House Concurrent Resolution 356

 http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/resolution356.html

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ADOPTS RESOLUTION ON 1932-33 MAN-MADE FAMINE IN UKRAINE

United States House of Representatives
Washington, D.C., Tuesday, October 21, 2003

The U.S. House of Representatives on 20 October adopted the following H. RES. 356 "Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives regarding the man-made famine that occurred in Ukraine in 1932-1933"  by a vote of 382 - 0.  The resolution was introduced by Henry Hyde (R-IL), Chairman of the House International Relations Committee (with Christopher Smith (R-NJ), Helsinki Commission Chairman and Tom Lantos (D-CA), Ranking Member, House International Relations Committee as original cosponsors.

Congressional Record Statement for The Honorable Christopher H. Smith on H.Res.356, Regarding the man-made famine that occurred in Ukraine 1932-33:
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        Mr.Speaker, I am proud to be an original cosponsor of H.Res. 356.  I thank and commend Mr. Hyde for introducing this resolution commemorating and honoring the memory of victims of an abominable act perpetrated against the people of Ukraine in 1932-33.  Seventy years ago, millions of men, women and children were murdered by starvation so that one man, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, could consolidate control over Ukraine.  The Ukrainian people resisted the Soviet policy of forced collectivization.  The innocent died a horrific death at the hands of a tyrannical dictatorship which had crushed their freedom.

        In an attempt to break the spirit of an independent-mindedUkrainian peasantry, and ultimately to secure collectivization, Stalin ordered the expropriation of all foodstuffs in the hands of the rural population. The grain was shipped to other areas of the Soviet Union or sold on the international market.  Peasants who refused to turn over grain to the state were deported or executed.  Without food or grain, mass starvation ensued. This manmade famine was the consequence of deliberate policies which aimed to destroy the political, cultural and human rights of the Ukrainian people.

        In short, food was used as a weapon in what can only be described as an organized act of terrorism designed to suppress a people's love of their land and the basic liberty to live as they choose.

        Mr. Chairman, I recall back in the 1980s seeing the unforgettable movie, Harvest of Despair, which depicted the horrors of the Famine, as well as the fine work of the congressionally-created Ukraine Famine Commission, which issued its seminal report in 1988.   Their work helped expose the truth about this horrific event.

        I am pleased that the resolution notes that there were those in the West, including The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who knowingly and deliberately falsified their reports to cover up the Famine because they wanted to curry favor with one of the most evil regimes in the history of mankind.

        The fact that this denial of the Famine took place then, and even much later by many scholars in the West is a shameful chapter in our own history.

        Mr. Chairman, this is an important resolution which will help give recognition to one of the most horrific events in the last century in the hopes that mass-murders of this kind truly become unthinkable.

TEXT OF RESOLUTION:

WHEREAS 2003 marks the 70th anniversary of the height of the famine in Ukraine that was deliberately initiated and enforced by the Soviet regime through the seizure of grain and the blockade of food shipments into the affected areas, as well as by forcibly preventing the starving population from leaving the region, for the purposes of eliminating resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture and destroying Ukraine's national identity;

WHEREAS this man-made famine resulted in the deaths of at least 5,000,000 men, women, and children in Ukraine and an estimated 1-2 million people in other regions;

WHEREAS the famine took place in the most productive agricultural area of the former Soviet Union while foodstocks throughout the country remained sufficient to prevent the famine and while the Soviet regime continued to export large quantities of grain;

WHEREAS as many Western observers with first-hand knowledge of the famine, including The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting from the Soviet Union, knowingly and deliberately falsified their reports to cover up and refute evidence of the famine in order to suppress criticism of the Soviet regime;

WHEREAS Western observers and scholars who reported accurately on the existence of the famine were subjected to disparagement and criticism in the West for their reporting of the famine;

WHEREAS the Soviet regime and many scholars in the West continued to deny the existence of the famine until the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991 resulted in many of its archives being made accessible, thereby making possible the documentation of the premeditated nature of the famine and its harsh enforcement;

WHEREAS the final report of the United States Government's Commission on the Ukraine Famine, established on December 13, 1985, concluded that the victims were `starved to death in a man-made famine' and that `Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933'; and

WHEREAS, although the Ukraine famine was one of the greatest losses of human life in the 20th century, it remains insufficiently known in the United States and in the world: 
 
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that--
1. the millions of victims of the man-made famine that occurred in Ukraine in 1932-1933 should be solemnly remembered and honored in the 70th year marking the height of the famine;
 
2. this man-made famine was designed and implemented by the Soviet regime as a deliberate act of terror and mass murder against the Ukrainian people;
 
3. the decision of the Government of Ukraine and the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) to give official recognition to the famine and its victims, as well as their efforts to secure greater international awareness and understanding of the famine, should be supported; and
 
4. the official recognition of the famine by the Government of Ukraine and the Verkhovna Rada represents a significant step in the reestablishment of Ukraine's national identity, the elimination of the legacy of the Soviet dictatorship, and the advancement of efforts to establish a democratic and free Ukraine that is fully integrated into the Western community of nations.

