Holodomor, Communism and Historical Memory

By Volodymyr Kish

Since the demise of that pernicious and malignant state known as the Soviet Union, Ukrainians have been aggressively pushing the genocidal tragedy known as the Holodomor into the world’s public consciousness. The death of some seven to ten million innocent Ukrainian peasants is an unquestioned tragedy and genocide in its own right, yet, regrettably, not enough otherwise intelligent and well-meaning people properly attribute this inhuman horror to the political system that created it, namely communism.

The ideologues and apologists for the communist creed would have us believe that the Holodomor was an unfortunate aberration, the product of a psychopathic individual, Stalin, or the over-zealousness of Bolshevik cadres carrying out the necessary transformation of Ukrainian agriculture towards the progressive ideal of collectivization. This type of revisionist thinking fails to account for the historical reality that in all cases where communism has become the ruling ideology in a given country, the inevitable result has been the cruel extermination of millions and millions of that country’s citizens.

The Holodomor in Ukraine was not an isolated case. Subsequent to taking power in China, Mao Zedong’s deliberate policies led to the death of some forty to seventy million Chinese through famine, forced labour and execution. Cambodia’s infamous Communist dictator Pol Pot executed somewhere between one to three million of his own citizens, or about a third of the country’s total population. North Korea, one of the few remaining Communist dictatorships, is guilty of some one to two million deaths, again from starvation, forced labour and direct executions. Even the relatively more benign Communist regime in Cuba has the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own people to account for.

The fact of the matter is that no matter what high ideals of brotherhood, equality and altruism communism may preach, in practice, the implementation of communism has always led to dictatorship, cruelty and death to whomever has fallen under its sway. Although one may find it difficult to argue against the supposedly moral and utopian ideals behind this dogma, it fails to account for the reality that human beings, with all their imperfections and frailties, find it difficult to live up to such high standards of perfection. Inevitably, failure to live up to ideals voluntarily, leads to imposition of strict rules and social structures, which leads to reaction and protest, which leads to political frustration and the dictatorial usurpation of powers by a leadership elite, which leads to rebellion, which leads to oppression and bloodshed. This pattern has been replayed on the world stage over the past century time and time again. We should have learned by now that Communism is doomed to failure one hundred percent of the time that it is tried.

And yet, there are still countless naïve idealists that believe that it is not the communist ideal that is at fault, but that it has failed due to the inadequacies of the political leaders that have tried to implement it, and that in proper hands it can and should succeed. I would counter that if you can find several thousand absolutely perfect, altruistic and totally moral and ethical individuals on this earth, then maybe I would grant you that there might be a possibility to make it work. In the meantime, we should stick to the more practical political systems like liberal and social democracies and free enterprise, which though not idealistically or morally perfect, at least have a track record of providing the most freedom and opportunity to the greatest number of people in a given society.

There is currently an effort under way to establish a Tribute to Liberty Memorial in Ottawa to commemorate all the countless victims of Communism over the past century. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress is one of the official sponsors, and the initiative has gained the approval and support of the Canadian government as well as many other ethnic and community organizations. Some two to three million dollars will be required to complete the memorial and a significant chunk of this has been raised already. Further information on this initiative can be found at: www.tributetoliberty.ca

For Ukrainians who have been one of the primary victims of communism in the recent past, it is important that we lead the fight to educate the world as to the real threat that communism represents to humanity and civilization. We owe it to those many millions of our countrymen who were never given the opportunity to realize their full potential in this troubled world of ours.