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searches and seizures of foodstuffs, a policy for which the Moscow Central
Committee and Stalin personally were responsible, the famine reached its
height in the spring of 1933. At the same time, the nationally minded wing of
the Communist Party of Ukraine was purged, and often its members were
arrested as spies and wreckers. All manifestations of Ukrainian cultural
distinctiveness were suppressed. The study of Ukrainian history disappeared
for a generation. Even the spelling rules of the Ukrainian language were
changed in order to bring the language closer to Russian, while those
responsible for the Ukrainian cultural attainments of the 1920s were arrested.
Ukrainization was abandoned and replaced by a policy of Russiflcation.

The Stalin-Postyshev policy of the 1930s may be summarized as follows:

1. The destruction of the Ukrainian national cultural leadership, the non-
Communist institutions in which they functioned, and their attain-
ments

2. The destruction of the nationally minded Communist elite

3. The abandonment of Ukrainization and reinstitution of Russification in
cities, which pushed Ukrainian national culture out of the cities and
back to the countryside whence it had come

4. The government-created famine, which dealt a body blow to the
traditional mass constituency of Ukrainian national self-assertion, the
Ukrainian villages

All this may be summarized as part of an attempt to neutralize the
Ukrainian nation as a political factor within the Soviet Union by destroying it
as a sociological entity.

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produced. Collectivization was carried out “on the basis of the liquidation of the
kulaks (so-called village exploiters but actually anyone the regime considered
unreliable) as a class.” According to official Soviet figures, 200,000 Ukrainian
farm families or about one million people were “dekulakized” or expropriated.
The true figure is a matter of speculation. At the same time Stalin began to chip
away at Ukrainian autonomism with the “discovery” of anti-Soviet conspiracies
among Ukraine’s leading scholars and cultural activists. As early as 1920
thousands were arrested in connection with the first such conspiracy, the so-
called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. Whole departments of the Ukrainian
Academy of Sciences were closed after their members were arrested, and
Ukrainian Orthodox autocephaly (church independence) was brought to an
end in 1920, ostensibly because of church involvement in this alleged plot.

Genocide

The essence of collectivization was the compulsory delivery to the state of
whatever quantity of produce the state demanded. The so-called first com-
mandment of Soviet agriculture enshrined the principle that all obligations to
the state, as the state set them, had to be met before anything could be given
to the peasants. Production declined while the state’s demands remained far
in excess of what the peasants had ever sold voluntarily. By the beginning of
1932, collectivization in Ukraine was virtually complete: 69 percent of all rural
households and 80 percent of all farmland had been collectivized. Repeated
extraction had exhausted Ukraine’s agriculture, and by the summer Ukraine’s
Communists spoke openly of “food supply difficulties” and lobbied unsuccess-
fully for relief from the exactions demanded by Moscow.

After the 1932 harvest the Ukrainian Communists carried out the grain
seizures that brought about the mass starvation of which they had warned. The
famine was created on a territorial basis, and its victims included members of
Ukraine’s minorities as well as Ukrainians.

In late 1932 measures against the so-called tight-fisted became ever more
severe. Local officials who were found insufficiently resolute in what the press
daily called “the struggle for bread” were arrested. As early as October, Stalin
began to appoint his own men to “strengthen” the Ukrainian apparatus by
occupying high posts in the UkSSR In December whole districts (raions) were
subject to economic blockade, and both the food for current needs and the seed
for the next year’s harvest were seized in the course of exacting house-to-house
searches. Many people died, and outbreaks of cannibalism were reported.
Officials in Ukraine kept Moscow fully informed of the situation.

Stalin’s response came in the form of two resolutions of the Central
Committee of the Ail-Union Communist Party. On December 13, 1932, the
Ukrainian authorities were ordered to purge all “national deviationists” (i.e.,
nationally minded Communists) in their midst. On January 24,1933, a second
decree found the Ukrainian authorities criminally negligent, and Stalin sent
his own satrap, Pavel Postyshev, to take direct control of the Ukrainian Party
organization and to occupy with new men virtually every important post in the
country. The new regime under Postyshev condemned the old for wavering in
the struggle for bread, ordered the grain seizures intensified, and combatted
the “serious evil” of produce being diverted from the state procurements for
such unauthorized uses as food and seed. As a result of this policy of intensified

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of non-Russian national cultural activities and the active recruitment of non-
Russians into the Party and state apparatuses.

