The Ukranian Genocide

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The Ukranian Genocide

"When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics"-these are the words of Joseph Stalin, a man who understood that "killing was a tool; properly used it could eliminate enemies, terrorize survivors into submission, and overwhelm outsiders beyond their ability to intervene" (Altman 41). The Soviet government claims that the famine of 1932-1933 was due to "conditions beyond human control," that it was an unfortunate but unintended consequence of the collectivization effort (Altman 47). The reality is that this disaster was not the result of inflation, crop failure, natural disasters, nor war. The shocking truth, which has been buried under sixty-five years of Soviet propaganda and Western corruption, is that the famine was engineered by Stalin and used as a weapon to annihilate between seven and ten million Ukrainians.

Realizing that the Soviet Union was fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries, Stalin devised a Five-Year Plan to industrialize the nation. Modernization was expensive, and in order to fund his new project, Stalin knew that the Soviet Union needed to increase its agricultural exports. To accomplish this he outlawed the private ownership of land and organized collective farms. Stalin demanded collective workers give a huge majority of their crops to the government.

The Ukrainians, a fiercely independent group, opposed Stalin's plan. Many refused to surrender their land. Some burned their crops and slaughtered their cattle in protest (Glennon 207). Millions more left the farms for cities, seeking jobs in the developing industry, which drastically hurt food production. Penalties for resisting the collectivization drive were forced labor camps ...

... middle of paper ...

...tressing lesson of Stalin's Ukrainian famine is that even great crimes against humanity can happen again if the world ignores or denies them" ("Denying the Terror Famine" 5).

Bibliography:

Bibliography

Altman, Linda Jacobs. Genocide: The Systematic Killing of a People. N.p.: Linda Jacobs

Altman, 1995.

Beers, Burton F. World History-Patterns of Civilization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall

Inc., 1990.

Glennon, Lorraine, ed. Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th Century. Atlanta: Turner

Publishing, 1995.

Procyk. The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33. N.p.:n.p., 1981.

Puddington, Arch. "Denying the Terror Famine." National Review 25 May 1992: 1-7. Magazine

Article Summaries Full Text Elite Ver. 5.0. CD-ROM. Ebsco. Jan. 1984-May 1996.

"Spiking the Ukrainian Famine, Again." National Review 11 April 1986: 33-36.

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