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‘The Holodomor': How Ukraine distorted the history of a tragic Soviet famine to help build its modern national myth
[RT] At the end of November, Ukraine commemorates the victims of the great Soviet famine of the 1930s. According to different estimates, the tragedy claimed from four to nine million lives throughout the country — in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. The exact number of deaths is hard to determine due to a lack of records, but the general Western consensus is that most deaths happened in the Russian and Ukrainian republics, with slightly more overall in the latter. However, per capita, the biggest effect was in Kazakhstan (where it is called the Asharshylyk), which lost over a third of its entire population. From the very first years of Ukraine’s independence, this event — known as the Holodomor (death by hunger) in the Ukrainian language — was politicized and served as a basis for constructing the country’s new national identity. For decades, various Ukrainian politicians, and other opinion formers, have convinced their people that the starvation of the 1930s was a deliberate and cynical extermination of the country’s intelligentsia and peasantry. Perpetrated by "Russians." However, not only was the Soviet Union controlled by the Georgian Joseph Stalin, at the time, Russians also died in their millions during the horrific great hunger. CUTTING TIES WITH THE EMPIRE Since the end of the 19th century, Ukraine has attempted to nationalize and mythologize its history in order to create a distinct Ukrainian national identity. For example Mikhail Grushevsky’s concept that Ukraine is the direct successor of Kievan Rus. In the post-Soviet period, the tendency to mythologize history grew even stronger in the new state. Backed by the government, Ukrainian researchers created their own historical narrative, attempting to separate the country’s history not only from its Soviet but also from its imperial past. Modern Russia was considered an ’heir’ of the Soviet Union and of the Russian Empire — in Ukraine’s understanding, the "colonizers" who wanted to wipe out the country’s national identity. Kiev quickly assumed the role of a victim of the communist regime. This allowed the country’s authorities to cut themselves off from the controversial decisions of the Soviet era — for example, the policy of "korenizatsiia" (nativization) i.e. the forceful "Ukrainization" of the republic’s elites and its cultural and educational fields. Most importantly, this concept allowed Ukraine to blame someone else for the country’s modern-day problems. The narrative implied that the main tragedy of the Ukrainian people in the Soviet era was not World War II and the German occupation, but the great famine of the 1930s. According to various estimates, between 3.5 million and 10 million people died of hunger throughout the USSR at that time. But in independent Ukraine, these tragic events were presented as a deliberate genocide against the peasantry and the intelligentsia. The tragedy became known as the Holodomor (literally death by hunger). According to the conclusions made by the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the famine was the result of a policy of forced collectivization that was implemented throughout the USSR. The censuses of 1926 and 1937 indicate that some other Soviet regions suffered from the famine, per capita, even more than the Ukrainian SSR. For example, the population of Ukraine decreased by 20.5% while that of Kazakhstan decreased by 30.9%, and the population decline in Russia’s Volga Region amounted to 23%. However, Ukrainian historians chose to ignore the data and insisted that the famine affected only Ukraine and, moreover, was a deliberate plan to annihilate the Ukrainian population. The Holodomor was widely discussed in the late 1980s, in light of the increasing criticism of communism. It played a major role in legitimizing Ukraine’s secession from the USSR and was actively used for propaganda purposes. Before the independence referendum, Ukrainian TV broadcast a publicly funded documentary film about the 1930s famine. The Ukrainian diaspora abroad played a major role in presenting the Holodomor as a deliberate extermination of Ukrainian people. In 1985, through the efforts of an organization called Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine, a parliamentary commission was established in the United States to investigate the circumstances of the great famine. In 1988, the World Congress of Free Ukrainians helped establish an international legal commission that recognized the policies of collectivization, "dekulakization" (repressions against ’kulaks’ or wealthy peasants), and starvation as acts of deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian people by the Soviet government. Ukrainian organizations also sponsored memorial exhibitions and rallies in cities and villages that had been particularly affected by the hunger. Long, but worth reading - I just got tired of MSM bullsh*t cited as fact here. Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2023-12-12 |
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