Remembering Modern History’s Greatest Crime

By Eric Margolis

Toronto - Canada will soon make an important contribution to the cause of historical accuracy, human rights, and justice. To coincide with last week’s visit to Ottawa of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko, the Canadian government announced it planned to recognize the mostly forgotten 1932-1933 genocide in Ukraine.

Ottawa’s decision was motivated as much by ethnic politics as historic justice: there are 1.1 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent. But Ottawa still deserves kudos for doing the right thing.

For eight decades, the greatest mass murder in modern history has been shamefully covered up or ignored. I have been repeatedly shocked to receive letters from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent saying they had known nothing about the 1930’s genocide, or `Holdomor,’ until reading about it in my columns. Hopefully, more will now know.

From 1932-33, Stalin and henchmen, Lazar Kaganovitch and Vyacheslav Molotov, conducted a merciless campaign to crush resistance by Ukrainian farmers to communism and collectivization. They isolated Ukraine, then cut off all food supplies and seeds. Six to nine million Ukrainians died from the ensuing man-made famine and mass shootings of `anti-State elements’ by secret police execution squads. Cannibalism became common.

Large numbers of Ukrainians were also murdered during the Great Terror of 1936-38 in which an estimated 2 million Soviet citizens were shot and the same number died in Stalin’s concentration camps.

In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the Soviet penal system reached its zenith: 5.4 million people were prisoners in the gulag. Some 300,000 more Ukrainians were sent to concentration camps under the supervision of Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, and 21,259 were killed in Soviet `pacification’ campaigns and against independence fighters. Other Ukrainian nationalist leaders were assassinated in Western Europe by special Soviet hit teams.

During the same period, Moscow unleashed terror on the tiny Baltic states. From March to May, 1949, 95,000 Lithuanians, 27,000 of them children, were sent to concentration camps. In total, 120,000 Lithuanians, 50,000 Latvians and 30,000 Estonians went to the gulag where the death rate was 51% per annum. (…Full Article)

 
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