October 15, 2011

A Holodomor for the New Millennium

By William Sullivan
In 1928, Joseph Stalin began a "program of agricultural collectivization" which included a mandate that farmers and peasants surrender their lands and livestock and submit to labor upon state-owned communal farms.  When Ukrainian farmers opposed this tyrannical affront to the rights of men, Stalin accused them of "bourgeois nationalism," an individualistic identity antithetical to the Communistic rule of the Soviet Union. In response to their defiance, Stalin raised militias to expropriate and deport the Ukrainians to the Siberian tundra.  When production stalled, he enacted decrees to arrest or execute any among the starving peasantry for taking or hiding "as little as a few stalks of wheat or a potato from the field he worked."  By 1933, "Ukrainians [were] dying at a rate of 25,000 a day, more than half of which [were] children.  In the end, up to 10 million starve[d] to death."  This event has come to be known as the Holodomor, which means "death by...(Read Full Article)