Since the non-Russians were overwhelmingly rural, the two policies, NEP
and indigenization, were but two sides of the same coin. As Stalin once wrote,
“The nationality problem is by the essence of the matter a problem of the
peasantry.” Official sponsorship of scholarship and the arts bore an extraor-
dinarily rich harvest. Schools that used Ukrainian as the primary language of
instruction, illegal before 1917 and begun under the UNR, were greatly
expanded. The language was standardized, and millions of people became
literate in it. There were even attempts to teach workers at the bench and
peasants at the plow to write poetry. Ukrainian, often dismissed only a few
years earlier as a “peasant tongue,” now became a vehicle in which one could
explain and discuss the latest cultural and scientific developments from
cinematic technique to Einstein’s theories. Ukraine’s cities, hitherto Russian-
speaking islands in the sea of Ukrainian speakers, were gradually Ukrainized.
By 1930 a majority of Ukraine’s industrial workers spoke Ukrainian, and the
main daily newspapers in all the country’s major cities were published in
Ukrainian. The regime in the UkSSR gradually became largely autonomous,
and even Communist spokespersons called for greater autonomy vis-a-vis the
central authorities in Moscow. Would such a rapidly developing nation remain
content with its dependent political status in the Soviet Union or would the old
goal of full political independence reassert itself with even greater force than
in the past? Those who ruled the Soviet Union might well have wondered.

The last Soviet census before the famine was that of 1926. At that time the
population of the USSR was 147 million of whom 77.8 million were Great
Russians, 31.2 million were Ukrainians, and the remaining 38 million were
spread among roughly one hundred smaller national groups, of which 4.7
million Byelorussians constituted the largest group. The population of the
RSFSR was then 92.7 million, the UkSSR’s 29.5 million, and the remaining
SSRs (as now constituted but within the pre-1939 USSR borders) together
possessed 24.8 million inhabitants. Since some of the SSRs which exist today
were then still part of the RSFSR, such a picture actually understates the
UkSSR’s predominance among the non-Russian SSRs. At the time of the
famine, despite the fact that the western fifth of Ukraine was not part of the
USSR, Ukrainians constituted almost half of the USSR’s non-Russians and the
population of the UkSSR greatly exceeded that of all other non-Russian SSRs
combined. Moreover, Ukraine then produced most of the Soviet Union’s
exportable wheat as well as most of its iron and steel. Despite decades of Soviet
economic policy favoring new investment in the Ural Mountains region and
Western Siberia over the construction of new facilities in Ukraine, even today
the UkSSR, if it were independent, would constitute one of the ten largest
economic powers in the world.

For this reason, nationality policy in early Soviet history largely revolved
around the issue of how to deal with the Ukrainians. If indigenization was
based on NEP, that base crumbled at the end of 1929 when Joseph Stalin
gained absolute power in the USSR and proclaimed a policy of the forced crash
collectivization of agriculture. Collectivization was bitterly opposed by the
peasantry, especially in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, where serfdom had
been brief and independent proprietorship was strongly ingrained in the rural
mind. It meant that those who tilled the soil no longer controlled what they

42

for example, the city of Lviv (which the Poles called Lwow, the Russians Lvov,
and the Germans Lemberg) had more Polish inhabitants than Ukrainians, and
Poland claimed the city on this basis. But this same city was located in an area
where Ukrainians outnumbered Poles rather substantially.

In most of Ukraine, which had been ruled by Russia, the bulk of the urban
dwellers considered themselves Russians, and most Russians considered
Ukrainians to be “Little Russians” who were merely a branch of a larger
Russian nation composed of both peoples along with the Byelorussians (or
White Ruthenians). Most Ukrainians disagreed, and few Ukrainians wanted to
be ruled by either Russians or Poles, the rival claimants for their territories.
Elections were held in 1917-18 to the All-Russian and All-Ukrainian constitu-
ent assemblies. These were the only free elections ever held in this part of the
world, and the majority of votes each time were cast for political parties
committed to the pursuit of Ukrainian home rule. immediately after the fall of
the imperial government in March, 1917, these parties had established the
Ukrainian Central Rada (council) in Kiev; and in the summer of that year, the
Rada was recognized by the Russian Provisional Government as the official
organ of Ukrainian territorial autonomy. After the Bolsheviks seized power in
November, the Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian National (or People’s) Republic
(UNR), and on January 22, 1918, declared the UNR to be sovereign and
independent.

