THE TORONTO SUN, Sunday, December 13, 1998
Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust
By ERIC MARGOLIS, contributing Foreign Editor
 

THE TORONTO SUN, Sunday, December 13, 1998
Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust
By ERIC MARGOLIS, contributing Foreign Editor
 

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 bloodiest 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 Mariam 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 OGPU hit

full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots.

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 Adolf 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.