Vol. 81/No. 48 December 25, 2017
Stalin’s 1932 ‘killing by starvation’ marked in Ukraine
The Holodomor was part of the consolidation of counterrevolutionary bureaucratic rule in the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin and the liquidation of the communist program and leadership of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It led to a total reversal of the internationalist, working-class course led by V.I. Lenin. The working class was pushed out of politics, the worker-peasant alliance that was the cornerstone of the revolution was shattered and Great Russian chauvinism reborn.
Part of this counterrevolutionary transformation was the reversal of the Bolshevik’s campaign to advance the national rights of Ukrainian workers and farmers, and expand use of their language, history and culture.
Claiming the biggest danger was peasants enriching themselves, the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1929 began a sharp shift in policy, launching a forced collectivization of agriculture. Peasants who resisted were branded as capitalists and attacked. In the name of financing rapid growth of industry, Moscow devastated agriculture. The Stalinist policy produced famines across the Soviet Union, but nowhere as consciously brutal and deadly as in Ukraine.
When Moscow’s quotas for grain requisitions were impossible to meet, peasants were ordered to turn over all their grain seed — though it meant they were left with nothing to eat or sell. There are hundreds of photos showing starved people collapsing in the street and dying.
In August 1932 the government decreed that any violation or damage to the property of a collective farm was punishable with death. To pick a potato in the field and eat it was to risk your life. Watchtowers were put up to enforce the Stalinist rulers’ dictates. Brigades with young, career-hungry party members roamed through the villages and confiscated the food. Ukraine’s borders were sealed and cities closed off to farmers, who were barred from buying long-distance rail tickets.
Estimates put the number of people who starved to death at some 3.5 million in Ukraine and an equal number of Ukrainians in other parts of Russia and in work camps and penal colonies.
The brutality of the forced collectivization was doubly severe in Ukraine because Moscow was determined to crush any nationalist aspirations among the Ukrainian people.
Holodomor part of counterrevolution
The consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy required the liquidation of the leadership of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and crushing any opposition inside the Communist Party.The revolution mobilized peasants to expropriate the estates of the big landlords and distribute the nationalized land to be worked by the toilers; organized workers to expropriate capitalist property in industry and banking; and fought to draw workers into taking increasing control of production.
The revolution also sounded the bell of “nation time.” It gave an impulse to revolutionary uprisings throughout the czarist empire, which Lenin described as a “prison house of nations.”
Lenin explained that the fight against the monarchy, the landlords and the capitalist exploiters could only be successful if it was led by a revolutionary party that mobilized workers and farmers to champion the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.
The question was sharply posed in Ukraine, the largest and most weighty of the czar’s imprisoned nations. In opposition to the czar’s moves at Russification, the Bolsheviks adopted a policy known as Ukrainization.
At Lenin’s urging, the party leadership adopted a resolution instructing members in Ukraine that they “must put into practice the right of the working people to study in the Ukrainian language and to speak their native language in all Soviet institutions; they must in every way counteract attempts at Russification that push the Ukrainian language into the background and must convert that language into an instrument for the communist education of the working people.”
The Ukrainian struggle for national rights exploded in the 1920s, leading to the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and a flowering of Ukrainian art, film and culture.
Lenin died in January 1924, but the course he set in motion in Ukraine continued almost through the end of the decade. As Stalin’s counterrevolution consolidated control over the Soviet government apparatus and the Communist Party, this all came to an end.
Ukraine was one of the strongholds of opposition to Stalin’s course, including among Communist Party members. As Ukrainian workers and farmers were made to pay in blood during the Holodomor, all those associated with Ukrainization who didn’t kneel down were targeted.
“Nowhere did restrictions, purges, repressions and in general all forms of bureaucratic hooliganism assume such murderous sweep as they did in the Ukraine in the struggle against the powerful, deeply-rooted longings of the Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and independence,” Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in April 1939. Trotsky, who had collaborated with Lenin in the Bolshevik government and Communist International, was expelled from the party in 1927 and driven into exile two years later.
Today in Ukraine, the capitalist government officials and leaders of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory try to use events commemorating the Stalinist Holodomor to smear Lenin and the whole record of Ukrainization in the 1920s. And they use it to promote anti-communist politics and restrict political rights by the regime of President Petro Poroshenko, seeking to undercut gains made by workers there through the Maidan revolt that overthrew the Moscow-backed regime of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
At the commemoration in Kiev Nov. 25, Poroshenko called for a thought-control law to make it a crime to deny the Holodomor was genocide.
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