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By Prof. James Mace
Consultant to The Day
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine
November 26, 2002
As Ukraine observed its Day of Memory of the Victims of the Manmade Famine
on Saturday, President Kuchma said that Ukraine must tell the world the
truth about what happened in 1933. "The Manmade Famine was a national
catastrophe. In 1932-1933 alone a fifth of the Ukraine's rural population
perished. The Holodomor and political repressions planned and carried out by
the Communist regime put in doubt the very existence of the Ukrainian
nation," the head of state declared.
With all due respect, as one who has had his fingers burned for trying to
tell the world what I thought (and think) was the truth about the famine,
perhaps I should best confine myself to fact.
The president was right to bracket the Famine and repressions together.
After years of infighting in Moscow with the support of the Communist Party
(bolshevik) of Ukraine being significant to Stalin's victory, the CP(b)U and
Ukraine in general had gained such a sphere of autonomous action that Stalin
himself expressed the fear that "we could lose Ukraine" and when his trusted
lieutenant Lazar Kaganovich was sent to the old North Caucasus Territory, he
made it clear that the main problem with bread was in Ukrainian speaking
areas, especially where there had been "arrivals" from Ukraine, meaning from
the Commissariat of Education, which had been the centerpiece of the
Ukrainization policy. In Ukraine itself, the whole business was under the
personal supervision on USSR Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, who on November 18,
1932 pushed through a resolution on "fines in kind," which punished people
without bread by taking whatever else that could be eaten. In December
Moscow explicitly blamed the failure to get bread on Ukrainian nationalism,
and whatever had been accomplished during the Revolution and in the 1920s
was destroyed. There is, of course, one tenured Professor Tauger at the
University of West Virginia, who chalks all this up to a bad harvest that
nobody who lived through it seems to have ever remembered. But let the
philosophers seek the truth. I confine myself to merely a few facts.
November 26 2002, The Day
http://www.day.kiev.ua/DIGEST/2002/37/issue.htm
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