Executive Summary
16) Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians m 1932-1933.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as one or more specified actions committed with intent “to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group wholly or partially as such.” Among actions defined as genocidal, if intended to destroy a protected group wholly or in part, are killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about total or partial destruction of the group. 94
One or more of the actions specified in the Genocide Convention was taken against the Ukrainians in order to destroy a substantial part of the Ukrainian people and thus to neutralize them politically in the Soviet Union. Overwhelming evidence indicates that Stalin was warned of impending famine in Ukraine and pressed for measures that could only ensure its occurrence and exacerbate its effects. Such policies not only came into conflict with his response to food supply difficulties elsewhere in the preceding year, but some of them were implemented with greater vigor in ethnically Ukrainian areas than elsewhere and were utilized in order to eliminate any manifestation of Ukrainian national self-assertion.
Among those most clearly implicated in this act of genocide were Joseph Stalin, then General Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party, who exerted virtually complete control over the Communist Party and Soviet state in this period and who thus bore primary responsibility for its actions; Viacheslav Molotov, then head of the USSR government and during the Famine a frequent visitor to Ukraine, where he rigorously enforced Stalin’s policies; Lazar Kaganovich, head of the agricultural section of the All-Union Central Committee during the Famine and, in November
1932, head of the special commission sent to the North Caucasus “to smash
sabotage of the grain procurements” in the Kuban; and Pavel Postyshev, Stalin’s
de facto ruler of Ukraine from January 1933.
17) The American government had ample and timely information about the Famine but failed to take any steps which might have ameliorated the situation. Instead, the Administration extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November
1933, immediately after the Famine. 95
The State Department received information on the Famine as early as the Fall of 1932. Humanitarian appeals from relatives of the starving arrived at the White House within weeks of President Roosevelt’s inauguration . 96 By mid-October of 1933, the existence of famine in Ukraine had been categorical¬ly confirmed by American diplomats in Riga, Latvia and Athens, Greece. 97
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94 Text in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds., The Human Rights Reader (New York,
New American library, 1979), pp. 201-202.
95 See chapter six below.
96 See, for example, Robert P. Skinner to Secretary of State, November 5, 1932; 861.6131/261;
Anna Witkopp, Bay City, Michigan, to President Roosevelt, March 13, 1933; 861.48/2432;
P. C. Hiebert, Chairman, Mennonite Central Committee, to President Roosevelt, April 7 1933
861.48/2433; T1249; Records of the Department of State; National Archives, Washington, D.C.
97 “Memorandum of a Conversation had by Mr. Cole and Mr. Lehrs with a Member of a Legation
in Moscow,” October 4, 1933; 961.48/2450; Lincoln MacVeath, American Minister Athens, to
Secretary of State, October 14,1933; 861.48/2451; T1249; Records of the Department of State; NA!