The UNR was a democratic and somewhat socialist republic which guar-
anteed full national cultural autonomy to the one-fifth of its citizens who were
members of various minority nationalities, principally the Russians, Jews, and
Poles. On January 22,1919, union was proclaimed with the Western Ukrain-
ian Peoples Republic, which had been established in the part of Ukraine that
had been ruled by Austria-Hungary.

Ukraine under the Soviets

the Ukrainians had to fight on several fronts against Russian Bolsheviks,
Russian anti-Bolsheviks, and Poles. Law and order broke down completely. By
the spring of 1919, hundreds of marauding bands led by warlords or otamans
roamed the countryside, fighting one another and switching sides among the
major rivals with impunity. Ukraine’s large Jewish community suffered terrible
pogroms that the UNR authorities were helpless to prevent. By the beginning
of 1921, the bulk of the country was in the hands of the Bolsheviks, led by
Vladimir Lenin, while smaller parts of Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Czecho-
slovakia, and Rumania. The Bolshevik Party officially changed its name to the
Russian Communist Party and at the end of 1922 forced the Ukrainian
Socialist Soviet Republic, which it had set up, to join with the Russian Soviet
Federative Socialist Republic and other parts of the old Russian Empire that
it had reconquered to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Ukrainians, as well as the other former subject nations of Russia whom
the Communists ruled, had been militarily defeated but remained restive.
Lenin was forced to grant concessions. in 1921 the Tenth Congress of the
Russian Communist Party proclaimed the New Economic Policy (NEP), guar-
anteeing the peasantry the right to their own individual farms and the right to
sell what they produced on them. In 1923 the Twelfth Party Congress
proclaimed a new policy of indigenization, which called for official sponsorship

41

USSR Intent is also implicit in the Soviet government’s vehement denials of the
existence of famine at the time it occurred and its rejection of all famine relief
offered by private individuals and organizations, as well as the export for sale
abroad of roughly 1.7 million metric tons of grain at the height of the mass
starvation.

Ukraine and the Ukrainians

Ukraine, presently constituted as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
(UkSSR), has a territory of 232,000 square miles, slightly more than that of
France, and in 1979 had 49.6 million inhabitants, of whom 73.6 percent were
Ukrainians. Ukrainians speak a Slavic language, as do most other East
Europeans. The Ukrainian language differs from Russian and Polish about as
much as Portuguese does from Castilian Spanish. Ukrainians possess a
distinct national culture and historical experience. The total number of
Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, according to the 1979 Soviet census, was 42.3
million. This makes the Ukrainians the most numerous of all the Slavic nations
except for the Great Russians (137.4 million). The UkSSR is located north of
the Black Sea and borders (clockwise from the Black Sea) on the Moldavian
SSR, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Belorussian SSR, and
the Russian SFSR (RSFSR). It is one of the USSR’s 15 constituent Soviet
Socialist Republics and has a seat in the United Nations.

The World War I ended in the successive collapse of the dynastic states
which had for centuries dominated Eastern Europe: Imperial Russia, Ottoman
Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Germany. (Just as Russians were a relatively
small minority in Western Imperial Russia, the Germans were a minority in the
eastern borderlands of the German Empire.) As each of these states disinte-
grated in turn, nations between the Russians and Germans which had not
enjoyed political independence for centuries reasserted themselves. Imperial
Russia collapsed first in 1917, and such hitherto foreign-ruled peoples as the
Finns, Poles (who were also divided with Germany and Austria-Hungary),
Baltic nations, Belorussians, nations of the Caucasus, and Ukrainians set up
national councils that moved toward complete national independence. Such
movements differed very little from their more successful counterparts to the
west, which arose in the wake of the 1918 upheaval.

