“HOLODOMOR.” Say it again – “Hol-o-do-mor.” This is the most important word for South Africans to know about Ukraine, as this conflict-ridden country has come suddenly into the centre of world news after its ministry of health confirmed 88 people (most of them protesters, with a much smaller number of police) were killed in its capital city, Kiev, two weeks ago.
For Ukrainian speakers, the outcome was national liberation. For Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev it was “armed mutiny”.
Since then Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian troops, armoured vehicles and warships to occupy the Crimea in southern Ukraine, with its Black Sea Russian naval base at Sevastopol – until 1957, a part of Russia. There is acute concern over the possibility of war between Russia and Ukraine over the future of eastern Ukraine, with its heavy industry, mineral riches and mainly Russian-speaking population, adjoining Russia itself.
During the Cold War, MK troops were trained near Simferopol, the capital city of Crimea.
Very few South Africans know the word “Holodomor”, mainly because the SACP and its predecessor, the Communist Party of South Africa, have always denied it ever happened. And because the SACP was a major influence within the ANC in exile and has been part of the government for the past 20 years, South Africans have been shielded from knowledge of a terrible history which makes the massacre of 69 protesters at Sharpeville in March 1960 look small.
Holodomor is a word in the Ukrainian language which means “extermination by hunger”.
It refers to a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933, when Josef Stalin was dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It has also been described as the “Terror Famine in Ukraine” and even as the “Genocide Famine”. This is what the Ukrainian protesters call it.
For the SACP, it carries a legacy of shame.
Recent research by scholars and government officials estimate that 2.4 to 7.5 million ethnic Ukrainian peasants died from starvation in that famine, directly caused by Stalin’s cruel and heartless economic programme – an issue always denied by the CPSA.
This is what happened.
At harvest time in 1932, Stalin’s communist government sent thousands of young activists – described as “city slickers” by one of them, Lev Kopelev (who later spent 10 years in the regime’s prison camps) – into the rural areas of Ukraine when it was the main breadbasket of the state. Their task was to take by force every grain of wheat from every peasant household.
Nothing was left for the peasants to eat; no grain was left for them to sow for the next harvest. Peasant families were then prevented by force from leaving, in the most brutal application of pass laws anywhere in the last century.
Thirty years later, a writer reported: “The men died first, then the children, and finally the women”.
Stalin’s government then sold the grain abroad, to acquire funds to industrialise the Soviet state.
It was a deliberate, conscious economic calculation, the most cold-hearted in modern history: peasants to die, to pay for heavy industry. And this at the hands of a regime which Lenin had called the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”.
The native Ukrainian speakers from western Ukraine, in the land of the fertile “black earth”, have never forgotten the fraudulence of that grim promise, which took back with a vengeance what it had once promised the peasants.
If one can imagine that the tragedy of the cattle killing among the amaXhosa following the prophecy by Nongqawuse in the 19th century had been carried out by British soldiers on the orders of the British government, with starving people forcibly prevented from moving away to seek relief – then one can imagine how the grandchildren of Ukrainian survivors might think about the government of neighbouring Russia today, under President Vladimir Putin, formerly an officer in the Soviet KGB.
“Hatred” is probably too gentle a term.
Unlike the famine tragedy among the amaXhosa, almost no word about the man-made famine in Ukraine came out at the time. The reason is simple: every word in the Soviet Union published or broadcast was controlled by the state, the state was controlled by the Communist Party, and the Communist Party was controlled by one man.
One of the most shocking passages of writing by the greatest Russian novelist of the Soviet period, Vasily Grossman – who reported the battle of Stalingrad from the front line, and was one of the first journalists to enter Hitler’s death camp at Treblinka – comes towards the end of his last novel, Everything Flows. A lifetime’s journalism in Stalin’s dictatorship succeeds in giving the most eerie sense here of a whole people condemned to die in their peasant huts, in a modern state, in deathly silence.