Jewish Witnesses on the Ukrainian Famine

The documents reproduced below were written by eyewitnesses of Jewish background. This fact has a double significance. First, their authors cannot be accused of Ukrainian bias. Second, their testimony is valuable. They too belonged to a nation which had been persecuted and thus the authors were able to both understand and empathize with the sufferings of others. 

VASILY GROSSMAN, a Russian language journalist and writer worked in the Donbas region of Ukraine in the early 1930s and saw the famine with his own eyes. In his autobiographical novel, Forever Flowing, he describes life under Stalin, and devotes two touching chapters to the famine in Ukraine (Ch. 14 & 15). The novel is also available in French (Tout passe, Paris, 1972), and in Russian (Vse techet. Frankfurt, 1970). Excerpts have been published in the Ukrainian Journal (Suchasnist). 

LEV KOPELEV, a journalist and a writer, was a young Communist activist in the 1930s. He was part of the cadres responsible for implementing Stalin's genocidal policies in Ukraine. His memoirs, The Education of a True Believer, published after the author's emigration to the West, reads like a confession and a testimony. 

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1- Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, New York: Harper & Row, 1972 
(Chapter 14). 

        I don't want to remember it. It is terrible. But I can't forget it. It just keeps on living within me; whether or not it slumbers, it is still there. A piece of iron in my heart, like a shell fragment. Something one cannot escape. I was fully adult when it all happened... 

        No, there was no famine during the campaign to liquidate the kulaks. Only the horses died. The famine came in 1932, the second year after the campaign to liquidate the kulaks... 

        And so, at the beginning of 1930, they began to liquidate the kulak families. The height of the fever was in February and March. They expelled them from their home districts so that when it was time for sowing there would be no kulaks left, so that a new life could begin. That is what we all said it would be: "the first collective farm spring."... 

        Our new life began without the co-called "kulaks". They started to force people to join the collective farms. Meetings were underway from morning on. There were shouts and curses. Some of them shouted: "We will not join!"... 

        And we thought, fools that we were, that there could be no fate worse than that of the kulaks. How wrong we were! The axe fell upon the peasants right where they stood, on large and small alike. The execution by famine had arrived. By this time I no longer washed floors but was a book-keeper instead. And, as a Party activist, I was sent to Ukraine in order to strengthen a collective farm. In Ukraine, we were told, they had an instinct for private property that was stronger than in the Russian Republic. And truly, truly, the whole business was much worse in Ukraine... 

        Moscow assigned grain production and delivery quotas to the provinces, and the provinces then assigned them to the districts. And our village was given a quota that it couldn't have fulfilled in ten years! In the village rada (council) even those who weren't drinkers took to drink out of terror... 

        Of course, the grain deliveries could not be fulfilled. Smaller areas had been sown, and the crop yield on those smaller areas had shrunk. So where could it come from, that promised ocean of grain from the collective farms? The conclusion reached up top was that the grain had all been concealed, hidden away. By kulaks who had not yet been liquidated, by loafers! The "kulaks" had been removed, but the "kulak" spirit remained. Private property was master over the minds of the Ukrainian peasant. 

        Who was it who then signed the act which imposed mass murder? ... For the decree required that the peasants of Ukraine, the Don, and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their tiny children. The instructions were to take away the entire seed fund. Grain was searched for as if it were not grain but bombs and machine guns. The whole earth was stabbed with bayonets and ramrods. Cellars were dug up, floors were broken through, and vegetable gardens were turned over. From some they confiscated grain, and dust hung over the earth. And there were no grain elevators to accommodate it, and they simply dumped it out on the earth and set guards around it. By winter the grain had been soaked by the rains and began to ferment -- the Soviet government didn't even have enough canvases to cover it up!... 

        Fathers and mothers wanted to save their children and hid a tiny bit of grain, and they were told: "You hate the country of socialism. You are trying to make the plan fail, you parasites, you pro-kulaks, you rats." ... The entire seed fund had been confiscated... 

        Everyone was in terror. Mothers looked at their children and began to scream in fear. They screamed as if a snake had crept into their house. And this snake was famine, starvation, death... 

        And here, under the government of workers and peasants, not even one kernel of grain was given them. There were blockades along all the highways, where militia, NKVD men, troops were stationed; the starving people were not to be allowed into the cities. Guards surrounded all the railroad stations. There were guards at even the tiniest of whistle stops. No bread for you, breadwinners! ... And the peasant children in the villages got not one gram. That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish children into the Nazi gas chambers: "You are not allowed to live, you are all Jews!" And it was impossible to understand, grasp, comprehend. For these children were Soviet children, and those who were putting them to death were Soviet people... 

