Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 26 – Today,
Ukrainians and people of good will around the world will mark the Day in Memory
of the Victims of the Holodomor in 1932-33, the largest of the three famines
visited upon Ukraine in Soviet times and one 81 percent of Ukrainians view as a
genocide (gordonua.com/news/society/v-ukraine-otmechayut-den-pamyati-zhertv-golodomorov-160972.html).
The killing of Ukrainians by
artificial famine was a genocide in a double sense. Not only did it lead to the
deaths of millions of Ukrainians but it was cleverly used by the Soviet leaders
to russify Ukraine. Under international law, the second action qualifies it as
a genocide every bit as much as does the first, although it is less often noted
in this case and in others.
In an article entitled “The
Holodomor as an Instrument of Russification,” Russian commentator Boris Sokolov
says that what happened in Ukraine was unquestionably a crime against humanity
but was not unique to Ukraine or to 1932-33 as many now suppose (day.kyiv.ua/ru/blog/istoriya/golodomor-kak-instrument-rusifikacii).
“For the Soviet communist regime,”
he writes, “actions of this kind were in the nature of things.” In 1921, for example,
Lenin used the famine that had arisen as a result of his War Communism policies
to launch a broad attack on the Orthodox Church on the assumption that starving
peasants would not resist him in that.
Moreover, the leader of the Soviet
state put out the word that he was taking valuables from the church in order to
buy food for the people. In fact, as Sokolov points out, these stolen goods
were converted into money to pay for the Soviet goal of world revolution. Those
who were hungry got nothing.
A decade later, after NEP, Stalin
decided to use a similar strategy in a more radical way, to take away any
resources of the peasantry and forcing them to work for almost nothing in order
to have enough money to pay for his strategy of seeking “rule over the entire
rest of the world.” That strategy was collectivization.
And it is no accident that this was
sometimes referred to as “the second socialist revolution,” not only because it
was directed against those who had resisted the Bolsheviks in the past but also
because it used famine as a weapon to break those communities so that they
could not offer any additional resistance.
As Sokolov points out, “the
population of Ukraine and especially its rural portion during the civil war
mostly were opponents of the communist authorities. The majority of Ukrainians
supported the Ukrainian Peoples Republic or one or another brand of anarchists.”
The same thing was true of the Cossacks of the North Caucasus and the Kazakhs,
Stalin’s two other targets.
“Of course,” the Russian commentator
says, “Stalin did not intend to completely destroy the Ukrainians, the Cossacks
or the Kazakhs.” In each case, some of their number participated in this crime;
and Stalin, just like the Turks in World War I with regard to the Armenians,
wanted to keep many of these people alive to serve as cannon fodder in a future
war.
But figures from the 1926 Soviet
census and the heavily falsified 1939 one show exactly what the Kremlin leader
was trying to do. According to the former,
in 1926, ethnic Ukrainians formed 87.5 percent of the rural population of that
republic, while forming only 47.3 percent of the urban one. Given that Ukraine
was overwhelming rural then, Ukrainians formed 80 percent of its total
population.
By 1939 after the Holodomor, “the
picture had fundamentally changed.” The ethnic Ukrainian share of the rural
population had fallen by 1.8 percent, an indication that “Ukrainians suffered
from collectivization significantly more than residents of other nationalities
in rural areas.”
At the same time,
between 1926 and 1939, the urban population of Ukraine almost doubled from 18.5
to 36.2 percent and the share of ethnic Ukrainians in it rose by 12.9 percent
to 60.2 percent, Sokolov notes. “But much more important is that the
[Ukrainian] share of the population fell to 76.47 percent in comparison with
1926.”
That means, he says, that “the
growth of the urban population of Ukraine in this period occurred much more
from the non-Ukrainian population, including those coming from other republics
than would have been the case if in Ukraine there had been a normal process of industrialization
and urbanization without the Holodomor genocide.”
And thus, Sokolov concludes that it
was “precisely after the Holodomor in Ukraine that the process of
russification, especially in its eastern and southern regions gathered force.”
At the same time, he reminds that the same thing happened in Cossack areas in
the North Caucasus and in northern Kazakhstan – and for exactly the same
reasons.
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