The word “holocaust” comes from the Greek word meaning “burnt whole” (annihilation). It has come to mean the deliberate destruction of huge numbers of people.
Afocal point of the exposition is a statement by the renowned American scholar and
professor of Stanford University Robert Conquest from his book Harvest of Sorrow, in
which he wrote that the famine was planned by Moscow to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry as a national bastion and that the Ukrainian peasants were destroyed not because
they were peasants but because they were Ukrainian peasants. Conquest’s statement
explains much, for Muscovite scholars frequently declare that a famine also occurred
at this time in the Trans–Volga region and Kazakhstan. However, Conquest notes that
a vigorous resistance to the Bolshevik regime in Ukraine lasted until the early 1930s.
The year 1930 heralded the period when entire villages in Ukraine were resisting, with
the peasants refusing to relinquish their property and their honour. This greatly
angered the Kremlin, and in late 1932 Muscovite emissaries were dispatched to
Ukraine, specifically Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and Vsevolod Balitsky, the
former head of the GPU, as well as a whole brigade of party workers, approximately
1,700 people, who were ordered to rectify this situation. As a result of the exceedingly
savage actions of Molotov’s committee, an immense quantity of grain was confiscated
from the Ukrainian peasantry. According to Moscow’s plans, Ukraine was slated to supply a quota of 360 million poods of grain [1 pood=36.11 lbs/16.38 kgs.], only 70 per.
cent of which the country was capable of producing. These were the methods used to
break the back of the Ukrainian nation and to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry.
Presented in the exposition are several unique photographs that show corpses of
people who died of hunger on the streets of Kharkiv. During 1932–33 the Soviet government categorically banned all photographic documentation attesting to the
famine. However, foreigners who were working in Ukraine managed to take some
photographs, and the world learned about the terrible famine in Ukraine. American
newspapers also reported on the famine.
However, after returning from Moscow in 1933 the famous playwright and free.
thinker George Bernard Shaw declared that “there is no famine [in Ukraine]”,
because he had partaken of one of the finest dinners of his life–an example of the lavish displays with which the Soviet government regaled foreigners in order to isolate
them from real life in Ukraine. But despite the fact that the West had information
about the famine in Ukraine, the United States at this time recognized the Soviet
Union as a state. Although Western countries had already recognized the true face of
this regime, it would have been politically awkward not to recognize Stalin’s government. After the liquidation in 1927 of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had
helped Bolsheviks to remain in power, a real threat had emerged, one that endangered
the supremacy of Marxist Leninist ideology in the USSR, which was built on the premise of a new type of state and the creation of a society free from bourgeois exploitation.
In practice, however, this did not take place. The Soviet state was barely function.
ing, and everywhere there were signs of decay and turmoil. The Bolshevik leaders
sought to prove the soundness of their socio–political doctrine at all costs. Once the
Bolsheviks had squandered the gold reserves of the former Russian Empire and
Anastas Mikoyan, the People’s Commissar for Procurement, had sold all the valuables from the Hermitage, the only principal “currency” at the Bolsheviks’ disposal was
grain. It was then that Stalin, together with the semi–literate members of his
Politburo, began exploiting this “currency” to the fullest capacity and hoodwinking
the international community with their grandiose industrial projects.
What were these projects? The Bolsheviks had mostly destroyed or repressed the
engineering corps of tsarist Russia, or had proclaimed them “saboteurs” who were
not to be trusted. Here is a list of the much vaunted technical projects, which the
Bolsheviks passed off as their own:
- the Moscow subway, initially named after Lazar Kaganovich, then changed to
Lenin (the current name): an American project.
- the Dniprohes Hydroelectric Station: an American project.
- the Kharkiv Tractor Factory: a German project
- the Magnitogorsk metallurgical group of enterprises: an American project.
- the GAZ automobile plant in Gorky: an American project.
- the civil aviation fleet of the USSR: a German project, with planes supplied by
Lufthansa.
