In the spring of 1933, the rural population of Ukraine was dying at a rate of 25,000 a day, half of them children. The land that was known worldwide as the breadbasket of Europe was being ravaged by a man-made famine of unprecedented scale. It was engineered by Stalin and his hangmen to teach Ukraine’s independent farmers a lesson they would not forget for resisting collectivization, which meant giving up their land and livestock to the state. (Ukraine was then under Soviet domination). Moreover, it was meant to deal a crushing blow to any national aspirations of the Ukrainian people, 80 percent of whom were peasant farmers. While millions of men, women and children in Ukraine and in the mostly ethnically Ukrainian areas of the northern Caucasus were dying, the Soviet Union was denying the famine and exporting enough grain from Ukraine to have fed the entire population. holodomorct.org/index.html
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:45:23 +0000