75 Years Ago

Ukraine Remembers – The Word Acknowledges

This year, the people of Ukraine and Ukrainians worldwide mark the 75^th anniversary of one of history’s greatest tragedies and certainly one of its most heinous crimes – the Great Famine of 1932-33 (Holodomor). This event which was the direct result of the then Soviet regime’s policy of collectivisation, carefully orchestrated by Josef Stalin from Moscow, resulted in the deaths of seven to ten million people, among them three million children.

The demise of the USSR in 1991 and the resultant accessibility of documents from Soviet archives have shed much light on this event. The forced collectivisation and grain requisition resulted in many deaths. However, additionally, the regime used these circumstances and conditions to perpetrate genocide against the Ukrainian nationality both in Soviet Ukraine and the Ukrainian concentrated Kuban region in Northern Caucasus.

Perhaps the single most significant document, which has appeared, is the previously purged census of 1937. Statistics of that census regarding nationalities in the USSR reveal that in 1937 there were 26 million Ukrainians in the USSR. The previous census in 1926 had indicated 31 million Ukrainians, thus a direct loss over eleven years of 5 million men, women and children. The non-Ukrainian nationalities within the USSR grew by 17% over that same period of time which percentage would have increased the Ukrainian population to 36 million in 1937, thus a discrepancy of 10 million including unborn children.

The aforesaid statistics constitute the corpus delicti and two recently unearthed Soviet documents, in particular, support both the mens rea and the actus reus of the genocide. On August 11, 1932 Josef Stalin wrote to his personal representative in Ukraine Lazar Kaganovich of the need to deal with the Ukrainian problem of nationalism, including the necessity of purging even Ukrainian communists. On January 22, 1933 Josef Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov issued a decree closing off the borders of Soviet Ukraine and the Ukrainian concentrated Kuban region in the North Caucusus in order to prevent peasants from leaving that republic and that region in search of bread. No other republics or regions in the USSR were addressed.

The United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 defines genocide inter alia as: …acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such …Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

The Convention codified what had been deemed abhorrent prior thereto, in particular, the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Ukrainian Famine/Genocide of 1932-33 and the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War.  Today the Convention serves not only as a legal obligation upon the UN Member States and signatories, but more importantly as a moral imperative for mankind represented in this venerable institution.

We appeal to the UN Member States and all UN affiliates to follow both their collective conscience as well as their Conventional duty and remember the 7-10 million victims of the Great Famine of 1932-33 (Holodomor) on this 75^th anniversary.

 October 24, 2008

Ukrainian World Congress

Eugene Czoli, President

Askold Lozynskyj, Chair of the UN Committee

Stefan Romaniw, General Secretary