Specialists from foreign research and development firms carried out all the
important engineering work of executing these costly Western technology projects,
while hundreds of thousands of “builders of a bright future” who had fled villages
struck by famine were mixing concrete with their bare feet for a bowl of prison soup.
Moscow paid the Western firms and specialists for these projects with the grain and
lives of millions of Ukrainian peasants. Such was the price of silence.
In 1983 the Americans partially broke their silence about the Ukrainian
“Holocaust” by creating a special Congressional Commission on the Famine.
Displayed on these panels are two items from the materials prepared by this commission, as well as translations into Ukrainian of the commission’s nineteen con–clusions
that were ratified by the U.S Congress. These points condemn the inaction and deliberate silence of the American government and acknowledge that the famine was an
action planned by Moscow against the Ukrainians.
The attitude of the current Ukrainian
government toward the tragedy of the
Ukrainian “Holocaust” is astonishing. In
1993, the sixtieth anniversary of the tragic
famine, a complete copy of the research
materials prepared by the U.S. Congressional Commission was solemnly han.
ded over to the Parliament of Ukraine.
However, to this day, Ukrainian scholars and researchers have had no access to these documents. As a result of an appeal
launched by our Society and the assistance of the Ukrainian Diaspora, in August 2001
another copy of these materials was obtained. However, two hundred audio cassettes containing the testimony of surviving
eyewitnesses of the famine are still locked away in the basement of the Verkhovna Rada.
Displayed in the upper part of panel 19 are several works on the famine of
1932–33 by Ukrainian scholars. The lower part of the stand displays works by foreign
scholars, as well as two volumes of the thirty–volume collection of research materials
of the Special U.S. Congressional Commission and the commission’s conclusions,
translated into Ukrainian by the Memorial Society. Today the bibliography of publications on the Ukrainian famine contains more than 6,000 entries.
Among the exhibits displayed in this group of panels devoted to the horrific period of 1932–33 is a map of the famine, which shows the percentages of population loss.
es for various oblasts of Ukraine. The map also shows the composition of the international commission of jurists and their table of population growth in republics adjacent
to Ukraine, compared to population losses in Ukraine during this period. The facts
demonstrate that the results of the Soviet population census of 1937 were never published or made public. Stalin ordered them to be destroyed, and then repressed or exe.
cuted the Ukrainian demographers who had cited figures in their reports indicating
loss of life due to the famine and the concomitant demographic changes. The figure of
3,084,000 famine victims, which is listed in the table drawn up by the commission of
jurists, is far from accurate. The commission took its statistics from Soviet sources dated
1926 and 1939, i.e., the six years before and six years after the famine. Today Moscow’s
secret archival reports about the relocation of entire collective farms and villages from
Russian gubernias to Ukrainian villages devastated by the famine are now open. If one
adds data relating to the demographic consequences of the famine, then Ukrainian
losses resulting from the famine of 1932–33 total no fewer than ten million people. In
order to conceal the exact number of Ukraine’s losses due to the famine that was artificially created by Moscow, Bolshevik commissars, after 1933, tore through villages in
Ukraine, confiscating economic management books and records from branches of the
Registry of Births and Deaths for 1933. The state archive of Vinnytsia oblast somehow
managed to preserve a few such records of the Sosonka village council of Vinnytsia
county for the period of April–June 1933. These documents read thus in the original:
– “May 9. Stashko, Danylo Martynovych, aged 42, Ukrainian, member of collective farm, cause of death–hunger.
– 14 May 1933, Romanenko, Yakiv Levkovych, aged 52, Ukrainian, member of collective farm. Died of hunger.
– Romanenko, Todoska Mykytivna, aged 6, nationality: Ukrainian, supported by: father; trade: peasant; occupational status: private farmer. Cause
of death determined by the village council and police: father killed and ate her.
– Zakharovych, Hryhorii Tymkov, aged 7. Cause of death: killed by a cannibal.
– Romanenko, Hanna Mykytivna, aged 3. Cause of death: killed by her father for food.
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