It seemed that each people had a different idea of what a nation could
legitimately claim. No one could agree on where the borders between nations
ought to be drawn. Conflicts were inevitable. Many Poles, for example,
understood Poland as a historico-cultural community that ought to extend
eastward far beyond the point where Poles constituted the majority of the
population. They believed that the territories that were part of the “historic”
Poland before 1772 ought to be part of the reborn Polish state. Others argued
on the basis of strategic or economic imperatives. The Czechs, for example,
argued that Czecho-Slovakia (only later was the hyphen dropped) could be
viable only if it included the mountainous western rim of Bohemia, the
population of which was overwhelmingly German, and certain ethnically Polish
coal-mining border regions.

Ukrainians, though more numerous than any of the East European
peoples who did achieve independence, were hampered by the fact that
Ukraine’s cities were largely inhabited by non-Ukrainians. In Western Ukraine,

40

*Please note that pages 31-38 are not included because they do not contain curriculum material on the Holodomor or any other Communist genocide.

Appendix B

The Ukrainian Genocide

Genocide by a leftist government

Even less known than the Armenian Genocide is the famine of 1932-33 in
Ukraine, during which five to seven million Ukrainians died because of official
Soviet policies that created a famine artificially. The Jewish Holocaust was
committed by a Fascist totalitarian dictatorship in the name of racial purity.
The Armenian Genocide was committed by an authoritarian dictatorship
determined to transform a traditional multinational dynastic entity into a
powerful modern state by destroying a nation that the leadership viewed as a
hindrance to the power of that state. The Ukrainian Genocide was committed
by a Communist totalitarian government which considered the Ukrainians a
hindrance to the achievement of that regime’s goals. Contrasting and compar-
ing the Jewish, Armenian, and Ukrainian case studies is thus important in
demonstrating the universality of genocide and collective victimization in the
twentieth century. The Ukrainian famine falls within the definition of genocide
provided by international convention in that actions defined by convention as
genocidal were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial, or religious group as follows: I

1. Killing members of the group. Members of specifically targeted groups
(Ukrainians, Cossacks, and Soviet Germans) perished because of an
official policy of seizing foodstuffs at a time when clear warnings of
impending famine had been received by responsible Soviet officials,
and the outbreak of mass starvation was followed by the intensification
of such seizures. Moreover, this policy was accomplished by mass
executions of Ukrainian national elites and the reversal of Soviet
nationality policy from one which attempted to gain a measure of
national legitimacy among non-Russians by means of officially spon-
soring their national cultural development to one of suppressing every
attempt at non-Russian national cultural self-assertion.

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. Those
who survived the famine suffered all the bodily harm of starvation, and
many suffered physical and emotional abuse in the course of grain
searches and seizures carried out in conditions of extreme brutality.
Survivors also suffered and often continue to suffer from their emo-
tional traumatizatlon.

3. Creating a famine that would not have occurred in the absence of
compulsory grain seizures in the Ukrainian SSR and the North
Caucasus. This action constitutes deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part

Intent is implicit in the policy of seizing foodstuffs from the starving and in
official attempts to prevent the starving from migrating from Ukraine and the
North Caucasus to Russia where food was available and to prevent food being
carried into Ukraine by Soviet citizens traveling there from other parts of the

39

The Plains Indians were 1he last obstacle to white control of the West. The seven
tribes of the Teton Sioux, numbering about 16,000 in 1880, were placed on a reserva-
tion in South Dakota. There the military proceeded to “civilize” them. They were
forced to give up their traditional economy and to become wards of the state. Children
were put in white schools and parents who balked lost their food rations. Religious and
political customs of the Sioux Indians were outlawed. The original treaty was broken
and half their land was taken in return for food and money that was never delivered.

By the end of the century, often defeated, demoralized Indians were ready for the
irrational hope offered by the Ghost Dance, a ritual first started by California tribes in
the 1870s. The Ghost Dance, Indians believed, had the power to alleviate their
miserable state. The last of the Ghost Dances started in 1890 when an Indian,
Wovoka, reported that in a dream, which he experienced in a trance during a solar
eclipse, God told him that if Indians danced the Ghost Dance, dead Indians would
come back to life. To whites, and especially to the U. S. Army, the Ghost Dance was
symbolic of Indian resistance, and though it did not encourage Indians to fight,
because they believed a miracle would save them, it was seen as a threatening activity.

