Int’l New York Times: Ukraine separatists rewrite history of 1930s famine

2015/4/29 13:12:00

The Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine are not only attacking Ukrainian government forces, they also have found time to rewrite Ukrainian history to suit Moscow’s version. The new line is that the Holodomor was a universal problem and Stalin was blameless. However, even some of the pro-Moscow rebels are having trouble swallowing that line.

 


By Andrew E. Kramer for the International New York Times, Apr 29, 2015

 

DONETSK, Ukraine — Yevdokiya was still a young girl, her nephew recalled, when the neighbors invited her over for a social occasion of some sort. This was during the great famine of 1933, he said, and her family became alarmed when she failed to return.

 

She never did come home, said the nephew, Aleksandr S. Khodakovsky, now a senior official in the Russian-backed separatist government of the Donetsk People’s Republic. To their horror, her parents discovered that she had been cannibalized by the desperate neighbors, not an uncommon occurrence in a famine that killed 3.3 million people, by most estimates.

 

Traditionally, Ukrainian historians have characterized the famine as a genocide, the direct result of Stalin’s forced collectivization and the Soviet government’s requisitioning of grain for export abroad, leaving Ukraine short — and its borders sealed shut. Since Ukraine gained independence, that is what its students have been taught.

 

But that is not what students in southeastern Ukraine are learning this year. Instead, under orders from the newly installed separatist governments, they are getting the sanitized Russian version, in which the famine was an unavoidable tragedy that befell the entire Soviet Union.

 

Even Mr. Khodakovsky, whose aunt’s remains were later found in a well, has trouble accepting that line in its entirety. “It was terrible,” he said of the famine, and not at all unavoidable. Rather, he said, it was the result of Stalinist policies, particularly the sale of grain to finance industrialization.

 

For the complete text, link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/wor ... tory-of-1930s-famine.html

 

For more truth about the Holodomor, link below:

http://propaganda-history.blogspot.co ... eat-famine-in-soviet.html

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