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SOVIET GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE
6. 12. 2008
RAFAEL LEMKIN
SOVIET GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE
Sosyura “Love Ukraine”
You cannot love other peoples
Unless you love Ukraine.
The
mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the
advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their
policy of expansionism, it is not an innovation devised simply to bring
uniformity out of the diversity of Poles, Hungarians, Balts, Romanians
– presently disappearing into the fringes of their empire. Instead, it
has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the
Kremlin – one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the
operations of Tsarist Russia. It is indeed an indispensable step in the
process of “union” that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the
“Soviet Man,” the “Soviet Nation”, and to achieve that goal, that
unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroy the
nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe.
What
I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet
genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the
destruction of the Ukrainian nation. This is, as I have said, only the
logical successor of such Tsarist crimes as the drowning of 10,000
Crimean Tatars by order of Catherine the Great, the mass murders of
Ivan the Terrible’s “SS troops” – the Oprichnina; the extermination of
National Polish leaders and Ukrainian Catholics by Nicholas I; and the
series of Jewish pogroms that have stained Russian history
periodically. And it has had its matches within the Soviet Union in the
annihilation of the Ingerian nation, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, the
Crimean Tatar Republics, the Baltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and
Latvia. Each is a case in the long-term policy of liquidation of
non-Russian peoples by the removal of select parts.
Ukraine
constitutes a slice of Southeastern USSR equal in area to France and
Italy, and inhabited by some 30 million people. Itself the Russian
bread basket, geography has made it a strategic key to the oil of the
Caucasus and Iran, and to the entire Arab world. In the north, it
borders Russia proper. As long as Ukraine retains its national unity,
as long as its people continue to think of themselves as Ukrainians and
to seek independence, so long Ukraine poses a serious threat to the
very heart of Sovietism. It is no wonder that the Communist leaders
have attached the greatest importance to the Russification of this
independent[-minded] member of their “Union of Republics,” have
determined to remake it to fit their pattern of one Russian nation. For
the Ukrainian is not and has never been, a Russian. His culture, his
temperament, his language, his religion – all are different. At the
side door to Moscow, he has refused to be collectivized, accepting
deportation, even death. And so it is peculiarly important that the
Ukrainian be fitted into the procrustean pattern of the ideal Soviet
man.
Ukraine is highly susceptible to racial murder by select
parts and so the Communist tactics there have not followed the pattern
taken by the German attacks against the Jews. The nation is too
populous to be exterminated completely with any efficiency. However,
its leadership, religious, intellectual, political, its select and
determining parts, are quite small and therefore easily eliminated, and
so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the
Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder,
deportation and forced labor, exile and starvation.
The attack
has manifested a systematic pattern, with the whole process repeated
again and again to meet fresh outburst of national spirit. The first
blow is aimed at the intelligentsia, the national brain, so as to
paralyze the rest of the body. In 1920, 1926 and again in 1930-33,
teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders, were
liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the Ukrainian
Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in
1931 alone. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most
prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is
conservatively estimated that at least 75 percent of the Ukrainian
intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine
and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians. (Ibid.
[Ukrainian Quarterly], Summer 1949).
Going along with this attack on
the intelligentsia was an offensive against the churches, priests and
hierarchy, the “soul” of Ukraine. Between 1926 and 1932, the Ukrainian
Orthodox Autocephalous Church, its Metropolitan (Lypkivsky) and 10,000
clergy were liquidated. In 1945, when the Soviets established
themselves in Western Ukraine, a similar fate was meted out to the
Ukrainian Catholic Church. That Russification was the only issue
involved is clearly demonstrated by the fact that before its
liquidation, the Church was offered the opportunity to join the Russian
Patriarch[ate] at Moscow, the Kremlin’s political tool.
Only two
weeks before the San Francisco conference, on April 11, 1945, a
detachment of NKVD troops surrounded the St. George Cathedral in Lviv
and arrested Metropolitan Slipyj, 2 bishops, 2 prelates and several
priests. All the students in the city’s theological seminary were
driven from the school, while their professors were told that the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had ceased to exist, that its
Metropolitan was arrested and his place was to be take by a
Soviet-appointed bishop. These acts were repeated all over Western
Ukraine and across the Curzon Line in Poland. At least seven bishops
were arrested or were never heard from again. There is no Bishop of the
Ukrainian Catholic Church still free in the area. Five hundred clergy
who met to protest the action of the Soviets, were shot or arrested.
Throughout the entire region, clergy and laity were killed by hundreds,
while the number sent to forced labor camps ran into the thousands.
Whole villages were depopulated. In the deportation, families were
deliberately separated, fathers to Siberia, mothers to the brickworks
of Turkestan, and the children to Communist homes to be “educated”. For
the crime of being Ukrainian, the Church itself was declared a society
detrimental to the welfare of the Soviet state, its members were marked
down in the Soviet police files as potential “enemies of the people.”
As a matter of fact, with the exception of 150,000 members in Slovakia,
the Ukrainian Catholic Church has been officially liquidated, its
hierarchy imprisoned, its clergy dispersed and deported.
These
attacks on the Soul have had and will continue to have a serious effect
on the Brain of Ukraine, for it is the families of the clergy that have
traditionally supplied a large part of the intellectuals, while the
priests themselves have been the leaders of the villages, their wives
the heads of the charitable organizations. The religious orders ran
schools, took care of much of the organized charities.