For South Africans there is a shameful dimension. Not only did the CPSA and the SACP deny this ever happened, but one of their most illustrious leaders, Bram Fischer, actually saw the peasant victims in Ukraine with his own eyes.
In the northern summer of June and July 1932, in an early phase of the famine, he travelled by train through the Ukraine with three fellow students from Oxford University on a journey organised by the state-run travel agency, Intourist. We know what they saw, because a student colleague of Fischer on the journey became a founder of modern television news reporting and one of Britain’s most respected journalists, Sir Geoffrey Cox (1910-2008).
In his autobiography, Eyewitness: A Memoir of Europe in the Thirties (1999), Cox reported that what they had seen was “peasant Russia on the move, in a massive, unexplained migration ... We were witnessing – though we had no idea of it then – the shock waves of that process , as dispossessed peasants and their families sought refuge in other parts of the country”.
These were the so-called “kulaks”, or richer peasants, who at least were allowed, or rather, made, to move. The fate of their poorer neighbours was later even worse, confined to starve in their peasant villages.
Cox reported seeing columns of bearded old men in patched clothes “guarded by Red Army soldiers ... Reluctantly the guides agreed that they were peasants being taken off to prison camps”.
Three years later at Oxford University, he realised the meaning of what he and Fischer had witnessed, when he read the novel Winter in Moscow by Malcolm Muggeridge. The first to break the news about Holodomor in reports published in the Manchester Guardian, Muggeridge had made the same journey in the summer of 1933, and understood what he saw.
But as Fischer’s biographer, Stephen Clingman, wrote: “Bram’s views did not change when he read Malcolm Muggeridge as his friend Geoffrey Cox’s did. In the Soviet Union, both then and as he looked back, he saw a way of dealing with South Africa’s problems and issues”.
In whatever has already happened in Ukraine, and whatever is about to happen, South Africans should know that the crime of Holodomor carries both a grim warning, and a call for honesty of conscience.
Paul Trewhela was editor of MK’s underground newspaper, Freedom Fighter, during the Rivonia Trial, and a political prisoner from 1964 to 1967. In exile in the UK, he was co-editor of the banned journal, Searchlight South Africa
Russia’s legacy of shame
For Ukrainian speakers, the outcome was national liberation. For Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev it was “armed mutiny”.
Since then Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian troops, armoured vehicles and warships to occupy the Crimea in southern Ukraine, with its Black Sea Russian naval base at Sevastopol – until 1957, a part of Russia. There is acute concern over the possibility of war between Russia and Ukraine over the future of eastern Ukraine, with its heavy industry, mineral riches and mainly Russian-speaking population, adjoining Russia itself.
During the Cold War, MK troops were trained near Simferopol, the capital city of Crimea.
Very few South Africans know the word “Holodomor”, mainly because the SACP and its predecessor, the Communist Party of South Africa, have always denied it ever happened. And because the SACP was a major influence within the ANC in exile and has been part of the government for the past 20 years, South Africans have been shielded from knowledge of a terrible history which makes the massacre of 69 protesters at Sharpeville in March 1960 look small.
Holodomor is a word in the Ukrainian language which means “extermination by hunger”.
It refers to a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933, when Josef Stalin was dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It has also been described as the “Terror Famine in Ukraine” and even as the “Genocide Famine”. This is what the Ukrainian protesters call it.
For the SACP, it carries a legacy of shame.
Recent research by scholars and government officials estimate that 2.4 to 7.5 million ethnic Ukrainian peasants died from starvation in that famine, directly caused by Stalin’s cruel and heartless economic programme – an issue always denied by the CPSA.
This is what happened.
At harvest time in 1932, Stalin’s communist government sent thousands of young activists – described as “city slickers” by one of them, Lev Kopelev (who later spent 10 years in the regime’s prison camps) – into the rural areas of Ukraine when it was the main breadbasket of the state. Their task was to take by force every grain of wheat from every peasant household.