        Death from starvation mowed down the village. First the children, then the old people, then those of middle age. At first they dug graves and buried them, and then as things got worse they stopped. Dead people lay there in the yards, and in the end they remained in their huts. Things fell silent. The whole village died. Who died last I do not know. Those of us who worked in the collective farm administration were taken off to the city... 

        Before they had completely lost their strength, the peasants went on foot across country to the railroad. Not to the stations where the guards kept them away, but to the tracks. And when the Kyiv-Odesa express came past, they would just kneel there and cry: "Bread, bread!" They would lift up their horrible starving children for people to see. And sometimes people would throw them pieces of bread and other scraps. The train would thunder on past, and the dust would settle down, and the whole village would be there crawling along the tracks, looking for crusts. But an order was issued that whenever trains were travelling through the famine provinces the guards were to shut the windows and pull down the curtains. Passengers were not allowed at the windows... 

        And the peasants kept crawling from village into the city. All the stations were surrounded by guards. All the trains were searched. Everywhere along the roads were roadblocks -- troops, NKVD. Yet despite all this the peasants made their way into Kyiv. They would crawl through the fields, through empty lots, through the swamps, through the woods -- anywhere to bypass the roadblocks set up for them. They were unable to walk; all they could do was crawl... 

        What I found out later was that everything fell silent in our village... I found out that troops were sent in to harvest the winter wheat. The army men were not allowed to enter the village, however. They were quartered in their tents. They were told there had been an epidemic. But they kept complaining that a horrible stink was coming from the village. The troops stayed to plant the spring wheat too. And the next year new settlers were brought in from Orel Province (Russia). This was the rich Ukrainian land, the black earth, whereas the Orel peasants were accustomed to frequent harvest failures. 
 
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2 -- Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. (Chapter IX "The Last Grain Collections") 

        The Myrhorod district had not fulfilled its plan of grain collection in December 1932. The oblast committee dispatched a visiting delegation of two newspapers, the Socialist Kharkiv Register and our Locomotive Worker, to issue news sheets in the lagging villages. There were four of us: two lads from Myrhorod -- a typesetter and a printer; and two from Kharkiv -- my assistant Volodya and myself... 

        The highest measure of coercion on the hard-core holdouts was "undisputed confiscation." 

        A team consisting of several young kolhospnyks and members of the village rada, led as a rule by Vashchenko himself, would search the hut, barn, yard, and take away all the stores of seed, lead away the cow, the horse, the pigs... Several times Volodia and I were present at such plundering raids. We even took part: we were entrusted to draw up inventories of the confiscated goods... The women howled hysterically, clinging to the bags-... 

        I heard the children echoing them with screams, choking, coughing with screams. And I saw the looks of the men: frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad, daring ferocity... 

        And I persuaded myself, explained to myself I mustn't give in to debilitating pity. We were realising historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland, for the five-year plan. 

        Some sort of rationalistic fanaticism overcame my doubts, my pangs of conscience and simple feelings of sympathy, pity and shame, but this fanaticism was nourished not only by speculative newspaper and literary sources. More convincing than these were people who in my eyes embodied, personified our truth and our justice, people who continued with their lives that it was necessary to clench your teeth, clench your heart and carry out everything the party and the Soviet power ordered.... 

        I have always remembered the winter of the last grain collections, the weeks of the great famine. And I have always told about it. But I did not begin to write it down until many years later. 

        And while I wrote the rough drafts and read them to friends, questions arose... Questions put to history, the present day, myself. 

        How could all this have happened? Who was guilty of the famine which destroyed millions of lives? How could I have participated in it?... 

        On December 27 [1932], the Central Committee issued a ruling on passports: they were to be introduced for city residents in order to facilitate "the counting of the population, the unburdening of the cities and the purging of kulak criminal elements from the cities." 

        But in fact the passport system laid an administrative and juridical cornerstone for the new serfdom; it provided one of the foundations for an unparalleled state totalitarianism. The "kulak elements" of which the cities should be cleansed proved to be all peasants who had left the countryside without the express permission of the local authorities. Once again the passport system tied down the peasantry, as it had before the emancipation of 1861. 

        In February 1933 I was sick... My father arrived after a trip through the provinces, where he had been checking on the preparations for planting sugar beets. He sat hunched over; his face was dark and his eyes inflamed, as if after a bout of malaria. But he was not emaciated. People don't go hungry at the sugar refineries... 

