Remembering Ukraine's Unknown Holocaust
By international syndicated columnist & broadcaster Eric Margolis
Dec. 13, 1998
LOS ANGELES - As Britain's socialist government cleared
the way for a gaudy show trial of that Great Satan of
the left, Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 65th
anniversary of this century's bloodiest crime was
utterly ignored. Leftists now baying for Pinochet's head
don't want to be reminded of the Unknown Holocaust.
In 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin unleashed genocide
in Ukraine. Stalin determined to force Ukraine's
millions of independent farmers - called `kulaks'- into
collectivized Soviet agriculture, and to crush Ukraine's
growing spirit of nationalism.
Ukraine's nightmare had begun in 1932. Faced by
resistance to collectivization, Stalin unleashed terror
upon Ukraine. Moscow dispatched 25,000 fanatical young
party militants - earlier versions of Mao's `Red Guards'
- to force 10 million Ukrainian peasants into collective
farms. Secret police units of OGPU began selective
executions of recalcitrant farmers.
When Stalin's red guards failed to make a dent in this
immense number, OGPU was ordered to begin mass
executions. But there were simply not enough Chekists
(secret police) to kill so many people, so Stalin
decided to replace bullets by a much cheaper medium of
death, mass starvation.
All seed stocks, grain, silage, and farm animals were
confiscated from Ukraine's farms. Ethiopia's communist
dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, used the very same
method in the 1970's to force collectivization: the
resulting famine cased one million deaths.
OGPU agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and
rail lines. Nothing came in or out of Ukraine. Farms
were searched and looted of food and fuel. Ukrainians
quickly began to die of hunger, cold, and sickness.
When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin
sent henchman, Lazar Kaganovitch, to destroy Ukrainian
resistance. Kaganovitch, the Soviet Eichmann, made
quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent
of all Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. Ukrainian
Nikita Khruschchev helped supervise the slaughter.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, mass starvation
created by Kaganovitch and OGPU hit full force.
Ukrainians ate their pets, boots, belts, bark, and
roots. Cannibalism became common; parents even ate
infant children.
The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin's
custom-made famine and Cheka firing squads remains
unknown to this day. KGB's archives, and recent work by
Russian historians, shows at least 7 million Ukrainians
died. Ukrainian historians put the figure at 9 million,
or higher. Twenty-five percent of Ukraine's population
was exterminated.
Six million other farmers across the USSR were starved
or shot during collectivization. Stalin told Churchill
he liquidated ten million peasants during the 1930's.
Add mass executions by the Cheka in Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania; the genocide of 3 million Muslims of the
USSR; massacres of Cossacks and Volga Germans. In total,
Soviet industrial genocide accounted for at least 40
million victims, not including 20 million war dead.
Kaganovitch, and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD)
were Jewish. The predominance of Jews among Bolshevik
leaders, and the frightful crimes and cruelty inflicted
by Stalin's Cheka on Ukraine, the Baltic, and Poland,
led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people
for both communism and their suffering. As a direct
result, during the subsequent Nazi occupation of Eastern
Europe, the region's innocent Jews became the target of
ferocious revenge by Ukrainians, Balts, and Poles.
While the world is by now fully aware of the destruction
of Europe's Jews by the Nazis, the story of the
numerically larger holocaust in Ukraine has been
suppressed, or ignored. Ukraine's genocide occured 8-9
years before Hitler began the Jewish Holocaust, and was
committed, unlike Nazi crimes, before the world's gaze.
But Stalin's murder of millions was simply denied, or
concealed by a leftwing conspiracy of silence that
continues to this day. In the strange moral geometry of
mass murder, only Nazis are guilty.
Socialist luminaries like Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and
Sidney Webb, and PM Edouard Herriot of France, toured
Ukraine during 1932-33, and proclaimed reports of famine
were false. Shaw announced, `I did not see one
under-nourished person in Russia.' New York Times
correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize
for his Russian reporting, wrote claims of famine were
`malignant propaganda.' Seven million people were dying
around them, yet these fools saw nothing. The New York
Times has never repudiated Duranty's lies.
Modern leftists do not care to be reminded their
ideological and historical roots are entwined with this
century's greatest crime - Stalin's mass murder machine
- the inevitable result of enforced social engineering
and marxist theology. Had Germany won the war, today's
`reformed' Euro-Nazis would take the same amnesiac
approach to Hitler as modern European socialists do to
Stalin.
Western historians delicately skirt the sordid fact that
the governments of Britain, the US, and Canada were
fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and Stalin's other
monstrous crimes. Yet they eagerly welcomed him as an
ally during World War II. Stalin, whom an adoring
Roosevelt called `Uncle Joe,' murdered four times more
people than Adolf Hitler - and a decade earlier.
Roosevelt and Churchill colluded with and helped save
history's most murderous regime. Time to face this ugly
fact.
None of the Soviet mass murderers who committed genocide
were ever brought to justice. `Soviet Eichmann' Lazar
Kaganovitch died peacefully in Moscow a few years ago,
still wearing his Order of the Soviet Union, and
enjoying a generous state pension.
Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1998
