REMEMBERING MODERN HISTORY’S GREATEST CRIME
Foreign Correspondent
June 2 2008
Canada
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.
While the Western world rightly commemorates genocide inflicted on
Armenians, Europe’s Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans, and Bosnians, it
shamefully shut its eyes to the Ukrainian Holdomor because it was
conducted by a key wartime ally whom President Franklin Roosevelt
hailed as `Uncle Joe.’
Nor has the West ever acknowledged genocide against other peoples of
the Soviet Union. In the Caucasus, Stalin sent most of the Chechen
and Ingush peoples to the gulag, where 500,000 died. Yet when the
children of the survivors fought for independence from Russia, the
West branded them `Islamic terrorists.’
Up to three million Muslims of the Soviet Union died at Stalin’s hands,
including 1.5 million Kazakhs and Crimean Tatars. Yet no holocaust
memorials exist for them.
Nearly 100,000 Moldovans were murdered in a purge conducted by then
Commissar Leonid Brezhnev, who would later lead the Soviet Union and
be feted by Western leaders. Add to this butcher’s bill Volga Germans,
Greeks, Cossacks, Armenians and Poles.
If we keep demanding that Germany and Japan atone for their wartime
crimes, is it not time for our governments to finally recognize and
atone their alliance with the biggest mass murderer in history, Josef
Stalin, a man whose crimes exceeded those of Adolf Hitler by a factor
of at least three or four times? Particularly so in the United States,
where World War II has become something of a state religion and is
endlessly invoked by conservatives and neocons to justify foreign
military adventures.
Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill cared to admit they had allied
themselves with a greater criminal than Hitler to wage their `Crusade
for Freedom,’ nor that the price of this compact with the devil was
giving Eastern Europe to the Soviets. In the end, the Allies destroyed
a lesser threat, Germany, and in doing so, created a greater one,
the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.
Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s alliance with Stalin, whom they knew
to be a mass murderer and tyrant, in my view denies the Allies any
claim to have been waging a `just’ or `good war.’ When the lingering
clouds of wartime propaganda finally dissipate, future historians will
likely look back on the western Allies as not much morally superior
to Germany or the USSR, though certainly less murderous.
Communists and leftists everywhere joined in covering up Stalin’s
crimes. For example, to the end of his life, Jean Paul Sartre
kept insisting Stalin’s gulag was a fiction created by western
propaganda. The official Communist Party line was that the deaths
of millions of Ukrainians was simply an unfortunate natural disaster
that also affected other parts of the USSR.
In North America, intense attention to the Jewish Holocaust tended
to push all other national historic tragedies into the background or
completely eclipse them. The fact that during the 1930’s, many senior
officers of Stalin’s Cheka, or secret police, were Jewish, including
Kaganovitch, led to ferocious reprisals against Ukraine’s Jews in the
following decade. As a result, Ukrainians were permanently branded
`anti-Semites;’ their suffering received scant sympathy.
Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky demanded a Nuremburg trial for all
the Soviet crimes, but unfortunately this will never happen. Most
of the criminals are dead. The Soviet Eichmann, Lazar Kaganovitch,
died peacefully in Moscow in 1991; Molotov died in 1986. In fact, not
a single Soviet official was ever indicted for the crime committed
by the state from the 1920’s to 1953, though many Cheskisti were
liquidated during Stalin’s purges.
Canada’s recognition of this historic crime is important for
two reasons. First, Canada is one of the world’s most respected
nations. Its acknowledgement of the Holdomor will be heard around
the globe. Second, nostalgia for Stalin is on the rise in today’s
Russia. His memory and politics are being rehabilitated. Russians
must to be reminded of his crimes and reign of terror.
In `les abuses de la mémoire,’ the Bulgarian-born French philosopher
Tzvetan Todorov, who studied the Jewish Holocaust, wrote: `Life
cannot withstand death, but memory is gaining in its struggle against
nothingness.’
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