PROCEEDINGS
Senator DeCONCINI: Today’s hearing of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine is one of a number of such hearings which Commission members have held in various cities around the country. In just a moment I’ll introduce my fellow Commissioners.

The Commission was created by Congress with a two-year mandate to study the Great Man-Made Famine of 1932 and 33 in Ukraine and report its findings to Con¬gress by April 22,1988.

Those who have come here today, we appreciate your time and your effort and your willingness to go through this very probably distasteful experience once again. It is im¬portant for all of us to understand the severity of the Soviet system and what was done to these people, though some will ask why after so many years should you still be wor¬ried about and concerned about such a thing as the Ukrainian famine of 1933. Be¬cause it was an artificial famine imposed by a totalitarian state without concern and regard for human dignity and without the belief that we have in this country and other western countries that each individual is important, and that no government has the right to impose its will and to commit genocide towards anyone.

Many nations have suffered inhumane tyranny, and sadly, many still do, and the reasons for us to be involved here is to remember and to learn from these sad ex¬periences.

The Ukrainian Famine was the classic case of the use of food as a weapon. Today we see food used as a weapon by both the Ethiopian government and the Soviet-spon¬sored government of Afghanistan. The collective victimization of Ukrainians by Stalin took place only a decade before Hitler’s mass extermination of the Jews.

Because of a classic campaign of disinformation and intimidation of the Western press in Moscow, the Ukrainian famine for a long time virtually disappeared from public awareness. Today, when we read such Soviet disinformation to the effect that AIDS was invented at a military installation in Maryland, the United States, we realize that in this too, the past is prologue to what we see today.

Thus, the study of the Ukrainian Famine of ‘33 we will find most important to all of us, and the testimony we had just three days ago in San Francisco with my fellow Com¬missioners here was, indeed, shocking and very, very interesting to this Senator, and I look forward to hearing the testimony today.
I would like to introduce on my left the Commissioner from Philadelphia, Pennsyl¬vania, Mrs. Mazurkevich, and for any opening statement she may have.

STATEMENT PRESENTED BY MS. ULANA MAZURKEVICH

The Commission until this day has had six public hearings, including the one here in Phoenix. The stories we’ve heard from survivors are the same, that the famine was limited to Ukraine, that food stuffs were being exported from Ukraine at the time that the famine was raging and millions were dying, and that it was a total cover-up by Mos¬cow, executed and planned by Moscow.

To this day Moscow denies that there ever was a famine, but hearings such as we have today will uncover this great cover-up, and the famine will no longer be just a footnote in history, but will gain its rightful place in history. Seven million lives should