Have you heard of Holodomor; the silent Ukrainian massacre?
Do you know about Holodomor, the unknown tragedy of Ukrainian population? Holodomor, derived from the Ukrainian words, means to death by hunger or starvation also known as terror genocide. In 1932–33, Joseph Stalin’s desire to negate Ukrainians lead to misuse of his powers and resulted in a horrific genocide. Ukraine; the bread-basket of Europe was an agrarian country. Majority of people were associated with the peasantry. The USSR considered it’s growing economy a threat to its integrity.
Having flipped the pages of history we know that, whenever a nation is threatened by an ethnic group, the freedom of speech is seized first because the voice holds more power than the weapons. All the intellectuals, journalists, activists who spoke against the Soviet ideologies were vanished from the world as if they were never born. After the intellectuals, the wealthy people hold supremacy and dominance. Therefore Kulaks; the wealthier peasants, were either arrested or lynched. This step was taken to prevail the air of intimidation and horror among the innocent people who were the providers of food and nourishment to the tables of snobbish owners of might and potency.
The USSR ordered them to meet certain demands of grain-production that was impossible. When the peasants couldn’t meet the demands, they confiscated their properties, ransacked their houses to seize every handful of grain. The Soviet state extracted 4.27 million tons of grain from Ukraine in 1932, enough to feed at least 12 million people for an entire year. A heinous act that lead to a severe famine. The borders were blocked. Other crimes proliferated; lawlessness, theft, anarchy, cannibalism and hunger intensified to the extent that people started eating grass, bugs, cats and dogs. the streets became the grave yards for their corpses.
Yarosh, a Holodomor survivor, tells the acts of savagery and evil as mentioned:
“Children were dying in the houses. Men gathered the dead bodies up, put them on a cart, then dug a big hole. There were 10 or even more children. They were all buried in this way. The communists slit open the cows and drowsed them with the poison creolin We have already been through so much — hunger and cold. And we must suffer still. We are still waiting for a victory, but I want to witness this victory.”
Tetiana Pavlychka remembered that her sister Tamara “had a large, swollen stomach, and her neck was long and thin like a bird’s neck. People didn’t look like people — they were more like starving ghosts.” Adults were no better equipped to cope with the rage brought on by hunger: one survivor remembered that a neighbor became so angered by the sounds of his own children crying for food that he smothered his baby in its cradle and killed two of his other children by slamming their heads. Timothy Snyder refers to the widespread cannibalism during the disaster:
The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.
Gareth Jones, a daring journalist who tried to unveil the secrets of USSR was shot dead just because he chose to stand in solidarity with the afflicted. He didn’t live to see his courageous reporting vindicated, but his memory is celebrated today in Ukraine, where he is a national hero.
Their identity, their culture, religion and language were crippled. Ukrainian activist, Ivan Drach broke the ice and revealed the details of this genocide after the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Stalin kept denying the atrocities. Even these deaths were not registered in the annual census.
There was no cemetery, no memory, no eulogy for the victims of the famine. “Nobody spoke about it, nobody wrote about it,” Simon wrote in a 2013 article “80 Years since the Holodomor — the Great Famine in Ukraine.”
Why did the West turn a blind eye to one of the world’s worst trauma? What is the point of all these so-called humanitarian organizations that are globally recognized? Why did a country dare consider themselves enough mighty that they thought it is normal to publicly carry out these detestable tasks and leave the people to die?