STALIN'S FOUR-PRONGED OFFENSIVE AGAINST UKRAINE EXPLAINED

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STALIN'S FOUR-PRONGED OFFENSIVE AGAINST UKRAINE EXPLAINED

Demographers now calculate that more than four million Ukrainians starved in just six months, one of the greatest genocides to befoul 20th-century European history, yet for decades, what happened was almost forgotten.

BY LUBOMYR LUCIUK   SEPTEMBER 26, 2018

A monument for the victims of the Holodomor famine in Kiev, Ukraine. (photo credit: REUTERS)

On September 20, 1953, Dr. Raphael Lemkin, a legal scholar, spoke in New York City about Stalin’s four-pronged offensive against Ukraine. That country’s dismemberment began with the evisceration of its heart, mind and soul, achieved through the murder or deportation of Ukraine’s writers and poets, intelligentsia and clergy. That outrage was coupled with a body blow against Ukraine’s peasantry, the repository of the nation’s traditions, orchestrated through a man-made famine. To finish off the assault, the country’s ethnic character was diluted through a mass resettlement of non-Ukrainians, particularly along Ukraine’s eastern marches.

Lemkin, known to history as “the father of the UN Genocide Convention,” understood clearly what had been done, branding it a “classic example of a Soviet genocide.” He estimated that five million Ukrainians perished during the Great Famine of 1932-1933, now known as the Holodomor. Another observer, Fred E. Beal, reported this same figure in his 1937 book Proletarian Journey. In a conversation held in 1933 with one of the famine’s architects, Grigory Petrovsky, the president of the ostensibly independent Soviet Ukraine, Beal asked, “They say five million people have died this year… What are we going to tell them?” Petrovsky responded frankly, “Tell them nothing! What they say is true. We know that millions are dying. That is unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify that. Tell them nothing!”

Demographers now calculate that more than four million Ukrainians starved in just six months, one of the greatest genocides to befoul 20th century European history, yet for decades, what happened was almost forgotten. Those who spoke out were invariably derided, most notably Gareth Jones, a brilliant Welsh journalist whose first-hand accounts of widespread starvation were suppressed by the “fake news” spread by Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent of The New York Times. He knowingly bleated the Kremlin line that there was no famine at all. Another truth-teller was the courageous Jewish-Canadian journalist, Rhea Clyman, whose searing accounts of the horror included a May 1933 article in the Toronto Telegraph. She described a peasant near Kharkiv crying, “We have no bread! We have nothing to eat. Our children were eating grass in the spring... there was nothing else for them.”

Read more at: https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Stalins-four-pronged-offesnsive-against-Ukraine-explained-568122?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter