The Holodomor
Margaret Siriol Colley
The Author of More Than a Grain of Truth and
A Manchukuo Incident
Being the Biographies of Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones
1905-1935
*******
UKRAINE: THE FAMINE (HOLODOMOR)
THE FAMINE AS AN ISSUE
The Ukrainian (Soviet) famine (holodomor)
of 1932-3 attracted relatively little attention until the mid-1980s
History is written by the oppressors and not until 1991,
at the time of the break up of the Soviet Union, was Ukraine in a position
to refer to the Great Famine. The only authentic accounts of the famine
should be taken from the spectators of the terrible crisis. The whole tragic
event was cleverly concealed by the manoeuvres and covered up by the Soviet
Government in 1933. One act of subterfuge was the Metrovik Affair and trial
whereby the Moscow correspondents were forced not report the famine. In
fact, Walter Duranty stated there was no famine and denied my uncle, Gareth
Jones’ honest reporting to be true. Duranty’s colleagues accused Gareth of
lying, “The throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of
us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes - but throw him
down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.…
We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that
damned Jones as a liar. ...iv
The British Government have much to answer for in
suppressing the news of the tragedy from history. I have no doubt that the
HMG prevented any reporting by Gareth after his last article in the
Western Mail and South Wales News on April 20th1933. He has
been curiously airbrushed out of history. Hitler had been made Chancellor in
January 1933 and it was then that the government commenced their policy of
appeasement. I shall quote Sir Laurence Collier, head of the Foreign Office
Northern Department furnished reply to Sir Waldron Smithers on July 2, 1934
who had enquired as to the economic situation and the famine in the Soviet
Union:
“The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a
certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia
[Ukraine] similar to what has appeared in the press, and that there is no
obligation on us not to make it public. We do not want to make it public,
however, because the Soviet Government would resent it and our relations
with them would be prejudiced.... We cannot give this explanation in public.[i]”
THE KEY HISTORICAL DEBATES: MORTALITY….
This paragraph questions the numbers of death’s.
I can only quote the figures at the time.
On 26, September 1933, Walter Duranty known for his
duplicity called at the British Embassy and gave to a member of the staff an
account of the impressions he had gathered following his visit in September
1933 with Stanley Richardson to Ukraine:xi
According to Mr. Duranty, the population of the North
Caucasus and the Lower Volga has decreased in the past year by 3 million,
and the population of the Ukraine by 4-5 million. Estimates that he had
heard from other foreigners living in the Ukraine were that approximately
half the population had moved either into the towns or into more prosperous
districts. ... Mr. Duranty estimated that about 30 per cent. of the harvest
would be lost as a result of pilferage and weather conditions. ... The
Ukraine had been bled white. ... Mr. Duranty thinks it quite possible
that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from
lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.
In 1931 Gareth visited a German Commune near Dneiperstroy
and was told:
“They sent the kulaks away from here and it was
terrible. We heard in a letter that ninety children died on the way -
ninety children from this district.” No account of figures has ever been
given for the deaths en route to the forced labour camps or while in these
camps.
0n Sunday May 28, 1993 Gareth wrote to his
parents from Danzig:
“The German Consul in Kharkoff and his wife thought that
my Russian articles gave a wonderful picture, but that it was really much
worse than I described it. Since March, it has got so much worse that it is
horrible to be in Kharkoff. So many die, ill and beggars. They are dying
off in the villages, he said, and the spring sowing campaign is
catastrophic. The peasants have been eating the seed. To talk of a bumper
crop, as Molotoff did, was a tragic farce, and he only said that to keep
their spirits up, but nobody believed Molotoff. Many villages are empty.
The fate of the German colonists is terrible, in some villages 25% have died
off, and there will be more dying off until August.”
Allan Monkhouse, who had been one of the six engineers on
trial in the Metrovik Affair wrote in his unbiased book:
“Last autumn, sixteen villages in the Ukraine failed to
produce the grain required from them, and their failure was attributed by
the authorities to deliberate sabotage. A decree was published in the local
papers, announcing that all grain hoarded in the offending villages was to
be confiscated, the co-operative stores in the villages were to be closed,
and no State distributing authority was to arrange to send food to them—in
other words sixteen villages were condemned to starve or secretly flee from
their homes. When
I was told of this decree I frankly did not believe it, but, when I saw for
myself, I had to express my apologies to the friend who first told me of it
for having doubted his statement.
“Speaking at Nijni Novgorod in June 1933, [President]
Kalinin himself is reported as having said: “There are collective farms in
the Ukraine and the North Caucasus where the supply of bread does not
suffice, or suffices with difficulty.” He interpreted this, however, as a
righteous judgment upon the collective farms where work had not proceeded
energetically..[ii]…
“It may be assumed from Kalinin’s words already quoted
that the peasants on the mismanaged collective farms will be left to their
fate.”
.
….& CAUSATION
The main one,
according to Davies and Wheatcroft, was the over-riding importance attached
by the Kremlin to the policy of industrialisation at break-neck speed by
ruthlessly squeezing the agricultural sector. This was to be achieved by
stripping the countryside of food through forcible grain requisitions. The
food would then be used to feed the USSR's rapidly-expanding urban
work-force.
