Holodor - statism in action.


The forgotten Holocaust: How Stalin starved four million to death in a grotesque Marxist experiment - which many in Russia STILL deny

Four million Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin across 1932 and 1933

Some left-leaning figures past and present have sympathised with his regime

But a new book by Anne Applebaum leaves no doubt about his responsibility

WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT

By Dominic Sandbrook for the Daily Mail
Published: 19:07 EDT, 18 September 2017 | Updated: 09:01 EDT, 19 September 2017

One day in the summer of 1933, in a village in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, a little boy woke on top of the family stove. He was starving — not just hungry but genuinely starving.

‘Dad, I want to eat! Dad!’ he cried. But the house was cold and from his father there came no answer.

The boy went over to his father, who was apparently still asleep. There was ‘foam under his nose’, he remembered. ‘I touched his head. Cold.’

A little later, a cart arrived laden with bodies ‘lying like sheaves’. Two men came into the house, lifted his father’s body into a sack and threw it onto the cart. Then they were gone.

The boy left home after that. He wandered the empty fields, sleeping in stables, scrabbling for grains, ‘swollen and ragged’. But somehow he survived. Some four million of his fellow Ukrainians were not so lucky.

The famine that struck Ukraine in late 1932 and 1933 was one of the most lethal catastrophes in European history.

In the West, it is nowhere near as well-known as it should be.

In Ukraine itself, however, the Holodmor — literally, ‘hunger extermination’ — is often seen as the equivalent of the Holocaust, a gigantic, man-made operation to murder millions of people.

And behind it was not just one man — Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-Twenties to 1953 — but an entire warped ideology which sought to remake a peasant society according to a Utopian Communist blueprint.

Even now, in an age when we are regularly assailed by images of horror and suffering, the details of the Holodmor are heartbreaking.

Starving children, mass graves, vigilantes, even cannibalism: the famine saw human nature stripped to the bone.

‘I was so frightened by what had happened that I could not talk for several days,’ recalled one woman who escaped after her emaciated body was mistakenly thrown into a mass grave. ‘I saw dead bodies in my dreams. And I screamed a lot.’

Today, almost unbelievably, there are still those who deny the famine happened. Indeed, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the architect of the famine, Stalin, is routinely presented not as a monstrous tyrant but as an admirably strong leader who made Russia walk tall in the world.

A few years ago, Mr Putin even told a press conference there was nothing wrong with restoring the statues of a man who claimed millions of lives. Stalin, he claimed, was no different to England’s Parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell — a comparison simply grotesque in its inaccuracy.

Thank goodness, then, for the journalist and author Anne Applebaum, whose new book, Red Famine, leaves no room for doubt about Stalin’s responsibility for what happened in Ukraine.

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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...l#ixzz4t8JbM7SU
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