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Tuesday, 11 March 2008 |
| Moreover, having officially sealed the borders of Ukraine to prevent any migration or relief efforts, the Soviet government could continue its barbarism without criticism from the outside world. In August 1932, members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) received authorization to officially confiscate grain from peasant households. Later that same month, a law that carried the death penalty for the theft of "social property" was introduced. Thousands of starving people caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective silo or farm were executed on the spot. Under extenuating circumstances these so called "crimes against the state" were punished by 10 years in Soviet labor camps. | At the height of the Famine: Ukrainian villages were dying at the rate of 25,000 per day or 1,000 per hour or 17 per minute; The Soviet regime dumped 1.7 million tons of grain on the Western markets - nearly a quarter of a ton of grain for every Ukrainian who starved to death; Among the children, one in three perished as a result of rapid collectivization and the forced famine-genocide; and, The 1933 Famine-Genocide was geographically focused for political ends as it stopped precisely at the Ukrainian-Russian ethnographic border
| | One in three children perished in the Holodomor | | This Soviet policy of terror was a political move aimed at crushing the peasants and landowners - those who most fervently resisted collectivization and supported the independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union. | | The pre-meditated nature and the political motives of the Soviets are apparent in the communist writings of the time. One of the leading communist papers in Ukraine carried an article, which stated: "collectivization in Ukraine has a special task … to destroy the social basis of Ukrainian nationalism - individually owned peasant agriculture." Stalin openly spoke of his plans to liquidate the individual farmers as a class in a conversation with Winston Churchill stating, "… the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle… Ten million. It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary…" Based on this, it is obvious that the goal of collectivization and the unrealistic agricultural quotas placed on farmers were a means of totally eliminating the Ukrainian peasantry. Nearly a forth of Ukraine's rural population paid with their lives because of their desire for freedom. This heinous Soviet crime left a great wound in the psychological and social development of the Ukrainian nation, which is still felt today. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 11 March 2008 )
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Holodomor 
