Ukraine Irks Russia With Push To Mark Stalin Famine As Genocide

KIEV, Ukraine -- Maksym Kravets remembers watching hunger kill his father, then his mother. Kravets, who was 14 when famine struck Ukraine in 1932, says he survived by eating a dog. About a third of the 1,000 people in his village, Lozova, perished as Soviet leader Josef Stalin cut off food supplies to force peasants onto collective farms.

Maksym Kravets, wearing medals for his service in the Soviet army in World War II, poses for a photo while his wife Stanislava sits in the background in their home in Kamyanets-Podilskiy, Ukraine, on Dec. 8, 2007.
``A special group of people was in the village taking away all the food we had,'' says Kravets, now 89, sitting in his kitchen in Kamyanets-Podilsky, 300 kilometers (186 miles) from where he almost starved to death. ``There were cases when people ate their dead children and parents.''

The yearlong famine, which killed at least 7 million people, is now the focus of books, exhibitions and documentaries marking the 75th anniversary. Ukraine's government is asking the United Nations to recognize the disaster as an act of genocide, worsening already frosty relations with Russia, which says the famine resulted from drought.

Russian nationalists vandalized an exhibit at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in November. While the Russian government didn't condone the attack, it called Ukraine's depiction of the famine a ``one-sided falsification of history.''

``It's completely impossible to treat it as genocide,'' says Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin. ``What happened there happened not only in Ukraine but in many parts of the former Soviet Union.''

State of Denial

Ukraine's famine was kept out of official history until 1991, when the country of 47 million won independence. It is recognized as genocide by countries including the U.S.

``Russian society is, broadly speaking, still in a state of denial about the crimes of the communist past,'' says Robin Shepherd, a senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London. Putin and his government see the drive to label the famine genocide as ``an insult to Russian pride.''

Ukraine didn't do much to put the famine on the historical map until the pro-European Union President Viktor Yushchenko took power in the 2004 Orange Revolution. Ukraine commemorated the victims for the first time two years ago.

Yushchenko now plans to make it an offence to deny the famine was an act of genocide. Violators would be subject to as much as two years in jail and a fine of 5,100 hryvnia ($1,020). The move would mirror Germany, where it's a crime to deny the Holocaust.

Political Battle

Communist Party leader Petro Simonenko says Yuschenko is ``stirring up hatred'' as Ukrainian and ethnic Russian politicians battle for control of the government.

Putin openly supported the pro-Russian candidate in the 2004 presidential election before the result was overturned as rigged by a Ukrainian court. Russia is opposed to the policies of the Orange coalition now in government, which is seeking closer ties to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the EU.

The anniversary events started Nov. 24, when thousands of people gathered in Kiev and on the main squares of other cities.

``The main killer was the totalitarian communist regime,'' Yushchenko told the crowd in the capital. ``Fear is at the root of today's political and social problems.''

In 1929, Stalin decreed that all agricultural workers had to join collective farms, bringing with them their livestock and tools. They were to plant and harvest together, so that the state could ship food to industrial areas. Some farmers resisted leaving their land, and many were sent to labor camps. Those who remained risked death from starvation.

Grain Seized

Across the Soviet Union, more than 10 million people died from hunger during the collectivization drive, according to research by historian Robert Conquest. The majority of the deaths were in Ukraine, the second most populous republic in the Soviet Union and the largest grain producer after Russia.

Stalin wrote in August 1932 to one of his politburo members expressing concern that Ukraine wasn't complying and must be forced into submission. ``If we don't fix the situation in Ukraine immediately, we may lose Ukraine,'' he wrote. The letter was published by Russia's Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 2000.

While the harvest was poor because of drought, as much as half of the grain was shipped out, says Vasyl Marochko, head of the Center for Ukrainian Genocide Studies in Kiev.

``The 1932 harvest was swept away completely,'' says Halyna Mendzyak, who was 9 and lived in Mynkivtsi, western Ukraine. ``When they put it in rail wagons, an orchestra was playing with slogans like `Let's give all grain to our state!'''

Kravets says peasants in his area refused five orders to collectivize their farms in the years before the famine began. His parents finally went to work on a state farm in 1932, leaving him alone in their house.

When two aunts came to his parents' home to check for survivors, they found only his emaciated body. Kravets recalls hearing them say he wouldn't last the night before they walked away, leaving the door ajar.

``A dog then entered and started to lick me, so I got up very slowly, tied him to a bed with a towel and then took an axe and killed him,'' he says. ``I still can't understand where I got the energy. I was eating that dog for several days.''

Source: Bloomberg