The communists' mass murder in the Ukraine

AP/Washington Times:

After authorities broke into Yakiv Atamanenko's home in autumn of 1932 and confiscated the family's food, his mother and two brothers died of starvation and their bloated bodies were tossed among others in a freshly dug grave on the outskirts of this farming village.

Mr. Atamanenko and other survivors said their neighbors, Oleksandra Korytnyk and her husband, ate their two children. "They cut their children into pieces and ate them," recalled Mr. Atamanenko, now a frail, gray-haired 95-year-old.

In the end, he and others said, the Korytnyks died as well.

Today, Ukraine marks the 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932-33, engineered by Soviet authorities to force peasants across what was then the U.S.S.R. to give up their privately held plots of land and join collective farms. Millions perished.

It began on November 24, 1932, with an order raising the quota for the state procurement of grain and wound up as an all-out forced collectivization of agriculture. Ukraine was hit hardest because it was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.

Now, President Viktor Yushchenko is leading an effort to gain international recognition of Holodomor — or death by hunger, as it is known here — as a crime rather than merely a disaster, by labeling it an act of genocide.

Long kept secret by Soviet authorities, accounts of the great famine still divide historians and politicians, not just in this nation of 47 million but throughout the former Soviet Union.

Some are convinced that the famine targeted Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Others argue authorities set out to eradicate all private landowners as a social class, and that the Soviets sought to pay for the U.S.S.R.'s industrialization with grain exports at the expense of starving millions of its own people.

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Estimates of the number of people who perished in Holodomor differ, but there is no doubt the death toll was horrific. Mr. Yushchenko estimates 10 million Ukrainians died, while Stanislav Kulchitsky, a Ukrainian historian, thinks the number is closer to 3.5 million.

Authorities set production quotas for each village. But these quotas generally exceeded crop yields and in village after village, when farmers failed to meet their targets, all their food was confiscated.

Residents were prohibited from leaving their homes — effectively condemning them to starvation.

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I think the figure is closer to the 10 million number. It was probably intentional, but could also be ascribed to the stupidity of communism. According to Ukrainian sources:

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In 1932, the Soviets increased the grain procurement quota for Ukraine by 44%. They were aware that this extraordinarly high quota would result in a grain shortage, therefore resulting in the inability of the Ukrainian peasant to feed themselves. Soviet law was quite clear in that no grain could be given to feed the peasants until the quota was met. Communist party officials with the aid of military troops, OGPU, NKVD secret police units were used to move against peasants who may be hiding grain from the Soviet government. Even worse, an internal passport system was implemented to restrict movements of Ukrainian peasants so that they could not travel in search of food. Ukrainian grain was collected and stored in grain elevators that were guarded by military units & NKVD secret police units while Ukrainians were starving in the immediate area. The actions of this Moscow instigated action was a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian peasant.

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You can see a similar genocide taking place today in Zimbabwe. It is genocide on the cheap. There is no waste of bullets or poison gas. Just starve the people and take their land. If Chavez did not have his oil wealth, similar events would be happening in Venezuela. Even with his oil wealth his policies are causing wide spread food rationing. No one is smarter than the market when it comes to rationing food or other commodities. You have to be really stupid or a communist or both to think you can.