This fear of the Ghost Dance may explain, in part, what happened during an
encounter at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on December 29,1890 between a cavalry
unit and a band of Indians, 120 men and 230 women and children, led by Sioux Chief
Big Foot. The Indians were on the way to the Pine Ridge reservation in North Dakota
when they met four cavalry units which were under orders to capture Big Foot
because he was considered one of the “fomenters of disturbances.” The Indians
immediately hoisted a white flag to indicate they would not fight. They were taken to
an army camp on Wounded Knee Creek.

As the soldiers ordered the Indians to give up their arms, the medicine man,
Yellow Bird, started the Ghost Dance urging his tribesmen to join him chanting in
Sioux, “The bullets will not go toward you.” When one young Indian initially refused to
give up his rifle, the soldiers opened fire. Only a few Indians had arms and most tried to
flee the gunfire. “We tried to run,” Louise Weasel Bear said, “but they shot us like we
were buffalo. 1 know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean
to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children.”11

At the end of the attack, 153 Indians were left dead in the field, but one estimate
placed the actual number killed at 300 since many of the wounded crawled away and
died soon after. Wounded Knee signalled the end of the Ghost Dance and was, in a
very real sense, also the end of the Indians’ courageous stand against an invading
force. Years later, the revered Sioux medicine man, Black Elk, who witnessed the
tragic event said:

I did not know how much was ended. When 1 look back horn this high
hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children
lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as 1
saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else
died there in that bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A
people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream .. . the nation’s
hope is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the
sacred tree is dead.12

years. The lives of thousands of innocent people were disrupted and even destroyed
without any pretense of legal due process. Few people spoke out in defense of the
Japanese Americans. Even the Supreme Court hesitated to challenge the “military
necessity” argument advanced by the government and the military. Only a few, such
as Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu
vs United States (1944), objected to locking up American citizens in “concentration
camps” simply because of their race.

Beginning with America’s first settlements, American Indians lost their land and
their lives, as colonists and settlers usurped the home of the native peoples to build a
new nation. Some people say the treatment of Native Americans constitutes geno-
cide. The army sometimes deliberately spread smallpox; they warred with superior
weapons, moved large populations from fertile native lands to barren deserts and
attempted to destroy native cultures. One early slaughter happened in Connecticut:

. . . The Puritans of New England were not immediately presented
with an Indian problem, for diseases introduced earlier by trading
ships along the coast had badly decimated the Indian population. Yet
when the Pequots resisted the migration of settlers into the Connect-
icut Valley in 1637, a party of Puritans surrounded the Pequot village
and set fire to it. About five hundred Indians were burned or shot to
death while trying to escape; the whites devoutly offered up thanks
to God that they had lost only two men. The woods were then
combed for any Pequots who had managed to survive, and these
were sold into slavery. Cotton Mather was grateful to the Lord that
“on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell.”9

Americans held conflicting views about the Indians. The first settlers often
thought Indians were not quite human. With closer observation, some people came to
look upon them as “noble savage” survivors of an earlier time, before the corrupting
influences of civilization. In time, Indians were viewed as human beings, though
heathens, and there were efforts to convert the tribes to Christianity. But as settlers
advanced westward and encountered tribes unwilling to give up their land, conflicts
arose and Indians were most often viewed as bloodthirsty savages who must be
eliminated.

In 1830 the United States Congress passed the Removal Act which gave the new
president the right to move all Indians east of the Mississippi to territories in the West.

… All in all, an estimated seventy thousand Indians are believed to
have resettled west of the Mississippi, but the number may have
been closer to one hundred thousand. No figures exist, though, as to
the numbers massacred before they could be persuaded to leave the
East, or on the tremendous losses suffered from disease, exposure,
and starvation on the thousand-mile march westward across an
unsettled and inhospitable land.10

The tragedy of the Indians did not end with this resettlement. No sooner were the
Eastern Indians located in the West than America discovered the area’s rich
resources and expansion pushed into the region. Indians still stood in the way of the
new nation’s “manifest destiny.” Treaties, nearly four hundred written by 1868, were
broken one by one, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Indian realized that
the white people could not be trusted. During the last decades of the century, Indians
and whites warred incessantly, with terrible brutality by both sides. The whites,
however, had the advantage and Indians continued to die.

29