act of sabotage punishable by execution. In some cases, soldiers were posted in watchtowers to prevent people from taking any of the harvest. Although informed of the dire conditions in Ukraine, central authorities ordered local officials to extract even more from the villages. Millions starved as the USSR sold crops from Ukraine abroad.
The USSR vigorously denied that the Holodomor had occurred. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, secret police, and government archives that have become accessible to researchers support the conclusion that the famine was caused by Soviet state policies and was indeed intentionally intensified by Soviet authorities.
Starving orphan children: Ukraine 1933
The term Holodomor (death by hunger, in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies. The Holodomor can be seen as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry, who resisted Soviet policies. This assault occurred in the context of a campaign of intimidation and arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, artists, religious leaders, and political cadres, who were seen as a threat to Soviet ideological and state-building aspirations.
Between 1917 and 1921, Ukraine briefly became an independent country and fought to retain its independence before succumbing to the Red Army and being incorporated into the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, Soviet central authorities, seeking the support of the populace, allowed for some cultural autonomy through the policy known as “indigenization.”
By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided to curtail Ukraine’s cultural autonomy, launching the intimidation, arrest, imprisonment and execution of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, as well as Communist Party functionaries who had supported Ukraine’s distinctiveness.
At the same time, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. The majority of Ukrainians, who were small-scale or subsistence farmers, resisted. The state confiscated the property of the independent farmers and forced them to work on government collective farms. The more prosperous farmers (owning a few head of livestock, for example) and those who resisted collectivization were branded kulaks (rich peasants) and declared enemies of the state who deserved to be eliminated as a class. Thousands were thrown out of their homes and deported.
In 1932, the Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state. When the villages were not able to meet the quotas, authorities intensified the requisition campaign, confiscating even the seed set aside for planting and levying fines in meat and potatoes for failure to fulfill the quotas. Special teams were sent to search homes and even seized other foodstuffs. Starving farmers attempted to leave their villages in search of food, but Soviet authorities issued a decree forbidding Ukraine’s peasants from leaving the country. As a result, many thousands of farmers who had managed to leave their villages were apprehended and sent back, virtually a death sentence. A law was introduced that made the theft of even a few stalks of grain an act of sabotage punishable by execution. In some cases, soldiers were posted in watchtowers to prevent people from taking any of the harvest. Although informed of the dire conditions in Ukraine, central authorities ordered local officials to extract even more from the villages. Millions starved as the USSR sold crops from Ukraine abroad.
The USSR vigorously denied that the Holodomor had occurred. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, secret police, and government archives that have become accessible to researchers support the conclusion that the famine was caused by Soviet state policies and was indeed intentionally intensified by Soviet authorities.