Nothing was left for the peasants to eat; no grain was left for them to sow for the next harvest. Peasant families were then prevented by force from leaving, in the most brutal application of pass laws anywhere in the last century.
Thirty years later, a writer reported: “The men died first, then the children, and finally the women”.
Stalin’s government then sold the grain abroad, to acquire funds to industrialise the Soviet state.
It was a deliberate, conscious economic calculation, the most cold-hearted in modern history: peasants to die, to pay for heavy industry. And this at the hands of a regime which Lenin had called the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”.
The native Ukrainian speakers from western Ukraine, in the land of the fertile “black earth”, have never forgotten the fraudulence of that grim promise, which took back with a vengeance what it had once promised the peasants.
If one can imagine that the tragedy of the cattle killing among the amaXhosa following the prophecy by Nongqawuse in the 19th century had been carried out by British soldiers on the orders of the British government, with starving people forcibly prevented from moving away to seek relief – then one can imagine how the grandchildren of Ukrainian survivors might think about the government of neighbouring Russia today, under President Vladimir Putin, formerly an officer in the Soviet KGB.
“Hatred” is probably too gentle a term.
Unlike the famine tragedy among the amaXhosa, almost no word about the man-made famine in Ukraine came out at the time. The reason is simple: every word in the Soviet Union published or broadcast was controlled by the state, the state was controlled by the Communist Party, and the Communist Party was controlled by one man.
One of the most shocking passages of writing by the greatest Russian novelist of the Soviet period, Vasily Grossman – who reported the battle of Stalingrad from the front line, and was one of the first journalists to enter Hitler’s death camp at Treblinka – comes towards the end of his last novel, Everything Flows. A lifetime’s journalism in Stalin’s dictatorship succeeds in giving the most eerie sense here of a whole people condemned to die in their peasant huts, in a modern state, in deathly silence.
For South Africans there is a shameful dimension. Not only did the CPSA and the SACP deny this ever happened, but one of their most illustrious leaders, Bram Fischer, actually saw the peasant victims in Ukraine with his own eyes.
In the northern summer of June and July 1932, in an early phase of the famine, he travelled by train through the Ukraine with three fellow students from Oxford University on a journey organised by the state-run travel agency, Intourist. We know what they saw, because a student colleague of Fischer on the journey became a founder of modern television news reporting and one of Britain’s most respected journalists, Sir Geoffrey Cox (1910-2008).
In his autobiography, Eyewitness: A Memoir of Europe in the Thirties (1999), Cox reported that what they had seen was “peasant Russia on the move, in a massive, unexplained migration ... We were witnessing – though we had no idea of it then – the shock waves of that process , as dispossessed peasants and their families sought refuge in other parts of the country”.
These were the so-called “kulaks”, or richer peasants, who at least were allowed, or rather, made, to move. The fate of their poorer neighbours was later even worse, confined to starve in their peasant villages.
Cox reported seeing columns of bearded old men in patched clothes “guarded by Red Army soldiers ... Reluctantly the guides agreed that they were peasants being taken off to prison camps”.
Three years later at Oxford University, he realised the meaning of what he and Fischer had witnessed, when he read the novel Winter in Moscow by Malcolm Muggeridge. The first to break the news about Holodomor in reports published in the Manchester Guardian, Muggeridge had made the same journey in the summer of 1933, and understood what he saw.
But as Fischer’s biographer, Stephen Clingman, wrote: “Bram’s views did not change when he read Malcolm Muggeridge as his friend Geoffrey Cox’s did. In the Soviet Union, both then and as he looked back, he saw a way of dealing with South Africa’s problems and issues”.
In whatever has already happened in Ukraine, and whatever is about to happen, South Africans should know that the crime of Holodomor carries both a grim warning, and a call for honesty of conscience.
Paul Trewhela was editor of MK’s underground newspaper, Freedom Fighter, during the Rivonia Trial, and a political prisoner from 1964 to 1967. In exile in the UK, he was co-editor of the banned journal, Searchlight South Africa
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