Joseph V. Stalin - Bolshevik revolutionary and the second leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin
considered the national consciousness and desire for freedom of the Ukrainian people to be an obstacle
in the implementation of his policy of collectivization in the Soviet Union. Of particular threat to Stalin
were the Ukrainian land-owning farmers whom he branded “kulaks”.
In 1929 Stalin introduced a policy for the liquidation of Ukrainian kulaks as a class and the policy was
legalized by the Soviet Central Committee in 1930. Anyone with a Ukrainian national consciousness was
branded an “enemy of the State” by Stalin’s regime. This initial campaign was geared toward kulaks
who resisted turning over their private farmland to the Soviet collective. Those kulaks were dealt with
through massive arrests and deportations to forced labor camps, often to the concentration camps in
Siberia. Those who weren’t arrested or deported were subject to the brutal terror of Stalin’s police and
oftentimes firing squad executions.
Despite the arrests, police seizures of their property and livestock, and even death sentences, the
kulaks continued to resist being subjugated by Moscow. Stalin reacted by imposed unrealistically large
grain quotas on Ukraine in 1931. As planned, Ukraine was unable to deliver on the grain quotas
because although it produced 27% of the entire Soviet grain harvest it was accountable for 38% of the
Soviet quota. This intentionally unrealistic goal allowed Stalin to take draconian measures to penalize
the kulaks for their failure to meet the quota, and thus Stalin’s artificially imposed Famine in Ukraine
began.
In 1932 Stalin ordered Ukraine’s borders to be sealed to outside world. In essence, Ukraine became
the world’s largest concentration camp. He ordered massive quantities of grain and agricultural
products to be exported out of Ukraine to feed the rest of the Soviet Union and for foreign export. This,
along with Stalin’s ban on food imports into Ukraine, left insufficient reserves of food in Ukraine to feed
the population.
Kulak villages that were considered uncooperative or underproducers were blacklisted and completely
blockaded. Anyone found to have foodstuffs in their possession was subject to execution, or in
extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for no less than 10 years in a Soviet concentration camp. It
was standard practice to be sentenced to 10 years in a concentration camp for being in possession of a
potato or a handful of wheat kernels.
|
Viachislav Molotov - Top Aid to Stalin who helped implement the 1932-33 genocide-famine policy
in Ukraine. Molotov was the head of the Extraordinary commission for grain delivery (khlebosdacha) in
Ukraine. On November 18, 1932, Molotov pushed through a resolution on "fines in kind," which
punished kulaks without bread by taking whatever else that could be eaten.
|
Lazer Kaganovich - In 1930 Kaganovich organized and headed a special department of the
Soviet secret police. It was referred to as the department of "wet affairs," with "wet" meaning "bloody." It
handled clandestine mass executions, of the sort carried out later at Vinnitsa in Ukraine and at Katyn in
Russia and at a thousand other places throughout the Soviet Union over the next two decades.
Kaganovich became the commissar in charge of mass murder.
|
Walter Duranty - New York Times journalist who in 1930s misled the world with his mendacious
articles on the situation in Ukraine, claiming that there were no famine there. He was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize for his fictitious articles which denied that peasants were being starved to death in Ukraine during
1932-1933. Duranty loved to repeat 'you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.' Those
few 'eggs' were the heads of men, women and children, and those 'few' were mererly tens of millions."
Mark Y. Herring - Review of S.J. Taylor's Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times Man in
Moscow, "Contra Mundum" No. 15.
|
|
