As Britain's socialist government cleared the way for a gaudy show trial
of that Great Satan of
the left, Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 65th anniversary of this century's
bloodiest crime
was utterly ignored. Leftists now baying for Pinochet's head don't want
to be reminded of the
Unknown Holocaust.
In 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin unleashed genocide in Ukraine.
Stalin determined to force
Ukraine's millions of independent farmers - called kulaks - into collectivized
Soviet agriculture,
and to crush Ukraine's growing spirit of nationalism. Faced by resistance
to collectivization,
Stalin unleashed terror and dispatched 25,000 fanatical young party militants
from Moscow -
earlier versions of Mao's Red Guards - to force 10 million Ukrainian peasants
into collective
farms. Secret police units of OGPU began selective executions of recalcitrant
farmers.
When Stalin's red guards failed to make a dent in this immense number,
OGPU was ordered
to begin mass executions. But there were simply not enough Chekists (secret
police) to kill so
many people, so Stalin decided to replace bullets with a much cheaper medium
of death -
mass starvation. All seed stocks, grain, silage and farm animals
were confiscated from
Ukraine's farms. (Ethiopia's Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam used
the same
method in the 1970s to force collectivization: the resulting famine cased
one million deaths.)
OGPU agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and rail lines. Nothing
came in or out of
Ukraine. Farms were searched and looted of food and fuel. Ukrainians quickly
began to die of
hunger, cold and sickness.
When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent henchman
Lazar
Kaganovitch to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovitch, the Soviet
Eichmann, made quota,
shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent of all Ukrainian intellectuals
were
executed. A Ukrainian party member named Nikita Khruschchev helped
supervise the
slaughter.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, mass starvation created by Kaganovitch
and OGPU hit
full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots.
The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin's custom-made famine
and Cheka firing
squads remains unknown to this day. The KGB's archives, and recent
work by Russian
historians, show at least seven million died. Ukrainian historians put
the figure at nine million, or
higher. Twenty-five percent of Ukraine's population was exterminated.
Millions of victims Six million other farmers across the USSR were starved
or shot during
collectivization. Stalin told Winston Churchill he liquidated 10 million
peasants during the
1930s. Add mass executions by the Cheka in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania;
the genocide of
three million Muslims in the USSR; massacres of Cossacks and Volga Germans
and Soviet
industrial genocide accounted for at least 40 million victims, not including
20 million war dead.
Kaganovitch and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD) were Jewish. The
predominance
of Jews among Bolshevik leaders, and the frightful crimes and cruelty inflicted
by Stalin's
Cheka on Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland, led the victims of Red
Terror to blame the
Jewish people for both communism and their suffering. As a direct
result, during the
subsequent Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the region's innocent Jews
became the target
of ferocious revenge by Ukrainians, Balts and Poles.
While the world is by now fully aware of the destruction of Europe's Jews
by the Nazis, the
story of the numerically larger holocaust in Ukraine has been suppressed,
or ignored.
Ukraine's genocide occurred 8-9 years before Hitler began the Jewish Holocaust,
and was
committed, unlike Nazi crimes, before the world's gaze. But Stalin's murder
of millions was
simply denied, or concealed by a left-wing conspiracy of silence that continues
to this day. In
the strange moral geometry of mass murder, only Nazis are guilty.
Socialist luminaries like Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and PM
Edouard Herriot
of France, toured Ukraine during 1932-33 and proclaimed reports of famine
were false. Shaw
announced: "I did not see one under-nourished person in Russia." New York
Times
correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Russian
reporting, wrote
claims of famine were "malignant propaganda." Seven million people were
dying around them,
yet these fools saw nothing. The New York Times has never repudiated Duranty's
lies.
Modern leftists do not care to be reminded their ideological and historical
roots are entwined
with this century's greatest crime - the inevitable result of enforced
social engineering and
Marxist theology.
Western historians delicately skirt the sordid fact that the governments of Britain, the U.S. and
Canada were fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and Stalin's other monstrous
crimes. Yet
they eagerly welcomed him as an ally during World War II. Stalin, who Franklin
Roosevelt
called "Uncle Joe," murdered four times more people than Adolf Hitler.
None of the Soviet mass murderers who committed genocide were ever brought
to justice.
Lazar Kaganovitch died peacefully in Moscow a few years ago, still wearing
his Order of the
Soviet Union, and enjoying a generous state pension.
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Eric can be reached by e-mail at: margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com
Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@sunpub.com