Out of all the genocides that occurred during the 1900’s, only one possessed the most fatal outcome. Compared to the six million deaths in the Holocaust, this genocide had between two million to ten million people. The Ukrainian genocide proved to be the one of the worst tragedies in Ukrainian history.
The Soviet Union was responsible for this genocide; specifically Joseph Stalin, who was very opposed to Ukrainian nationalism. He came into power after the fall of the Russian Empire and after Vladimir Lenin gained power but died a year later. His main goal in the Ukraine was to destroy Ukrainian nationalism and get rid of the Kulaks. Kulaks were considered peasants who were better off economically and a threat to state control. In order to gain control of the Ukraine, Stalin implemented his five-year plan.
During Stalin’s five year plan, he wanted to increase agriculture massively to feed the people working in industry as well as sell to strengthen the economy. Stalin began the genocide by annihilating “Ukraine’s cultural intelligentsia—not so much its engineers, doctors, and technicians, but its linguists, historians, artists, folk singers, and others whose work and professional lives suggested a separate cultural or historical identity for Ukraine” (History in Dispute). They had also included Ukrainian communists in the first objective. Stalin’s second objective was to destroy the economic and political relevance of individual peasant farmers. Most Ukrainian residents had their owns farms even when the serfs were in existence; prosperous on their own with the New Economic Policy from the 1920’s. Stalin’s plan would end the independent ways of living and prosperous peasantry.
Under the implementation, many of the mo...
... middle of paper ...
.... 3 May 2014. http://find.galegroup.com/gic/infomark.do?&source=gale&idigest=c78bffd7bb4a35e4038a943301d3e0d6&prodId=GIC&userGroupName=vale41196&tabID=T001&docId=CX3434600345&type=retrieve&contentSet=EBKS&version=1.0 "US-UKRAINE-FAMINE-ASSESSMENT." Ukraine General Newswire 21 Nov. 2011. Global Issues In Context. Web. 3 May 2014. http://find.galegroup.com/gic/infomark.do?&source=gale&idigest=c78bffd7bb4a35e4038a943301d3e0d6&prodId=GIC&userGroupName=vale41196&tabID=T004&docId=A273116503&type=retrieve&contentSet=IAC-Documents&version=1.0 Krushelnycky, Askold. "Ukraine Famine." Ukraine Famine. Ukrainian Archives, n.d. Web. 3 May 2014. http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/ukraine_famine.html Serbyn, Roman. "The Ukrainian Famine - Holodomor." The Ukrainian Famine - Holodomor. Holodomor Education, n.d. Web. 03 May 2014.
http://www.holodomoreducation.org/index.php/id/183
Stalin’s five-year plans and policies affected people in all different ways some farmers were in the midst of famine, others were treated negatively, and some had an optimistic view of Stalin’s plans. Stalin’s five-year plan largely helped out the growing economy, but at the same time it hurt the farmers. Although Stalin was extremely supportive to the publics faces, his reign, starting in the 1920’s, led to the most killings in European history. The Soviet Union ended up surviving another thirty years.
The first five-year plan, approved in 1929, proposed that state and collective farms provide 15 percent of agriculture output. The predominance of private farming seemed assured, as many farmers resisted collectivization. By late 1929, Stalin moved abruptly to break peasant resistance and secure the resources required for industrialization. He saw that voluntary collectivism had failed, and many “Soviet economists doubted that the first plan could even be implimented.”1 Stalin may have viewed collectivization as a means to win support from younger party leaders, rather than from the peasants and Lenin’s men. “Privately he advocated, industrializing the country with the help of internal accumulation” 2 Once the peasantry had been split, Stalin believed that the rural proletarians would embrace collectivization . Before this idea had a chance to work, a grain shortage induced the Politburo to support Stalin’s sudden decision for immediate, massive collectivization.
Holodomor is a Ukrainian word meaning “Genocide Famine” in English [holodomor.org]. The Holodomor ultimately began in 1928 when the then current leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin introduced a program which would lead to the collectivization of agriculture within the Soviet Union. In order to do this, farmers would have to give up privately owned farms, livestock and equipment. These farmers would have to join state owned collective farms as they would no longer have their own farms to run. These collective farms would need to produce large amounts of grain along with feeding their own workers. Ukrainian farmers refused to join these farms, as they considered it a returned to the serfdom of centuries past. In response, Stalin
It has been noted, “This ‘reshaping’ had three main aspects: the elimination of all dissent; the liquidation of all forms of democracy and of working class organisation; the slashing of the living standards of the working class and the physical annihilation of millions of peasants” (Text 5). This quote explains how Stalin wanted to industrialize Russia, which includes the deaths of several peasants of Russia. The Russians did not just die from The Great Purge, but also from Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. The Five-Year Plan was an attempt to industrialize the Soviet Union. It was also a plan to increase the output of steel, coal, oil, and electricity.
Foster, Aaron. "Armenian Genocide 1915 Information and Recognition."Genocide 1915. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
The first reason that formed my collective memory about Holodomor was power. Power is the main component why leaders who have it start to abuse it. The excuse that goes along with it is usually the war that had occurred earlier. Since Ukraine was part of a union made by Russia, Russia felt like it had to show who was the boss and put the country back in place. The abuse was caused by Stalin not wanting to lose Ukraine but also because they needed the natural supplies. They figured they were doing nothing wrong and had the right to go into a different country with the power that a dictator holds. It is said that Stalin targeted specifically the Ukrainian people because they began to pose a serious threat to soviet’s union integrity and aspirations. Stalin wanted to annihilate the Ukrainian people that would go against his ideas and be their own country. People were arrested more often for speaking out against Stalin, hiding food, and sent to Siberia to work as a slave. Communist fanatics that helped Stalin ravaged and confisc...
...he human depravity one can imagine. Even though Genocide did not begin with the Holocaust, Germany and Adolf Hitlers’ heartless desire for “Aryanization” came at the high cost of human violence, suffering and humiliation towards the Jewish race. These warning signs during the Holocaust, such as Anti-Semitism, Hitler Youth, Racial profiling, the Ghettos, Lodz, Crystal Night, Pogroms, and Deportation unraveled too late for the world to figure out what was going on and help prevent the horrors that came to pass. The lessons learned from all of this provide a better understanding of all the scars genocide leaves behind past and present. In spite the ongoing research in all of these areas today, we continue to learn new details and accounts. By exploring the various warning signs that pointed toward genocide, valuable knowledge was gained on how not to let it happen again.
History aims to examine the actions and legacy of mankind. The past is filled with the achievements that humans have reached, however, history also shows us the evil that man is capable of. No atrocity against mankind is more heinous than the act of genocide. Genocide is the aim to destroy all (or part of) of a racial, religious, ethnic, or national group of people. This paper will examine two famous cases of genocide in history: The holocaust of Jews and other groups in Nazi Germany, and the destruction of the Congolese people under Belgian colonialism. The Holocaust remains as one of the main legacies of Hitler and the Nazi party, who claimed an estimated 11 million victims, 6 million of which were Jews. Comparatively, the Congolese Genocide
Hovannisian, Richard. "The Reality and Relevance of the Armenian Genocide." UCLA: Armenian Studies. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/centers/armenian/source109.html (accessed April 11, 2014).
During Stalin’s reign, he didn't kill so many million Russians because of some evil inborn of his nature but because he had to eliminate those who refused to willingly turn over property and wealth to the state. Thus, the people who supported industrialization are as responsible for the death of those millions because they failed to understand that such violence would be the ending result.
The Armenian Genocide Started in Ottomans Empire. Which really shocked people because they have lived in peace for 3,000 years. After the peace was disrupted the rulers created restrictions against the Armenians Christians like unequal and unjust laws forcing them to pay higher taxes, have fewer political rights, and legal rights. Many Armenian men were forced into labor camps which had a highest death rate. They built roads and were almost like a human pack. Those who did not die in the labor area were most likely shot. When the orders were given to exterminate the Armenians it was in a coded telegram then, round ups began in April of 1915. The Turkish rounded up different types of people from their homes and were jailed, tortured, hanged or shot. Another torture method was a large number of people arrested where they were tied together and taken to outskirts of their town where they were shot and killed by the death squads or Turkish soldiers (United Human Rights Council).
The Armenian genocide is recognised as the first of the century and it was carried out by Turks during World War I. The genocide was an act of revenge as selected Armenians volunteered to fight alongside the Russian army, against Turkey. The attack on Armenians of the Ottoman Empire began in March, 1915. It took an immense toll on the women; hundreds of thousands of women were murdered or died on the harsh march from Turkey, south to Syria. The genocide consisted of brutal deaths, including burning alive, drowning, being tossed off cliffs, starvation, dying of thirst and through the act of rape and evisceration. The majority of men were killed through the severing of the head. Khanum Palootzian was a surviv...
The Armenian Genocide can be labelled as a very controversial topic. Many people argue that the massacre of Armenians was considered a genocide. On the other hand, an abundance of people along with the Turks deny the event to be a genocide even till this day. The Turkish government deliberately had an intent to isolate and destroy the Armenians. They had an organized plan to carry out the killings and the acts of the Turkish government can be considered as the destruction of Armenians, not just the killings of them. The mass murder of this specific group of people during World War One should be identified as a genocide not only in this course but around the world as well.
The intentional murder of an enormous group of people is near unthinkable in today’s society. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, numerous authoritarian regimes committed genocide to undesirables or others considered to be a threat. Two distinct and memorably horrific genocides were the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the Holodomor by the Soviet Union. In the Holocaust, The Nazis attempted to eradicate all European Jews after Adolf Hitler blamed them for Germany’s hardship in recent years. During the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union attempted to destroy any sense of Ukrainian nationalism by intentionally starving and murdering Ukrainian people. The two atrocities can be thoroughly compared and contrasted through the eight stages of genocide. The Holocaust and Holodomor shared many minor and distinct similarities under each stage of genocide, but were mainly similar to the methods of organization, preparation, and extermination, and mainly differed
History 101 Professor Esther Nunez Nadine Stewart Genocide – The Armenian Struggle The denial of the Armenian genocide and the use of the term “alleged” are insults to those who have agitated over the years in highlighting the genocide and the Armenian people themselves. The pictorial anger and anguish of this painful traumatic experience has left the survivors of this horrific event with deep scars beyond repair. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a dark world for the Armenians who were held helpless and bound at the treacherous hand of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. The Armenian Genocide includes: the context of power of the Ottoman Empire, the plan of execution in different stages, trial, and the lack of support from their counterparts, the struggle for acceptance of the act as Genocide by Turkey government, and its refusal to acknowledge and provide support to the Armenian. The Armenians existed for years as a Christian minority within the Ottoman Empire.