The third
prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of
independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folk lore
and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit,
of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most
terrible of all – starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000
Ukrainians starved to death, an inhumanity which the 73rd Congress
decried on May 28, 1934. There has been an attempt to dismiss this
highpoint of Soviet cruelty as an economic policy connected with the
collectivization of the wheatlands and the elimination of the kulaks,
the independent farmers that was therefore necessary. The fact is,
however, that large-scale farmers in Ukraine were few and far-between.
As a Soviet writer Kossior declared in Izvestiia on December 2, 1933,
“Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger,” and it was to eliminate
that nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity of the Soviet
state that the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed. The method used in
this part of the plan was not at all restricted to any particular
group. All suffered – men, women, children. The crop that year was
ample to feed the people and livestock of Ukraine, though it had fallen
off somewhat from the previous year, a decrease probably due in large
measure to the struggle over collectivization. But a famine was
necessary for the Soviet[s] and so they got one to order, by plan,
through an unusually high grain allotment to the state as taxes. To add
to this, thousands of acres of wheat were never harvested, were left to
rot in the fields. The rest was sent to government granaries to be
stored there until the authorities had decided how to allocate it. Much
of this crop, so vital to the lives of the Ukrainian people, ended up
as exports for the creation of credits abroad
In the face of
famine on the farms, thousands abandoned the rural areas and moved into
the towns to beg food. Caught there and sent back to the country, they
abandoned their children in the hope that they at least might survive.
In this way, 18,000 children were abandoned in Kharkiv alone. Villages
of a thousand had a surviving population of a hundred; in others, half
the populace was gone, and deaths in these towns ranged from 20 to 30
per day. Cannibalism became commonplace.
As C. Henry Chamberlain, the Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, wrote in 1933:
The
Communists saw in this apathy and discouragement, sabotage and
counter-revolution, and, with the ruthlessness peculiar to
self-righteous idealists, they decided to let the famine run its course
with the idea that it would teach the peasants a lesson.
Relief
was doled out to the collective farms, but on an inadequate scale and
so late that many lives had already been lost. The individual peasants
were left to shift for themselves; and much higher mortality rate among
the individual peasants proved a most potent argument in favor of
joining collective farms.
The fourth step in the process
consisted in the fragmentation of the Ukrainian people at once by the
addition to the Ukraine of foreign peoples and by the dispersion of the
Ukrainians throughout Eastern Europe. In this way, ethnic unity would
be destroyed and nationalities mixed. Between 1920 and 1939, the
population of Ukraine changed from 80 percent Ukrainian to only 63
percent. In the face of famine and deportation, the Ukrainian
population had declined absolutely from 23.2 million to 19.6 million,
while the non-Ukrainian population had increased by 5.6 million. When
we consider that Ukraine once had the highest rate of population
increase in Europe, around 800,000 per year, it is easy to see that the
Russian policy has been accomplished.
These have been the chief
steps in the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation. Notably,
there have been no attempts at complete annihilation, such as was the
method of the German attack on the Jews. And yet, if the Soviet program
succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests and the
peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every
Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has
kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which
have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation
rather than a mass of people.
The mass, indiscriminate murders
have not, however, been lacking – they have simply not been integral
parts of the plan, but only chance variations. Thousands have been
executed, untold thousands have disappeared into the certain death of
Siberian labor camps.
The city of Vinnitsa might well be called
the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91 graves there lie the bodies of 9,432
victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938.
Among the gravestones of real cemeteries, in woods, with awful irony,
under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937 until their discovery by
the Germans in 1943. Many of the victims had been reported by the
Soviets as exiled to Siberia.
Ukraine has its Lidice too, in the
town of Zavadka, destroyed by the Polish satellites of the Kremlin in
1946. Three times, troops of the Polish Second Division attacked the
town, killing men, women and children, burning houses and stealing farm
animals. During the second raid, the Red commander told what was left
of the town’s populace: “The same fate will be met by everyone who
refuses to go to Ukraine. I therefore order that within three days the
village be vacated; otherwise, I shall execute every one of you.”
From DEATH AND DEVASTATION ON THE
CURZON LINE by Walter Dushnyck
When
the town was finally evacuated by force, there remained only 4 men
among the 78 survivors. During March of the same year, 2 other
Ukrainian towns were attacked by the same Red unit and received more or
less similar treatment.
What we have seen here is not confined
to Ukraine. The plan that the Soviets used there has been and is being
repeated. It is an essential part of the Soviet program for expansion,
for it offers the quick way of bringing unity out of the diversity of
cultures and nations that constitute the Soviet Empire. That this
method brings with it indescribable suffering for millions of people
has not turned them from their path. If for no other reason than this
human suffering, we would have to condemn this road to unity as
criminal. But there is more to it than that. This is not simply a case
of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of
individuals only, but of a culture and a nation. Were it possible to do
this even without suffering we would still be driven to condemn it, for
the family of minds, the unity of ideas, of language and customs that
forms what we call a nation constitutes one of the most important of
all our means of civilization and progress. It is true that nations
blend together and form new nations – we have an example of this
process in our own country, – but this blending consists in the pooling
of benefits of superiorities that each culture possesses. And it is in
this way that the world advances. What then, apart from the very
important question of human suffering and human rights that we find
wrong with Soviet plans is the criminal waste of civilization and of
culture. For the Soviet national unity is being created, not by any
union of ideas and of cultures, but by the complete destruction of all
cultures and of all ideas save one – the Soviet.
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