The Throne of the Emperor of Famine

History is as endless and inexhaustible as life itself. Some of its highly inspired pages demonstrate the exploits of people who defend their dignity and divine right to be a free nation, rather than a mass of slaves, and to freely choose their future. But there also are years of horrible disasters and epochs of boundlessly cruel tragedies that the human mind is incapable of fathoming and against which the morality of every sound-minded individual revolts. But in this case, the word “tragedy” seems to be an empty, meaningless abstraction that fails to convey the degree of the all-pervading and unspeakable pain of dealing with the cold-blooded genocide of an entire nation.

Last Saturday this country marked the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor [genocide by famine]. We, Ukrainians, may not forget even in another thousand years what occurred on our soil seventy years ago in 1932-1933 (and earlier, in 1921, and some fifteen years later, in 1946-1947). “Terror by famine” is the name of this heinous crime. Here it must be emphasized that the famine of the early 1930s was a premeditated genocide well planned and organized by the Stalin government, whereas the famines of the 1920s and the postwar years deserve a separate discussion, for they were caused by both political factors and bad harvests, which cannot be said about 1932-1933, despite the official Soviet propaganda. Just one document of those times may give the reader an inkling of what human language has no words to express.

A Soviet Ukrainian secret police report dated March 12, 1933, describes the situation known as “terror by famine,” which the authors call by the Jesuitical term “food shortages”: “The largest number of famine cases was recorded in late February and early March. In some places this assumed a mass-scale nature. Starving households have to eat all kinds of surrogates, such as corn cobs and stalks, millet flakes, dried straw, grass, rotten water melons and beet roots, potato peelings, acacia pods, etc. Also recorded are facts relating to the use of cat, dog, and horseflesh as food. There were 28 cases of cannibalism, including 19 in Kyiv oblast.” Never before had this kind of thing occurred in the history of Ukraine.

Undoubtedly, remembering this apocalypse (ordinary people used precisely this word as well as the phrase “doomsday is nigh”) is our highest duty if we are to remain human beings. But there is also another, no less important, moral debt to the millions of the dead: to thoroughly analyze how and by what methods the throne of the Emperor of Famine was built and what made this thing possible. The obvious answer may be that the way to the terror by famine was made possible by a split in the single Ukrainian nation along class lines: the kulak exploiter (foe) vs. the middle and poor peasant (friend). Moreover, it was only up to the authorities to decide who was who. What also paved the way to genocide was the criminal extermination of Ukrainian intellectuals, the creme de la creme of the nation, which was brutally accused of nationalism. It is no accident that these two processes took place concurrently: on the one hand, organizing the famine, sealing off most of Ukraine’s villages by means of NKVD units, denying the famine-stricken population access to the largest cities, and on the other, cracking down on the intelligentsia in 1930-1934. An additional factor contributing to the national disaster was the “Iron Curtain” that fell between the West and us. Tragically, many well-known European figures, such as Bernard Shaw, Edouard Herriot, and Henri Barbusse, categorically denied the very fact of the famine. Finally, it was the absolute uncontrollability of the government by the people that paved the way to the apocalypse.

Stalin surely knew what he was doing. The goal was to erase Ukraine from the world map as a land populated by a distinct people with a pronounced national identity. Here is what Antonio Gradenigo, a consul in Italy’s embassy in Moscow, reported to his superiors in May 1933: “The current disaster (terror by famine — Author) will cause Ukraine to be colonized — predominantly by Russians. This will change its ethnographic nature. And, perhaps, in the not so distant future there will be no question of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people and, hence, the Ukrainian problem because Ukraine will in fact become a Russian land.”

This did not happen, although the Stalinist regime spared no effort to achieve this end. This did not occur, if only because the nation’s genetic memory, despite all the terrors, preserved the “basic code:” we are a united people and we have the same fatherland. The images of the apocalyptic terror of 1932-1933 are an excruciatingly painful but inalienable part of this memory. We must hand down this understanding to our children and grandchildren if we want them to remain human beings.