        Father was gloomy and immediately let into me. "Everything is done for! Do you understand? No grain in the village! I'm not talking about the Central Workers Co-op or the city story, but the village. The grain growers are dying of starvation! Not some derelict. tramps, not some unemployed Americans, but the Ukrainian grain growers are dying from want of grain! And my dear little boy helped to take it away."
 
Remembering Ukraine's Uknown Holocaust
Eric Margolis 
The Sunday Sun, December 13, 1998 
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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 bloodlest 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 Marjam 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 0GPU hit full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots. Some parents even ate infant children. 

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 AdoIf 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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Reprinted with the permission of SunMedia Corporation.
Cartoon reprinted with permission of the artist.

A Tale of Truth and Two Journalists
by Ian Hunter 
Report Magazine,  March 27, 2000 
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It is hard to credit that a decade has slipped away since the death of Malcolm Muggeridge on November 14, 1990. The most compellingly readable of journalists, hardly a day goes by that I do not recall one of Muggeridge's insights or marvel afresh at his prophetic vision. 

Muggeridge's journalistic integrity was shaped by one searing experience; in 1932 he went to Moscow as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Joseph Stalin's twin manias - collectivization of agriculture and dekulakization of peasants - were then at their bloodthirsty zenith, but few Westerners could have guessed it from the sycophantic foreign reporting. 

The Dean of the Moscow press corps was Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Joseph Alsop would later say of him: "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade." 

For two decades Duranty was the most influential foreign correspondent in Russia. His dispatches were regarded as authoritative; indeed Duranty helped to shape U.S. foreign policy. His biographer, Susan Taylor (Stalin's Apologist, Oxford University Press, 1990) has demonstrated that Duranty's reporting was   critical factor in President Roosevelt's decision in 1933 to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union. 

Duranty, an unattractive, oversexed little man, with a wooden leg, falsified facts, spread lies and half truths, invented occurrences that never happened, and turned a blind eye to the man-made famine that starved to death more than 14 million people (according to an International Commission of Jurists which examined this  tragedy in 1988-90). When snippets of the truth began to leak out, Duranty coined the phrase: "You can't   make an omelette without breaking eggs". This phrase, or a variant thereof, has since proved useful to a rich variety of ideologues who contend that a worthy end justifies base means. Yet when the Pulitzer committee conferred its prize on Duranty (in 1932, at the height of the famine) they cited his "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity." 

One story that circulated among Moscow correspondents trying to explain Duranty was that he was    necrophiliac; in exchange for favourable reporting, the Soviet authorities may have allowed him unsupervised night access to the city morgues. Whether true or not (and Duranty's biographer, Susan Taylor, leaves this question open), certain it is that the regime had some sort of hold on Duranty; they showered benefits on him, - a fancy apartment, an automobile, and fresh caviar daily. 

Enter Malcolm Muggeridge. In the spring of 1933 Muggeridge did an audacious thing; without permission he set off on a train journey through what had formerly been the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine and North Caucusus. What Muggeridge witnessed, he never forgot. In a series of articles smuggled  out in the diplomatic pouch, he described a man-made famine that had become a holocaust: peasants, millions of them, dying like famished cattle, sometimes within sight of full granaries, guarded by the army an  police. "At a railway station early one morning, I saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded into cattle trucks at gunpoint - all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet." At a German co-operative farm, an oasis of prosperity in the collectivized wilderness   he saw peasants kneeling down in the snow, begging for a crust of bread. In his Diary, Muggeridge wrote: "Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven't seen this. Ideas will come and go; but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood." 

But few believed him. His dispatches were cut. He was sacked by the Guardian and forced to leave Russia. Muggeridge was vilified, slandered and abused, not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, where sympathy to what was called "the great Soviet experiment" was de rigour. Walter Duranty's voice led the chorus of denunciation and denial, although privately Duranty told a British foreign office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had been starved to death - adding, characteristically, "but they're only Russians." 

Beatrice Webb (Muggeridge's aunt by marriage) admitted that "In the Soviet Union, people disappear," but she still denounced Muggeridge's famine reports as "base lies". The Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, applauded Stalin's "steady purpose and kindly generosity." George Bernard Shaw made a whirlwind tour and pronounced himself fully satisfied that there was ample food for all in the worker's paradise. 

If vindication was a long time coming, it cannot have been sweeter than when Duranty's biographer, Susan Taylor, wrote in 1990: "But for Muggeridge's eyewitness accounts of the famine in the spring of 1933 and his stubborn chronicle of the event, the effects of the crime upon those who suffered might well have remained as hidden from scrutiny as its perpetrators intended. Little thanks he has received for it over the years, although there is a growing number who realize what a singular act of honest and courage his reportage constituted." 

Alas, when these words came to be written, Muggeridge had died. Still, they are worth remembering.