I question this last statement. The grain requisitions
were to pay
for imports of machinery for her
newly-founded industries and for armaments to combat an
anticipated invasion by the Japanese
from the recently established Manchukuo. Due to the
global slump of the Depression the
Soviet Union was finding it difficult to export her wheat, timber and other
goods to an ever-diminishing market with a decreasing financial return.
Despite
starvation in the Soviet Union, the
ruthless Stalin continued to sell grain on the open market
endeavouring to convince the outside
world that peasants, particularly in Ukraine, were not suffering nor dying
of starvation.
The theory
of Collectivisation was a failure. According to Allan Monkhouse in
his book wrote without bitterness:
“The outlook in the agricultural areas is not good. The
better-class and experienced peasants have been banished from the villages.
Their herds have been to a large extent destroyed. The collective farms have
fallen into the hands of political organizers with comparatively little
farming experience and the poorer peasants, the bedniaki, who have in the
past proved themselves unsuccessful farmers. Discontent is rife everywhere
in the villages, except amongst the young people.[iii]
Following the October
Revolution of 1917 Ukrainian Nationalism was encouraged by Mykola Skrynik
who took over from Oleksander Shums’ki as Commissar for Education and
Ukraine became an autonomous, though still a Bolshevik country. The diaries
(March 1933), which Gareth wrote, we still have in our possession and he
made the cryptic notes:
“Skrypnik, the Commissar for Education has been
removed (now in Gosplan) was for Ukrainian rights. He was accused over
Ukrainisation.
He was removed the beginning of March.”[iv]
Stalin had sent his henchman, Pavel Postyshev to remove Skrypnik, who was
charged with Ukrainisation.
During the first year of Postyshev’s presence in
Ukraine, nearly 100,000 were purged from the CP(b)U.[v]
Skrypnik committed suicide in the July of 1933.
To quote part of Gareth’s article in
The Washington Herald, Sunday, June 4th 1933:
“The famine is man made. It is the
result of the Soviet policy of abolishing the private farm and replacing it
by large collective farms, where the land and cattle were owned in common….
“The second point of the governments
new policy is the new agricultural tax, by which the collective farms will
pay in tax so much gain (usually about 2 ½ centners) per hectare of the
sowing area PLANNED, and be free to sell the rest in open.
“I asked some peasants about that.
One said:
"Yes, they said it would be alright last year to sell the surplus on the
private market, yet they took everything away. We do not believe them any
longer. They say they will only take 15 poods per hectare, but they will
take everything.
“In most districts the yield will be
so small that it may be less than the tax. The peasants have so lost faith
in the government that the new policy will not encourage the peasants to
work. The outlook for the harvest therefore, remains black in spite of the
new policy.”[vi]
But was the famine a genocidal
act directed against the Ukrainian nation? There is a widely-held belief,
in Ukraine and elsewhere, that it was.
It is true that other areas in the Soviet Union suffered
from famine – Siberia, the Volga and West Russia. Gareth reported one
million out of five million of the nomadic Kyrgyz
had died in Kazakhstan.” It is true that Stalin
carried out many purges, but Ukraine was the first on his list of his
barbarism.
Ukraine was the country that put up most resistance. It
is difficult to see how such a rapid change in the agricultural policy could
be achieved and yet supply enough grain for export. The better off peasants,
the Kulaks were harried to Siberia. Stalin was determined to suppress
Ukraine and ‘russify’ the country. The intelligentsia and politicians were
‘liquidated’and the latter replaced by Stalin's Communist henchmen. Above
all the quota of wheat grown did not reach the amount that was a required by
tax.
Throughout Ukraine Gareth heard these words echoed:
“There is no bread. We are waiting for death.”
Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones died in mysterious
circumstances in Inner Mongolia on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, August
12 1935. He never lived to be vindicated or expose the truth about the
famine in Ukraine.
http://www.margaretcolley.co.uk/Soviet_articles.htm
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Document
Derived from a Ukrainian expression which means 'to inflict death
by hunger'.
Defined in Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention &
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as 'any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial or religious group, such as: (a) killing members of the
group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e)
forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.' For the
full text, see http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
iv
Eugene Lyons XE "Eugene Lyons" , Assignment in Utopia,
Harcourt Brace, New York, 1937.p.576.
[i] The Foreign Office
and the Famine British Documents on Ukraine and the Great
Famine of 1932-1933. Edited by Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk
and Bohdan S. Kordan. The Limestone Press Kingston, Ontario - Vestal,
New York 1988. p. 397 no 71.
[ii]
Allan Monkhouse, MOSCOW, 1911—1933 Being the Memoirs of
Victor Gollancz Ltd, London
1933, p. 116
[iii]
Allan Monkhouse, MOSCOW, 1911—1933 Being the Memoirs of
Victor Gollancz Ltd London
1933 p. 118.
[iv]
http://www.margaretcolley.co.uk/Powerpoint_hero_ukraine.htm
[v]
THE WASHINGTON
HERALD Sunday,
June 4th 1933 http://www.margaretcolley.co.uk/washington_herald.htm
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