Seven million died in the 'forgotten' holocaust
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor Toronto Sun
Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was
shocked
to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian
descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of
the
1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalin's Soviet regime murdered seven
million
Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps.
How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many? For Jews
and
Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories
that
influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the
destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has
almost vanished into history's black hole.
So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the communists in the
1920s,
the Volga Germans in 1941 and mass executions and de****tations to
concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles. At the
end
of World War II, Stalin's gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% of them
Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.
Almost unknown is the genocide of two million of the USSR's Muslim
peoples:
Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkirs and Kazaks. The Chechen
independence fighters who today are branded as "terrorists" by the U.S.
and
Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.
Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from
1945-47 of at least two million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children,
and
the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which two million
German girls and women were raped.
Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of
numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people in 1932, sending Commissars
V.
Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch and NKVD secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda
to
crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization.
Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated.
NKVD
death squads executed "anti-party elements." Furious that insufficient
Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch - virtually the Soviet Union's
Adolf
Eichmann - set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of
Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being
shot
or died of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes
historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future
Bergen-Belsen death camp.
The mass murder of seven million Ukrainians, three million of them
children,
and de****tation to the gulag of two million more (where most died) was
hidden
by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like The New York Times'
Walter Duranty, British writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and French Prime
Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied re****ts of genocide, and
applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform." Those who spoke out
against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."
The U.S., British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of
the
genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to
Ukraine.
The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder
were, ironically and for their own cynical and self-serving reasons,
Hitler
and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and some other senior Communist party and NKVD
officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish
plot
to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across a fearful
Europe.
When war came, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston
Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware
his
regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler's
extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus
of
mass murder, only Germans were guilty.
Though Stalin murdered three times more people than Hitler, to Roosevelt
he
remained "Uncle Joe."
The British-U.S. alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime.
Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve history's most murderous regime,
to
which they handed over half of Europe in 1945.
After the war, the left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul
Sartre
denied the gulag even existed.
For the western Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit
being
allied to mass murderers. For the Soviets, promoting the Jewish Holocaust
perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their own crimes.
The Jewish people, understandably, saw their Holocaust as a unique event.
It
was Israel's raison d'etre. Raising other genocides at that time would,
they
feared, diminish their own. This was only human nature.
While today, academia, the media and Hollywood rightly keep attention
focused
on the Jewish Holocaust, they mostly ignore Ukraine. We still hunt Nazi
killers, but not communist killers. There are few photos of the Ukraine
genocide or Stalin's gulag, and fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no
tales.
Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.
We know all about the crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler;
about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.
But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda,
Yezhov and Beria? Were it not for writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might
never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma and Vorkuta. Movie
after
movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes
from
view or dissolves into nostalgia.
The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.
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