"While the world is 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."

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 caused 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 per cent of Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. A 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. Some parents even ate infant children.

Britain, the U.S. and Canada were fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and Stalin's other monstrous crimes. (Soviet Leader Josef Stalin committed genocide in the '30s, then became an ally against Hitler in the '40s)

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 per cent of Ukraine's population was exterminated.

Six million other farmers across the Soviet Union 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, Lativia and Lithuania, the genocide of three million Muslims, 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 Checka 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 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 eight to nine 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 Premier 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 the Second World War. Stalin, who Franklin Roosevelt called "Uncle Joe", murdered four times more people than Adolph 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 the Order of the Soviet Union and enjoying a generous state pension."

-###-

January 21, 2008 by Eric S. Margolis, Foreign Affairs Editor for Sun Media Newspapers, London Free Press, London, Ontario, Canada. margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com. Posted in the interests of truth by for James W. Black who is of Ukrainian and Scottish descent. Some of his relatives were interned in the Nazi forced labour camps and died in the camp during World War Two. His grandmother's brother, who was a Ukrainian nationalist, was arrested in Ukraine for wearing Ukraine's national colours and reading Ukrainian poetry to his friends and then sent to the Gulag. He was never seen nor heard from again.