The Soviets' genocide on the cheap

Times:

Grigori Garaschenko remembers seeing his classmates starve slowly to death in a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine.

A neighbour driven mad by hunger killed her six-year-old daughter and began to eat her, he said, after Soviet soldiers confiscated all the food in their village during house-to-house searches.

Mr Garaschenko, 89, is one of the few remaining survivors of the famine of 1932-33. Now, 75 years on, Ukraine wants the world to recognise that what it calls the Holodomor was a deliberate act of genocide by Stalin's Soviet Union.

It is a campaign that infuriates modern Russia. Moscow argues that there was no such crime because Russians and other nationalities also starved under Stalin's policy of turning peasant farms into large state-run collectives.

The Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian body responsible for researching the Holodomor, calculates that three million people died in the months after Stalin punished the collective farms for failing to meet grain production targets in 1932. Soviet troops confiscated the harvest and all the food in villagers' homes.

Igor Yukhnovsky, the director of the institute, told The Times that as many as nine million may have died as a result of the famine and its aftermath. Stalin's intention, he said, was to break Ukraine's national identity.

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The Russian parliament, the Duma, passed a resolution in April rejecting claims that the famine “was organised along ethnic lines”, and warning Ukraine against using the tragedy as “a tool for modern political speculation”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was equally vociferous, condemning the “provocateur's cry of ‘genocide'” in a newspaper article.

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Mass murder for communism is still genocide. Communism and a command economy are so foreign to peoples real aspirations and desires that it can only be imposed through coercion and killings. Doing on the cheap through starvation is still genocide. The Russian government argument makes no sense. If their were Russians killed as part of the purge they were also victims of Stalin's political genocide.

It is important to make this point so the world will know the evils of communism. For political reasons and for control of the the population the communist were the largest mass murderers in the history of the world. Mao and Pol Pot were also mass murders as was Castro and Che.